Lonesome Land by B. M. Bower (reading strategies book .TXT) 📖

the size of it,” Kent admitted reluctantly. “Only I wouldn't have put it just that way, maybe.”

“Indeed! And how would you pit it, then?”

Kent leaned harder against the door, and looked at her curiously. Women, it seemed to him, were always going to extremes; they were either too soft and meek, or else they were too hard and unmerciful.

“How would you put it? I am rather curious to know your point of view.”

“Well, I know men better than you do, Mrs. Fleetwood. I know they can do some things that look pretty rotten on the surface, and yet be fairly decent underneath. You don't know how a habit like that gets a fellow just where he's weakest. Man ain't a beast. He's selfish and careless, and he gives way too easy, but he thinks the world of you. Jim says he cried like a baby when he came into the saloon, and acted like a crazy man. You don't want to be too hard on him. I've an idea this will learn him a lesson. If you take him the right way, Mrs. Fleetwood, the chances are he'll quit drinking.”

Val smiled. Kent thought he had never before seen a smile like that, and hoped he never would see another. There was in it neither mercy nor mirth, but only the hard judgment of a woman who does not understand.

“Will you bring him to me here, Mr. Burnett? I do not feel quite equal to invading a saloon and begging him, on my knees, to come—after the conventional manner of drunkards' wives. But I should like to see him.”

Kent stared. “He ain't in any shape to argue with,” he remonstrated. “You better wait a while.”

She rested her chin upon her hands, folded upon the high chair back, and gazed at him with her tawny eyes, that somehow reminded Kent of a lioness in a cage. He thought swiftly that a lioness would have as much mercy as she had in that mood.

“Mr. Burnett,” she began quietly, when Kent's nerves were beginning to feel the strain of her silent stare, “I want to see Manley as he is now. I will tell you why. You aren't a woman, and you never will understand, but I shall tell you; I want to tell somebody.

“I was raised well—that sounds queer, but modesty forbids more. At any rate, my mother was very careful about me. She believed in a girl marrying and becoming a good wife to a good man, and to that end she taught me and trained me. A woman must give her all—her life, her past, present, and future—to the man she marries. For three years I thought how unworthy I was to be Manley's wife. Unworthy, do you hear? I slept with his letters under my pillow.” The self-contempt in her tone! “I studied the things I thought would make me a better companion out here in the wilderness. I practiced hours and hours every day upon my violin, because Manley had admired my playing, and I thought it would please him to have me play in the firelight on winter evenings, when the blizzards were howling about the house! I learned to cook, to wash clothes, to iron, to sweep, and to scrub, and to make my own clothes, because Manley's wife would live where she could not hire servants to do these things. I lived a beautiful, picturesque dream of domestic happiness.

“I left my friends, my home, all the things I had been accustomed to all my life, and I came out here to live that dream!” She laughed bitterly.

“You can easily guess how much of it has come true, Mr. Burnett. But you don't know what it costs a girl to come down from the clouds and find that reality is hard and ugly—from dreaming of a cozy little nest of a home, and the love and care of—of Manley, to the reality—to carrying water and chopping wood and being left alone, day after day, and to find that his love only meant—Oh, you don't know how a woman clings to her ideals! You don't know how I have dung to mine. They have become rather tattered, and I have had to mend them often, but I have clung to them, even though they do not resemble much the dreams I brought with me to this horrible country.

“But if it's true, what you tell me—if Manley himself is another disillusionment—if beyond his selfishness and his carelessness he is a drunken brute whom I can't even respect, then I'm done with my ideals. I want to see him just as he is. I want to see him once without the halo I have kept shining all these months. I've got my life to live—but I want to face facts and live facts. I can't go on dreaming and making believe, after this.” She stopped and looked at him speculatively, absolutely without emotion.

“Just before I left home,” she went on in the same calm quiet, “a girl showed me some verses written by a very wicked man. At least, they say he is very wicked—at any rate, he is in jail. I thought the verses horrible and brutal; but now I think the man must be very wise. I remember a few lines, and they seem to me to mean Manley.

“For each man kills the thing he loves— Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word; The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword.

“I don't remember all of it, but there was another line or two:

“The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold.

“I wish I had that poem now—I think I could understand it. I think—”

“I think you've got talking hysterics, if there is such a thing,” Kent interrupted harshly. “You don't know half what you're saying. You've had a hard day, and you're all tired out, and everything looks outa focus. I know—I've seen men like that sometimes when some trouble hit 'em hard and unexpected. What you want is sleep; not poetry about killing people. A man, in the shape you are in, takes to whisky. You're taking to graveyard poetry—and, if you ask me, that's worse than whisky. You ain't normal. What you want to do is go straight to bed. When you wake up in the morning you won't feel so bad. You won't have half as many troubles as you've got now.”

“I knew you wouldn't understand it,” Val remarked coldly, still staring at him with her chin on her hands.

“You won't yourself, to-morrow morning,” Kent declared unsympathetically, and called Mrs. Hawley from the kitchen. “You better put Mrs. Fleetwood to bed,” he advised gruffly. “And if you've got anything that'll make her sleep, give her a dose of it. She's so tired she can't see straight.” He was nearly to the outside door when Val recovered her speech.

“You men are all alike,” she said contemptuously. “You give orders and you consider yourselves above all the laws of morality or decency; in reality you are beneath them. We shouldn't expect anything of the lower animals! How I despise men!”

“Now you're talking,” grinned Kent, quite unmoved. “Whack us in a bunch all you like—but don't make one poor devil take it all. Men as a class are used to it and can stand it.” He was laughing as he left the room, but his amusement lasted only until the door was