CHAPTER XIV
JACK OF ALL TRADES
IN due time I received another communication from my unknown friend. Very brief it was. It said:
“I appreciate your confidence. I am glad to know of Haidee. But I want still more to know of yourself. Can you trust me?”
I did not answer this at once, revolving it in my mind. A few days later I wrote in this wise:
“There is little to know, kind friend. Eight years ago, when I was twenty-four, I came to Idaho. I took up a homestead on the Cœur d’Alene River. I proved up on it, and I have sold all but sixteen acres. I have worked hard. I have grown horny-handed, weather-beaten and a bit gray. I live in a flannel shirt and corduroy trousers, and I eat off a pine table in the kitchen of a three-roomed shack. Lately, I have developed into a craftsman. It is a sordid enough tale—is it not?”
Conversations with Haidee were still infrequent. Wanza ordinarily shared them, and Joey was nearly always present.
We were seated in a group about the pool in the Dingle, one morning, Haidee in her chair, Joey at her feet with Jingles asleep at his side, Wanza on the brink of the pool with her tatting, gazing in from time to time at the reflection of her pale blonde loveliness, while I, seated on a stump of a pine tree, was carving a bow-gun for Joey.
There was a white syringa bush above Haidee that was dropping pale flowers on her head. They seemed to me like perfumed petals of Paradise. I caught one as it fell, smiling into her tranquil eyes. I said to myself that with each succeeding day Haidee’s voice grew lighter, her laughter more frequent, her expression brighter.
As we sat there, an entrancing harmony arose about us. Waves of ecstatic melody swelled and softened and swelled again through the green fragrant woods. Trills on one hand, deep throaty mellow carolings on the other. The thrush, the warbler, the sparrow joined in a mighty chorus.
“What a magnificent orchestra,” Haidee cried. “The birds are holding high carnival.”
The pearl-like, throbbing symphony grew sweeter and sweeter. We sat spellbound drinking in the enchantment with hungry ears. Suddenly I cried:
“Look! There is a lazuli-bunting.”
I pointed to the feathered blue beauty that was winging its way to a nearby maple.
“Lazuli-bunting?” Haidee echoed. “What a cosy name. I suppose the baby birds are called baby buntings, Joey.”
Joey looked up in her face with adoration in his brown eyes, and she moved a little forward and pressed his head gently back against her knee. They contemplated each other with a sort of radiant satisfaction.
“No one ever told me about baby buntings,” Joey declared at last.
“What a shame! Mr. Dale, do you know you have neglected Joey’s education?”
Very slowly and prettily Haidee repeated the old rhyme, her fingers stroking the lad’s sunburnt cheek. Wanza’s eyes were very big and strangely burning as they rested on her. And her lips were drawn into a straight, unlovely red line as she finally dropped her regard to her tatting. I carved in silence, and the lazuli-bunting was forgotten as the recital of the nursery rhyme led to the demand for others.
“Wanza,” I teased, going up behind her in the kitchen later, and reaching round to tickle her chin with a ribbon grass as she bent over the ironing board. “Wanza, why so pensive? Where are your smiles?”
“She smiles enough for both,” Wanza retorted, giving an angry flirt to the ruffle she was ironing. “I don’t know which is the worst—your smiley kind or your everlasting scolds. Mrs. Olds would sour the cream—and Mrs. Batterly’s eternal smirk makes me think of a sick calf. And when I feel like rushing around and biting the furniture it’s just enough to kill me, so it is, to have her so purry and mealy-mouthed.”
“But why should you want to rush around and bite the furniture?” I asked in bewilderment.
“Oh, just because I’m a great big rough, mean-tempered country girl! I’ve never had real bringing up.” Tears stood in Wanza’s stormy eyes. “No perfect lady ever felt like biting anything. Oh, please go away, Mr. Dale, and leave me be—I’m cross and tired—and not fit to be noticed!”
I saw Mrs. Olds smiling palely at me from the door of the sick room. She tiptoed forward.
“Hush,” she whispered. “My patient is asleep. He is quite rational, Mr. Dale. In a few days he will be able to sit up.”
