Parnassus on Wheels (14 page)

I decided to camp where I was. I guided Peg into a field beside the
road, hitched her to a fence, and took the dog into the van with me.
I was too tired to undress. I fell into the bunk and drew the
blankets over me. As I did so, something dropped down behind the
bunk with a sharp rap. It was a forgotten corncob pipe of the
Professor's, blackened and sooty. I put it under my pillow, and
fell asleep.

Monday, October seventh. If this were a novel about some charming,
slender, pansy-eyed girl, how differently I would have to describe
the feelings with which I woke the next morning. But these being
only a few pages from the life of a fat, New England housewife, I
must be candid. I woke feeling dull and sour. The day was gray and
cool: faint shreds of mist sifting up from the Sound and a desolate
mewing of seagulls in the air. I was unhappy, upset, and—yes—shy.
Passionately I yearned to run to the Professor, to gather him into
my arms, to be alone with him in Parnassus, creaking up some sunny
by-road. But his words came back to me: I was nothing to him. What
if he didn't love me after all?

I walked across two fields, down to the beach where little waves
were slapping against the shingle. I washed my face and hands in
salt water. Then I went back to Parnassus and brewed some coffee
with condensed milk. I gave Peg and Bock their breakfasts. Then I
hitched Peg to the van again, and felt better. As I drove into the
town I had to wait at the grade crossing while a wrecking train
rumbled past, on its way back from Willdon. That meant that the
line was clear again. I watched the grimy men on the cars, and
shuddered to think what they had been doing.

The Vigor county jail lies about a mile out of the town, an ugly,
gray stone barracks with a high, spiked wall about it. I was
thankful that it was still fairly early in the morning, and I drove
through the streets without seeing any one I knew. Finally I reached
the gate in the prison wall. Here some kind of a keeper barred my
way. "Can't get in, lady," he said. "Yesterday was visitors' day.
No more visitors till next month."

"I
must
get in," I said. "You've got a man in there on a
false charge."

"So they all say," he retorted, calmly, and spat halfway across the
road. "You wouldn't believe any of our boarders had a right to be
here if you could hear their friends talk."

I showed him Governor Stafford's card. He was rather impressed
by this, and retired into a sentry-box in the wall—to telephone,
I suppose.

Presently he came back.

"The sheriff says he'll see you, ma'am. But you'll have to leave
this here dynamite caboose behind." He unlocked a little door in the
immense iron gate, and turned me over to another man inside. "Take
this here lady to the sheriff," he said.

Some of Vigor county's prisoners must have learned to be pretty good
gardeners, for certainly the grounds were in good condition. The
grass was green and trimly mowed; there were conventional beds of
flowers in very ugly shapes; in the distance I saw a gang of men
in striped overalls mending a roadway. The guide led me to an
attractive cottage to one side of the main building. There were two
children playing outside, and I remember thinking that within the
walls of a jail was surely a queer place to bring up youngsters.

But I had other things to think about. I looked up at that grim,
gray building. Behind one of those little barred windows was the
Professor. I should have been angry at Andrew, but somehow it all
seemed a kind of dream. Then I was taken into the hallway of the
sheriff's cottage and in a minute I was talking to a big,
bull-necked man with a political moustache.

"You have a prisoner here called Roger Mifflin?" I said.

"My dear Madam, I don't keep a list of all our inmates in my
head. If you will come to the office we will look up the records."

I showed him the Governor's card. He took it and kept looking at it
as though he expected to see the message written there change or
fade away. We walked across a strip of lawn to the prison building.
There, in a big bare office, he ran over a card index.

"Here we are," he said. "Roger Mifflin; age, 41; face, oval;
complexion, florid; hair, red but not much of it; height, 64
inches; weight, stripped, 120; birthmark...."

"Never mind," I said. "That's the man. What's he here for?"

"He's held in default of bail, pending trial. The charge is attempt
to defraud one Helen McGill, spinster, age..."

"Rubbish!" I said. "I'm Helen McGill, and the man made no attempt to
defraud me."

"The charge was entered and warrant applied for by your brother,
Andrew McGill, acting on your behalf."

"I never authorized Andrew to act on my behalf."

"Then do you withdraw the charge?"

"By all means," I said. "I've a great mind to enter a counter-charge
against Andrew and have
him
arrested."

"This is all very irregular," said the sheriff, "but if the prisoner
is known to the Governor, I suppose there is no alternative. I
cannot annul the warrant without some recognizance. According to
the laws of this State the next of kin must stand surety for the
prisoner's good behaviour after release. There is no next of kin...."

"Surely there is!" I said. "I am the prisoner's next of kin."

"What do you mean?" he said. "In what relationship do you
stand to this Roger Mifflin?"

"I intend to marry him just as soon as I can get him away from here."

He burst into a roar of laughter. "I guess there's no stopping you,"
he said. He pinned the Governor's card to a blue paper on the desk,
and began filling in some blanks.

"Well, Miss McGill," he went on, "don't take away more than one of
my prisoners or I'll lose my job. The turnkey will take you up to
the cell. I'm exceedingly sorry: you can see that the mistake was
none of our fault. Tell the Governor that, will you, when you see
him?"

I followed the attendant up two flights of bare, stone stairs, and
down a long, whitewashed corridor. It was a gruesome place; rows
and rows of heavy doors with little, barred windows. I noticed
that each door had a combination knob, like a safe. My knees felt
awfully shaky.

But it wasn't really so heart-throbby as I had expected. The jailer
stopped at the end of a long passageway. He spun the clicking dial,
while I waited in a kind of horror. I think I expected to see the
Professor with shaved head (they couldn't shave much off his head,
poor lamb!) and striped canvas suit, and a ball and chain on his
ankle.

