Lonesome Land (17 page)

“Indeed!” Val was sitting now upon the red plush chair. Her face was perfectly colorless, her manner frozen. The word seemed to speak itself, without having any relation whatever to
her thoughts and her emotions.

Kent waited. It seemed to him that she took it harder than she would have taken the news that Manley was dead. He had no means of gauging the horror of a young woman who has all her life been
familiar with such terms as “the demon rum,” and who has been taught that “intemperance is the doorway to perdition”; a young woman whose life has been sheltered jealously
from all contact with the ugly things of the world, and who believes that she might better die than marry a drunkard. He watched her unobtrusively.

“Anyway, it was worrying over you that made him get off wrong today,” he ventured at last, as a sort of palliative. “They say he was going to start home right in the face of
the fire, and when they wouldn’t let him, he headed straight for a saloon and commenced to pour whisky down him. He thought sure you—he thought the fire would—”

“I see,” Val interrupted stonily. “For the very doubtful honor of shaking the hand of a politician, he left me alone to face as best I might the possibility of burning alive;
and when it seemed likely that the possibility had become a certainty, he must celebrate his bereavement by becoming a beast. Is that what you would have me believe of my husband?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Kent admitted reluctantly. “Only I wouldn’t have put it just that way, maybe.”

“Indeed! And how would you put it, then?”

Kent leaned harder against the door, and looked at her curiously. Women, it seemed to him, were always going to extremes; they were either too soft and meek, or else they were too hard and
unmerciful.

“How would you put it? I am rather curious to know your point of view.”

“Well, I know men better than you do, Mrs. Fleetwood. I know they can do some things that look pretty rotten on the surface, and yet be fairly decent underneath. You don’t know how a
habit like that gets a fellow just where he’s weakest. Man ain’t a beast. He’s selfish and careless, and he gives way too easy, but he thinks the world of you. Jim says he cried
like a baby when he came into the saloon, and acted like a crazy man. You don’t want to be too hard on him. I’ve an idea this will learn him a lesson. If you take him the right way,
Mrs. Fleetwood, the chances are he’ll quit drinking.”

Val smiled. Kent thought he had never before seen a smile like that, and hoped he never would see another. There was in it neither mercy nor mirth, but only the hard judgment of a woman who does
not understand.

“Will you bring him to me here, Mr. Burnett? I do not feel quite equal to invading a saloon and begging him, on my knees, to come—after the conventional manner of drunkards’
wives. But I should like to see him.”

Kent stared. “He ain’t in any shape to argue with,” he remonstrated. “You better wait a while.”

She rested her chin upon her hands, folded upon the high chair back, and gazed at him with her tawny eyes, that somehow reminded Kent of a lioness in a cage. He thought swiftly that a lioness
would have as much mercy as she had in that mood.

“Mr. Burnett,” she began quietly, when Kent’s nerves were beginning to feel the strain of her silent stare, “I want to see Manley
as
he is
now.
I
will tell you why. You aren’t a woman, and you never will understand, but I shall tell you; I want to tell
somebody.

“I was raised well—that sounds queer, but modesty forbids more. At any rate, my mother was very careful about me. She believed in a girl marrying and becoming a good wife to a good
man, and to that end she taught me and trained me. A woman must give her all—her life, her past, present, and future—to the man she marries. For three years I thought how unworthy I was
to be Manley’s wife.
Unworthy,
do you hear? I slept with his letters under my pillow.” The self-contempt in her tone! “I studied the things I thought would make me a better
companion out here in the wilderness. I practiced hours and hours every day upon my violin, because Manley had admired my playing, and I thought it would please him to have me play in the firelight
on winter evenings, when the blizzards were howling about the house! I learned to cook, to wash clothes, to iron, to sweep, and to scrub, and to make my own clothes, because Manley’s wife
would live where she could not hire servants to do these things. I lived a beautiful, picturesque dream of domestic happiness.

“I left my friends, my home, all the things I had been accustomed to all my life, and I came out here to live that dream!” She laughed bitterly.

“You can easily guess how much of it has come true, Mr. Burnett. But you don’t know what it costs a girl to come down from the clouds and find that reality is hard and
ugly—from dreaming of a cozy little nest of a home, and the love and care of—of Manley, to the reality—to carrying water and chopping wood and being left alone, day after day, and
to find that his love only meant—Oh, you don’t know how a woman clings to her ideals! You don’t know how I have clung to mine. They have become rather tattered, and I have had to
mend them often, but I have clung to them, even though they do not resemble much the dreams I brought with me to this horrible country.

“But if it’s true, what you tell me—if Manley himself is another disillusionment—if beyond his selfishness and his carelessness he is a drunken brute whom I can’t
even respect, then I’m done with my ideals. I want to see him just as he is. I want to see him once without the halo I have kept shining all these months. I’ve got my life to
live—but I want to face facts and live facts. I can’t go on dreaming and making believe, after this.” She stopped and looked at him speculatively, absolutely without emotion.

“Just before I left home,” she went on in the same calm quiet, “a girl showed me some verses written by a very wicked man. At least, they say he is very wicked—at any
rate, he is in jail. I thought the verses horrible and brutal; but now I think the man must be very wise. I remember a few lines, and they seem to me to mean Manley.

