Miss Morgan laughed with relief until she felt that her hair was coming loose on the back of her head. "You mean--you mean--gnomes?"
Tularecito nodded.
"What do you want to know about them?"
"I never saw any," said Tularecito. His voice neither rose nor fell, but continued on one low note.
"Why, few people do see them, I think."
"But I knew about them."
Miss Morgan's eyes squinted with interest. "You did? Who told you about them?"
"Nobody."
"You never saw them, and no one told you? How could you know about them then?"
"I just knew. Heard them, maybe. I knew them in the book all right."
Miss Morgan thought: "Why should I deny gnomes to this queer, unfinished child? Wouldn't his life be richer and happier if he did believe in them? And what harm could it possibly do?"
"Have you ever looked for them?" she asked.
"No, I never looked. I just knew. But I will look now."
Miss Morgan found herself charmed with the situation. Here was paper on which to write, here was a cliff on which to carve. She could carve a lovely story that would be far more real than a book story ever could. "Where will you look?" she asked.
"I'll dig in holes," said Tularecito soberly.
"But the gnomes only come out at night, Tularecito. You must watch for them in the night. And you must come and tell me if you find any. Will you do that?"
"I'll come," he agreed.
She left him staring after her. All the way home she pictured him searching in the night. The picture pleased her. He might even find the gnomes, might live with them and talk to them. With a few suggestive words she had been able to make his life unreal and very wonderful, and separated from the stupid lives about him. She deeply envied him his searching.
In the evening Tularecito put on his coat and took up a shovel. Old Pancho came upon him as he was leaving the tool shed. "Where goest thou, Little Frog?" he asked.
Tularecito shifted his feet restlessly at the delay. "I go out into the dark. Is that a new thing?"
"But why takest thou the shovel? Is there gold, perhaps?"
The boy's face grew hard with the seriousness of his purpose. "I go to dig for the little people who live in the earth."
Now Pancho was filled with horrified excitement. "Do not go, Little Frog! Listen to your old friend, your father in God, and do not go! Out in the sage I found thee and saved thee from the devils, thy relatives. Thou art a little brother of Jesus now. Go not back to thine own people! Listen to an old man, Little Frog!"
Tularecito stared hard at the ground and drilled his old thoughts with this new information. "Thou hast said they are my people," he exclaimed. "I am not like the others at the school or here. I know that. I have loneliness for my own people who live deep in the cool earth. When I pass a squirrel hole, I wish to crawl into it and hide myself. My own people are like me, and they have called me. I must go home to them, Pancho."
Pancho stepped back and held up crossed fingers. "Go back to the devil, thy father, then. I am not good enough to fight this evil. It would take a saint. But see! At least I make the sign against thee and against all thy race." He drew the cross of protection in the air in front of him.
Tularecito smiled sadly, and turning, trudged off into the hills.
The heart of Tularecito gushed with joy at his homecoming. All his life he had been an alien, a lonely outcast, and now he was going home. As always, he heard the voices of the earth--the far-off clang of cow bells, the muttering of disturbed quail, the little whine of a coyote who would not sing this night, the nocturnes of a million insects. But Tularecito was listening for another sound, the movement of two-footed creatures, and the hushed voices of the hidden people.
Once he stopped and called, "My father, I have come home," and he heard no answer. Into squirrel holes he whispered, "Where are you, my people? It is only Tularecito come home." But there was no reply. Worse, he had no feeling that the gnomes were near. He knew that a doe and fawn were feeding near him; he knew a wildcat was stalking a rabbit behind a bush, although he could not see them, but from the gnomes he had no message.
A sugar-moon arose out of the hills.
"Now the animals will come out to feed," Tularecito said in the papery whisper of the half witless. "Now the people will come out, too."
The brush stopped at the edge of a little valley and an orchard took its place. The trees were thick with leaves, and the land finely cultivated. It was Bert Munroe's orchard. Often, when the land was deserted and ghost-ridden, Tularecito had come here in the night to lie on the ground under the trees and pick the stars with gentle fingers.
