FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
LOVE STORIES
BY
ZONA GALE
AUTHOR OF "FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," "THE LOVES
OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE," ETC.
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1909,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909. Reprinted
November, 1909 ; April, 1912.
Norwood Press
J. S. Gushing Co. Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
UO
MY FRIENDS IN PORTAGE
WISCONSIN
248987
CERTAIN of the following chapters have appeared
in Everybody's, The American Magazine, The Out-
look, The Woman's Home Companion, and The
Delineator. Thanks are due to the editors for their
courteous permission to reprint these chapters, and
to Messrs. Harper Brothers for permission to re-
print the sonnet in Chapter XL
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGB
I. OPEN ARMS ...... I
II. INSIDE JUNE 15
III. MIGGY 33
IV. SPLENDOUR TOWN ..... 43
^ V. DIFFERENT 62
VI. THE FOND FORENOON . . . .81
VII. AFRAID 96
VIII. THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT . . . .116
IX. THE COLD SHOULDER . . . . .136
X. EVENING DRESS . . . . . .148
XI. UNDERN . . . . . . .176
XII. THE WAY THE WORLD Is . . . .191
XIII. HOUSEHOLDRY ...... 2C>6
XIV. POSTMARKS . . . . . . .223
XV. PETER 248
XVI. THE NEW VILLAGE 258
XVII. ADOPTION . . . . ... .274
XVIII. AT PETER'S HOUSE 293
XIX. THE CUSTODIAN . . , , . . 309
Friendship Village Love Stories
OPEN ARMS
ALTHOUGH it is June, the Little Child about whom
I shall sometimes write in these pages this morning
brought me a few violets. June violets. They
sound unconvincing and even sentimental. How-
ever, here they are in their vase ; and they are all
white but one.
" Only one blue one," said Little Child, regret-
fully; " May must be 'most dead by mistake."
" Don't the months die as soon as they go away? "
I asked her, and a little shocked line troubled her
forehead.
"Oh, no," she said; "they never die at all.
They wait and show the next months how."
So this year's May is showing June how. As if
one should have a kind of pre-self, who kept on,
after one's birth, and told one what to live and what
not to live. I wish that I had had a pre-self and
that it had kept on with me to show me how. It is
what one's mother is, only one is so occupied in
2. FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
being one's born self that one thinks of her worship-
fully as one's mother instead. But this young June
seems to be chiefly May, and I am glad : for of all
the months, May is to me most nearly the essence
of time to be. In May I have always an impulse
to date my letters " To-morrow," for all the enchant-
ment of the usual future seems come upon me. The
other months are richly themselves, but May is all
the great premonitory zest come true; it is expecta-
tion come alive; it is the Then made Now. Con-
servatively, however, I date my May letters merely
" To-morrow," and it is pleasant to find a conserva-
tive estimate which no one is likely to exceed. For
I own that though there is a conservatism which is
now wholly forbidden to me, yet I continue to take
in it a sensuous, stolen pleasure, such as I take in
certain ceremonies; and I know that if I were wholly
pagan, extreme conservatism would be my chief
indulgence.
This yet-May morning, then, I have been down
in the village, gardening about the streets. My sort
of gardening. As in spring another looks along the
wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the
upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence
I peered round this wall and that for faces and things
in the renascence of recognition, or in the pleasant
importance of having just been born. Many a gate
and fa9ade and well-house, of which in my absence I
OPEN ARMS 3
have not thought even once, has not changed a whit
in consequence. And when changes have come, they
have done so with the prettiest preening air of accom-
plishment: "We too," they say, "have not been
idle."
Thus the streets came unrolling to meet me and
to show me their treasures : my neighbour's new
screened-in porch " with a round extension so to see
folks pass on the cross street " ; in the house in
which I am to live a former blank parlour wall gravely
regarding me with a magnificent new plate glass eye;
Daphne Street, hitherto a way of sand, now be-
come a thing of proud macadam ; the corner catalpas
old enough to bloom ; a white frame cottage rising
like a domestic Venus from a once vacant lot of
fo^m-green " Timothy "; a veranda window-box ac-
quired, like a bright bow-knot at its house's throat;
and, farther on, the Herons' freshly laid cement side-
walk, a flying heron stamped on every block. I
fancy they will have done that with the wooden
heron knocker which in the kitchen their grandfather
Heron himself carved on sleepless nights. (" Six
hundred and twenty hours of Grandpa Heron's life
hanging on our front door," his son's wife said; " I
declare I feel like that bird could just abqpt lay.")
To see all these venturesome innovations, these ob-
scure and pleasant substitutions, is to be greeted by
the very annuals of this little garden as a real gar-
4 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
dener in green lore might be signalled, here by a
trembling of new purple and there by a yellow
marching line of little volunteers.
I do not miss from their places many friends. In
this house and that I find a new family domiciled
and to be divined by the subtle changes which no
old tenant would ever have made: the woodpile
in an unaccustomed place, the side shed door dis-
used and strung for vines, a wagon now kept by a
north and south space once sacred to the sweet-pea
trench. Here a building partly ruined by fire shows
grim, returned to the inarticulate, not evidently to
be rebuilt, but to be accepted, like any death. But
these variations are the exception, and only one vari-
ation is the rule, and against that one I have in me
some special heritage of burning. I mean the felling
of the village trees. We have been used wantonly
to sacrifice to the base and the trivial, trees already
stored with years of symmetry when we of these
Midlands were the intruders and not they and I
own that for me the time has never wholly passed.
They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel
our lawns with twigs, they rot the shingles on our
barns. It has seemed to occur to almost nobody
to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too,
are beginning to discern^ so that when in the laying
of a sidewalk we meet a tree who was there before
we were anywhere at all, though we may not yet
OPEN ARMS 5
recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our
love of a straight line, and our votive offering is to
give the tree the walk such a slight swerving is
all the deference she asks ! and in return she
blesses us with balms and odours. . . . For me
these signs of our mellowing are more delightful to
experience than might be the already-made quietudes
of a nation of effected and distinguished standards.
I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves
an elemental gesture, though I personally would
prefer not to be the one to have made the gesture.
And this is my solace when with some inquisitioner
I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine an
isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hem-
lock : verily, I say, it was so that we did here in
the old days when there were forests to conquer,
and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his
blood as he has his genius for toil. And I try not
to remember that if in America we had had plane
trees, we should almost certainly have cutthem into
cabins. . . . But this morning even the trees that
I missed could not make me sad. No, nor even
the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers
hanging on a street door which I passed. All these
were as if something elementary had happened, need-
less wounds, it might be, on the plan of things, con-
tortions which science has not yet bred away, but,
as truly as the natural death from age, eloquent of
6 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
the cosmic persuading to shape in which the nations
of quietude and we of strivings are all in fellowship.
In fellowship ! I think that in this simple basic
emotion lies my joy in living in this, my village.
Here, this year long, folk have been adventuring to-
gether, knowing the details of one another's lives,
striving a little but companioning far more than striv-
ing, kindling to one another's interests instead of
practising the faint morality of mere civility ; and I
love them all unless it be only that little Mrs.
Oliver Wheeler Johnson, newly come to Friendship ;
and perhaps my faint liking for her arises from the
fact that she has not yet lived here long enough to be
understood, as Friendship Village understands. The
ways of these primal tribal bonds are in my blood, for
from my heart I felt what my neighbour felt when she
told me of the donation party which the whole village
has just given to Lyddy Ember :
" I declare," she said, c< it wasn't so much the
stuff they brought in, though that was all elegant,
but it was the Togetherness of it. I couldn't get to
sleep that night for thinkin' about God not havin'
anybody to neighbour with."
It was no wonder, therefore, that when in the
middle of Daphne Street my neighbour met me this
morning, for the first time since my return, and held
out her arms, I walked straight into them. Here
is the secret, as more of us know than have the
OPEN ARMS 7
wisdom to acknowledge : fellowship, comradeship,
kinship call it what you will. My neighbour and
I will understand.
" I heard you was here," my neighbour said
bless her, her voice trembled. I suppose there
never was such a compliment as that tremor of her
voice.
I am afraid that I am not going to tell what else
she said. But it was all about our coming to
Friendship Village to live ; and that is a thing
which, as I feel about it, should be set to music and
sung in the wind where Thoreau said that some
apples are to be eaten. As for me, I nodded at my
neighbour, and could do no more than that as is
the custom of mortals when they are face to face
with these sorceries of Return and Meeting and
Being Together.
I am not yet wonted to the sweetness of our com-
ing to Friendship Village to live, the Stranger and
I. Here they still call him the Stranger ; and this
summer, because of the busts and tablets which he
must fashion in many far places, so do I. Have I
said that that Stranger of mine is a sculptor ? He is.
But if anyone expects me to write about him, I tell
you that it is impossible. Save this : That since
he came out of the mist one morning on the Plank
Road here in Friendship Village, we two have kept
house in the world, shared in the common welfare,
8 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
toiled as we might for the common good, observed
the stars, and thanked God. And this : that since
that morning, it is as if Someone had picked us up
and set us to music and sung us to the universal
piping. And we remember that once we were only
words, and that sometime we shall be whatever
music is when it is free of its body of sound, and for
that time we strive. But I repeat that these vagrant
notes are not about this great Stranger, absent on
his quests of holy soul prisoned in this stone and
that marble, nor yet about our life together. Rather,
I write about our Family, which is this loved town
of ours. For we have bought Oldmoxon House,
and here, save for what flights may be about and
over-seas, we hope that we may tell our days to
their end.
My neighbour had both my hands, there in the
middle of Daphne Street, and the white horse of the
post-office store delivery wagon turned out for us as
if he knew.
" If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd
have put on my other hat," my neighbour said, " but
I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down for some
rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't
what they used to be, are they ? One season an'
they lay down life. I could jounce up an 7 down I'm
so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed
gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'.
OPEN ARMS
I heard the girl that was comin' to help you ain't
comin' near."
My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and
she has done the disappointing by telegraph. I had
almost said, publicly by telegraph. But I protest
that I would rather an entire village should read my
telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole
city should care almost nothing for me or my tele-
grams either. And if you please, I would rather
not have that telegram-reading criticised.
"Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity,
" I've got you one. She'll be up to talk^to you in a
day or two I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can
spell like the minister."
I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her
name with something of that sense of the inescapable
to which the finality of my neighbour impressed me.
As if I were to have said, " So, then, it is to be
Miggy ! " Or was it something more than that ?
Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and mine had
struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have
come to call the emotion of finality. I suppose that
other people have it : that occasional prophetic
sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses
this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness
of shall I say? brightness; a mental area of
clearness ; a quite definite physical emotion of yes-
ness. But if the thing will not happen this says
io FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
itself by a complementary apprehension of dim,
down-sloping, vacant negation. I have seldom
known this divination to fail me though I am
chary of using it lest I use it up ! And then I do
not always wish to know. But this morning my
emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware : I
knew that it would be Miggy.
" What a curious name," I said, in a manner of
feebly fending off the imminent; " why Miggy?"
For it seemed to me one of those names instead of
which any other name would have done as well and
perhaps better.
" Her name is Margaret," my neighbour explained,
cc and her mother was a real lady that come here from
Off and that hard work killed her because she was
a lady. The father was bound there shouldn't be
any lady about Miggy, but he couldn't seem to
help himself. Margaret was her mother's name
and so he shaved it and shrunk it and strained it
down to Miggy. No frills for nobody,' was his
motto, up to his death. Miggy and her little
sister lives with her old Aunt Effie that dress-
makes real French but not enough to keep 'em
alive on. Miggy does odd jobs around. So
when I heard about your needin' somebody, I
says to myself, c Miggy !' just like I've said it
to you."
It was not the name, as a name, which I would
OPEN ARMS ii
have said could be uppermost in my mind as I
walked on that street of June that May was help-
ing to make fair. And I was annoyed to have the
peace of my return so soon invaded. I fell wonder-
ing if I could not get on, as I usually do, with no
one to bother. I have never wanted a helper at all
if I could avoid it, and I have never, never wanted a
helper with a personality. A personality among my
strewn papers puts me in a fever of embarrassment
and misery. Once such an one said to me in the
midst of a chapter: "Madame, I'd like to ask you
a question. What do you think of your hero ? "
In an utter rout of confusion I owned that I
thought very badly of him, indeed ; but I did not add
the truth, that she had effectually drugged him and
disabled me for at least that day. My taste in
helpers is for one colourless, noiseless, above all in-
tonationless, usually speechless, and always without
curiosity some one, save for the tips of her trained
fingers, negligible. As all this does sad violence to
my democratic passions, I usually prefer my negligi-
ble self. So the idea of a Miggy terrified me, and
I said to myself that I would not have one about.
As I knew the village, she was not of it. She was
not a part of my gardening. She was no proper
annual. She was no doubt merely a showy little
seedling, chance sown in the village. . . . But all
the time, moving within me, was that serene area of
iz FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
brightness, that clear certainty that, do what I could,
it would still be Miggy.
... It is through this faint soothsaying, this con-
ception which is partly of sight and partly of feeling,
that some understanding may be won of the orches-
tration of the senses. I am always telling myself
that if I could touch at that fluent line where the
senses merge, I should occasionally find there that
silent Custodian who is myself. I think, because
emotion is so noble, that the Custodian must some-
times visit this line where the barrier between her
and me is so frail. Her presence seems possible
to me only for a moment, only, it may be, for the
fraction of a second in which I catch the romance,
the idea of something old and long familiar. And
when this happens, I say : She has just been there,
between the seeing and the feeling, or between the
seeing and the knowing. Often I am sure that I
have barely missed her. But I am never quick
enough to let her know. . . .
When I finished my walk and stepped under the
poplars before my gate, I caught a faint exclamation.
It was that Little Child, who had been waiting for
me on my doorstep and came running to meet me
and bring me the violets. When she saw me, she
said, " Oh ! " quickly and sweetly in her throat, and,
as I stood still to taste the delight of having her run
toward me, I felt very sorry for every one who has
OPEN ARMS 13
not heard that involuntary " Oh ! " of a child at
one's coming. Little Child and I have met only
once before, and that early this morning, at large, on
the village street, as spirits met in air, with no back-
ground of names nor auxiliary of exchange of names ;
but we had some talk which for me touched on
eternal truth and for her savoured of story-telling ;
and w,e are friends. So now when she gave me the
violets and explained to me Who was showing June
how, I accepted this fair perception of the mother-
hood of May, this childish discernment of the
familyhood of things, and,
" Will you come some day soon to have another
story ? " I asked her.
"Prob'ly I can," said Little Child. "I'll ask
Miggy."
" Miggy ! But is it your Miggy, too ? " I
demanded.
" It's my sister," said Little Child, nodding.
I thought that the concreteness of her reply to
my ill-defined query was almost as if she remem-
bered how to understand without words. You
would think that children would need to have things
said out, but they are evidently closer to a more
excellent way.
So when I entered the house just now, I brought
in with me a kind of premonitory Miggy, one of
those ghostly, anticipatory births which we are con-
14 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
stantly giving to those whom we have not met. As
if every one had for us a way of life without the
formality of being seen. As if we are a big, near
family whether we want to be so or not. Verily,
it is not only May and June, or Little Child and
Miggy, who are found unexpectedly to be related ;
it is the whole world, it seems, and he is wise who
quickens to many kinships. I like to think of the
comrade company that already I have found here :
June and Little Child and Miggy-to-be and my
neighbour and Daphne Street and the remembered
faces of the village and the hamadryads. I think
that I include the very herons in the cement side-
walk. Like a kind of perpetual gift it is, this which
my neighbour called Togetherness.
II
INSIDE JUNE
THE difficulty with a June day is that you can never
get near enough to it. This month comes within few
houses, and if you want it you must go out to it.
When you are within doors, knowing that out-of-
doors it is June, the urge to be out there with it is
resistless. But though you wade in green, steep in
sun, breast wind, and glory in them all, still the day
itself eludes you. It would seem, in June, that there
should be a specific for the malady of being oneself,
so that one might get to be a June day outright.
However, if one were oneself more and more, might
not one finally become a June day? . . .
Or something of this sort. I am quoting, as
nearly as may be, from the Book of Our Youth,
your youth and mine. Always the Book of Youth
will open at a page like this. And occasionally it
is as if we turned back and read there and made a
path right away through the page.
This morning a rose-breasted grosbeak wakened me,
singing on a bough of box-elder so close to my window
15
1 6 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
that the splash of rose on his throat almost startled
me. It was as if I ought not to have been looking.
And to turn away from out-of-doors was like leav-
ing some one who was saying something. But as
soon as I stepped into the day I perceived my old
problem : The difficulty with a June day is that you
can never get near enough.
I stood for a little at the front gate trying soberly
to solve the matter or I stood where the front
gate should have been ; for in our midland Ameri-
can villages we have few fences or hedges, and, alas,
no stone walls. Though undoubtedly this lack
comes from an insufficient regard for privacy, yet
this negative factor I am inclined to condone for
the sake of the positive motive. And this I con-
ceive to be that we are wistful of more ample occu-
pation than is commonly contrived by our fifty-feet
village lots, and so we royally add to our " yards "
the sidewalk and the planting space and the road
and as much of our neighbour's lawn as our imagi-
nation can annex. There seems to me to be in this
a certain charming pathos ; as it were, a survival in
us of the time when we had only to name broad
lands our own and to stay upon them in order to
make them ours in very fact. And now it is as if
this serene pushing back of imaginary borders were
in reality an appending, a kind of spiritual taking
up of a claim.
INSIDE JUNE 17
How to get nearer to June ? I admit that it is a
question of the veriest idler. But what a delightful
company of these questions one can assemble. As,
How to find one's way to a place that is the way
it seems Away Across a Meadow. How to meet
enough people who hear what one says in just the
way that one means it. How to get back at will
those fugitive moments when one almost knows . . .
what it is all about. And with this question the
field of the idler becomes the field of the wise man ;
and, indeed, if one idles properly or rather, if the
proper person idles the two fields are not always
on opposite sides of the road. To idle is by no
means merely to do nothing. It is an avocation,
a calling away, nay, one should say, a piping away.
To idle is to inhibit the body and to let the spirit
keep on. Not every one can idle. I know es-
timable people who frequently relax, like chickens
in the sun ; but I know only a few who use relaxa-
tion as a threshold and not as a goal, and who idle
until the hour yields its full blessing.
I wondered if to idle at adventure might not be
the way to June, so I went out on the six o'clock
street in somewhat the spirit in which another might
ride the greenwood. Almost immediately I had an
encounter, for I came on my neighbour in her
garden. Not my neighbour who lives on the other
side of me, and who is a big and obvious deacon,
1 8 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
with a family of a great many Light Gowns ; but
My Neighbour. She was watering her garden.
These water rules and regulations of the village are
among its spells. To look at the members of the
water commission one would never suspect them of
romance. But if they have it not, why have they
named from five until nine o'clock the only morning
hours when one may use the city water for one's
lawn and garden ? I insist that it cannot be a mere
regard for the municipal resources, and that the com-
missioners must see something of the romance of get-
ting up before five o'clock to drench one's garden,
and are providing for the special educational value
of such a custom. Or, if I do not believe this, I
wish very much that I did, with the proper grounds.
To tell the truth, however, I do not credit even
my neighbour with feeling the romance of the hour
and of her occupation. She is a still woman of more
than forty, who does not feel a difference between
her flower and her vegetable gardens, but regards
them both as a part of her life in the kind of car-
window indifference and complacency of certain
travellers. She raises foxgloves and parsley, and the
sun shines over all. I must note a strange impres-
sion which my neighbour gives me : she has always
for me an air of personal impermanence. I have
the fancy, amounting to a sensation, that she is
where she is for just a moment, and that she must
INSIDE JUNE 19
rush back and be at it again. I do not know
at what. But whether I see her in church or at a
festival, I have always all I can do to resist saying
to her, "How did you get away?" It was so
that she was watering her flowers ; as if she were
intending at any moment to hurry off to get break-
fast or put up the hammock or mend. And yet be-
fore she did so she told me, who was a willing
listener, a motion or two of the spirit of the village.
There is, I observe, a nicety of etiquette here,
about the Not-quite-news, Not-quite-gossip shared
with strangers and semi-strangers. The rules seem
to be :
Strangers shall be told only the pleasant occur-
rences and conditions.
Half strangers may discuss the unpleasant matters
which they themselves have somehow heard, but
only pleasant matters may be added by accretion.
The rest of society may say whatever it " has a
mind." But this mind, as I believe, is not harsh,
since nobody ever gossips except to people who
gossip back.
" Mis' Toplady told me last night that Calliope
Marsh is coming home for the Java entertainment,
next week," my neighbour imparted first. And this
was the best news that she could have given me.
It has been a great regret to me that this summer
Calliope is not in the village. She has gone to the
20 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
city to nurse some distant kinswoman more lonely
than she, and until ill-health came, long forgetful of
Calliope. But she is to come back now and again,
to this and to that, for the village interests are all
her own. I have never known any one in whom
the tribal sense is so persistently alive as in Calliope.
