The Idyl Of Red Gulch
Sandy was very drunk. He was lying under an azalea bush, in pretty
much the same attitude in which he had fallen some hours before.
How long he had been lying there he could not tell, and didn't
care; how long he should lie there was a matter equally indefinite
and unconsidered. A tranquil philosophy, born of his physical
condition, suffused and saturated his moral being.
The spectacle of a drunken man, and of this drunken man in
particular, was not, I grieve to say, of sufficient novelty in Red
Gulch to attract attention. Earlier in the day some local satirist
had erected a temporary tombstone at Sandy's head, bearing the
inscription, "Effects of McCorkle's whisky--kills at forty rods,"
with a hand pointing to McCorkle's saloon. But this, I imagine,
was, like most local satire, personal; and was a reflection upon
the unfairness of the process rather than a commentary upon the
impropriety of the result. With this facetious exception, Sandy
had been undisturbed. A wandering mule, released from his pack,
had cropped the scant herbage beside him, and sniffed curiously at
the prostrate man; a vagabond dog, with that deep sympathy which
the species have for drunken men, had licked his dusty boots, and
curled himself up at his feet, and lay there, blinking one eye in
the sunlight, with a simulation of dissipation that was ingenious
and doglike in its implied flattery of the unconscious man beside
him.
Meanwhile the shadows of the pine trees had slowly swung around
until they crossed the road, and their trunks barred the open
meadow with gigantic parallels of black and yellow. Little puffs
of red dust, lifted by the plunging hoofs of passing teams,
dispersed in a grimy shower upon the recumbent man. The sun sank
lower and lower; and still Sandy stirred not. And then the repose
of this philosopher was disturbed, as other philosophers have been,
by the intrusion of an unphilosophical sex.
"Miss Mary," as she was known to the little flock that she had just
dismissed from the log schoolhouse beyond the pines, was taking her
afternoon walk. Observing an unusually fine cluster of blossoms on
the azalea bush opposite, she crossed the road to pluck it--picking
her way through the red dust, not without certain fierce little
shivers of disgust and some feline circumlocution. And then she
came suddenly upon Sandy!
Of course she uttered the little staccato cry of her sex. But when
she had paid that tribute to her physical weakness she became
overbold, and halted for a moment--at least six feet from this
prostrate monster--with her white skirts gathered in her hand,
ready for flight. But neither sound nor motion came from the bush.
With one little foot she then overturned the satirical headboard,
and muttered "Beasts!"--an epithet which probably, at that moment,
conveniently classified in her mind the entire male population of
Red Gulch. For Miss Mary, being possessed of certain rigid notions
of her own, had not, perhaps, properly appreciated the
demonstrative gallantry for which the Californian has been so
justly celebrated by his brother Californians, and had, as a
newcomer, perhaps fairly earned the reputation of being "stuck-up."
As she stood there she noticed, also, that the slant sunbeams were
heating Sandy's head to what she judged to be an unhealthy
temperature, and that his hat was lying uselessly at his side. To
pick it up and to place it over his face was a work requiring some
courage, particularly as his eyes were open. Yet she did it, and
made good her retreat. But she was somewhat concerned, on looking
back, to see that the hat was removed, and that Sandy was sitting
up and saying something.
The truth was, that in the calm depths of Sandy's mind he was
satisfied that the rays of the sun were beneficial and healthful;
that from childhood he had objected to lying down in a hat; that no
people but condemned fools, past redemption, ever wore hats; and
that his right to dispense with them when he pleased was
inalienable. This was the statement of his inner consciousness.
Unfortunately, its outward expression was vague, being limited to a
repetition of the following formula--"Su'shine all ri'! Wasser
maar, eh? Wass up, su'shine?"
Miss Mary stopped, and, taking fresh courage from her vantage of
distance, asked him if there was anything that he wanted.
"Wass up? Wasser maar?" continued Sandy, in a very high key.
"Get up, you horrid man!" said Miss Mary, now thoroughly incensed;
"get up, and go home."
Sandy staggered to his feet. He was six feet high, and Miss Mary
trembled. He started forward a few paces and then stopped.
"Wass I go home for?" he suddenly asked, with great gravity.
"Go and take a bath," replied Miss Mary, eying his grimy person
with great disfavor.
To her infinite dismay, Sandy suddenly pulled off his coat and
vest, threw them on the ground, kicked off his boots, and, plunging
wildly forward, darted headlong over the hill, in the direction of
the river.
"Goodness heavens!--the man will be drowned!" said Miss Mary; and
then, with feminine inconsistency, she ran back to the schoolhouse
and locked herself in.
