A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  Sarah laughed good naturedly, and Abbie asked, “Then it wasn’t just because you wanted to see me, Kathie?”

  “Oh, no,” she admitted blithely, “it’s all on account of Jimmie.”

  “Jimmie?”

  “Jimmie Buchanan.”

  “Oh, . . .” Abbie remembered. “The young man in John’s law office.”

  “ ‘The very same,’ quoth the maiden, ‘as a tear stood in her eye.’ I’ve had a crush on him ever since I first saw him striding along with his little old textbooks across the campus. But I never dated him then. I suppose you can guess why?”

  “No.” Abbie Deal and Sarah Lutz gave up immediately, for the answers to Katherine’s conundrums were usually as unique as they were varied.

  “Because,” Katherine said, mysteriously, “he was a barb.”

  “No,” said Abbie. “Not that bad?” Abbie might not be conversant with half of Katherine’s modern vernacular, but she did know that a barb was a non-fraternity man.

  “Now . . . Granny . . . you’re turning on the sarcasm. Don’t you make merry with me. Yes, my loves, a barb, . . . never went into a frat.” It was as though she spoke of Lucifer’s fall or Napoleon’s exile. “He probably washed his own shirts on Saturdays and ate at hamburger joints . . . and here I’m crazy about him. But he won’t have me. I’ve done everything but fling myself on the cement walk in front of Uncle John’s office and yell until he comes out and picks me up. Mother is getting a little discouraged about marrying me to the Prince of Wales. But she is still counting on some one of the Vanderastors . . . and here I am just foolish about Jimmie Buchanan and ready to throw myself at his re-soled Oxfords. He’ll be Governor some day or Secretary of the Exterior. But in the meantime, he’ll marry some neat little Jane that’ll economize and have twins . . .”

  “Kathie!” It was both grandmothers, simultaneously.

  “Oh . . . very well . . . one at a time if you prefer,” she went on unblushingly.

  “He’s a nice boy,” Abbie Deal broke in to avert other verbal catastrophes. “John speaks so highly of him. I’ll invite him out some night to supper when you’re here.”

  “Oh, you needn’t bother. I have already. It’s to-night.” She smiled at them cheerfully. “I’m going in to get him at six. You’ll fix a nice little dinner, won’t you, Granny?”

  Abbie Deal sat down weakly. Flesh of her flesh was saying that. Blood of her blood was taking the initiative in a love affair. “Oh, Kathie . . . girls are so queer now-days. They do such forward things. It would have been nicer for me to.”

  “Girls now-days,” said Miss Deal, “do things immediately . . . right off the bat . . . snap . . . just like that.”

  “So I see,” said Abbie Deal dryly.

  “Now, here’s the idea,” Kathie went on, unperturbed. “You two old baby-dolls get up a nice little dinner while I go after Jimmie. Then I’ll come home with him and put on a fetching pink apron and set the table and bring in the provender . . . and Jimmie will begin to think I’m the neat little Jane.” She smiled at them with gay nonchalance. She patted them both. She kissed them each a time or two. And they gave in.

  “She’s yours, Sarah, as much as she’s mine,” Abbie said, when they were starting the meal, “and I, for one, am ashamed of her.”

  “Oh, . . . she’s all right, Abbie. She’s just outspoken.”

  “At nineteen, Sarah, I was married, and had Katherine’s father, and had washed and ironed and sewed and made soap and woven rag carpet . . . and . . .”

  “Yes . . . but, Abbie, you just couldn’t do anything else. I can think of a dozen things that Kathie could do right now if she set her mind to it.”

  They prepared the dinner . . . the two old belles of another generation.

  A little after six, Katherine dashed into the lane road at a speed which jangled the nerves of a flock of stolid Plymouth Rock hens, and set the brakes a few inches from a gander that stuck out his neck and expressed disapproval of the blue and white monstrosity.