I asked my neighbour what this Java entertain-
ment would be, which was to give back Calliope,
and she looked her amazement that I did not know.
It would be, it appeared, one of those great fairs
which the missionary society is always projecting
and carrying magnificently forward.
"It's awful feet-aching work," said my neighbour,
reflectively ; " but honestly, Calliope seems to like it.
I donno but I do, too. The Sodality meant to have
one when they set out to pave Daphne Street, but it
turned out it wasn't needed. Well, big affairs like
that makes it seem as if we'd been born into the
whole world and not just into Friendship Village."
My neighbour told me that a new public library
had been opened in a corner of the post-office store,
and that " a great crowd " was drawing books, though
for this she herself cannot vouch, since the library is
only open Saturday evenings, and " Saturday," she
says with decision, " is a bad night." It is, in fact,
I note, very difficult to find a free night in the
village, save only Tuesday. Monday, because of
its obvious duties and incident fatigue, is as impos-
INSIDE JUNE 21
sible as Sunday ; Wednesday is club day ; Thursday
"is prayer-meeting"; Friday is sacred to church sup-
pers and entertainments and the Ladies' Aid Society ;
and Saturday is invariably denominated a bad night
and omitted without question. We are remote from
society, but Tuesday is literally our only free even-
ing.
" Of course it won't be the same with you about
books," my neighbour admits. " You can send your
girl down to get a book for you. But I have to be
home to get out the clean clothes. How's your
girl going to like the country ? " she asked.
I am to have here in the village, I find, many a
rebuke for habits of mine which lag behind my
theories. For though I try to solve my share of a
tragic question by giving to my Swedish maid, Elfa,
the self-respect and the privilege suited to a human
being dependent on me, together with ways of com-
fort and some leisure, yet I find the homely customs
of the place to have accomplished more than my
careful system. And though, when I took her from
town I scrupulously added to the earnings of my little
maid, I confess that it had not occurred to me to
wonder whether or not she would like Friendship
Village. We seem so weary-far from the conditions
which we so facilely conceive. Especially, I seem
far. I am afraid that I engaged Elfa in the first
place with less attention to her economic fitness than
22 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
that she is so trim and still and wistful, with such a
peculiarly winning upward look ; and that her name
is Elfa. I told my neighbour that I did not know yet,
whether Elfa would like it here or not ; and for refuge
I found fault with the worms on the rose bushes.
Also I made a note in my head to ask Elfa how she
likes the country. But the spirit of a thing is flown
when you make a note of -it in your head. How
does Elfa like the town, for that matter? I never
have asked her this, either.
" She'll be getting married on your hands, any-
way," my neighbour observed ; "the ladies here say
that's one trouble with trying to keep a hired girl.
They will get married. But I say, let 'em."
At least here is a matter in which my theory, like
that of my neighbour's, outruns those of certain folk
of both town and village. For I myself have heard
women complain of their servants marrying and
establishing families, and deplore this shortsighted-
ness in not staying where there is " a good home,
a nice room, plenty to eat, and all the flat pieces
sent to the laundry."
" Speaking of books," said my neighbour, " have
you seen Nicholas Moor ? "
" I see almost no new books," I told her guiltily.
" Me either," she said ; " I don't mean he's a book.
He's a boy. Nicholas Moor that does a little
writin' himself? I guess you will see him. He'll
INSIDE JUNE 23
be bringin' some of his writings up to show you.
He took some to the new school principal, I heard,
and to the invalid that was here from the city. He
seems to be sort of lonesome, though he has got
a good position. He's interested in celluloid and
he rings the Catholic bell. Nicholas must be near
thirty, but he hasn't even showed any signs."
" Signs ? " I hazarded.
" Of being in love," she says simply. And I have
pondered pleasantly on this significant ellipsis of hers
which takes serenely for granted the basic business
of the world. Her elision reminds me of the
delicate animism of the Japanese which says, " When
the rice pot speaks with a human voice, then the
demon's name is Kanjo." One can appraise a race
or an individual by the class of things which speech
takes for granted, love or a demon or whatever it be.
And apropos of " showing signs," do I remember
Liva Vesey and Timothy Toplady, Jr. ? I am
forced to confess that I remember neither. I recall,
to be sure, that the Topladys had a son, but I had
thought of him as a kind of qualifying clause and it
is difficult to conceive of him as the subject of a new
sentence. When I hear of Liva Vesey I get her
confused with a pink gingham apron and a pail of
buttermilk which used sometimes to pass my house
with Liva combined. Fancy that pink gingham
and that pail becoming a person! And my neigh-
24 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
hour tells me that the Qualifying Clause and the
Pink Gingham are " keeping company/* and per-
haps are to determine the cut of indeterminate
clauses and aprons, world without end.
" The young folks will couple off/* says my
neighbour ; " and," she adds, in a manner of spon-
taneous impression, " / think it's nice. And it's nice
for the whole family, too. I've seen families that
wouldn't ever have looked at each other come to be
real friends and able to see the angels in each other
just by the young folks pairing off. This whole
town's married crisscross and kittering, family into
family. I like it. It kind o' binds the soil."
My neighbour told me of other matters current
in the village, pleasant commonplaces having for
her the living spirit which the commonplace holds
in hostage. ("I'm breathing," Little Child soberly
announced to me that first day of our acquaintance.
And I wonder why I smiled?) My neighbour
slowly crossed her garden and I followed on the
walk these informal colloquies of no mean length
are perfectly usual in the village and they do not
carry the necessity for an invitation within the house
or the implication of a call. The relations of host-
ess and guest seem simply to be suspended, and we
talk with the freedom of spirits met in air. Is this
not in its way prophetic of the time when we shall
meet, burdened of no conventions or upholstery or
INSIDE JUNE 25
perhaps even words, and there talk with the very
freedom of villagers ? Meanwhile I am content
with conventions, and passive amid upholstery. But
I do catch myself looking forward.
Suddenly my neighbour turned to me with such
a startled, inquiring manner that I sent my atten-
tion out as at an alarm to see what she meant. And
then I heard what I had not before noted : a thin,
wavering line of singing, that had begun in the
street beyond our houses, and now floated incon-
sequently to us, lifting,Mipping, wandering. I could
even hear the absurd words.
" My Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I never know.
You don't make me merry, very, but you maKe me sorry, oh "
the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air.
To say something was like interrupting my
neighbour's expression ; so I waited, and,
" It's old Gary," she explained briefly. " When
he does that it's like something hurts you, ain't it?"
I thought that this would be no one of my ac-
quaintance, and I said so, but tentatively, lest I
should be forgetting some inherent figure of the
village.
"He's come here in the year," she explained
and, save about the obvious import of old Gary's maud-
lin song, she maintained that fine, tribal reticence
of hers. " Except for the drinking," she even said,
26 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
cc he seems to be a quiet, nice man. But it's a
shame for Peter's sake. Peter .Gary," she added,
like a challenge, " is the brainiest young man in this
town, say what you want."
On which she told me something of this young
superintendent of the canning factory who has
" tried it in Nebraska," and could not bear to leave
his father here, " this way," and has just returned.
cc He works hard, and plays the violin, and is making
a man of himself generally," she told me ; " Don't
miss him." And I have promised that I will try not
to miss Peter Gary.
" They live out towards the cemetery way," she
added, " him and his father, all alone. Peter'll be
along by here in a minute on his way to work
it's most quarter to. I set my husband down to his
breakfast and got up his lunch before I come out
I don't have my breakfast till the men folks get
out of the way."
I never cease to marvel at these splendid capabili-
ties which prepare breakfasts, put up lunches, turn
the attention to the garden, and all, so to speak,
with the left hand ; ready at any moment to enter
upon the real business of life to minister to the
sick or bury the dead, or conduct a town meeting
or a church supper or a birth. They have a kind
of goddess-like competence, these women. At any
of these offices they arrive, lacking the cloud, it is
INSIDE JUNE 27
true, but magnificently equipped to settle the occa-
sion. In crises of, say, deafness, they will clap a
hot pancake on a friend's ear with an ^sculapian
savoir fatre, for their efficiencies combine those of
lost generations with all that they hear of in this, in
an open-minded eclecticism. With Puritans and
foresters and courtiers in our blood, who knows but
that we have, too, the lingering ichor of gods and
goddesses? Oh "don't you wish you bad?'
What a charming peculiarity it would be to be de-
scended from a state of immortality as well as to
be preparing for it, nay, even now to be entered
upon it !
In a few moments after that piteous, fuddled song
had died away on the other street, Peter Gary came
by my neighbour's house. He was a splendid, mus-
cular figure in a neutral, belted shirt and a hat bat-
tered quite to college exactions, though I am sure
that Peter did not know that. I could well believe
that he was making a man of himself. I have
temerity to say that this boy superintendent of a
canning factory looked as, in another milieu, Shelley
might have looked, but so it was. It was not the
first time that I have seen in such an one the look,
the eyes with the vision and the shadow. I have
seen it in the face of a man who stood on a step-
ladder, papering a wall ; I have seen it in a mason
who looked up from the foundation that he mor-
23 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
tared ; I have seen it often and often in the faces of
men who till the soil. I was not surprised to
know that Peter Gary " took " on the violin. The
violin is a way out (for that look in one's eyes), as,
for Nicholas Moor, I have no doubt, is the ringing
of the Catholic bell. And I am not prepared to say
that celluloid, and wall-paper, and mortar, and mead-
ows, and canneries, run under good conditions,
may not be a way out as well. At all events, the
look was still in Peter's face.
Peter glanced briefly at my neighbour, running
the risk of finding us both looking at him, realized
the worst, blushed a man's brown blush, and nodded
and smiled after he had looked away from us.
" You see this grass ? " said my neighbour.
" Peter keeps it cut, my husband don't get home
till so late. We're awful fond of Peter."
There is no more tender eulogy. And I would
rather have that said of me in the village than in any
place I know. No grace of manner or dress or mind
can deceive anybody. They are fond of you or they
are not, and I would trust their reasons for either.
My neighbour's husband came out the front door
at that moment, and he and Peter, without greeting,
went on together. Her husband did not look
toward us, because, in the village, it seems not to be
a husband and wife ceremonial to say good-by in
the morning. I often fall wondering how it is in
INSIDE JUNE 29
other places. Is it possible -that men in general go
away to work without the consciousness of family,
of themselves as going forth on the common quest ?
Is it possible that women see them go and are so
unaware of the wonder of material life that they do
not instance it in, at least, good-by ? One would
think that even the female bear in the back of the
cave must growl out something simple when her
lord leaves her in the hope of a good kill.
And when the two men had turned down the
brick walk, the maple leaves making a come-and-go
of shadows and sun-patterns on their backs, my
neighbour looked at me with a smile or, say, with
two-thirds of a smile as if her vote to smile were
unanimous, but she were unwilling by it to impart too
much.
" It's all Miggy with Peter," she said, as if she
were mentioning a symptom.
" Miggy?" I said with interest and found my-
self nodding to this new relationship as to a new
acquaintance. And I was once more struck with the
precision with which certain simple people and nearly
all great people discard the particularities and lay bare
their truths. Could any amount of elegant phrasing
so reach the heart of the thing and show it beating
as did, " It's all Miggy with Peter"?
" Yes," my neighbour told me, " it's been her with
him ever since he come here."
30 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Assuredly I thought the better of Miggy for this ;
and,
"Is it all Peter with Miggy?" I inquired, with
some eagerness.
Land knows, my neighbour thought, and handed
me the hose to hold while she turned off the water
at the hydrant. I remember that a young robin
tried to alight on the curving sp'ray just as the water
failed and drooped.
"I like to get a joke on a robin that way," said
my neighbour, and laughed out, in a kind of pleasant
fellowship with jokes in general and especially with
robins. " It made Miggy's little sister laugh so the
other day when that happened," she added. Then
she glanced over at me with a look in her face that
I have not seen there before.
" Land," she said, " this is the time of day, after
my husband goes off in the morning, when I wish I
had a little young thing, runnin' round. Now al-
most more than at night. Well I don't know;
both times."
I nodded, without saying anything, my eyes on
a golden robin prospecting vainly among the green
mulberries. I wish that I were of those who know
what to say when a door is opened like this to some
shut place.
" Well," said my neighbour, " now I'll bake up the
rest of the batter. Want a pink? "
INSIDE JUNE 31
Thus tacitly excused how true her instinct was,
courteously to put the three fringed pinks in my
hand to palliate her leaving ! I have come back to
my house and my own breakfast.
" Elfa," said I, first thing, "do you think you are
going to like the country? "
My little maid turned to me with her winning
upward look.
" No'm," she shocked me by saying. And there
was another door, opened into another shut place;
and I did not know what to say to that either.
But I am near to my neighbour ; and, in a manner
to which Elfa's trimness and wistfulness never have
impressed me, near to Elfa herself, and I am near,
near to the village. As I left the outdoors just now,
all the street 'was alive: with men and girls going to
work, women opening windows, a wagon or two in
from a Caledonia farm, a general, universal, not to
say cosmic air of activity and coffee. All the little
houses, set close together up and down the street,
were like a friendly porch party, on a long, narrow
veranda, where folk sit knee to knee with an avenue
between for the ice-cream to be handed. All the
little lawns and gardens were disposed like soft green
skirts, delicately embroidered, fragrant, flowing. . . .
As I looked, it seemed to me that I could hear the
faint hum of the village talk in every house the
intimate, revealing confidences of the Family, quick
32 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
with hope or anxiety or humour or passion, animated
by its common need to live. And along the street
flooded the sun, akin to the morning quickening in
many a heart.
The day has become charged for me with some-
thing besides daylight, something which no less
than daylight pervades, illumines, comes to meet me
at a thousand points. I wonder if it can be that,
unaware, I did get near to June?
Ill
MIGGY
I HAVE never heard the chimes of Westminster
cathedral, but when sometime they do sound forme
I shall find in them something all my own. For
the old rosewood clock which hap. told time for me
these many years is possessed of a kind of intelli-
gence because its maker gave to it the Westminster
chimes. Thus, though the clock must by patient
ticking teach the rhythm of duration until the secret
monotony of rhythm is confessed, it has also its
high tides of life, rhythmic, too, and at every quarter
hour fills a kind of general creative office : four
notes for the quarter, eight for the half, twelve for
the three-quarters, sixteen for the hour, and then
the deep Amen of the strokes. At twelve o'clock it
swells richly to its zenith of expression and almost says
something else. Through even the organ fulness of
the cathedral bells I shall hear the tingling melody of
the rosewood clock chimes, for their sweet incidence
has been to me both matins and lullaby and often
trembles within my sleep. I have the clock always
D 33
34 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
with me. It is a little voice-friend, it is one of
those half folk, like flowers and the wind and an
open fireplace and a piano, which are a frail, semi-
born race, wistful of complete life, but as yet only
partly overlapping our own sphere. These fasci-
nate me almost as much as the articulate. That
was why, when my little maid Elfa had brought me
the summons to-day, I stood on the threshold and
in some satisfaction watched Miggy, rapt before my
clock in its musical maximum of noon.
Miggy is as thin as a bough, and her rather large
head is swept by an ungovernable lot of fine brown
hair. Her face was turned from me, and she was
wearing a high-necked gingham apron faded to
varying values of brown and faint purple and violet
of a quite surprising beauty. When the last stroke
ceased, she turned to me as if I had been there all
the time.
" I wish I could hear it do that again," she said,
standing where she had stood, arms folded.
" You will, perhaps, to-morrow," I answered.
Truly, if it was to be Miggy, then she would hear
the chimes to-morrow and to-morrow ; and as she
turned, my emotion of finality increased. I have
never loved the tribe of the Headlongs, though I
am very sorry for any one who has not had with
them an occasional innocent tribal junket; but I
hold that through our intuitions, we may become
MIGGY 35
a kind of apotheosis of the Headlongs. Who of us
has not chosen a vase, a chair, a rug, by some motive
transcending taste, by the bidding of a friendly-
faithful monitor who, somewhere inside one, nodded
a choice which we obeyed ? And yet a vase is a
dead thing with no little seeking tentacles that catch
and cling, while in choosing the living it is that
one's friendly-faithful monitor is simply recognizing
the monitor of the other person. I, for one, am
more and more willing to trust these two to avow
their own. For I think that this monitor is, per-
haps, that silent Custodian whom, if ever I can win
through her elusiveness, I shall know to be myself.
As the years pass I trust her more and more. I find
that we like the same people, she and I! And in-
stantly we both liked Miggy.
Miggy stood regarding me intently.
" I saw you go past the Brevy's yesterday, where
the crape is on the door," she observed ; " I thought
it was you."
I wonder at the precision with which very little
people and very big people brush aside the minor
conventions and do it in such ways that one nature
is never mistaken for the other.
" The girl who died there was your friend, then ? "
I asked.
" No," Miggy said ; " I just knew her to speak
to. And she didn't always bother her head to
3 6 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
speak to me. I just went in there yesterday morning
to get the feeling."
" I beg your pardon. To get what? " I asked.
" Well/' said Miggy, " you know when you look
at a corpse you can always sense your own breath
better like it was something alive inside you.
That's why I never miss seeing one if I can help.
It's the only time I'm real glad I'm living."
As I motioned her to the chair and took my own,
I felt a kind of weariness. The neurotics, I do
believe, are of us all the nearest to the truth about
things, but as I grow older I find myself getting to
take a surpassing comfort in the normal. Or rather,
I am always willing to have the normal thrust upon
me, but my neurotics I wish to select for myself.
" My neighbour tells me," I said merely, "that she
thinks you should be my secretary." (It is a big
word for the office, but a little hill is still a hill.)
" I think so, too," said Miggy, simply, " I was
afraid you wouldn't."
" Have you ever been anybody's secretary ? " I
continued.
" Never," said Miggy. " I never saw anybody
before that had a secretary."
" But something must have made her think you
would do," I suggested. "And what made you
think so ? "
" Well," Miggy said, " she thinks so because she
MIGGY 37
wants me to get ahead. And I think so because I
generally think I can do anything except mathe-
matics. Has Secretary got any mathematics about
it ? "
" Not my secretary work/' I told her, reviewing
these extraordinary qualifications for duty ; " except
counting the words on a page. You could do
that ? "
" Oh, that ! " said Miggy. " But if you told me
to multiply two fractions you'd never see me again,
no matter how much I wanted to come back.
Calliope Marsh says she's always expecting to find
some folks' heads caved in on one side same as red
and blue balloons. If mine caved, it'd be on the
mathematics corner."
I assured her that I never have a fraction in my
house.
" Then I'll come," said Miggy, simply.
But immediately she leaned forward with a look
of anxiety, and her face was pointed and big-eyed,
so that distress became a part of it.
" Oh," she said, " I forgot. I meant to tell you
first."
" What is it ? Can you not come, after all ? " I
inquired gravely.
" I've got a drawback," said Miggy, soberly.
" A man's in love with me."
She linked her arms before her, a hand on either
3 8 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
shoulder arms whose slenderness amazes me,
though at the wrist they taper and in their extreme
littleness are yet round. Because of this frailty she
has a kind of little girl look which at that moment
curiously moved me.
"Who told you that?" I asked abruptly.
" About it being a drawback ? Everybody 'most/'
said Miggy. " They all laugh about us and act like
it was a pity."
For a moment I felt a kind of anger as I felt
it once when a woman said to me of a wife of many
years whose first little child was coming, that she
was " in trouble." I own that, save with my
neighbour, and Calliope, and a few more whom I
love here in the village I miss the simple good
breeding of the perception that nothing is nobler
than the emotions, and the simple good taste of
taking seriously love among its young. Taking it
seriously, I say. Not, heaven forbid, taking it for
granted, as do the cities.
" Other things being equal, I prefer folk who are
in love," I told Miggy. Though I observe that I
instance a commercialization which I deplore by not
insisting on this secretarial qualification to anything
like the extent with which I insist on, say, spelling.
Miggy nodded three little nods which seemed
to settle everything.
"Then I'll come," she repeated. "Anyhow, it
MIGGY 39
isn't me that's in love at all. It's Peter. But of
course I have to have some of the blame."
So ! It was, then, not " all Peter with Miggy."
Poor Peter. It must be a terrific problem to be a
Peter to such a Miggy. I must have looked " Poor
Peter," because the girl's face took on its first smile.
Such a smile as it was, brilliant, sparkling, occupy-
ing her features instead of informing them.
" He won't interfere much," she observed. " He's
in the cannery all day and then he practises violin
and tinkers. I only see him one or two evenings a
week ; and I never think of him at all."
" As my secretary," said I, cc you may make a
mental note for me : remind me that I wish some-
time to meet Peter."
"He'll be real pleased," said Miggy, "and real
scared. Now about my being your secretary : do
I have to take down everything you do ? "
" My dear child!" I exclaimed.
" Don't I ? " said Miggy. " Why, the Ladies' Aid
has a secretary and she takes down every single
thing the society does. I thought that was being
one."