With Mrs. Olds’ permission I went in and stood at the bedside and looked down at the sleeping man. He was thin and his face was lean and white. He looked a very different being from the man who had staggered into the cabin that night in the storm. He looked more nearly a man as God intended him to look. His brow was high, his jaw clean cut, his hair grew luxuriantly on his well-shaped head. But his mouth beneath the brown moustache was loose-lipped, self indulgent, and obstinate. And there was something hateful to me in the set of his thick neck on his big shoulders.
I returned to the kitchen. It was very hot in the small room, and the steam that arose from a kettle of soup on the stove as Wanza lifted the lid assailed my nose and eyes unpleasantly. I opened the door to allow the steam to escape, and Wanza spoke hastily:
“Shut the door, Mr. Dale, please, you’re cooling off the oven, and I’m baking this morning.”
“Does a whiff of air like that cool your oven?” I asked curiously.
“Well, I should say so. My, it’s hot in here!” I looked at her red face, and as I did so an inspiration came to me. “Wanza,” I said, “why should I not make you a fireless cooker?”
She stared at me.
“Is there any reason why you would not like one?” I queried.
“Glory! I’d like one right enough.”
“Come to the workshop after dinner,” I rejoined, “and we will discuss it.”
Wanza came to the shop later in the afternoon and I convinced her that the construction of a fireless cooker was a bagatelle to a skilled craftsman such as I considered myself to be. Her face flamed with the fire of her enthusiasm. She caught my hand, and cried:
“You’re a fixing man, all right! You sure are.”
I had never seen her blue eyes so softly grateful before. They were like humid flowers. Her voice was full and low. Her hand pressed my hand, and clung. Seeing her thus moved I stammered:
“Why, I seem to be a sort of Jack of all trades. A Jack of all trades is master of none, usually.” Her face was very close to mine, and what with her strange witchery and her appealing wistfulness I might have said more; but as I gazed at her my senses untangled, and I locked my lips. I shook my head at her, and I smiled a little deprecatingly and loosed my hand as she murmured: “I think you’re just grand—just grand! You’re kind as kind can be. Oh, Mr. David Dale, you sure are a good, good fellow!”
“All of this because I am going to try to turn out some sort of fireless cooker,” I remonstrated.
“You’re always trying to do something—for somebody—trying to help along—that’s it. It ain’t so much just this.”
Wanza was rather incoherent as she turned and walked out of the shop. And someway instead of her words of commendation heartening me they left me dejected. But the cooker was a success. A stout box, lined with asbestos, a receptacle of tin, and sawdust for packing turned the trick. And the corned-beef and cabbage that Wanza, the conjurer, straightway evolved from this crude contrivance left nothing to be desired.
The chicken Wanza cooked one day soon after was so unusually succulent that we decided at once to ride to the village before supper and carry Captain Grif a generous portion.
“He’ll relish a bit of chicken after so much pork and corn bread, and such living. I can warm it up on the stove for him, and stir up some biscuits, while you and him are having a game of chess on the porch,” Wanza announced.
Accordingly we rode away over the ploughed field together at about five o’clock, Mrs. Olds watching us dourly from the kitchen doorway, and Joey yelling after us: “I’ll see to Bell Brandon while you’re away.”
Captain Grif’s was the warmest of welcomes.
“Well, well, well,” he said, rising from his rocker on the front porch as we mounted the steps, “and here you be, the two of ye—and better than a crowd, I say! By golly, s-ship-mate, you’re a sight for sore eyes. You looked peaked, too, and Wanza ain’t at her best. But sit right down—Wanza, there’s the hammock—the hammock I slept in many a night at sea—plump into that now.”
He beamed at his daughter. It was good to see his pride and delight in her.
“Dad,” Wanza said, wagging her bright head at him, “something told us you was pining for chicken—chicken with dumpling, Dad. It’s in this pail. You sit here with Mr. Dale, and I’ll get out the chessmen, and while you’re playing I’ll warm up the stew. Then when you’ve had your bite with us, I’ll play on the melodeon—I’ll play ‘Bell Mahone’—and you and Mr. Dale can sit on the porch and watch the moon come up, and you can tell him stories; and pretty soon I’ll come out, after I have tidied up, and go to sleep in the hammock.”
