The Secret of a Weed's Plain Heart

The Secret of a Weed’s Plain Heart

T was nine o’clock as Helen stood before her mirror, languidly tying the bow of ribbon that fastened her muslin morning jacket. Even at this hour it was already hot. Through the long windows which opened on the balcony, the warm air, charged with the spicy scent of climbing roses, the pungent animal odor of the eucalyptus, and the sweet, heavy perfume of lemon and orange blossoms, drifted in.

Her bow tied, she gave her hair—her silky blond hair once dressed with slow solitude—a carelessly arranging touch, and stepped out on the balcony.

The landscape, in its brilliant familiarity, outspread like a great unrolled map under the eternal glittering sunshine, struck upon her desolate mood with rasped irritation. She swept it with an eye of sullen dislike. Their own ranch house was bosomed deep in the green of its trees, with the level, leafy acres of its vineyaeds stretching out on every  hand. Beyond, the bare, golden valley extended, flat as a billiard table, to a distant line of mountains hanging on the horizon like a faded mirage. It was August and the fields were mown. A close-cropped yellow stubble covered them, looking blond and silky as her own head might if her hair had been cut. Through these limitless shaven meadows a network of creeks threaded a meandering way like the embedded silver wires in cloisonné ware, and against the pale sky lines of poplars stood like the teeth of a comb.

It made Helen think of a huge, glaring picture painted in a few primary colors. Part of her horror of it lay in its crushing combination of size and silence. And then its monotony! The arch of blue sky that never clouded, the floor of earth that, dry and cracked by drought, was yet teeming with a coarse fecundity, and over all the maddening, blistering blaze of sun—how she hated them all!

But she hated the sunshine the most. In the spring, when Jim had come on to New York to marry her, she had thought his description of California and the ranch too lovely, and the loveliest thing in it the days all brightness. She had pictured it to herself as something radiantly tropical, in which hammocks and palm-leaf fans played a part. And she saw herself thus environed sweeping gracefully about in thin white dresses against a background of roses. It was true that Jim had said it would be hot—very hot in summer.

Hot! Now as she trailed her muslin skirts down the outside stairs she noticed that the distance already was swimming through veils of heat, as if the very air was staggering under the force of the sun.

She crossed the lower balcony and, pushing open the net door, entered the dining-room. The house was deserted save for the Chinaman in the kitchen. In the silence the high nasal notes he was emitting, and which he called singing, were oddly distinct. The remains of Jim’s breakfast, cold in its congealed gravy, were standing on the end of the table. They had been there since half-past six, for at this season the rancher was up and out early. It was by his command that his young wife breakfasted three hours later. Jim had never lost sight of the fact that he had brought a New York girl of twenty-four to a ranch in the San Joaquin Valley. But even a sympathetic and deeply loving husband did not quite realize what an uprooting it was.

The Chinaman, hearing her footstep, shouted a cheerful hail from the kitchen, whence the odor of frying bacon issued. She looked at the broken bits of Jim’s breakfast and suddenly felt a pricking of tears in her eyes and a trembling of her lip. She had never been a lachrymose person, and yet several times in the desperation of her homesickness these sudden unbidden tears had welled up. And to-day—to-day it seemed just too unbearable. The heat, and the loneliness, the smell of bacon, and that terrible, blinding, devilish sun!

After a pretence of breakfasting, she went out on the back balcony, where her hammock hung and her books and work-basket stood on a table. This was a little bit like her dream. There was a clump of orange and lemon trees below the railings round which climbing roses trailed. Below, in the parched soil, Jim had made a rose garden for her, at what care and expense she had never guessed. Four times a week one of the men dug a little trench round each tree, and at sundown the water-wheel was set in motion and streams of water deflected to it from the trenches. Then every tree drank, the thirsty earth sucking in the water till only a bubble or two rested on the surface.