“I wish I had that poem now—I think I could understand it. I think—”

“I think you’ve got talking hysterics, if there is such a thing,” Kent interrupted harshly. “You don’t know half what you’re saying. You’ve had a hard
day, and you’re all tired out, and everything looks outa focus. I know—I’ve seen men like that sometimes when some trouble hit ’em hard and unexpected. What you want is
sleep; not poetry about killing people. A man, in the shape you are in, takes to whisky. You’re taking to graveyard poetry—and, if you ask
me,
that’s worse than whisky. You
ain’t normal. What you want to do is go straight to bed. When you wake up in the morning you won’t feel so bad. You won’t have half as many troubles as you’ve got
now.”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand it,” Val remarked coldly, still staring at him with her chin on her hands.

“You won’t yourself, tomorrow morning,” Kent declared unsympathetically, and called Mrs. Hawley from the kitchen. “You better put Mrs. Fleetwood to bed,” he advised
gruffly. “And if you’ve got anything that’ll make her sleep, give her a dose of it. She’s so tired she can’t see straight.” He was nearly to the outside door
when Val recovered her speech.

“You men are all alike,” she said contemptuously. “You give orders and you consider yourselves above all the laws of morality or decency; in reality you are beneath them. We
shouldn’t expect anything of the lower animals! How I
despise
men!”

“Now you’re
talking,
” grinned Kent, quite unmoved. “Whack us in a bunch all you like—but don’t make one poor devil take it all. Men as a class are used
to it and can stand it.” He was laughing as he left the room, but his amusement lasted only until the door was closed behind him. “Lord!” he exclaimed, and drew a deep breath.
“I’d sure hate to have that little woman say all them things about
me!
” and glanced involuntarily over his shoulder to where a crack of light showed under the faded green
shade of one of the parlor windows.

He crossed the street and entered the saloon where Manley was still drinking heavily, his face crimson and blear-eyed and brutalized, his speech thickened disgustingly. He was sprawled in an
armchair, waving an empty glass in an erratic attempt to mark the time of a college ditty six or seven years out of date, which he was trying to sing. He leered up at Kent.

“Wife ’sall righ’,” he informed him solemnly. “Knew she would be—fine guards’ got out there. ’Sall righ’—somebody shaid sho. Have a
drink.”

Kent glowered down at him, made a swift, mental decision, and gripped him by the shoulder. “You come with me,” he commanded. “I’ve got something important I want to tell
you. Come on—if you can walk.”

“’Course I c’n walk all righ’. Shertainly I can walk. Wha’s makes you think I can’t walk? Want to inshult me? ’Sall my friends here—no secrets
from my friends. Wha’s want tell me? Shay it here.”

Kent was a big man; that is to say, he was tall, well-muscled and active. But so was Manley. Kent tried the power of persuasion, leaving force as a last, doubtful result. In fifteen minutes or
thereabouts he had succeeded in getting Manley outside the door, and there he balked.

“Wha’s matter wish you?” he complained, pulling back. “C’m on back ’n’ have drink. Wha’s wanna tell me?”

“You wait. I’ll tell you all about it in a minute. I’ve got something to show you, and I don’t want the bunch to get next. Savvy?”

He had a sickening sense that the subterfuge would not have deceived a five-year-old child, but it was accepted without question.

He led Manley stumbling up the street, evading a direct statement as to his destination, pulled him off the board walk, and took him across a vacant lot well sprinkled with old shoes and tin
cans. Here Manley fell down, and Kent’s patience was well tested before he got him up and going again.

“Where y’ goin’?” Manley inquired pettishly, as often as he could bring his tongue to the labor of articulation.

“You wait and I’ll show you,” was Kent’s unvaried reply.

At last he pushed open a door and led his victim into the darkness of a small, windowless building. “It’s in here—back against the wall, there,” he said, pulling Manley
after him. By feeling, and by a good sense of location, he arrived at a rough bunk built against the farther wall, with a blanket or two upon it.

“There you are,” he announced grimly. “You’ll have a sweet time getting anything to drink here, old boy. When you’re sober enough to face your wife and have some
show of squaring yourself with her, I’ll come and let you out.” He had pushed Manley down upon the bunk, and had reached the door before the other could get up and come at him. He
pulled the door shut with a slam, slipped a padlock into the staple, and snapped it just before Manley lurched heavily against it. He was cursing as well as he could—was Manley, and he began
kicking like an unruly child shut into a closet.

“Aw, let up,” Kent advised him, through a crack in the wall. “Want to know where you are? Well, you’re in Hawley’s ice house; you know it’s a fine place for
drunks to sober up in; it’s awful popular for that purpose. Aw, you can’t do any business kicking—that’s been tried lots of times. This is sure well built, for an ice house.
No, I can’t let you out. Couldn’t possibly, you know. I haven’t got the key—old lady Hawley has got it, and she’s gone to bed hours ago. You go to sleep and forget
about it. I’ll talk to you in the morning. Good night, and pleasant dreams!”

The last thing Kent heard as he walked away was Manley’s profane promise to cut Kent’s heart out very early the next day.

“The darned fool,” Kent commented, as he stopped in the first patch of lamplight to roll a cigarette. “He ain’t got another friend in town that’d go to the trouble
I’ve gone to for him. He’ll realize it, too, when all that whisky quits stewing inside him.”

CHAPTER TWELVE