It all fell out as Wanza planned. We had our bite together; I helped carry the dishes to the sink in the kitchen while Captain Grif filled his pipe; and then Wanza played on the melodeon and sang “Bell Mahone,” and “Wait for the Wagon,” and “Bonnie Eloise,” while Captain Grif and I chatted on the porch. The moon came up later, and Wanza swung in the hammock and dozed, or pretended to, while her father told me one story after another. The central figure of many of his tales was Dockery—the ship’s steward—whom he described as a bald-pated, middle-aged man, with a round face, a Mephistophelean smile, and the helpless frown of a baby. “A curious m-mixture that feller! I was some time readin’ him—but I read him. He wa’n’t very sharp—that was his trouble mostly. It’s a trouble lots of us is afflicted with. Them as knows it I have a sort o’ respect for—them as don’t I ’bominate, I sure do, s-ship-mate. Ignorance itself is bad enough, but when it’s mixed proper with conceit, they’s no standin’ it.” In this wise old Grif would discourse much to our edification.
To-night he was hugely interested in dissecting the big man’s character from bits concerning him Wanza and I had dropped.
“I don’t take no stock in him, boy—I’ve told Wanza so from the first—with all his nightshirts embroidered like an old lady’s antimacassar! And when he gets to settin’ up, and needs waitin’ on, I want Wanza should make herself scarce. The gal tells me she thinks he is a rich man. Well, may be—may be; that don’t mend matters if he’s a rascal.”
At this juncture Wanza yawned, tossed her arms abroad, and said sleepily:
“He’s a gentleman, Dad.”
Old Grif chuckled.
“Now, what do you mean by that? A gentleman! Ump! I’ve never knowed the time I ain’t heard somebody called a gentleman that hadn’t any more call to be considered a gentleman than your pap here. A gentleman, hey? you mean he has clothes made by a tailor and money in his pockets, and goes to the barber frequent, probably takes a bath every day—runnin’ water in his room at home, you guess? Hum—well—yes—he’s a gentleman ’cording to them standards. I got my own standard I measure men by, thank God.”
In his excitement Captain Grif rose from his chair and limped back and forth on the porch, thumping his cane down hard at each step. He went on:
“Now, Dale, here—he’s a gentleman. You bet he is. He ain’t got no initial embroidered on his shirts—ain’t got mor’n two, likely. He ain’t got no runnin’ water in his house—but he douses himself in the river every day; and he shaves himself. It’s some work for him to get himself up presentable. Tain’t no credit to a feller to keep clean when he has a shower bath in his closet.” He was chuckling again, and Wanza ventured to say:
“I call him a gentleman because—he’s different—that’s what he is. He don’t talk or look or act like any one in these parts. I like him. I think I could earn a bit amusing him when he is able to sit up, Dad.”
“You’ll march right back home here if I hear of your tryin’ it, gal, mark me, now!”
“But, Dad, you’re not fair! Why, he may be the best man living. You haven’t ever laid your eyes on him.”
“I knows it—I knows it, Wanza. I may sound a leetle mite prejudiced; but I ain’t—oh, no! I’m fair-minded; but I’m a reader of character, and I can tell as much by a man’s nightshirts as some of these here phrenologists can tell by the bumps on his head. The minute you said he had flowers and initials worked on his nightshirts that minute I said to myself, ‘He ain’t no good’; and you mark my words, he ain’t.”
Going home, Wanza said to me:
“Poor Dad, he’s terribly suspicious, ain’t he, Mr. Dale?”
“A little, Wanza, perhaps.”
“You’re suspicious, too, David Dale. You don’t think the big man is a gentleman.”
I considered.
“I think he would be called a gentleman, Wanza.”
She tossed her head.
“I do think he’s the handsomest man—and the smartest man, seems! And I like embroidered underclothes. So there!”