Lydia of the Pines/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
LYDIA GIGGLES
"Nature is neither cruel nor sad. She is only purposeful, tending to an end we cannot see."
THE days flew lightly by, lightly for Lydia, too, in spite of the heavy secret she carried of Levine's plotting. Lightly, in spite of the fact that Lydia was undergoing some soul-changing experiences in this short holiday, experiences that were to direct her life's course.
The day before they broke camp, Lydia's old squaw appeared and asked for Charlie Jackson.
Charlie and Kent were cooking dinner.
"Dear me," said Miss Towne, "tell him to take the poor thing away, Lydia."
"He must feed her, first," exclaimed Lydia, leading the old Indian over to the cooking shelter.
Kent and Lydia exchanged glances as Charlie led the squaw—Susie, he called her—into the woods, after Lydia had heaped her old arms with food. Kent and Gustus had put the dinner on the table and they all were seated at the meal when Charlie returned.
"What did she want, Charlie?" asked Olga.
"You wouldn't care if I told you," replied Charlie, grimly. "But," he burst forth suddenly, "some day you whites will pay. Some day the Japs or the Jews will do to you Americans what you've done to us."
"Who cares!" cried Olga, pertly. "Have a pickle, Charlie, and cheer up." She pushed the pickle dish toward him.
"Or some catsup," suggested Gustus, depositing the bottle by Charlie's plate.
"Or a sardine," added Margery.
Charlie's lips twitched and he smiled and Miss Towne sighed in a relieved way. The meal progressed without a further crisis.
After the dishes were done, Kent followed Lydia, who was strolling off for a last walk in the woods.
"Do you suppose she told Charlie about Levine?" he asked, as he overtook her.
"Look out, Charlie's coming," said Lydia and in a moment the Indian had joined them.
"Look here, Lydia," he began, "Levine is up to some new cussedness. Old Susie came on him in council the other night with six of the worst half breeds in the reservation. She lost her head and began to jaw him so she didn't find out what it was about. And he's getting the last of my timber now. Lydia, you've got to help me. When you get home, talk to Levine."
"Getting the last of your timber!" exclaimed Kent.
"Yes, the law lets 'em get the 'dead and down' stuff and who's going to swear it's fresh stuff that he cut this summer and will get out next winter?"
"Do you mean he's up cutting your pines now?" cried Lydia, aghast.
"No! No!" impatiently. "His half breeds do that."
"But how does he come to be taking your wood? Why don't you go to see him yourself?" asked Kent.
"I can't answer either of those questions," replied Charlie, sullenly.
The two young whites thought of the attack on Levine, and looked at each other apprehensively.
"Won't the Indian Agent stop him?" asked Lydia.
"He! Why, he's deep in the mire himself with Dave Marshall. My God, Margery Marshall went to New York on a blind Indian boy's pines! Lydia, save my pines for me! They belong to my tribe. My father kept them and so did his father for his people. As long as they had those miles of pines, they had a place for the tribe to live. Father was going to Washington three years ago to tell the president about the graft when they shot him from ambush. If I put up a fight, they'll shoot me. My father wanted me to learn white ways so I could protect the tribe. And the more I learn of white ways the more I realize I'm helpless. Lydia, won't you help us?"
Neither Kent nor Lydia ever had seen Charlie thus before. He was neither arrogant nor sullen. He was pleading with a tragic hopelessness that moved his two hearers profoundly.
"Oh, Charlie! I will try," cried Lydia. "I truly will."
"I knew you would," said Charlie, huskily, and he turned back abruptly to the camp.
"Gee!" exclaimed Kent. "Chapter number two!"
Lydia stamped her foot. "How can you speak so, Kent! It's a frightful thing!"
"Sure it's frightful, but it can't be helped. The whites have got to have this land. Might's right."
"What makes the whites so crazy for it?" asked Lydia.
"Money," returned Kent.
