A Sappho of Green Springs

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A SAPPHO OF GREEN SPRINGS


By Bret Harte




CONTENTS


A SAPPHO OF GREEN SPRINGS

THE CHATELAINE OF BURNT RIDGE

THROUGH THE SANTA CLARA WHEAT

A MAECENAS OF THE PACIFIC SLOPE





A SAPPHO OF GREEN SPRINGS


CHAPTER I


"Come in," said the editor.

The door of the editorial room of the "Excelsior Magazine" began to
creak painfully under the hesitating pressure of an uncertain and
unfamiliar hand. This continued until with a start of irritation the
editor faced directly about, throwing his leg over the arm of his chair
with a certain youthful dexterity. With one hand gripping its back,
the other still grasping a proof-slip, and his pencil in his mouth, he
stared at the intruder.

The stranger, despite his hesitating entrance, did not seem in the least
disconcerted. He was a tall man, looking even taller by reason of the
long formless overcoat he wore, known as a "duster," and by a long
straight beard that depended from his chin, which he combed with two
reflective fingers as he contemplated the editor. The red dust which
still lay in the creases of his garment and in the curves of his soft
felt hat, and left a dusty circle like a precipitated halo around his
feet, proclaimed him, if not a countryman, a recent inland importation
by coach. "Busy?" he said, in a grave but pleasant voice. "I kin wait.
Don't mind ME. Go on."

The editor indicated a chair with his disengaged hand and plunged again
into his proof-slips. The stranger surveyed the scant furniture and
appointments of the office with a look of grave curiosity, and then,
taking a chair, fixed an earnest, penetrating gaze on the editor's
profile. The editor felt it, and, without looking up, said--

"Well, go on."

"But you're busy. I kin wait."

"I shall not be less busy this morning. I can listen."

"I want you to give me the name of a certain person who writes in your
magazine."

The editor's eye glanced at the second right-hand drawer of his desk.
It did not contain the names of his contributors, but what in the
traditions of his office was accepted as an equivalent,--a revolver.
He had never yet presented either to an inquirer. But he laid aside his
proofs, and, with a slight darkening of his youthful, discontented face,
said, "What do you want to know for?"

The question was so evidently unexpected that the stranger's face
colored slightly, and he hesitated. The editor meanwhile, without
taking his eyes from the man, mentally ran over the contents of the last
magazine. They had been of a singularly peaceful character. There seemed
to be nothing to justify homicide on his part or the stranger's. Yet
there was no knowing, and his questioner's bucolic appearance by no
means precluded an assault. Indeed, it had been a legend of the office
that a predecessor had suffered vicariously from a geological hammer
covertly introduced into a scientific controversy by an irate professor.

"As we make ourselves responsible for the conduct of the magazine,"
continued the young editor, with mature severity, "we do not give up the
names of our contributors. If you do not agree with their opinions"--

"But I DO," said the stranger, with his former composure, "and I reckon
that's why I want to know who wrote those verses called 'Underbrush,'
signed 'White Violet,' in your last number. They're pow'ful pretty."

The editor flushed slightly, and glanced instinctively around for any
unexpected witness of his ludicrous mistake. The fear of ridicule was
uppermost in his mind, and he was more relieved at his mistake not being
overheard than at its groundlessness.

"The verses ARE pretty," he said, recovering himself, with a critical
air, "and I am glad you like them. But even then, you know, I could not
give you the lady's name without her permission. I will write to her and
ask it, if you like."

The actual fact was that the verses had been sent to him anonymously
from a remote village in the Coast Range,--the address being the
post-office and the signature initials.

The stranger looked disturbed. "Then she ain't about here anywhere?" he
said, with a vague gesture. "She don't belong to the office?"

The young editor beamed with tolerant superiority: "No, I am sorry to
say."

"I should like to have got to see her and kinder asked her a
few questions," continued the stranger, with the same reflective
seriousness. "You see, it wasn't just the rhymin' o' them verses,--and
they kinder sing themselves to ye, don't they?--it wasn't the chyce o'
words,--and I reckon they allus hit the idee in the centre shot every
time,--it wasn't the idees and moral she sort o' drew out o' what she
was tellin',--but it was the straight thing itself,--the truth!"

"The truth?" repeated the editor.

"Yes, sir. I've bin there. I've seen all that she's seen in the
brush--the little flicks and checkers o' light and shadder down in
the brown dust that you wonder how it ever got through the dark of the
woods, and that allus seems to slip away like a snake or a lizard if you
grope. I've heard all that she's heard there--the creepin', the sighin',
and the whisperin' through the bracken and the ground-vines of all that
lives there."

