For another, at that moment a little delegation showed up at the house: that boy I had fought, his Pa, and a town constable, ready to hang me, I expect, for assault with a deadly weapon.
Though Mrs. P. as a mother left something to be desired, in this type of situation she couldn’t be bettered. In polite relations, as you might call them, she was the Queen of England.
First place, she kept them people in the hall while me and her continued to sit upon the loveseat. I don’t mean she said Stay out there; she just had that force of will. So the constable, a beefy individual, filled the whole doorway and if the boy’s Pa wanted to say something, had to step aside. They was always bumping into one another. We never saw the boy at all.
“Missus,” the constable says, “if it be discommoding to you, why they ain’t no reason why we cain’t come back another time.” He waited for a bit, but Mrs. Pendrake never answered such commentary. “Well then, I got a lad here, Lucas English, son of Horace English what owns the feed store-”
“Is that Mr. English behind you, Mr. Travis?” asks Mrs. P., and then the constable and English, a fellow in vest and sleeve-garters, do that little dance of interchange and Travis drops his helmet, and English says: “Yes’m, and there ain’t nothing personally involved in this matter, Mrs. Reverend, for I been obliged to the Reverend for many years for supplying his wants in the way of feed-”
Mrs. Pendrake says there with her cold smile: “I believe you refer to the wants of the Reverend Pendrake’s animal, do you not, Mr. English, and are not suggesting that Mr. Pendrake eats oats.”
English gasps with false laughter, which gets his hoof further down his throat, and the constable pushes him away and steps into the doorframe.
“It’s like this, Mrs.,” says he. “There seems to be a fight between two lads. One lad’s got him a knife, and according to the statement of the first, says he will get him the other’s scalp with it like the redskin practice.” He grins. “Which of course ain’t within the law.”
Mrs. Pendrake says: “The poet tells us to err is human, Mr. Travis. I’m sure the English boy did not intend to use his knife on my dear Jack, but simply to make a childish threat. If Jack can forgive him, I shall not prefer charges.” She looks at me and asks: “Dear?”
“Sure,” I says, feeling real queer to hear her call me that for the first time.
“Ah then, Mr. Travis,” Mrs. P. says. “So far as I am concerned, there’s an end to it.” And thanked him, and called for Lucy to let them out.
Now I figured after that handsome performance I owed Mrs. Pendrake something. Oh, I suppose even at the time I knew she had never done it for me, though it was obvious to a clever woman like her that I had the knife. She just wasn’t going to let no man take her to task even indirectly. The fact I belonged to her gave me absolute immunity, the way she saw it. I had never before known a woman, white or red, who had that type of opinion of herself, which was power though you might say used negatively. Had it been used in the positive fashion, she’d have been manly, but nobody could ever take Mrs. Pendrake for anything but 110 per cent female though you might not confuse her with your Ma.
But right now, I thought I could please her by pretending, anyway, to make that very confusion. It might have been play-acting on her part to call me “dear,” but I’ll tell you I liked it in front of those slobs.
So I says: “Mother”-“Mother” is what I says-“Mother, which is the poet what wrote that particular motto?”
Well sir, the word did a lot for her, though I might not have pronounced it with much confidence this first time. Of course she didn’t let on, but went to a bookcase and brought back a volume.
“Mr. Alexander Pope,” she says, “who also wrote: ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’ ”
She read me some of that man’s verse, which sounded like the trotting of a horse if you never paid attention to the words or didn’t understand most of them like me. What I did savvy seemed right opinionated, like that fellow had the last word on everything.
My only complaint was that for a poet he wasn’t any too romantic. Now you take a boy who lived my kind of life, you’d figure him to be about as realistic as any, if not altogether cynical. That may be so, but it never applied to women, or at least not to beautiful white women who was useless for practical purposes.
I fell into an infatuation for Mrs. Pendrake right then. I guess even at my present time of life, I am still weak on the subject of elegant and gracious ladies. Authority is also involved, as in her handling that constable and feed merchant, and having a knowledge of fine aspects, like the way she held the works of Mr. Pope, with her head inclined against the afternoon sun from the west window so that the margins of her nose and forehead was crystalline and her hair old gold. She always knowed the right thing so far as civilization went, like an Indian knows it for savagery. And I saw then that uselessness was a necessary part of it. If you put such a woman to work, you’d lose that which was her special value, like if you made a hitching post of a statue.
I figured to have got the idea of white life, right then. It hadn’t ought to do with the steam engine or arithmetic or even Mr. Pope’s verse. Its aim was to turn out a Mrs. Pendrake.
I said infatuation, but you can call it love, and directly I was awed by it and moved over to my end of the bench again.
Just about then, while I was sliding my butt across the plush, in comes the Reverend from the door behind us which connected with his study. He had stopped rumbling there when the men had showed up. Now he moves ponderously around in front of us, and for some moments his wife kept reading whatever poem she was on then, so he waited till she was done. Then he spoke to me.
“Boy,” he said, real kindly. “Boy, it is my opinion that you have labored earnestly at your studies in these three months since coming to this house.” The next thing he done was to falter and stroke his beard. The wonders of this day was never-ceasing. After that first afternoon, he had no more spoke to me than to Mrs. Pendrake in my hearing.
“I do not want you to have the misapprehension,” he finally said, “that we here see life as all duty. Therefore tomorrow, which is Saturday, and if Mrs. Pendrake does not require you and if you are favorably disposed to the project, I should be willing to take you fishing.”
Now, it being November of the year and while not winter as yet the weather was cold and damp and not the time any sane person would have fished for sport, I lost no time in accepting the invite. Add to the other reasons against so doing that I really couldn’t stand the Reverend except when he was eating, and you won’t understand why I did until I say that if he seemed to be in his wife’s debt, I had just now got to feeling in his.
So there we was, out to the creek next day in fairly miserable weather where the air was like a big sponge full of water and no sooner had we reached the stream when someone squeezed it and rain begun to pour down. We had come out in a buckboard, with Lavender driving and only he had sense enough to bring protection against the inclemency, for he had a big toe that was infallible as a weather gauge.
I could see right off that the Reverend didn’t know anything about fishing from the way he put a doughball on the hook-that was what we used, for Lavender claimed he couldn’t find worms in late November. And the day was sufficiently unpleasant to drive off a fellow who was crazy for the sport. But Pendrake had said he was going fishing, and that’s what he fixed to do, the water swirling around his hatbrim and running off his black coat. He was dressed in his usual, by the way, with no provision for leisure.
Lavender offered us his umbrella in insincere fashion, for which I didn’t blame him, but Pendrake said no, he didn’t require it, so Lavender kept it over himself and put a blanket underneath a tree and set there and looked at an illustrated paper someone had give him though he couldn’t read, but seemed to get more out of it than those who could, for he was laughing at it.