# The Dear Little Four-flusher

Extracted from Adventure magazine, May 1918, pp. 22-29, 78-81. Illustrations by Ernest Fuhr may be omitted
The DEAR LITTLE FOUR-FLUSHER
By
Harold Titus
SADIE DEERE'S rather tired blue eyes took in the first line of the new placard on the Welfare Department's bulletin board as she entered the rest room for Hindelbaum's lady employees, and the query caught her attention with a nip.
It was:
“What About Your Vacation?”
Sadie Deere forgot the languor that the first enervating warmth of spring had set in her slim young body. She crossed the room briskly and read:
   “Young men and women on vacations can find delightful employment during July and early August in the cool, fruit laden orchards of the Grand Traverse Region. Cherry pickers combine work with play, enjoy the pleasures of summer resorting, and turn their spare time to profit. Address, Grand Traverse Fruit Exchange, Traverse City, Michigan.”
When, after reading slowly three times, Sadie stood before the mirror, patting into firmness the discs of black hair at her temples, here yes, not quite so tired, stared at the reflection of a small, white face which was lighted with an extraordinary interest. That expression grew through the moment she stood there, developing from interest to anticipation, then to an enthusiasm which spread to her movements. They lost their sluggishness, became quick, almost vivacious; and yet the corners of her vividly red mouth drooped, suggesting a yearning and ache which was deep in her heart and would not be uprooted by any transient buoyancy.
She had sought the rest-room for respite from the button-counter and because the routine was mad drudgery by that sunlight which the Loop smoke could not wholly defeat and by the warmth which the ventilating system could not utterly rob of its suggestion of swelling buds. She had intended to kill a considerable interval there, but she did not. She hurried away, stopping long enough to read the new placard twice again, then slipped down in the elevator to wait on a petulant old lady, with a degree of consideration that sent the customer away in a greatly improved mood.
Throughout that forenoon a phrase stuck in Sadie's mind, repeating itself rhythmically like the laugh of a brook, like the whisper of zephyr-wooed trees, like—like many delightful sounds, until Sadie found her lips shaping the words—“cool, fruit-laden orchards—cool, fruit orchards—” And growing for the moment mundane but thereby adding a trifle to her waxing enthusiasm, she said half aloud, “spare time to profit—to profit——”
The first two hours of the day had dragged; the next pair sped. Just before her lunch another girl, Marjorie Mede, stared at her and said:
“Gosh, Sade, you look like a couple o' million dollars to-day! Why so happy?”
“Spring! Spring and sunshine and vacation time just ahead!”
The other brightened about a fig's worth and yawned. “Vacation!”—tapping her mouth with manicured fingers. “Gosh, I hadn't thought of it. I s'pose it's the same old racket; sand in my shoes, sunburn, mosquito bites until I can't set still, clothes that it broke me to buy ruined, glad to get back to Chicago an' rest up!”
“The regular resorts are tiresome,” Sadie agreed. “I've given up trying to get fun out of them. Besides, when fathers and mothers get to a certain time of life they want quiet, and by going off with them to some place among cool, fruit-laden orchards and all that sort of thing you have a lot more fun.”
The other girl showed marked envy. “Wish I could think so. Them darned frogs singin'—they make me lonesome.” Pause. “Folks—that kind—would make a difference, sure. I'll take mine in the reg'lar way, I expect”—cynically. “Say, Sade, didn't you tell me you had double time this year?”
“Yes. Last summer, you know, I stayed when that tall girl was sick. Then it was too late to try for different reservations. I stayed on and they told me I could take a month this summer.”
She snapped the band about her sales-book and departed for lunch, thinking of the cherries she had once had on a hat.
Fifteen minutes later, as Sadie stood before a cafeteria counter ordering recklessly of cherry pie—which was ten cents—Marjorie Mede was saying to another girl:
“Gosh, I'm kind of jealous of Sade! She takes things so darned easy; don't get worried or tired. She dresses swell an' 's refined. Bet she's got a dandy home with swell folks and all. She's goin' off some'eres with 'em for vacation, off in th' country where it's cool and quiet; to one of these here new farmhouse resorts, I guess. She don't have to work, but they ain't nothing stuck up or four-flushin' about her. Not much!”