"You seem to be a poet yourself," said the editor, with a patronizing
smile.

"I'm a lumberman, up in Mendocino," returned the stranger, with sublime
naivete. "Got a mill there. You see, sightin' standin' timber and
selectin' from the gen'ral show of the trees in the ground and the lay
of roots hez sorter made me take notice." He paused. "Then," he added,
somewhat despondingly, "you don't know who she is?"

"No," said the editor, reflectively; "not even if it is really a WOMAN
who writes."

"Eh?"

"Well, you see, 'White Violet' may as well be the nom de plume of a man
as of a woman, especially if adopted for the purpose of mystification.
The handwriting, I remember, WAS more boyish than feminine."

"No," returned the stranger doggedly, "it wasn't no MAN. There's ideas
and words there that only come from a woman: baby-talk to the birds, you
know, and a kind of fearsome keer of bugs and creepin' things that don't
come to a man who wears boots and trousers. Well," he added, with a
return to his previous air of resigned disappointment, "I suppose you
don't even know what she's like?"

"No," responded the editor, cheerfully. Then, following an idea
suggested by the odd mingling of sentiment and shrewd perception in
the man before him, he added: "Probably not at all like anything you
imagine. She may be a mother with three or four children; or an old maid
who keeps a boarding-house; or a wrinkled school-mistress; or a chit
of a school-girl. I've had some fair verses from a red-haired girl of
fourteen at the Seminary," he concluded with professional coolness.

The stranger regarded him with the naive wonder of an inexperienced
man. Having paid this tribute to his superior knowledge, he regained his
previous air of grave perception. "I reckon she ain't none of them. But
I'm keepin' you from your work. Good-by. My name's Bowers--Jim Bowers,
of Mendocino. If you're up my way, give me a call. And if you do write
to this yer 'White Violet,' and she's willin', send me her address."

He shook the editor's hand warmly--even in its literal significance
of imparting a good deal of his own earnest caloric to the editor's
fingers--and left the room. His footfall echoed along the passage and
died out, and with it, I fear, all impression of his visit from the
editor's mind, as he plunged again into the silent task before him.

Presently he was conscious of a melodious humming and a light leisurely
step at the entrance of the hall. They continued on in an easy harmony
and unaffected as the passage of a bird. Both were pleasant and both
familiar to the editor. They belonged to Jack Hamlin, by vocation a
gambler, by taste a musician, on his way from his apartments on
the upper floor, where he had just risen, to drop into his friend's
editorial room and glance over the exchanges, as was his habit before
breakfast.

The door opened lightly. The editor was conscious of a faint odor of
scented soap, a sensation of freshness and cleanliness, the impression
of a soft hand like a woman's on his shoulder and, like a woman's,
momentarily and playfully caressing, the passage of a graceful shadow
across his desk, and the next moment Jack Hamlin was ostentatiously
dusting a chair with an open newspaper preparatory to sitting down.

"You ought to ship that office-boy of yours, if he can't keep things
cleaner," he said, suspending his melody to eye grimly the dust which
Mr. Bowers had shaken from his departing feet.

The editor did not look up until he had finished revising a difficult
paragraph. By that time Mr. Hamlin had comfortably settled himself on
a cane sofa, and, possibly out of deference to his surroundings, had
subdued his song to a peculiarly low, soft, and heartbreaking whistle as
he unfolded a newspaper. Clean and faultless in his appearance, he had
the rare gift of being able to get up at two in the afternoon with
much of the dewy freshness and all of the moral superiority of an early
riser.

"You ought to have been here just now, Jack," said the editor.

"Not a row, old man, eh?" inquired Jack, with a faint accession of
interest.

"No," said the editor, smiling. Then he related the incidents of the
previous interview, with a certain humorous exaggeration which was part
of his nature. But Jack did not smile.

"You ought to have booted him out of the ranch on sight," he said. "What
right had he to come here prying into a lady's affairs?--at least a lady
as far as HE knows. Of course she's some old blowzy with frumpled hair
trying to rope in a greenhorn with a string of words and phrases,"
concluded Jack, carelessly, who had an equally cynical distrust of the
sex and of literature.

"That's about what I told him," said the editor.

"That's just what you SHOULDN'T have told him," returned Jack. "You
ought to have stuck up for that woman as if she'd been your own mother.
Lord! you fellows don't know how to run a magazine. You ought to let ME
sit on that chair and tackle your customers."

