CLAIRE BOLTWOOD lived on the Heights, Brooklyn.
Persons from New York and other parts of the Middlewest have been
known to believe that Brooklyn is somehow humorous. In newspaper
jokes and vaudeville it is so presented that people who are willing
to take their philosophy from those sources believe that the
leading citizens of Brooklyn are all deacons, undertakers, and
obstetricians. The fact is that North Washington Square, at its
reddest and whitest and fanlightedest, Gramercy Park at its most
ivied, are not so aristocratic as the section of Brooklyn called
the Heights. Here preached Henry Ward Beecher. Here, in mansions
like mausoleums, on the ridge above docks where the good ships came
sailing in from Sourabaya and Singapore, ruled the lords of a
thousand sails. And still is it a place of wealth too solid to
emulate the nimble self-advertising of Fifth Avenue. Here dwell the
fifth-generation possessors of blocks of foundries and shipyards.
Here, in a big brick house of much dignity, much ugliness, and much
conservatory, lived Claire Boltwood, with her widower father.
?Henry B. Boltwood was vice-president of a firm dealing in
railway supplies. He was neither wealthy nor at all poor. Every
summer, despite Claire's delicate hints, they took the same cottage
on the Jersey Coast, and Mr. Boltwood came down for Sunday. Claire
had gone to a good school out of Philadelphia, on the Main Line.
She was used to gracious leisure, attractive uselessness,
nut-center chocolates, and a certain wonder as to why she was
alive.
?She wanted to travel, but her father could not get away.
He consistently spent his days in overworking, and his evenings in
wishing he hadn't overworked. He was attractive, fresh,
pink-cheered, white-mustached, and nerve-twitching with years in
detail.
?Claire's ambition had once been babies and a solid
husband, but as various young males of the species appeared before
her, sang their mating songs and preened their newly dry-cleaned
plumage, she found that the trouble with solid young men was that
they were solid. Though she liked to dance, the "dancing men" bored
her. And she did not understand the district's quota of
intellectuals very well; she was good at listening to symphony
concerts, but she never had much luck in discussing the cleverness
of the wood winds in taking up the main motif. It is history that
she refused a master of arts with an old violin, a good taste in
ties, and an income of eight thousand.
?The only man who disturbed her was Geoffrey Saxton, known
throughout the interwoven sets of Brooklyn Heights as "Jeff." Jeff
Saxton was thirty-nine to Claire's twenty-three. He was clean and
buy; he had no signs of vice or humor. Especially for Jeff must
have been invented the symbolic morning coat, the unwrinkable gray
trousers, and the moral rimless spectacles. he was a graduate of a
nice college, and he had a nice tenor and a nice family and nice
hands and he was nicely successful in New York copper dealing. When
he was asked questions by people who were impertinent, clever, or
poor, Jeff looked them over coldly before he answered, and often
they felt so uncomfortable that he didn't have to answer.
?The boys of Claire's own age, not long out of Yale and
Princeton, doing well in business and jumping for their evening
clothes daily at six-thirty, light o' loves and admirers of
athletic heroes, these lads Claire found pleasant, but hard to tell
apart. She didn't have to tell Jeff Saxton apart. He did his own
telling. Jeff called-not too often. He sang-not too sentimentally.
He took her father and herself to the theater-not too lavishly. He
told Claire-in a voice not too serious-that she was his helmed
Athena, his rose of all the world. He informed her of his
substantial position-not too obviously. And he was so
everlastingly, firmly, quietly, politely, immovably always there.
?She watched the hulk of marriage drifting down on her
frail speed-boat of aspiration, and steered in desperate circles.
?Then her father got the nervous prostration he had richly
earned. The doctor ordered rest. Claire took him in charge. He
didn't want to travel. Certainly he didn't want the shore or the
Adirondacks. As there was a branch of his company in Minneapolis,
she lured him that far away.
?Being rootedly of Brooklyn Heights, Claire didn't know
much about the West. She thought that Milwaukee was the capital of
Minnesota. She was not so uninformed as some of her friends,
however. She had heard that in Dakota wheat was to be viewed in
vast tracts-maybe a hundred acres.
