Ragged Lady, Complete

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This etext was produced by David Widger

[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks at the end of this file
for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making
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RAGGED LADY.

By William Dean Howells

Part 1.

I.

It was their first summer at Middlemount and the Landers did not know the
roads. When they came to a place where they had a choice of two, she
said that now he must get out of the carry-all and ask at the house
standing a little back in the edge of the pine woods, which road they
ought to take for South Middlemount. She alleged many cases in which
they had met trouble through his perverse reluctance to find out where
they were before he pushed rashly forward in their drives. Whilst she
urged the facts she reached forward from the back seat where she sat, and
held her hand upon the reins to prevent his starting the horse, which was
impartially cropping first the sweet fern on one side and then the
blueberry bushes on the other side of the narrow wheel-track. She
declared at last that if he would not get out and ask she would do it
herself, and at this the dry little man jerked the reins in spite of her,
and the horse suddenly pulled the carry-all to the right, and seemed
about to overset it.

"Oh, what are you doing, Albe't? "Mrs. Lander lamented, falling helpless
against the back of her seat. "Haven't I always told you to speak to the
hoss fust?"

"He wouldn't have minded my speakin'," said her husband. "I'm goin' to
take you up to the dooa so that you can ask for youaself without gettin'
out."

This was so well, in view of Mrs. Lander's age and bulk, and the hardship
she must have undergone, if she had tried to carry out her threat, that
she was obliged to take it in some sort as a favor; and while the vehicle
rose and sank over the surface left rough, after building, in front of
the house, like a vessel on a chopping sea, she was silent for several
seconds.

The house was still in a raw state of unfinish, though it seemed to have
been lived in for a year at least. The earth had been banked up at the
foundations for warmth in winter, and the sheathing of the walls had been
splotched with irregular spaces of weather boarding; there was a good
roof over all, but the window-casings had been merely set in their places
and the trim left for a future impulse of the builder. A block of wood
suggested the intention of steps at the front door, which stood
hospitably open, but remained unresponsive for some time after the
Landers made their appeal to the house at large by anxious noises in
their throats, and by talking loud with each other, and then talking low.
They wondered whether there were anybody in the house; and decided that
there must be, for there was smoke coming out of the stove pipe piercing
the roof of the wing at the rear.

Mr. Lander brought himself under censure by venturing, without his wife's
authority, to lean forward and tap on the door-frame with the butt of his
whip. At the sound, a shrill voice called instantly from the region of
the stove pipe, "Clem! Clementina? Go to the front dooa! The'e's
somebody knockin'." The sound of feet, soft and quick, made itself heard
within, and in a few moments a slim maid, too large for a little girl,
too childlike for a young girl, stood in the open doorway, looking down
on the elderly people in the buggy, with a face as glad as a flower's.
She had blue eyes, and a smiling mouth, a straight nose, and a pretty
chin whose firm jut accented a certain wistfulness of her lips. She had
hair of a dull, dark yellow, which sent out from its thick mass light
prongs, or tendrils, curving inward again till they delicately touched
it. Her tanned face was not very different in color from her hair, and
neither were her bare feet, which showed well above her ankles in the
calico skirt she wore. At sight of the elders in the buggy she
involuntarily stooped a little to lengthen her skirt in effect, and at
the same time she pulled it together sidewise, to close a tear in it, but
she lost in her anxiety no ray of the joy which the mere presence of the
strangers seemed to give her, and she kept smiling sunnily upon them
while she waited for them to speak.

"Oh!" Mrs. Lander began with involuntary apology in her tone, "we just
wished to know which of these roads went to South Middlemount. We've
come from the hotel, and we wa'n't quite ce'tain."

The girl laughed as she said, "Both roads go to South Middlemount'm; they
join together again just a little piece farther on."

The girl and the woman in their parlance replaced the letter 'r' by vowel
sounds almost too obscure to be represented, except where it came last in
a word before a word beginning with a vowel; there it was annexed to the
vowel by a strong liaison, according to the custom universal in rural New
England.