"What would you have done, Jack?" asked the editor, much amused to
find that his hitherto invincible hero was not above the ordinary human
weakness of offering advice as to editorial conduct.

"Done?" reflected Jack. "Well, first, sonny, I shouldn't keep a revolver
in a drawer that I had to OPEN to get at."

"But what would you have said?"

"I should simply have asked him what was the price of lumber at
Mendocino," said Jack, sweetly, "and when he told me, I should have said
that the samples he was offering out of his own head wouldn't suit. You
see, you don't want any trifling in such matters. You write well enough,
my boy," continued he, turning over his paper, "but what you're lacking
in is editorial dignity. But go on with your work. Don't mind me."

Thus admonished, the editor again bent over his desk, and his friend
softly took up his suspended song. The editor had not proceeded far in
his corrections when Jack's voice again broke the silence.

"Where are those d----d verses, anyway?"

Without looking up, the editor waved his pencil towards an uncut copy of
the "Excelsior Magazine" lying on the table.

"You don't suppose I'm going to READ them, do you?" said Jack,
aggrievedly. "Why don't you say what they're about? That's your business
as editor."

But that functionary, now wholly lost and wandering in the non-sequitur
of an involved passage in the proof before him, only waved an impatient
remonstrance with his pencil and knit his brows. Jack, with a sigh, took
up the magazine.

A long silence followed, broken only by the hurried rustling of sheets
of copy and an occasional exasperated start from the editor. The sun
was already beginning to slant a dusty beam across his desk; Jack's
whistling had long since ceased. Presently, with an exclamation of
relief, the editor laid aside the last proof-sheet and looked up.

Jack Hamlin had closed the magazine, but with one hand thrown over the
back of the sofa he was still holding it, his slim forefinger between
its leaves to keep the place, and his handsome profile and dark
lashes lifted towards the window. The editor, smiling at this unwonted
abstraction, said quietly,--

"Well, what do you think of them?"

Jack rose, laid the magazine down, settled his white waistcoat with both
hands, and lounged towards his friend with audacious but slightly
veiled and shining eyes. "They sort of sing themselves to you," he said,
quietly, leaning beside the editor's desk, and looking down upon him.
After a pause he said, "Then you don't know what she's like?"

"That's what Mr. Bowers asked me," remarked the editor.

"D--n Bowers!"

"I suppose you also wish me to write and ask for permission to give you
her address?" said the editor, with great gravity.

"No," said Jack, coolly. "I propose to give it to YOU within a week, and
you will pay me with a breakfast. I should like to have it said that I
was once a paid contributor to literature. If I don't give it to you,
I'll stand you a dinner, that's all."

"Done!" said the editor. "And you know nothing of her now?"

"No," said Jack, promptly. "Nor you?"

"No more than I have told you."

"That'll do. So long!" And Jack, carefully adjusting his glossy hat over
his curls at an ominously wicked angle, sauntered lightly from the room.
The editor, glancing after his handsome figure and hearing him take
up his pretermitted whistle as he passed out, began to think that the
contingent dinner was by no means an inevitable prospect.

Howbeit, he plunged once more into his monotonous duties. But the
freshness of the day seemed to have departed with Jack, and the
later interruptions of foreman and publisher were of a more practical
character. It was not until the post arrived that the superscription on
one of the letters caught his eye, and revived his former interest.
It was the same hand as that of his unknown contributor's
manuscript--ill-formed and boyish. He opened the envelope. It contained
another poem with the same signature, but also a note--much longer than
the brief lines that accompanied the first contribution--was scrawled
upon a separate piece of paper. This the editor opened first, and read
the following, with an amazement that for the moment dominated all other
sense:--


MR. EDITOR,--I see you have got my poetry in. But I don't see the
spondulix that oughter follow. Perhaps you don't know where to send it.
Then I'll tell you. Send the money to Lock Box 47, Green Springs P.
O., per Wells Fargo's Express, and I'll get it there, on account of my
parents not knowing. We're very high-toned, and they would think it's
low making poetry for papers. Send amount usually paid for poetry in
your papers. Or may be you think I make poetry for nothing? That's where
you slip up!

Yours truly,

WHITE VIOLET.

P. S.--If you don't pay for poetry, send this back. It's as good as what
you did put in, and is just as hard to make. You hear me? that's me--all
the time.

WHITE VIOLET.


