VERNONIA EAGLE, VERNONIA, OREGON
LUCKY LAWRENCES
Copyright by Kathleen Norris
By
CHAPTER I
HE Lawrence family, although
In the best sense of the word pi
oneers, had not come to the Golden
West by means of covered wagons.
They had left their Boston moor
ings, like the gentlefolk of means
and leisure that they were. In
the year of our Lord 1849, and
had sailed elegantly for Rio, for
Buenos Aires, and around the Horn.
They had loitered In Valparaiso and
In Lima for some weeks, taking
things easily. In a leisurely day, and
had In due time come up the stormy
coast of California, and
bad
dropped anchor In the opalescent
harbor of peaceful Yerba Buena.
For San Francisco had been still
familiarly known as Yerba Buena,
then, and the blue waters of the
bay had lapped the strand at Mont
gomery street. The globe trotters,
magnificent Philip Lawrence and
his frail, Indian-shawled, pretty
wife, bad remained on the ship for
a few days, for the settlement on
shore promised small comfort for
tourists.
Early In their second week, how
ever, they had been obliged to seek
lodging ashore. This was for two
reasons, one important, one ridic
ulous. The Important reason was
that an heir to the Lawrences was
about to be born. The absurd rea
son was that some preposterous
person had discovered gold, or had
pretended to, at a place called Sut
ter Creek, and that every one In
Yerba Buena bad promptly lost his
senses.
Philip and Abigail Lawrence nat
urally did not lose their senses.
They were rich anyway; they were
above this undignified scramble for
lucre. Philip had an income of
three thousand a year, and Abigail’s
father owned five sailing vessels,
including this very Abby Baldwin
in which they had made their won
derful honeymoon trip.
But the sailors, and Indeed the
officials of the Abby Baldwin, bad
felt differently.
They were not
above acquiring fortunes, and they
had Instantly deserted the ship and
made for the gold region. The ru
mor of gold, spreading like prairie
fire between breakfast and the noon
dinner, had found the ship emptied
by sunset Philip and Abigail nad
signaled a Chinese crab catcher, and
in bls little shallop with stained
brown sails he had rowed them and
their carpet bags ashore.
They had gone to "the French
woman's," a quaint-looking adobe
bouse on a hill, with an upper bal
cony and shutters. There were no
windows, but there were tents of
mosquito netting over the bed, and
the bare Boors were clean. Down
stairs was merely a level of dim
arcades, earthen-floored and smell
ing of spilled wine, where men
lounged on benches, and where the
Frenchwoman herself tended the
bar.
But the upstairs room bad
been comfortable
enough
and
Abigail had eaten a shore meal of
fish stew, dumplings, fresh soft
black
figs, sour bread, and thin
wine, with some appetite.
This would do for the present,
she had said. But one could not
live quite like a savage, after all,
and Immediately after breakfast to
morrow Philip must find a really
nice place, and a nurse. If not, then
they would have to go back to the
ship.
Philip had returned flushed, dis
tressed, and annoyed from bis
search the next morning; he had
returned flushed, distressed, and in
creasingly
annoyed
from
the
searches of the following days. The
Frenchwoman’s was not only the
best. It appeared to be the only pos
sible place for Abigail to stay, and
to contemplate a confinement there,
with the noise and drinking and the
smell of wine below stairs, and with
T
WNU Barrios
KATHLEEN NORRIS
nobody but whiskered old Madame
Bouvier to attend her, was mad
ness. Desperate, Philip had rented
a spanking team and a loose
wheeled buggy and had begun to
drive about the adjoining country
looking for shelter.
Abigail had covered passionate
pages with the story of their adven
tures, and had put the letters Into
the canvas flap of her trunk, under
the pasted picture of the little girl
with the rope of roses. Some day
they would get home again, Philip,
she, and the baby, and what a story
they would have to tell I
Meanwhile, fifty miles southeast
of foggy Yerba Buena, they had
found refuge on a rancho. It was
managed by a widow, one Señora
Castellazo, who lived farther south
In another hacienda, and was will
ing to rent this one to the strangers.
It had contained no furnishings
whatsoever when the Lawrences
had moved in.
But many trips to the Abby Bald
win had pretty well transformed
the dismal place.
Philip, breath
lessly grateful that somehow, with
the aid of a Mormon doctor from
Benicia and the care of two stolid,
wall-eyed Mexican women, Abigail
had actually brought forth a first
born daughter, had made no com
plaints. He had had carted down
wagon loads of chairs, carpets,
china, bed linen, books—all the per
sonal possessions of himself and
his bride.
