At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern

by Myrtle Reed

  IX

  Another

  For the first time in her life, Mrs. Carr fully comprehended thesensations of a wild animal caught in a trap. In her present painfulpredicament, she was absolutely helpless, and she realised it. It wasHarlan's house, as he had said, but so powerful and penetrating was thepersonality of the dead man that she felt as though it was still largelythe property of Uncle Ebeneezer.

  The portrait in the parlour gave her no light upon the subject, though shestudied it earnestly. The face was that of an old man, soured andembittered by what Life had brought him, who seemed now to have apeculiarly malignant aspect. Dorothy fancied, in certain morbid moments,that Uncle Ebeneezer, from some safe place, was keenly relishing the wholesituation.

  Upon her soul, too, lay heavily that ancient Law of the House, whichdemands unfailing courtesy to the stranger within our gates. Just why theeating of our bread and salt by some undesired guest should exert anyparticular charm of immunity, has long been an open question, but the Lawremains.

  She felt, dimly, that the end was not yet--that still other strangers werecoming to the Jack-o'-Lantern for indefinite periods. She saw, now, whywing after wing had been added to the house, but could not understand theodd arrangement of the front windows. Through some inner sense of loyaltyto Uncle Ebeneezer, she forebore to question either Mrs. Smithers orDick--two people who could probably have given her some light on thesubject. She had gathered, however, from hints dropped here and there, aswell as from the overpowering evidence of recent events, that a horde ofrelatives swarmed each Summer at the queer house on the hilltop andremained until late Autumn.

  Harlan said nothing, and nowadays Dorothy saw very little of him. Most ofthe time he was at work in the library, or else taking long, solitaryrambles through the surrounding country. At meals he was moody andtaciturn, his book obliterating all else from his mind.

  He doubtless knew, subconsciously, that his house was disturbed by alienelements, but he dwelt too securely in the upper regions to be troubled bythe obvious fact. Once in the library, with every door securely bolted, hecould afford to laugh at the tumult outside, if, indeed, he should everbecome aware of its existence. The children might make the very air vocalwith their howls, Elaine might have hysterics, Mrs. Smithers render hymnsin a cracked, squeaky voice, and Dick whistle eternally, but Harlan was ina strange new country, with a beautiful lady, a company of gallantknights, and a jester.

  The rest was all unreal. He seemed to see people through a veil, to hearwhat they said without fully comprehending it, and to walk through hisdaily life blindly, without any sort of emotion. Worst of all, Dorothyherself seemed detached and dream-like. He saw that her face was white andher eyes sad, but it affected him not at all. He had yet to learn that inthis, as in everything else, a price must inevitably be paid, and that thesudden change of all his loved realities to hazy visions was the terriblepenalty of his craft.

  Yet there was compensation, which is also inevitable. To him, the book wasvital, reaching down into the very heart of the world. Fancy took hiswork, and, to the eyes of its creator, made it passing fair. At times hewould sit for an hour or more, nibbling at the end of his pencil, onlynegatively conscious, like one who stares fixedly at a blank wall.Presently, Elaine and her company would come back again, and he would goon with them, writing down only what he saw and felt.

  Chapter after chapter was written and tossed feverishly aside. The wordsbeat in his pulses like music, each one with its own particularsignificance. In return for his personal effacement came moments ofsupremest joy, when his whole world was aflame with light, and colour, andsound, and his physical body fairly shook with ecstasy.

  Little did he know that the Cup was in his hands, and that he was drainingit to the very dregs of bitterness. For this temporary intoxication, hemust pay in every hour of his life to come. Henceforward he was set apartfrom his fellows, painfully isolated, eternally alone. He should havefriends, but only for the hour. The stranger in the street should be thesame to him as one he had known for many years, and he should be equallyready, at any moment, to cast either aside. With a quick, mercilessinsight, like the knife of a surgeon used without an anaesthetic, he shouldexplore the inmost recesses of every personality with which he came incontact, involuntarily, and find himself interested only as some new traitor capacity was revealed. Calm and emotionless, urged by some hiddenpower, he should try each individual to see of what he was made; observingthe man under all possible circumstances, and at times enmeshing newcircumstances about him. He should sacrifice himself continually if by sodoing he could find the deep roots of the other man's selfishness, and,conversely, be utterly selfish if necessary to discover the other's powerof self-sacrifice.