There were faint wandering whiffs of zephyr-like air this morning. Lying in her hammock, she watched the petals of the Claire Canot roses drift along the wooded floor like blood-colored shreds of silk. Her thoughts were elsewhere. Last summer at this time she had been at Bar Harbor, at her aunt’s, and Jim had come on from California and stayed there for three weeks. They had been engaged a year then, and it had seemed such a long engagement with Jim 3,000 miles away and only able to come on in summer for a short visit. But how happy she had been at Bar Harbor when he came, and how she loved to listen to him tell of the ranch—their ranch! It had sounded so different someway or other to what it was. Perhaps it was because Jim, who in the beginning had come from New York too, seemed to like it so. She remembered with surprise how he had often said he liked it better than the East. She recollected a day when she had taken him driving in the dogcart and he had said he thought it a silly, uncomfortable sort of wagon with the girl perched up in the air, and objected to the horse that she drove because it had a docked tail.

Now when they drove it was in an old buggy that never was washed, and lately, when all the horses were in use, they had to take Maggie, the mare, who had recently had a foal, which was tied to the shaft by a rope.

At twelve o’clock her reverie was interrupted by a harsh clanging of a bell, and a sudden invasion of the flower-scented air by an overpowering smell of cooking. It was the men’s dinner hour, and as she rose from the hammock she could hear the clump of their heavy feet as they filed into the kitchen. She brushed her skirts into shape and came round to the front balcony, for it was time for Jim to be back, and there was a thrill of unchanging sweetness in meeting him, a dying down of bitterness and homesickness when she heard his horses’ hoofs on the road, a sense of peace and security when she felt his strong arm around her. If only Jim were oftener with her.

He came up the steps, bronzed and handsome, the hair on his forehead damp with perspiration, and his thin shirt turned back from his throat.

“It’s hot, young woman,” he said, taking her little soft hand. “It’s a regular scorcher; but it’ll make the grapes swell.”

She followed him into the spare bedroom which he used as a dressing-room, there having been no guest to disturb its fresh neatness since the bride had been installed. When he had washed and brushed for dinner, he drew her toward him, put his hands on her shoulders and looked at her.

“You’ve got a little pale face no bigger than a dime,” he said. “Do you know what I’m going to do with you? I’m going to take you away.”

“Where to?” she asked, listlessly, as they turned to go into the dining-room. “Where is there to go to?”

“Santa Cruz! That’s a good change—cool, sea air, bathing, and nice people.”

“Nice people!” she echoed, with a sarcastic rise of key, “the Bechtels are going to be there.”

The Bechtels were their nearest neighbors, six miles to the west. They were prosperous ranchers of German extraction. The wife, a good-looking young woman, with a growing family and an eye on a future translation to the urban delights of San Francisco society, had been pronounced by Helen as quite impossible. Jim had taken her there one afternoon and left her to talk to Mrs. Bechtel while Mr. Bechtel had offered him true ranch hospitality by segregating him from his womenkind and then proffering him whiskey. Helen had returned silent and depressed from that visit. She would rather be lonely for the rest of her life than foregather with Mrs. Bechtel.

“Well,” said her husband, “you don’t mind that. Mrs. Bechtel may not be a Vere de Vere, but you can stand speaking to her on the beach now and then.”

“I don’t want to speak to her on the beach or anywhere else, or to anyone—anywhere. I’m—I’m”

Again the sudden clutch of tears seized her, and her voice quivered and broke. Her husband looked up startled from his plate. Helen was ashamed that he should guess that the thought of Mrs. Bechtel’s society had power to make her weep, and bent her face over the rose she had brought in from the balcony.

“Well, of course, if you don’t want to go,” said he, “we won’t. I was only thinking of it for you. This heat’s trying when you’re not used to it, and I’m afraid it’s lonely for you here all day.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” she said, limply. “I don’t know anyone in this part of the world, so I might as well stay here.”

The violent odors of coarse cooking and the shouts and laughter of the feeding men rose from the kitchen. Had her husband not been there she would have left the room. A wave of recollection of the well-ordered elegance of her own home rose within her with an almost throttling sense of homesickness. She moved uneasily in her chair and tried to divert her mind by looking at the prints on the wall, and thinking of them. Suddenly Jim said:

“I’m going to drive over to Ortega’s ranch this afternoon if you’d like to go. He’s to be sold up on a mortgage, and it’s a good piece of land. It’s up in the hills and quite pretty. Will you come?”

“Yes,” she assented, faintly, “I’ll go.”

“I think I can get it for five thousand. Then later on, if I can get Miller’s tract, I’ll have a stretch from here to the hills of the finest land in this part of the valley.”

