The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles

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СКАЧАТЬ but was awakened, it seemed to her, almost at once. Cordy stood before her, lamp in hand, laughing nervously; her temples glistened with tiny drops of sweat, and her eyes were dark and strange.

      “It’s time,” said she.

      When it was over, and they could, in the gray morn, sit down for a few minutes’ rest before cooking breakfast. Easter saw Jim approach the bed on tiptoe. His wife smiled, and raised the coverlet softly from over a wee elevation. Tears came into the girl’s eyes, and she rose hastily and went to build a fire in the stove.

      Beside the wagon road that was the sole avenue of communication between the Blue Spring district and the outer world, Easter sat on the mossy roots of a great beech awaiting her husband’s return. Her sunbonnet lay on the ground at her feet, and she was enjoying herself thoroughly, alone in the rich October woods. She was now almost a woman; her abundant vitality had early ripened into a beauty as superbly borne as that of a red wood-lily. She had walked a long way among the ridges, her weight swinging evenly from one foot to the other at every step with a swift, light roll; she was taking time for once in her life to rejoice with the autumn winds and the riot of color and autumn light. How much of outdoor vigor was incarnate in that muscular body of beech towering beside her! Easter’s eyes ran up from the spreading base to the first sweep of the lower branches, noting the ropelike torsion under the bark. A squirrel, his cheeks too full of nuts even to scold her, peeped excitedly from one hiding-place after another, and finally scampered into safety round the giant bole. Then through a rent in the arras of pendent boughs she saw her man coming.

      His grandfathers both had worn the fringed hunting-shirt and the moccasins; and though he himself was clad in the Sunday clothes of a workingman, he moved with the plunge and swing of their hunting gait. Such a keen, clean face as she watched it, uplifted to the light and color and music of the hour! His feet rustled the drifting leaves, and he sang as he came.

      It seemed but a moment’s mischief to hide herself behind a tree so as to give him a surprise; but the prompting instinct was older than the tree itself—old as the old race of young lovers.

      . . . Suddenly they were face to face. He never knew how he cleared the few remaining steps, nor how he came to be holding both the hands she gave him. They laughed in sheer happiness, and stood looking at each other so, until Easter became embarrassed and stirred uneasily. He drew her hand within his arm as she turned, and, not knowing what else to do, they began to walk together along the leaf-strewn roadside, but stopped as aimlessly as they had started.

      To him a woman’s dropped eyes might have meant anything or just nothing at all. He scarcely dared, but drew her to him and bent his head. And somehow their lips met, and his arms were about her, and his cheek—a sandpapery, warm surface that comforted her whole perturbed being with its suggestion of man-strength and promise of husbandly protection—lay against hers.

      That kiss was a revelation. To him it brought the ancient sense of mastery, of ownership—the certainty that here was his wife, the mate for whom his twenty years had been period of preparation and waiting. And the tears of half-shamed fright that started under Easter’s lids were dried at their source by the realization that it was her own man who held her, that he loved her utterly, and that her soul trusted in him. She lifted her arms, and her light sleeves fell back from them as she pushed them round his neck.

      “Oh, Allison, Allison, Allison, Allison!” she murmured, as she had said his name over to herself so many hundreds of times; only, now she was giving herself to him for good or ill with every repetition.

      Before them lay the vision of their probable future—the crude, hard beginning, the suffering and toil that must come; the vision of a life crowned with the triple crown of Love and Labor and Pain. Their young strength rose to meet it with a new dignity of manhood and womanhood. In both their hearts the gladness of love fulfilled was made sublime by the grandeur of responsibility—by the courage required to accept happiness in sure foreknowledge of the suffering of life.

      The squirrel ran down the beech and gathered winter provender unheeded; and yellow leaves swirled round them as through the forest came a wind sweet with the year’s keenest wine.

      two

      The Broken Urn

      From Putnam’s 5 (February 1909): 574–80; illustrated by Alden K. Dawson

      Continuing the theme of woman’s common lot, “The Broken Urn” opens with two small girls already playing out their expected gender roles in their rock playhouse: cooking and cleaning; piecing quilt patterns from discarded quilt scraps; and talking shyly of eventual marriage. But as adulthood approaches, their choices take them in different directions. Sarepta, the quiet beauty of the pair, remains in the mountain community and marries her childhood sweetheart. Nigarie, the adventurous one, leaves the mountain in the company of her husband, the hotel proprietor’s son. The contrast in their adult lives provides the conflict around which this plot turns and offers an explanation for the author’s choice of title: “The Broken Urn,” after the quilt pattern that serves as metaphor for the story.

      . . .

      Above the cabin, in the edge of the clearing, stood a great irregular block of sandstone. Gaunt and barren it may have been, as first fallen from the cliffs that towered behind the forest; but centuries of weather had made it a thing of friendliness and comfort. Succulent grasses, rooted in the loam accumulated by the yearly drift of fallen leaves, sprouted from every crevice; ferns trembled over its edge; the fence led only to the rock on either side, so that its bulk interposed to spare the mauling of several dozen rails; a hollow scooped under it on the woodland exposure afforded shelter in winter to any number of pigs; and beneath the overhang facing the valley two little girls had built a playhouse. Here signs of frequent occupancy were not lacking: the ground was lightly printed all over by slim bare feet, and the rock was smudged with woodsmoke above a tiny furnace of stones. No real playthings were visible, but the rock shelves were stocked with potsherds and broken crockery, and there were tin pails and even little skillets and cookers, cleverly fashioned from old tin cans, for the making and serving of real bear-grass salad.

      It was, however, too late in the season for bear-grass. The tide of young summer had brimmed the valleys, and came rushing up the slopes to burst along the bluffs in a high-flung surf of laurel bloom. The two small friends were seated now on the grassy top of the rock, shaded by a great arching tupelo; they were piecing quilt patterns. They had laid out for comparison on their knees and about on the grass, the Eagle, the Dream, the Texas and Kentucky Stars, the Crazy Ann, the Tree of Paradise, and three or four varieties of brick-work and log-cabin. The pattern under immediate consideration was the Broken Urn.

      “I been a-studyin’,” said Nigarie, the sprightly, dark one, “whether hit wouldn’t be the prettiest to piece the urn out whole.”

      “Let’s try hit that-a-way,” agreed Sarepta, a child with an angel’s face.

      Against nature, the beauty was also the worker, and Sarepta’s small skilled fingers swiftly cut and laid out in pink and brown calico the design they had mentioned, her big gray eyes shaded by sumptuous lashes, brooding full of tender dreams above a tangle of flaxy-gold curls falling about the down-bent, intent face, pure in outline and tint as a pearl.

      Even loquacious Nigarie sat acutely observant, scarcely speaking, her three-cornered kitten countenance with its hard, round little cheeks under the beryl-green eyes puckered to disproportionate anxiety, till the urn was an accomplished fact, so absorbed were they both in this, their one avenue of artistic expression.

      “Hit’s some like grandma’s Vase of Friendship,” commented Nigarie, drawing a long breath when it was done.

      “We СКАЧАТЬ