  Unknowingly, he had ceased to be a man and had become a ferret. It was nolight payment exacted in return for the pleasure of writing about Elaine.He had the ability to live in any place or century he pleased, but he hadpaid for it by putting his present reality upon precisely the samefooting. Detachment was his continually. Henceforth he was a spectatormerely, without any particular concern in what passed before his eyes.Some people he should know at a glance, others in a week, a month, or ayear. Across the emptiness between them, some one should clasp his hand,yet share no more his inner life than one who lies beside a dreamer andthinks thus to know where the other wanders on the strange trails ofsleep.

  In the dregs of the Cup lay the potential power to cast off his presentlife as a mollusk leaves his shell, and as completely forget it. For Love,and Death, and Pain are only symbols to him who is enslaved by the pen.Moreover, he suffers always the pangs of an unsatisfied hunger, theexquisite torture of an unappeased and unappeasable thirst, for somethingwhich, like a will-o'-the-wisp, hovers ever above and beyond him, past thepower of words to interpret or express.

  It is often reproachfully said that one "makes copy" of himself and hisfriends--that nothing is too intimately sacred to be seized upon anddissected in print. Not so long ago, it was said that a certain man was"botanising on his mother's grave," a pardonable confusion, perhaps, offacts and realities. The bitter truth is that the writer lives hisbooks--and not much else. From title to colophon, he escapes no pang,misses no joy. The life of the book is his from beginning to end. At theclose of it, he has lived what his dream people have lived and borne thesorrows of half a dozen entire lifetimes, mercilessly concentrated intothe few short months of writing.

  One by one, his former pleasures vanish. Even the divine consolation ofbooks is partly if not wholly gone. Behind the printed page, he sees everthe machinery of composition, the preparation for climax, the repetitionin its proper place, the introduction and interweaving of major and minor,of theme and contrast. For the fine, glowing fancy of the other man hasnot appeared in his book, and to the eye of the fellow-craftsman only themechanism is there. Mask-like, the author stands behind his Punch-and-Judybox, twitching the strings that move his marionettes, heedless of the factthat in his audience there must be a few who know him surely for what heis.

  If only the transfiguring might of the Vision could be put into print,there would be little in the world save books. Happily heedless of themockery of it all, Harlan laboured on, destined fully to sense his entirepayment much later, suffer vicariously for a few hours on account of it,then to forget.

  Dorothy, meanwhile, was learning a hard lesson. Harlan's changelesspreoccupation hurt her cruelly, but, woman-like, she considered it amanifestation of genius and endeavoured to be proud accordingly. It hadnot occurred to her that there could ever be anything in Harlan's thoughtinto which she was not privileged to go. She had thought of marriage as asort of miraculous welding of two individualities into one, and wasperceiving that it changed nothing very much; that souls went on their wayunaltered. She saw, too, that there was no one in the wide world who couldshare her every mood and tense, that ultimately each one of us lives anddies alone, within the sanctuary of his own inner self, cheered only bysome passing mood of friend or stranger, which chances to chime with
his.

  It was Dick who, blindly enough, helped her over many a hard place, andquickened her sense of humour into something upon which she might securelylean. He was too young and too much occupied with the obvious to lookfurther, but he felt that Dorothy was troubled, and that it was his duty,as a man and a gentleman, to cheer her up.

  Privately, he considered Harlan an amiable kind of a fool, who shuthimself up needlessly in a musty library when he might be outdoors, ortalking with a charming woman, or both. When he discovered that Harlan hadhitherto earned his living by writing and hoped to continue doing it, helooked upon his host with profound pity. Books, to Dick, were among thethings which kept life from being wholly pleasant and agreeable. He hadgone through college because otherwise he would have been separated fromhis friends, and because a small legacy from a distant relative, who hadconsiderately died at an opportune moment, enabled him to pay for histuition and his despised books.

