The days went past and Clara said nothing. During her last week in the house she and the two older people scarcely spoke. The young woman was in an odd way relieved. Every evening she went to dine with Kate Chanceller who, when she heard the story of the afternoon in the suburb and the incident on the porch, went off without Clara’s knowing of it and had a talk with Henderson Woodburn in his office. After the talk the manufacturer was puzzled and just a little afraid of both Clara and her friend. He tried to tell his wife about it, but was not very clear. “I can’t make it out,” he said. “She is the kind of woman I can’t understand, that Kate. She says Clara wasn’t to blame for what happened between her and Frank Metcalf, but don’t want to tell us the story, because she thinks young Metcalf wasn’t to blame either.” Although he had been respectful and courteous as he listened to Kate’s talk, he grew angry when he tried to tell his wife what she had said. “I’m afraid it was just a lot of mixed up nonsense,” he declared. “It makes me glad we haven’t a daughter. If neither of them were to blame what were they up to? What’s getting the matter with the women of the new generation? When you come down to it what’s the matter with Kate Chanceller?”
The plow manufacturer advised his wife to say nothing to Clara. “Let’s wash our hands of it,” he suggested. “She’ll go home in a few days now and we will say nothing about her coming back next year. Let’s be polite, but act as though she didn’t exist.”
Clara accepted the new attitude of her uncle and aunt without comment. In the afternoon she did not come home from the University but went to Kate’s apartment. The brother came home and after dinner played on the piano. At ten o’clock Clara started home afoot and Kate accompanied her. The two women went out of their way to sit on a bench in a park. They talked of a thousand hidden phases of life Clara had hardly dared think of before. During all the rest of her life she thought of those last weeks in Columbus as the most deeply satisfactory time she ever lived through. In the Woodburn house she was uncomfortable because of the silence and the hurt, offended look on her aunt’s face, but she did not spend much time there. In the morning Henderson Woodburn ate his breakfast alone at seven, and clutching his ever present portfolio of papers, was driven off to the plow factory. Clara and her aunt had a silent breakfast at eight, and then Clara also hurried away. “I’ll be out for lunch and will go to Kate’s for dinner,” she said as she went out of her aunt’s presence, and she said it, not with the air of one asking permission as had been her custom before the Frank Metcalf incident, but as one having the right to dispose of her own time. Only once did her aunt break the frigid air of offended dignity she had assumed. One morning she followed Clara to the front door, and as she watched her go down the steps from the front porch to the walk that led to the street, called to her. Some faint recollection of a time of revolt in her own youth perhaps came to her. Tears came into her eyes. To her the world was a place of terror, where wolf-like men prowled about seeking women to devour, and she was afraid something dreadful would happen to her niece. “If you don’t want to tell me anything, it’s all right,” she said bravely, “but I wish you felt you could.” When Clara turned to look at her, she hastened to explain. “Mr. Woodburn said I wasn’t to bother you about it and I won’t,” she added quickly. Nervously folding and unfolding her arms, she turned to stare up the street with the air of a frightened child that looks into a den of beasts. “O Clara, be a good girl,” she said. “I know you’re grown up now, but, O Clara, do be careful! Don’t get into trouble.”
The Woodburn house in Columbus, like the Butterworth house in the country south of Bidwell, sat on a hill. The street fell away rather sharply as one went toward the business portion of the city and the street car line, and on the morning when her aunt spoke to her and tried with her feeble hands to tear some stones out of the wall that was being built between them, Clara hurried along the street under the trees, feeling as though she would like also to weep. She saw no possibility of explaining to her aunt the new thoughts she was beginning to have about life and did not want to hurt her by trying. “How can I explain my thoughts when they’re not clear in my own mind, when I am myself just groping blindly about?” she asked herself. “She wants me to be good,” she thought. “What would she think if I told her that I had come to the conclusion that, judging by her standards, I have been altogether too good? What’s the use trying to talk to her when I would only hurt her and make things harder than ever?” She got to a street crossing and looked back. Her aunt was still standing at the door of her house and looking at her. There was something soft, small, round, insistent, both terribly weak and terribly strong about the completely feminine thing she had made of herself or that life had made of her. Clara shuddered. She did not make a symbol of the figure of her aunt and her mind did not form a connection between her aunt’s life and what she had become, as Kate Chanceller’s mind would have done. She saw the little, round, weeping woman as a boy, walking in the tree-lined streets of a town, sees suddenly the pale face and staring eyes of a prisoner that looks out at him through the iron bars of a town jail. Clara was startled as the boy would be startled and, like the boy, she wanted to run quickly away. “I must think of something else and of other kinds of women or I’ll get things terribly distorted,” she told herself. “If I think of her and women like her I’ll grow afraid of marriage, and I want to be married as soon as I can find the right man. It’s the only thing I can do. What else is there a woman can do?”