Lydia stared about her. Supposing, she thought, that she owned a hundred acres of this pine land. She forgot Kent and concentrated every force of her mind on sensing what land ownership would mean. And suddenly there woke in her, her racial hunger for land. Suddenly there stirred within her a desire for acreage, for trees, soil, stream and shrub, a wide demesne that should be hers and her children's forever. She was still too young to trace the hunger back to its primal source, the desire for permanency, the yearning to possess that which is the first and the last of existence, which neither moth nor dust can corrupt nor thieves break through and steal. But somewhere back in her still childish mind a lust for a wide domain of pine land bestirred itself to begin battle with the sense of right and justice that her heart of hearts told her Levine was outraging.
"Are you really going to talk to Levine?" Kent roused her from her reverie.
"Yes! Didn't I promise to?"
"Lots of good it'll do," grunted Kent. "And if you tell him we overheard him in the woods, I'll be sore."
"I don't see why."
"Because, after I finish High School, I'm going to tell him I know, to make him let me in on the deal. Look here, Lyd, don't tell him I was with you, anyhow."
"Oh, all right," replied Lydia, crossly. "For goodness' sake, don't let's talk about it any more. I don't see why men always have to be plotting! I'm going back to camp and help pack."
The driver arrived with the carryall at nine o'clock the next morning, and at mid-afternoon, Lydia was dropped at the gate, where Adam took possession of her. It was earlier than she had been expected, and Lizzie had not returned from her Saturday marketing. Lydia lugged her suitcase up the path, glad to be at home, yet murmuring to herself a little disconsolately.
"Nothing to look forward to now, but school in the fall."
The house seemed small and dingy to her, after the open splendor of the pine woods. Old Lizzie had "let things go" and the rooms were dusty and disorderly. Lydia dropped her suitcase in the kitchen.
"I've just got to train old Lizzie," she said, "so that she won't leave her old carpet slippers and her apron in the middle of the kitchen every time she goes out. And Dad just must quit leaving his pipe on the dining-room table. I do wish we had Mission furniture instead of this everlasting old mahogany. I just guess there's got to be some reforming in this house, this summer. If I've got to leave off slang, Dad and Lizzie can leave off a few of their bad habits."
She carried the suitcase on into her bedroom and Lizzie, coming in, hot and bundle-laden an hour later, found the living-room in immaculate order and Lydia, in an old dress, blacking the kitchen stove.
"For the land's sake, child," said Lizzie as Lydia kissed her and took her bundles from her, "how tanned you are! And you shouldn't have begun work the minute you got home."
"I had to. I couldn't stand the dirt," answered Lydia, briskly. "Is Daddy all right? You'll find your slippers where they belong, Lizzie."
The old lady, in her rusty black alpaca which she always wore to town, gave Lydia a look that was at once reproachful and timid. Lydia had shown signs lately of having reached the "bringing up the family" stage of her development and Lizzie dreaded its progress.
Amos came in the gate shortly after six. Lydia was waiting for him at the front door. He looked suddenly shabby and old to Lydia and she kissed him very tenderly. It required all the supper hour and all the remainder of the evening to tell the story of the camp and to answer Lizzie's and Amos' questions. There were several episodes Lydia did not describe; that of the half breed council in the wood, for example, nor the "spooning" with Kent.
It was ten o'clock when Amos rose with a sigh. "Well, you had a good time, little girl, and I'm glad. But I swan, I don't want you ever to go off again without me and Liz and Adam. Adam howled himself to sleep every night and I'd 'a' liked to. I'm going out to see if the chickens are all right."
"I got everything that belongs to you mended up, Lydia," said Lizzie, following into the kitchen bedroom.
Lydia looked from the gnarled old hands to the neat rolls of stockings on the bureau. She had been wishing that Lizzie was a neat maid with a white apron! A sense of shame overwhelmed her and she threw her arms about her kind old friend.
"Lizzie, you're a lot too good to me," she whispered.