II
STUCK up, no. Four-flushing—well, deny that, too. Aspiring, and dreaming aloud are gentler terms and, in all fairness, more apt; so, in those particulars, Marjorie was not far wrong, but in guessing otherwise about Sadie Deere she missed truth by a margin of—oh, of a mile or so!
Now, seeming to be without worry or fatigue were conditions to which Sadie aspired, but she was forced to depend on the stipend of a button-counter attendant to assuage concern and to provide against tired soul and body. Difficult, that. Her want of peace was tenacious and so lusty that it could not be confined by fact. The desire grew into a dream, the dream shaped a specific frame of mind; and Sadie, by the favor of her imagination, led, for abstracted periods, the life she coveted, coming back to realities with a jolt frequently, but always rebounding enough to keep her want at a pitch where it clung to the dream which deceived herself a part of the time, others most of the time.
Dressing well and being refined were properties, the one accomplished by marvelous economies, the other by an alert study of people, in flesh and in fiction. The “dandy home” was a myth, for Sadie was housed in a dark little room close against the elevated. The parents: the mother was represented by a low mound, the worthless father was dead, or lost in the city's shuffle. And the impression of not having to work was rendered by a studied reserve, a well-assumed air of stability which quite covered her everlasting sense of impending want—all except the drooping of the red mouth, recorded early in this story.
And creating by suggestion an impression of conditions which yielded happiness where otherwise there would have been only wretchedness, even though such an achievement causes fact to be—yes, to be reshaped—isn't to be condemned, is it? Especially when the suggestion, as effective with herself as with others, was the only real joy a girl like Sadie could have?
If she attempted a show of superiority, if she had tried to flaunt her blessings before the less fortunate, then it would have been different. But she did neither. She was kindly and sympathetic, and girls like Marjorie could say they were jealous of her and, in the same breath, sing her praises.
When Sadie told the other girl that she had abandoned her delayed vacation of the year before because of resort congestion—well, that was close to an out-and-out fib. Shoes and dresses, not to mention food, had advanced so tremendously that her game of simulating a degree of emancipation from material worries took all her stipend and she could not go away; she welcomed the opportunity to work rather than sit idle and let lonely hours impress her with the contrast between her existence and the life which she dreamed of. Worked, though her limbs and back and eyes and brain ached for relaxation.
The game of pretend kept Sadie going. Before her inventions the noisy little room became a well-appointed chamber in a quiet apartment—gray, with triple mirrors on the dressing-table. Her meals, frugal to an alarming degree, grew into satisfying repasts; her clothing, scant in array and purchased after weeks of debate, represented in her mind merely the favored articles of a well-stocked wardrobe. She did not admit that her long evenings over library books were devices to fight loneliness; instead, she made believe that they were relief from an existence cluttered up by many and insistent friends. And now the hour that she devoted each night to Jessup's “Home-Taught Shorthand and Typewriting” quite lifted her from the round of selling buttons, opened new vistas, put her in the way of delightful opportunities; for she saw herself already an expert stenographer with easy hours and thrice her meager income.
That was the most helpful factor in all this improvising: Sadie actually struggled to make her dreams come true; struggled against impossible handicaps often, but in some things she stood at least a fair chance of attaining the goal. Her aunt—the one who had brought her up after her mother died—had been a stenographer, wan and weary, but nevertheless better off than any shop-girl Sadie had ever known. Sadie was fifteen before the aunt grew so weary that she could not hold up her faded blond head; within a month she was gone, her savings were gone, and Sadie was gone, out in the world of counters. Finally, seeing the limitations, she tried night-school to find a way out, but her bodily strength failed and she fell back on the slower but less exacting Jessup.
A tough struggle. The dreams held her to the task. She play-acted through it all, ever living on the level above her. Sometimes the game grew stale, as it now had. Nearly two years had passed since she had had more than a day's rest at a time. Spring tugged at her energy, made the button-counter even more tedious, and those warm evenings caused her progress in the “Home-Taught” to become discouragingly slow.
