7
IN MONTEREY there lived and worked a harness-maker and saddler named McGreggor, a furious philosopher, a Marxian for the sake of argument. Age had not softened his ferocious opinions, and he had left the gentle Utopia of Marx far behind. McGreggor had long deep wrinkles on his cheeks from constantly setting his jaw and pinching his mouth against the world. His eyes drooped with sullenness. He sued his neighbors for an infringement of his rights, and he was constantly discovering how inadequate was the law’s cognizance of his rights. He tried to browbeat his daughter Elizabeth and failed as miserably as he had with her mother, for Elizabeth set her mouth and held her opinions out of reach of his arguments by never stating them. It infuriated the old man to think that he could not blast her prejudices with his own because he did not know what they were.
Elizabeth was a pretty girl, and very determined. Her hair was fluffy, her nose small and her chin firm from setting it against her father. It was in her eyes that her beauty lay, grey eyes set extremely far apart and lashed so thickly that they seemed to guard remote and preternatural knowledge. She was a tall girl; not thin, but lean with strength and taut with quick and nervous energy. Her father pointed out her faults, or rather faults he thought she had.
“You’re like your mother,” he said. “Your mind is closed. You have no single shred of reason. Everything you do is the way you feel about it. Take your mother, now, a highland woman and straight from home—her own father and mother believed in fairies, and when I put it up to her like a joke, she’d shoot her jaw and shut up her mouth like a window. And she’d say, ‘There’s things that won’t stand reason, but are so, just the same.’ I’ll take a wager your mother filled you with fairies before she died.”
And he modeled her future for her. “There’s a time coming,” he said prophetically, “when women will earn their own bread. There’s no reason why a woman can’t learn a trade. Take you, for instance,” he said. “There’s a time coming, and not far off, either, when a girl like you will be making her wage and be damned to the first man that wants to marry her.”
McGreggor was shocked, nevertheless, when Elizabeth began studying for county examinations so she could be a teacher. McGreggor almost went soft. “You’re too young, Elizabeth,” he argued. “You’re only seventeen. Give your bones a chance to get hard, at least.” But Elizabeth smiled slightly in triumph and said nothing. In a house where the littlest statement automatically marshaled crushing forces of argument against itself, she had learned to be silent.
The profession of school teaching was something more than child-instructing to a girl of spirit. When she turned seventeen she could take county examinations and go adventuring; it was a decent means of leaving her home, and her town where people knew her too well; a means of preserving the alert and shatterable dignity of a young girl. To the community where she was sent she was unknown and mysterious and desirable. She knew fractions and poetry; she could read a little French and throw a word of it into conversation. Sometimes she wore underclothes of lawn or even silk, as could be seen when her laundry was on the line. These things which might have been considered uppish in an ordinary person were admired and expected in the school teacher, for she was a person of social as well as educational importance, and she gave an intellectual and cultural tone to her district. The people among whom she went to live did not know her baby name. She assumed the title “Miss.” The mantle of mystery and learning enveloped her, and she was seventeen. If, within six months, she did not marry the most eligible bachelor in the district, she must be ugly as a gorgon, for a school teacher could bring social elevation to a man. Her children were thought to be more intelligent than ordinary children. School teaching could be, if the teacher wished to make it so, a subtle and certain move toward matrimony.
Elizabeth McGreggor was even more widely educated than most teachers. In addition to fractions and French she had read excerpts from Plato and Lucretius, knew several titles of Aeschylus, Aristophanes and Euripides, and had a classical background resting on Homer and Virgil. After she had passed the examinations she was assigned to the school at Nuestra Señora. The isolation of the place pleased Elizabeth. She wanted to think over all the things she knew, to arrange them in their places, and from their eventual arrangement to construct the new Elizabeth McGreggor. In the village of Our Lady she went to board with the Gonzales family.
Word flew through the valley that the new teacher was young and very pretty, and thereafter, when Elizabeth went out, when she walked to school or hurried to the grocery, she met young men who, though idle, were intensely preoccupied with their watches, with the rolling of a cigarette or with some vague but vital spot in the distance. But occasionally there was one strange man among the loiterers who was preoccupied with Elizabeth; a tall man, black-bearded and with sharp blue eyes. This man bothered Elizabeth, for he stared at her when she passed, and his eyes pierced through her clothing.
When Joseph heard about the new teacher he drew in upon her in lessening circles until at last he sat in the Gonzales parlor, a carpeted, respectable place, and he stared across at Elizabeth. It was a formal call. Elizabeth’s soft hair was puffed on her head, but she was the teacher. Her face wore a formal expression, almost stern. Except that she smoothed down her skirt over her knees again and again, she might have been composed. At intervals she looked up into the searching eyes of Joseph and then looked away again.
Joseph wore a black suit and new boots. His hair and beard were trimmed, and his nails were as clean as he could get them.
“Do you like poetry?” Elizabeth asked, looking for a moment into the sharp, unmoving eyes.
“Oh, yes—yes, I like it, what I have read of it.”
“Of course, Mr. Wayne, there are no modem poets like the Greeks, like Homer.”
Joseph’s face became impatient. “I remember,” he said, “of course I remember. A man went to an island and got changed into a pig.”
Elizabeth’s mouth pinched at the corners. In an instant she was the teacher, remote and above the pupil. “That is the Odyssey,” she said. “Homer is thought to have lived about nine hundred, B.C. He had a profound effect on all Greek literature.”
“Miss McGreggor,” Joseph said earnestly, “there’s a way to do this thing, but I don’t know it. Some people seem to know by instinct, but I don’t. Before I came I tried to think what I’d say to you, but I couldn’t discover a way, because I’ve never done anything like this before. There’s a time of fencing to go through and I don’t know how to do it. Besides it all seems useless to me.”
Elizabeth was caught by his eyes now, and she was startled by his intensity of speech. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Wayne.” She had been flung from her seat of learning, and the fall frightened her.
“I know I’m doing it all wrong,” he said. “I don’t know any other way. You see, Miss McGreggor, I’m afraid I might get confused and embarrassed. I want you to be my wife, and you must know it. My brothers and I own six hundred and forty acres of land. Our blood is clean. I think I should be good to you if I could know what you want.”
He had dropped his eyes while he talked. Now he looked up and saw that she was flushing and looking very miserable. Joseph jumped to his feet. “I suppose I’ve done it wrong. Now I’m confused, but I got it out first. And now I’ll go, Miss McGreggor. I’ll come back after we’ve stopped being embarrassed.” He hurried out without saying goodbye, leaped on his horse and galloped away into the night.
There was a burn of shame and of exultance in his throat. When he came to the wooded river bottom he pulled up his horse, rose in his stirrups and shouted to ease the burn, and the echo blatted back at him. The night was very black and a high mist dulled the sharpness of the stars and muffled the night noises. His cry had blasted a thick silence and frightened him. For a moment he sat dumbly in his saddle and felt the swell and fall of his panting horse.
“This night is too still,” he said, “too unimpressed. I must do something.” He felt that the time required a sign, an act to give it point. Somehow an act of his must identify him with the moment that was passing or it would slip away, taking no part of him with it. He whipped off his hat and flung it away into the dark. But this was not enough. He felt for his quirt where it hung from the saddlehorn, and plucking it off, lashed his own leg viciously to make a moment of pain. The horse plunged aside, away from the whistle of the blow, and then reared. Joseph threw his quirt away into the brush, controlled the horse with a powerful pressure of his knees, and when it was quieted, trotted the nervous animal toward the ranch. Joseph opened his mouth to let the cool air into his throat.