A bride I Poor Abigail had laughed
forlornly on the first anniversary of
her wedding day. It had found her
weak and weary, stretched on a
mattress on the floor of one of the
cool rooms, with a burning August
day hammering away at the spread
level acres of the rancho outside.
Beside her had been Annie Sarah.
They bad brought her in hot dusty
grapes, and hot dusty figs, and
warm wine, and finally goat’s milk,
to solace her in her ordeaL Except
for that, neither Mexican woman
had volunteered anything. They
had watched the frightened, doubt
ful, breathless struggle apathetical
ly, until their oily brown hands had
actually
grasped
Annie
Sarah.
After that they had seemed capa
ble enough.
Anyway, it had been gotten over,
somehow, and Abigail had been free
to cry a little, thinking of her room
at home in an orderly, shaded Mas
sachusetts village, with Ma's laven
der-scented linen on the smooth
bed, roses In a green glass vase on
the bureau, and the lace curtains
blowing softly in and out of the
opened upstairs windows. Lilacs,
trembling grass, and Grandpa’s
grave in the graveyard, and dough
nuts and currant jelly—oh, dear I
As soon as the baby and the
mother were well upon the road to
normal living, Philip and Abigail
had seriously discussed going home.
Then old Señora Castellazo bad
died, and her sons bad wished to
dispose of the Santa Clara hacien
da. Four hundred acres for nine
hundred dollars. Philip had con
sidered it a wise investment There
was fruit—some fruit—there al
ready, there were sheep and cattle
included in the sale price. If figs
and grapes would grow there, why
not other fruits—peaches and pears?
He would take bis wife and
daughter back to New England, be
promised, on the first suitable ship;
It would be a long bard trip for a
woman with a baby, but the journey
across the plains would be worse,
and there was no further hope of
the Abby Baldwin.
No, upon consideration It had
seemed to Philip that this sunshiny,
sheltered flat region, well Inland,
was the coming district, and that
by bolding onto this property ten
years, fifteen years, be and Abigail
could not fall to be among the pros
perous pioneers of the new world.
Philip was one of the men who bad
shot dead the gold crnze with an
epigram: "a flash In the pan.”
Meanwhile Fanny Lucy had been
born.
“Look here, young lady, aren’t
there any boys where you came
from?*' Philip bad said, half serious,
halt teasing, as be held his second
daughter in his arms. Abigail had
,ooked at him anxiously.
But be
had not been really angry.
Only It had been rather trying
that a fine ship had left for South
America and eastern ports on the
very next day. She had delayed so
long In San Francisco harbor that
Philip and Abigail bad really hoped
to be able to sail on her. But Fan
ny Lucy bad delayed, too, and bad
unconsciously affected her parents’
destinies thereby.
For letters had gone to Boston
on that ship, and letters, four
months later, somehow had strug
gled overland in answer. The re
spective families of Abigail and
Philip bad been perfectly delighted
at their venture, and wrote that
they were certainly envious of the
dwellers in a country where there
was no snow, no thunderstorms,
and no poverty.
Abigail wrote glowing accounts
of her new life to the family at
borne. She and Philip were going
to build a really nice frame house,
with bay windows, a bathroom, and
a cupola. Everything they touched
prospered; people called them "the
Lucky Lawrer es.”
A
Love-Tale
FULL OF
SURPRISES
•
By One of America’s
Best-Loved Woman
Novelists
Kathleen
Norris
•
Read this first
installment of
The
Lucky
Lawrences
and follow the story
as it appears in
this paper
And Abigail had eight daughters
and one son, and the girls all mar
ried, during the last Sixties and
early Seventies, in a land in which
women were still rare and prized.
San Francisco grew like a mush
room, and Philip might have opened
a thousand doors to great wealth,
bad he been a man to see. But he
closed one after the other with his
own hand, and went blindly on in
an Infatuation of satisfaction with
his rolling acres, his miles of fruit
trees, the growing family over
which he ruled supreme.
Some of the girls went east when
they married, some lived In San
Francisco or Stockton, some died.
It was not a salubrious day for pio
neer women, with one out of every
seven dying In childbirth.
Some
were
poor,
opening
boarding
houses, scrimping In lonely cross
road villages.
The one son, Patterson Law
rence, duly married, too, and lived
In the house with which his par
ents had replaced the old adobe
hacienda.
Abigail, and after her her daugh
ter-in-law, in their fervor to en
courage shade In that hot, dry
country, planted everything upon
which they could put their hands,
close to the house. They did not
foresee that the pampas grass and
the verbena trees, the peppers and
roses and evergreens, would grow
closer, thicker, darker every year.
For thirty years the House of
Lawrence had been In eclipse, and
the garden showed It
Acre by
acre old Philip Lawrence and his
son Patterson had watched their
fortunes decline; the old pioneer of
the Yerba Buena days lived to see
the end of the century, and the end
of bis own prosperity, and died,
leaving what remained in hands
even less capable than his own.