She yearned for change. A magazine story crystallized the want, and she commenced to think of sweeping meadows, winding roads, birds, streams, quiet. She pictured herself reveling in the luxury of relaxation. And lo, she was there! On the elevated, where she should have been tired and worn, facing the problems of food and shelter themselves, she saw herself stretched in long, fresh-scented grasses, a neglected book in her hand, eyes languidly watching the scud of summer clouds, ears open for the sounds of insects moving along the sweet, warm earth, a splendid peace thrilling her limbs, making her heart pulse slowly—until it leaped to the bawl of her station.
But vacations such as Sadie wanted come high. She planned—in her earth-walking moments—with determined brows, yet in all directions seeing her way blocked by the paucity of her savings. She talked bravely of a month's leave, yet figure as she might she could not calculate even a week at the nearest and most modest resting place.
So the drooping of her mouth became accentuated, the longing in her blue eyes actually noticeable. Had it not been for the comfort she found in pretending, she would have given up entirely.
Circumstances might have forced a surrender anyhow, had it not been for the invitation posted in the rest-room. Wonderful thing! Cool, fruit-laden orchards! And spare time turned to profit! Compared to such promises, manna in the desert was a detail. The yearning retreated in her eyes, the corners of her mouth perked upward. She assaulted Jessup with fresh vigor, promising herself that by winter she would be equipped to try a change in work—and straightway saw herself, not as a laborer among those heavy-limbed cherry trees, but as a magazine-cover girl in a hammock beneath them, middy blouse, languid eyes and all.
III
SHE went north by boat. The steamer was crowded, but Sadie remained on deck until she was alone, thinking of to-morrow. She leaned her elbows on the high rail along the bow and watched the phosphorescent dash of water away from the ship's side, heard the untimed beat of swells as the prow met and clove them. Occasionally, a spoken word came down to her from the wheel-house; now and and then a door slammed aft or laughter reached her ears; but much of the time she was heedless of these, being surrounded by the people of her imagery who fitted with the warm July wind kissing her cheek, with the pulse of the screw, with the white stars. It was one of the rare intervals when Sadie was not aspiring concretely, when she lifted her wings of romance and sailed through a void of delicious improbability—she stared into the east where the star points grew dim as they hung low on the horizon and heard a voice—a man's voice—saying in her ear: “Over there is the coast of Africa.”
She sighed; because, for the interval, she was Hope Langham, still the statuesque Gibson girl, though advanced two even decades in attire, standing beside Robert Clay in the last pages of “Soldiers of Fortune.” She was enveloped in a wonderful glow: relief at stormy days peacefully closed, loved by an incredible man, steaming up a tropic sea toward matrimony and the life her lover pictured as they leaned against the dingy coaster's rail. For moments Sadie was so. Finally she drew back a strand of her hair that, loosed by the wind, had brushed Clay's cheek—until that gesture roused her and, half back in reality, turned and moved down the pitch of the deck toward her stateroom.
IV
IN the country, Sadie knew, the day's activity gathered headway earlier than it does in cities. Yet in that hour when she walked up from the dock she was unprepared for the intensity of purpose which centered about the headquarters of the Fruit Exchange. Motor trucks, refrigerator cars dripping water, cords of cases showing the red and yellow and black fruit through their ventilating spaces; men and boys, lifting and passing and stamping and checking until she felt lost, of little consequence, and was taken with a quick fear that no one might have attention for her.
But when she asked a man at a desk if he could tell her where cherry pickers were wanted he looked up quickly, and another man, perspiring even in that young sunshine, stopped his rush for the door and looked sharply at her.
“Bet your life!” he grinned and said. “Are you all of you?”
Sadie smiled timidly and admitted that she was.
“Ezra Hornblow telephoned for pickers last night,” he said to the man at the desk. “Get him on the line. She can catch this truck back if you hurry.”
Ezra Hornblow! What a name to conjure and cartoon with! In Sadie's mind, as she perched beside the driver of the rumbling truck, she pictured this Ezra: straw-hat on his head, straw in his mouth, overalls tucked into boots, Adam's apple, bucolic and kindly. She smiled at the type she visioned, then forgot it as they stormed through town and swung along the bay shore.