That night, while seated at supper with her hostess, the
blacksmith's wife, it came to Miss Mary to ask, demurely, if her
husband ever got drunk. "Abner," responded Mrs. Stidger,
reflectively, "let's see: Abner hasn't been tight since last
'lection." Miss Mary would have liked to ask if he preferred lying
in the sun on these occasions, and if a cold bath would have hurt
him; but this would have involved an explanation, which she did not
then care to give. So she contented herself with opening her gray
eyes widely at the red-cheeked Mrs. Stidger--a fine specimen of
Southwestern efflorescence--and then dismissed the subject
altogether. The next day she wrote to her dearest friend, in
Boston: "I think I find the intoxicated portion of this community
the least objectionable. I refer, my dear, to the men, of course.
I do not know anything that could make the women tolerable."
In less than a week Miss Mary had forgotten this episode, except
that her afternoon walks took thereafter, almost unconsciously,
another direction. She noticed, however, that every morning a
fresh cluster of azalea blossoms appeared among the flowers on her
desk. This was not strange, as her little flock were aware of her
fondness for flowers, and invariably kept her desk bright with
anemones, syringas, and lupines; but, on questioning them, they one
and all professed ignorance of the azaleas. A few days later,
Master Johnny Stidger, whose desk was nearest to the window, was
suddenly taken with spasms of apparently gratuitous laughter that
threatened the discipline of the school. All that Miss Mary could
get from him was, that someone had been "looking in the winder."
Irate and indignant, she sallied from her hive to do battle with
the intruder. As she turned the corner of the schoolhouse she came
plump upon the quondam drunkard--now perfectly sober, and
inexpressibly sheepish and guilty-looking.
These facts Miss Mary was not slow to take a feminine advantage of,
in her present humor. But it was somewhat confusing to observe,
also, that the beast, despite some faint signs of past dissipation,
was amiable-looking--in fact, a kind of blond Samson whose corn-
colored, silken beard apparently had never yet known the touch of
barber's razor or Delilah's shears. So that the cutting speech
which quivered on her ready tongue died upon her lips, and she
contented herself with receiving his stammering apology with
supercilious eyelids and the gathered skirts of uncontamination.
When she re-entered the schoolroom, her eyes fell upon the azaleas
with a new sense of revelation. And then she laughed, and the
little people all laughed, and they were all unconsciously very
happy.
It was on a hot day--and not long after this--that two short-legged
boys came to grief on the threshold of the school with a pail of
water, which they had laboriously brought from the spring, and that
Miss Mary compassionately seized the pail and started for the
spring herself. At the foot of the hill a shadow crossed her path,
and a blue-shirted arm dexterously but gently relieved her of her
burden. Miss Mary was both embarrassed and angry. "If you carried
more of that for yourself," she said, spitefully, to the blue arm,
without deigning to raise her lashes to its owner, "you'd do
better." In the submissive silence that followed she regretted the
speech, and thanked him so sweetly at the door that he stumbled.
Which caused the children to laugh again--a laugh in which Miss
Mary joined, until the color came faintly into her pale cheek. The
next day a barrel was mysteriously placed beside the door, and as
mysteriously filled with fresh spring water every morning.
Nor was this superior young person without other quiet attentions.
"Profane Bill," driver of the Slumgullion Stage, widely known in
the newspapers for his "gallantry" in invariably offering the box
seat to the fair sex, had excepted Miss Mary from this attention,
on the ground that he had a habit of "cussin' on upgrades," and
gave her half the coach to herself. Jack Hamlin, a gambler, having
once silently ridden with her in the same coach, afterward threw a
decanter at the head of a confederate for mentioning her name in a
barroom. The overdressed mother of a pupil whose paternity was
doubtful had often lingered near this astute Vestal's temple, never
daring to enter its sacred precincts, but content to worship the
priestess from afar.
With such unconscious intervals the monotonous procession of blue
skies, glittering sunshine, brief twilights, and starlit nights
passed over Red Gulch. Miss Mary grew fond of walking in the
sedate and proper woods. Perhaps she believed, with Mrs. Stidger,
that the balsamic odors of the firs "did her chest good," for
certainly her slight cough was less frequent and her step was
firmer; perhaps she had learned the unending lesson which the
patient pines are never weary of repeating to heedful or listless
ears. And so, one day, she planned a picnic on Buckeye Hill, and
took the children with her. Away from the dusty road, the
straggling shanties, the yellow ditches, the clamor of restless
engines, the cheap finery of shop windows, the deeper glitter of
paint and colored glass, and the thin veneering which barbarism
takes upon itself in such localities--what infinite relief was
theirs! The last heap of ragged rock and clay passed, the last
unsightly chasm crossed--how the waiting woods opened their long
files to receive them! How the children--perhaps because they had
not yet grown quite away from the breast of the bounteous Mother--
threw themselves face downward on her brown bosom with uncouth
caresses, filling the air with their laughter; and how Miss Mary
herself--felinely fastidious and intrenched as she was in the
purity of spotless skirts, collar, and cuffs--forgot all, and ran
like a crested quail at the head of her brood until, romping,
laughing, and panting, with a loosened braid of brown hair, a hat
hanging by a knotted ribbon from her throat, she came suddenly and
violently, in the heart of the forest, upon--the luckless Sandy!
