 | The Return of Mr. Wills |  |
Austin, Mary. "The Return of Mr. Wills."
Century Magazine 74 (1907): 244-247.
Author of "Isidro," etc.
MRS. WILLS had lived seventeen years with Mr. Wills, and when he left her for three, those three were so much the best of her married life that she wished he had never come back. The only real trouble with Mr. Wills was that he should never have moved West. Back East, I suppose, they breed such men because they need them, but they ought really to keep them there.
I am quite certain that when Mr. Wills was courting Mrs. Wills he parted his hair in the middle and the breast pocket of his best suit had a bright silk lining which Mr. Wills pulled up to simulate a silk handkerchief. Mrs. Wills had a certain draggled prettiness and a way of tossing her head, that came back to her after Mr. Wills left, which made one think she might have been the prettiest girl of her town. They were happy enough at first when Mr. Wills was a grocery clerk, assistant Sunday school superintendent, and they owned a cabinet organ and four little Willses. It might have been that Mr. Wills thought he could go right on being the same sort of man in the West—he was clerk at the Bed Rock Emporium and had brought the organ and the children—or it might have been he thought himself at bottom a very different sort of man, and meant to be it if he got a chance.
There is a sort of man bred up in close communities, who is like a cask, to whom the church, public opinion, the social note, are hoops to hold him in serviceable shape. Without these there are a good many ways of going to pieces. Mr. Wills's way was lost mines.
Being clerk at the Emporium, where miners and prospectors bought their supplies, he heard a lot of talk about mines, and was too new to it to understand that the man who has the most time to stop and talk about it has the least to do with mining. And of all he heard, the most fascinating to Mr. Wills, who was troubled with an imagination, was of the lost mines, incredibly rich ledges, touched, and not found again. To go out into the unmapped hills on the mere chance of coming across something was, on the face of it, a risky business; but to look for a mine once located, sampled, and proved, definitely situated in a particular mountain range or a certain canon, had a smack of plausibility. Besides that, an ordinary prospect might or might not prove workable, but the lost mines were always amazingly rich.
Of all the ways in the West in which a man may go to pieces this is the most insidious. Out there beyond the towns the long wilderness lies brooding, imperturbable; she puts out to adventurous minds glittering fragments of fortune or romance, like the lures men use to catch antelopes. Clip! then she has them. If Mr. Wills had gambled or drank, his wife could have gone to the minister about it, his friends could have done something. There was a church in Maverick of twenty-seven members, and the Willses had brought letters to it; but except for the effect it had on Mrs. Wills it would not be worth mentioning. Though he might never have found it out in the East, Mr. Wills belonged to the church not because of what it meant to him, but for what it meant to other people. Back East it had meant social standing, repute, moral impeccability. To other people in Maverick it meant a weakness which was excused in you so long as you did not talk about it. Mr. Wills did not because
He began by grub-staking Pedro Ruiz to look for the lost ledge of Fisherman's Peak, and that was not so bad, for it had not been lost more than thirty years, the peak was not a hundred miles from Maverick, and, besides, I have a piece of the ore myself. Then he was bitten by the myth of the "Gunsight," of which there was never any thing more tangible than a dime's worth of virgin silver, picked up by a Jayhawker, hammered into a sight for a gun; and you had to take the gun on faith at that, for it and the man who owned it had quite disappeared. Afterward it was the Duke o' Wild Rose, which was never a mine at all, but merely an arrow-mark on a map left by a penniless lodger, found dead in a San Francisco hotel. Grub-staking is expensive even to a clerk at the Bed Rock Emporium, getting discounts on the grub, and grub-staked prospectors are about as dependable as the dreams they chase, often pure fakes, lying up at seldom visited waterholes while the stake lasts, and returning with wilder tales and more alluring clues.
It was a late conviction that led Mr. Wills, when he put the last remnant of his means into the search for the White Cement Mines, to resign his clerkship and go in charge of the expedition himself. There is no doubt whatever that there is a deposit of cement on Bald Mountain, with lumps of gold sticking out of it like plums in a pudding. It lies at the bottom of a small gulch near the middle fork of Owens's River, and is overlaid by pumice. There is a camp-kit buried somewhere near, and two skeletons. There was also an Indian in that vicinity who was thought to be able to point out the exact location, if he would. It was quite the sort of thing to appeal to the imagination of Mr. Wills, and he spent two years proving that he could not find it. After that he drifted out toward the Lee district to look for Lost Cabin mine, because a man who had immediate need of twenty dollars had, for that amount, offered Wills some exact and unpublished information as to its location. By that time Wills's movements had ceased to interest anybody in Maverick. He could be got to believe anything about any sort of a prospect, provided it was lost.
The only visible mark left by all this was on Mrs. Wills. Everybody in a mining town except the minister and professional gamblers, who wear frock-coats, dresses pretty much alike, and Wills very soon got to wear on his face the guileless, trustful fixity of the confirmed prospector. It seemed as if the desert had overshot him and struck at Mrs. Wills, and Richard Wills, Esther Wills, Benjy Wills, and the youngest Wills, who was called Mugsey. Desertness attacked the door-yard and the house; even the cabinet organ had a weathered look. During the time of the White Cement obsession the Wills family looked to be in need of a grub-stake themselves. Mrs. Wills's eyes were like the eyes of trail-weary cattle. Her hands grew to have that pitiful way of catching the front of her dress of the woman not so much a slattern as hopeless. It was when her husband went out after Lost Cabin, that she fell into the habit of sitting down to a cheap novel, with the dishes unwashed, a sort of drugging of despair common among women of the camps.