Cool, fruit-laden orchards! A whole panorama of them! Sadie, with half-closed eyes, breathed the air deeply. The road was so white, the dust they raised so glorified by the sun; the verdure as green as the roofs of bungalow's in architects' folders, the sky a smooth blue, as vivid as the bay they saw stretched far below them as they topped a long grade. Orchards on all sides, on the hills across the water; old orchards, with spreading branches; youngster trees in precise rows, upstanding, precocious with their first offerings of fruit clustering among the prim, stiff little twigs. Farmhouses sheltered by groves slipped past, open doors offering invitation to peaceful rooms. A woman in a sunbonnet driving a runabout gave them the road. A little girl, hand-throttling clover blossoms, scampered for safety as they rumbled toward her, and Sadie felt her heart tighten at memory of her own babyhood, in a city street. At a mail-box a lass in a pink-checkered apron watched them, the sun in her golden hair, its tan on her blooming cheeks. She was, by guess, Sadie's age, and Sadie felt a leap of envy for her. To live in a quiet house among trees away from an elevated, to wear an apron, to feel the sun, to—some day—wear a sunbonnet and drive a runabout! Ah, that would be life!
Then the truck was gone and Sadie Deere, queerly excited, was walking briskly down the private road the driver had indicated. Her hat was a wide-brimmed mushroom, white straw, with a black velvet band. The smock was chartreuse dotted with modest black embroidery at the wrists, cut properly in a low V, for her throat was molded to be seen. Her skirt was black, peg topped. Her boot-silk stockings—fifty-four cents—lay close against the trim contour of her ankles, and the new gun-metal pumps—two years old in model and thereby available—made her small feet seem even more shapely. She carried an imitation calfskin bag, purchased at ten off in the bargain basement, which would stand several wettings, even without betraying its true self.
A small figure, peculiarly out of place, sophisticated, citified, set down there in a tree-shaded lane. She realized again her apartness from the setting as she came upon the buildings. She had a confused impression of maple-trees and tents and many people trooping off into orchards, of white horses and strange, implements and reluctantly moving cows, beehives, sunflowers, of a guinea hen's cry—which she could not catalogue—turkeys, a bleating calf. And, of a sudden, gazing at her from a pair of very fine brown eyes which laughed ever so subtly as they took her in from hat to pumps, was a young man, capable-looking despite his youth, bronzed, bare-armed, clothes toil-stained yet worn with an air, duck hat back on his large, blond head.
“Good morning,” he said, and his wide, kindly mouth seemed to be laughing.
“Good morning,” Sadie replied. “Is the proprietor in?”
“I must be the man you're after.” He laughed outright, as if immensely amused.
“Are you Mr. Hornblow? Mr. Ezra Hornblow?”—incredulity in tone, accent, and widening eyes, for this man was no prototype of the Ezra she had conceived.
“Guilty as charged! What can the the proprietor do for you?” He stressed the self-designating word slightly and his eyes twinkled.
“At the Exchange office they told me you wanted cherry-pickers.”
“Are you experienced?” he asked, his gaze discomfiting in its steadfastness, yet pleasant, too.
Sadie hesitated. Did one need experience to revel in the luxury of these cool, fruit-laden orchards? Was there a possibility that, for lack of training, she might fail to make this dream come true? If that was so, oh, how she coveted experience! And quite before she realized, she had summoned a smile and was saying:
“Why, I never spend my vacations any other way than picking cherries. It's the best rest I've ever found. Besides, being born a country girl makes it easier, you know”—with a tug in her throat as she unconsciously recalled the scampering child with the clover nosegay.
Not really a lie, was it? No! The country was in her blood; she so envied those sun-blessed children that, for the hour, she was their kind; nothing in that moment could have convinced Sadie that she had not picked flowers along roadsides at three, that she had not worn pink-checkered aprons and gone bare-headed no longer ago than her last vacation period.
