Rose of Dutcher's Coolly Part 21

John considered a moment.

"But, Rosie, seems to me you've got enough; you're graduated."

Rose saw the hopelessness of making him understand that, so she went back.

"It's so lonesome for me here, pappa John!"

He considered again. "I 'spose it is. Well, you can go to the Siding every day if you want to. Hitch up old Doll every day--"

"I don't care for the Siding; it's just as lonesome there for me. I want to go to Chicago."

John grew rigid. "Chicago! What you want to do there?"

"I want to study, pappa. I want to go on with my work. I'll come home summers just the same. I'll come home Christmas if you want me to. It won't cost much, I'll live just as cheap as I can----"

"'Tain't that, 'tain't that, Rose," he said. Then he lifted his head and looked around.

She read his thought and the tears came to her eyes in blinding rush.

"I know, pappa. It's terrible to go now, when you've built this nice home for me, but what can I do? It's so lonesome here! I thought maybe I'd get used to it, but it gets worse. I can't stay here this winter.

You _must_ let me go. I'll go crazy if I stay here all winter. I must go out into the world. I want to be an artist. I want to see great people.

I can't stay here, pappa John!"

The terrible earnestness of every sentence stabbed John Dutcher's heart like a poniard thrust. He put her away and rose stiffly.

"Well, well, Rosie, if you want to go----"

He did not finish, but turned tremblingly and walked out. She remained on the floor near his chair and watched him go, her soul sick with wretchedness.

Why was the world so ordered? Why must she torture that beautiful, simple soul? Why was it that all her high thoughts, her dreams, her ambitions, her longings, seemed to carry her farther away from him?

She could have beaten her head against the wall in her suffering. She rose at last and crawled slowly to her room, and abandoned herself to black, rayless hopelessness.

John Dutcher went out to the hedgerow and sat down on a stool. Around him bees were humming in the wet clover. The calves thrust their inquiring noses through the fence and called to him. The rain-clouds were breaking up, and the sun was striking under the flying canopy at the West.

It was the bitterest moment of his life, since his wife's death. His eyes were opened to his fate; he saw what he had done; he had educated his daughter out of his world. Never again would she be content in the coolly beside him. He saw how foolish he had been all these years, to suppose he could educate and keep her. For a moment he flamed with resentment and said to himself:

"I wish she had never seen a book."

Then he grew tender. He saw her again in her little blue ap.r.o.n with its pockets full of wheat--he saw her blowing hair, her sunny face; he heard again the wind-tossed chatter of her cunning lips. He ran swiftly over her development--how tall she grew and how splendid she was now, the handsomest girl in the coolly, and he softened. She was right. Who was there of the young farmers or even in Tyre good enough for her?

So he rose to a conception which had never come to him before, and even now it was formlessly vast; he felt the power of the outside world, and reached to a divination of the fatality of it all. It had to be, for it was a part of progress. He was old and bent and dull. She was young, gloriously young. The old must give way to the young, while she was the one to be bowed down to. She was queen and he was subject.

With these conceptions in his mind he went back and looked for her. He called her softly, but she did not hear, she was sobbing deep into her pillow. He came up the stairs and saw her lying face downward on her bed. His heart rose in his throat, because it was a terrible thing to see his imperious girl weep.

"Rosie, old pappa John surrenders. You're right and he's an old dummy."

She turned her face upon him.

"No, you're right. We won't be separated."

"But we ain't going to be." He came over and sat down on the edge of the bed.

"You'll come home summers, and maybe I'll go to Chicago winters."

Her face flashed into a smile. She flung her arms about him again.

"O will you, pappa John?"

"Course I will. Wait till you see me in a spike-tail coat and a boiled s.h.i.+rt. I'll astonish the city dudes."

Rose laughed a little wildly, and tightened her clasp about his neck.

"You're my dear old pappa John."

She went at once to her desk and wrote a letter to Mary Compton, an old schoolmate who had gone to Chicago and whose guidance to bed and board now seemed valuable.

That night John Dutcher did not go to sleep at once, as he usually did on entering his room. He went to his bureau--the old bureau he had bought for his wife thirty years before. In it he kept his pictures.

There were several tin-types of Rose, in awkward, scared poses, and there too was the last picture of his wife which had been taken with Rose as a babe in her arms.

Dutcher sat for a long time looking at it, and the tears ran down his face unheeded, pitiful to see.

When he got up at last he moved stiffly as if he had suddenly grown ten years older, and in his sleep his sister heard him groan and talk. In the morning he said he had a touch of rheumatism, but it would most probably pa.s.s off as the sun came out.

CHAPTER XV

CHICAGO

Almost 6 o'clock, and the train due in Chicago at 6:30! The city grew more formidable to Rose as she approached it. She wondered how it would first appear on the plain. There was little sign of it yet.

As she looked out of the car window she saw men stacking grain, and plowing. It was supper time at home, and John was just rising from the table. The calves were bleating for their pails of milk; the guinea-hens were clacking, and the little turkeys crying in the gra.s.s, the bees were homing, heavy with honey, and here she sat, rus.h.i.+ng toward that appalling and unimaginable presence--Chicago.

Somewhere just ahead it sat, this mighty hive of a million and a half of people. The thought of it made her heart beat quick, and her throat filled. She was going there; the lake was there; art was there, and music and the drama--and love! Always under each emotion, always behind every success, was the understanding that love was to be the woman's reward and recompense. It was not articulate nor feverish, this thought; it was a deep, pure emotion, streaming always toward the unknown.

She dreamed as the train rumbled on. She would succeed, she _must_ succeed. She gripped the seat-rail with her broad, strong hands, and braced herself like one entering a flood.

It was this wonderful thing again, a fresh, young and powerful soul rus.h.i.+ng to a great city, a s.h.i.+ning atom of steel obeying the magnet, a clear rivulet from the hills hurrying to the sea. On every train at that same hour, from every direction, others, like her, were entering on the same search to the same end.

"See that cloud?" some one said; "that's Chicago."

Rose looked--far to the south-east a gigantic smoke-cloud soared above the low horizon line, in shape like an eagle, whose hovering wings extended from south to east, trailing mysterious shadows upon the earth.

The sun lighted its mighty crest with crimson light, and its gloom and glow became each moment more sharply contrasted. Towards this portentous presence the train rushed, uttering an occasional shrill neigh, like a stallion's defiance.

The brazen bell upon the engine began to clang and clang; small towns of scattered wooden houses came into view and were left behind. Huge, misshapen buildings appeared in flat s.p.a.ces, amid hundreds of cars. Webs of railway tracks spread out dangerously in acres of marvelous intricacy, amid which men moved, sooty, grimy, sullen and sickly.