The door swung open heavily. There was a narrow, clean little room
with a low camp bed, and under the barred window a table strewn with
sheets of paper. It was the Professor in his own clothes, writing
busily, with his back toward me. Perhaps he thought it was only
an attendant with food, or perhaps he didn't even hear the
interruption. I could hear his pen running busily. I might have
known you never would get any heroics out of that man! Trust him
to make the best of it!

"Lemon sole and a glass of sherry, please, James," said the
Professor over his shoulder, and the warder, who evidently had
joked with him before, broke into a cackle of laughter.

"A lady to see yer Lordship," he said.

The Professor turned round. His face went quite white. For the first
time in my experience of him he seemed to be at a loss for speech.

"Miss—Miss McGill," he stammered. "You
are
the good Samaritan.
I'm doing the John Bunyan act, see? Writing in prison. I've really
started my book at last. And I find the fellows here know nothing
whatever about literature. There isn't even a library in the place."

For the life of me, I couldn't utter the tenderness in my heart with
that gorilla of a jailer standing behind us.

Somehow we made our way downstairs, after the Professor had gathered
together the sheets of his manuscript. It had already reached
formidable proportions, as he had written fifty pages in the
thirty-six hours he had been in prison. In the office we had to sign
some papers. The sheriff was very apologetic to Mifflin, and offered
to take him back to town in his car, but I explained that Parnassus
was waiting at the gate. The Professor's eyes brightened when he
heard that, but I had to hurry him away from an argument about
putting good books in prisons. The sheriff walked with us to the
gate and there shook hands again.

Peg whickered as we came up to her, and the Professor patted her
soft nose. Bock tugged at his chain in a frenzy of joy. At last we
were alone.

I never knew just how it happened. Instead of driving back through
Port Vigor, we turned into a side road leading up over the hill and
across the heath where the air came fresh and sweet from the sea.
The Professor sat very silent, looking about him. There was a grove
of birches on the hill, and the sunlight played upon their satin
boles.

"It feels good to be out again," he said calmly. "The Sage cannot
be so keen a lover of open air as his books would indicate, or he
wouldn't be so ready to clap a man into quod. Perhaps I owe him
another punch on the nose for that."

"Oh, Roger," I said—and I'm afraid my voice was trembly—"I'm
sorry
. I'm
sorry
."

Not very eloquent, was it? And then, somehow or other, his arm was
around me.

"Helen," he said. "Will you marry me? I'm not rich, but I've saved
up enough to live on. We'll always have Parnassus, and this winter
we'll go and live in Brooklyn and write the book. And we'll travel
around with Peg, and preach the love of books and the love of human
beings. Helen—you're just what I need, God bless you. Will you come
with me and make me the happiest bookseller in the world?"

Peg must have been astonished at the length of time she had for
cropping the grass, undisturbed. I know that Roger and I sat
careless of time. And when he told me that ever since our first
afternoon together he had determined to have me, sooner or later,
I was the proudest woman in New England. I told Roger about the
ghastly wreck, and my agony of apprehension. I think it was the
wreck that made us both feel inclined to forgive Andrew.

We had a light luncheon together there on the dunes above the Sound.
By taking a short cut over the ridge we struck into the Shelby road
without going down into Port Vigor again. Peg pulled us along toward
Greenbriar, and we talked as we went.

Perhaps the best of it was that a cold drizzle of rain began to fall
as we moved along the hill road. The Professor—as I still call him,
by force of habit—curtined in the front of the van with a rubber
sheet. Bock hopped up and curled himself aginst his master's leg.
Roger got out his corncob pipe, and I sat close to him. In the
gathering gloom we plodded along, as happy a trio—or quartet, if
you include fat, cheery old Peg—as any on this planet. Summer was
over, and we were no longer young, but there were great things
before us. I listened to the drip of the rain, and the steady creak
of Parnassus on her axles. I thought of my "anthology" of loaves of
bread and vowed to bake a million more if Roger wanted me to. It was
after supper time when we got to Greenbriar. Roger had suggested
that we take a shorter road that would have brought us through to
Redfield sooner, but I begged him to go by way of Shelby and
Greenbriar, just as we had come before. I did not tell him why I
wanted this. And when finally we came to a halt in front of Kirby's
store at the crossroads it was raining heavily and we were ready for
a rest.

"Well, sweetheart," said Roger, "shall we go and see what sort of
rooms the hotel has?"

"I can think of something better than that," said I. "Let's go up to
Mr. Kane and have him marry us. Then we can get back to Sabine Farm
afterward, and give Andrew a surprise."

"By the bones of Hymen!" said Roger. "You're right!"

It must have been ten o'clock when we turned in at the red gate
of Sabine Farm. The rain had stopped, but the wheels sloshed
through mud and water at every turn. The light was burning in the
sitting-room, and through the window I could see Andrew bent over
his work table. We climbed out, stiff and sore from the long ride.
I saw Roger's face set in a comical blend of sternness and humour.

"Well, here goes to surprise the Sage!" he whispered.

We picked our way between puddles and rapped on the door. Andrew
appeared, carrying the lamp in one hand. When he saw us he grunted.

"Let me introduce my wife," said Roger.

"Well, I'll be damned," said Andrew.

But Andrew isn't quite so black as I've painted him. When he's
once convinced of the error of his ways, he is almost pathetically
eager to make up. I remember only one remark in the subsequent
conversation, because I was so appalled by the state of everything
at Sabine Farm that I immediately set about putting the house to
rights. The two men, however, as soon as Parnassus was housed in
the barn and the animals under cover, sat down by the stove to talk
things over.

"I tell you what," said Andrew—"do whatever you like with your
wife; she's too much for me. But I'd like to buy that Parnassus."

"Not on your life!" said the Professor.