Besides, she must have convinced him, she reasoned, for he laughed again and looked her over curiously and became serious: “I don't think there's room for you in the tents, so I'll have to get Mrs. Whitney to take care of you. She has a spare room.”
As they passed the tents Sadie was glad they were crowded. Beds were made on the ground, many slept in each shelter. Healthy, perhaps. but strange; too strange.
The man turned her over to Mrs. Whitney, a diminutive woman with white hair, who met them at her kitchen door, and while Sadie was putting her bag into the up-stairs room they gave her—a room calcimined blue, with white curtains and a high, white bed—she heard his voice in the kitchen and his suppressed laugh as he went out. She wondered sharply just why.
Then Mrs. Whitney was climbing the stairs and looking her clothing over and dear-childing her with gentle, welcome rebuke. Twenty minutes later, clad in an apron that covered her from throat to ankle, wearing cotton stockings from the woman's darning basket, and frayed but sufficiently fitting sneakers instead of the high-heeled pumps, Sadie Deere, eyes a trifle doubtful with all their enthusiasm, walked down the rows of trees and sought Ezra Hornblow as he directed the early activities of his picking crew.
“Right here,” he said, placing a ladder. “Get your shears and pail at the packing table.”
Then he was gone and Sadie was glad. To commence a strange work before him, to ask a question, she feared might be her undoing. She had eyes, though, observant as they were blue.
Cherries aren't picked at all in the Grand Traverse Region, she discovered. The stems are clipped with shears. They are dropped into a tin pail which hangs from your waist and at a packing-table are sorted and crated.
It was a relief to know that much. She watched some of the pickers, silent, intent, speeding up, snipping and dropping with mechanical regularity, filling pails with astonishing rapidity. She saw others dawdling; and still others doing nothing.
She would be good, she told herself. She tried hard, undismayed by the first slowness, and soon she had forgotten the seriousness of her errand, the fact that she must be more self-supporting while on this task, forgot all else but that she was in a cool, fruit-laden orchard—and that Ezra Hornblow would talk to her again, probably.
Cool it was, with a northwest breeze coming over the hill that hid the bay. And fruit-laden for sure. They picked Black Tartarians, big pointed cherries with a flat cheek, thin skins restraining an unbelievably sweet juice and tender pulp. Their thick clusters weighted down the long branches, in rich contrast to the deep green of foliage, Beyond were rows of trees bearing light-colored cherries, pink and yellow cheeked, still holding a greenish cast, evidence of immaturity. Then more red ones, of a hue as yet too light, Other trees, in reaching rows, smaller, of different foliage: sour cherries, acre after acre of them, drooping with masses of fruit that would be reckoned in tons before the season closed.
And as she worked, losing her awkwardness, stopping to poke a plump cherry between her even teeth now and then, Sadie Deere thought that after all, the dream of a month in a middy blouse and a hammock was tawdry compared to this; she lifted her chin, to let the wind brush her throat. She was supremely happy, happier than she had ever been in her most ecstatic dreams; so happy that once she covertly, not without a qualm, pinched a finger with her shears to see if she might not awaken.
He spoke suddenly: “Well, how goes it?”
He had come on her silently through the well-tilled soil and stood looking over her shoulder, the suggestion of a laugh still in his eyes.
“Oh fine,” Sadie laughed. “Much better than sitting at a typewriter all day.”
She felt a sudden contempt for that long-coveted desk and note-book.
“Yes, it is,” he said abstractedly, watching her work. “I notice that all you girls who are stenographers or play the piano do mighty well. Your fingers are intelligent. Your occupation put with your experience should make you mighty fast.”
She looked up sharply, wondering at the queer quality in his voice, but he had turned away.
That day she picked three crates of cherries, seventy-five cents' worth. She heard one of the women whom she had judged a sluggard say she had picked seven. Realizing this, Sadie recalled the young man's voice as he commented on her ability and an uneasy suspicion worried her.
