by Edna Ferber
And so the woman who was, after all, the most intelligent among them, set about creating some sort of social order for the good wives of the community. All her life Sabra had been accustomed to the open-handed hospitality of the South. The Venable household in Wichita had been as nearly as possible a duplicate of the Mississippi mansion which had housed generations of Sabra’s luxury-loving and open-handed ancestors. Hordes of relatives came and went. Food and drink were constantly being passed in abundance. White muslin dresses and blue sashes whirled at the least provocative tinkle of the handsome old square piano with its great blobs of grapevine carving. Friends drove up for midday dinner and stayed a week. Felice Venable’s musical drawl was always tempting the sated guest to further excesses. “I declare, Cousin Flora May, you haven’t eaten enough to keep a bird alive. Angie’ll think you don’t fancy her cooking.… Lacy, just another quail. They’re only a mouthful.… Mittie, pass the currant jell.”
Grimly Sabra (and, in time, the other virtuous women of the community) set about making this new frontier town like the old as speedily as possible. Yancey, almost single handed, tried to make the new as unlike the old as possible. He fought a losing fight from the first. He was muddled; frequently insincere; a brilliant swaggerer. He himself was not very clear as to what he wanted, or how to go about getting it. He only knew that he was impatient of things as they were; that greed, injustice, and dishonesty in office were everywhere; that here, in this wild and virgin land, was a chance for a Utopian plan. But he had no plan. He was sentimental about the under dog; overgallant to women; emotional, quick-tempered, impulsive, dramatic, idealistic. And idealism does not flourish in a frontier settlement. Yancey Cravat, with his unformed dreams—much less the roistering play boys of saloon and plain and gambling house—never had a chance against the indomitable materialism of the women.
Like Sabra, most of the women had brought with them from their homes in Nebraska, in Arkansas, in Missouri, in Kansas, some household treasure that in their eyes represented elegance or which was meant to mark them as possessed of taste and background. A chair, a bed, a piece of silver, a vase, a set of linen. It was the period of the horrible gimcrack. Women all over the country were covering wire bread toasters with red plush, embroidering sulphurous yellow chenille roses on this, tying the whole with satin ribbons and hanging it on the wall to represent a paper rack (to be used on pain of death). They painted the backsides of frying pans with gold leaf and daisies, enhanced the handles of these, too, with bows of gay ribbon and, the utilitarian duckling thus turned into a swan, hung it on the wall opposite the toaster. Rolling pins were gilded or sheathed in velvet. Coal scuttles and tin shovels were surprised to find themselves elevated from the kitchen to the parlor, having first been subjected to the new beautifying process. Sabra’s house became a sort of social center following the discovery that she received copies of Harper’s Bazar with fair regularity. Felice Venable sometimes sent it to her, prompted, no doubt, by Sabra’s rather guarded account of the lack of style hints for the person or for the home in this new community. Sabra’s social triumph was complete when she displayed her new draped jars, done by her after minute instructions found in the latest copy of Harper’s. She then graciously printed these instructions in the Oklahoma Wigwam, causing a flurry of excitement in a hundred homes and mystifying the local storekeepers by the sudden demand for jars.
As everything [the fashion note announced, haughtily] is now draped, we give an illustration [Sabra did not—at least in the limited columns of the Wigwam] of a china or glass jar draped with India silk and trimmed with lace and ribbon, the decoration entirely concealing any native hideousness in the shape or ornamentation of the jar. Perfectly plain jars can also be draped with a pretty piece of silk and tied with ribbon bows or ornamented with an odd fragment of lace and thereby makes a pretty ornament at little or no cost.
Certainly the last four words of the hint were true.
With elegancies such as these the womenfolk of Osage tried to disguise the crudeness and bareness of their glaring wooden shacks. Usually, there was as well a plush chair which had survived the wagon journey; a tortured whatnot on which reposed painted seashells and the objets d’art above described; or, on the wall, a crayon portrait or even an oil painting of some stern and bewhiskered or black-silk and fichued parent looking down in surprised disapproval upon the ructions that comprised the daily activities of this town. From stark ugliness the house interiors were thus transformed into grotesque ugliness, but the Victorian sense of beauty was satisfied. The fact was that these women were hungry for the feel of soft silken things; their eyes, smarting with the glare, the wind, the dust, ached to rest on that which was rich and soothing; their hands, roughened by alkali water, and red dust, and burning sun and wind, dwelt lovingly on these absurd scraps of silk and velvet, snipped from an old wedding dress, from a bonnet, from finery that had found its way to the scrap bag.
