The Fighting Shepherdess Part 12

No one could seem to remember that the wind had not always blown, or realize that it would sometime stop. No character was strong enough to maintain a perfect equilibrium after three days of it. Logic or philosophy made no more impression upon the mental state than water slipping over a rock. It set the nerves on edge. Irritation, restlessness and discontent were as uncontrollable as great fear. Two wildcats tied together were not more incompatible than husbands and wives, who under normal conditions lived together happily. Doting mothers became shrews; fond fathers, brutes, lambasting their offspring on the smallest pretext; while seven was too conservative an estimate to place upon the devils of which the children who turned the house into Bedlam seemed to be possessed.

Optimists grew green with melancholia, pessimists considered suicide as an escape from the futility of life, neighbors resurrected buried hatchets. Friends found fault with friends. Enemies vowed to kill each other as soon as the wind let up.

If the combination of wind and alt.i.tude had this effect upon phlegmatic temperaments, something of Mrs. Toomey's state may be surmised. With nerves already overwrought this prolonged windstorm put her in a condition in which, as she declared hysterically to her husband, she was "ready to fly."

Lying on his back on the one-time handsome sofa, where he spent many of his waking hours, Toomey responded, grimly:

"I'm getting so light on that breakfast-food diet that we'll both fly if I don't make a 'touch' pretty quick. I'm 'most afraid to go out in a high wind without running a little shot in the bottoms of my trousers."

Mrs. Toomey, who was standing at the dining room table laying a section of a newspaper pattern upon a piece of serge, felt an uncontrollable desire to weep. Furthermore, the conviction seized her that, turn and twist the pattern as she might, she was not going to have material enough unless she pieced.

Her lids turned pink and her eyes filled up.

"Isn't it awful, j.a.p, to think of us being like this?"

"You make me think of a rabbit when you sniffle like that. Can't you cry without wiggling your nose?"

Mrs. Toomey's quavering voice rose to the upper register:

"Do you suppose I care how I look when I feel like this?"

"How do you think I feel," ferociously, "with my stomach slumping in so I can hardly straighten up?" He raised a long arm and shook a fist as though in defiance of the Fate that had brought him to this. "I'd sell my soul for a ham! I'm going to Scales and put up a talk."

Toomey found his hat and coat. "Don't cut your throat with the scissors while I'm gone, Little Sunbeam, and I'll be back with food pretty quick--unless I blow off."

He spoke with such confidence that Mrs. Toomey looked at him hopefully.

When he opened the door the furious gust that shook the house and darkened the room with a cloud of dust seemed to suck him into a vortex.

Mrs. Toomey watched him round the corner with a sense of relief. Now that she was alone she could cry comfortably and look as ugly as she liked, so the tears flowed copiously as she stood at the table puzzling over the pattern and cloth. They flowed afresh when she proved beyond the question of a doubt that she would have to piece the under-arm sleeve. Simultaneously she wondered if she could do it so skilfully that Mrs. Abram Pantin would not see the piece. Then she frowned in vexation at the realization that it was becoming second nature to wonder what Prissy Pantin would think. Was it possible that there had been a time when she had debated as to whether she wanted to know Mrs. Abram Pantin at all?

When she had married j.a.p she had thought she was done forever with the miserable poverty and hateful economies that are the lot of the family of a small-town minister; that after years of suppression of opinions and tastes in order not to evoke criticism or give offense, she at last was in a position to a.s.sert herself.

And now after a taste of freedom, of power and opulence, here she was back in practically the same position and rapidly developing the same mental att.i.tude towards those more affluent and, therefore, more socially important than herself. Mrs. Toomey's thoughts were much the color of the serge into which she slashed.

Finally, after a glance at the clock, she walked to the window to look for her husband. He was not in sight. As she lingered her glance fell on Mormon Joe's tar-paper shack that set in the middle of the lot on the diagonal corner from their house, and she told herself bitterly that even that drunken renegade, that social pariah, had enough to eat.

Her face brightened as Toomey turned the corner and promptly lengthened when she saw that he was empty-handed and walking with the exaggerated swagger which she was coming to recognize as a sign of failure.

A glimpse of his face as he came in, banged the door, and flung off his hat and coat made her hesitate to speak.