The moment he walked into the orchard he knew he was nearing home. He could not hear them, but he knew the gnomes were near. Over and over he called to them, but they did not come.
"Perhaps they do not like the moonlight," he said.
At the foot of a large peach tree he dug his hole--three feet across and very deep. All night he worked on it, stopping to listen awhile and then digging deeper and deeper into the cool earth. Although he heard nothing, he was positive that he was nearing them. Only when the daylight came did he give up and retire into the bushes to sleep.
In midmorning Bert Munroe walked out to look at a coyote trap and found the hole at the foot of the tree. "What the devil!" he said. "Some kids must have been digging a tunnel. That's dangerous! It'll cave in on them, or somebody will fall into it and get hurt." He walked back to the house, got a shovel and filled up the hole.
"Manny," he said to his youngest boy, "you haven't been digging in the orchard, have you?"
"Uh-uh!" said Manny.
"Well, do you know who has?"
"Uh-uh!" said Manny.
"Well, somebody dug a deep hole out there. It's dangerous. You tell the boys not to dig or they'll get caved in."
The dark came and Tularecito walked out of the brush to dig in his hole again. When he found it filled up, he growled savagely, but then his thought changed and he laughed. "The people were here," he said happily. "They didn't know who it was, and they were frightened. They filled up the hole the way a gopher does. This time I'll hide, and when they come to fill the hole, I'll tell them who I am. Then they will love me."
And Tularecito dug out the hole and made it much deeper than before, because much of the dirt was loose. Just before daylight, he retired into the brush at the edge of the orchard and lay down to watch.
Bert Munroe walked out before breakfast to look at his trap again, and again he found the open hole. "The little devils!" he cried. "They're keeping it up, are they? I'll bet Manny is in it after all."
He studied the hole for a moment and then began to push dirt into it with the side of his foot. A savage growl spun him around. Tularecito came charging down upon him, leaping like a frog on his long legs, and swinging his shovel like a club.
When Jimmie Munroe came to call his father to breakfast, he found him lying on the pile of dirt. He was bleeding at the mouth and forehead. Shovelfuls of dirt came flying out of the pit.
Jimmie thought someone had killed his father and was getting ready to bury him. He ran home in a frenzy of terror, and by telephone summoned a band of neighbors.
Half a dozen men crept up on the pit. Tularecito struggled like a wounded lion, and held his own until they struck him on the head with his own shovel. Then they tied him up and took him in to jail.
In Salinas a medical board examined the boy. When the doctors asked him questions, he smiled blandly at them and did not answer. Franklin Gomez told the board what he knew and asked the custody of him.
"We really can't do it, Mr. Gomez," the judge said finally. "You say he is a good boy. Just yesterday he tried to kill a man. You must see that we cannot let him go loose. Sooner or later he will succeed in killing someone."
After a short deliberation, he committed Tularecito to the asylum for the criminal insane at Napa.
V
H
elen Van Deventer was a tall woman with a sharp, handsome face and tragic eyes. A strong awareness of tragedy ran through her life. At fifteen she had looked like a widow after her Persian kitten was poisoned. She mourned for it during six months, not ostentatiously, but with a subdued voice and a hushed manner. When her father died, at the end of the kitten's six months, the mourning continued uninterrupted. Seemingly she hungered for tragedy and life had lavishly heaped it upon her.
At twenty-five she married Hubert Van Deventer, a florid hunting man who spent six months out of every year trying to shoot some kind of creature or other. Three months after the wedding he shot himself when a blackberry vine tripped him up. Hubert was a fairly gallant man. As he lay dying under a tree, one of his companions asked whether he wanted to leave any message for his wife.
"Yes," said Hubert. "Tell her to have me mounted for that place in the library between the bull moose and the bighom! Tell her I didn't buy this one from the guide!"