The explanations, apologies, and not overwise conversation that
ensued need not be indicated here. It would seem, however, that
Miss Mary had already established some acquaintance with this ex-
drunkard. Enough that he was soon accepted as one of the party;
that the children, with that quick intelligence which Providence
gives the helpless, recognized a friend, and played with his blond
beard and long silken mustache, and took other liberties--as the
helpless are apt to do. And when he had built a fire against a
tree, and had shown them other mysteries of woodcraft, their
admiration knew no bounds. At the close of two such foolish, idle,
happy hours he found himself lying at the feet of the
schoolmistress, gazing dreamily in her face, as she sat upon the
sloping hillside weaving wreaths of laurel and syringa, in very
much the same attitude as he had lain when first they met. Nor was
the similitude greatly forced. The weakness of an easy, sensuous
nature that had found a dreamy exaltation in liquor, it is to be
feared was now finding an equal intoxication in love.
I think that Sandy was dimly conscious of this himself. I know
that he longed to be doing something--slaying a grizzly, scalping a
savage, or sacrificing himself in some way for the sake of this
sallow-faced, gray-eyed schoolmistress. As I should like to
present him in a heroic attitude, I stay my hand with great
difficulty at this moment, being only withheld from introducing
such an episode by a strong conviction that it does not usually
occur at such times. And I trust that my fairest reader, who
remembers that, in a real crisis, it is always some uninteresting
stranger or unromantic policeman, and not Adolphus, who rescues,
will forgive the omission.
So they sat there, undisturbed--the woodpeckers chattering overhead
and the voices of the children coming pleasantly from the hollow
below. What they said matters little. What they thought--which
might have been interesting--did not transpire. The woodpeckers
only learned how Miss Mary was an orphan; how she left her uncle's
house, to come to California, for the sake of health and
independence; how Sandy was an orphan, too; how he came to
California for excitement; how he had lived a wild life, and how he
was trying to reform; and other details, which, from a woodpecker's
viewpoint, undoubtedly must have seemed stupid, and a waste of
time. But even in such trifles was the afternoon spent; and when
the children were again gathered, and Sandy, with a delicacy which
the schoolmistress well understood, took leave of them quietly at
the outskirts of the settlement, it had seemed the shortest day of
her weary life.
As the long, dry summer withered to its roots, the school term of
Red Gulch--to use a local euphuism--"dried up" also. In another
day Miss Mary would be free; and for a season, at least, Red Gulch
would know her no more. She was seated alone in the schoolhouse,
her cheek resting on her hand, her eyes half-closed in one of those
daydreams in which Miss Mary--I fear to the danger of school
discipline --was lately in the habit of indulging. Her lap was
full of mosses, ferns, and other woodland memories. She was so
preoccupied with these and her own thoughts that a gentle tapping
at the door passed unheard, or translated itself into the
remembrance of far-off woodpeckers. When at last it asserted
itself more distinctly, she started up with a flushed cheek and
opened the door. On the threshold stood a woman the self-assertion
and audacity of whose dress were in singular contrast to her timid,
irresolute bearing.
Miss Mary recognized at a glance the dubious mother of her
anonymous pupil. Perhaps she was disappointed, perhaps she was
only fastidious; but as she coldly invited her to enter, she half-
unconsciously settled her white cuffs and collar, and gathered
closer her own chaste skirts. It was, perhaps, for this reason
that the embarrassed stranger, after a moment's hesitation, left
her gorgeous parasol open and sticking in the dust beside the door,
and then sat down at the farther end of a long bench. Her voice
was husky as she began:
"I heerd tell that you were goin' down to the Bay tomorrow, and I
couldn't let you go until I came to thank you for your kindness to
my Tommy."
Tommy, Miss Mary said, was a good boy, and deserved more than the
poor attention she could give him.