Lydia was sitting on the front steps, the next afternoon, with a book in her lap and Adam at her feet, when Billy Norton called. He stopped for a chat in the garden with her father, before coming up to greet Lydia.
"He is awful homely. A regular old farmer," she thought, comparing him with the elegant Gustus and with Kent's careless grace.
Billy was in his shirtsleeves. His blond hair was cropped unbecomingly close. Lydia did not see that the head this disclosed was more finely shaped than either of her friends. He was grinning as he came toward Lydia, showing his white teeth.
"Hello, Lyd! Awful glad you're back!"
He sat down on the step below her and Lydia wrinkled her nose. He carried with him the odor of hay and horses.
"How's your mother?" asked Lydia. "I'm coming over, to-morrow."
"Mother's not so very well. She works too hard at the blamed canning. I told her I'd rather never eat it than have her get so done up."
"I'll be over to help her," said Lydia. "We had a perfectly heavenly time in camp, Billy."
"Did you?" asked her caller, indifferently. "Hay is fine this year. Never knew such a stand of clover."
"Miss Towne was grand to us. And Kent and Charlie are the best cooks, ever."
"Great accomplishment for men," muttered Billy. "Are you going to try to sell fudge, this winter, Lyd?"
"I don't know," Lydia's tone was mournful, "Daddy hates to have me. Now I'm growing up he seems to be getting sensitive about my earning money."
"He's right too," said Billy, with a note in his voice that irritated Lydia.
"Much you know about it! You just try to make your clothes and buy your school books on nothing. Dad's just afraid people'll know how little he earns, that's all. Men are selfish pigs."
Astonished by this outburst, Billy turned round to look up at Lydia. She was wearing her Sunday dress of the year before, a cheap cotton that she had outgrown. The young man at her feet did not see this. All he observed were the dusty gold of her curly head, the clear blue of her eyes and the fine set of her head on her thin little shoulders.
"You always look just right to me, Lyd," he said. "Listen, Lydia. I'm not going to be a farmer, I'm—"
"Not be a farmer!" cried Lydia. "After all you've said about it!"
"No! I'm going in for two years' law, then I'm going into politics. I tell you, Lydia, what this country needs to-day more than anything is young, clean politicians."
"You mean you're going to do like Mr. Levine?"
"God forbid!" exclaimed the young man. "I'm going to fight men like Levine. And by heck," he paused and looked at Lydia dreamily, "I'll be governor and maybe more, yet."
"But what's changed you?" persisted Lydia.
"The fight about the reservation, mostly. There's something wrong, you know, in a system of government that allows conditions like that. It's against American principles."
His tone was oratorical, and Lydia was impressed. She forgot that Billy smelled of the barnyard.
"Well," she said, "we'd all be proud of you if you were president, I can tell you."
"Would you be!" Billy's voice was pleased. "Then, Lydia, will you wait for me?"
"Wait for you?"
"Yes, till I make a name to bring to you."
Lydia flushed angrily. "Look here, Billy Norton, you don't have to be silly, after all the years we've known each other. I'm only fifteen, just remember that, and I don't propose to wait for any man. I'd as soon think of waiting for—for Adam, as for you, anyhow."
Billy rose with dignity, and without a word strode down the path to the gate and thence up the road. Lydia stared after him indignantly. "That old farmer!" she said to Adam, who wriggled and slobbered, sympathetically.
She was still indignant when John Levine arrived and found her toasting herself and the waffles for supper, indiscriminately. Perhaps it was this sense of indignation that made her less patient than usual with what she was growing to consider the foibles of the male sex. At any rate, she precipitated her carefully planned conversation with Levine, when the four of them were seated on the back steps, after supper, fighting mosquitoes, and watching the exquisite orange of the afterglow change to lavender.
The others were listening to Lydia's account of her investigating tour with Charlie.