Helen Van Deventer closed off the drawing room with its trophies. Thereafter the room was holy to the spirit of Hubert. The curtains remained drawn. Anyone who felt it necessary to speak in the drawing room spoke softly. Helen did not weep, for it was not in her nature to weep, but her eyes grew larger, and she stared a great deal, with the vacant staring of one who travels over other times. Hubert had left her the house on Russian Hill in San Francisco, and a fairly large fortune.
Her daughter Hilda, born six months after Hubert was killed, was a pretty, doll-like baby, with her mother's great eyes. Hilda was never very well; she took all the children's diseases with startling promptness. Her temper, which at first wore itself out with howling, became destructive as soon as she could move about. She shattered any breakable thing which came into the pathway of her anger. Helen Van Deventer soothed and petted her and usually succeeded in increasing the temper.
When Hilda was six years old, Dr. Phillips, the family physician, told Mrs. Van Deventer the thing she had suspected for a long time.
"You must realize it," he said. "Hilda is not completely well in her mind. I suggest that she be taken to a psychiatrist."
The dark eyes of the mother widened with pain. "You are sure, doctor?"
"Fairly sure. I am not a specialist. You'll have to take her to someone who knows more than I do."
Helen stared away from him. "I have thought so too, doctor, but I can't take her to another man. You've always had the care of us. I know you. I shouldn't ever be sure of another man."
"What do you mean, 'sure'?" Dr. Phillips exploded. "Don't you know we might cure her if we went about it right?"
Helen's hands rose a trifle, and then dropped with hopelessness. "She won't ever get well, doctor. She was born at the wrong time. Her father's death--it was too much for me. I didn't have the strength to bear a perfect child, you see."
"Then what do you intend to do? Your idea is foolish, if I may be permitted."
"What is there to do, doctor? I can wait and hope. I know I can see it through, but I can't take her to another man. I'll just watch her and care for her. That seems to be my life." She smiled very sadly and her hands rose again.
"It seems to me you force hardships upon yourself," the doctor said testily.
"We take what is given us. I can endure. I am sure of that, and I am proud of it. No amount of tragedy can break down my endurance. But there is one thing I cannot bear, doctor. Hilda cannot be taken away from me. I will keep her with me, and you will come as always, but no one else must interfere."
Dr. Phillips left the house in disgust. The obvious and needless endurance of the woman always put him in a fury. "If I were Fate," he mused, "I'd be tempted to smash her placid resistance too."
It wasn't long after this that visions and dreams began to come to Hilda. Terrible creatures of the night, with claws and teeth, tried to kill her while she slept. Ugly little men pinched her and gritted their teeth in her ear, and Helen Van Deventer accepted the visions as new personalities come to test her.
"A tiger came and pulled the covers," Hilda cried in the morning.
"You mustn't let him frighten you, dear."
"But he tried to get his teeth through the blanket, mother."
"I'll sit with you tonight, darling. Then he can't come."
She began to sit by the little girl's bedside until dawn. Her eyes grew brighter and more feverish with the frenzied resistance of her spirit.
One thing bothered her more than the dreams. Hilda had begun to tell lies. "I went out into the garden this morning, mother. An old man was sitting in the street. He asked me to go to his house, so I went. He had a big gold elephant, and he let me ride on it." The little girl's eyes were far away as she made up the tale.
"Don't say such things, darling," her mother pleaded. "You know you didn't do any of those things."
"But I did, mother. And the old man gave me a watch. I'll show you. Here." She held out a wrist watch set with diamonds. Helen's hand shook with terror as she took the watch. For a second her face lost its look of resistance, and anger took its place.
"Where did you get it, Hilda?"
"The old man gave it to me, mother."
"No--tell me where you found it! You did find it, didn't you?"
"The old man gave it to me."
On the back of the watch a monogram was cut, initials unknown to Helen. She stared helplessly at the carved letters. "Mother will take this," she said harshly. That night she crept into the garden, found a trowel and buried the watch deep in the earth. That week she had a high iron fence built around the garden, and Hilda was never permitted to go out alone after that.