"Thank you, miss; thank ye!" cried the stranger, brightening even
through the color which Red Gulch knew facetiously as her "war
paint," and striving, in her embarrassment, to drag the long bench
nearer the schoolmistress. "I thank you, miss, for that! and if I
am his mother, there ain't a sweeter, dearer, better boy lives than
him. And if I ain't much as says it, thar ain't a sweeter, dearer,
angeler teacher lives than he's got."
Miss Mary, sitting primly behind her desk, with a ruler over her
shoulder, opened her gray eyes widely at this, but said nothing.
"It ain't for you to be complimented by the like of me, I know,"
she went on, hurriedly. "It ain't for me to be comin' here, in
broad day, to do it, either; but I come to ask a favor--not for me,
miss--not for me, but for the darling boy."
Encouraged by a look in the young schoolmistress's eye, and putting
her lilac-gloved hands together, the fingers downward, between her
knees, she went on, in a low voice:
"You see, miss, there's no one the boy has any claim on but me, and
I ain't the proper person to bring him up. I thought some, last
year, of sending him away to Frisco to school, but when they talked
of bringing a schoolma'am here, I waited till I saw you, and then I
knew it was all right, and I could keep my boy a little longer.
And O, miss, he loves you so much; and if you could hear him talk
about you, in his pretty way, and if he could ask you what I ask
you now, you couldn't refuse him.
"It is natural," she went on, rapidly, in a voice that trembled
strangely between pride and humility--"it's natural that he should
take to you, miss, for his father, when I first knew him, was a
gentleman--and the boy must forget me, sooner or later--and so I
ain't goin' to cry about that. For I come to ask you to take my
Tommy--God bless him for the bestest, sweetest boy that lives--to--
to--take him with you."
She had risen and caught the young girl's hand in her own, and had
fallen on her knees beside her.
"I've money plenty, and it's all yours and his. Put him in some
good school, where you can go and see him, and help him to--to--to
forget his mother. Do with him what you like. The worst you can
do will be kindness to what he will learn with me. Only take him
out of this wicked life, this cruel place, this home of shame and
sorrow. You will; I know you will--won't you? You will--you must
not, you cannot say no! You will make him as pure, as gentle as
yourself; and when he has grown up, you will tell him his father's
name--the name that hasn't passed my lips for years--the name of
Alexander Morton, whom they call here Sandy! Miss Mary!--do not
take your hand away! Miss Mary, speak to me! You will take my
boy? Do not put your face from me. I know it ought not to look on
such as me. Miss Mary!--my God, be merciful!--she is leaving me!"
Miss Mary had risen and, in the gathering twilight, had felt her
way to the open window. She stood there, leaning against the
casement, her eyes fixed on the last rosy tints that were fading
from the western sky. There was still some of its light on her
pure young forehead, on her white collar, on her clasped white
hands, but all fading slowly away. The suppliant had dragged
herself, still on her knees, beside her.
"I know it takes time to consider. I will wait here all night; but
I cannot go until you speak. Do not deny me now. You will!--I see
it in your sweet face--such a face as I have seen in my dreams. I
see it in your eyes, Miss Mary!--you will take my boy!"
The last red beam crept higher, suffused Miss Mary's eyes with
something of its glory, flickered, and faded, and went out. The
sun had set on Red Gulch. In the twilight and silence Miss Mary's
voice sounded pleasantly.
"I will take the boy. Send him to me tonight."
The happy mother raised the hem of Miss Mary's skirts to her lips.
She would have buried her hot face in its virgin folds, but she
dared not. She rose to her feet.
"Does--this man--know of your intention?" asked Miss Mary,
suddenly.
"No, nor cares. He has never even seen the child to know it."
"Go to him at once--tonight--now! Tell him what you have done.
Tell him I have taken his child, and tell him--he must never see--
see--the child again. Wherever it may be, he must not come;
wherever I may take it, he must not follow! There, go now, please--
I'm weary, and--have much yet to do!"
They walked together to the door. On the threshold the woman
turned.
"Good night."
She would have fallen at Miss Mary's feet. But at the same moment
the young girl reached out her arms, caught the sinful woman to her
own pure breast for one brief moment, and then closed and locked
the door.
It was with a sudden sense of great responsibility that Profane
Bill took the reins of the Slumgullion Stage the next morning, for
the schoolmistress was one of his passengers. As he entered the
highroad, in obedience to a pleasant voice from the "inside," he
suddenly reined up his horses and respectfully waited as Tommy
hopped out at the command of Miss Mary. "Not that bush, Tommy--the
next."
Tommy whipped out his new pocketknife, and, cutting a branch from a
tall azalea bush, returned with it to Miss Mary.
"All right now?"
"All right."
And the stage door closed on the Idyl of Red Gulch.
-THE END-
Bret Harte's short story: The Idyl Of Red Gulch
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