Heart's Kindred

“I says I’d leave you off, didn’t I?” he demanded. “It’s ten mile yet.”

Ten miles! The Inger stood by Lory and looked at the streets. Amazing piles of dirty masonry, highways of dirty stone, processions of carts, armies of people.

“He lied,” he thought. “They couldn’t keep it up for ten miles.”

When at last the two were set down, it was on one of those vast, treeless stretches outside Chicago, where completed sidewalks cut the uncompleted lengths of sand and coarse grass, and where an occasional house stands out like a fungus – as quickly evolved as a fungus, too, and almost as parti-colored. But these open spaces the two hailed in thanksgiving.

The Inger dropped his pack and stretched mightily.

“What’d they want to go and muss up the earth for?” he said. “It’s good enough for me, naked.”

The girl footed beside him, looking everywhere in wonder. Her scarlet handkerchief cap had slipped sidewise on her hair which was loosened and fallen on her neck. Her dress, of some rough brown, was scant and short, and it was tight on her full arms and bosom, beneath a little blue knit shawl that had been her mother’s. But she was as lovely here as ever she had been in the desert and on Whiteface. And as soon as they were alone, the Inger always fell silent, with the perpetual sense of trying to understand.

The days on the train had not left them as their meeting had found them. There had been hours, side by side, drawing over the burning yellow and rose of their desert; and over the flat emptiness and fulness of Kansas; nights on the rear platform, close to the rail, so that the overhead lights should not extinguish the stars; hours when the train waited for a bridge to be mended, and they had walked on the prairie, and secretly had been homesick for the friendly huddling shapes against the horizons. To the Inger, with the Flag-pole for his background, the luxury of a Pullman had occurred no more than to Lory. It was a way for some folk to ride, as diamonds were for certain folk to buy. But as for them, they had sat in the day-coach, and at night had laid their heads on their packs, as simply as they had eaten the remains of their lunch, and of food snatched at station counters.

And all the way, he had been trying to understand. She was very gentle with him – sometimes he felt as if she were almost pitying. Always she seemed the elder. How was it possible, he wondered, that she could be to him like this?

For in these days he had come to understand her, with a man’s curiously clear understanding of a “good” woman. He knew the crystal candor of her, the wholesomeness, the humanness, and, for all her merriment and her charm and her comradeship, the exquisite aloofness of her, a quality as strange in Jem Moor’s daughter as it was unusual in any womanhood of Inch. But, these things being so, how was it possible that she could tolerate him? She could not have forgiven him – that was unthinkable, and, he dimly felt, undesirable. How then could she be to him so gentle, so genuinely human?

Of exactly what had occurred that night on Whiteface, he could not be sure. He wearied himself, trying to remember what he had said, what he had done. Of one thing he was certain: he had not laid his hands on her. That he should have remembered, and that, he knew, she would not have let pass by as she was letting memory of that night pass. Yet it was the same thing, for he had tried. What, then, exactly, was she thinking?

These things he did not cease to turn in his mind. And bit by bit it seemed to him that he understood: for at first, on the mountain, she had needed him. Without him she could not have followed that imperceptible trail. Then, here on the train, she was deeply his debtor, as he had forced her to be. Whatever, in her heart, she was thinking of him, she could not now reveal to him. Indeed how was it possible that she did not despise him? So, as she had sat beside him on the Overland, he had been torturing himself.

Yet never once did her gentleness to him fail. There was, in her manner now, as she spoke to him, something of this incomparable care:

“Will you do something?” she said, looking away from him.

“If it’s for you, I reckon you can reckon on it,” he said.

“I donno who it’s for,” she told him. “But will you be just as nice to my uncle as you are to me?”

He stared at her.

“Be kind of polite to him,” she said. “Don’t pull your revolver on him,” she explained.

“I hardly ever pull my revolver,” he defended himself indignantly.

“Well, don’t shake him or – or lift him up by the collar for anything,” she suggested.

“Oh,” he comprehended. “You want me to trot out my Chicago manners – is that it? He laughed. “All right,” he said. “I’m on.”

“Uncle Hiram is good,” she cried earnestly. “He come to see us, once – he’s good! You treat him right – please.”

The Inger sunk his chin on his chest and walked, mulling this. So she hadn’t liked his way with folks! He felt vaguely uneasy, and as if he had stumbled on some unsuspected standard of hers.

“I don’t know,” she said, troubled, “what Aunt ’Cretia’s goin’ to think. I mean about your coming with me.”

He raised his head.

“What about me coming with you?” he demanded.

Before the clear candor of his eyes, her own fell.

“She’ll think the truth,” he blazed, “or I’ll burn the house down!”

At this they both laughed, and now it was she who was feeling a dim shame, as if from some high standard of his, she had been the one to vary.

At the intersection of two paved roads, whose sidewalks were grass-grown, in their long waiting for footsteps, stood the house which they had been seeking. It was of dullish blue clapboards whose gabled ends were covered with red-brown toothed shingles. The house was too high for its area, and a hideous porch of cement blocks and posts looked like a spreading cow-catcher. On a clothes line, bed blankets and colored quilts were flapping, as if they were rejoicing in their one legitimate liberty from privacy.

Everywhere, on the porch, and on the scrubby lawn, and within the open door, stood packing boxes. The leap of alarm which Lory felt at sight of them was not allayed by the unknown woman in blue calico, with swathed head, who bent over the box in the hall.

At Lory’s question, the woman stared.

“You mean the family that’s just went out of here?” she asked. “Well, they’ve moved to Washington, D.C.”

“What’s that?” cried the Inger, suddenly.

“If you mean the family that’s just went out of here – ” the woman was beginning.

The Inger struck his hand sharply on the post.

“We mean Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Folts,” he shouted. “And if you’re trying to be insulting – ”

The woman looked at him, open-mouthed.

“Why, my land,” she said, “I never heard their names in my life. I just happened to know the family moved to Washington. You better ask next door – mebbe they knew ’em.”

Lory interposed, thanked her, got back to the street.

“S’posin’ she was puttin’ on,” she urged. “It don’t hurt us any.”

“Puttin’ on,” raged the Inger. “Well, I should say. Pretendin’ not to know the name of whoever moved out of the same house she’s movin’ into!”

It was true, the neighbor told them. Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Folts had been gone for almost a month. She found the Washington address for them, and in a moment they were back on the Illinois prairie again, with grass-grown sidewalks leading them nowhere.

“I must look for a job,” Lory said, only. “I must begin now and look for a job.”

The Inger’s look travelled over the waste stretches, cut by neat real estate signs. The sun was struggling through a high fog, the sky was murky, and on the horizon where Chicago lay, the black smoke hung like storm clouds.

“What a devil of a hole,” he said. “It looks like something had swelled up big, and bust, and scattered all over the place.”

“I donno how to look for a job,” Lory said only, staring toward that black horizon cloud where lay the city.

“Don’t you want to go on to Washington?” the Inger asked casually.

Lory shook her head.

“I can’t,” she said. “An’ I ain’t goin’ to come down on to you again.”