"I shouldn't say it was the best idea in the world for you to be wandering through the woods with that young Indian," was Levine's comment when Lydia had finished.
"I don't see how you can speak so," cried Lydia, passionately, "when this minute you're taking his pine wood."
"Lydia!" said Amos, sharply.
"Let her alone, Amos," Levine spoke quietly. "What are you talking about, Lydia?"
For a moment, Lydia sat looking at her friend, uncertain how much or how little to say. She had idealized him so long, had clung so long to her faith in his perfection, that a deep feeling of indignation toward him for not living up to her belief in him drove her to saying what she never had dreamed she could have said to John Levine.
"The Indians are people, just like us," she cried, "and you're treating them as if they were beasts. You're robbing them and letting them starve! Oh, I saw them! Charlie showed the poor things to me—all sore eyes, and coughing and eating dirt. And you're making money out of them! Maybe the very money you paid our note with was made out of a starved squaw. Oh, I can't stand it to think it of you!"
Lydia paused with a half sob and for a moment only the gentle ripple of the waves on the shore and the crickets were to be heard Levine, elbow on knee, chin in hand, looked through the dusk at the shadowy sweetness of Lydia's face, his own face calm and thoughtful.
"You're so good and kind to me," Lydia began again, "how can you be so hard on the Indians? Are you stealing Charlie's logs? Are you, Mr. Levine?"
"I bought his pine," replied Levine, quietly.
"He doesn't believe it. He thinks you're stealing. And he's so afraid of you. He says if he makes a fuss, you'll shoot him. Why does he feel that way, Mr. Levine?"
Lydia's thin hands were shaking, but she stood before the Congressman like a small accusing conscience, unafraid, not easily to be stilled.
"Lydia! What're you saying!" exclaimed Amos.
"Keep out, Amos," said Levine. "We've got to clear this up. I've been expecting it, for some time. Lydia, years ago before the Government began to support the Indians, they were a fine, upstanding race. The whites could have learned a lot from them. They were brave, and honorable, and moral, and in a primitive way, thrifty. Well, then the sentimentalists among the whites devised the reservation system and the allowance system. And the Indians have gone to the devil, just as whites would under like circumstances. Any human being has to earn what he eats or he degenerates. You can put that down as generally true, can't you, Amos?"
"You certainly can," agreed Amos.
"Now, the only way to save those Indians up there is to kick them out. The strong ones will live and be assimilated into our civilization. The weak ones will die, just like weak whites do."
"But how about Charlie's pines?" insisted Lydia.
Something like a note of amusement at the young girl's persistence was in John's voice, but he answered gravely enough.
"Yes, I've bought his pines and I'll get them out, next winter. There's no denying we want the Indians' land. But there's no denying that throwing the Indian off the reservation is the best thing for the Indian."
"But what makes Charlie think you're stealing them? And he says that when the pines go, the tribe will die."
"I paid for the pine," insisted Levine. "An Indian has no idea of buying and selling. It's a cruel incident, this breaking up of the reservation, but it's like cutting off a leg to save the patient's life. Sentiment is wasted."
"That's the great trouble with America, these days," said Amos, his pipe bowl glowing in the summer darkness. "All these foreigners coming in here filled the country with gush. What's become of the New Englanders in this town? Well, they founded the University, named the streets, planted the elms and built the Capitol. Since then they've been snowed under by the Germans and the Norwegians, a lot of beer drinkers and fish eaters. Nobody calls a spade a spade, these days. They rant and spout socialism. The old blood's gone. The old, stern, puritanical crowd can't be found in America to-day."
Lydia was giving little heed to her father. Amos was given to fireside oratory. She was turning over in her mind the scene in the woods between John and the half breeds. That then was a part of the process of removing the patient's leg! The end justified the means.
She heaved a great sigh of relief. "Well, then, I don't have to worry about that any more," she said. "Only, I don't dare to think about those starving old squaws, or the baby that froze to death."
"That's right," agreed Levine, comfortably. "Don't think about them."