Aside from the wedding silver and linen that she had brought with her, the loveliest thing that Sabra possessed was the hand-woven blue coverlet that Mother Bridget had given her. It made a true and brilliant spot of color in the sitting room, where it lay neatly folded at the foot of the sofa, partly masking the ugliness of that utilitarian piece of furniture. This Sabra did not know. As silk patchwork quilts, made in wheel and fan patterns, and embroidered in spider webs of bright-colored threads were quite the fashion, the blue coverlet was looked on with considerable disrespect. Thirty years later, its color undimmed, Sabra contributed it temporarily to an exhibition of early American handiwork held in the Venetian room of the Savoy-Bixby Hotel, and it was cooed and ah’d over by all the members of Osage’s smart set. They said it was quaint and authentic and very native and a fine example of pioneer handicraft and Sabra said yes indeed, and told them of Mother Bridget. They said she must have been quaint, too. Sabra said she was.
Slowly, in Sabra’s eyes, the other women of the town began to emerge from a mist of drabness into distinct personalities. There was one who had been a school teacher in Cairo, Illinois. Her husband, Tracy Wyatt, ran the spasmodic bus and dray line between Wahoo and Osage. They had no children. She was a sparse and simpering woman of thirty-nine, who talked a good deal of former trips to Chicago during which she had reveled in the culture of that effete city. Yancey was heard learnedly discoursing to her on the subject of Etruscan pottery, of which he knew nothing. The ex-school teacher rolled her eyes and tossed her head a good deal.
“You don’t know what a privilege it is, Mr. Cravat, to find myself talking to someone whose mind can soar above the sordid life of this horrible town.”
Yancey’s ardent eyes took on their most melting look. “Madam, it is you who have carried me with you to your heights. ‘In youth and beauty wisdom is but rare!’ ” It was simply his way. He could not help it.
“Ah, Shakespeare!” breathed Mrs. Wyatt, bridling.
“Shakespeare—hell!” said Yancey to Sabra, later. “She doesn’t know Pope when she hears him. No woman ought to pretend to be intelligent. And if she is she ought to have the intelligence to pretend she isn’t. And this one looks like Cornelia Blimber, to boot.”
“Cornelia? …”
“A schoolmarm in Dickens’s Dombey and Son. A magnificent book, honey. I want you to read it. I want Cim to read it by the time he’s twelve. I’ve got it somewhere here on the shelves.” He was searching among the jumble of books. Five minutes later he was deep in a copy of Plutarch which he had bewailed as lost.
Sabra persisted. “But why did you make her think she was so smart and attractive when you were talking to her?”
“Because she is so plain, darling.”
“It’s just that you can’t bear not to have everybody think you’re fascinating.”
She never read Dombey and Son, after all. She decided that she preferred exchanging recipes and discussing the rearing of children with the other women to the more intellectual conversation of Mrs. Wyatt.
It was Sabra who star
ted the Philomathean Club. The other women clutched at the idea. It was part of their defense against these wilds. After all, a town that boasted a culture club could not be altogether lost. Sabra had had no experience with this phase of social activity. The languorous yet acid Felice Venable had always scorned to take part in any civic social life that Wichita knew. Kansas, even then, had had its women’s clubs, though they were not known by this title. The Ladies’ Sewing Circle, one was called; the Twentieth Century Culture Society; the Hypatias.
Felice Venable, approached as a prospective member, had refused languidly.
“I just naturally hate sewing,” she had drawled, looking up from the novel she was reading. “And as for culture! Why, the Venables and the Marcys have had it in this country for three hundred years, not to speak of England and France, where they practically started it going. Besides, I don’t believe in women running around to club meetings. They’ll be going into politics next.”
Sabra timidly approached Mrs. Wyatt with her plan to form a woman’s club, and Mrs. Wyatt snatched at it with such ferocity as almost to make it appear her own idea. Each was to invite four women of the town’s élite. Ten, they decided, would be enough as charter members.
“I,” began Mrs. Wyatt promptly, “am going to ask Mrs. Louie Hefner, Mrs. Doc Nisbett——”
“Her husband’s horrid! I hate him. I don’t want her in my club.” The ten barrels of water still rankled.
“We’re not asking husbands, my dear Mrs. Cravat. This is a ladies’ club.”
“Well, I don’t think the wife of any such man could be a lady.”
“Mrs. Nisbett,” retorted Mrs. Wyatt, introducing snobbery into that welter of mud, Indians, pine shacks, drought, and semi-barbarism known as Osage, Indian Territory, “was a Krumpf of Ouachita, Arkansas.”
Sabra, descendant of the Marcys and the Venables, lifted her handsome black eyebrows. Privately, she decided to select her four from among the less vertebrate and more ebullient of Osage’s matrons. Culture was all very well, but the thought of mingling once every fortnight with nine versions of the bony Mrs. Wyatt or the pedigreed Mrs. Nisbett (née Krumpf) was depressing. She made up her mind that next day, after the housework was done, she would call on her candidates, beginning with that pretty and stylish Mrs. Evergreen Waltz. Sabra had inherited a strain of frivolity from Felice Venable. At supper that evening she told Yancey of her plans.
“We’re going to take up literature, you know. And maybe early American history.”
“Why, honey, don’t you know you’re making it?”
This she did not take seriously. “And then current events, too.”
“Well, the events in this town are current enough. I’ll say that for them. The trick is to catch them as they go by. You girls’ll have to be quick.” She told him of her four prospective members.