  “Honk honk, yourself,” Katherine called out to the offended dignitary, and then came into the house with a nice-looking, clean-cut young fellow. She came triumphantly. “Well . . . here’s Jimmie. It took handcuffs and an anesthetic to get him but I did the deed. Jimmie, you know Grandmother Deal, . . . but I want to present you to Grandmother Lutz. Grandma . . . Jimmie Buchanan . . . the conquered. Well,” she waved an airy hand at the two old ladies, “how do you like ’em, Jimmie? I could love either . . . ‘were t’other dear charmer away.’ ”

  Abbie Deal was embarrassed beyond measure. She was used to the girl’s wild talk before her own people, but she did not dream Kathie would keep it up when the young man came. Abbie looked at him. He was not disgusted. He was looking at Katherine with approbation and liking . . . even admiration. He liked her flippant talk. The young man, himself, liked it. Well, she gave up. She washed her hands of the present generation. They were away beyond her.

  Katherine put on a rose-pink apron which she had brought with evident forethought, and winked openly at her respective progenitors as she carried in the food.

  They ate the palatable if simple dinner together,—this rather incongruous little group, after which Katherine said demurely, “Now, Jimmie and I’ll wash the dishes, won’t we, Jimmie?” Which was something of an astonishing innovation in itself, as, heretofore, dish-washing had not been one of Katherine’s favorite indoor sports.

  A half-hour later, Abbie and Sarah went into the kitchen, just as Katherine was hanging up her dishpan. “Everything all right, Granny?” she wanted to know.

  “Why, I think so, Katherine. It looks very nice.”

  “Neat little Jane, am I not?” She grinned brazenly at Abbie Deal, who immediately reddened for her.

  “Well, Sarah,” said Abbie when they were alone, “my mother blushed and gave my father a rose by a well on the Scottish moors. I cried on Will’s shoulder in an old honey-locust lane. Mack courted Emma after church and singing-school. And Kathie . . . Kathie goes out and gets her man.”

  Sarah Lutz laughed. “After all, Abbie, there’s something honest about it and frank and aboveboard.”

  Abbie put the butter-crock back into the big white refrigerator. “Sarah,” she said, “it may be honest and it may be frank and it may be aboveboard,—but it’s not subtle and it’s not romantic and it’s not artistic.”

  Sarah Lutz’s bright black eyes twinkled behind her shell-rimmed glasses. “If you’re not all wet, old lady,” she said solemnly, . . . “you’ve said a mouthful.”

  CHAPTER XXXI

  Abbie made her usual extensive preparations for Christmas that year. The daughters and daughters-in-law said a great deal against her using up so much energy. “But you might as well talk to the wind,” Grace wrote to Isabelle. “There’s something stubborn about Mother. She is bound to go through with all that mince-meat, doughnut, pop-corn-ball ordeal even if she’s sick in bed afterward. Margaret wants us to come there to save her all that work, and Emma and Eloise have both offered their homes, too, but she won’t listen. ‘No,’ she says, ‘as long as I’m here, the Christmas gathering is here.’ I’ve tried to tell her over and over that conditions have changed, that we don’t live out on an isolated prairie any more; that she doesn’t make one thing that she couldn’t buy, but she just won’t catch up with the times. ‘They’re not so full of the Christmas spirit when you don’t fix them yourself,’ she says. Isn’t that the last word in old-fashioned ideas?” So the clan came once more to the old farmhouse behind the cedars. Grace was the first to arrive in her own roadster, coming over the graveled highway from Wesleyan University. The others arrived at various times before Christmas eve. Mack and Emma, Donald and Katherine came. Only Stanley was missing from the Mack Deal family. Having married, Stanley had discovered that a wife’s people must also be reckoned with. Margaret and Dr. Fred Baker, Dr. Fred, Jr., and his wife and two little boys came. Isabelle and Harrison Rhodes got in from Chicago on the afternoon train, the road
boasting a flyer now instead of the old baggage-and-day affair of the time when the children were small. John and Eloise, Wentworth and Laura and Millard, who was eight now, all came over from their home on the other side of Cedartown in time for the evening meal. Every car was loaded to the doors with packages.

  Abbie had an oyster supper. That, too, was a hang-over from the days when sea food was scarce and expensive. No matter that the bi-valves were on every menu placed before the various members of the Deal family these days, Abbie continued to have an oyster supper each Christmas eve,—bowls of crackers alternating down the long table with celery, standing upright in vase-looking dishes, like so many bouquets from the greenhouse.

  Jimmie Buchanan came over later in the evening and brought Katherine a gift. Jimmie was rather astounded at the sight of so many relatives.