?Mr. Boltwood could not be coaxed to play with the people
to whom his Minneapolis representative introduced him. He was
overworking again, and perfectly happy. He was hoping to find
something wrong with the branch house. Claire tried to tempt him
out to the lakes. She failed. His nerve-fuse burnt out the second
time, with much fireworks.
?Claire had often managed her circle of girls, but it had
never occurred to her to manager her executive father save by
indirect and pretty teasing. Now, in conspiracy with the doctor,
she bullied her father. He saw gray death waiting as alternative,
and he was meek. He agreed to everything. He consented to drive
with her across two thousand miles of plains and mountains to
Seattle, to drop in for a call on their cousins, the Eugene
Gilsons.
?Back East they had a chauffeur and two cars-the limousine,
and the Gomez-Deperdussin roadster, Claire's beloved. It would, she
believed, be more of a change from everything that might whisper to
Mr. Boltwood of the control of men, not to take a chauffeur. Her
father never drove, but she could, she insisted. His easy agreeing
was pathetic. He watched her with spaniel eyes. They had the Gomez
roadster shipped to them from New York.
?On a July morning, they started out of Minneapolis in a
mist, and as it has been hinted, they stopped sixty miles
northward, in a rain, also in much gumbo. Apparently their nearest
approach to the Pacific Ocean would be this oceanically moist edge
of a cornfield, between Schoenstrom and Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.
?Claire roused from her damp doze and sighed, "Well, I must
get busy and get the car out of this."
?"Don't you think you'd better get somebody to help us?"
?"But get who?"
?"Whom!"
?"No! It's just 'who,' when you're in the mud. No. One of
the good things about an adventure like this is that I must do
things for myself. I've always had people to do things for me.
Maids and nice teachers and you, old darling! I suppose it's made
me soft. Soft-I would like a soft davenport and a novel and a pound
of almond-brittle, and get all sick, and not feel so beastly virile
as I do just now. But-"
?She turned up the collar of her gray tweed coat, painfully
climbed out-the muscles of her back racking-and exclaimed the state
of the rear wheels. They were buried to the axle; in front of them
the mud bulked in solid, shiny blackness. She took out her jack and
chains. It was too late. There was no room to get the jack under
the axle. She remembered from the narratives of motoring friends
that brush in mud gave a firmer surface for the wheels to climb
upon.
?She also remembered how jolly and agreeably heroic the
accounts of their mishaps had sounded-a week after they were over.
?She waded down the road toward an old wood-lot. At first
she tried to keep dry, but she gave it up, and there was pleasure
in being defiantly dirty. She tramped straight through puddles; she
wallowed in mud. In the wood-lot was long grass which soaked her
stockings still her ankles felt itchy. Claire had never expected to
be so very intimate with a brush-pile. She became so. As though she
were a pioneer woman who had been toiling here for years, she came
to know the brush stick by stick-the long valuable branch that she
could never quite get out from under the others; the thorny bough
that pricked her hands every time she tried to reach the curious
bundle of switches.
?Seven trips she made, carrying armfuls of twigs and
solemnly dragging large boughs behind her. She patted them down in
front of all four wheels. Her crisp hands looked like the paws of a
three-year-old boy making a mud fort. Her nails hurt from the mud
wedged beneath them. her mud-caked shoes were heavy to lift. It was
with exquisite self-approval that she sat on the running-board,
scraped a car-load of lignite off her soles, climbed back into the
car, punched the starter.
?The car stirred, crept forward one inch, and settled
back-one inch. The second time it heaved encouragingly but did not
make quite so much headway. Then Claire did sob.
?She rubbed her cheek against the comfortable rough,
heather-smelling shoulder of her father's coat, while he patted her
and smile, "Good girl! I better get out and help."
?She sat straight, shook her head. "Nope. I'll do it. And
I'm not going to insist on being heroic any longer. I'll get a
farmer to pull us out."