I told her, as well as might be, what I should re-
quire of her not by now, I own, with any particu-
larity of idea that I had a secretary, but rather that I
had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be
of use in many a little mechanical task. She listened,
4 o FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
and, when I had made an end, gave her three little
nods ; but her face fell.
" It's just doing as you're told," she summed it up
with a sigh. cc Everything is, ain't it ? I thought
maybe Secretary was doing your best."
" But it is," I told her.
" No," she said positively, " you can't do your
best when you have to do just exactly what you're
told. Your best tells you how to do itself."
At this nai've putting of the personal equation
which should play so powerful a part in the eco-
nomics of toil I was minded to apologize for intend-
ing to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible du-
ties with me. She had the truth, though : that the
strong creative instinct is the chief endowment,
primal as breath ; for on it depend both life and the
expression of life, the life of the race and the ultimate
racial utterance.
We talked on for a little, Miggy, I observed,
having that royal indifference to time which, when
it does not involve indifference to the time of other
people, I delightedly commend. For myself, I
can never understand why I should eat at one or
sleep at eleven, if it is, as it often is, my one and my
eleven and nobody else's. For, as between the
clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other
o'clocks are mine and I am not theirs. But I have
known men and women living in hotels who would
MIGGY 41
interrupt a sunset to go to dine, or wave away the
stars in their courses to go to sleep, merely because
the hour had struck. It must be in their blood,
poor things, as descendants from the cell, to which
time and space were the only considerations.
When Miggy was leaving, she paused on the
threshold with her first hint of shyness, a hint
which I welcomed. I think that every one to whom
I am permanently drawn must have in his nature a
phase of shyness, even of unconquerable timidity.
"If I shouldn't do things," Miggy said, "like
you're used to having them done would you tell
me ? I know a few nice things to do and I do
*em. But I'm always waking up in the night and
thinking what a lot there must be that I do wrong.
So if I do 'em wrong would you mind not just
squirming and keeping still about 'em but tell
me?"
" I'll tell you, child, if there is need," I promised
her. And I caught her smile that faint, swift,
solemn minute which sometimes reveals on a face
the childlike wistfulness of every one of us, under
the mask, to come as near as may be to the others.
I own that when, just now, I turned from her
leave-taking, I had that infrequent sense of empti-
ness-in-the-room which I have had usually only
with those I love or with some rare being, all fire
and spirit and idea, who has flamed in my presence
42 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
and died into departure. I cannot see why we do
not feel this sense of emptiness whenever we leave
one another. Would you not think that it would
be so with us who live above the abyss and below
the uttermost spaces ? It is not so, and there are
those from whose presence I long to be gone in a
discomfort which is a kind of orison of my soul to
my body to hurry away. It is so that I long to be
gone from that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson,
and of this I am sorely ashamed. But I think that
all such dissonance is merely a failure in method,
and that the spirit of this business of being is that
we long for one another to be near.
Yes, in " this world of visible images " and pat-
terns and schedules and o'clocks, it is like stumbling
on the true game to come on some one who is not on
any dial. And I fancy that Miggy is no o'clock.
She is not Dawn o'clock, because already she has
lived so much ; nor Noon o'clock, because she is
far from her high moment ; nor is she Dusk o'clock,
because she is so poignantly alive. Rather, she is
like the chimes of a clock which do not tell the
time, but which almost say something else.
IV
SPLENDOUR TOWN
LAST night I went for a walk across the river,
and Little Child went with me to the other end of
the bridge.
I would have expected it to be impossible to come
to the fourth chapter and to have said nothing of
the river. But the reason is quite clear: for the
setting of the stories of the village as I know them
is preeminently rambling streets and trim door-
yards, and neat interiors with tidy centre-tables.
Nature is merely the necessary opera-house, not the
intimate setting. Nature's speech through the trees
is most curiously taken for granted as being trees
alone, and she is, as I have shown, sometimes cut
off quite rudely in the midst of an elm or linden
sentence and curtly interrupted by a sidewalk. If a
grove of trees is allowed to remain in a north door-
yard it is almost certainly because the trees break
the wind. Likewise, Nature's unfoldings in our turf
and clover we incline to regard as merely lawns, the
results of seeds and autumn fertilizing. Our vines
43
44 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
are for purposes of shade, cheaper and prettier than
awnings or porch rollers. With our gardens, where
our " table vegetables " are grown, Nature is, I think,
considered to have little or nothing to do ; and we
openly pride ourselves on our early this and our
prodigious that, quite as when we cut a dress or
build a lean-to. We admit the rain or the sunny
slope into partnership, but what we recognize is
weather rather than the mighty spirit of motherhood
in Nature. Indeed, our flower gardens, where are
wrought such miracles of poppies and pinks, are per-
haps the only threshold on which we stand abashed,
as at the sound of a singing voice, a voice that sings
believing itself to be alone.
These things being so, it is no wonder that the
river has been for so long no integral part of village
life. The river is accounted a place to fish, a place
to bathe, a thing to cross to get to the other side,
an objective point including the new iron bridge
-to which to take guests. But of the everyday
life it is no proper part. On the contrary, the other
little river, which strikes out silverly for itself to
eastward, is quite a personality in the village, for on
it is a fine fleet of little launches with which folk
take delight. But this river of mine to the west is
a thing of whims and eddies and shifting sand bars,
and here not many boats adventure. So the river is
accepted as a kind of pleasant hermit living on the
SPLENDOUR TOWN 45
edge of the village. It draws few of us as Nature
can draw to herself. We know the water as a taste
only and not yet as an emotion. We say that we
should enjoy going there if we had the time. I
know, I know. You see that we do not yet live the
river, as an ancient people would live their moor.
But in our launches, our camping parties, our
flights to a little near lake for dinner, in a tent here
and a swing there, set to face riverward, there lies
the thrill of process, and by these things Nature is
wooing us surely to her heart. Already the Pump
pasture has for us the quality of individuality, and
we have picnics there and speak of the pasture
almost as of a host. Presently we shall be com-
panioned by all our calm stretches of meadow, our
brown sand bars, our Caledonia hills, our quiet
lakes, our unnavigable river, as the Northmen were
fellowed of the sea.
Little Child has at once a wilder and a tamer
instinct. She has this fellowship and the fellowship
of more.
" Where shall we go to-day ? " I ask her, and
she always says, "Far away for a party" in a
combination, it would seem, of the blood of shepherd
kings with certain corpuscles of modernity. And
when we are in the woods she instances the same
dual quality by, " Now let's sit down in a roll and
wait for a fairy, and be a society."
46 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
We always go along the levee. Little Child and
I, and I watch the hour have its way with her, and
I do not deny that occasionally I try to improve on
the hour by a tale of magic or by the pastime of
teaching her a lyric. I love to hear her pretty
treble in "Who is Sylvia? What is she?" and
" She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," and
"April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter," and in
Pippa's song. Last night, to be sure, the lyrics
rather gave way to some talk about the circus to be
to-day, an unwonted benison on the village. But
even the reality of the circus could not long keep
Little Child from certain sweet vagaries, and I love
best to hear her in these fancyings.
" Here," she said to me last night, " is her
sponge."
I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are al-
ways rinding the fairy's cast-off ornaments and articles
of toilet. On occasion we have found her crown,
her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her
plumed fan, her parasol a skirtful of fancies which
next day Little Child has brought to me in a shoe
box for safe keeping so that " They " would not
throw the things away : that threatening " They "
which overhangs childhood, casting away its treas-
ures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying a ladder straight
through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the
back yard. I can visualize that " They " as I
SPLENDOUR TOWN 47
believe it seems to some children, something dark
and beetling and menacing and imminent, less like
the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this
precious idea of the Family, to conserve which is
one of our chief hopes, should so often be made to
appear to its youngest member in the general sem-
blance of a phalanx?
We sat down for a little at the south terminal of
the bridge, where a steep bank and a few desperately
clinging trees have arranged a little shrine to the
sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across
the bridge I had been watching against the gold the
majestic or apathetic or sodden profiles of the farm-
ers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face,
it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it
to forecast the weather. Such a procession I want
to see painted upon a sovereign sky and called
" The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant
carpenter of the village as I once saw him, his great
bare arms upholding a huge white pillar, while blue
figures hung above and set the acanthus capital.
And there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the
butcher's cart halted in snow while a tawny-jersey ed
boy lifts high his yellow light to find a parcel.
Some day we shall see these things in their own
surprising values and fresco our village libraries with
them yes, and our drug stores, too.
The story that I told Little Child while we rested
48 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
had the symbolism which I often choose for her :
that of a girl keeping a garden for the coming of
a child. All her life she has been making ready
and nothing has been badly done. In one green
room of the garden she has put fair thoughts, in
another fair words, and in the innermost fastnesses
of the garden fair deeds. Here she has laid colour,
there sweet sound, there something magic which is
a special kind of seeing. When the child comes,
these things will be first toys, then tools, then weap-
ons. Sometimes the old witch of the wood tries to
blow into the garden a thistle of discord or bubbles
of delight to be followed, and these must be warded
away. All day the spirit of the child to come wan-
ders through the garden, telling the girl what to do
here or here, keeping her from guile or from idle-
ness-without-dreams. She knows its presence and
I think that she has even named it. If it shall be
a little girl, then it is to be Dagmar, Mother of
Day, or Dawn ; but if a little boy, then it shall be
called for one whom she has not yet seen. Meanwhile,
outside the door of the garden many would speak
with the girl. On these she looks, sometimes she
even leans from her casement, and once, it may be,
she reaches out her hand, ever so swiftly, and some
one without there touches it. But at that she
snatches back her hand and bars the garden, and
for a time the spirit of the little child does not
SPLENDOUR TOWN 49
come very near. So she goes serenely on toward
the day when a far horn sounds and somebody
comes down the air from heaven, as it has occurred
to nobody else to do. And they hear the voice of
the little child, singing in the garden.
"The girl is me/' says little Little Child, as she
always says when I have finished this story.
Yes," I tell her.
" I'd like to see that garden," she says thought-
fully.
Then I show her the village in the trees of the
other shore, roof upon roof pricked by a slim
steeple ; for that is the garden.
" I don't care about just bein* good," she says,
" but I'd like to housekeep that garden."
" For a sometime-little-child of your own," I tell
her.
" Yes," she assents, " an* make dresses for."
I cannot understand how mothers let them grow
up not knowing, these little mothers-to-be who so
often never guess their vocation. It is a reason for
everything commonly urged on the ground of con-
duct, a ground so lifeless to youth. But quicken
every desert space with "It must be done so for the
sake of the little child you will have some day," and
there rises a living spirit. Morals, civics, town and
home economics, learning there is the concrete
reason for them all; and the abstract understanding
50 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
of these things for their own sakes will follow, flower-
wise, fruit-wise, for the healing of the times.
I had told to that old Aunt Effie who keeps
house for Miggy and Little Child something of
what I thought to do breaking in upon the old
woman's talk of linoleum and beans and other things
having, so to say, one foot in the universe.
" Goodness/' that old woman had answered, with
her worried turn of head, "I'm real glad you're
going to be here. / dread saying anything"
Here too we must look to the larger day when
the state shall train for parenthood and for citizen-
ship, when the schools and the universities shall
speak for the state the cosmic truths, and when by
comparison botany and differential calculus shall be
regarded as somewhat less vital in ushering in the
kingdom of God.
The water reservoir rose slim against the woods
to the north ; to the south was a crouching hop
house covered with old vines. I said to Little
Child :
" Look everywhere and tell me where you think
a princess would live if she lived here."
She looked everywhere and answered:
" In the water tower in those woods."
"And where would the old witch live ? " I asked
her.
" In the Barden's hop house," she answered.
SPLENDOUR TOWN 51
cc And where would the spirit of the little child
be ? " I tested her.
She looked long out across the water.
" I think in the sunset," she said at last. And
then of her own will she said over the Sunset Spell
I have taught her :
" I love to stand in this great air
And see the sun go down.
It shows me a bright veil to wear
And such a pretty gown.
Oh, I can see a playmate there
Far up in Splendour Town."
I could hardly bear to let her go home, but eight
o'clock is very properly Little Child's bedtime, and
so I sent her across the bridge waving her hand
every little way in that fashion of children who, I
think, are hoping thus to save the moment that has
just died. I have known times when I, too, have
wanted to wave my hand at a moment and keep it
looking at me as long as possible. But presently
the moment almost always turned away.
Last night I half thought that the sunset itself
would like to have stayed. It went so delicately
about its departure, taking to itself first a shawl of soft
dyes, then a painted scarf, then frail iris wings. It
mounted far up the heavens, testing its strength for
flight and shaking brightness from its garments.
And it slipped lingeringly away as if the riot of
52 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
colour were after all the casual part, and the real
business of the moment were to stay on with every-
body. In the tenuity of the old anthropomorphisms
I marvel that they did not find the sunset a living
thing, tender of mortals, forever loth to step from
out one moment into the cherishing arms of the
next. Think ! The sunset that the Greeks knew
has been flaming round the world, dying from mo-
ment to moment and from mile to mile, with no
more of pause than the human heart, since sunset
flamed for Hero and Helen and Ariadne.
If the sunset was made for lovers, and in our mid-
land summers lingers on their account, then last
night it was lingering partly for Miggy and Peter.
At the end of the bridge I came on them together.
Miggy did not flush when she saw me, and though
I would not have expected that she would flush I
was yet disappointed. I take an old-fashioned de-
light in women whose high spirit is compatible with
a sensibility which causes them the little agonizings
proper to this moment, and to that.
But Miggy introduced Peter with all composure.
" This," she said, " is Peter. His last name is
Gary."
" How do you do, Peter ? " I said very heartily.
I thought that Peter did something the rationale
of which might have been envied of courts. He
turned to Miggy and said " Thank you." Secretly
SPLENDOUR TOWN 53
I congratulated him on his embarrassment. In a
certain milieu social shyness is as authentic a patent
of perception as in another milieu is taste.
" Come home with me," I besought them. " We
can find cake. We can make lemonade. We can
do some reading aloud." For I will not ask the mere
cake and lemonade folk to my house. They must
be, in addition, good or wise or not averse to becom-
ing either.
I conceived Peter's evident agony to rise from
his need to reply. Instead, it rose from his need to
refuse.
" I take my violin lesson," he explained miserably.
"He takes his violin lesson," Miggy added, with
a pretty, somewhat maternal manner of translating.
I took note of this faint manner of proprietorship,
for it is my belief that when a woman assumes it she
means more than she knows that she means.
" I'm awful sorry," said Peter, from his heart ; " I
was just having to go back this minute."
" To-morrow's his regular lesson day," Miggy
explained, " but to-morrow he's going to take me
to the circus, so he has his lesson to-night. Go
on," she added, " you'll be late and you'll have to
pay just the same anyway." I took note of this
frank fashion of protection of interests, for it is
my belief that matters are advancing when the lady
practises economics in courtship. But I saw that
54 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Miggy was manifesting no symptoms of accompany-
ing Peter, and I begged them not to let me spoil
their walk.
" It's all right," Miggy said ; " he'll have to hurry
and I don't want to go in yet anyway. I'll walk back
with you." And of this I took note with less satis-
faction. It was as if Miggy had not come alive.
Peter smiled at us, caught off his hat, and went
away with it in his hand, and the moment that he
left my presence he became another being. I could
see by his back that he was himself, free again, under
no bondage of manner. It is a terrific problem, this
enslavement of speech and trivial conduct which to
some of us provides a pleasant medium and for some
of us furnishes fetters. When will they manage a
wireless society ? I am tired waiting. For be it a
pleasant medium or be it fetters, the present com-
munication keeps us all apart. " I hope," I said
once at dinner, "that I shall be living when they think
they get the first sign from Mars." " I hope," said
my companion, " that I shall be living when I think I
get the first sign from you and you and you,
about this table." If this young Shelley could
really have made some sign, what might it not
have been ?
" Everybody's out walking to-night," Miggy ob-
served. " There's Liva Vesey and Timothy Top-
lady ahead of us."
SPLENDOUR TOWN 55
" They are going to be married, are they not ? "
I asked.
Miggy looked as if I had said something indelicate.
" Well," she answered, " not out loud yet."
Then, fearing that she had rebuked me, " He's
going to take her to the circus to-morrow in their
new buckboard," she volunteered. And I find in
Friendship that the circus is accounted a kind of
official trysting-place for all sweethearts.
We kept a- little way back of the lovers, the sun
making Liva Vesey's pink frock like a vase-shaped
lamp of rose. Timothy was looking down at her
and straightway looking away again when Liva had
summoned her courage to look up. They were
extremely pleasant to watch, but this Miggy did not
know and she was intent upon me. She had met
Little Child running home.
" She's nice to take a walk with," Miggy said ;
" but I like to walk around by myself too. Only
to-night Peter came."
" Miggy," said I, " I want to congratulate you
that Peter is in love with you."
She looked up with puzzled eyes.
" Why, that was nothing," she said ; " he seemed
to do it real easy."
" But it is not easy," I assured her, " to find many
such fine young fellows as Peter seems to be. I
hope you will be very happy together."
56 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" I'm not engaged," said Miggy, earnestly; " Fm
only invited/'
" Ah, well," I said, " if I may be allowed I hope
you are not sending regrets."
Miggy laughed out suddenly.
" Married isn't like a party," she said ; " I know
that much about society. Party you either accept
or regret. Married you do both."
I could have been no more amazed if the rose-
wood clock had said it.
" Who has been talking to you, child ? " I asked
in distress.
" I got it out of living," said Miggy, solemnly.
" You live along and you live along and you find out
'most everything."
I looked away across the Pump pasture where the
railway tracks cut the Plank Road, that comes on
and on until it is modified into Daphne Street. I re-
membered a morning of mist and dogwood when
I had walked that road through the gateway into an
earthly paradise. Have I not said that since that
time we two have been, as it were, set to music and
sung ; so that the silences of separation are difficult to
beguile save by the companionship of the village
the village that has somehow taught Miggy its bour-
geoise lesson of doubt?
My silence laid on her some vague burden of
proof.
SPLENDOUR TOWN 57
" Besides," she said, " I'm not like the women
who marry people. Most of 'em that's married
ain't all married, anyway."
" What do you mean, child ? " I demanded.
" They're not," protested Miggy. " They marry
like they pick out a way to have a dress made when
they don't admire any of the styles very much, and
they've wore out everything else. Women like
some things about somebody, and that much they
marry. Then the rest of him never is married at
all, and by and by that rest starts to get lonesome."
" But Miggy," I said to all this, " I should think
you might like Peter entirely."
She surprised me by her seriousness.
"Anyhow, I've got my little sister to bring up,"
she said ; " Aunt Effie hasn't anything. And I
couldn't put two on him to support."
I wondered why not, but I said nothing.
" And besides," Miggy said after a pause, "there's
Peter's father. You know about him ? "
I did know who in the village did not know ?
Since my neighbour had told me of him I had my-
self seen him singing through the village streets,
shouting out and disturbing the serene evenings,
drunken, piteous. . . .
" Peter has him all the time," I suggested.
She must have found a hint of resistance in my
voice, for her look questioned me.
58 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" I never could stand it to have anybody like that
in the house/'she said defensively. " I've told Peter.
I've told him both reasons. . . . " Miggy threw out
her arms and stood still, facing the sunset. " Any-
way, I want to keep on feeling all free and liberty-
like ! " she said.
This intense individualism of youth, passioning
only for far spaces, taking no account of the com-
mon lot nor as yet urgent to share it is, like the
panther grace in the tread of the cat, a survival of
the ancient immunity from accountabilities. To
note it is to range down the evolution of ages. To
tame it there is a task for all the servants of the
new order.
Miggy was like some little bright creature caught
unaware in the net of living and still remembering
the colonnades of otherwhere, renowned for their
shining. She was looking within the sunset, where
it was a thing of wings and doors ajar and fair cor-
ridors. I saw the great freedoms of sunset in her
face the sunset where Little Child and I had
agreed that a certain spirit lived. . . . Perhaps it was
that that little vagrant spirit signalled to me and
the Custodian understood it. Perhaps it was that 1
saw, beneath the freedoms, the woman-tenderness
in the girl's face. In any case I spoke abruptly
and half without intention.
" But you don't want to be free from Little Child.
SPLENDOUR TOWN 59
It is almost as if she were your little girl, is it not?"
I said.
Miggy's eyes did not leave the sunset. It was
rather as if she saw some answer there.
" Well, I like to pretend she is," she said simply.
" That," I said quietly, " is pleasant to pretend."
And now her mood had changed as if some one
had come to take her place.
"But if she was that," she said, "her name,
then, would most likely be Margaret, like mine,
wouldn't it ? "
" It would be very well to have it Margaret,"
I agreed.
Her step was quickened as by sudden shyness.
" It's funny to think about," she said. " Some-
times I most think of her, till she seems in the
room. Not quite my sister. I mean Margaret"
It made my heart beat somewhat. I wondered
if anything of my story to Little Child was left in
my mind, and if subconsciously Miggy was reading
it. This has sometimes happened to me with a
definiteness which would be surprising if the super-
natural were to me less natural. But I think that
it was merely because Miggy had no idea of the
sanctity of what she felt that she was speaking of it.
