Elia Peattie, an Uncommon Woman

 

Omaha World-Herald | Short Stories of the West | Ghost Stories | Short Novels | Children's Stories | Miscellaneous

Wild Fruit


Originally published in The Teepee Book July 1915: 150-164

There is still much open range within 50 miles of Moose Hill, and there are ranches by the twenties—great ranches of the old style. The country is broken by gulches and evil-looking buttes, with here and there a level spot streaked red and black and of unimaginable richness. Here grain, fruit and flowers respond almost exotically to the efforts of the planter.

It was to such a spot that Tiffany Breed brought his wife Marion, who was much more exotic than anything that the over-stimulated soil could produce, that wherever one put her, she was arresting. Her husband had brought her to this wild place for a profound and unspoken reason. He had discovered after two years of marriage that she possessed no more than the beginnings of a soul. He was a Western man, transplanted to an Eastern city. He had met the city eye to eye, brawn to brawn. There was one thing only he had not been able to understand, and that was the woman who was his wife. She eluded him. At first he had supposed it was because he was so simple and she so complicated, so subtle, so mysterious. He tried to explain himself to her, at first gently, by implication. Then desperately, as a man might call for help from the bottom of a well. All he heard was the reverberations of his own voice. Men, seeing him with this beautiful woman envied him. They thought him marvelously companioned. They did not know that no more lonely man walked the earth.

And that was why he came west. He brought the woman with him because he thought the West a good place for souls. He remembered it to be so. At any rate, disaster was ahead of him in the city; he was no pessimist, but he could see that.

The ranch house on the tract of land he had purchased was low, compact and bare as a bone. It was, nevertheless, rudely convenient, and it looked upon the broken and fantastic line of hills through purple distance. No furniture had been brought. Tiffany was sick to the soul of elaborate litter with which this woman had surrounded herself.

"Why not be free for a little while?" he had asked. "Try the life with me for two years, Marion. At the end of that time, if you can't stand it, I'll send you back home."

She agreed. She, too, was rather tired of things as she knew them. And besides, since Tiffany had become so disagreeable, he almost interested her.

He had wired for necessary furniture, and while awaiting it, he and Marion lived at the "Moose Hill Palace," a hostelry which took it grandeur out in its name. Here they met some of the townspeople. State Congressman Cutting and his wife lived there, ranch-people, taking their ease after a hard life. Their daughters were married, their sons at Leland Stanford University.

"Except Reno," said Mrs. Cutting. She and Marion were sitting in the "ladies' parlor," a stark plede [sic] decorated with the horns of slain animals.

"Reno?" echoed Marion vaguely. "Isn't that a town?"

"My son was born there," said Mrs. Cutting. "That is why he is called Reno."

"But he's not in college?" Not that Marion cared, but she had the habit of politeness. She, too, she could see that this tense, eager woman thought her beautiful. She had never been far away from admiration, and she could not afford to isolate herself from it now.

"Oh, he's long past college years," Mrs. Cutting said, "and he never was interested in his schooling. Yet he does not lose a chance to help me with the library I'm getting up for Moose Hill."

"You are getting together a library?" Marion hardly concealed her surprise. She was answered by the fire that leapt into the woman's eyes.

"Yes, I am, Mrs. Breed, and I want you to help me. I want that library done before I die. I want the building and thousands of books in it, and ways to send them to every man, woman and child who wants them. There mustn't be so lonely a ranch anywhere that people on it can't have books!"

"It will be very nice," murmured Marion.

The little woman leaped to her feet and strode across the room till she stood before this tall, languid girl in her modish clothes.

"Nice?" she cried. "Nice? Mrs. Breed, you're not understanding what I am talking about. Sending books out into those lonely places is like sending food to the starving, don't you see? But you don't know—you can't. How could you comprehend the loneliness—the nothingness—the day's coming and going—always seeing the same things, thinking of the same people—"

She could not go on.

Marion rose to the drama in the woman.

"Maybe I shall understand by and by," she said with more interest than she had yet shown. "I'd like to help you. I could get money for the library if you wanted it."

Tears leaped into Mrs. Cutting's over-bright eyes.

"There, I was too harsh. I thought you didn't care. You're so—beautiful. Sometimes women like you don't care, except about themselves. You see, now the children are gone, and Mr. Cutting is where men look up to him, there isn't much left for me to do. So I took up this thing. It is my religion now.