"Oh, do they?" said Mrs. Lander.

"Yes'm," answered the girl. "It's a kind of tu'nout in the wintatime; or
I guess that's what made it in the beginning; sometimes folks take one
hand side and sometimes the other, and that keeps them separate; but
they're really the same road, 'm."

"Thank you," said Mrs. Lander, and she pushed her husband to make him say
something, too, but he remained silently intent upon the child's
prettiness, which her blue eyes seemed to illumine with a light of their
own. She had got hold of the door, now, and was using it as if it was a
piece of drapery, to hide not only the tear in her gown, but somehow both
her bare feet. She leaned out beyond the edge of it; and then, at
moments she vanished altogether behind it.

Since Mr. Lander would not speak, and made no sign of starting up his
horse, Mrs. Lander added, "I presume you must be used to havin' people
ask about the road, if it's so puzzlin'."

"O, yes'm," returned the girl, gladly. "Almost every day, in the
summatime."

"You have got a pretty place for a home, he'e," said Mrs. Lander.

"Well, it will be when it's finished up." Without leaning forward
inconveniently Mrs. Lander could see that the partitions of the house
within were lathed, but not plastered, and the girl looked round as if to
realize its condition and added, "It isn't quite finished inside."

"We wouldn't, have troubled you," said Mrs. Lander, "if we had seen
anybody to inquire of."

"Yes'm," said the girl. "It a'n't any trouble."

"There are not many otha houses about, very nea', but I don't suppose you
get lonesome; young folks are plenty of company for themselves, and if
you've got any brothas and sistas--"

"Oh," said the girl, with a tender laugh, "I've got eva so many of them!"

There was a stir in the bushes about the carriage, and Mrs. Lander was
aware for an instant of children's faces looking through the leaves at
her and then flashing out of sight, with gay cries at being seen. A boy,
older than the rest, came round in front of the horse and passed out of
sight at the corner of the house.

Lander now leaned back and looked over his shoulder at his wife as if he
might hopefully suppose she had come to the end of her questions, but she
gave no sign of encouraging him to start on their way again.

"That your brotha, too?" she asked the girl.

"Yes'm. He's the oldest of the boys; he's next to me."

"I don't know," said Mrs. Lander thoughtfully, "as I noticed how many
boys there were, or how many girls."

"I've got two sistas, and three brothas, 'm," said the girl, always
smiling sweetly. She now emerged from the shelter of the door, and Mrs.
Lander perceived that the slight movements of such parts of her person as
had been evident beyond its edge were the effects of some endeavor at
greater presentableness. She had contrived to get about her an overskirt
which covered the rent in her frock, and she had got a pair of shoes on
her feet. Stockings were still wanting, but by a mutual concession of
her shoe-tops and the border of her skirt, they were almost eliminated
from the problem. This happened altogether when the girl sat down on the
threshold, and got herself into such foreshortening that the eye of Mrs.
Lander in looking down upon her could not detect their absence. Her
little head then showed in the dark of the doorway like a painted head
against its background.

"You haven't been livin' here a great while, by the looks," said Mrs.
Lander. "It don't seem to be clea'ed off very much."

"We've got quite a ga'den-patch back of the house," replied the girl,
"and we should have had moa, but fatha wasn't very well, this spring;
he's eva so much better than when we fust came he'e."

"It has, the name of being a very healthy locality," said Mrs. Lander,
somewhat discontentedly, "though I can't see as it's done me so very much
good, yit. Both your payrints livin'?"

"Yes'm. Oh, yes, indeed!"

"And your mother, is she real rugged? She need to be, with such a flock
of little ones!"

"Yes, motha's always well. Fatha was just run down, the doctas said, and
ought to keep more in the open aia. That's what he's done since he came
he'e. He helped a great deal on the house and he planned it all out
himself."

"Is he a ca'penta?" asked Mrs. Lander.