" How does she look ? " I asked.
" Like me," said Miggy, readily ; " I don't want
her to either. I want her to be pretty and I'm
60 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
not. But when I think of her running 'round in
the house or on the street, I always make her look
like me. Only little."
"Running 'round in the house." That was the
way my neighbour had put it. Perhaps it is the
way that every woman puts it.
" Does she seem like you, too ? " I tempted her
on.
" Oh, better," Miggy said confidently ; " learning
to play on the piano and not much afraid of folks
and real happy."
" Don't you ever pretend about a boy ? " I asked.
She shook her head.
"No," she said; " if I do I never can think
him out real plain. Margaret I can most see."
And this, too, was like the girl in the garden and
the spirit of that one to be called by a name of one
whom she had not seen.
I think that I have never hoped so much that I
might know the right thing to say. And when most
I wish this I do as I did then : I keep my impulse
silent and I see if that vague Custodian within, some-
where between the seeing and the knowing, will not
speak for me. I wonder if she did ? At all events,
what either she or I said was :
" Miggy ! Look everywhere and tell me the
most beautiful thing you can see."
She was not an instant in deciding.
SPLENDOUR TOWN 61
" Why, sunset," she said.
" Promise me," said I said we ! "that you will
remember Now. And that after to-night, when you
see a sunset always, always, till she comes you
will think about her. About Margaret."
Because this caught her fancy she promised readily
enough. And then we lingered a little, while the
moment gave up its full argosy. I have a fancy for
these times when I say " I will remember," and I
am always selecting them and knowing, as if I had
tied a knot in them, that I will remember. These
times become the moments at which I keep waving
my hand in the hope that they will never turn away.
And it was this significance which I wished the hour
to have for Miggy, so that for her the sunset should
forever hold, as Little Child had said that it holds,
that tiny, wandering spirit. . . .
Liva Vesey and Timothy had lingered, too, and
we passed them on the bridge, he still trying to win
her eyes, and his own eyes fleeing precipitantly when-
ever she looked up. The two seemed leaning upon
the winged light, the calm stretches of the Pump
pasture, the brown sand bar, the Caledonia hills.
And the lovers and the quiet river and the village,
roof upon roof, in the trees of the other shore, and
most of all Miggy and her shadowy Margaret seemed
to me like the words of some mighty cosmic utter-
ance, with the country evening for its tranquil voice.
DIFFERENT
THOSC who had expected the circus procession to
arrive from across the canal to-day were amazed to ob-
serve it filing silently across the tracks from the Plank
Road. The Eight Big Shows Combined had ar-
rived in the gray dawn ; and word had not yet gone
the rounds that, the Fair Ground being too wet, the
performance would " show " in the Pump pasture,
beyond the mill. There was to be no evening
amusement. It was a wait between trains that con-
ferred the circus on Friendship at all.
Half the country-side, having brought its lunch
into town to make a day of it, trailed as a matter of
course after the clown's cart at the end of the parade,
and about noon arrived in the pasture with the
pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to
find it transformed into unknown ground. Who in
the vicinity of the village had not known the Pump
pasture of old? Haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys
and orioles, it had lain expressionless as the hills,
62
DIFFERENT 63
for as long as memory. When in spring, " Where
you goin' ? Don't you go far in the hot sun ! " from
Friendship mothers was answered by, " We're just
goin' up to the Pump pasture for vi'lets " from
Friendship young, no more was to be said. The
pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great,
faithful Newfoundland dog ; and about it was some-
thing of the safety of silence and warmth and night-
in-a-trundle-bed.
And lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture
were articulate. The great elliptical tent, the
strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of the
hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were
doing these gave to the place the aspect of having
from the first been secretly familiar with more than
one had suspected.
"Ain't it the divil ? " demanded Timothy Top-
lady, Jr., ecstatically, as the glory of the scene burst
upon him.
Liva Vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in
the buckboard, looked up at his brown Adam's
apple she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as
her sweetheart's face and rejoined:
" Oh, Timmie ! ain't it just what you might say
great ? "
" You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly,
" that it is that."
He looked down in her face with a lifting of eye-
64 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
brows and an honest fatuity of mouth. Liva Vesey
knew the look without ever having met it squarely,
she could tell when it was there, and she promptly
turned her head, displaying to Timothy's ardent
eyes tight coils of beautiful blond, crinkly hair, a
little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver
locket chain. At which Timothy now collapsed
with the mien of a man who is unwillingly having
second thoughts.
" My ! " he said.
They drove into the meadow, and when the horse
had been loosed and cared for, they found a great
cottonwood tree, its leaves shimmering and moving
like little banners, and there they spread their lunch.
The sunny slope was dotted with other lunchers.
The look of it all was very gay, partly because the
trees were in June green, and among them wind-
mills were whirling like gaunt and acrobatic witches,
and partly because it was the season when the
women were brave in new hats, very pink and very
perishable.
The others observed the two good-humouredly
from afar, and once or twice a tittering group of
girls, unescorted, passed the cottonwood tree, mak-
ing elaborate detours to avoid it. At which Liva
flushed, pretending not to notice ; and Timothy
looked wistfully in her face to see if she wished that
she had not come with him. However, Timothy
DIFFERENT 65
never dared look at her long enough to find out
anything at all ; for the moment that she seemed
about to meet his look he always dropped his eyes
precipitantly to her little round chin and so to the
silver chain and locket. And then he was miser-
able.
It was strange that a plain heart-shaped locket,
having no initials, could make a man so utterly,
extravagantly unhappy. Three months earlier,
Liva, back from a visit in the city, had appeared
with her locket. Up to that time the only person-
ality in which Timothy had ever indulged was to
mention to her that her eyes were the colour of his
sister's eyes, whose eyes were the colour of their
mother's eyes and their father's eyes, and of Timo-
thy's own, and " Our eyes match, mine and yours,"
he had blurted out, crimson. And yet, even on
these terms, he had taken the liberty of being
wretched because of her. How much more now
when he was infinitely nearer to her ? For with
the long spring evenings upon them, when he had
sat late at the Vesey farm, matters had so far ad-
vanced with Timothy that, with his own hand, he
had picked a green measuring-worm from Liva's
throat. Every time he looked at her throat he
thought of that worm with rapture. But also every
time he looked at her throat he saw the silver
chain and locket. And on circus day, if the oracles
66 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
seemed auspicious, he meant to find out whose
picture was worn in that locket, even though the
knowledge made him a banished man.
If only she would ever mention the locket ! he
thought disconsolately over lunch. If only she
would " bring up the subject," then he could find
courage. But she never did mention it. And the
talk ran now :
" Would you ever, ever think this was the Pump
pasture ? " from Liva.
" No, you wouldn't, would you ? It don't look
the same, does it ? You'd think you was in a city
or somewheres, wouldn't you now? Ain't it dif-
fer'nt ? "
" Did you count the elephants ? "
" I bet I did. Didn't you ? Ten, wa'n't it ?
Did you count the cages? Neither did I. And
they was too many of 'em shut up. I don't know
whether it's much of a circus or not " with gloomy
superiority " they not bein' any calliope, so."
" A good many cute fellows in the band," ob-
served Liva. For Liva would have teased a bit if
Timothy would have teased too. But Timothy re-
plied in mere misery :
" You can't tell much about these circus men,
Liva. They're apt to be the kind that carouse
around. I guess they ain't much to 'em but their
swell way."
DIFFERENT 67
" Oh, I don't know," said Liva.
Then a silence fell, resembling nothing so much
as the breath of hesitation following a faux pas y save
that this silence was longer, and was terminated by
Liva humming a little snatch of song to symbolize
how wholly delightful everything was.
" My ! " said Timothy, finally. " You wouldn't
think this was the Pump pasture at all, it looks so
differ'nt."
" That's so," Liva said. " You wouldn't."
It was almost as if the two were inarticulate, as
the pasture had been until the strange influences of
the day had come to quicken it.
While Liva, with housewifely hands, put away
the lunch things in their basket, Timothy nibbled
along lengths of grass and hugged his knees and
gloomed at the locket. It was then that Miggy and
Peter passed them and the four greeted one another
with the delicate, sheepish enjoyment of lovers who
look on and understand other lovers. Then Timo-
thy's look went back to Liva. Liva's rose-pink
dress was cut distractingly without a collar, and the
chain seemed to caress her little throat. Moreover,
the locket had a way of hiding beneath a fold of
ruffle, as if it were her locket and as if Timothy had
no share in it.
" Oh," cried Liva, " Timmie ! That was the lion
roared. Did you hear ? "
68 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Timothy nodded darkly, as if there were worse
than lions.
" Wasn't it the lion ? " she insisted.
Timothy nodded again ; he thought it might have
been the lion.
" What you so glum about, Timmie ? " his sweet-
heart asked, glancing at him fleetingly.
Timothy flushed to the line of his hair.
" Gosh," he said, " this here pasture looks so dif-
fer'nt I can't get over it."
" Yes," said Liva, " it does look difFer'nt, don't it?"
Before one o'clock they drifted with the rest
toward the animal tent. They went incuriously
past the snake show, the Eats-'em-alive show, and
the Eastern vaudeville. But hard by the red wagon
where tickets were sold Timothy halted spellbound.
What he had heard was :
"Types. Types. Right this way AND in this
direction for Types. No, Ladies, and no, Gents :
Not Tin-types. But Photo-types. Photographs
put up in Tintype style AT Tintype price. Three
for a quarter. The fourth of a dozen for the fourth
of a dollar. Elegant pictures, elegant finish, refined,
up-to-date. Of yourself, Gents, of yourself. Or of
any one you see around you. And WHILE you
wait."
Timothy said it before he had any idea that he
meant to say it :
DIFFERENT 69
cc Liva," he begged, " come on. You."
When she understood and when Timothy saw
the momentary abashment in her eyes, it is certain
that he had never loved her more. But the very
next moment she was far more adorable.
" Not unless you will, Timmie," she said, " and
trade."
He followed her into the hot little tent as if the
waiting chair were a throne of empire. And per-
haps it was. For presently Timothy had in his
pocket a tiny blurry bit of paper at which he had
hardly dared so much as glance, and he had given
another blurry bit into her keeping. But that was
not all. When she thanked him she had met his
eyes. And he thought oh, no matter what he
thought. But it was as if there were established a
throne of empire with Timothy lord of his world.
Then they stepped along the green way of the
Pump pasture and they entered the animal tent, and
Strange Things closed about them. There under-
foot lay the green of the meadow, verdant grass and
not infrequent moss, plantain and sorrel and clover,
all as yet hardly trampled and still sweet with the
breath of kine and sheep. And three feet above,
foregathered from the Antipodes, crouched and
snarled the striped and spotted things of the wild,
with teeth and claws quick to kill, and with genera-
tions of the jungle in their shifting eyes. The bright
70 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
wings of unknown birds, the scream of some harsh
throat of an alien wood, the monkeys chattering,
the soft stamp and padding of the elephants chained
in a stately central line along the clover it was
certain, one would have said, that these must change
the humour of the pasture as the companionship of
the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the
mind. That the pasture, indeed, would never be
the same, and that its influence would be breathed
on all who entered there. Already Liva and Tim-
othy, each with the other's picture in a pocket, moved
down that tent of the field in another world. Or
had that world begun at the door of the stuffy little
phototype tent?
It was the cage of bright- winged birds that held
the two. Timothy stood grasping his elbows and
looking at that flitting flame and orange. Dare he
ask her if she would wear his phototype in her locket
dare he dare he
He turned to look at her. Oh, and the rose-pink
cambric was so near his elbow ! Her face, upturned
to the birds, was flushed, her lips were parted, her
eyes that matched Timothy's were alight ; but there
was always in Timothy's eyes a look, a softness,
a kind of speech that Liva's could not match. He
longed inexpressibly to say to her what was in his
heart concerning the locket the phototype
themselves. And Liva herself was longing to say
DIFFERENT 71
something about the sheer glory of the hour. So
she looked up at his brown Adam's apple, and,
" Think, Timmie," she said, " they're all in the
Pump pasture where nothin' but cows an' robins an'
orioles ever was before !"
" I know it I know it ! " breathed Timothy fer-
vently. " Don't seem like it could be the same place,
does it?"
Liva barely lifted her eyes.
" It makes us seem differ'nt, too," she said, and
flushed a little, and turned to hurry on.
" I was thinkin' that too ! " he cried ecstatically,
overtaking her. But all that Timothy could see
was tight coils of blond, crinkled hair, and a little
ear and a curve of white throat, with a silver
locket chain.
Down the majestic line of the elephants, towering
in the apotheosis of mere bulk to preach ineffectually
that spirit is apocryphal and mass alone is potent;
past the panthers that sniffed as if they guessed the
nearness of the grazing herd in the next pasture ; past
the cage in which the lioness lay snarling and baring
her teeth above her cubs, so pathetically akin to the
meadow in her motherhood; past unknown creatures
with surprising horns and shaggy necks and lolling
tongues it was a wonderful progress. But it was
as if Liva had found something more wonderful than
these when, before the tigers' cage, she stepped for-
72 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
ward, stooped a little beneath the rope, and stood
erect with shining eyes.
" Look! " she said. Look, Timmie."
She was holding a blue violet.
" In front of the tigers ; it was growing ! "
" Why don't you give it to me ? " was Timothy's
only answer.
She laid it in his hand, laughing a little at her
daring.
" It won't ever be the same," she said. " Tigers
have walked over it. My, ain't everything in the
pasture differ'nt?"
" Just as differ'nt as differ'nt can be," Timothy
admitted.
" Here we are back to the birds again," Liva said,
sighing.
Timothy had put the violet in his coat pocket and
he stood staring at the orange and flame in the cage :
Her phototype and a violet her phototype and a
violet.
But all he said, not daring to look at her at all,
was:
" I can't make it seem like the Pump pasture to
save me."
There is something, as they have said of a bugle,
"winged and warlike" about a circus the confu-
sions, the tramplings, the shapes, the keen flavour of
the Impending, and above all the sense of the Un-
DIFFERENT 73
toward, which is eternal and which survives glamour
as his grave survives a man. Liva and Timothy sat
on the top row of seats and felt it all, and believed
it to be merely honest mirth. Occasionally Liva
turned and peered out through the crack in the can-
vas where the side met the roof, for the pure joy of
feeling herself alien to the long green fields with their
grazing herds and their orioles, and at one with the
colour and music and life within. And she was glad
of it all, glad to be there with Timothy. But all she
said was :
" Oh, Timmie, I hope it ain't half over yet. Do
you s'pose it is ? When I look outside it makes me
feel as if it was over."
And Timothy, his heart beating, a great hope liv-
ing in his breast, answered only :
" No, I guess it'll be quite some time yet. It's
a nice show. Nice performance for the money, right
through. Ain't it?"
When at length it really was over and they left
the tent, the wagons from town and country-side and
the "depot busses" had made such a place of dust
and confusion that he took her back to the cotton-
wood on the slope to wait until he brought the buck-
board round. He left her leaning against the tree,
the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly
on the smooth silver locket. And when he drove
back, and reached down a hand to draw her up to
74 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment, as
she mounted, with all the panorama of the field be-
hind her, he perceived instantly that the locket was
gone. Oh, and at that his heart leaped up ! What
more natural than to dream that she had taken it
off to slip his phototype inside and that he had come
back too soon? What more natural than to divine
the reality of dreams?
His trembling hope held him silent until they
reached the highway. Then he looked at the field,
elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming crowds,
and he observed as well as he could for the thump-
ing of his heart:
"I kind o' hate to go off an' leave it. To-
morrow when I go to town with the pie-plant, it'll
look just like nothin' but a pasture again."
Liva glanced up at him and dropped her eyes.
" I ain't sure," she said.
"What do you mean?" he asked her, wondering.
But Liva shook her head.
" I ain't sure," she said evasively, " but I don't
think somehow the Pump pasture'll ever be the
same again."
Timothy mulled that for a moment. Oh, could
she possibly mean because . . .
Yet what he said was, "Well, the old pasture
looks differ'nt enough now, all right."
" Yes," assented Liva, " don't it ? "
DIFFERENT 75
Timothy had supper at the Vesey farm. It was
eight o'clock and the elder Veseys had been gone to
prayer-meeting for an hour when Liva discovered
that she had lost her locket.
" Lost your locket ! " Timothy repeated. It
was the first time, for all his striving, that he had
been able to mention the locket in her presence.
He had tried, all the way home that afternoon, to
call her attention innocently to its absence, but the
thing that he hoped held fast his intention. " Why,"
he cried now, in the crash of that hope, " you had
it on when I left you under the cottonwood."
" You sure ? " Liva demanded.
" Sure," Timothy said earnestly ; "didn't didn't
you have it off while I was gone ? " he asked wist-
fully.
" No," Liva replied blankly ; she had not taken
it off.
When they had looked in the buckboard and had
found nothing, Timothy spoke tentatively.
" Tell you what," he said. " We'll light a lantern
and hitch up and drive back to the Pump pasture
and look."
" Could we ? " Liva hesitated.
It was gloriously starlight when the buckboard
rattled out on the Plank Road. Timothy, wretched
as he was at her concern over the locket, was yet
recklessly, magnificently happy in being alone by
76 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
her side in the warm dusk, and on her ministry.
She was silent, and, for almost the first time since
he had known her, Timothy was silent too as if
he were giving his inarticulateness honest expres-
sion instead of forcing it continually to antics of
speech.
From the top of the hill they looked down on the
Pump pasture. It lay there, silent and dark, but
no longer expressionless ; for instantly their imagina-
tion quickened it with all the music and colour and
life of the afternoon. Just as Timothy's silence was
now of the pattern of dreams.
He tied the horse, and together they entered the
field by the great open place where the fence had
not yet been replaced. The turf was still soft and
yielding, in spite of all the treading feet. The
pasture was girdled by trees locusts and box-alders
outlined dimly upon the sky, nest-places for orioles ;
and here and there a great oak or a cottonwood made
a mysterious figure on the stars. One would have
said that underfoot would certainly be violets. A
far light pricked out an answer to their lantern, and
a nearer firefly joined the signalling.
" I keep thinkin' the way it looked here this
afternoon," said Liva once.
cc That's funny, so do I," he cried.
Under the cottonwood on the slope, its leaves
stirring like little banners, Timothy flashed his light,
DIFFERENT 77
first on tufted grass, then on red-tasselled sorrel, then
lying there as simply as if it belonged there on
Liva's silver locket. She caught it from him with a
little cry.
" Oh/' she said, " I'm so glad. Oh, thank you
ever so much, Timmie."
He faced her for a moment.
" Why are you so almighty glad ? " he burst out.
" Why, it's the first locket I ever had ! " she said
in surprise. " So of course I'm glad. Oh, Timmie
thank you ! "
" You're welcome, I'm sure," he returned stiffly.
She gave a little skipping step beside him.
" Timmie," she said, " let's circle round a little
ways and come by where the big tent was. I want
to see how it'll seem."
His ill-humour was gone in a moment.
" That's what we will do ! " he cried joyously.
He walked beside her, his lantern swinging a
little rug of brightness about their feet. So they
passed the site of the big red ticket wagon, of the
Eastern vaudeville, of the phototype tent ; so they
traversed the length where had stretched the great
elliptical tent that had prisoned for them colour and
music and life, as in a cup. And so at last they
stepped along that green way of the pasture where
underfoot lay the grass and the not infrequent moss
and clover, not yet wholly trampled to dust; and
78 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
this was where there had been assembled bright-
winged birds of orange and flame and creatures of
the wild from the Antipodes, and where Strange
Things had closed them round.
The influence of what the pasture had seen must
have been breathed on all who entered there that
night : something of the immemorial freedom of
bright birds in alien woods, of the ancestral kinship
of the wild. For that tranquil meadow, long haunted
of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles, expressionless
as the hills, dependable as a nurse, had that day
known strange breath, strange tramplings, cries and
trumpetings, music and colour and life and the
beating of wild hearts and was it not certain that
these must change the humour of the place as the
coming of the grotesque and the vast alters the
humour of the mind ? The field bore the semblance
of a place exquisitely of the country and, here in the
dark, it was inarticulate once more. But something
was stirring there, something that swept away what
had always been as a wind sweeps, something that
caught up the heart of the boy as ancient voices stir
in the blood.
Timothy cast down his lantern and gathered Liva
Vesey in his arms. Her cheek lay against his
shoulder and he lifted her face and kissed her,
three times or four, with all the love that he
bore her.
DIFFERENT 79
" Liva," he said, " all the time every day
I've meant this. Did you mean it, too ? "
She struggled a little from him, but when he
would have let her go she stood still in his arms.
And then he would have her words and " Did
you ? " he begged again. He could not hear what
she said without bending close, close, and it was
the sweeter for that.
" Oh, Timmie," she answered, " I don't know.
