Ma Pettengill Part 26

Pretty soon he says he's nearly as well as ever, but that wasn't much.

Now the patriots for the auction begun to throng in and Genevieve May is once more proud and fluttering. She glances fondly at her n.o.ble array of jars, with these illegitimate preserves s.h.i.+ning richly through, and she gets the Frenchman on his feet and onto the box; and the crowd cheers like mad and presses close. I was standing close to G.H. Stultz, and he whispers to me:

"My Lord! If there was only some means of getting that stock into the German commissary! But I'm told they a.n.a.lyze everything. Anyway, I got my bidders planted and I'll have to buy up the stock if it breaks me."

Then the Frenchman begun to talk in a very nice way. He said a few words about his country--how they had been fighting all these years, not knowing whether they could win or not, but meaning to fight till there wasn't any fighters left; and how grateful France was for the timely aid of this great country and for the efforts of beautiful ladies like Madam Popper, and so on.

You bet no one laughed, even if he didn't talk such very good English.

They didn't even laugh when he said beautiful ladies like Madam Popper, though Cousin Egbert, somewhere off in the crowd, made an undignified sound which he pretended was coughing.

The Frenchman then said he would now ask for bids for these beautiful table delicacies, which were not only of rich food value but were more priceless than gold and jewels because of having been imprisoned in the crystal gla.s.s by the fair hands of the beautiful Madam Popper; and what was he offered for six bottles of this unspeakable jelly?

Of course G.H. Stultz would of had 'em in no time if the panic hadn't saved him. Yes, sir; right then something terrible and unforeseen happened to cause a frightful panic. About five of them jars of preserves blew up with loud reports. Of course everyone's first thought was that a German plot was on to lay Horticultural Hall in ruins with dynamite. It sounded such. No one thought it was merely these strange preserves that had been working overtime in that furnace.

Women screamed and strong men made a dash for the door over prostrate bodies. And then a lot more explosions took place. The firing became general, as the reports say. Bottle after bottle shot its dread contents into the fray, and many feeble persons was tromped on by the mob.

It wasn't any joke for a minute. The big jars, mostly loaded with preserves, went off with heavy reports; then there was these smaller bottles, filled with artificial ketchup and corked. They went off like a battery of light field guns, putting down a fierce barrage of ketchup on one and all. It was a good demonstration of the real thing, all right.

I ain't never needed any one since that to tell me what war is.

The crowd was two thirds out before any one realized just what kind of frightfulness was going on. Then, amid shot and sh.e.l.l that would still fly from time to time, the bravest, that hadn't been able to fight their way out, stood by and picked up the wounded under fire and helped brush their clothes off. The groans of the sufferers mingled with the hiss of escaping ketchup.

Genevieve May was in hysterics from the minute the first high-powered gun was fired. She kept screaming for everyone to keep cool. And at last, when they got some kind of order, she went into a perfectly new fit because her Frenchman was missing. She kept it up till they found the poor man. He was found, without his crutch, at the far end of the hall, though no one has ever yet figgered how he could get there through the frenzied mob. He was on a chair, weak and trembling, behind a fancy quilt made by Grandma Watkins, containing over ten thousand pieces of silk. He was greenish yellow in colour and his heart had gone wrong.

That'll show you this bombardment wasn't any joke. The poor man had been exhausted by Cousin Egbert's well-meant efforts to show him something exciting, and he was now suffering from sure-enough sh.e.l.l shock, which he'd had before in more official circ.u.mstances.

He was a brave man; he'd fought like a tiger in the trenches, and had later been shot down out of the air four times, and was covered with wounds and medals and crosses; but this here enfilade at the fair hands of the beautiful Madam Popper, coming in his weak state, had darn near devastated what few nerves the war had left him.

It was a sad moment. Genevieve May was again exploding, like her own handiwork, which wasn't through itself yet by any means, because a solitary shot would come now and then, like the main enemy had retreated but was leaving rear guards and snipers. Also, people that had had exhibits in the art section and the fancy-work section was now setting up yells of rage over their treasures that had been desecrated by the far-flung ketchup.

But tender hands was leading the stricken Frenchman back of the lines to a dressing station, and all was pretty near calm again, except for G.H.

Stultz, who was swearing--or words to that effect.

It really took a good hour to restore perfect calm and figure up the losses. They was severe. Of course I don't mean to say the whole three hundred bottles of this ammunition dump had exploded. Some had been put up only a short while and hadn't had time to go morbid; and even some of the old stuff had remained staunch.

