Corduroy

FOR the first time in her life--she had been alive twenty-two vivid and zestful years--Virginia Valdés McVeagh, nicknamed, descriptively, “Ginger,” felt something like reverence for a male creature of her own species.

Her father, that stolid Scot, had died while she was a hearty and unimaginative child; Aleck, her only brother, killed on the last day of fighting in the Great War, had been her pal and play-fellow, as were, in lesser and varying degrees, the young ranchers of the miles-wide neighborhood, while the vaqueros and old Estrada, mayordomo of her cattle ranch, were her henchmen, loyal, admiring, unquestioning. Always she had been able to divide the men of her world unhesitatingly into two classes--her equals, her inferiors.

Dean Wolcott was different. He was framed in mystery and hallowed by grief, coming to her--almost like a visitant from another world--in the dawn of a Christmas Day she had vowed not to keep, bringing her the word of her dead brother for which she had thirsted, and a stained and crumpled letter in Aleck’s own hand. It was the first shred of information she had had since the official communication, nearly four months after the armistice. That had come on a delicate day of early California spring; the rains had been late and the hills were only faintly brushed with green, but the wild flowers were out, brilliant, arresting, and the oaks were vocal with linnets and orioles; meadow larks sank liltingly on the low ground; the narrow little creek was lively and vehement, and the air was honey and wine. Everything was awake and alive except Aleck, and Aleck was dead. The grave official statement regretted to inform her that Lieutenant Alexander McVeagh was dead. Dead; not alive any more; never coming back to Dos Pozos; never to ride with her over the range again.

Something in Virginia Valdés McVeagh died likewise. When Aleck was there she had seemed less than her age; now she was more. She ceased at once to be “Ginger.” Swiftly, almost, it seemed, with a single motion, she grew up. She had always been cognizant of every detail of enterprise on the big cattle ranch, and now, with Estrada’s help, she took competent charge. She rode with him over the rolling hills on Aleck’s horse, brought in her cattle from remote pastures, saw to the planting of her alfalfa crops and the harvesting of her wheat, held rodeos, marketed her stock. Leaving off the mellow corduroys which toned alluringly with her skin and eyes and hair, and the brave scarlet sweaters and wine-red velvet dresses which sharply underlined her Spanish coloring, she swathed herself in black as bitterly as her Valdés grandmother would have done. She knew that it cut her beauty in two and she was glad: there had been flagelantes on her mother’s side of the house, three generations earlier.

The slow and difficult year had crawled away; February ... December. Virginia had refused to go to relatives in Los Angeles or San Francisco and asked them not to come to her. This first black Christmas (the one a year earlier had been vibrant with hope) she must be allowed to spend alone, in the luxury of uninterrupted and unconsoled grief. Even the servants--Estrada and his men, old Manuela, the housekeeper, Ling, the moon-faced Chinese cook--were banished to San Luis Obispo on the morning of the twenty-fourth, not to return until the twenty-sixth, but her gift to herself of solitude had been snatched away from her. Dos Pozos was five miles off the highway, but in good weather motorists often took the dirt road for a short cut. This year Virginia had neglected to have it kept up; the bridge, half a mile from the house, was a frail and ancient structure. Aleck had meant to replace it with a permanent one of concrete, and Estrada had begged her to carry out the young señor’s plan, but she would not. Later, perhaps; for the present, she was thankful for anything which made for isolation.

And then, ironically enough, the very thing which was to have kept the world away, brought it to her. It rained in torrents, lavish, riotous California rain; the road sank down into a batter of soft mud; the bridge whined in the storm; at seven o’clock on Christmas Eve four machines and ten persons, wailing children among them, were stranded and helpless. The telephone line was down; the vaqueros spending their holiday in town; and tradition was rigid; no one, gentle or simple, ever lifted the latch of Dos Pozos in vain. Grudgingly, with unadorned civility, Virginia had taken them into the old adobe ranch house and prepared to give them camp fare, for there was no way in which she could summon her servants.

It immediately appeared, however, that her servants did not require summoning; they were already there. The good creatures had merely driven round the turn of the road in the morning, waited until she had ridden off in the rain, and crept back again, hiding themselves discreetly in their quarters. Their idea had been to feed her as the ravens fed the prophet and to keep out of her sight, for they were on intimate terms with her temper and her tongue. When the house party enforced descended upon their mistress they had come boldly forth, rather giving themselves airs; what--they wanted respectfully to know--would she have done without them?

So it fell out that two brisk and cheerful school-teachers and a forlorn widower and his shabby children and a couple of Stanford students and a personage in a limousine made philosophically merry beneath the roof which had fully intended to cover nothing but desolate grief and decent silence, and Ling plied happily between his table and his glowing range, his queue snapping smartly out behind him, and old Manuela built fires and made up beds in the guest rooms, and Estrada rode into San Luis Obispo to send telegrams to distracted families.