I don't know if I did. But I do now."
Timothy's courage came upon him like a mantle.
" An' be my wife ? " he asked.
" An' be ..." Liva assented, and the words fal-
tered away. But they were not greatly missed.
Timothy looked over the pasture, and over
the world. And lo, it was suddenly as if, with
these, he were become articulate, and they were
all three saying something together.
When they turned, there was the lantern glimmer-
ing alight on the trodden turf. And in its little
circle of brightness they saw something coloured
and soft. It was a gay feather, and Timothy took
it curiously in his hand.
" See, it's from one of the circus birds," he said.
" No ! " Liva cried. " It's an oriole feather.
One of the pasture orioles, Timmie ! "
" So it is," he assented, and without knowing why,
he was glad that it was so. He folded it away with
8o FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
the violet Liva had gathered that afternoon. After
all the strangeness, what he treasured most had be-
longed to the pasture all the time.
" Liva ! " he begged. " Will you wear the picture
my picture in that locket ? "
" Oh," she said, " Timmie, I'm so sorry. The
locket's one I bought cheap in the city, and it don't
open."
She wondered why that seemed to make him love
her more. She wondered a little, too, when on the
edge of the pasture Timothy stood still, looking
back.
" Liva ! " he said, " don't the Pump pasture seem
differ'nt ? Don't it seem like another place ? "
" Yes," Liva said, " it don't seem the same."
" Liva ! " Timothy said again, " it ain't the
pasture that's so differ'nt. It's us"
She laughed a little softly, and very near his
coat sleeve.
" I 'most knew that this afternoon," she answered.
VI
THE FOND FORENOON
THIS morning Miggy came by appointment to
do a little work for me, and she appeared in some
" best " frock to honour the occasion. It was a blue
silk muslin, cut in an antiquated style and trimmed
with tarnished silver passementerie. In it the child
was hardly less distinguished than she had been
in her faded violet apron. It was impossible for
her to seem to be unconscious of her dress, and
she spoke of it at once with her fine directness.
" I didn't have anything good enough to wear,"
she said. " I haven't got any good dress this summer
till I get it made myself. I got this out of the
trunk. It was my mother's."
" It suits you very well, Miggy," I told her.
" I thought maybe she'd like my wearing it
here," said Miggy, shyly. " You've got things the
way she always wanted 'em."
We went in my workroom and sat among my
books and strewn papers. A lighted theatre with
raised curtain and breathless audience, a room which
G 8l
82 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
one wakens to find flooded by a gibbous moon,
these have for me no greater sorcery than morning
in a little book-filled room, with the day before me.
Perhaps it is that I ought to be doing so many
things that I take an idler's delight in merely attend-
ing to my own occupation.
While I wondered at what I should set Miggy,
I looked for the spirit of the minute and tried not to
see its skeleton. The skeleton was that I had here
an inexperienced little girl who was of almost no use
to me. The spirit was that whatever I chose to do,
my work was delightful to me, and that to bring
Miggy in contact with these things was a kind of
adventure. It is, I find, seldom sufficient to think
even of the body of one's work, which to-day proved
to be in my case a search in certain old books and
manuscripts for fond allusions. If one can, so to
say, think in and out till one comes to the spirit of
a task, then there will be evident an indeterminate
sense of wings. Without these wings there can be
no expression and no creation. And in the true
democracy no work will be wingless. It will still be,
please God, laborious, arduous, even heart-breaking,
but never body-fettered, never with its birdlike
spirit quenched. And in myself I would bring to
pass, even now, this fair order of sweet and willing
toil by taking to my hand no task without looking
deep within for its essential life.
THE FOND FORENOON 83
So it was with a sense not only of pleasure but of
leisure that I established Miggy by the window
with a manuscript of ancient romances and told her
what to do : to look through them for a certain
story, barely more than a reference, to the love of
an Indian woman of this Middle West for her Indian
husband, sold into slavery by the French Canadians.
It is a simple story you will find small mention
made of it but having once heard it the romance
had haunted me, and I was fain to come on it again :
the story of the wife of Kiala, fit to stand niched
with the great loves of the world.
The morning sun it was hardly more than
eight o'clock slanted across the carpet ; some
roses that Little Child had brought me before her
breakfast were fresh on my table ; and the whole time
was like a quiet cup. In that still hour experience
seemed drained of all but fellowship, the fellowship
of Miggy and my books and the darling insistence
of the near outdoors. Do you not think how much of
life is so made up, free of rapture or anxiety, dedi-
cated, in task or in pastime, to serene companion-
ship?
I have said that for me there are few greater
sorceries than morning, with the day before me, in
a small book-filled room. I wonder if this is not
partly because of my anticipations of the parentheses
I shall take ? Not recesses, but parentheses, which
84 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
can flavour a whole day. I remember a beloved
house in which breakfast and luncheon were daily
observations looked forward to not so much for
themselves, as that they were occasions for the most
delightful interruptions. Dinner was a ceremony
which was allowed to proceed ; but a breakfast or a
luncheon was seldom got through without one or
two of us leaving the table to look up a stanza, or
to settle if two words had the same derivation, or to
find if some obsolete fashion in meanings could not
yet be worn with impunity. It grieved the dear
housewife, I remember, and we tried to tell her how
much more important these things were than that
our new potatoes should be buttered while they were
hot. But she never could see it, and potatoes made
us think of Ireland, and in no time we were deep in
the Celtic revival and racing off to find " The Love
Talker." I remember but one dinner interruption,
and that was when we all left in the midst of the fish
to go in the study and determine if moonlight shin-
ing through stained glass does cast a coloured
shadow, as it did on St. Agnes' eve. ... I sup-
pose, in those days, we must have eaten something,
though, save a certain deep-dish cherry pie I cannot
remember what we ate ; but those interruptions are
with me like so many gifts, and I maintain that these
were the realities. Those days and especially
the morning when we read through the : Ancient
THE FOND FORENOON 85
Mariner" between pasting in two book plates!
taught me the precious lesson that the interruption
and not the task may hold the angel. It was so
that I felt that morning with Miggy ; and I know
that what we did with that forenoon will persist
somewhere when all my envelopes of clippings are
gone to dust.
After a time I became conscious that the faint
rustling of the papers through which I was looking
was absorbed by another sound, rhythmic, stedfast.
I looked out on my neighbour's lawn, and at that
moment, crossing my line of vision through the
window before which Miggy was seated, I saw Peter,
cutting my neighbour's grass. I understood at
once that he had chosen this morning for his service
in order to be near Miggy. It all made a charming
sight, Peter, bareheaded, in an open-throated,
neutral shirt, cutting the grass there beyond Miggy
in her quaint dress, reading a romance. I forgot
my work for a 1'ttle, and watched for those mo-
ments of his passing. Miggy read on, absorbed.
Then, for a little, I watched her, pleased at her ab-
sorption.
Sometimes, from my window, I have looked down
on the river and the long yellow sand bar and the
mystery of the opposite shore where I have never
been, and I have felt a great pity that these things
cannot know that they are these things. Some-
86 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
times, in the middle of a summer night, when the
moon is so bright that one can see well within one's
own soul, I have fancied that I have detected an
aroma of consciousness, of definite self-wonder, in
the Out-of-doors. Fleetingly I have divined it in
the surprise of Dawn, the laughter of a blue Fore-
noon, the girlish shyness of Twilight. And this
morning I wanted self-wonder for Miggy and Peter.
What a pity that they could not see it all as I saw
it: the Shelley-like boy cutting the grass and
loving this girl, in her mother's gown. But you
must not suppose, either, that I do not know how
that vast unconsciousness of Nature and Love flows
with a sovereign essence almost more precious than
awareness.
" Miggy," I said presently, " Peter is not at
work to-day. That is he cutting grass."
She looked out briefly.
" He's got two days off coming to him," she
answered. " It's for overtime. This must be one of
'em. Have you read these stories ? "
" Yes," I said, " I have. Miggy, don't you want
to go and ask Peter to have lunch with us at
twelve ? "
" Oh, no, thank you," she dismissed this. " This
isn't the day I see him."
" But wouldn't you like it ? " I pressed the matter
curiously. " Just we three at luncheon alone ? "
THE FOND FORENOON 87
She was turning the leaves of the manuscript and
she looked up to set me right.
" Oh, you know," she said, " I don't know Peter
that way at all. I just know him to have him walk
home with me, or call, or go walking. Peter never
eats with me."
Poor Peter, indeed, to be denied the simple in-
timacy of sometimes breaking bread with Miggy.
I understood that to invite a man to " noon lunch "
in the village was almost unheard of, but,
" I think he would eat this noon if he never ate
before," said I. To which Miggy made answer:
" If you have read all these stories will you
wouldn't you tell me some, please ? I can't bear
to think of having to wait to read 'em before I know
'em!"
She shut the book and leaned her chin in her
hand and looked at me. And the idea of having
Peter with us for lunch drifted out of the room, un-
attended.
I maintain that one who loves the craft of letters
for its own sake, one who loves both those who have
followed it and the records that they have left, and
one who is striving to make letters his way of service,
must all have acted in the same way ; and that was
the way that I took. In these days when Helen and
Juliet are read aloud to children while they work
buttonholes in domestic science class, think of the
88 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
pure self-indulgence of coming on a living spirit
I say a living spirit who had never heard of the
beloved women of the world. I wonder if we could
not find such spirits oftener if we looked with care ?
When I see certain women shopping, marketing,
jolting about in busses, I am sometimes moved to
wonder if they know anything about Nicolete and, if
they were to be told, whether it would not rest them.
I love it, I love this going back into old time and
bringing out its sweet elements. I have said that
there is a certain conservatism in which, if I let my
taste have its way with me, I would luxuriate, as I
might then indulge my love of the semi-precious
stones, or of old tiling, or of lilies-of-the-valley, all
day long. And it is so that my self-indulgence
would lead me to spend my days idling over these
shadowy figures in the old romances and the old
biographies. The joy of it never leaves me. Always
from these books drifts out to me the smoke of
some hidden incense that makes the world other.
Not that I want the world to be that way, but I like
to pretend. I know now that in a world where one
must give of one's utmost, spend and be spent if one
is even to pay for one's keep, these incense hours
must be occasional, not to say stolen. So that to
find a Miggy to whom to play preceptor of romance
was like digging a moonstone out of the river bank.
What did I tell her ? Not of Helen or Cleopatra
THE FOND FORENOON 89
or Isolde or Heloise or Guinevere, because why, I
think that you would not have told her of these,
either. Of Beatrice and Brunhilde and Elaine and
Enid I told her, for, though these are so sad, there beat
the mighty motives, seeds of the living heart. Last
I told her, of Nicolete and of Griselda and of Psyche
and of the great sun of these loves that broke from
cloud. She listened, wrapt as I was wrapt in the
telling. Was it strange that the room, which had
been like a quiet cup for serene companionship,
should abruptly be throbbing with the potent prin-
ciples of the human heart ? I think that it was not
strange, for assuredly these are nearer to us than
breathing, instant to leap from us, the lightning of
the soul, electric with life or with death. We are
never very far from strong emotion. Even while I
recounted these things to Miggy, there, without my
window, was Peter, cutting the grass.
When I had done, " Is there more like that in
books ? " asked Miggy.
Oh, yes ; thank heaven and the people who wrote
them down, there are in books many more like
these.
" I s'pose lots didn't get into the books at all,"
said Miggy, thoughtfully.
It is seldom that one finds and mourns a bird
that is dead. But think of the choir of little bright
breasts whose raptures nobody hears, nobody misses,
9 o FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
nobody remembers. How like them we are, we of
the loving hearts.
" I wouldn't wonder if there's lots of folks being
that way right, right now," concluded Miggy.
Who am I that I should doubt this ?
" A tournament," said Miggy, dreamily ; "I s'pose
that was something like the Java entertainment is
going to be."
She slipped to one side of the big chair and laid
both hands on its arm.
" Listen," she said. " Would this be one ? You
know Delly Watson that's crazy ? She was in love
with Jem Pitlaw, a school teacher that used to be
here, an' that died, an' that wasn't in love with her
even if he had stayed living, and it did that to her.
You know . . . she talks about things that nobody
ever heard of, and listens, and laughs at what she
thinks she hears. Ain't that like Elaine ? "
Yes, if poor Delly Watson of the village had had
a barge and a dwarf and a river winding from tow-
ered city to towered city, she would not have been
unlike Elaine.
" And Jerry, that sets up folks's stoves and is so
in love with the music teacher that he joined the
chorus and paid his dues and set in the bass corner
all winter to watch her and he can't sing a note.
And she don't even see him when she passes him.
Ain't that like Beatrice and the Pale Man ? "
THE FOND FORENOON 91
Jerry is so true and patient, and our young music
teacher is so fair, that no one could find it sacrilege to
note this sad likeness.
" And Mis' Uppers that her husband went out
West and she didn't get any word, and he don't
come, and he don't come, and she's selling tickets
on the parlour clock, and she cries when anybody
even whistles his tunes isn't that some like Brun-
hilde, that you said about, waiting all alone on top
of the mountain ? I guess Brunhilde had money,
but I don't think Mis' Uppers' principal trouble is
that she ain't. With both of 'em the worst of it
must 'a' been the waiting."
And I am in no wise sure that that slow-walking
woman in the pointed gray shawl may not have a
heart which aches and burns and passions like a
valkyr's.
" And Mame Wallace, that her beau died and all
she's got is to keep house for the family, and keep
house, and keep house. It seems as if she's sort of
like Psyche, that had such an awful lot of things to
do and her life all mussed up."
Perhaps it is so that in that gaunt Mame Wal-
lace, whose homing passion has turned into the
colourless, tidy keeping of her house, there is some-
thing shining, like the spirit of Psyche, that would
win back her own by the tasks of her hand.
"And then there's Threat Hubbelthwait," said
92 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Miggy, " that gets drunk and sets in his hotel bar
riddling, and Mis' Hubbelthwait shoves him his
meals in on to the cigar show-case and runs before he
throws his bow at her she's just exactly like
those two rt
" Enid or Griselda ? " I recognized them, and
Miggy nodded. Poor Mis' Hubbelthwait ! Was
she not indeed an Enid, lacking her beauty, and a
Griselda, with no hope of a sweet surprise of a love
that but tested her ? Truly, it was as Miggy said :
in some form they were all there in the village,
minus the bower and the silken kirtle, but with the
same living hearts.
And these were not all.
"Miggy," I said, "what about Liva Vesey and
Timothy ? Did you count them ? " For Aucas-
sin and Nicolete were happy and so are Liva and
Timothy, and I think that they have all understood
meadows.
Miggy looked startled. One's own generation
never seems so typical of anything as did a genera-
tion or two past.
" Could they be ? " she asked. " They got en-
gaged the night of the circus Liva told me every-
body knows. Could they be counted in ? "
Oh, yes, I assured her. They might be counted.
So, I fancy, might all love-in-the-village, if we knew
its authentic essence.
THE FOND FORENOON 93
" Goodness," said Miggy, meditatively, " then
there's Christopha and Allen last winter, that I was
their bridesmaid, and that rode off in the hills that
way on their wedding night. I s'pose that was like
something, if we only knew ? "
I could well believe that that first adventure of the
young husband and wife, of whom I shall tell you,
was like something sweet and bright and long ago.
" And what," I said to Miggy abruptly, " about
Peter ? "
" Peter ? " repeated Miggy.
Why not Peter ?
She looked out the window at him.
" Why," she said, " but he's now. Peter's now.
And he wears black clothes. And he's cutting
grass. . . ."
True for Peter, to all these impeachments. I
told her that, in his day, Aucassin was now, too;
and that he wore the clothes of his times, and that
if he did not do the tasks nearest his hand, then
Nicolete should not have loved him.
" And," said I," unless I'm very much mistaken,
in the same way- that all the ancient lovers loved
their ladies, Peter loves you."
" 'That way ? " said Miggy, laying her hand on
the manuscript.
" That way," said I. And a very good way it
was, too.
94 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Miggy put up both hands with a manner of point-
ing at herself.
"Oh, no," she said, "not me." Then her little
shoulders went up and she caught her breath like a
child. " Honest ? " she said.
I said no more, but sat silent for a little, watch-
ing her across the fallen manuscript of ancient ro-
mances. Presently I picked up the sheets, and by
chance my look fell on the very thing for which we
had been searching : the story of the wife of Kiala, a
Wisconsin Indian chief who was sold into slavery
and carried to Martinique. And alone, across those
hundreds of miles of pathless snow and sea, the wife
of Kiala somehow followed him to the door of his
West Indian owner. And to him she gave herself
into slavery so that she might be with her husband.
I read the story to Miggy. And because the
story is true, and because it happened so near and
because of this universe in general, I was not able
to read it quite so tranquilly as I should have wished.
" Oh," Miggy said, " is it like that?"
Yes, please God ; if the heart is big enough to
hold it, it is like that.
Miggy put her hand down quickly on the blue
muslin dress she wore.
" My mother knew ! " she said.
And that is the most wonderful thing of all : one's
mother knew.
THE FOND FORENOON 95
Miggy turned once more and looked out the
window at Peter. Bless Peter! I think that he must
have been over that grass with the mower quite twice
perhaps twice and a half. Almost immediately
Miggy looked away from Peter, and I thought
though perhaps after all it was merely the faint colour
that often hovers in her cheek. I felt, however, that
if I had again suggested to Miggy that we ask Peter
to lunch, Peter might possibly have lunched with
us. But now I did not suggest it. No, if ever it
gets to be " all Peter with Miggy," it must be so by
divine non-interference.
My little voice-friend up there on the shelf, the
Westminster chimes, struck twelve, in its manner of
sweet apology for being to blame for things end-
ing. In the village we lunch at twelve, and so my
forenoon was done and even the simple tasks I had
set were not all finished. I wonder, though, if deep
within this fond forenoon we have not found some-
thing wings, or a light, or a singing that was of
the spirit of the tasks ? I wish that I thought so
with reasons which I could give to a scientist.
At all events I am richly content. And over
our luncheon Miggy has just flattered me uncon-
scionably.
" My ! " she said, " I should think everybody
would want to be Secretary."
VII
AFRAID
I MUST turn aside to tell of Allen and Chris-
topha, that young husband and wife whose first
adventure, Miggy thought, was like something sweet
and bright and long ago. It happened this last
winter, but I cannot perceive any grave difference
between that winter night and this June. Believe
me, the seasons and the silences and we ourselves
are not so different as we are alike.
On the night of her wedding, Christopha threw
her bouquet from the dining-room doorway, because
there were no front stairs from which to throw it,
but instead only a stairway between walls and to be
reached from the dining room : a mere clerk of a
stair instead of a proprietor-like hall staircase. In
the confusion which followed the carnations had
narrowly missed the blazing white gas burner high
in the room the bride ran away above stairs, her
two bridesmaids following. Her mother was al-
ready there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As
Miggy had told me, she herself was one of Chris-
95
AFRAID 97
topha's bridesmaids, and it is from Miggy that I
have heard something of the outcome of the story.
Almost as soon as the door was closed there was
a rap at it, a rap peremptory, confident.
" Let me in," said Allen ; " I'm the groom ! "
Chris herself opened the door. Her muslin, wed-
ding gown and the little bells of lilies unfaded in
her blond hair became her wholly, and all her simple
prettiness still wore the mystery and authority of
the hour.
" Allen," she said, " you oughtn't to of."
" Yes, sir, I ought ! " he protested gayly, his voice
pleasant with mirth and with its new, deep note.
" I'll never see you a bride again a real, weddin'-
dress bride. I had to come."
Christopha's mother looked up from her vague,
bright fabrics.
" I thought you started to take the minister the
kodak album," she said to Allen plaintively. "Has
he got anybody to show him any attention ? I
should think you might "
But the two bridesmaids edged their way into the
next room, and on some pretext of fabrics, took
Christopha's mother with them, as if there were
abroad some secret Word of which they knew the
meaning. For Miggy is sufficiently dramatic to
know the Word for another, though she is not suf-
ficiently simple to know it for herself.
98 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Allen sat beside his bride on the cretonne-covered
skirt box. And after all, he did not look at her, but
only at her warm left hand in his.
" It is the funniest thing," he said, " when I see
you comin' in the parlour lookin' so differ'nt, I'm
blessed if I wasn't afraid of you. What do you
think of that ? "
" You's afraid of my dress," Chris told him,
laughing, " not me. You use* to be afraid of me
when we's first engaged, but you ain't now. It's me.
I feel afraid of you Allen. You're differ'nt."
He laughed tenderly, confidently.
" Boo I " he said. " Now are you ? "
" Yes," she answered seriously ; " now."
" Chris ! " he cried boyishly, " we're married !
We're goin' to keep house."
" Oh," she said, "Allen ! Think of the fun of
puttin' the presents in the house the dishes, and
the glass, and the ornaments. There won't be
another dinin' room in town like ours. Sideboard
an' plate rail, an' the rug not tacked down."
Their thoughts flew to the little house, furnished
and waiting, down the snowy street by the Triangle
park. . their house.