  “Every one has to be here,” Katherine told him. “In all the wedding ceremonies, whenever a Deal is married, the question is asked, ‘Do you solemnly promise to spend all your Christmases at Granny Deal’s, forsaking all others as long as you shall live?’ And if you can’t promise,—out you go before you’re in.”

  Abbie Deal was embarrassed beyond words. To speak so to a young man with whom you were keeping company!

  Katherine went on, “No, sir,—it wouldn’t be Christmas without the wax flowers in the parlor and the patent rocking-chair and the painting of the purple cow and the whut-nut. Grandma makes us all animal cookies yet. Can you beat it? When I was big enough to read love stories by the dozens, she gave me ‘The Frog That Would A-Wooing Go,’—not but that it had its romantic appeal, too. We always stay two nights and we have to have beds everywhere. Granny puts us in corners, on couches, sinks, bath-tubs, ironing-boards . . . and not one of us would miss it. Donald passed up a dance at the Fontanelle for it. You can’t tell the reason, but the minute you see those old cedar trees and come up the lane under the Bombarded poplars with snow on ’em, you’re just little and crazy over Christmas.”

  There were some very lovely presents the next morning,—the radio in its dull-finished cabinet for Abbie, jewelry, a fur, expensive toys and books,—an old musty smelling one for Emma, who had gone in for first and rare editions. Margaret gave her mother the painting of the prairie with the sunshine lying in little yellow-pink pools between the low rolling hills. “For I think you made me love it, Mother, when I was a little girl. I learned to see it through your eyes,” she told her.

  In the afternoon, Mackenzie Deal, the Omaha banker, in an overcoat and old muffler that had been his father’s, spent a large share of his time out in the barn cracking walnuts on a cottonwood chunk. John Deal, the state legislator, went up into the hay-loft and potted a few pigeons with an old half-rusty rifle. Isabelle Deal Rhodes, the well-known Chicago singer, called her husband to help her get the old reed-organ out of the storehouse. She dusted it, and then, amid a great deal of hilarity, pumped out, “By the Blue Alsatian Mountains.” One of the keys gave forth no sound at all, so that whenever she came to it the young folks all shouted the missing note.

  By evening the younger members of the group had gone,—Fred Jr. and his family back to Lincoln, Donald and Wentworth to Omaha, while Katherine was off somewhere with Jimmie Buchanan. But the others, in the early dusk of the Christmas twilight, gathered in the parlor with the homely coal-burner and the lovely floor lamp, with Abbie’s crude painting of the prairie and Margaret’s exquisite one, with the what-not and the blue plush album and the tidy on the back of the patent-rocker.

  “There was one Christmas we had, Mother,” Mack said, “that I always remember more than the others. I can see the things yet,—my old brass cornet, a big wooden horse made out of logs, a tree that looked . . . well, I’ve never seen a tree since look so grand. Where in Sam Hill did you raise all the things in those days?”

  “I think I know which one you mean,” Abbie was reminiscent. “It was the year after the grasshoppers. Well, my son, your father and I made all of those things out of sticks and rags and patches and love.”

  It brought on a flood of reminiscences.

  “Remember, Mack, the Sunday afternoon we were herding hogs on the prairie and that Jake Smith that kept the store at Unadilla, came along with his girl in a spring wagon, and threw a whole handful of stick candy out in the grass for us?” Mrs. Frederick Hamilton Baker, well-known artist and club woman of Lincoln, was speaking.

  “Do I? I can see them yet, red and white striped,—and looking as big as barber-poles to me. I wondered how any one in the world could be that rich and lavish,” Mackenzie Deal, a vice-president of one of the Omaha banks, was answering.

  “And do you remember, John, how scared you were . . . the time we chased the calf and you grabbed it by the tail when it ran by you and the tail was frozen and came off in your hands?”

  When they had all laughed at the recollection, Isabelle put in, “But I’ll bet he wasn’t as scared as I was once, . . . the time a man came to the door and told Father he was drawn on the jury. You all stood around looking solemn, and I took a run for Mother’s old wardrobe and hid in behind the clothes and cried.”

  “Why . . . what did you think?” They were all asking.