"No'm; but he's--I don't know how to express it--he likes to do every
kind of thing."

"But he's got some business, ha'n't he?" A shadow of severity crept over
Mrs. Lander's tone, in provisional reprehension of possible
shiftlessness.

"Yes'm. He was a machinist at the Mills; that's what the doctas thought
didn't agree with him. He bought a piece of land he'e, so as to be in
the pine woods, and then we built this house."

"When did you say you came?"

"Two yea's ago, this summa."

"Well! What did you do befoa you built this house?"

"We camped the first summa."

"You camped? In a tent?"

"Well, it was pahtly a tent, and pahtly bank."

"I should have thought you would have died."

The girl laughed. "Oh, no, we all kept fast-rate. We slept in the tents
we had two--and we cooked in the shanty." She smiled at the notion in
adding, "At fast the neighbas thought we we'e Gipsies; and the summa
folks thought we were Indians, and wanted to get baskets of us."

Mrs. Lander did not know what to think, and she asked, "But didn't it
almost perish you, stayin' through the winter in an unfinished house?"

"Well, it was pretty cold. But it was so dry, the aia was, and the woods
kept the wind off nicely."

The same shrill voice in the region of the stovepipe which had sent the
girl to the Landers now called her from them. "Clem! Come here a
minute!"

The girl said to Mrs. Lander, politely, "You'll have to excuse me, now'm.
I've got to go to motha."

"So do!" said Mrs. Lander, and she was so taken by the girl's art and
grace in getting to her feet and fading into the background of the
hallway without visibly casting any detail of her raiment, that she was
not aware of her husband's starting up the horse in time to stop him.
They were fairly under way again, when she lamented, "What you doin',
Albe't? Whe'e you goin'?"

"I'm goin' to South Middlemount. Didn't you want to?"

"Well, of all the men! Drivin' right off without waitin' to say thankye
to the child, or take leave, or anything!"

"Seemed to me as if SHE took leave."

"But she was comin' back! And I wanted to ask--"

"I guess you asked enough for one while. Ask the rest to-morra."

Mrs. Lander was a woman who could often be thrown aside from an immediate
purpose, by the suggestion of some remoter end, which had already,
perhaps, intimated itself to her. She said, "That's true," but by the
time her husband had driven down one of the roads beyond the woods into
open country, she was a quiver of intolerable curiosity. "Well, all I've
got to say is that I sha'n't rest till I know all about 'em."

"Find out when we get back to the hotel, I guess," said her husband.

"No, I can't wait till I get back to the hotel. I want to know now. I
want you should stop at the very fust house we come to. Dea'! The'e
don't seem to be any houses, any moa." She peered out around the side of
the carry-all and scrutinized the landscape. "Hold on! No, yes it is,
too! Whoa! Whoa! The'e's a man in that hay-field, now!"

She laid hold of the reins and pulled the horse to a stand. Mr. Lander
looked round over his shoulder at her. "Hadn't you betta wait till you
get within half a mile of the man?"

"Well, I want you should stop when you do git to him. Will you? I want
to speak to him, and ask him all about those folks."

"I didn't suppose you'd let me have much of a chance," said her husband.
When he came within easy hail of the man in the hay-field, he pulled up
beside the meadow-wall, where the horse began to nibble the blackberry
vines that overran it.

Mrs. Lander beckoned and called to the man, who had stopped pitching hay
and now stood leaning on the handle of his fork. At the signs and sounds
she made, he came actively forward to the road, bringing his fork with
him. When he arrived within easy conversational distance, he planted the
tines in the ground and braced himself at an opposite incline from the
long smooth handle, and waited for Mrs. Lander to begin.

"Will you please tell us who those folks ah', livin' back there in the
edge of the woods, in that new unfinished house?"

The man released his fork with one hand to stoop for a head of timothy
that had escaped the scythe, and he put the stem of it between his teeth,
where it moved up and down, and whipped fantastically about as he talked,
before he answered, "You mean the Claxons?"