" Dinners, and suppers, and breakfas's just us
two by ourselves," Allen said. " And the presents.
My!"
"Well, and company," she reminded him,
AFRAID 99
" that's what I want. The girls in to tea in our own
house."
" Yes," he assented. " Right away ? " he wanted
to know.
"No," she said, "not right away, Silly ! We've
got to buy curtains and things. I never thought I'd
have so many presents," she went on happily.
" They's two water pitchers alike. Bess says I can
change hers. We'll take it to the City " she
gave a little bounce on the skirt box "and see a
show, a really, truly show."
" Sure we will," said he, magnificently. " And I'll
take you to the place I told you about where I
got picked up."
The little bride nodded, her eyes softening almost
maternally. It was as if that story were her own,
the story of Allen, the little stray child picked up
on the streets of the City by that good woman
whom Chris had never seen. But the name of
Sarah Ernestine was like a charm to Chris, for the
woman had been to Allen father and mother both.
Chris bent down swiftly to his hands, closed over
her own, and kissed them.
" Oh, Allen," she said, with a curious wistfulness,
" will you always, always be just like you are now ? "
" Well, I should say I would," he answered
gently. " They's nobody like you anywheres,
Chris. Mis' Chris, Mis' Allen Martin."
ioo FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" Don't it scare you to say it ? " she demanded.
"YeS, sir, it does," he confessed. "It's like
sayin' your own name over the telephone. What
about you ? Will you always, too ? "
" Yes," she said, " always. Only "
" Only what ? " he repeated anxiously.
" Oh," she said, " don't let's let any outside
things come between us, Allen like they do, like
with Bess and Opie, business and sewin', that's
what I'm afraid of," she ended vaguely.
" Well," he said, " I guess we ain't much afraid of
each other, honey. I guess we're just afraid of what
could come between us."
A voice, unconvincing, unimportant, a part of the
inessential aspect of alien things, detached itself from
the accompaniment in the next room, saying some-
thing responsible and plaintive about only an hour
till train time.
"An hour," Allen said over, and put his arms
about her, with boyish awkwardness for the sake of
the crisp muslin gown that had so terrified him.
She rose and stood beside him, and he waited for a
moment looking up in her face. " Chris," he said,
"I'm scared of this one hour even. Till train time."
" I'll hurry up and get the hour done as quick as
I can," she promised him gayly.
" Honestly, now " said Chris's mother from the
vague and indeterminate region where she moved.
AFRAID 101
"Right off, Mis' Mother!" Allen said, and
knew that she was in the doorway, with the brides-
maids laughing beside her. And then he went
down the stairway, his first radiant moment gone by.
In the dining room the messenger was waiting. The
messenger had arrived, in the clear cold of the night,
from a drive across the Caledonia hills, and someone
had sent him to that deserted room to warm himself.
But Allen found him breathing on his fingers and
staring out the frosty window into the dark. It was
Jacob Ernestine, brother to the woman who had
brought up Allen and had been kind to him when
nobody else in the world was kind. For years
Sarah Ernestine had been " West " and with that
awful inarticulacy of her class, mere distance had be-
come an impassable gulf and the Silence had taken
her. Allen had not even known that she meant
to return. And now, Jacob told him, she was here,
at his own home back in the hills Sarah and a
child, a little stray boy, whom she had found and
befriended as she had once befriended Allen. And
she was dying.
" She didn't get your letter, I guess," the old man
said, " 'bout gettin'; married. She come to-day, so
sick she couldn't hold her head up. 1 see she didn't
know nothin' 'bout your doin's. I didn't let her
know. I jus' drove in, like split, to tell you, when
the doctor went. He says she can't she won't
' 'fo'2 ' '* TklENDSHlF VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
. . . till mornin'. I thought," he apologized wist-
fully, " ye'd want to know, anyways, so I jus' drove
in."
" That was all right," Allen said. " You done
right, Jacob."
Then he stood still for a moment, looking down
at the bright figures of the carpet. Jacob lived
twelve miles back in the hills.
" How'd you come ? " Allen asked him briefly.
" I've got the new cutter," the old man answered,
with a touch of eager pride. " I'll drive ye."
Then some one in the parlour caught sight of the
bridegroom, and they all called to him and came
where he was, besieging him with good-natured,
trivial talk. The old man waited, looking out the
window into the dark. He had known them all
since they were children, and their merrymaking did
not impress him as wholly real. Neither, for that
matter, did Allen's wedding. Besides, his own sis-
ter was dying somehow putting an end to the time
when he and she had been at home together. That
was all he had thought of during his drive to town,
and hardly at all of Allen and his wedding. He
waited patiently now while Allen got the wedding
guests back to the parlour, and then slipped away from
them, and came through the dining room to the stair
door.
" Stay there a minute," Allen bade him shortly,
AFRAID 103
and went back to the ^ppx/ floor and to Chris's door
again.
It was her mother who answered his summons
this time, and Allen's manner and face checked her
wor^ls. Before he had done telling her what had
happened, Chris herself was on the threshold, already
in sober bVown, as one who has put aside rainbows
and entered on life. She had a little brown hat in
one hand, and for the other hand he groped out and
held it while he told her, as well as he could,
" I guess I've got to go, Chrissie," he ended
miserably.
She met his eyes, her own soft with sympathy for
the plight of the other woman.
" Well, yes," she said quietly, " of course we've
got to go."
He looked at her breathlessly. That possibility
had not crossed his mind.
"You!" he cried. "You couldn't go, dear.
Twelve miles out in Caledonia, cold as it is to-night.
You "
In spite of her sympathy, she laughed at him
then.
" Did you honestly think I wouldn't? " she asked,
in a kind of wonder.
"Well, I'm sure " began her mother. But the
two bridesmaids manifestly heard the Word again,
for they talked with her both at once.
104 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" Not with Jacob, though," Chris was saying de-
cisively. " You help father and the boys get out
our cutter, Allen."
Allen strode past the mother and lifted his wife's
face in his hands.
" Do you mean it ? " he demanded. cc Will you
go in the cold all that long way "
" You Silly ! " she answered, and drew away from
him and set the little brown hat on her head.
The road lay white before them, twelve miles
of snow and stars to Jacob's cottage among the Cale-
donia hills. Jacob had gone on from the crest
of the rise by the Corner church they saw him and
heard the faint signalling of his bells. It was a
place, that rise by the Corner church on the edge of
the village, where two others in such case might
have drawn rein to look at Everything, stretching
before, rhythmic crest and shallow, and all silent and
waiting. But not these two, incurious as the gods,
nai've as the first lovers. Only, though of this they
were unconscious, they saw things a little differently
that night.
" Look ! " said the girl, with a sign to the lowlands,
expressive with lights. "So many folks's houses
homes, all started. I s'pose it was just as big a thing
for them. But theirs don't seem like anything,
side of ours ! "
AFRAID 105
" That's so, too," assented Allen. " And theirs
ain't anything side of ours ! " he maintained stoutly.
" No, sir," she agreed, laughing.
Then she grew suddenly grave, and fell silent for
a little, her eyes here and there on the valley lights,
while Allen calculated aloud the time of the arrival
at Jacob's house.
" Allen ! " she said at last.
" Here ! " he answered. " I'm here, you bet."
" Just look at the lights," she said seriously, cc and
then think. There's Bess and Opie not speakin'
to each other. Over there's the Hubbelthwait farm
that they've left for the hotel an' Threat Hubbel-
thwait drunk all the time. An' Howells's, poor and
can't pay, and don't care if they can't, and quarrels
so folks can hear 'em from the road. And the
Moneys', that's so ugly to the children, and her
findin' fault, and him can't speak without an oath.
That only leaves the Topladys' over there that's
real, regular people. And she kind o' bosses him."
" Well, now, that's so, ain ? " s?iid Allen, look-
ing at the lights with a difference.
Chris's right hand was warm in his great-coat
pocket, and she suddenly snuggled close to him, her
chin on his shoulder.
" Oh, Allen," she said, I'm afraid! "
"What? On the Plank Road?" he wanted to
know, missing her meaning.
io6 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
cc All them folks started out with presents, and a
house, like us," she said, " and with their minds all
made up to bein' happy. But just look at 'em."
" Well," said Allen, reasonably, "we ain't them."
<c We might get like 'em," she insisted. " How
can you tell ? Folks just do get that way or they
just doi.. r. T :,;-,. can you tell? ''
" I sVjse chat's so, ain't it? " said Allen, thought-
fully'.
" Mother's got a picture of the Hubbelthwaits
when they was married," Chris pursued. "Her
in white an' slippers and bracelets, and him slick as
a kitten's foot. Think of her now, Allen, with
bracelets. And him drunk all the time, 'most.
How can you tell how things'll turn out? Oh,
Allen, I ami I'm afraid."
He bent to her face and laid his own against hers,
glowing and cold and with fresh, warm lips.
(< Let's just try to be happy and keep ourselves
happy," he said.
The trouble ' --vr \., was sill 1 in her face, but at
his touch the fears went: a little away, and the valley
lights being already left behind among the echoes of
the bells, they forgot both the lights and their
shadows and drifted bi.ck to talk about the new
house and the presents, and the dinners and suppers
and breakfasts together. For these were the stuff
of which the time w. s iaa Ic. As it was made, too,
AFRAID 107
of that shadowy, hovering fear for the fntu^ and
the tragic pity of their errand, and of sad conjecture
about the little stray child whom Sarah Ernestine
had brought.
" That ain't it a'ready, is it ? " Christopha ex-
claimed when they saw Jacob's cottage.
" It just is it's 'leven o'clock now," Allen an-
swered, and gave the horse to the old man ; and
they two went within.
The light in the room, like the lights back in the val-
ley, was as if some great outside influence here and
there should part the darkness to win a little stage for a
scene of the tragedy : in the valley, for the drunken-
ness at the Hubbelthwaits', the poverty at the How-
ells', the ill nature at the Moneys' ; and here, in
Jacob's cottage, for death. There was no doubt of
the quality of the hour in the cottage. The room was
instinct with the outside touch. Already it was
laid upon the woman in the bed, ar.vl \\l:h a n*y;-.r.ery
and authority not unlike that which had come upon
Christopha in her marriage hour and was upon her
still.
The woman knew Allen, smiled at him, made
him understand her thankfulness that he had come.
At Christoph?. she looked kindly and quite without
curiosity. Some way, that absence of curiosity at
what was so vital to him gripped Allen's heart, and
without: his ki;o\vir the process, showed him the
of *
io8 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
nature of death. The neighbour who had been
with the sick woman slipped outside, and as she
went she patted Chris's shoulder; and Allen felt that
she understood, and he was dumbly grateful to her.
Allen sat by the bed and held the hand of his
foster-mother ; and Chris moved about the room,
heating water for a little pot of tea. And so it was
Chris who first saw the child. He was sitting at
the end of the wood box, on the floor before the
oven that little stray boy whom Sarah Ernestine
had picked up as she had once picked up Allen.
He looked up at Christopha with big, soft eyes,
naive as the first bird. Almost before she knew
that she meant to do so, Chris stooped, with a won-
dering word, and took him in her arms. He clung
to her and she sat in the rocking chair near the win-
dow where stood Jacob's carnation plant. And
she tried both to look at the child and to love him,
at the same time.
" See, Allen," she said, " this little boy ! "
The child looked over his shoulder at Allen, his
little arms leaning on Christopha's breast. And
very likely because he had felt strange and lonely
and now was taken some account of, he suddenly
and beautifully smiled, and you would have loved
him the more for the way he did that.
The woman, lying with closed eyes, understood
and remembered.
AFRAID 109
"Allen," she said, "that's little John. You find
him a home somewheres. If you can . . ."
" Why, yes, mother, we'll do that. We can do
that, I guess. Don't you worry any about him"
said Allen.
" He's all alone. I donno his name, even. . . . But
you be good to him, Allen, will you ? " she said
restlessly. " I found him somewheres."
" Like me," Allen said.
She shook her head feebly.
" Worse," she said, " worse. I knew I couldn't
do much. I just thought I could keep him
from bein' wicked mebbe."
" Like you did me, mother, I guess," the boy said.
Then she opened her eyes.
" Allen !" she said clearly. "Oh, if I did! When
I think how mebbe I done that / ain't afraid to
die."
Jacob Ernestine came in the room and stood
rubbing one hand on the back of the other. He
saw the kettle's high column of steam and looked
inquiringly at Chris. But she sat mothering the
little silent boy, who looked at her gravely, or
smiled, or pulled at her collar, responsive to her
touch as she was thrillingly responsive to his near-
ness. So Jacob lifted the kettle to the back of the
stove, moved his carnation plant a little away from
the frost of the pane, and settled himself at the bed's
no FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
foot to watch. And when, after a long time, the
child fell asleep, Chris would not lay him down.
Allen would have taken him, and Jacob came and
tried to do so, but she shook her head and they let
her be. She sat so still, hour after hour, that at
last she herself dozed; and it seemed to her, in a
manner of dreaming, that the carnation plant on
the window-sill had lifted and multiplied until some-
thing white and like fragrance filled the room ;
and this, then, she dreamed, was what death is,
death in the room for the woman. Or might it
not be the perfume of her own bridal bouquet, the
carnations which she had carried that night ? But
then the child stirred, and Christopha roused a little,
and after all, the sense of flowers in the room was
the sense of the little one in her arms. As if
many things mean one thing.
It was toward dawn that the end came, quite
simply and with no manner of finality, as if one were
to pass into another chamber. And after that, as
quickly as might be, Christopha and Allen made
ready to drive back to the village for the last bitter
business of all.
Allen, in the barn with Jacob, wondered what he
must do. Allen was sore-hearted at his loss, grateful
for the charge that he had been given ; but what
was he to do? The child ought not to stay in
Jacob's cottage. If Chris's mother would take him
AFRAID 1 1 1
for a little, but Allen knew, without at all being able
to define it, her plaintive, burdened manner, the
burdened manner of the irresponsible. Still puz-
zling over this, he brought the cutter to the side
door; and the side door opened, and Chris came
out in. the pale light, leading the little boy awake,
warmly wrapped, ready for the ride.
" Where you goin' to take him to, Chrissie ? "
Allen asked breathlessly.
" Some of the neighbours, I guess, ain't we ? "
she answered. "I donno. I thought we could see.
He mustn't be left here now."
" No, that's so, ain't it ? " said Allen only. "He
mustn't."
The three drove out together into the land lying
about the gate of dawn. A fragment of moon was
in the east. There was about the hour something
primitive, as if, in this loneliest of all the hours, the
world reverted to type, remembered ancient savage
differences, and fell in the primal lines.
" Allen," Chris said, " you'll miss her. I mean
miss knowin' she's alive."
" Yes," the boy said, " I'll miss knowin' she's
alive."
" Well, we must try to settle what to do with the
little boy," she suggested hastily.
"Yes," he assented, "that's right. We've got to
settle that," and at this they fell silent.
112 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" There's Hopkins's," Chris said presently, nod-
ding toward the home of the neighbour who had
waited their coming to Jacob's cottage. " But
she'll hev to be over there lots to-day and to-mor-
row. And she was kep' up so late it don't hardly
seem as if we'd ought to stop and ask her."
" No," Allen said, " I donno as it does, really."
" There's Cripps's," she suggested a little farther
on, " but they ain't up yet. I donno's 'twould do
to roust 'em up."
" No," Allen agreed, " best not do that, I guess."
Christopha looked over the great fields.
" My ! " she said, " you'll miss her miss thinkin'
of her bein' somewheres. Allen ! Where do you
s'pose she is? "
" I thought o' that," said Allen, soberly.
"Goodness!" said Christopha, and shivered, and
suddenly drew the child close to her. He was sleep-
ing again. And it was so, with his little body between
them, that she could no longer keep her hand warm
in Allen's greatcoat pocket. But above the child's
head her eyes and Allen's would meet, and in that
hour the two had never been so near. Nearer they
were than in the talk about the new house, and the
presents, and the dinners and suppers and breakfasts
together.
They passed the farmhouses that looked asleep,
and the farmhouses that looked watchfully awake
AFRAID 113
while their owners slept. It would not be well to
knock at these, still and sombre-windowed. And
though there were lights at the Moneys' and at the
Howells' and at the Hubbelthwait farm, and even at
Bess and Opie's, their gates, by common consent, were
also passed. Nor did they stop at the Topladys'.
" They're real, regular people with a grown son,"
Chris said of them vaguely, " and it don't seem
hardly fair to give 'em little John, too ! "
" Little John," Allen said over wonderingly. When
they called him that the child seemed suddenly a
person, like themselves. Their eyes met above his
head.
"Allen!" Chris said.
" What? What is it? " he asked eagerly.
"Could do you think could we? " she
demanded.
" My ! " he answered, " I been a-wishin' "
Involuntarily he drew rein. They were on the
rise by the Corner church at the edge of the village.
The village, rhythmic crest of wall and shallow of
lawn, lay below them, and near the little Triangle
park would be their waiting house.
" Did you mean have him live with us ? " -Allen
made sure.
"Yes, I did," Chris said, " if we had the money."
"Well!" said the boy, "well, I guess that'll be
all right ! "
Ii4 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" How much shed of liked it," said Chris.
" Wouldn't she, though/' Allen assented ; " wouldn't
she? And you heard what she said that about
keepin' him from bein' wicked? Chrissie could
we, you and me? This little fellow? "
Chris lifted her face and nodded.
" I ain't afraid," she said simply.
" I ain't either," her husband said.
As if, in this new future, there were less need of
fear than in the future which had sought to " try to
be happy and keep ourselves happy."
They looked down where their house would be,
near the gate of the coming dawn. And as two
others in such case might have seen it was as if
they were the genii of their own mysterious future,
a future whose solution trembled very near. For
with the charge of the child had come a courage,
even as the dead woman had known, when she
thought of her charge of Allen, that she was not
afraid to die.
"Allen," said Chris, stumblingly, "it don't seem
as if we could get like the Howells' an' the Hub-
belthwaits and them. Somehow it don't seem as if
we could! "
"No," said Allen, "we couldn't. That's so,
ain't it?"
Above little John's head their eyes met in a kind
of new betrothal, new marriage, new birth. But
AFRAID 115
when he would have driven on, Allen pulled at the
reins again, and,
" Chrissie," he said suddenly, " if afterwards
there should be anybody else. I mean for us.
Would would you keep on lovin' this little kiddie,
too?"
She met his eyes bravely, sweetly.
" Well, you Silly," she said, " of course I would ! "
At which Alien laughed joyously, confidently.
" Why, Chris," he cried, " we're married ! For
always an' always. An' here's this little old man to
see to. Who's afraid ? "
Then they kissed each other above the head of
the sleeping child, and drove on toward the village,
and toward their waiting house.
VIII
THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT
*.
WHEN I opened my door this morning, the Out-
doors was like a thing coming to meet me. I mean
that it was like a person coming to meet me no, it
was like many persons, hand in hand and, so to
speak, mind in mind ; a great company of whom
straightway I became one. I felt that swift, good
gladness that now was now y that delicate, fleeting
Now, that very coquette of time, given and with-
drawn. I remember that I could not soon go to
sleep on the night of the day on which I learned that
the Hebrew tongue has no present tense. They
could not catch at that needle-point of experience,
and we can do so. I like to glory in it by myself
when no one else is thinking of it ; to think aside, as
if to Something, that now is being now. . . . And I
long for the time when we shall all know it together,
all the time, and understand its potentialities and let
it be breath and pulse to keep the Spirit Future alive
and pure.
It would have been no great wonder if I had been
116
THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT 117
rejoicing past all reason in the moment. For at
that very instant came Calliope Marsh, home for the
Java entertainment which was set for to-night, and
driving to my gate the Sykes's white horse in the
post-office store delivery wagon. And as I saw her,
so precisely did she look like herself, that I could
have believed that Now was not Now, but Then,
when first I knew her.
Calliope brought the buckled lines informally over
the horse's head and let them fall about the tie post,
and ran to me. I am afraid that I am not going to
tell what we said. But it was full of being once
more in the presence of those whom you love. Do
you not think that such being together is a means
of actual life transcending both breath and perception?
When our greeting was done, Calliope sat down
on the stair in my hall, and,
" Hev you got any spare candle-shades an'
sherbet glasses, an' pretty doilies an' lunch cloths
an' rugs an' willow chairs an' a statue of almost any-
body an* a meat-chopper with a peanut-butter at-
tachment an' a cap an' gown like colleges ? " she
demanded.
And when I told her that I thought I might
have some of these things,
" Well," Calliope said, " she wants 'em all. Who
do I mean by She? Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson,
the personal queen of things."
u8 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
She leaned forward, hugging her thin little arms,
and she looked up at me from under the brim of
her round straw hat.
" I'm in need of grace," she said shortly. " I
never felt like this toward any human being. But
I tell you, when that little Mis' Johnson comes
dilly-nippin' around where I am, noddin' her blue
ostrich tip, seems my spine just stiffens out in me
like it was going to strike at her, same as a stick.