The rest of the pickers cooked their own food on common stoves, Sadie ate at the Whitney table and that evening she discovered that Hornblow ate there, too. But he was at the far end, and between them were a half-dozen farm hands. Twice during that meal the girl saw Ezra's eyes on her, studying her while he talked to the men. Sadie helped with the dishes and learned much about her employer. He was alone; his mother had died before he went to the Agricultural College, and his father in the spring of his last year. He lived in the big gray house they could see through the trees. He was a good, steady boy with a great heart, and his only fault was working so hard that he often skipped his meals.
Sadie found herself hoping that he would not skip any more meals during her four weeks. Four wrecks! She ached at the thought of the shortness of the time.
That night was a wonderful experience. A fading impression of white curtains waving a good-night blessing and a heavenly blank; no crash of the elevated to make her toss, no quick startings to half wakefulness, no cramped, tense postures while she slept, and, in the morning, no deadening desire to sleep again, no sense of vitality unrestored. She stretched and found her muscles sore. She remembered the look in Ezra Hornblow's eyes—the half-laughing look—and thrilled! Yet she dressed in an uncomfortable mood that made her forget the sun.
That morning, on her way to the orchard, a waddling gander hissed at her and she detoured in disorder. Disorder grew to confusion as she saw Hornblow laughing at her from the barn.
“City life has made you shy!” he called, and she went on, oppressed by an intuitive sense that he was thinking of her boasted childhood on the farm.
She shut her teeth and the blue of her eyes darkened.
“Well, I will be experienced!” she vowed to herself.
She spent a quarter of an hour with the best picker of all, watching his methods and that evening, blowing on the thumb where the shears had raised a blister, Sadie counted her tally. She had picked seven and a half crates. Almost two dollars' worth.
That night she dreamed of snipping irate geese from swaying branches with shears which it taxed her strength to lift. Also, of brown eyes laughing at her.
By the end of the first week Sadie Deere was second to none of the pickers for speed. Also, though she fought it, she was rapidly developing a dangerous admiration for Ezra Hornblow.
Heretofore, in Sadie's experience, men had occupied a negligible place. As a character in fiction, a nice, aspiring girl like Sadie should have looked up from her button counter to meet the wondering eyes of a young man whose financial rating was comparatively as high as the horse-power of his waiting twelve-cylinder roadster and who had come to match a cut-steel button for his sister. He should have forgotten his errand in the giddiness engendered by sight of such beauty in humble service. He should have taken her from the store, passing his chauffeur with a covert nod of dismissal, and gone to a meager lunch. She should have loved him for his simplicity, never knowing he was of North Shore extraction until he ushered her into his superb home and waited while the sister, who proved to be perfectly delightful, welcomed her with a kiss.
But no such thing ever happened to Sadie. So she had given up boys for the time being. She reasoned that when “Jessup's Home Taught” had been mastered, her new level would bring her in contact with the proper sort.
But now! At meal-times she listened with hungry ears for Ezra Hornblow's words; during the day she watched him, thrilled by his manner of authority, gentle but firm and assured. And by the beginning of the second week she was commencing to imagine herself living forever in cool, fruit-laden orchards, loved by a man like——
And that was as far as she ever permitted the vision to take shape in her own consciousness. In spite of all her imaginings Sadie had a regard for probability. She realized—with a heart-sinking that caused her to dismiss the thought hurriedly each time it presented itself—that Hornblow had deduced her misrepresentations from events which followed her coming. That forever forbade him taking her seriously and as for Ezra—well, he was so superior to any man she had ever dreamed of, living a life of such great charm, that, with all her practise, she could not have dreamed up to the part of his beloved had she let herself try. And she must not try, Sadie told herself. She had an inherent dread of withered hopes.
Thwarted there, she opened a new existence forthwith. It helped quiet the discomfort she felt each time she; told herself that to dream of Hornblow was futile.
“Was there mail for me?” she asked him one noon when he came in from the box with papers and letters.
“Not a mail,” he said.
“Well, that man's getting mighty independent,” Sadie laughed.
Ezra looked at her and that knowing light, which had not shown itself for days, flickered in his eyes again; then disappeared.
“I should think that a fellow who had the privilege of writing to as nice a girl as you are would see to it you didn't have to wait for letters.”
Sadie blushed at the flattery.