“But five thousand dollars! That’s so much just now.”

She was thinking that if he spent this the trip to New York in the late autumn they had several times spoken of would have to be postponed. She had never let him guess how she had been longing for and building on this trip. Now she saw it crumbling before her eyes.

“Yes!” he assented, “it is a lot just now. But then the chance may never occur again. Ortega’s land is some of the best about here. It would be madness to let it go.”

She swallowed and made no reply. She had no need to struggle with her tears. She was past that. Blank misery settled upon her.

At half-past four they started out. The sun was still burning, and Helen sat under a parasol of white chiffon, a trousseau possession purchased at a Fifth Avenue milliner’s. As they drove the wavy edge of it kept getting into Jim’s eyes, and without speaking he would gently push it up with the whip. The old buggy looked very shabby, and Maggie, the mare, plodded on with a maternal eye ever roaming toward her foal, who, tied to the shaft by a piece of rope, went cantering happily through the stubble, its long legs as stiff as wood, and its head up alert for everything new in this world of level blue and gold.

The country lay before them singularly still, save for the faint sleepy creak of a water-wheel. Along distant highways a blur of dust, tarnishing the brightness of the afternoon, told where a wagon had passed. In the motionless, glaring panorama the only human creatures to be seen were the Chinamen squatting among the vines. The man and woman in the buggy seemed to shrink to the vanishing point of insignificance in the vastness of this dormant nature, resting after its fierce energies of reproduction. Under the arch of blue, along the yellow floor, they passed, of no more moment in their setting than is the fly that creeps on the frame of a picture. The silence and indifference round them seemed to oppress them, and they were silent, too, while the sun beat down, causing the air to grow dizzy and reel as though stricken by the heat of the hour.

Helen’s hidden hatred of it all suddenly rose within her in a passion of revolt. Without preface she broke the silence in a high, protesting key:

“Why do you want to buy Ortega’s place? Haven’t you got enough? All your land isn’t cultivated yet.”

“Yes, but this is a chance that doesn’t often come. Ortega’s land is the best in this part of the valley. He’s a lazy greaser and hasn’t done anything with it He never had much energy, and since his wife’s death he’s just let everything slide. She died last spring, and left him with three kids, almost babies. It’s my idea to buy the place and put him on as superintendent at a decent salary. Under supervision he’s all right. I’ve known Ortega for years. It’s his wife’s death that caved him in.”

His engrossment in this man’s affairs seemed to her callous, almost cruel, when she was so miserable. The note of protest was augmented by a quaver when she replied:

“But it will take all the money, the money you’ve made this year.”

“Yes, pretty much all.”

“And then we can’t go to New York in October?”

“Well, I suppose we can’t; but then we can go next autumn. It’s only putting it off for a year.”

A year! Another year of it!

It was too much. She burst into a paroxysm of tears, collapsing into a limp, white heap against the back of the buggy, her parasol falling unheeded on Jim’s feet.

Jim was amazed, horrified, aghast. What had suddenly happened to her? He dropped the reins, a fact of which Maggie was instantly aware and which caused her to come to an abrupt, tranquil stop. In order to offer the consolation which the occasion demanded, he had first to pick up and close the parasol, and sitting thus in the blazing sun, take the weeping figure in his arms and try and stanch the flow of tears before his dazed masculine intelligence could grasp what was wrong.

“It’s so hot, so hot,” she sobbed on his shoulder, “and there’s that terrible sun!”

“Sun!” he exclaimed, bewildered. “What sun? Whose son?”

“The sun that’s always shining—I hate it so.”

“It is hot,” he said, contritely, and tried to open the parasol and hold it over her, but she peevishly pushed it away.

“But—but we can’t help the sun,” he stammered; “it always shines this way in summer. I told you it did.”

“Oh, it’s not that only—I’d—I’d—been hoping to go to New York so. Oh, you don’t know how I’d been hoping to go! I hate this place. And now—and now”

Her voice rose in a wail of misery that caused Maggie to turn her head with matronly deliberation and survey the occupants of the buggy. The little foal was glad of the rest, and went sniffing about at the end of its rope investigating the world.

Jim looked grave.

“Why, of course, dearest, if you want to go you can. I wouldn’t hive disappointed you for the world. Why didn’t you tell me so at first? I—I—thought you didn’t care so much about it Now brace up and smile. Of course, you can go—don’t worry about that. Do you feel a little more cheerful?”