Do you know the feelin' ? "
I answered reluctantly, and not as I should wish
to answer ; for it is certain that I, too, have seldom
seen Mrs. Johnson without an urgency to be gone
from her little fluttering presence. But Calliope !
I could not imagine Calliope shrinking from any
one, or knowing herself alien to another.
cc For sixty years," she answered my thought of
her, " I've never known what it was to couldn't
bear anybody, not without I had a reason. They
ain't much of anybody I what you might say don't
like, without they're malicious or ugly a-purpose.
Ugly by nature, ugly an' can't help it, ugly an'
don't know it I can forgive all them. An' Mis'
Johnson ain't ugly at all she's just a real sweet
little slip of a thing, doin' her hard-workin' best.
But when I first see her in church that day, I says
to myself: c I'll give that little piece two months to
carry the sail she's carryin' here to-day ; four months
THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT 119
to hev folks tired of her, an' six months to get her-
self the com shoulder all 'round/ An* I hold to
what I said. An' when her baby-blue nineteen-inch
feather swings in an* 'round, an' when she tells how
things ought to be, I kind o j bristle all over me.
I'm ashamed of it an' yet, do you know, I like to
give in to it ? " Calliope said solemnly. " I donno
what's come over me. Hev you heard where the
Java entertainment's put to be ? "
I had not heard, nor was I sure just why it was of
Java, save that Friendship is continually giving
entertainments with foreign names and practising a
wild imperialism to carry out an effect of foreign
parts. And since, at the missionary meeting which
had projected the affair, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler John-
son had told about their Java entertainment in their
church at home, that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda
Toplady, who was president of the society, had ap-
pointed her chairman of the Java entertainment com-
mittee.
" And," Calliope informed me, " she's picked out
the engine-house for it. Yes, sir, the fire-engine
house. No other place was quaint enough. No
other place lent itself to decoration probabilities
or somethin' like that. She turned her back flat on
the church an' went round to empty stores, lookin'
for quaint-ity. One while I thought she'd hev us
in the Chinese laundry, she seemed that took with
izo FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
the tomato-coloured signs on the walls. But, finally,
she lit on the engine-house ; an' when she see the
big, bare engine-room, with the big, shinin' engine
in it, an* harnesses hangin' from them rough board
beams in a kind of avenoo, an' the board walls all
streaked down, she spatted her hands an' 'lowed
we'd hev our Java there. c What a dear, quaint
place/ s's she, c so flexible ! ' She held out about
the harnesses bein' so quaintly picturesque an' the
fire-engine a piece o' resistance or somethin' like
that. An' she rents the room, without ay, yes, no,
nor boo. My way of thinkin', a chairman ought
to hev boo for a background, even if she is chair-
man. That's where she wants the statue an' the
nut butter an' the cap an' gown. Can we borrow
'em of you ? "
" The engine-house ! " I repeated incredulously.
" You cannot mean the fire-engine house, Calliope?"
" I do," Calliope said firmly, " the quaint, flexible
fire-engine house. They ain't been a fire in
Friendship in over two years, so Mis' Johnson says
we ain't got that to think of an' I donno as we
hev. An' they never use the engine any more,
now they've got city water, excep' for fires in the
country, and then nobody ever gets in to give the
alarm till the house is burned down an' no need
to bother goin'. Even if they do get in in some
sort of season, the department has to go to the
THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT 121
mayor to get a permit to go outside the city
limits. It was so when the Topladys' barn burned.
Timothy told 'em, when they come gallopin' up
after it was most done smokin', that if they had
held off a little longer they could have been a sight
of help to him in shinglin' the new one. Oh, no,
they ain't much of any danger of our being disturbed
by a fire in them two hours to-night. Anyhow,
they can't be a fire. Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson
said so."
We laughed like children as we loaded my " Java "
stuffs on the wagon. Calliope was a valiant helper
to Mrs. Johnson, and so I told her. She was stand-
ing in the wagon box, one arm about my palm, the
other free for driving.
" I'm the chairman o' the refreshments, too," she
confessed. " Oh, well. Yourself you can boss
round, you know," she threw back, smiling ; " any-
body can do that. But your feelin's you're some
cramped about runnin'."
It is certain that Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson
was signally unfitted for a future in Friendship Vil-
lage. She was a woman of some little world in
which she had moved before she came to us, and in
the two worlds she perceived no difference. Or,
where she saw a difference, she sought to modify it
by a touch when a breath would have been too
much, and the only factor of potency would have
122 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
been a kind of potency of spirit, which she did not
possess.
The Oliver Wheeler Johnsons had moved to
Friendship only three months before, and nobody
had looked for them at church on their first Sunday.
cc Movin' so, you want your Sabbath to take some
rest in, an* you ain't expected to dress yourself up
an' get out to Sunday service an' face strangers,"
the village said and when the two walked into
church while the responses were being made nearly
everybody lost the place.
They were very young, and they were extremely
well dressed.
" He's got on one o' the long coats," comment
ran after church, " an' he's got a real soft-speakin'
voice. But he seems to know how to act."
And, " I declare, nice white gloves an' a nineteen-
inch baby-blue ostrich feather durin' movin' seems
some like puttin' on."
And, " The back of her dress fits her just like the
front, an' I must say she knows it. No pullin' down
the jacket or hitchin' the strings forward for her,
when she stands up ! "
As Miggy, who first told me about that day, had
said, " That Sunday morning, Mis' Oliver Wheeler
Johnson was the belle of the congregation."
After service that day, instead of going directly
home or waiting to be addressed, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler
THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT 123
Johnson had spoken to the woman with whom she
had been seated. It was Mis' Postmaster Sykes.
"Thank you so much," Mrs. Johnson said, "for
letting us share your pew. May I present my
husband ? We have come to Friendship to live,
and we shall be coming here to church. And I
shall want to join your Ladies' Aid Society and
your Missionary Circle and, perhaps, be in the
Sunday-school right away. I I think I'll be less
homesick "
" Actually," Mis' Sykes said afterward, " she took
my breath clear away from me. I never heard of
such a thing. Of course, we're real glad to hev our
newcomers Christian people, but we want quiet Chris-
tians. An' did you notice how she was when I give
her an introduction around ? Why, she up an' out
with somethin' to say to everybody. Just a neat
little c How d' do ' wouldn't do for her to remark.
I always suspicion them talkative-at-first kind. It's
like they'd been on the stage or brought up in a
hotel."
When she first came to the Ladies' Aid and the
missionary meetings, Mrs. Johnson "said some-
thing." She was "up to her feet" three or four
times at each session with suggestion, information, or
description of how they did in her home church.
And some way I think that what chiefly separated
her from the village was the way that inevitable
124 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
nineteen-inch blue ostrich plume on the little
woman's hat bobbed and won attention and was
everywhere at once. Or, perhaps such creatures
of wax we are to our impressions it may have
been little Mrs. Johnson's mere way of lifting her
small, pointed chin when she talked, and of frown-
ing and over-emphasizing. Or it may have been
that she stood with her hands clasped behind her in
what seemed to Friendship exaggerated ease, or that
she smiled arbitrarily and ingratiatingly as she talked
when there was absolutely nothing at which to smile.
I think that these made her seem as alien to us as,
in varied measure, certain moral defects might have
done.
Moreover, she mentioned with familiarity objects
and usages of which Friendship Village knew nothing :
Carriage shoes, a new cake of soap for each guest,
some kind . of ice served, it was incredulously re-
peated, " in the middle o' the meal ! " She innocently
let fall that she sent to the city for her letter-paper.
She had travelled in a state-room on a train, and she
said so. She knew a noted woman. She used, we
saw from the street, shaded candles on the table when
she and her husband were at supper alone. She
thought nothing of ordering Jimmy Sturgis and the
bus to take her down town to her marketing on a
rainy day. She had inclined to blame the village
that Daphne Street was not paved, instead of joining
THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT 125
with the village to blame somebody else. Above
all, she tried to buy our old furniture. I do not
know that another might not have done all these
quite without giving offence, and, indeed, rather have
left us impressed with her superior familiarity with
an envied world. But by the time of the Java
entertainment Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had
innocently alienated half Friendship Village. And
this morning Calliope merely voiced what I knew to
be the sentiment of most of Mrs. Johnson's
neighbours and acquaintances. For these people are
the kindly of earth ; but they are of earth, where
reign both the centrifugal and centripetal forces,
and the control is not always so swift as science and
the human heart could wish.
At five o'clock to-day the day set for the Java
evening entertainment I made my way to the
engine-house. This was partly because I wished to
be as much as possible with Calliope during her few
days in the village, and partly it was because the
affair would belong to the class of festivity which I
am loath to miss, and I think that, for Friendship's
sake, I will never willingly pass by a " hall" in which
is to be found a like diversion. Already on the great
room, receiving its final preparation, had descended
something of the excited spirit of the evening : the
heat, the insufficient light, the committee members'
shrill, rollicking children sliding on the floor, the
126 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
booths which in all bazaars contain with a precision
fairly bewildering the same class of objects ; and the
inevitable sense of hurry and silk waists and aching
feet and mustn't-take-your-change-back. But to all
these things the Java engine-house affair would add
an element of novelty, almost a flavour of romance.
Certainly the room lent itself to " decoration prob-
abilities," as Calliope had vaguely quoted; it had
been a roller-skating rink, utilized by the fire-de-
partment on the decline of the pastime, and there
was, as Mrs. Johnson's piece de resistance, the fire-
engine.
I had never before been in the engine-house
you know how there will be commonplace enough
spots in your own town to which you never go: the
engine-house, the church belfry, the wood yard,
upstairs over this store and that, and grocery cellars
whose sloping trap-doors, open now and then to the
walk, are as alien as the inside of the trunks of your
trees. When I stepped in the engine-house, it seemed
insistently a place in which I had never been before.
And this may have been partly because the whole
idea of a village fire-department is to me singular :
the waiting horses and ladders and hose, whose
sole reason for being is merely ameliorative, and
never human and preventive; that pealing of the
sharp, peculiar, terrifying alarm and summons first
imprinting something on the very air, stabbing us
THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT 127
with Halt while we count the bell strokes for the
ward, and then clanging the wild fury of the quick-
stroke command to help.
To-day the great glittering fire-engine, flanked by
hose-cart and hook-and-ladder wagon, occupied
almost wonderingly the head of the room which had
been invaded, and an inspired committee had gar-
landed the engine with paper roses and American
flags. The flag of the Netherlands, copied from
a dictionary and wrought in red-white-and-blue
cambric with a silver crown, drooped meditatively
from the smoke-stack ; a scarlet fez and a peacock-
feather fan hung on the supply hose ; and on the
tongue-bracer was fixed a pink sofa cushion from
Mis' Amanda Toplady's parlour, with an olive Indian
gentleman in a tinsel zouave jacket stamped on the
cover. On the two big sliding doors, back of which
stood the fire company's horses, were tacked in-
numerable Javanese trifles more picturesque than
authentic ; and on outlying booths and tables there
were others. Directly before the engine was to be
the tea-table, where Mis' Postmaster Sykes was to
serve Java tea from a Java canister, loaned by the
Post-office store.
As soon as I entered I sought out Calliope's
booth, a huge affair constructed of rugs whose red-
tongued, couchant dogs and bounding fawns some-
what marred the Eastern effect. And within, I
iz8 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
found myself in a circle of the Friendship women
whom I know best all of them tired with that
deadly tiredness born of a day's work at a church
fair of any nation. But at once I saw that it was
not merely fatigue which was disquieting them.
Calliope was leaning against a bit of Bagelen blue,
loaned by the new minister's wife. And she said to
me as if, I thought, in explanation of what I was to
hear, "I guess we're all pretty tired. Most of us
look like we wanted to pant. I'm all of a shake,
myself."
When Mis' Postmaster Sykes spoke unsmilingly,
I understood :
" It ain't the bein' tired," she disclaimed ; " tired I
can stand an' hev stood since my own birth. But it's
the bein' commanded 'round me, commanded
by that little I'm-the-one-an'-you-do-as-I-say out
there!"
" Land-a-livin' an' a-dyin' ! " said Mis' Holcomb-
that-was-Mame-Bliss, " I declare if I know whether
I'm on foot or on horseback. It's bad enough to
hev to run a fair, without you've got to be run your-
self, too. Ain't it enough for Mis' Johnson to
be made chairman without her wantin' to boss
besides ? She might as well say to me,. ( Mis'
Holcomb, you do everything the opposite way
from the way you've just done it,' an' hev it over
with."
THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT 129
Mis' Amanda Toplady even that great, tolerant
Mis* Amanda shook her head.
" Mis' Johnson surely acts used to bein' bowed
down to," she admitted ; " she seems fair bent on
lordin' it. My land, if she wasn't bound to bor-
row my Tea rose plant that's just nearin' ready
to bud."
Calliope laughed, a little ruefully, and wholly in
sympathy.
"Honest," she said, " I guess what's the matter
with all of us ain't so much what she does as the
particular way she does it. It's so with some folks.
They just seem to sort of set you all over, when you
come near 'em same as the cold does to gravy.
We'd all ought to wrostle with the feelin', I expect."
" I expect we had," said Mis' Holcomb, " but
you could wrostle all your days with vinegar an' it'd
pucker your mouth same way."
" Funny part," Calliope observed, rt everybody
feels just alike about her. When she skips around
so sort o' momentous, we all want to dodge. I felt
sorry for her, first, because I thought she was in
for nervous prostration. But after a while I see it
wasn't disease it was just her feelin' so up an*
down significant, you might say."
" I donno," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-
Bliss, "but it's part the way she says her #'s. That
real 0-soundin' a kind," she explained vaguely.
ijo FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE
"She's so right an* left cuffy I guess that's
the whole thing/' Calliope put it in her rich idiom.
" Well," said Mis' Amanda, sadly, " there must
be somethin' we could like her for, even if it was
only her husband."
"He ain't what I'd call much, either," Cal-
liope dismissed Mr. Oliver Wheeler Johnson posi-
tively ; " he's got too soft-speakin' a voice. I like
a man's voice to rumble up soft from his chest an*
not slip down thin from his brain."
I remember that I listened in a great wonder to
these women whom I had seen at many an office of
friendliness to strangers and aliens. Yet as I looked
across the floor at that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler
Johnson who, in the hat with the blue plume,
was everywhere, directing, altering, objecting, ar-
ranging, commanding and, especially, doing over
I most unwillingly felt much as they felt. If only
Mrs. Johnson had not continually lifted her little
pointed chin. If only she had not perpetually
and ingratiatingly smiled when there was nothing at
which to smile at all.
Then Abigail Arnold hurried up to us with a tray
of cups for the Java tea.
" Calliope," she said to the chairman of the re-
freshments, " Mis' Johnson jus' put up her little
chin an* says, c What ! ain't we no lemons for the
tea?'"
THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT 131
Calliope compressed her lips and lifted their thin
line tight and high.
" Lemins," she replied, " ain't necessarily found
in Java. I've a good big mind to go home to
bed."
Then we saw little Mrs. Johnson's blue linen
dress hurrying toward us with the waving line of
the blue feather above her, like a last little daring
flourish by the artist of her. She was really very
pretty and childish, with a manner of moving in
wreaths and lines and never in solids. Her little
feet twinkled along like the signature to the pretty
picture of her. But yet she was not appealing.
She was like an overconfident child whom you
long to shut in a closet. Yes, I understand that I
sound like a barbarian in these days of splendid
corrective treatment of children who are studied and
not stormed at. And in this treatment I believe to
the uttermost. And yet, overconfidence in a child
is of all things the most I will amend what I said :
Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson was like an overconfi-
dent child whom you long to shut in a closet because
of your ignorance of what else on earth to do. No
doubt there is a better way, but none of us knew it.
And she came toward us intent, every one felt, on
some radical change in arrangements, though the big
room was now in the pink of appointment and ready
to be left while the committee went home to sup on
1 32 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
"just sauce and bread-and-butter," and to don silk
waists.
We saw little Mrs. Johnson hurrying toward us,
upon a background of the great, patient room, all-
tolerant of its petty bedizening. And then Mrs.
Johnson, we in Calliope's booth, the sliding, rollick-
ing children, and all the others about stood still, at
the sharp, peculiar terrifying alarm and summons
which seemed to imprint something on the very air,
stabbing us with Halt that we might count the bell
strokes for the ward, and clanging a wild fury of the
quick-stroke command to help. For the first time
in two years the Friendship fire alarm was sounding
from the tower above our heads.
There was a panting sweep and scurry for the
edges of the room, as instantly a gong on the wall
sounded with the alarm, and the two big sliding
doors went back, scattering like feathers the innu-
merable Javanese trifles that had been tacked there.
Forward, down the rug-hung vista, plunged the two
big horses of the department. We saw the Java
tea-table borne to earth, the Javanese exhibits adorn-
ing outlying counters swept away, and all the " dec-
oration probabilities " vanish in savage wreck.
Then the quaintly picturesque harnesses fell to the
horses' necks, their hoofs trampled terrifyingly on
the loose boards of the floor, and forth from the
yawning doors the horses pounded, dragging the
THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT 133
piece de resistance, with garlands on its sides, the pink
zouave cushion crushed beneath it, and the flag of the
Netherlands streaming from the stack. Horses
rushed thither in competition, came thundering at
the doors, and galloped to place before the two carts.
I think not a full minute can have been consumed.
But the ruin of the Java entertainment committee's
work was unbelievably complete. Though there
had been not a fire in Friendship Village in two
years, that night, of all nights, Jimmy Sturgis's
" hay-barn," for the omnibus horses, " took it on
itself," it was said, " to go to work an' burn up."
And Jimmy's barn is outside the city limits, so that
the piece de resistance had to be used. And Jimmy
is in the fire-department, so that the company gal-
loped informally to the rescue without the benefit of
the mayor's authority.
As the last of the department disappeared, and
the women of the committee stood looking at one
another tired with the deadly tiredness of a day
such as theirs a little blue linen figure sprang
upon a chair and clasped her hands behind her, and
a blue ostrich feather lifted and dipped as she spoke.
" Quickly ! " Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson cried.
"All hands at work now! Mrs. Sykes, will you
set up the tea-table ? You can get more dishes from
my house. Mrs. Toplady, this booth, please. You
can make it right in no time. Mrs. Holcomb, you
134 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
will have to do your booth entirely over you can
get some things from my house. Miss Marsh
ah, Calliope Marsh, you must go to .my house for
my lace curtains "
She smiled ingratiatingly and surely arbitrarily,
for we all knew full well that there was 'absolutely
nothing to smile at. And with that Calliope's in-
dignation, as she afterward said, " kind of crystal-
lized and boiled over/' I remember how she
stood, hugging her thin little arms and speaking
her defiance.
" I donno how you feel, Mis' Johnson/' she said
dryly, " but, my idea, Bedlam let loose ain't near
quaint enough for a Java entertainment. Nor I
don't think it's what you might say real Java,
either. Things here looks to me too flexible.
I'm goin' home an' go to bed."
There was no doubt what the rest meant to do.
With one impulse they turned toward the door as
Calliope turned, and silently they took the way that
the piece de resistance had taken before them. Lit-
tle Mrs. Johnson stood on her chair making many
gestures ; but no one went back.
Calliope looked straight before her.
" My feet ache like I done my thinkin' with 'em/'
she said, "an* my head feels like I'd stood on
it. An' what's it all for ? "
" Regular clock performance," Mis' Postmaster
THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT 135
Sykes assented. " We've ticked hard all day long
an* ain't got a thing out of it. I often think it's
that way with my housework, but I did think the
Ladies' Missionary could tick, when it did tick,
for eternity. I'm tuckered to the bone."
" Nobody knows," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was
Mame-Bliss, " how my poor neck aches. It's there
I suffer first an' most."
Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was walking behind
the rest, took three great steps and caught us up
and spoke, a little breathlessly :
" Land, land," she said, " I guess I'll go home an*
pop some corn. Seems to me it'd smell sort of
cosy an' homelike an' soothin' down. It's a grand
thing to smell when you're feelin' far off from your-
self."
Calliope laughed a little then.
" Well," she said, " anyhow I ain't got my silk
waist to get into and I didn't hev a nice one to
put on anyway. I was wishin' I had, and now my
wish has come true by bein' took away from me,
bodily like they will. But just the same -
She turned on the walk and faced us, and hugged
her thin little arms.
" A while ago," she said, "I give that little woman
there six months to get 'herself the cold shoulder all
around. Well, the time ain't up yet but both
my shoulders feels stone cold ! "
IX
THE COLD SHOULDER
THERE is something more about Mrs. Oliver
Wheeler Johnson.
Did you ever look through an old school-book of
your own and, say, on the history picture of Vesuvius
in eruption impose your own memory of Pompeii,
visited in these twenty years since you studied
about it ; and have you not stared hard at the time
between and felt yourself some one other than that
one who once dreamed over the Vesuvius picture ?