"Well?" he glared at her. "Why don't you say something?"

"What is there to say, j.a.p?" meekly. "I see he refused you."

"Refused me? He insulted me!"

Mrs. Toomey looked hurt.

"What did he say, j.a.p?"

"He offered me fifteen dollars a week to _clerk_."

Toomey resented fiercely the pleased and hopeful expression on his wife's face, and added:

"I suppose you'd like to see me cutting calico and fis.h.i.+ng salt pork out of the brine?"

She ventured timidly:

"I thought you might take it until something worth while turned up."

"Maybe," he sneered, "I could get a job swamping in 'Tinhorn's'

place--was.h.i.+ng fly specks off the windows and sweeping out."

"Of course, you're right, j.a.p," conciliatingly, but she sighed unconsciously as she went back to her work.

Toomey paced the floor for a time, then sank into his usual place on the sofa. Mrs. Toomey permitted herself to observe sarcastically:

"It's a wonder to me you don't get bed sores--the amount of time you spend on the flat of your back."

"What do you mean by that?" suspiciously. "Do you mean I'm lazy because I didn't take that job?"

Since she made no denial, conversation ceased, and the silence was broken only by the sound of her scissors upon the table and the howling of the gale.

He smoked cigarette after cigarette in gloomy thought, finally getting up and going to a closet off the kitchen.

"What are you looking for, j.a.p?" she called as she heard him rummaging.

He did not reply, but evidently found what he sought for he came out presently carrying a shotgun.

"Are you going to try and raffle that?"

Still he did not deign to answer, but preserved his injured air, and getting once more into his hat and coat started off with the martyred manner of a man who has been driven from home.

Mrs. Toomey finally threw down her scissors with a gesture of despair.

She was too nervous to do any more. The wind, her anxious thoughts, the exacting task of cutting a suit from an inadequate amount of cloth, was a combination that proved to be too much. She glanced at the clock on the bookcase--only three o'clock! Actually there seemed forty-eight hours in days like this. She stood uncertainly for a moment, then determination settled on her tense worried face. Why put it off any longer? It must be done sooner or later--she was sure of that. Besides, nothing ever was as hard as one antic.i.p.ates. This was a cheering thought, and the lines in Mrs. Toomey's forehead smoothed out as she stood before the mirror b.u.t.toning her coat and tying a veil over her head.

It took no small amount of physical courage for a person of Mrs.

Toomey's frailty to face such a gale. But with her thin lips in a determined line and her gaze straight ahead, she managed, by tacking judiciously and stopping at intervals to clasp a telephone pole while she recovered her breath, to reach the iron fence imported from Omaha which gave such a look of exclusiveness to the Pantins' residence.

Mr. Pantin thought he heard the gate slam and peered out through the dead wild-cuc.u.mber vines which framed the bow window to see Mrs. Toomey coming up the only cement walk in Prouty. He immediately thrust his stockinged feet back in his comfortable Romeos preparatory to opening the door, but before he got up he stooped and looked again, searchingly.

Mr. Pantin was endowed with a gift that was like a sixth sense, which enabled him to detect a borrower as far as his excellent eyesight could see one. This intuition, combined with experience, had been developed to the point of uncanniness. No borrower, however adroit, could hope to conceal from Mr. Pantin for a single instant the real purpose of his call by irrelevant talk and solicitous inquiries about his health. In the present instance it did not require great ac.u.men to guess that something urgent had brought Mrs. Toomey out on a day like this, nor any particular keenness to detect the signs of agitation which Mr. Pantin noted in his swift glance. She was coming to borrow--he was as sure of that as though she already had asked, and if any further confirmation were needed, her unnatural gayety when he admitted her and the shortness of her breath finished that.

It availed Mrs. Toomey nothing to tell herself that Mrs. Pantin was her best friend, and that what she was asking was merely a matter of business--the sort of thing that Mr. Pantin was doing every day. Her heart beat ridiculously and she was rather shocked to hear herself laughing shrilly at Mr. Pantin's ba.n.a.l inquiry as to whether she had not "nearly blown off." He added in some haste:

"Priscilla's in the kitchen."

Mrs. Pantin looked up in surprise at her caller's entrance.

"How perfectly sweet of you to come out a day like this!" she chirped.