The mincemeat shrapnel had proved fairly destructive, but the turnip marmalade didn't seem to of developed much internal energy. All of them jars of marmalade proved to be what they call "duds." But you bet enough had gone up to make a good battle sketch. The ketchup, especial, was venomous.

I met G.H. Stultz as I left the trenches. He'd been caught in a machine-gun nest of ketchup and had only wiped about half of it off his face. He looked like a contagious disease.

"Say, look here," he says; "you can't tell me there isn't a Providence ever watching over this world to give some of us just what's coming to us!" That was very silly, because I'd never told him anything of the sort.

Then I go out into No Man's Land and meet Cousin Egbert by a lemonade stand. He was one radiant being. He asked me to have a gla.s.s of the beverage, and I done so; and while I was sipping it he says brightly:

"Wasn't that some gorgeous display of fireworks? And wasn't it fine to stand there and watch them bottles laugh their heads off at this food profiteer?"

I said he ought to be right sorry for her--after all the work she'd done.

"Not me!" he says firmly. "She never done any work in her life except to boost her own social celebrity."

Then he took another gulp of his lemonade and says, very bitter:

"Madam Peach Blossom! I wonder what that funny little mite of hers will say when she sees her to-night? Something laughable, I bet--like it would be 'Madam Onion Blossom!'--or something comical, just to give her a good laugh after her hard day."

Such is Cousin Egbert, and ever will be. And Genevieve May, having took up things all round the circle, is now back to the dance.

X

AS TO HERMAN WAGNER

It had been a toilsome day for Ma Pettengill and me. Since sunup we had ridden more than a score of mountain miles on horses that could seldom exceed a crawl in pace. At dawn we had left the flatlands along the little timbered river, climbed to the lava beds of the first mesa, traversed a sad stretch of these where even the sage grew scant, and come, by way of a winding defile that was soon a mounting canon, into big hills unending.

Here for many hours we had laboured over furtive, tortuous trails, aimless and lost, it might have seemed, but that ever and again we came upon small bands of cattle moving one way. These showed that we had a mission and knew, after all, what we were about. These cattle were knowingly bent toward the valley and home. They went with much of a businesslike air, stopping only at intervals to s.n.a.t.c.h at the spa.r.s.e short gra.s.s that grows about the roots of the sagebrush. They had come a long journey from their grazing places, starting when the range went bad and water holes dried, and now seemed glad indeed to give up the wild free life of a short summer and become tended creatures again, where strangely thoughtful humans would lavish cut gra.s.s upon them for certain obscure but doubtless benevolent purposes of their own.

It was our mission this day to have a look-see, mebbe as far as Horsefly Mountain, and get a general idee of how many head was already coming down to eat up the so-and-so shortest hay crop that had ever been stacked on the Arrowhead since the dry winter of '98, when beef fell to two cents a pound, with darned few takers at that.

It was really a day of scenic delight, if one hadn't to reflect sorely upon the exigencies of the beef-cattle profession, and at least one of us was free of this thrall.

What we reached at last were small mountains rather than big hills; vast exclamatory remnants of shattered granite and limestone, thickly timbered, reckless of line, sharp of peak. One minute canon we viewed from above was quite preposterous in its ambitions, having colour and depth and riot of line in due proportions and quite worthy of the grand scale. It wasn't a Grand Canon, but at least it was a baby grand, and I loitered on its brink until reminded sharply that I'd better pour leather into that there skate if I wanted to make home that night.

I devoutly did wish to make home that night, for the spot we were on was barren of those little conveniences I am accustomed to. Moreover, the air was keen and a hunger, all day in the building, called for strong meats.

So I not too reluctantly pa.s.sed on from this scenic miniature of parlour dimensions--and from the study of a curious boulder thereby which had intrigued me not a little.

Now we were home and relaxed by the Arrowhead fireside, after a moving repast of baked young sage hens. The already superior dynamics of the meal, moreover, had been appreciably heightened by a bottle of Uncle Henry's homemade grape wine, which he warmly recommends for colds or parties, or anything like that. It had proved to be a wine of almost a too-recent _cru_. Ma Pettengill said that if Uncle Henry was aiming to put it on the market in quant.i.ty production he had ought to name it the Stingaree brand, because it was sure some stuff, making for malevolence even to the lengths of matricide, if that's what killing your mother is called. She said, even at a Polish wedding down across the tracks of a big city, it would have the ambulances and patrol wagons clanging up a good half hour quicker than usual.