“Waltz’s wife!” Surprise and amusement, too, were in his voice, but she was too full of her plans to notice. Besides, Yancey often was mystifyingly amused at things that seemed to Sabra quite serious. “Why, that’s fine, Sabra. That’s fine! That’s the spirit!”
“I noticed her at church meeting last Sunday. She’s so pretty, it rests me to look at her, after all these—not that they’re—I don’t mean they’re not very nice ladies. But after all, even if it’s a culture club, someone nearer my own age would be much more fun.”
“Oh, much,” Yancey agreed, still smiling. “That’s what a town like this should be. No class distinctions, no snobbery, no highfalutin notions.”
“I saw her washing hanging on the line. Just by accident. You can tell she’s a lady. Such pretty underthings all trimmed with embroidery, and there were two embroidery petticoats all flounced and every bit as nice as the ones Cousin Belle French Vian made for me by hand, for my trousseau.”
“I’m not surprised.” Yancey was less loquacious than usual. But then, men were not interested in women’s clothes.
“She looks kind of babyish and lonely, sitting there by the window sewing all day. And her husband’s so much older, and a cripple, too, or almost. I noticed he limps quite badly. What’s his trouble?”
“Shot in the leg.”
“Oh.” She had already learned to accept this form of injury as a matter of course. “I thought I’d ask her to prepare a paper for the third meeting on Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh.’ I could lend her yours to read up on, if you don’t mind, just in case she hasn’t got it.”
Yancey thought it unlikely.
Mrs. Wyatt’s house was one of the few in Osage which were used for dwelling purposes alone. No store or office occupied the front of it. Tracy Wyatt’s bus and dray line certainly could not be contained in a pine shack intended for family use. Mrs. Wyatt had five rooms. She was annoyingly proud of this, and referred to it on all possible occasions.
“The first meeting,” she said, “will be held at my house, of course. It will be so much nicer.”
She did not say nicer than what, but Sabra’s face set itself in a sort of mask of icy stubbornness. “The first meeting of the Philomathean Society will be held at the home of the Founder.” After all, Mrs. Wyatt’s house could not boast a screen door, as Sabra’s could. It was the only house in Osage that had one. Yancey had had Hefner order it from Kansas City. The wind and the flies seemed to torture Sabra. It was so unusual a luxury that frequently strangers came to the door by mistake, thinking that here was the butcher shop, which boasted the only other screen door in the town.
“I’ll serve coffee and doughnuts,” Sabra added, graciously. “And I’ll move to elect you president. I”—this not without a flick of malice—“am too busy with my household and my child and the newspaper—I often assist my husband editorially—to take up with any more work.”
The paper on Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh” never was written by the pretty Mrs. Evergreen Waltz. Three days later Sabra, chancing to glance out of her sitting-room window, saw the crippled and middle-aged gambler passing her house, and in spite of his infirmity he was walking with great speed—running, almost. In his hand was a piece of white paper—a letter, Sabra thought. She hoped it was not bad news. He had looked, she thought, sort of odd and wild.
Evergreen Waltz, after weeks of tireless waiting and watching, had at last intercepted a letter from his young wife’s lover. As he now came panting up the street the girl sat at the window, sewing. The single shot went just through the center of the wide white space between her great babyish blue eyes. They found her with the gold initialed thimble on her finger, and the bit of work on which she had been sewing, now brightly spotted with crimson, in her lap.
“Why didn’t you tell me that when she married him she was a girl out of a—out of a—house!” Sabra demanded, between horror and wrath.
“I thought you knew. Women are supposed to have intuition, or whatever they call it, aren’t they? All those embroidered underthings on the line in a town where water’s scarce as champagne—scarcer. And then ‘Aurora Leigh.’ ”
She was thoroughly enraged by now. “What, for pity’s sake, has ‘Aurora Leigh’ got to do with her!”
He got down the volume. “I thought you’d been reading it yourself, perhaps.” He opened it. “ ‘Dreams of doing good for good-for-nothing people.’ ”
11
Sabra’s second child, a girl, was born in June, a little more than a year after their coming to Osage. It was not as dreadful an ordeal there in those crude surroundings as one might have thought. She refused to send for her mother; indeed, Sabra insisted that Felice Venable be told nothing of the event until after her granddaughter had wailed her way into the Red Man’s country. Yancey had been relieved at Sabra’s decision. The thought of his luxury-loving and formidable mother-in-law with her flounced dimities and her high-heeled slippers in the midst of this Western wallow to which he had brought her daughter was a thing from which even the redoubtable Yancey shrank. Curiously enough, it was not the pain, the heat, nor the inexpert attention she received that most distress
ed Sabra. It was the wind. The Oklahoma wind tortured her. It rattled the doors and windows; it whirled the red dust through the house; its hot breath was on her agonized face as she lay there; if allowed its own way it leaped through the rooms, snatching the cloth off the table, the sheets off the bed, the dishes off the shelves.