?As she let herself down into the ooze, she reflected that
all farmers have hearts of gold, anatomical phenomena never found
among the snobs and hirelings of New York. The nearest heart of
gold was presumably beating warmly in the house a quarter of a mile
ahead.
?She came up a muddy lane to a muddy farmyard, with a muddy
cur yapping at her wet legs, and geese hissing in a pool of purest
mud serene. The house was small and rather old. It may have been
painted once. The barn was large and new. It had been painted very
much, and in a blinding red and white trimmmings. There was no
brass plate on the house, but on the barn, in huge white letters,
was the legend, "Adoplh Zolzac, 1913."
?She climbed by log steps to a narrow frame back porch
littered with parts of a broken cream-separator. She told herself
that she was simple and friendly in going to the back door instead
of the front, and it was with gaiety that she knocked on the
ill-jointed screen door, which flapped dismally in response.
?"Ja?" from within.
?She rapped again.
?"Hinein!"
?She opened the door on a kitchen, the highlight of which
was a table heaped with dishes of dumplings and salt pork. A
shirt-sleeved man, all covered with mustache and calm, sat by the
table, and he kept right on sitting as he inquired:
?"Vell?"
?"My car-my automobile-has been stuck in the mud. A bad
driver, I'm afraid! I wonder if you would be so good as to-"
?"I usually get t'ree dollars, but I dunno as I have to do
it for less than four. Today I ain'd feelin' very goot," grumbled
the golden-hearted.
?Claire was aware that a woman whom she had not noticed-so
much smaller than the dumplings, so much less vigorous than the
salt pork was she-was speaking: "
Aber, papa, dot's a shame you sharge de poor young lady
dot, when she drive by
sei self. Vot she t'ink of de Sherman people?"
?The farmer merely grunted. To Claire, "Yuh four dollars.
Dot's what I usually charge sometimes."
?"Usually? Do you mean to say that you leave that hole
there in the road right along-that people keep on trying to avoid
and get stuck as I was? Oh! If I were an official-"
?"Vell, I dunno, I don't guess I run my place to suit you
smart alecks-"
?Papa! How you talk on the young lady! Make shame!"
?"-from the city. If you don't like, you stay
bei Mineapolis! I haul you out for t'ree dollars and a
half. Everybody pay dot. Last mont' I make forty-five dollars. They
vos all glad to pay. They say I help them fine. I don't see vot
you're kicking about! Oh, these vimmins!"
?"It's blackmail! I wouldn't pay it, if it weren't for my
father sitting waiting out there. But-go ahead. Hurry!"
?She sat tapping her toe while Zolzac completed the
stertorous task of hogging the dumplings, then stretched, yawned,
scratched, and covered his merely dirty garments with overalls that
were apparently woven of processed mud. When he had gone to the
barn for his team, his wife came to Claire. On her drained face
were the easy tears of the slave women.
?"Oh, miss, I don't know vot I should do. My boys go on the
public school, and they speak American just so goot as you. Oh, I
vant man lets me luff America. But papa he says it is an
Unsinn; you go the money, he says, nobody should care if
you are American or Old Country people. I should vish I could ride
once in an automobile! But-I am so 'shamed, so 'shamed that I must
sit and see my
Mann make this. Forty years I been married to him, and
pretty soon I die-"
?Claire patted her head. There was nothing to say to
tragedy that had outlived hope.
?Adolph Zolzac clumped out to the highroad behind his vast,
rolling-flanked horses-so much cleaner and better fed that his wisp
of a wife. Claire followed him, and in her heart she committed
murder and was glad of it. When Mr. Boltwood looked out with mild
wonder at Claire's new friend, Zolzac hitched his team to the axle.
It did not seem possible that two horses could pull out the car
where seventy horsepower had fainted. But, easily, yawning and
thinking about dinner, the horses drew the wheels up on the
mud-bank, out of the hole and-
?The harness broke, and with a flying mess of straps and
rope, and the car plumped with perfect exactness back into its bed.