He looked tenderly at her tear-stained face, which she lifted from his shoulder and mopped with a wisp of handkerchief. From his own face he smoothed all suggestion of the disappointment he felt in learning that she was not contented in the home he had made for her. Looking at her with eyes which only saw the pitifulness of her swollen eye lids and little reddened nose, he laid his big hand on hers and said:

“You don’t want to keep the things you’d like to do a secret like that. Your hand wants you to be happy. You can go in October and stay as long as you like. Now don’t fret about it any more.”

She turned her hand round in his so that they clasped and drooped against his shoulder.

“What will you do about Ortega’s land?” she asked, with a languid air.

“I guess I’ll have to give that up. But I can take Ortega on to our place and give him the cottage the Swede’s wife had. I’ve got to get him some kind of a job. He’ll pull up again if he gets a start.”

Seeing that she seemed more herself, he took up the reins and clucked to Maggie, who went jogging off again. Helen sat back in the buggy, her arm through his, her little fingers mingled with his as they held the reins. Now and then they spoke of the coming trip, but for the most part she was silent. She did not feel that satisfaction a gratified desire should give. Jim could not go with her. That was a painful revelation. Once she started urging it, but he quietly made her understand it was impossible. If things went well he would go on and bring her back. When? Whenever she liked. Would she like to stay over Christmas?

“Christmas?" she exclaimed in a voice of hurt surprise. “Why that would be over two months there.”

And she felt secretly aggrieved that Jim should want her to stay so long.

The air was growing cooler as they began to ascend toward Ortega’s land, a long-neglected tract extending into the first rounded farms of the hills. Here and there an oak dotted the burnt expanse, casting a slanting, inky shadow over the pale grass. Ortega’s house, a sorry little cabin, standing amid a litter of household refuse, was overshadowed by a superb specimen. Here, in a rickety cane chair, his heels balanced on what was once a hitching bar for visitors’ horses, sat Ortega himself smoking a cigarette. His children were playing near him. As the sound of wheels struck their ears, Helen had a vision of their small faces lit by startled black eyes, and then their scurrying departure in every direction.

After the first words of greeting were exchanged, the two men entered upon the discussion of business, and Helen alighted and began to wander about. A glance into the wretched cabin was enough for her, and seeing a footpath winding upward behind the tree, she took it and began to saunter aimlessly about.

The grass was slippery under her foot, almost white, and dry as hemp. A stealthy quiver now and then agitated it, betokening the passage of a snake. The live oaks grew at intervals, the only vegetation that seemed able to defy the fevered length of the rainless summer. Gaining a level space backed by one of them, she paused to rest, and sat down on a fallen log some predecessor of Ortega’s had dragged there for a seat.

The sun’s rays were red and slanting and the floor of the valley was striped with a few long shadows. The ranches and their surrounding verdure, high and close gathered about the houses, and low lying where the vineyards ran out into the plain, looked like green islands floating in a yellow sea. She turned her eyes away from them with a muffled sigh. Her glance fell on the ground beside her, and suddenly was arrested by a blossom starting up from a bare patch of earth.

At the first glance she thought a butterfly had lighted on a spear of grass and was resting there with outspread wings. Then she realized it was a flower, three wide petals of a pale pink, streaked and mottled with a darker hue, expanding in exquisite efflorescence from the end of a long, leafless stalk. Though she had never seen it before, she knew it to be the Mariposa lily, of which she had often heard.

How wonderful it was, and in what ungrateful soil and unlovely surroundings it had bloomed! From the baked ground, whence even the hardy grass had withdrawn, and on which no rain or dew fell, it had slowly unfolded its beauty, uncommended, unseen. A chance seed had fallen there. The flower had risen, accomplishing its mission of grace in the arid spot where Fate had placed it.

Immovable, stirred by sudden, illuminating thoughts, Helen sat looking at it. How had it grown there? What moisture had had nourished its thread-like roots in that parched soil? How hopefully patient must have been their slow spread, groping for sustenance in the iron earth. What power of endurance had been in that tiny stem to withstand the furnace heats of mid-day, and under the sun’s fiercely hostile eye mature with such sweet, deliberate daintiness. It had done its part with heart of grace, unmindful of the hard conditions of its environment. It had bloomed slowly and perfectly in the spot where it had chanced to be.