The editor turned quickly to the new contribution for some corroboration
of what he felt must be an extraordinary blunder. But no! The few lines
that he hurriedly read breathed the same atmosphere of intellectual
repose, gentleness, and imagination as the first contribution. And yet
they were in the same handwriting as the singular missive, and both were
identical with the previous manuscript.

Had he been the victim of a hoax, and were the verses not original? No;
they were distinctly original, local in color, and even local in the use
of certain old English words that were common in the Southwest. He had
before noticed the apparent incongruity of the handwriting and the text,
and it was possible that for the purposes of disguise the poet might
have employed an amanuensis. But how could he reconcile the incongruity
of the mercenary and slangy purport of the missive itself with the
mental habit of its author? Was it possible that these inconsistent
qualities existed in the one individual? He smiled grimly as he thought
of his visitor Bowers and his friend Jack. He was startled as he
remembered the purely imaginative picture he had himself given to the
seriously interested Bowers of the possible incongruous personality of
the poetess.

Was he quite fair in keeping this from Jack? Was it really honorable, in
view of their wager? It is to be feared that a very human enjoyment of
Jack's possible discomfiture quite as much as any chivalrous friendship
impelled the editor to ring eventually for the office-boy.

"See if Mr. Hamlin is in his rooms."

The editor then sat down, and wrote rapidly as follows:--


DEAR MADAM,--You are as right as you are generous in supposing that
only ignorance of your address prevented the manager from previously
remitting the honorarium for your beautiful verses. He now begs to send
it to you in the manner you have indicated. As the verses have attracted
deserved attention, I have been applied to for your address. Should
you care to submit it to me to be used at my discretion, I shall feel
honored by your confidence. But this is a matter left entirely to your
own kindness and better judgment. Meantime, I take pleasure in accepting
"White Violet's" present contribution, and remain, dear madam, your
obedient servant,

THE EDITOR.


The boy returned as he was folding the letter. Mr. Hamlin was not only
NOT in his rooms, but, according to his negro servant Pete, had left
town an hour ago for a few days in the country.

"Did he say where?" asked the editor, quickly.

"No, sir: he didn't know."

"Very well. Take this to the manager." He addressed the letter, and,
scrawling a few hieroglyphics on a memorandum-tag, tore it off, and
handed it with the letter to the boy.

An hour later he stood in the manager's office. "The next number is
pretty well made up," he said, carelessly, "and I think of taking a day
or two off."

"Certainly," said the manager. "It will do you good. Where do you think
you'll go?"

"I haven't quite made up my mind."


CHAPTER II


"Hullo!" said Jack Hamlin.

He had halted his mare at the edge of an abrupt chasm. It did not appear
to be fifty feet across, yet its depth must have been nearly two
hundred to where the hidden mountain-stream, of which it was the banks,
alternately slipped, tumbled, and fell with murmuring and monotonous
regularity. One or two pine-trees growing on the opposite edge, loosened
at the roots, had tilted their straight shafts like spears over the
abyss, and the top of one, resting on the upper branches of a sycamore a
few yards from him, served as an aerial bridge for the passage of a boy
of fourteen to whom Mr. Hamlin's challenge was addressed.

The boy stopped midway in his perilous transit, and, looking down upon
the horseman, responded, coolly, "Hullo, yourself!"

"Is that the only way across this infernal hole, or the one you prefer
for exercise?" continued Hamlin, gravely.

The boy sat down on a bough, allowing his bare feet to dangle over the
dizzy depths, and critically examined his questioner. Jack had on this
occasion modified his usual correct conventional attire by a tasteful
combination of a vaquero's costume, and, in loose white bullion-fringed
trousers, red sash, jacket, and sombrero, looked infinitely more dashing
and picturesque than his original. Nevertheless, the boy did not reply.
Mr. Hamlin's pride in his usual ascendency over women, children, horses,
and all unreasoning animals was deeply nettled. He smiled, however, and
said, quietly,--

"Come here, George Washington. I want to talk to you."

Without rejecting this august yet impossible title, the boy presently
lifted his feet, and carelessly resumed his passage across the
chasm until, reaching the sycamore, he began to let himself down
squirrel-wise, leap by leap, with an occasional trapeze swinging from
bough to bough, dropping at last easily to the ground. Here he appeared
to be rather good-looking, albeit the sun and air had worked a miracle
of brown tan and freckles on his exposed surfaces, until the mottling of
his oval cheeks looked like a polished bird's egg. Indeed, it struck Mr.
Hamlin that he was as intensely a part of that sylvan seclusion as
the hidden brook that murmured, the brown velvet shadows that lay like
trappings on the white flanks of his horse, the quivering heat, and the
stinging spice of bay. Mr. Hamlin had vague ideas of dryads and fauns,
but at that moment would have bet something on the chances of their
survival.