"It's a great work for you to do," ventured Marion. She was a trifle ill at ease before this woman who seemed on the verge of reading her. (And she was a woman who did not wish to be read by other women.)

"Reno's helping me," went on the old ranch woman. "As I said, he's not one to care for books. You couldn't educate him in schools any more than you could a maverick. The free range for him. Yet he carries word of my library everywhere. He holds up cow punchers and horse wranglers and liquor men—makes them contribute. Every month he has their names printed in what he calls a roll of honor, and he mails it all around the country. It would tickle you to see how proud some of the roughest men are to get their names on that roll.

She chuckled slyly, and looked at Marion out of her shining, opaque eyes, which gleamed like glass from amid the innumerable wrinkles of her dark face.

"He does it because he loves his mother," said Marion in her mellifluous voice. Mrs. Cutting moved toward her with out-stretched hands. That last sentence had made a slave of her. She became on the instant one of the great company of those who loved this woman, and for no reason that they could tell.

"It's just as sweet of you as it can be to help me," she said. "I must write to Reno about you. He'll be wild to meet you."

A month later, when Marion had been settled in her new home quite long enough to make it her own, there came at a certain twilight, a knock at the door. Her Japanese servant flew on noiseless feet to open it, and Marion, standing with the light of the leaping flames upon her heart, turned and beheld a stranger.

"I'm Reno Cutting," the man said heartily in a voice that vibrated, "and I've taken the liberty of calling to thank you for all that you've done for my mother. Why, that money you got for her finished off the job!"

He hurt her with his hand-clasp, and when, against her will she showed it, he made apologies after his own fashion.

"That's the awkward savage I am," he cried, ashamed. "I come to thank you, and I hurt you. You see, the hands I am in the habit of shaking can stand a good deal. I'm a cattle buyer, ma'am, and spend my time going over the country. I meet many sorts—but not all sorts. No one like you. I have never met anyone like you before."

He had the wide-eyed wonder of a child. Marion smiled gloriously.

"Sit down, please," she said, motioning to a chair with a gesture which enchanted him. "I've heard volumes about you."

"From mother? I've given her more worry than all the rest of the children put together. That's why she likes me best."

He was curiously at his ease; and he was, in his way, wonderful. More a man, Marion decided, than any representative of his sex she had ever met. His great frame seemed to house a completely emancipated spirit. She had never seen glances from eyes once so bold and so respectful—sun-flecked eyes, full of light mockeries.

She made him stay till her husband came, and Breed induced him to remain for dinner. When they had eaten, and Marion had played upon the piano for them, the two men talked together and she sat apart regarding them and comparing one with the other. There was an academic decision in her husband's accent; bluff authority in the tones of his guest. Her husband wore glasses over hard-worked eyes; Reno Cutting could have looked at the sun and hardly faltered. The city man was tall, slender, elegant; the other stood, sat, moved squarely, with force. Each was a strong man after his fashion. One had worshipped her—suffered because of her; the other was capable of doing so. It occurred to her that, for a moment, neither was thinking of her. She moved nearer to the fire, and dropped there, her pale blue draperies falling about her exquisitely. She knew well the contour she presented. She knew when the men began to think about her again. Their conversation faltered. She was happily aware that she irritated them; that she got in the way of their communion. She pretended to yawn—beautifully. Then she smiled.

What was it this stranger made her think of?

Ah, yes, of Sigmund when he entered the hut of Siglinda and Spring burst into flower and the song of the wood without.

Moos Hill was interested in the erection of two new buildings; the government laboratory for the investigation of diseases of cattle; and the edifice that was to house the Fremont County Circulating Library. Tiffany Breed was superintending completion of the first; Reno Cutting was pushing along the beginnings of the second.

The two men saw each other every day. Cutting came often to Breed's ranch, and Sunday he rode with Breed and his wife over the wiled, strange country, ravaged by ancient fires. Eagles swung above them; coyotes howled from the rose and purple buttes; and the vast droves of cattle browsing the brown grass watched them with startled eyes.