Old Lizzie snored gently, gave a sudden sigh and a jerk. "Land! I must have dozed off for a minute."
Lydia laughed. "It was nip and tuck between you and Adam, Lizzie. Let's get in away from the mosquitoes—I'm so glad I had this talk with you, Mr. Levine."
"Lydia should have been a boy," said Amos; "she likes politics."
"I'd rather be a girl than anything in the world," protested Lydia, and the two men laughed. If there was still a doubt in the back of Lydia's mind regarding the reservation, for a time, at least, she succeeded in quieting it. She dreaded meeting Charlie and was relieved to hear that Dr. Fulton had taken him East with him for a couple of weeks to attend a health convention.
One of the not unimportant results of the camping trip was that Lydia rediscovered the pine by the gate. It was the same pine against which she had beaten her little fists, the night of Patience's death. She had often climbed into its lower branches, getting well gummed with fragrant pitch in the process. But after her return from the reservation, the tall tree had a new significance to her.
She liked to sit on the steps and stare at it, dreaming and wondering. Who had left it, when all the rest of the pines about it had been cleared off? How did it feel, left alone among the alien oaks and with white people living their curious lives about it? Did it mourn, in its endless murmuring, for the Indians—the Indians of other days and not the poor decadents who shambled up and down the road? For the Indians and the pines were now unalterably associated in Lydia's mind. The life of one depended on that of the other. Strange thoughts and perhaps not altogether cheerful and wholesome thoughts for a girl of Lydia's age.
So it was probably well that Margery about this time began to show Lydia a certain Margery-esque type of attention. In her heart, in spite of her mother's teachings, Margery had always shared her father's admiration for Lydia. In her childhood it had been a grudging, jealous admiration that seemed like actual dislike. But as Margery developed as a social favorite and Lydia remained about the same quiet little dowd, the jealousy of the banker's daughter gave way to liking.
Therefore several times a week, Margery appeared on her bicycle, her embroidery bag dangling from the handle bars. The two girls would then establish themselves on cushions by the water, and sew and chatter. Lizzie, from the kitchen or from the bedroom where she was resting, could catch the unceasing sound of voices, broken at regular intervals by giggles.
"Lydia's reached the giggling age," she would say to herself. "Well, thank the Lord she's got some one to giggle with, even if Margery is a silly coot. There they go again! What are they laughing at?"
Hysterical shrieks from the lawn, with the two girls rolling helplessly about on the cushions! Overhearing the conversation would not have enlightened old Lizzie, for the girls' talk was mostly reminiscent of the camp experiences or of their recollections of Kent's little boyhood, of Charlie's prowess at school, or of Gustus' "sportiness" and his fascinating deviltry. Lydia was enjoying the inalienable right of every girl of fifteen to giggle, and talk about the boys, the two seemingly having no causative relation, yet always existing together.
Lizzie had not realized how quiet and mature Lydia had been since little Patience's death until now. She would mix some lemonade and invite the girls into the house to drink it, just for the mere pleasure of joining in the laughter. She never got the remotest inkling of why the two would double up with joy when one or the other got the hiccoughs in the midst of a sentence. But she would lean against the sideboard and laugh with them, the tears running down her old cheeks.
It was no uncommon occurrence during this summer for Amos to come on the two, giggling helplessly on a log by the roadside. Lydia would have been walking a little way with Margery to come back with her father, when their mirth overcame them. Amos had no patience with this new phase of Lydia's development.
"For heaven's sake," he said to John Levine, one Sunday afternoon, when hysterical shrieks drifted up from the pier, "do you suppose I'd better speak to Doc Fulton or shut her up on bread and water?"
"Pshaw, let her alone. It's the giggles! She's just being normal," said John, laughing softly in sympathy as the shrieks grew weak and maudlin.
The two did have lucid intervals during the summer, however. During one of these, Lydia said, "I wish we had hard wood floors like yours."