"I don't know what thei' name is." Mrs. Lander repeated exactly what she
had said.

The farmer said, "Long, red-headed man, kind of sickly-lookin'?"

"We didn't see the man"--

"Little woman, skinny-lookin; pootty tonguey?"

"We didn't see her, eitha; but I guess we hea'd her at the back of the
house."

"Lot o' children, about as big as pa'tridges, runnin' round in the
bushes?"

"Yes! And a very pretty-appearing girl; about thi'teen or fou'teen, I
should think."

The farmer pulled his fork out of the ground, and planted it with his
person at new slopes in the figure of a letter A, rather more upright
than before. "Yes; it's them," he said. "Ha'n't been in the neighbahood
a great while, eitha. Up from down Po'tland way, some'res, I guess.
Built that house last summer, as far as it's got, but I don't believe
it's goin' to git much fa'tha."

"Why, what's the matta?" demanded Mrs. Lander in an anguish of interest.

The man in the hay-field seemed to think it more dignified to include
Lander in this inquiry, and he said with a glimmer of the eye for him,
"Hea'd of do-nothin' folks?"

"Seen 'em, too," answered Lander, comprehensively.

"Well, that a'n't Claxon's complaint exactly. He a'n't a do-nothin';
he's a do-everything. I guess it's about as bad." Lander glimmered back
at the man, but did not speak.

"Kind of a machinist down at the Mills, where he come from," the farmer
began again, and Mrs. Lander, eager not to be left out of the affair for
a moment, interrupted:

"Yes, Yes! That's what the gul said."

"But he don't seem to think't the i'on agreed with him, and now he's
goin' in for wood. Well, he did have a kind of a foot-powa tu'nin'
lathe, and tuned all sots o' things; cups, and bowls, and u'ns for fence-
posts, and vases, and sleeve-buttons and little knick-knacks; but the
place bunt down, here, a while back, and he's been huntin' round for
wood, the whole winta long, to make canes out of for the summa-folks.
Seems to think that the smell o' the wood, whether it's green or it's
dry, is goin' to cure him, and he can't git too much of it."

"Well, I believe it's so, Albe't!" cried Mrs. Lander, as if her husband
had disputed the theory with his taciturn back. He made no other sign of
controversy, and the man in the hay-field went on.

"I hea' he's goin' to put up a wind mill, back in an open place he's got,
and use the powa for tu'nin', if he eva gits it up. But he don't seem to
be in any great of a hurry, and they scrape along somehow. Wife takes in
sewin' and the girl wo'ked at the Middlemount House last season. Whole
fam'ly's got to tu'n in and help s'po't a man that can do everything."

The farmer appealed with another humorous cast of his eye to Lander; but
the old man tacitly refused to take any further part in the talk, which
began to flourish apace, in question and answer, between his wife and the
man in the hay-field. It seemed that the children had all inherited the
father's smartness. The oldest boy could beat the nation at figures, and
one of the young ones could draw anything you had a mind to. They were
all clear up in their classes at school, and yet you might say they
almost ran wild, between times. The oldest girl was a pretty-behaved
little thing, but the man in the hay-field guessed there was not very
much to her, compared with some of the boys. Any rate, she had not the
name of being so smart at school. Good little thing, too, and kind of
mothered the young ones.

Mrs. Lander, when she had wrung the last drop of information out of him,
let him crawl back to his work, mentally flaccid, and let her husband
drive on, but under a fire of conjecture and asseveration that was
scarcely intermitted till they reached their hotel. That night she
talked along time about their afternoon's adventure before she allowed
him to go to sleep. She said she must certainly see the child again;
that they must drive down there in the morning, and ask her all about
herself.

"Albe't," she concluded; "I wish we had her to live with us. Yes, I do!
I wonder if we could get her to. You know I always did want to adopt a
baby."

"You neva said so," Mr. Lander opened his mouth almost for the first
time, since the talk began.