So the long winter wore along. In the cities there were shining, thronged boulevards, there was opera, there were theatres, gatherings of people in the amazing new fashions, dancing the amazing new dances. Marion heard from her friends of all this; to her surprise it was no more to her than the breaking surf on an unknown shore. She who knew Paris, the spas, Floridian idleness, had found something more stimulating than anything hitherto come into her life. She who had thought herself even weary of conquest, awoke each morning with the eagerness of a child. She throbbed with life; she expanded in beauty; never had her laugh been so like music, her eyes so brilliant and compelling. She exuded some power impossible to define. Perhaps it might be called a conscious femininity.

And she was waiting for an event—waiting for the hour of Reno Cutting's declaration of love for her. She had not yet made up her mind how she would receive it. She knew he was an uncompromising man. True to himself, to his friends, to his inherited, hearty ideals. He meant to be what he called "true." When, at last—and inevitably—his outburst came, it would be terrifying and compelling. She knew she could not play with him as she had played with other men. But she did not wish to play with him. She who had long enthralled, was herself the enthralled on now. She grew breathless, dreaming of the splendid hour that must come. She wondered where it would be—how it would terminate. She did not feel responsible for the outcome. If he said: "Come," she would go. He was the only man she had ever met for whom she would care to make a sacrifice.

Tiffany Breed was called to Washington. He asked his wife to go with him, but she refused.

"If I go east I might never come back again," she said tauntingly. "Best let sleeping dogs lie, Tiffany."

Maybe he thought so, too. He went without her.

Cutting kept away from the ranch then. Marion, wrapped in rich and intoxicating reveries, saw the slow days drag by, and he did not come. The silent, vision-haunted nights throbbed with him—yet he did not come. She knew the same tumult that raged in her was driving him half-mad; knew by all of her newly awakened intuitions. Yet he held silence and distance between them.

"He is very strong," she said to herself. His fall would be the greater.

Then, one night as she sat before her fire, robed in flame-colored silk wonderful in its Japanese embroidery, thinking of him, summoning him with her whole being, she heard the hoofs of his horse without the door. She arose, sailed to the door like a conquering ship, and he saw her, all crimson in the flaunting gown and the blazing fire-light. He blanketed his horse and came in, and when the door was closed they melted into each other's embrace.

"You called me," he whispered, covering her hair with kisses, "you kept calling me—all day and all night. I had to come."

Marion did not try to speak. She drew back from him, leaning over his arm, so that he could see the perfect curve of her throat and neck, the deep solicitation of her exquisite eyes.

He never had imagined that such beauty could exist. He bent over her, drunk with his happiness. Then a sound made him start. The latch of the door has loosened. In another moment it was blown o pen. He released her while he closed it. Something on the table clattered to the floor. Mechanically he stooped to raise it. It was a picture of his other, set in a silver frame, her weather-bitten, plain, too eager face contrasting almost absurdly with the elaborately chased frame. He laid it on the table face down and held out his arms to the woman who stood there, tranced and entrancing. But he, after all, had given her a moment in which to summon her coquetries.

She swept by him toward the fire.

"So you thought you heard me calling you?"

"If I did not, I should not be here."

"And now that you are here—"

"And now that I am here in another man's house in his absence, I will say what I came to say. It's a magnificent hour for us, but it's a shameful hour, too."

She shivered a trifle. He was much more lucid than she had expected to find him. She doubted if her spell had been complete enough.

"Did you ever eat wild fruit—Marion?" he asked, speaking her name for the first time. "I don't suppose you ever did. It ripens by itself, and it tastes of the sun. Nothing else satisfies the craving in man for sweet and sour the way that does. Nothing. Well, this love of ours is wild fruit, and the tang of it—the tang maddens me, the way the loco weed does a horse. I've eaten it, and now the questions is—"

But his deliberation enraged her.

"What question can there be?" she demanded. Her face had grown flushed, her eyes were flaming.

"The question as to whether or not we shall go away together forever," he said slowly. "Just that."

She took a step toward him, almost menacingly.

"Do you hesitate?" she cried. She had seen men who loved her less, broken before her groveling at her dress-hem. She loved this man for his strength, but she say that she might hate him for it, too.