Be that as it may, or is, when I had expected sleep to steal swiftly to the mending of the day's ravages I merely found myself wakeful and wondering. This stuff of Uncle Henry's is an able ferment. I wondered about a lot of things. And at the same time I wondered interminably about that remarkable boulder at the side of the Tom Thumb Grand Canon. I was even wakeful enough and discursive enough--my hostess had taken but one gla.s.s from the bottle--to wonder delightedly about all rocks and stones, and geology, and that sort of thing. It was almost scientific, the way I wondered, as I sat there idly toying with my half-filled gla.s.s.

Take this particular boulder, for example. It had once been mere star dust, hadn't it? Some time ago, I mean, or thereabouts. But it had been star dust; and then, next thing it knew, it got to be a kind of cosmic stew, such as leisurely foreigners patch out highways with, and looking no more like a granite boulder than anything.

Then something happened, like someone letting the furnace fire go out the night of the big freeze; and this stuff I'm talking about grew cold and discouraged, and quit flat, apparently not caring a hoot what shape it would be found in years and years later, the result being that it was found merely in the general shape of rocks or boulders--to use the more scientific term--which is practically no shape at all, as you might say, being quite any shape that happens, or the shape of rocks and boulders as they may be seen on almost every hand by those of us who have learned to see in the true sense of the word.

I have had to be brief in this shorter science course on the earth's history before the time of man, because more important matters claim my attention and other speakers are waiting. The point is that this boulder up there by the dwarf canon had survived from unremembered chaos; had been melted, stewed, baked, and chilled until it had no mind of its own left; then b.u.mped round by careless glaciers until it didn't care where it came to rest; and at last, after a few hundred million years of stony unconcern for its ultimate fate, here it had been drawn by the cunning hand of man sprang into the complex mechanism of our industrial human scramble.

That is to say, this boulder I speak of, the size of a city hall, lying there in n.o.ble neglect since long before wise old water animals were warning their children that this here fool talk about how you could go up out of the water and walk round on dry land would get folks into trouble, because how could a body breathe up there when there wasn't any water to breathe in? And the fools that tried it would soon find out; and serve 'em right! Well, I mean to say, this boulder that had lain inert and indifferent while the ages wrought man from a thing of one cell--and not much of a cell at that--bore across that face of it nearest the winding trail, a lettered appeal, as from one man to another. The letters were large and neatly done in white paint and the brushwork was recent. And the letters said, with a good deal of pathos, it seemed to me:

WAGNER'S SYLVAN GLEN, ONLY THIRTY-TWO MILES. HERMAN WAGNER, SOLE PROP.

Let this teach us, one and all, this morning, that everything in Nature has its use if we but search diligently. I mean, even big rocks like this, which are too big to build homes or even courthouses of. May we not, at least, paint things on them in plain letters with periods and commas, and so on, and so give added impetus to whatever is happening to us?

But the evening wears on and the whipping mental urge of grape juice meddled with by Uncle Henry wears off. And so, before it all ends, what about Herman Wagner, Sole Prop. of Wagner's Sylvan Glen?

I know it has been a hard day, but let us try to get the thing in order.

Why not begin cautiously with a series of whys? Why any particular sylvan glen in a country where everything is continuously and overwhelmingly sylvan and you can't heave a rock without hitting a glen? Really, you can't walk fifty yards out there without stepping on a glen--or in a glen; it doesn't matter. What I am earnestly trying to get at is, if this Herman Wagner wanted to be sole prop. of a sylvan glen, why should he have gone thirty-two miles farther for one? Why didn't he have it right there? Why insanely push thirty-two miles on in a country where miles mean something serious? Up-and-down miles, tilted horribly or standing on edge!

It didn't seem astute. And Herman achieved simply no persuasion whatever with me by stocking in that "only." He could have put only all over the rock and it would still have been thirty-two miles, wouldn't it? Only indeed! You might think the man was saying "Only ten minutes' walk from the post office"--or something with a real meaning like that. I claimed then and I claim now that he should have omitted the only and come out blunt with the truth. There are times in this world when the straight and bitter truth is better without any word-lace. This Wagner person was a sophist. So I said to him, now, as a man will at times:

"All right, Herman, old top! But you'll have to think up something better than only to put before those thirty-two miles. If you had said 'Only two miles' it might have had its message for me. But thirty more than that!