“He's mighty busy down in Chicago.”
“Well, next year you'll have to bring this friend of yours up to work for me. Would he like this hayseed life?”
“Like it?” she cried, her eyes snapping. “I guess a fellow who'll slave in a dirty, noisy city, skipping vacations and all, just so he can buy a farm some day would like it!”
“Oh, he's that sort, is he?” Hornblow asked.
But after Sadie had bet that he was and Hornblow had gone, her mouth drooped threateningly. The yearning, the hopelessness was unmistakable in her eyes.
One Sunday afternoon Ezra asked Sadie to ride in his car with him. “Business trip,” he explained, “only a couple of hours.”
They returned at four, and when Sadie thanked Hornblow she felt dangerously lonely. She went to her room, so quiet in the Sabbath hush, and rather too warm. She looked into the mirror and told herself that some day they would have a farm and a Ford and Sunday afternoon rides. That alluring picture plucked her spirits from their sagging for a time and she went to sit under a maple, Jessup open at Lesson VII, trying to make her eyes understand the paragraphs. Finally, a sob swam up from somewhere and she shut her lids to squeeze back the tears and lay down in the grass. Her make-believe lover was so intangible! Jessup and all it meant got in the way of any future there under the trees. All this was so sweet and peaceful; living here always, just a friend—no more—of Ezra Hornblow would be so heavenly—and it was all so far away, so very far. She went to sleep.
Later, Hornblow discovered her and passed cautiously on, but he did see the redness about lid and nostril and the rudimentary lesson in shorthand, as the unconscious fingers still held the book open. He entered his house and sat a long time, looking out at the distant waters of the bay, now and then smiling to himself.
One evening, Sadie sat with Hornblow on the porch of his tenant-house watching the lightning play across the sky, and his friendly talk was like flashes of light to her starved heart. Another evening, for an hour, she helped him check his accounts, her eyes intent on his handsome face. The woman who had been head of the packing-table became ill and left, and Ezra put Sadie in her place, where during those last rushing days, she was his right-hand helper.
In spite of her conviction that she must prevent it, a hope began to find root in Sadie's heart, a hope that Hornblow thus singled her out, not wholly because of her skill, but because she interested him. This hope fed on the fact that now and then she looked up to see him staring at her and that the laughter she had at first found in his eyes was no longer there. Then, at the end of one of the last trying afternoons he said to her, “I wish every girl who came up this road turned out to he as good help as you are.”
Her hope wilted. “Every girl!” He saw in her only a female hand. His one wish was that others might he like her.
That moment marked a crisis, a turning-point. Somehow, when she arose next morning, Sadie's spirits did not rebound to the glory of life in the cool, fruit-laden orchards. She felt sodden, depressed. The morning was gray, too, and hurrying through breakfast, she did not see Ezra's worried eyes as they roved between the gathering clouds and her.
Rain came in the middle of the forenoon and the enforced idleness made Sadie as dreary as the day itself. Late in the afternoon the sun broke through, making jewels for the trees, and the washed wind blew out of the south, warm and comforting. Hornblow smiled at supper and after the meal said to Sadie: “Won't you play with me to-night? I'll take you to the movies in town or anywhere you like.”
“Oh, I can't!” Sadie protested, afraid to allow herself the precious hour, knowing that it was only another taste of the dream that would not come true. “You see, I——”
“Oh, that chap won't care, will he?” Ezra broke in, smiling at her with a recurrence of the laughing light in his eye and a new quality in his manner. “You see, I handle the mail, going and coming; I don't think he has a right to care. I—don't think you really care. Won't you come along, just this once? You'll be going soon——”
“Oh, don't!” she broke in hoarsely. “Don't! Don't!”—her voice weakening as she fled up the stairs.
Had his way of telling her that she had failed to deceive him on another count not been so dismaying, Sadie might have seen the want in his eyes, heard the earnest longing in his voice; but all she knew was that he had struck down her last house of cards, had dissipated her last air-castle; over and over she told herself that: he had found her out—he had found her out—until she slept.