As Clara and Kate walked about in the evening, they talked continually of the new position Kate believed women were on the point of achieving in the world. The woman who was so essentially a man wanted to talk of marriage and to condemn it, but continually fought the impulse in herself. She knew that were she to let herself go she would say many things that, while they might be true enough as regards herself, would not necessarily be true of Clara. “Because I do not want to live with a man or be his wife is not very good proof that the institution is wrong. It may be that I want to keep Clara for myself. I think more of her than of any one else I’ve ever met. How can I think straight about her marrying some man and becoming dulled to the things that mean most to me?” she asked herself. One evening, when the women were walking from Kate’s apartment to the Woodburn house, they were accosted by two men who wanted to walk with them. There was a small park nearby and Kate led the men to it. “Come,” she said, “we won’t walk with you, but you may sit with us here on a bench.” The men sat down beside them and the older one, a man with a small black mustache, made some remark about the fineness of the night. The younger man who sat beside Clara looked at her and laughed. Kate at once got down to business. “Well, you wanted to walk with us: what for?” she asked sharply. She explained what they had been doing. “We were walking and talking of women and what they were to do with their lives,” she explained. “We were expressing opinions, you see. I don’t say either of us had said anything that was very wise, but we were having a good time and trying to learn something from each other. Now what have you to say to us? You interrupted our talk and wanted to walk with us: what for? You wanted to be in our company: now tell us what you’ve got to contribute. You can’t just come and walk with us like dumb things. What have you got to offer that you think will make it worth while for us to break up our conversation with each other and spend the time talking with you?”
The older man, he of the mustache, turned to look at Kate, then got up from the bench. He walked a little away and then turned and made a sign with his hand to his companion. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get out of here. We’re wasting our time. It’s a cold trail. They’re a couple of highbrows. Come on, let’s be on our way.”
The two women again walked along the street. Kate could not help feeling somewhat proud of the way in which she had disposed of the men. She talked of it until they got to the door of the Woodburn house, and, as she went away along the street Clara thought she swaggered a little. She stood by the door and watched her friend until
she had disappeared around a corner. A flash of doubt of the infallibility of Kate’s method with men crossed her mind. She remembered suddenly the soft brown eyes of the younger of the two men in the park and wondered what was back of the eyes. Perhaps after all, had she been alone with him, the man might have had something to say quite as much to the point as the things she and Kate had been saying to each other. “Kate made the men look like fools, but after all she wasn’t very fair,” she thought as she went into the house.
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Clara was in Bidwell for a month before she realized what a change had taken place in the life of her home town. On the farm things went on very much as always, except that her father was very seldom there. He had gone deeply into the project of manufacturing and selling corn-cutting machines with Steve Hunter, and attended to much of the selling of the output of the factory. Almost every month he went on trips to cities of the West. Even when he was in Bidwell, he had got into the habit of staying at the town hotel for the night. “It’s too much trouble to be always running back and forth,” he explained to Jim Priest, whom he had put in charge of the farm work. He swaggered before the old man who for so many years had been almost like a partner in his smaller activities. “Well, I wouldn’t like to have anything said, but I think it just as well to have an eye on what’s going on,” he declared. “Steve’s all right, but business is business. We’re dealing in big affairs, he and I. I don’t say he would try to get the best of me; I’m just telling you that in the future I’ll have to be in town most of the time and can’t think of things out here. You look out for the farm. Don’t bother me with details. You just tell me about it when there is any buying or selling to do.”
Clara arrived in Bidwell in the early afternoon of a warm day in June. The hill country through which her train came into town was in the full flush of its summer beauty. In the little patches of level land between the hills grain was ripening in the fields. Along the streets of the tiny towns and on dusty country roads farmers in overalls stood up in their wagons and scolded at the horses, rearing and prancing in half pretended fright of the passing train. In the forests on the hillsides the open places among the trees looked cool and enticing. Clara put her cheek against the car window and imagined herself wandering in cool forests with a lover. She forgot the words of Kate Chanceller in regard to the independent future of women. It was, she thought vaguely, a thing to be thought about only after some more immediate problem was solved. Just what the problem was she didn’t definitely know, but she did know that it concerned some close warm contact with life that she had as yet been unable to make. When she closed her eyes, strong warm hands seemed to come out of nothingness and touch her flushed cheeks. The fingers of the hands were strong like the branches of trees. They touched with the firmness and gentleness of the branches of trees nodding in a summer breeze.
Clara sat up stiffly in her seat and when the train stopped at Bidwell got off and went to her waiting father with a firm, business-like air. Coming out of the land of dreams, she took on something of the determined air of Kate Chanceller. She stared at her father and an onlooker might have thought them two strangers, meeting for the purpose of discussing some business arrangement. A flavor of something like suspicion hung over them. They got into Tom’s buggy, and as Main Street was torn up for the purpose of laying a brick pavement and digging a new sewer, they drove by a roundabout way through residence streets until they got into Medina Road. Clara looked at her father and felt suddenly very alert and on her guard. It seemed to her that she was far removed from the green, unsophisticated girl who had so often walked in Bidwell’s streets; that her mind and spirit had expanded tremendously in the three years she had been away; and she wondered if her father would realize the change in her. Either one of two reactions on his part might, she felt, make her happy. The man might turn suddenly and taking her hand receive her into fellowship, or he might receive her as a woman and his daughter by kissing her.