The voiced of Jim calling her aroused her from the grip of her thoughts, and she started and traced her steps along the path. He was tying the foal to the shaft, while Ortega stood by exchanging a few last sentences, and the children’s faces peered round the side of the cabin. As she settled herself in the seat, the Spaniard stood beside the buggy, his hat lifted with the solemn, almost grandiose courtesy of his race, while the children crept out of their hiding-places, drawing nearer with frightened stealth. Jim clucked to Maggie, who jogged off again with some show of speed, the foal, prancing at her side, trying to veil its fear of the settling twilight by a show of spirited nonchalance.

They were not particularly talkative at first. Jim made some remarks about Ortega’s wretched condition, to which she offered monosyllabic replies. They were out in the valley again, when she suddenly said:

“I don’t want to go to New York this autumn. I’d rather stay here.”

“Helen! Really? Do you really mean that?”

In the dim light she could see his face, illuminated, beaming with surprised joy. The pathos of it gripped her like a hand on her heart.

“Of course I mean it. I want to stay. I don’t seem to want to go any more.”

“But what’s made you think so differently? This afternoon you couldn’t bear the thought of staying. You said you—you—hated it.”

“Did I? Well, that was this afternoon. This is this evening, three hours have passed. A great deal can happen in three hours and I’ve changed my mind. Sometimes I change my mind in three minutes, so it’s not so odd for me to change it in three hours.”

“But why did you change it at all?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She leaned against his shoulder in the old, rickety, unwashed buggy and slipped her hand into his.

“Perhaps I didn’t want to leave you,” she said. The two hands clasped tight.

“Did you change it up there while Ortega and I were talking?”

“Yes, up there on the hillside. I was sitting on a log and I just changed it.”

“What a little, whimsical wisp of a girl you are!” he said, dropping his voice to the key of lovers’ confidences. “And I wouldn’t have you different for anything in the world.”

“Did you ever see the Mariposa lily?” she asked, with abrupt irrelevance.

“Yes, hundreds of times. What’s that got to do with it?”

“I think it has a good deal. It was growing in the dry ground up there so beautifully—just doing the best that was in it, being itself in a simple, complete sort of way, as if it was in a greenhouse, or the prize flower in some millionaire’s garden”

“That’s the way it always does; that’s its nature. You wouldn’t have it get mad and fade, would you; just because it wasn’t in a greenhouse?”

“Well, it might. People do, sometimes.”

“Do they? Well, then,those people haven’t got the grit of one poor little wild flower.”

“No—” she answered, in a small voice, “that’s one of the things I discovered this afternoon.”

“Good little beggars, aren’t they?” he said, turning to give her a fond side glance, and quite ignorant of the fact that his words might be regarded as having a personal application, “they just grow where they happen to get dropped without making any fuss. And they do it in such a pretty way, too, so bright and perky, and not pulling a long face about it being their duty, and making their friends feel mean.”

“Have I made you feel mean, Jim?” she asked, in low, almost solemn tones.

“You? You? You’ve made me feel the proudest man in the valley. You’ve made me feel as proud as that bare, dry patch of ground when the Mariposa lily gets up and blooms on it.”

“Jim!” she breathed, in softly falling cadence.

“My life out here was just like that bare, dry patch, till you came and bloomed on it.”

“And it was such a miserable, pinched little blooming. But it’s going to be different now—a beautiful blossoming. It will quite hide the bare, dry patch."

They drove on for a space in silence. The valley, swimming before them in suave evening tints, began to settle to rest, with the soft, sleepy sounds of nightfall.

“See," she said, “the lights are coming out It looks as if the ranchers were saying ‘Good-night!’ to each other.”

Here and there over the far-flung expanse the glimmer of a light pierced the veil of dusk. These friendly dots of yellow seemed to render the huge plain more home-like, to project a ray of welcome across the levels of field and vineyard, and flash a beacon from ranch to ranch.

Jim pointed with his whip to an agglomeration of winking points far away.

“There,” he said, “is where we belong. That’s our home.”

“Home,” she repeated dreamily, “isn’t it a nice word!”