After breakfast he approached, his face grave, and said: “Oh, say, now, I'm sorry. I'm such a bungler——”
But Sadie interrupted: “Please, Mr. Hornblow!”
“But I owe you an apology!”
“Don't—or I'll have to go away.”
Troubled, he turned from her. Troubled, Sadie went on with her task. And still troubled, she entered on her last day in the cool orchard, no longer fruit-laden. In the blocks of trees which had borne earlier in the season, nourishing cover crops were already springing up, the last rows to lie stripped of their fruit hung listless, like fagged toilers whose stint is over and who lop heartlessly before recommencing their tasks. The life seemed to have gone from the place. And surely, the spirit had gone from Sadie's heart.
The pickers were to dance that night in the big barn.
“Of course, you'll come,” Ezra said to her. “You go in the morning. I want to talk to you before that time.”
She mumbled an assent, though she doubted her courage. To lie with him, to dance with him, would be far better than the best of her old dreams, but when, standing in her room debating with herself, the first music came from the phonograph across the way and the clatter of tongues gave way to a measured scraping of feet, she cried out:
“I can't go. He knows I'm a sham—a four-flusher. He wants to—he'll want to be kind to me, and make me stop lying—I couldn't stand it!”
So she flung herself on the bed and clutched the pillow in fevered fists and opened the wells of her grief.
She ached dully after giving vent to her emotion. She knew that she could never look at Ezra Hornblow again; knew that every memory of him was a wrench at her heart. She wanted to be away where he could never see her, to find refuge from the torment of regret that would come at sight of him.
She packed her bag by moonlight. She patted fondly the aprons she had worn through those weeks in the cool, fruit-laden orchards. She tucked Jessup away with a pang in her throat, for now that dream seemed as hopeless as the others. She put on her pumps and her mushroom hat, and paused at the head of the stairs to listen.
It was the last dance and the “contraption” that furnished the music was grinding out “Home, Sweet Home.” What a mockery to the girl, running away to Hindelbaum's! A home—a sweet home! She thought of the room against the elevated and wanted to be there quickly, to cling close to what she was, to stop tantalizing herself by these imaginings of what might have been.
She stumbled down the stairs and sprinted, her legs flying up the road to be out on the highway, trudging toward the town, before the dancers came from the barn.
Footsteps behind her; a voice calling her name. She turned a startled face over her shoulder and ran faster.
“Sadie!” he called. “Sadie, come back—Sadie!” But not until his hand reached out and shut down firmly on her shoulder did she stop.
“Don't! Oh, don't!” she begged, twisting to be free.
He shook her roughly and made her face him. “What are you doing?” he demanded breathlessly, his voice trembling.
“Go—going away!”
“Without letting me talk to you. Without letting me tell you what I've got to tell you, Sadie?”
She dropped the bag and lifted her hands to her face.
“Oh, please, don't!” she begged. “I know what it is! You're kind. I know I shouldn't have done it to you. I know you found me out. I'm only a fo—four—just a fo—four-flusher!”
Then she was tight against him and his arms were stilling her shoulders and his face was in her hair, for he had knocked off her hat.
“Dear little four-flusher!” he whispered. “Dear Sadie Deere! Why, haven't you seen that I had to have you all along? Couldn't you know? And I wasn't sure until just the other day that it was all a game of pretend with you—you're such a good pretender. I thought maybe there was somebody else. I knew that with the other things you were only dreaming out loud because you wanted 'em so badly you couldn't do without them. Your summers picking cherries, growing up on a farm. I knew! I know all about Jessup, too, and you trying to be a stenographer. But the lover. You see, that meant so much to me I was afraid to decide. He was just a dream boy, too, wasn't he? Wasn't he, Sadie?”—shaking her gently. “And won't you change him for an alive one? For one who has a farm and who needs a Sadie? Can't you?”
She made a funny sound in her throat and though she would not look at him she wrapped her arms tightly about his neck. He kissed her hungrily.
“I'll never pretend again,” she promised in a strained voice. “Never; honest!”
“We won't have to, sweetheart. It won't be necessary to pretend happiness. It's ours—right here!”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1967, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 56 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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