For Patterson Lawrence was a
poet, who lived merely to gather
worthless old books about him, to
dream over the painstaking pen
ning of insignificant essays, which
were rarely printed and for which
he was never paid.
At forty he married a poet’s
daughter, who had been precari
ously existing for ail her sixteen
years upon bread, water, and the
“Sonnets from the Portuguese,” in
a shanty on Rincon hllL Edltha,
before her early death, brought to
the House of Lawrence two sons
and three daughters. Sixteen when
she married, ten years later, when
Ariel was born, she quietly, hap
pily expired, to music, as It were.
For Patterson had been reading
poetry to her, the four older chil
dren, by some miracle, quiet and
occupied down by the creek, and
Ariel in her mother’s arms taking
a fourth-day view of life, when
death came.
"She looks as If she were listen
ing, Pat! She’s going to be a great
poet, and make all our fortunes I”
Edltha had said. And one minute
later she had slipped away, leav
ing the prophecy to gild little
Ariel's childhood.
The widowed elderly father did
the best he could for them all until
his oldest son was nearly eighteen
and Gail a capable, bustling house
manager two years younger. Then
the big guns began to boom across
the water, the service flags flashed
in answer upon many a quiet flag
pole In Cllpperavllle, and Patterson
Lawrence, fifty-eight years old, put
a copy of Keats in one pocket and
a copy of Shelley tn the other and
hurried off to die of flu tn over
crowded Washington, just as sure
as bls loyal children were sure that
he was helping his country and
doing the patriotic thing.
Then Phil and Gail bad to shoul
der the burden. Gall Lawrence was
supremely the girl for the job. 8be
was squarely built, womanly at
sixteen, brimming with Interests,
activities, ambitions, and enthual
asms.
By this time tbe once lucky
Lawrences had almost no money.
Phil bad all but finished high
school, and all the friends, rela
tives. snd neighbors said that cer
tainly a bright, fine boy like that
ought to complete his course. But
as Phil and Gall quite simply
agreed, meals were more Important
than education.
So Phil stopped
nls schooling and went to work
at the Iron Works, and Gail, upon
being offered a Job In the public
library, accepted It gratefully.
They scrambled along In the dis
reputable old bouse very happily;
They were always laughing, sing
ing, going on picnics; they were
passionately devoted to each other,
and everyone was sure that they
would get along splendidly. Were
they not the last of the Lucky Law
rences?
Surest of all was Gall, the resolute,
undaunted, optimistic mother and sla
ter, cook, nurse and lawmaker in
one. Life bad been a story to Gall,
for a few years, and she had turned
a fresh page eagerly every day. She
and Edith were going to marry de
lightful men, and Phil should marry,
too. And Sammy should live in
Edith's house and Ariel In Gall's,
and Ariel should write wonderful
poetry. There would be plenty of
money for everything, as there al
ways bad been . . . soon.
But somehow it had not worked
out that way. Gall bad grown a
little more sober, a little thinner, as
tbe years had slipped by; they had
all grown shabbier. Even to her,
poverty began to seem a serious
matter.
Phil, to her concern, had never
quite seen the joke of being poor
and being orphaned. He had always
been brief, worried, and unrespon
sive when Gall had tried to drag
him into her dreams. And Edith
hated poverty, too; It hurt her
pride. She had grjwn quieter, book
ish, Intellectual, something of a
recluse.
Sammy had done nothing except
slide through his shoes and get **D
minus” marks In bls studies. And
Ariel was completely spoiled. They
had all hailed her as a poet before
she could fairly write. She did
write poetry, and that was enough
Ho Had Rowed Them and Thole
Carpet Bags Ashore.
for Cllppersvllle. Cllpperavllle was
not critical. The Challenge pub
lished everything Ariel wrote. And
Ariel was discontented, proud, and
unmanageable.
Her twenty-third birthday found
Gall a quick-witted, eager, capable
girl, secretly a little bit scared and
doubtful, but outwardly gay, irre
sponsible, and pleasant to look at—
like all the Lawrences. Even the
boys never seemed to go through
lumpy or spotty phases, but were
clean - skinned
and
bright - eyed
through boyhood as through baby
hood. Tbe older four had tawny
<
k hair, which bad tumbled all
,,»er tbelr heads as children, but
which on xxaslons could be made
to take more fitting positions.
Ariel was different: frail, pink
cheeked, and cream-skinned, with
frightened big haxel eyes and a
small mouth. Ariel's hair was corn-
silk gold.
(TO BS OONTINUMD.)
___ _