  "I was never a pig, though," he explained to Dorothy, in a confidentialmoment. "There was one chump in our class who wanted to know all there wasin the book, and made himself sick trying to cram it in. All of a sudden,he graduated. He left college feet first, three on a side, with the classwalking slow behind him. I never was like that. I was sort of an epicurewhen it came to knowledge, tasting delicately here and there, and nevergreedy. Why, as far back as when I was studying algebra, I nobly refusedto learn the binomial theorem. I just read it through once, hastily, liketaking one sniff at a violet, and then let it alone. The other fellowsfairly gorged themselves with it, but I didn't--I had too much sense."

  When Mr. Chester had been there a week, he gave Dorothy two worn andcrumpled two-dollar bills.

  "What's this?" she asked, curiously. "Where did you find it?"

  "'Find it' is good," laughed Dick. "I earned it, my dear lady, in hard anduncongenial toil. It's my week's board."

  "You're not going to pay any board here. You're a guest."

  "Not on your life. You don't suppose I'm going to sponge my keep offanybody, do you? I paid Uncle Ebeneezer board right straight along andthere's no reason why I shouldn't pay you. You can put that away in yoursock, or wherever it is that women keep money, or else I take the nexttrain. If you don't want to lose me, you have to accept four plunks everyMonday. I've got lots of four plunks," he added, with a winning smile.

  "Very well," said Dorothy, quite certain that she could not spare Dick."If it will make you feel any better about staying, I'll take it."

  He had quickly made friends with Elaine, and the three made a moreharmonious group than might have been expected under the circumstances.With returning strength and health, Miss St. Clair began to take more ofan interest in her surroundings. She gathered the white clover blossoms inwhich Dorothy tied up her pats of sweet butter, picked berries in thegarden, skimmed the milk, helped churn, and fed the chickens.

  Dick took entire charge of the cow, thus relieving Mrs. Smithers of anuncongenial task and winning her heartfelt gratitude. She repaid him withunnumbered biscuits of his favourite kind and with many a savoury "snack"between meals. He also helped Dorothy in many other ways. It was Dick whocollected the eggs every morning and took them to the sanitarium, alongwith such other produce as might be ready for the market. He securedastonishing prices for the things he sold, and set it down to man'ssuperior business ability when questioned by his hostess. Dorothy neverguessed that most of the money came out of his own pocket, and was chargedup, in the ragged memorandum book which he carried, to "Elaine's board."

  Miss St. Clair had never thought of offering compensation, and no onesuggested it to her, but Dick privately determined to make good thedeficiency, sure that a woman married to "a writing chump" would soon bein need of ready money if not actually starving at the time. That peopleshould pay for what Harlan wrote seemed well-nigh incredible. Besides,though Dick had never read that "love is an insane desire on the part of aman to pay a woman's board bill for life," he took a definite satisfactionout of this secret expenditure, which he did not stop to analyse.

  He brought back full price for everything he took to the "repair-shop," ashe had irreverently christened the sanitarium, though he seldom sold much.On the other side of the hill he had a small but select graveyard where heburied such unsalable articles as he could not eat. His appetite wascapricious, and Dorothy had frequently observed that when he came backfrom the long walk to the sanitarium, he ate nothing at all.

  He established a furniture factory under a spreading apple tree at arespectable distance from the house, and began to remodel the black-walnutrelics which were evidence of his kinsman's poor taste. He took many a bedapart, scraped off the disfiguring varnish, sandpapered and oiled thewood, and put it together in new and beautiful forms. He made severaltables, a cabinet, a bench, half a dozen chairs, a set of hanging shelves,and even aspired to a desk, which, owing to the limitations of thematerial, was not wholly successful.

  Dorothy and Elaine sat in rocking-chairs under the tree and encouraged himwhile he worked. One of them embroidered a simple design upon a burlapcurtain while the other read aloud, and together they planned a shapelyremodelling of the Jack-o'-Lantern. Fortunately, the woodwork was plain,and the ceilings not too high.