When she was thirteen, Hilda escaped and ran away. Helen hired private detectives to find her, but at the end of four days a policeman discovered Hilda sleeping in a deserted real estate tract office in Los Angeles. Helen rescued her daughter from the police station. "Why did you run away, darling?" she asked.
"Well, I wanted to play on a piano."
"But we have one at home. Why didn't you play on it?"
"Oh, I wanted to play on the other kind, the tall kind."
Helen took Hilda on her lap and hugged her tightly. "And what did you do then, dear?"
"I was out in the street and a man asked me to ride with him. He gave me five dollars. Then I found some gypsies, and I went to live with them. They made me queen. Then I was married to a young gypsy man, and we were going to have a little baby, but I got tired and sat down. Then a policeman took me."
"Darling, poor darling," Helen replied. "You know that isn't true. None of it is true."
"But it is true, mother."
Helen called Dr. Phillips. "She says she married a gypsy. You don't think--really you don't think she could have? I couldn't stand that."
The doctor looked at the little girl carefully. At the end of his examination he spoke almost viciously. "I've told you she should be put in the hands of a specialist." He approached the little girl. "Has the mean old woman been in your bedroom lately, Hilda?"
Hilda's hands twitched. "Last night she came with a monkey, a great big monkey. It tried to bite me."
"Well, just remember she can't ever hurt you because I'm taking care of you. That old woman's afraid of me. If she comes again, just tell her I'm looking after you and see how quick she runs away."
The little girl smiled wearily. "Will the monkey run away too?"
"Of course, and while I think of it, here's a little candy cane for your daughter." He drew a stick of stripey peppermint from his pocket. "You'd better give that to Babette, isn't that her name?" Hilda snatched the candy and ran out of the room.
"Now!" said the doctor to Helen, "my knowledge and my experience are sadly lacking, but I do know this much. Hilda will be very much worse now. She's reaching her maturity. The period of change, with its accompanying emotional overflow, invariably intensifies mental trouble. I can't tell what may happen. She may turn homicidal, and on the other hand, she may run off with the first man she sees. If you don't put her in exp
ert hands, if you don't have her carefully watched, something you'll regret may happen. This last escapade is only a forerunner. You simply cannot go on as you are. It isn't fair to yourself."
Helen sat rigidly before him. In her face was that resistance which so enraged him. "What would you suggest?" she asked huskily.
"A hospital for the insane," he said, and it delighted him that his reply was brutal.
Her face tightened. Her resistance became a little more tense. "I won't do it," she cried. "She's mine, and I'm responsible for her. I'll stay with her myself, doctor. I won't let her out of my sight. But I will not send her away."
"You know the consequences," he said gruffly. Then the impossibility of reasoning with this woman overwhelmed him. "Helen, I've been your friend for years. Why should you take this load of misery and danger on your own shoulders?"
"I can endure anything, but I cannot send her away."
"You love the hair shirt," he growled. "Your pain is a pleasure. You won't give up any little shred of tragedy." He became furious. "Helen, every man must some time or other want to beat a woman. I think I'm a mild man, but right now I want to beat your face with my fists." He looked into her dark eyes and saw that he had only put a new tragedy upon her, had only given her a new situation to endure. "I'm going away now," he said. "Don't call me any more. Why--I'm beginning to hate you."
The people of the Pastures of Heaven learned with interest and resentment that a rich woman was coming to live in the valley. They watched truckloads of logs and lumber going up Christmas Canyon, and they laughed a little scornfully at the expense of hauling in logs to make a cabin. Bert Munroe walked up Christmas Canyon, and for half a day he watched the carpenters putting up a house.
"It's going to be nice," he reported at the General Store. "Every log is perfect, and what do you know, they've got gardeners working there already. They're bringing in big plants and trees all in bloom, and setting them in the ground. This Mrs. Van Deventer must be pretty rich."
"They sure lay it on," agreed Pat Humbert. "Them rich people sure do lay it on."
"And listen to this," Bert continued. "Isn't this like a woman? Guess what they got on some of the windows--bars! Not iron bars, but big thick oak ones. I guess the old lady's scared of coyotes."