"I did not hear what you said just now, general," he remarked, with
great elegance of manner, "but I know from your reputation that it could
not be a lie. I therefore gather that there IS another way across."

The boy smiled; rather, his very short upper lip apparently vanished
completely over his white teeth, and his very black eyes, which showed a
great deal of the white around them, danced in their orbits.

"But YOU couldn't find it," he said, slyly.

"No more could you find the half-dollar I dropped just now, unless I
helped you."

Mr. Hamlin, by way of illustration, leaned deeply over his left stirrup,
and pointed to the ground. At the same moment a bright half-dollar
absolutely appeared to glitter in the herbage at the point of his
finger. It was a trick that had always brought great pleasure and profit
to his young friends, and some loss and discomfiture of wager to his
older ones.

The boy picked up the coin: "There's a dip and a level crossing about a
mile over yer,"--he pointed,--"but it's through the woods, and they're
that high with thick bresh."

"With what?"

"Bresh," repeated the boy; "THAT,"--pointing to a few fronds of bracken
growing in the shadow of the sycamore.

"Oh! underbrush?"

"Yes; I said 'bresh,'" returned the boy, doggedly. "YOU might get
through, ef you war spry, but not your hoss. Where do you want to go,
anyway?"

"Do you know, George," said Mr. Hamlin, lazily throwing his right
leg over the horn of his saddle for greater ease and deliberation in
replying, "it's very odd, but that's just what I'D like to know. Now,
what would YOU, in your broad statesmanlike views of things generally,
advise?"

Quite convinced of the stranger's mental unsoundness, the boy glanced
again at his half-dollar, as if to make sure of its integrity, pocketed
it doubtfully, and turned away.

"Where are you going?" said Hamlin, resuming his seat with the agility
of a circus-rider, and spurring forward.

"To Green Springs, where I live, two miles over the ridge on the far
slope,"--indicating the direction.

"Ah!" said Jack, with thoughtful gravity. "Well, kindly give my love to
your sister, will you?"

"George Washington didn't have no sister," said the boy, cunningly.

"Can I have been mistaken?" said Hamlin, lifting his hand to his
forehead with grieved accents. "Then it seems YOU have. Kindly give her
my love."

"Which one?" asked the boy, with a swift glance of mischief. "I've got
four."

"The one that's like you," returned Hamlin, with prompt exactitude.
"Now, where's the 'bresh' you spoke of?"

"Keep along the edge until you come to the log-slide. Foller that, and
it'll lead you into the woods. But ye won't go far, I tell ye. When you
have to turn back, instead o' comin' back here, you kin take the trail
that goes round the woods, and that'll bring ye out into the stage road
ag'in near the post-office at the Green Springs crossin' and the new
hotel. That'll be war ye'll turn up, I reckon," he added, reflectively.
"Fellers that come yer gunnin' and fishin' gin'rally do," he concluded,
with a half-inquisitive air.

"Ah?" said Mr. Hamlin, quietly shedding the inquiry. "Green Springs
Hotel is where the stage stops, eh?"

"Yes, and at the post-office," said the boy. "She'll be along here
soon," he added.

"If you mean the Santa Cruz stage," said Hamlin, "she's here already. I
passed her on the ridge half an hour ago."

The boy gave a sudden start, and a quick uneasy expression passed over
his face. "Go 'long with ye!" he said, with a forced smile: "it ain't
her time yet."

"But I SAW her," repeated Hamlin, much amused. "Are you expecting
company? Hullo! Where are you off to? Come back."

But his companion had already vanished in the thicket with the
undeliberate and impulsive act of an animal. There was a momentary
rustle in the alders fifty feet away, and then all was silent. The
hidden brook took up its monotonous murmur, the tapping of a distant
woodpecker became suddenly audible, and Mr. Hamlin was again alone.

"Wonder whether he's got parents in the stage, and has been playing
truant here," he mused, lazily. "Looked as if he'd been up to some
devilment, or more like as if he was primed for it. If he'd been a
little older, I'd have bet he was in league with some road-agents to
watch the coach. Just my luck to have him light out as I was beginning
to get some talk out of him." He paused, looked at his watch, and
straightened himself in his stirrups. "Four o'clock. I reckon I might as
well try the woods and what that imp calls the 'bresh;' I may strike a
shanty or a native by the way."