"Of course I hesitate," he replied in his downright boyish way that seemed so inconsistent with the maturity of his passion for her. "Wouldn't I naturally hesitate to break up a friend's home? Wouldn't I hesitate to place you where no woman in the state would want to take you into her home? Wouldn't I hesitate to blacken my own name? Men out here think they can count on Reno Cutting> If I go to the bad, it does a lot more than—"

"Can you stand there and argue?" she said, lowering her voice and bending her head with almost menacing intensity.

"It isn't as if I loved you alone," went on the man, doggedly. "I love women. I have been brought up to revere them. I've seen my mother go through her life like an angel with a sword." She looked at him in amazement. She could not make him out.

"I've the kind of love my mother knew, to measure things by," he said after a moment. He had gone to the table and lifted her picture in his hand, and he looked at it almost sternly. "She—she had such a reverence for life. I've seen her nurse a strange Indian back to life, 'for life's sake,' she said. When my father cut his foot in the saw mill, she carried him a mile on her back, and as you know, she's about half his size. It wasn't strength of body that gave her the power to do that, was it? My youngest sister was born out on a timber claim miles from anybody. Father was at town, and there were only us children there. I was the oldest and she turned to me. "Don't you be frightened," she said, "I'll tell you what to do, son, and you must stand by me. We all came into the world the same way, and it's a holy mystery. 'I've got to live for all your sakes.' That's what she said to me. I went down on my knees to her; and she gave me strength to see her thru that day. I worshipped women ever since."

Marion Breed drew back from him. She sank on a seat beside the fire and put her hands about her knees.

"Go on," she said with quiet satire.

"I'd want my sons to look on their mother that same way," he said. "That same way!" He stood for a moment, thinking profoundly. Then setting the picture down again he came toward his friend's wife. His hands were clenched, and the muscles of his tense arms showed thru his sleeves. His face was dark, almost distorted.

"I am mad with you," he said so low she could hardly hear him. "I love you day and night, always, everywhere. You fill the world for me—now. You are in my blood, in my brain—"

He broke off and lifted one fist heavenward.

"And I am going to leave you, so help me God!"

She leaped to her feet like a tigress, stung to madness by the affront. For the first time in her life she had been humiliated. She, whom men of cultivation, of fortune, of wisdom had loved, was being rejected by this man of the wilderness.

"You—coward!" she said.

He shook his head as if the word had no meaning for him.

"You will never be loved again as I love you now," he said.

He went out before her unbelieving eyes and closed the door. She heard the sharp clatter of his horse's hoofs on the frozen earth.

She ran to the door and shrilled his name into the night, but he could not have heard her, for he went on. She wanted to strike some one dead. If there had been anything at hand with which she could have destroyed herself, perhaps, in that frantic moment—that hideous moment when nothing opposed itself to her rage—she would have done so. As it was, she stood with her back against the closed door, inwardly raging. The storm of her shame and misery tore at her like a wild beast. She grew weak and sick with the torment, and after a long time she walked toward the fire, groping her way and holding to the furniture. Passing the table, her glance fell upon the picture of Maria Cutting, the little staunch, wind-tanned, hardy pioneer—the woman who had defeated her. She snatched the picture from the table, meaning to hurl it into the fire, but something in the humorous twist about the eyes and mouth withheld her. It was as if the little old trouble-fighter was in the room, laughing at human passion, at life's chances and changes—at the eternal Mutability.

Marion Breed kept the picture in her hand, and sank upon the huge fur rug before the fire. She was very cold, and she reached for a cloak on the divan and wrapped herself in it. But still she was shivering. Her teeth chattered. Sometimes waves of blackness went before her eyes. But after a time, these passed. Thru her surging misery she was able to study that face in the photograph—the face of the woman who had made her son worship women. Marion had an imagination, though she had not put it to its highest use; but it stirred in her now. She began to picture the incidents in this woman's life. She saw her always giving of her strength, her love, her service. And she saw, too, scenes from her own moving-picture show of life, and as she looked, shame shook her, for it was as if she ran thru the world snatching the goods of others—gathering their blossoms and their fruit. That the hands that snatched had been beautiful, and the feet that ran had been white, made, she now knew, no difference.

As Saul saw a light, so, before the cold grey dawn came over the scoriated [sic] buttes, Marion Breed saw one, too. In the hour of her defeat came the beginning of her victory. With slow travail there came into the world that day, a woman's soul.

July 1915, 150–164

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