All this time Mr. Wills was drifting about from camp to camp of the desert borders, working when it could not be avoided, but mostly on long, fruitless trudges among the unmindful ranges. I do not know if the man was honest with himself, or if he knew by this time that the clue of a lost mine was the baldest of excuses merely to be out and away from everything that savored of definiteness and responsibility. The fact was, the desert had got him. All the hoops were off the cask. The mind of Mr. Wills faded out at the edges like the desert horizon, which melts in mists and mirages, and finally he went on an expedition from which he did not come back.
He had been gone nearly a year when Mrs. Wills gave up expecting him. She had grown so used to the bedraggled crawl of life that she might never have taken any notice of the disappearance of Mr. Wills had not the Emporium refused to make any more charges in his name. There had been a great many dry waterholes on the desert that year and more than the usual complement of sun-dried corpses. In a general way this accounted
Mrs. Wills and the children went to work, and work was about the only thing in Maverick of which there was more than enough. It was a matter of a very few months when Mrs. Wills made the remarkable discovery that after the family bills were paid at the end of the month there was a little over—a very little. Mrs. Wills had lived so long with the tradition that a husband is a natural provider that it took some months longer to realize that she not only did not need Mr. Wills, but got on better without him. This was about the time she was able to have the sitting-room repapered and to put up lace curtains. And the next spring the children planted roses in the front yard. All up and down the wash of Salt Creek there were lean coyote mothers and wild folk of every sort that could have taught her that nature never makes the mistake of neglecting to make the child-bearer competent to provide. But Mrs. Wills had not been studying life in the lairs. She had most of her notions of it from the church and her parents, and, under the new sense of independence and power, she had an ache of forlornness and neglect. As a matter of fact, she filled out, grew stronger, had a spring in her walk. She was not pining for Mr. Wills; the desert had him, though for whatever conceivable use, it was more than Mrs. Wills could put him to. Let the desert keep what it had got.
It was in the third summer that she regained a certain air that made one think she must have been pretty when Mr. Wills married her. And no woman in a mining town can so much as hint at prettiness without its being found out. Mrs. Wills had a good many prejudices left over from the time when Mr. Wills had been assistant superintendent of the Sunday school, and would not hear of divorce. Yet, as the slovenliness of despair fell away from her, as she held up her head and began to have company to tea, it is certain somebody would have broached it to her before the summer was over; but by that time Mr. Wills came back.
It happened that Benjy Wills, who was fourteen and driving the Bed Rock delivery-wagon, had a runaway accident in which he had behaved very handsomely and got a fractured skull. News of it went by way of the local paper to Tonopah and from there drifted south to the Funeral Mountains and the particular prospect that Mr. Wills was working on a grub-stake. He had come to that. Perhaps as much because he had found there was nothing in it as from paternal anxiety, he came home the evening of the day the doctor had declared the boy out of danger.
It was my turn to sit up that night, I remember, and Mrs. Meyer, who had the turn before, was telling me about the medicines. A neighbor woman, who had come in by the back door with a bowl of custard, and the doctor, standing in the sitting-room with Mrs. Wills, were present, when Mr. Wills came in through the black block of the doorway with his hand before his face to ward off the light--and perhaps some shamefacedness: who knows?
I saw Mrs. Wills quiver, and her hand went up to her bosom as if some one had struck her. I have seen horses start and check like that as they came over the pass and the hot blast of the desert took them fairly. It was the stroke of desolation. I remember turning quickly, at the doctor's curt signal, to shut the door between the sitting-room and Benjy.
"Don't let the boy see you to-night, Wills," said the doctor, with no hint of a greeting; "he's not to be excited." With that he got himself off as quickly as possible, and the neighbor woman and I went out and sat on the back steps a long time, and tried to talk about everything but Mr. Wills. When I went in at last he was sitting in the Morris chair, which had come with soap wrappers, explaining to Mrs. Meyer about the rich prospect he had left to come to his darling boy. But he did not get so much as a glimpse of his darling boy while I was in charge.
Mr. Wills settled on his family like a blight. For a man who has prospected lost mines to so great an extent is positively not good for anything else. It was not only as though the desert had sucked the life out of him and cast him back, but as though it would have Mrs. Wills in his room. As the weeks went on, one
But he had brought the desert with him on his back. If it had been at any other time than when her mind was torn with anxiety for Benjy, Mrs. Wills might have made a fight against it. But the only practical way to separate the family from the blight was to divorce Mr. Wills, and the church to which Mrs. Wills belonged admitted divorce only in the event of there being another woman.
Mrs. Wills rose to the pitch of threatening, I believe, about the time Mr. Wills insisted on his right to control the earnings of his sons. But the minister called; the church put out its hand upon her poor staggered soul, which sunk back. The minister himself was newly from the East, and did not understand that the desert is to be dealt with as a woman and a wanton. He was thinking of it as a place on the map. Therefore he was not of the slightest use to Mrs. Wills, which did not prevent him from commanding her behavior. And the power of the Wilderness lay like a wasting sickness on the home.
About that time Mrs. Wills took to novel-reading again; the eldest son drifted off up Tonopah way, and Benjy began to keep back a part of the wages he brought home. Mr. Wills is beginning to collect misinformation about the exact locality where Peg-leg Smith is supposed to have found the sunburned nuggets. He does not mention the matter often, being, as he says, done with mines, but whenever Peg-leg comes up in talk, I can see Mrs. Wills chirk up a little, her gaze wandering to the inscrutable grim spaces, not with the hate you might suppose, but with something like hope in her eye—as if she had guessed what I am certain of, that in time its insatiable spirit will reach out and take Mr. Wills again.
And this time, if I know Mrs. Wills, he will not come back.
| The Return of Mr. Wills | |