  "I think," said Elaine, "that the big living room with the casementwindows will be perfectly beautiful. You couldn't have anything lovelierthan this dull walnut with the yellow walls."

  Whatever Mrs. Carr's thoughts might be, this simple sentence was usuallysufficient to turn the current into more pleasant channels. She hadplanned to have needless partitions taken out, and make the whole lowerfloor into one room, with only a dining-room, kitchen, and pantry back ofit. She would take up the unsightly carpets, over which impossible plantswandered persistently, and have them woven into rag rugs, with green andbrown and yellow borders. The floor was to be stained brown and the pinewoodwork a soft, old green. Yellow walls and white net curtains, with thebeautiful furniture Dick was making, completed a very charming picture inthe eyes of a woman who loved her home.

  Outspeeding it in her fancy was the finer, truer living which she believedlay beyond. Some day she and Harlan, alone once more, with the cobwebs ofestrangement swept away, should begin a new and happier honeymoon in thetransformed house. When the book was done--ah, when the book was done! Buthe was not reading any part of it to her now and would not let her begincopying it on the typewriter.

  "I'll do it myself, when I'm ready," he said, coldly. "I can use atypewriter just as well as you can."

  Dorothy sighed, unconsciously, for the woman's part is always to waitpatiently while men achieve, and she who has learned to wait patiently,and be happy meanwhile, has learned the finest art of all--the art oflife.

  "Now," said Dick, "that's a peach of a table, if I do say it asshouldn't."

  They readily agreed with him, for it was low and massive, built on simple,dignified lines, and beautifully finished. The headboards of threeponderous walnut beds and the supporting columns of a hideous sideboardhad gone into its composition, thus illustrating, as Dorothy said, thatugliness may be changed to beauty by one who knows how and is willing towork for it.

  The noon train whistled shrilly in the distance, and Dorothy started outof her chair. "She's afraid," laughed Dick, instantly comprehending."She's afraid somebody is coming on it."

  "More twins?" queried Elaine, from the depths of her rocker. "Surely therecan't be any more twins?"

  "I don't know," answered Dorothy, vaguely troubled. "Someway, I feel asthough something terrible were going to happen."

  Nothing happened, however, until after luncheon, just as she had begun tobreathe peacefully again. Willie saw the procession first and ran backwith gleeful shouts to make the announcement. So it was that the entirehousehold, including Harlan, formed a reception committee on the frontporch.

  Up the hill, drawn by two straining horses, came what appeared at first tobe a pyramid of furniture, but later resolved itself into the componentparts of a more ponderous bed than the ingenu
ity of man had yet contrived.It was made of black walnut, and was at least three times as heavy as anyof those in the Jack-o'-Lantern. On the top of the mass was perched alittle old man in a skull cap, a slippered foot in a scarlet sock airilywaving at one side. A bright green coil closely clutched in his witheredhands was the bed cord appertaining to the bed--a sainted possession fromwhich its owner sternly refused to part.

  "By Jove!" shouted Dick; "it's Uncle Israel and his crib!"

  Paying no heed to the assembled group, Uncle Israel dismounted nimblyenough, and directed the men to take his bed upstairs, which they did,while Harlan and Dorothy stood by helplessly. Here, under his profane andinvolved direction, the structure was finally set in place, even to thepatchwork quilt, fearfully and wonderfully made, which surmounted it all.

  Financial settlement was waved aside by Uncle Israel as a matter in whichhe was not interested, and it was Dick who counted out two dimes and anickel to secure peace. A supplementary procession appeared with a small,weather-beaten trunk, a folding bath-cabinet, and a huge case which, fromUncle Israel's perturbation, evidently contained numerous fragile articlesof great value.

  "Tell Ebeneezer," wheezed the newcomer, "that I have arrived."

  "Ebeneezer," replied Dick, in wicked imitation of the old man's asthmaticspeech, "has been dead for some time."

  "Then," creaked Uncle Israel, waving a tremulous, bony hand suggestivelytoward the door, "kindly leave me alone with my grief."