"I didn't suppose you'd like it," said his wife.

"Well, she a'n't a baby. I guess you'd find you had your hands full,
takon' a half-grown gul like that to bring up."

"I shouldn't be afraid any," the wife declared. "She has just twined
herself round my heat. I can't get her pretty looks out of my eyes.
I know she's good."

"We'll see how you feel about it in the morning."

The old man began to wind his watch, and his wife seemed to take this for
a sign that the incident was closed, for the present at least. He seldom
talked, but there came times when he would not even listen. One of these
was the time after he had wound his watch. A minute later he had
undressed, with an agility incredible of his years, and was in bed, as
effectively blind and deaf to his wife's appeals as if he were already
asleep.

II.

When Albert Gallatin Lander (he was named for an early Secretary of the
Treasury as a tribute to the statesman's financial policy) went out of
business, his wife began to go out of health; and it became the most
serious affair of his declining years to provide for her invalid fancies.
He would have liked to buy a place in the Boston suburbs (he preferred
one of the Newtons) where they could both have had something to do, she
inside of the house, and he outside; but she declared that what they both
needed was a good long rest, with freedom from care and trouble of every
kind. She broke up their establishment in Boston, and stored their
furniture, and she would have made him sell the simple old house in which
they had always lived, on an unfashionable up-and-down-hill street of the
West End, if he had not taken one of his stubborn stands, and let it for
a term of years without consulting her. But she had her way about their
own movements, and they began that life of hotels, which they had now
lived so long that she believed any other impossible. Its luxury and
idleness had told upon each of them with diverse effect.

They had both entered upon it in much the same corporal figure, but she
had constantly grown in flesh, while he had dwindled away until he was
not much more than half the weight of his prime. Their digestion was
alike impaired by their joint life, but as they took the same medicines
Mrs. Lander was baffled to account for the varying result. She was sure
that all the anxiety came upon her, and that logically she was the one
who ought to have wasted away. But she had before her the spectacle of a
husband who, while he gave his entire attention to her health, did not
audibly or visibly worry about it, and yet had lost weight in such
measure that upon trying on a pair of his old trousers taken out of
storage with some clothes of her own, he found it impossible to use the
side pockets which the change in his figure carried so far to the rear
when the garment was reduced at the waist. At the same time her own
dresses of ten years earlier would not half meet round her; and one of
the most corroding cares of a woman who had done everything a woman could
to get rid of care, was what to do with those things which they could
neither of them ever wear again. She talked the matter over with herself
before her husband, till he took the desperate measure of sending them
back to storage; and they had been left there in the spring when the
Landers came away for the summer.

They always spent the later spring months at a hotel in the suburbs of
Boston, where they arrived in May from a fortnight in a hotel at New
York, on their way up from hotels in Washington, Ashville, Aiken and
St. Augustine. They passed the summer months in the mountains, and early
in the autumn they went back to the hotel in the Boston suburbs, where
Mrs. Lander considered it essential to make some sojourn before going to
a Boston hotel for November and December, and getting ready to go down to
Florida in January. She would not on any account have gone directly to
the city from the mountains, for people who did that were sure to lose
the good of their summer, and to feel the loss all the winter, if they
did not actually come down with a fever.

She was by no means aware that she was a selfish or foolish person. She
made Mr. Lander subscribe statedly to worthy objects in Boston, which she
still regarded as home, because they had not dwelt any where else since
they ceased to live there; and she took lavishly of tickets for all the
charitable entertainments in the hotels where they stayed. Few if any
guests at hotels enjoyed so much honor from porters, bell-boys, waiters,
chambermaids and bootblacks as the Landers, for they gave richly in fees
for every conceivable service which could be rendered them; they went out
of their way to invent debts of gratitude to menials who had done nothing
for them. He would make the boy who sold papers at the dining-room door
keep the change, when he had been charged a profit of a hundred per cent.
already; and she would let no driver who had plundered them according to
the carriage tariff escape without something for himself.