"What kind are yours?" inquired Margery.
"Just pine, and kind of mean, splintery pine, too."
"Upstairs at Olga's all the floors were that way," said Margery, "and they had a man come and sandpaper 'em and put kind of putty stuff in the cracks and oil and wax 'em and they look fine."
"Gee!" said Lydia, thoughtfully. "That is, I don't mean 'Gee,' I mean whatever polite word Miss Towne would use for 'Gee.'"
The girls giggled, then Lydia said, "I'll do it! And I'll cut our old living-room carpet up into two or three rugs. Lizzie'll have to squeeze enough out of the grocery money for fringe. I'd rather have fringe than a fall coat."
Amos, coming home a night or so later found the living-room floor bare and Lydia hard at work with a bit of glass and sand paper, scraping at the slivers.
"Ain't it awful?" asked Lizzie from the dining-room. "She would do it."
Lydia's knees and back had given out and she was lying on her stomach and one elbow, scraping away without looking up.
"Lizzie's complained all day," she said. "She doesn't realize how our house looks like 'poverty and destruction' compared with other folks. I'm going to get some style into it, if I have to tear it down. Oh, Daddy, don't you get sick of being poor?"
"Yes," said Amos, shortly, "and I think you're a silly girl to wear yourself out on this kind of thing."
Lydia sat up and looked at him. She was growing fast and was thinner than ever, this summer. "If mother was alive," she said, "she'd know exactly how I feel."
Suddenly there came to Amos' memory a weak and tender voice, with contralto notes in it like Lydia's, "Lydia's like me, Amos. You'll never have trouble understanding her, if you'll remember that."
"Lydia," he said, abruptly, "make the house over if you want to, my dear," and he marched out to the kitchen to wash and take off his overalls.
It took Lydia several days to complete her task. When it was done the cracks were still prominent and the oily finish was spotted. But in Lydia's eyes it was a work of art and she cut the old carpet into three parts with enthusiasm. She sewed the fringe on the rugs, on the front porch. Sitting so, she could see Margery when she appeared far down the road, could view the beauty of the Nortons' wide fields, and could hear the quiet sighing of the pine by the gate. On the afternoon on which she finished the last of the rugs, Charlie Jackson and not Margery appeared. Lydia's heart sank a little as he turned in the gate, though in his greeting he seemed his usual genial self.
He admired the rugs and the gleam of the shining floor through the doorway. Then without preamble, he asked, "Did you talk to Levine, Lydia?"
"Yes," she said. "He—he just doesn't see it any way but his, Charlie!"
The young Indian's face fell. "I certainly thought you could influence him, Lydia. Did you really try?"
"Of course I tried," she exclaimed, indignantly. "He insists that the only way to save you Indians is to make you work for a living."
"He's doing it all for our good, huh?" sneered Charlie.
"He doesn't pretend. He says he wants the land. He's paying for it though."
"Paying for it!" cried the Indian. "How's he paying, do you know?"
"No, and I don't want to know! I'm tired of hearing things against Mr. Levine."
"I don't care if you are," said Charlie, grimly. "If you're going to keep on being his friend, you've got to be it with your eyes open. And you might as well decide right now whether you're going to take him or me for your friend. You can't have us both."
"I wouldn't give up Mr. Levine for any one on earth." Lydia's voice shook with her earnestness. "And I don't see why I have to be dragged into this business. I've nothing to do with it."
"You have too! You're white and it's every white's business to judge in this. You'll be taking some of the profits of the reservation if it's thrown open, yourself."
"I will not!" cried Lydia. "I wouldn't want an inch of that land." Then she caught her breath. Something within her said, "Wouldn't, eh—not the vast acres of cathedral pines, you thought of as yours, at camp?" She flushed and repeated vehemently, "Not an inch!"
Charlie smiled cynically. "Listen, Lydia, I'll tell you how Levine pays for his Indian lands."