  “Well, I knew ‘jury’ had something to do with law and jails and penitentiaries. And I had heard of ‘hung,’ ‘quartered’ and ‘drawn’ so the inference was that Father was going to be hung in the penitentiary.”

  “I remember once when I wasn’t scared but mad.” It was Grace’s contribution. “It was when Aunt Regina came to help Mother take care of Grandma. I was modestly effacing myself under the dining-room table and she scooped me out with a sprightly, ‘So this is little Grace.’ Then she took me on her lap and put her arms around me and pressed me to her bosom and apparently forgot me, while she and mother verbally married off and buried all the relatives over my head.”

  “Why didn’t you have the gumption to get down?”

  “Too bashful, I suppose. That’s where your ancient theories of child training come in. No modern child would stand it. But I just sat on while my legs went to sleep and my brain atrophied. I used to think I sat there a month. But I know now it couldn’t have been more than a week.”

  “That’s as bad as I was.” It was John. “Remember that preacher that used to stop at our house, the one with the beard that looked as though it was made out of yellow rope?”

  “Who could forget it? He tied it up like a horse’s tail when he ate.” They were all answering at once.

  “The first time he stopped, he said to Mack, ‘What’s your name, son?’ Mack said, ‘Mackenzie.’ ‘And what’s yours, little man?’ he said to me. I was so scared I said ‘Mackenzie,’ too. Can you beat it? I’ll bet there isn’t a kid living to-day as bashful as that.”

  “Do you remember,” it was Isabelle, “the old milk-wagon, John, you rigged up to peddle your milk in? I can smell the inside of it yet, the damp, sweetish odor of warm milk. Remember how you used to ring an old cow-bell and the women would come out with their pans and pitchers, and have their aprons twisted up over their heads? Think of the evil-looking germs that must have perched on the rims of those pitchers when the dust swirled around!”

  And so they went on, recalling their childhood days,—days of sunburn and days of chilblains, of made-over clothes and corn-bread meals, of trudging behind plows or picking up potatoes, of work that was interwoven with fun, because youth was youth. Prairie children never forget.

  Far into the evening they sat around the old coal burner, talking and laughing, with tears not far behind the laughter,—the state legislator and the banker, the artist, the singer, and the college teacher. And in their midst, rocking and smiling, sat the little old lady who had brought them up with a song upon her lips and a lantern in her hand.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  The Mackenzie Deals were leaving the morning after Christmas.

  “Can’t you and Katherine stay longer?” Abbie asked Emma, a little wistfully.

  “No, Granny,” Katherine assum
ed the responsibility for the decision. “I’ve had a grand time, but now I must go, for I have a date to-night,—and a blind one at that, . . . a Minnesota U. man.”

  “ ‘A blind date.’ For goodness’ sake, Katherine, what is that?”

  “Blind, Grandmother mine, means ‘not seeing.’ A date is a man with whom to while away a boresome hour or two. There, you have it . . . a man that you have never seen with whom to while away an hour or two.”

  “Kathie . . . you mean you’ve never been introduced to him?”

  “Not only never introduced to him . . . but have never set limpid violet eyes upon him.”

  “Kathie . . . how horrible! Why, it makes me think of veiled people in heathenish countries.”

  “Quite so, and a merry little gamble it is. But see the thrill of it! Is he going to be dark, light, short, tall, a keen looker, or a crock . . . interesting or a prune? Will he glide up in a high-powered machine or rattle up in an egg-beater?”

  “Kathie!”

  “If Jimmie were going to be there I wouldn’t have made the date. But Jimmie’s not going to be there . . . and a poor girl has to have somebody to love her.”

  “Kathie,” Abbie looked at her granddaughter as at some queer museum specimen, “do you know, you just make me wonder whatever your great-great-grandmother would have thought of you. Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, her name was. She was gentle and refined,—very lovely and very aristocratic. She lived on the beautiful Mackenzie estates . . .”

  “Stop . . . stop right there!” Katherine sat up, alert as a young deer with uplifted head. “For heaven’s sake, why has no one ever told me that before? Why, our sorority is just keen about family. That’s our line. I’ve been sort of uncertain about the past . . . a little shy in mentioning some of our aunty-cedents and uncle-cedents . . . not ashamed of anybody, y’unn’erstan’, but just supposing they were all this same kind, . . . out-of-the-soil-up-to-God.”