A sense of their munificence penetrated the clerks and proprietors with a
just esteem for guests who always wanted the best of everything, and
questioned no bill for extras. Mrs. Lander, in fact, who ruled these
expenditures, had no knowledge of the value of things, and made her
husband pay whatever was asked. Yet when they lived under their own roof
they had lived simply, and Lander had got his money in an old-fashioned
business way, and not in some delirious speculation such as leaves a man
reckless of money afterwards. He had been first of all a tailor, and
then he had gone into boys' and youths' clothing in a small way, and
finally he had mastered this business and come out at the top, with his
hands full. He invested his money so prosperously that the income for
two elderly people, who had no children, and only a few outlying
relations on his side, was far beyond their wants, or even their whims.

She as a woman, who in spite of her bulk and the jellylike majesty with
which she shook in her smoothly casing brown silks, as she entered hotel
dining-rooms, and the severity with which she frowned over her fan down
the length of the hotel drawing-rooms, betrayed more than her husband the
commonness of their origin. She could not help talking, and her accent
and her diction gave her away for a middle-class New England person of
village birth and unfashionable sojourn in Boston. He, on the contrary,
lurked about the hotels where they passed their days in a silence so
dignified that when his verbs and nominatives seemed not to agree, you
accused your own hearing. He was correctly dressed, as an elderly man
should be, in the yesterday of the fashions, and he wore with
impressiveness a silk hat whenever such a hat could be worn. A pair of
drab cloth gaiters did much to identify him with an old school of
gentlemen, not very definite in time or place. He had a full gray beard
cut close, and he was in the habit of pursing his mouth a great deal.
But he meant nothing by it, and his wife meant nothing by her frowning.
They had no wish to subdue or overawe any one, or to pass for persons of
social distinction. They really did not know what society was, and they
were rather afraid of it than otherwise as they caught sight of it in
their journeys and sojourns. They led a life of public seclusion, and
dwelling forever amidst crowds, they were all in all to each other, and
nothing to the rest of the world, just as they had been when they resided
(as they would have said) on Pinckney street. In their own house they
had never entertained, though they sometimes had company, in the style of
the country town where Mrs. Lander grew up. As soon as she was released
to the grandeur of hotel life, she expanded to the full measure of its
responsibilities and privileges, but still without seeking to make it the
basis of approach to society. Among the people who surrounded her, she
had not so much acquaintance as her husband even, who talked so little
that he needed none. She sometimes envied his ease in getting on with
people when he chose; and his boldness in speaking to fellow guests and
fellow travellers, if he really wanted anything. She wanted something of
them all the time, she wanted their conversation and their companionship;
but in her ignorance of the social arts she was thrown mainly upon the
compassion of the chambermaids. She kept these talking as long as she
could detain them in her rooms; and often fed them candy (which she ate
herself with childish greed) to bribe them to further delays. If she was
staying some days in a hotel, she sent for the house-keeper, and made all
she could of her as a listener, and as soon as she settled herself for a
week, she asked who was the best doctor in the place. With doctors she
had no reserves, and she poured out upon them the history of her diseases
and symptoms in an inexhaustible flow of statement, conjecture and
misgiving, which was by no means affected by her profound and
inexpugnable ignorance of the principles of health. From time to time
she forgot which side her liver was on, but she had been doctored (as she
called it) for all her organs, and she was willing to be doctored for any
one of them that happened to be in the place where she fancied a present
discomfort. She was not insensible to the claims which her husband's
disorders had upon science, and she liked to end the tale of her own
sufferings with some such appeal as: "I wish you could do something for
Mr. Landa, too, docta." She made him take a little of each medicine that
was left for her; but in her presence he always denied that there was
anything the matter with him, though he was apt to follow the doctor out
of the room, and get a prescription from him for some ailment which he
professed not to believe in himself, but wanted to quiet Mrs. Lander's
mind about.

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