When she went to bed at midnight Virginia had worked out something of her rebellion in weariness. She had resurrected toys for the pinched children, helped the school-teachers and the Stanford students to trim a tree for them and to decorate the big rooms with snowberries and scarlet _toyon_--spurred herself to a civil semblance of hospitality. As she fell asleep she was aware of a feeling she had sometimes had when she was a rather bad and turbulent child--that, having been good, unusually, laboriously good--something good should and must come to her.

It came at sunrise, when Estrada wakened her, calling excitedly in front of her window. She slipped her feet into Indian moccasins and threw a serape about her and padded down the long corridor and out on to the veranda. She heard people stirring as she passed the guest rooms; one of the children was whimpering with eagerness to be dressed and allowed to hunt for its Christmas stocking.

Behind the mayordomo stood a tall man in uniform: for one mad moment her heart stood still and her eyes dilated and blurred and the figure in khaki swam dizzily in the keen morning light.

Then the old Spaniard stepped quickly forward and she saw that his eyes were wet. “_Gracias a Dios, Señorita_--it is a friend of Señor Alejandrino! At last he has come, over the sea and over the land, to bring you the message!”

The stranger came slowly nearer, staring at her. She saw then that he was a young man, but he did not look young. His eyes were intolerably tired and tragic and he was weary with weakness. He blinked a little as he looked at her; it was as if the brightness of her eyes and mouth and the gay serape hurt and dazed him. “You are--‘Ginger’?” he wanted gravely to know.

He spoke in a hoarse whisper and in a whisper she answered him, breathing fast. “Yes. I am Ginger. Aleck----”

He began to speak, very slowly and carefully, pushing the words before him, one at a time, as a feeble invalid pushes his feet along the floor. He had been with her brother for a month; they had come to regard each other as friends, in the red intimacy of war; they had had a feeling ... something ... that last day, that they would not both come through it. They had written letters and exchanged them, promised each other----

She cried out at that. “A letter? He wrote--you’ve brought me a letter?” She held out her hands, shaking.

He was fumbling at a pocket and his fingers were likewise unsteady. He explained, very humbly, why he had been so long in coming. He had been wounded, too, not an hour later. Shattering wounds ... he moved his thin body uncomfortably as if at a bad memory; shell shock; he had forgotten everything, even to his own name. A month ago, in England, he had started in to remember, and he had been traveling to her ever since. He gave her a worn and soiled bit of paper, folded up like a child’s letter. Estrada slipped softly into the house.

She snatched at it hungrily and read it three times through before she looked up again. Aleck’s crude and boyish backhand; Aleck’s crude and boyish words, hearty, heartening, lifting the black blanket of silence; Aleck.

Then she looked up and caught her breath sharply. A strong shaft of winter morning sunlight had fallen along the veranda, and it was shining on his face and through his face. Virginia had never in all her days harbored an eerie imagining, but she was harboring one now. Her Valdés mother had died when she was a baby, and her upbringing had been along the gray lines of the McVeagh Scotch Presbyterianism; nevertheless, from old Manuela, the housekeeper, she had heard many a colorful tale of the santos. Now, it flashed upon her swiftly, this worn young soldier, more than a man in spirit, less than a man in body, was like a saint; a warrior saint; a martyr saint. He swayed a little, backward, away from her; it seemed entirely possible that he might melt into the bar of sunlight, into the morning.... She had hoped and imagined so many things for so many months ... it was conceivable that she was only hoping and imagining this....

Estrada came out again. His quick Spanish cut into her phantasy. “_Señorita_, this gentleman is very tired and ill--he must rest!” He put a steadying hand under the young man’s arm and he sagged heavily against him.

Virginia came out of her abstraction with a sharp sigh. “Yes, he must rest. Come!” She caught the serape together with one hand and she was magnificently unaware of her bare brown ankles and her bare brown throat, and the tumbled ropes of black hair swinging over her shoulders, and held open the door. “Come,” she said again, smiling mistily back at him.

The widower’s children were registering shrill rapture over their stockings and the tree; the older members of the house party, having been enlightened by Estrada, drew quietly back and watched with leashed curiosity as the trio went through the room and down the long corridor. Virginia halted before the door of the last bedroom, the heavy old-fashioned iron latch in her hand. “This is Aleck’s room. No one ever comes here but myself; no one else ever takes care of it.” She flung open the door. Then, at the dim prompting of some Spanish forbear, she made a little ritual of it, taking his hand and leading him over the threshold. “Now I give it to you.” She led him gently across the red tiled floor to a great armchair, cushioned with a brilliant Navaho blanket. “This was Aleck’s chair.” She began quite steadily. “He always sat here. And now you are sitting here. And you saw him die, didn’t you? I saw him live, all the years of his life, riding the range, in this house, in this room--and you saw him die. You saw--Aleck--_die_.” Then she started to cry, very quietly. She slipped down and sat huddled on the floor beside him, her forehead against the big arm of the chair. He leaned over and laid his hand uncertainly on her hair, but he could not manage to say anything to her. It was as if the courage and energy which had driven and dragged him across an ocean and a continent had left him utterly, now that his pledge was kept, his message given.