He did neither. They drove in silence through the town and passed over a small bridge and into the road that led to the farm. Tom was curious about his daughter and a little uncomfortable. Ever since the evening on the porch of the farmhouse, when he had accused her of some unnamed relationship with John May, he had felt guilty in her presence but had succeeded in transferring the notion of guilt to her. While she was away at school he had been comfortable. Sometimes he did not think of her for a month at a time. Now she had written that she did not intend to go back. She had not asked his advice, but had said positively that she was coming home to stay. He wondered what was up. Had she got into another affair with a man? He wanted to ask, had intended to ask, but in her presence found that the words he had intended to say would not come to his lips. After a long silence Clara began to ask questions about the farm, the men who worked there, her aunt’s health, the usual home-coming questions. Her father answered with generalities. “They’re all right,” he said, “every one and everything’s all right.”
The road began to lift out of the valley in which the town lay, and Tom stopped the horse and pointing with the whip talked of the town. He was relieved to have the silence broken, and decided not to say anything about the letter announcing the end of her school life. “You see there,” he said, pointing to where the wall of a new brick factory arose above the trees that grew beside the river. “That’s a new factory we’re building. We’re going to make corn-cutting machines there. The old factory’s already too small. We’ve sold it to a new company that’s going to manufacture bicycles. Steve Hunter and I sold it. We got twice what we paid for it. When the bicycle factory’s started, he and I’ll own the control in that too. I tell you the town’s on the boom.”
Tom boasted of his new position in the town and Clara turned and looked sharply at him and then looked quickly away. He was annoyed by the action and a flush of anger came to his cheeks. A side of his character his daughter had never seen before came to the surface. When he was a simple farmer he had been too shrewd to attempt to play the aristocrat with his farm hands, but often, as he went about the barns and as he drove along country roads and saw men at work in his fields, he had felt like a prince in the presence of his vassals. Now he talked like a prince. It was that that had startled Clara. There was about him an indefinable air of princely prosperity. When she turned to look at him she noticed for the first time how much his person had also changed. Like Steve Hunter he was beginning to grow fat. The lean hardness of his cheeks had gone, his jaws seemed heavier, even his hands had changed their color. He wore a diamond ring on the left hand and it glistened in the sunlight. “Things have changed,” he declared, still pointing at the town. “Do you want to know who changed it? Well, I had more to do with it than any one else. Steve thinks he did it all, but he didn’t. I’m the man who has done the most. He put through the plant-setting machine company, but that was a failure. When you come right down to it, things would have gone to pieces again if I hadn’t gone to John Clark and talked and bluffed him into giving us money when we wanted it. I had most to do with finding the big market for our corn-cutters, too. Steve lied to me and said he had ‘em all sold for a year. He didn’t have any sold at all.”
Tom struck the horse with the whip and drove rapidly along the road. Even when the climb became difficult he would not let the horse walk, but kept cracking the whip over his back. “I’m a different man than I was when you went away,” he declared. “You might as well know it, I’m the big man in this town. It comes pretty near being my town when you come right down to it. I’m going to take care of every one in Bidwell and give every one a chance to make money, but it’s my town now pretty near and you might as well know it.”
Embarrassed by his own words, Tom talked to cover his embarrassment. Something he wanted very much to say got itself said. “I’m glad you went to school and fitted yourself to be a lady,” he began. “I want you should marry pretty soon now. I don’t know whether you met any one at school there or not. If you did and h
e’s all right, it’s all right with me. I don’t want you should marry an ordinary man, but a smart one, an educated man, a gentleman. We Butterworths are going to be bigger and bigger people here. If you get married to a good man, a smart one, I’ll build a house for you; not just a little house but a big place, the biggest place Bidwell ever seen.” They came to the farm and Tom stopped the buggy in the road. He shouted to a man in the barnyard who came running for her bags. When she had got out of the buggy he immediately turned the horse about and drove rapidly away. Her aunt, a large, moist woman, met her on the steps leading to the front door, and embraced her warmly. The words her father had just spoken ran a riotous course through Clara’s brain. She realized that for a year she had been thinking of marriage, had been wanting some man to approach and talk of marriage, but she had not thought of the matter in the way her father had put it. The man had spoken of her as though she were a possession of his that must be disposed of. He had a personal interest in her marriage. It was in someway not a private matter, but a family affair. It was her father’s idea, she gathered, that she was to go into marriage to strengthen what he called his position in the community, to help him be some vague thing he called a big man. She wondered if he had some one in mind and could not avoid being a little curious as to who it could be. It had never occurred to her that her marriage could mean anything to her father beyond the natural desire of the parent that his child make a happy marriage. She began to grow angry at the thought of the way in which her father had approached the subject, but was still curious to know whether he had gone so far as to have some one in mind for the role of husband, and thought she would try to find out from her aunt. The strange farm hand came into the house with her bags and she followed him upstairs to what had always been her own room. Her aunt came puffing at her heels. The farm hand went away and she began to unpack, while the older woman, her face very red, sat on the edge of the bed. “You ain’t been getting engaged to a man down there where you been to school, have you, Clara?” she asked.
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