Or, years after you read the Letters, you have made
a little mark below Cicero's cry from exile, " Oh, that
I had been less eager for life ! " and you look at the
cry and at the mark, and you and one of these be-
come an anachronism but you are not sure which
it is that so becomes. So now, in reading over these
notes some while after I have set them down, I am
minded here to give you my look ahead to the end
of the summer and to slip in some account of what
happened as a closing of the tale. And I confess
that something about me perhaps it is the Cus-
136
THE COLD SHOULDER 137
todian herself likes this way of pretending a free-
dom from time and of looking upon its fruit to say
which seeds have grown and which have not.
Friendship Village is not superstitious, but when
curious coincidences occur we do, as we say, "take
down note." And it did seem like a judgment upon
us that, a little time after the Java fiasco, and while
indignation was yet at high noon, Mrs. Oliver
Wheeler Johnson fell ill.
At first I think we affected not to know it.
When she did not appear at church, none of us
mentioned it for a Sunday or two. Then when
some one casually noted her absence we said, " Oh,
wasn't she ? Got little cold, likely." That we saw
her no more down town or " brushing up " about
her door we facilely laid to chance. When the vil-
lage heard that her maid who always offended by
talking almost in a whisper had once or twice ex-
cused her mistress to callers, every one shut lips and
hardened hearts and said some folk acted very funny
about their calling duties. But when, at the twelve
o'clock breakfast of the new minister's wife (" Like
enough breakfast at noon was a real Bible custom,"
the puzzled devotees solved that amazing hour),
Mrs. Johnson did not appear, the village was forced
to admit that something must be wrong.
Moreover, against its will the behaviour of young
Mr. Johnson was gravely alarming Friendship.
1 38 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Mr. Johnson was in real estate and insurance in
the city, and this did not impress the village as a
serious business. " Because, what does he sell! " as
Abigail Arnold said. " We know he don't own
property. He rents the very house they live in. A
doctor's a doctor an' he gives pills, an' a store's a store
with the kind o' thing you need. But it don't seem
like that man could make a real good livin' for
her, dealin' vague in nothin' that way." His income,
it was felt, was problematical, and the village had set-
tled it that what the Oliver Wheeler Johnsons' had
was chiefly wedding presents "an' high-falutin' tastes."
But, in the face of the evidence, every afternoon at
three o'clock the young husband ordered a phaeton
from Jimmy Sturgis and came home from the city
to take his wife to drive. Between shutters the vil-
lage saw that little Mrs. Johnson's face did look
betrayingly pale, and the blue ostrich plume lay
motionless on her bright hair.
" I guess Mis' Johnson's real run down," her ac-
quaintances said to one another uneasily. Still we
did not go to see her. The weeks went by until, one
morning, Calliope met the little new Friendship doc-
tor on the street and asked him about his patient.
" I up an' ask' him flat out," Calliope confessed
afterward ; " not that I really cared to be told, but
I hated to know I was heathenish. You don't like
the feelin'. To know they ain't heathens is all
THE COLD SHOULDER 139
that keeps some folks from bein 'em. Well, so I
ask' him. f Doctor Heron/ s'l, < is that Mis' John-
son real sick, or is she just sickish ? ' He looks at
me an' c Looks pretty sick, don't she ? ' s'e.
< Well,' s'l, ' I've seen folks look real rich that
wa'n't it by right-down pocketbook evidence.' c Been
to see her ? ' s'e. f No,' s'l, short. c Might drop
in,' s'e, an* walks off, lookin' cordial. That little
Doctor Heron is that close-mouthed I declare if I
don't respect him same as the minister an' the pipe-
organ an' the skippin' hills."
So, as midsummer passed and found the little
woman still ailing, I obeyed an idle impulse and
went one evening to see her. I recall that as soon
as I had crossed her threshold the old influence came
upon me, and I was minded to run from the place
in sheer distaste of the overemphasis and the lifted,
pointed chin and the fluttering importances of her
presence. I was ashamed enough that this should
be so, but so it was ; and I held my ground to
await her coming to the room only by a measure
of will.
I sat with Mrs. Johnson for an hour that evening.
And it would seem that, as is the habit of many,
having taken my own way I was straightway pos-
sessed to draw others after me. There are those
who behave similarly and who set cunningly to
work to gain their own ends, as, for example, I did.
140 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
For one night soon I devised a little feast, which
I have always held to be a good doorway to any
enterprise, and, at the Friendship-appointed supper
hour of six, I made my table as fair as possible, as
has been done in like case ever since butter was first
served " in a lordly dish." And my guests were
Calliope, without whom no festival is wholly in
keeping, and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss,
and Mis'* Postmaster Sykes, and that great, tolerant
Mis' Amanda Toplady.
Because they had arrived so unsuspectingly I
own myself to have felt guilty enough when, in
that comfortable half-hour after a new and delectable
dessert had been pronounced upon, I suggested
with what casualness I might summon that we five
pay a visit that night to Mrs. Oliver Wheeler
Johnson.
"Land!" said Mis' Holcomb, " I've thought I
would an' then I've thought I wouldn't till I feel
all two-faced about myself. I donno. Sometimes
I think one way an' sometimes I think the other.
Are you ever like that ? " W
" I s'pose," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, majesti-
cally, " that them in our position ought to overlook.
I donno 's 'twould hurt us any to go," she added
graciously.
Calliope's eyes twinkled.
"That's it," she said; "let them that's got the
THE COLD SHOULDER 141
social position to overlook things be Christian an*
overlook 'em."
That great Mis' Amanda Toplady folded her
hands, dimpled like a baby giant's.
" I'd be glad to go," she said simply ; " I've got
some grape jell that looks to me like it wasn't goin'
to keep long, an' I'd be thankful to be on terms
with her so's I could carry it in to her. They ain't
a single other invalid in Friendship."
Calliope sprang to her feet and crossed her little
arms, a hand hugging either shoulder.
" Well said ! " she cried ; " do let's go ! I'm
sick to death of slidin' off the subject whenever it
comes up in my mind."
So, in the fair October dusk, we five went down
the Plank Road where Summer lingers late.
The air was gentle with the soft, impending dark.
I wonder why the colonnade of sweet influences,
down which we stepped, did not win us to them-
selves. But I remember how, instead, our im-
minent visit drew us back to the days of Mrs.
Johnson's coming, so that presently we were going
over the incident of the Java entertainment, and, as
Calliope would have put it, " crystallizing and boil-
ing over " again in the old distaste.
But when we reached the little cottage of the
Johnsons, our varied motives for the visit were ab-
ruptly merged in a common anxiety. For Doctor
1 42 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Heron's buggy stood at the gate and the little one-
story cottage was dark save for a light in what we
knew to be a corner bedroom. The hallway was
open to the night, but though we could distinctly
hear the bell jingle in the kitchen no one answered
the summons. Then, there being somewhere about
a murmur of voices, Calliope stepped within and
called softly :
" Doctor, Doctor Heron you there? Is they
anything we can do ? "
The doctor came momentarily to the lighted door-
way down the hall.
" That you, Calliope ? " he said. " You might
come here, will you ? Tell the rest to sit down
somewheres. And you tell Mr. Johnson he can
come."
On which, from out the dark living room, some
one emerged very swiftly and without a word pushed
by us all where we were crowded in the passage and
strode down to the little lighted chamber. Calliope
hurried after him, and we four shrank back in sud-
den dread and slipped silently into the room which
the young husband had left, and stood together in
the dimness. Was she so sick ? In that room he
must have heard the door-bell as we had heard it,
and yet he had not answered. Was it possible that
we had come too late ?
While we waited we said nothing at all, save that
THE COLD SHOULDER 143
great Mis' Amanda Toplady, who said three times
or four, " Oh, dear, oh, dear, I'm always waitin'
till somethin's too late either me or the other
thing." It seemed very long before we heard some
stir, but it can have been only a few minutes until
the doctor came down the little hall and groped into
the room. In answer to all that we asked he merely
occupied himself in lighting a match and setting it
deliberately to the candles on the table and adjusting
their shades. They were, we noted afterward, the
same candles whose presence we had detected and
derided at those long ago tete-a-tete suppers in that
house. The light glowed on the young doctor's
pale face as he looked at us, each in turn, before he
spoke. And when he had done with his slow
scrutiny I think that we cannot wholly have
fancied its accusation he said only :
" Yes, she's pretty sick. I can't tell yet."
Then he turned and closed the outer door and
stood leaning against it, looking up the hall.
" Miss Marsh ! " he called.
But why did the man not tell us something, we
wondered ; and there flashed in my mind Calliope's
reference to the pipe-organ and the skipping hills.
At all events, Calliope would tell us.
And so she did. We heard her step in the hall,
coming quickly and yet with a manner of exceeding
care. I think that with the swift sense which wings
144 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
before intelligence, the others understood before
they saw her, even as I understood. Calliope
stopped in the doorway as if she could trust herself
to go no farther. And she was holding something
in her arms.
" Calliope," we said ; " Calliope . . ."
She looked down at that which she held, and then
she looked at us. And the tears were in her eyes,
but her face was brighter than I have ever known it.
" It's a baby," she said, " a little bit of a baby.
Her baby. An' it makes me feel it makes me
feel oh," she broke off, "don't it make you feel
that way, too ? "
We looked at one another, and avoided one
another's look, and then looked long at the baby.
I do not remember that we said anything at all, or
if we did so, that it bore a meaning. But an instant
after Calliope gave the baby to the nurse who ap-
peared in the doorway, we all tiptoed down to the
kitchen by common consent. And it was plain
that Mrs. Johnson's baby made us feel that way, too.
In our desire to be of tardy service we did the
most absurd things. We took possession of the
kitchen, rejoicing that we found the supper dishes
uncared for, and we heated a great kettle of water,
and washed and wiped and put away, as softly as
we could ; and then we " brushed up around." I
think that only the need of silence kept us from
THE COLD SHOULDER 145
cleaning windows. When the nurse appeared
who had arrived that day unknown of Friendship
we sprang as one to do her bidding. We sent the
little maid to bed, we tidied the living room, walk-
ing tiptoe, and then we went back through the
kitchen and sat down on the little side "stoop."
And all this time we had addressed one another only
about the tasks which we had in hand.
After a little silence,
" The milkman was quite late this morning,"
observed Mis' Holcomb.
" Well, he's begun to deliver in cans instead o'
bottles," Mis' Sykes explained; " it takes him some
longer to get around. He says bottles makes his wife
just that much more to do."
Then we fell silent again.
It was Calliope, sitting on the porch step outside,
where it was dark, who at last had the courage to be
articulate.
"I hope I hope" she said, "she's goin' to be
all right."
Mis' Sykes shaded her eyes from the bracket lamp
within.
" I'll go bail," she said, " that little you-do-as-I-
say chin'll carry her through. I'm glad she's got
it."
Just then we heard the thin crying of the child
and we could divine Calliope, that on the step where
146 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
she sat she was hugging her arms and rocking some-
what, to and fro.
"Like enough," she said, "oh, like enough
folks ain't so cramped about runnin' their own
feelin's as they think they are ! "
To this we murmured something indefinite in
sound but positive enough in sense. And we all
knew what we all knew.
" Let's go out around the house to the front gate,"
said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady, abruptly.
" Have any of you ladies got two handkerchiefs? "
"I've got two," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, "an'
I ain't used either one. Do you want the one with
essence or the one without?"
" I ain't partial," said Mis' Amanda.
We rose and stumbled along the grassy path that
led round the house. At the gate we met Doctor
Heron.
"Well," he said slowly, "well." And after a
moment, " Will will any of you be here in the
morning ? " he asked.
" Yes," we all said simply.
" That's good," he commented shortly, " I didn't
know."
We five had to separate at the first corner to go
our home ways, and we stood for a moment under
the gas-light. I remember how, just then, Peter's
father came singing past us, like one of the Friend-
THE COLD SHOULDER 147
ship family who did not understand his kinship.
Even as we five had not understood ours.
" You haven't got a shawl, hev you ? " Mis'
Sykes said to me solicitously.
" The nights have been some chilly on a person's
shoulders for a day or two now," said Mis' Hoi-
comb.
Calliope put her hand up quickly to her throat.
" Quit," she said. " All of you. Thank God.
An' shake hands. I tell you, after this I bet I'll
run my own feelin's about folks or I'll bring down
the sky an' make new feelin's ! Oh," said Calliope,
" don't her an' now an' the baby an' oh, an'
that bright star winkin' over that hitchin' post, make
things seem easy ? Good night. I can't stand
out here any longer."
But when we had gone away a few steps, Calliope
called us back. And as we turned again,
" To bring down the sky," she repeated, " I bet
that's the way God meant us to do. They ain't any
of us got enough to us to piece out without it ! "
EVENING DRESS
I HAVE said that Daphne Street has been paved
within the past year, but I had not heard of the
manner in which the miracle had been wrought until
the day when Calliope's brief stay in the village ended
and she came to tell me good-by and, more than in-
cidentally, to show me some samples of a dress which
she might have, and a dress which she wouldn't
have, and a dress which she had made up her mind
to have.
" We don't dress much here in Friendship Vil-
lage," she observed. " Not but what we'd like to,
but we ain't the time nor the means nor the places
to wear to. But they was one night "
She looked at me, as always when she means to
tell a story, somewhat with the manner of asking a
permission.
" None of the low-neck' fashion-plates used to
seem real to us," she said. " We used to look at
'em pinned up in Lyddy Ember's dressmakin'
148
EVENING DRESS 149
windows, ah-ahing in their low pink an* long blue,
an' we'd look 'em over an' think tolerant enough,
like about sea-serpents. But neither the one nor
the other bit hold rill vital, because the plates was
so young an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an' we was
old an' busy, like you get, an' considered past the
dressin' age. Still, it made kind of a nice thing to
do on the way home from the grocery hot fore-
noons draw up there on the shady side, where
the street kitters some into a curve, an' look at
Lyddy's plates, an' choose, like you was goin' to
get one.
" Land knows we needed some oasises on that
street from the grocery up home. Daphne Street,
our main street, didn't always use' to be what it is
now neat little wooden blpcks an' a stone curb.
You know how it use' to be no curb an' the road
a sight, over your shoe-tops with mud in the
wet, an' over your shoe-tops with sand when it
come dry. We ladies used to talk a good deal
about it, but the men knew it meant money to hev
it fixed, an' so they told us hevin' it fixed meant
cuttin' the trees down, an' that kept us quiet all
but the Friendship Married Ladies Cemetery Im-
provement Sodality.
"Mis' Postmaster Sykes was president o' the
Sodality last year, you know, she's most always
president of everything, an' we'd been workin'
150 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
quite hard all that winter, an* had got things in the
cemetery rill ship-shape at least I mean things on
the cemetery was. An* at one o' the July meetings
last summer Mis' Sykes up an' proposed that we
give over workin' for the dead an* turn to the living
an' pave the main street of Friendship Village.
"'True/ she says, c our constitution states that
the purpose of our Sodality shall be to keep up the
graves of our townspeople an* make 'em attractive
to others. But,' says she, c when they ain't enough
of us dead to occupy all the time, the only Chris-
tian way to remedy that is to work for folks before
they die, while we're waitin' for their graves.'
" This seemed reasonable, an' we voted unani-
mous to pave Daphne Street. An' on the way
home Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Timothy Toplady an'
I see Timothy Toplady settin' in the post-office
store, an' we went in to tell him an' Silas Sykes
about it. But before we could start in, Silas says,
eyebrows all eager, c Ain't you heard ? '
" c Heard what ? ' says his wife, kind o' cross,
bein' he was her wedded husband an' she hadnt
heard.
" 'Bout Threat Hubbelthwait,' says Silas, lookin'
at Mis' Toplady an' me, bein's Mis' Sykes was his
wife. c Drunk again,' says Silas, c an' fiddlin' for
dear life, an' won't let anybody into the hotel.
Mis' Hubbelthwait has gone over to her mother's,
EVENING DRESS 151
an* the hired girl with her; an' Threat's settin' in
the bar an' playin' all the hymn tunes he knows.'
" It wasn't the first time it had happened, you
know. Threat an' his wife an' the hired girl keep
the only hotel in Friendship Village when Threat
is sober. When he isn't, he sometimes closes up
the house an' turns out whoever happens to be
there, an' won't let a soul in though, of course,
not much of anybody ever comes to Friendship
anyway, excep' now an' then an automobile on its
way somewheres. An' there Threat will set in the
bar, sometimes most of one week, sometimes most
of two, an' scrape away on the only tunes he knows
all hymns, c Just As I Am/ an' c Can A Little
Child Like Me ? ' Threat don't mean to be sacri-
legious; he shows that by never singin' them two
hymns in church, when they're give out.
" c Land ! ' says Mis' Sykes, when Silas got through,
c what men are ! '
" c We ain't so much as woman, lemme tell you,'
says Silas, right crisp. Which wasn't what he meant,
an' we all laughed at him, so he was a little mad to
start with.
" c The Sodality's decided to pave Daphne Street,'
Mis' Sykes mentions then, simple.
" c Pave what ? ' shouts Silas Silas always seems
to think the more you do in sound the more you'll
do in sense.
152 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" c Do what to Daphne Street ? ' says Timothy,
whirlin' from the peanut roaster.
" c Pave Daphne Street/ says Mis' Sykes an* Mis
Toplady an* me, wonderin'.
" Silas wrapped his arms around his own shoulders.
" c When,' says he, lettin' his head lurch with his
own emphasizing c did the Common Council hear
about this ? '
" ' They ain't heard. about it/ says Mis' Sykes, c no
more'n we ever hear anything about them.'
" Silas an' Timothy is both aldermen, an' rill sen-
sitive over it. I guess the Common Council always
is a delicate subject, ain't it ?
" Mebbe it wasn't a rill diplomatic way to begin,
but it hadn't entered the Sodality's head that the
town wouldn't be glad to hev the pavin' done if the
Sodality was willin' to do it. Ain't it a hard thing
to learn that it ain't all willingness, nor yet all bein'
capable, that gets things done in the world ? It's
part just edgin' round an' edgin' round.
" What did the Common Council do that night
but call a special meetin' an' vote not to order any
city pavin' done that present year. Every member
was there but Threat Hubbelthwait, who was
fiddlin', an* every vote was switched by Silas an*
Timothy to be unanimous, excep' Eppleby Hoi-
comb's vote. Eppleby, we heard afterwards, said
that when a pack o' women made up their minds to
EVENING DRESS 153
pave, they'd pave if it was to pave some place
that Eppleby hadn't ought to V mentioned ; an*
he was goin' to be on the pavin' side. But then,
Eppleby is the gentlest husband in Friendship Vil-
lage, an* known to be.
" Sodality met special next day, not so much to
do anything as to let it be known that we'd took
action. This we done by votin' to lay low till such
time as we could order the wooden blocks. We
preferred to pave peaceable, it bein' hot weather.
" Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Hol-
comb-that-was-Mame-Bliss an' Mis' Mayor Uppers
an' I walked home together from that meetin'. It
was a blisterin' July afternoon one of them after-
noons that melts itself out flat, same as a dropped
pepp'mint on a brick walk, an' you're left stickin'
in it helpless as a fly, an' generally buzzin'. I rec-
'lect we was buzzin' comin' down Daphne Street
in that chokin' dust an' no pavement.
"/It's a dog's life, livin' in a little town in
some respects,' I remember Mis' Sykes says.
" < Well,' says Mis' Toplady, tolerant, I know.
I know it is. But I'd rather live in a little town
an' dog it out than go up to the city an* turn wolf,
same as some.'
" An' yet we all felt the same, every one of us.
They ain't a woman livin' in a little place that don't
feel the same, now and again. It's quiet an' it's
154 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
easy housework, an' you get to know folks well.
But oh, none of it what you might say glitters.
An' they ain't no woman whatever no matter
how good a wife an' mother an' Christian an' even
housekeeper she is that don't, 'way down deep in
her heart, feel that hankerin' after some sort o' glitter.
" So it was natural enough that we should draw
up at Lyddy's dressmakin' window an' rest ourself.
An' that afternoon we'd have done so, anyway, for
she hed been pinnin' up her new summer plates
Lyddy don't believe in rushin' the season. An' no
sooner had we got a good look at 'em big col-
oured sheets they was, with full-length pictures
than Mis' Toplady leaned 'way forward, her hands
on her knees, an' stood lookin' at 'em the way you
look at the parade.
" Well, look-a-there,' she says. ' Look at that
one.'
" The one she meant was a woman with her hair
all plaited an' fringed an' cut bias, an' with a little
white hat o' lilacs 'bout as big as a cork ; an' her
dress my land! Her dress was long an' rill light
blue, an' seemed like it must have been paper, it was
so fancy. It didn't seem like cloth goods at all,
same as we hed on. It was more like we was wearin'
meat an' vegetable dresses, an' this dress was des-
sert all whipped cream an' pink sugar an' a flower
on the plate.
EVENING DRESS 555
" c Dear land ! ' says Mis' Toplady, lookin' 'round
at us strange, c do they do it when they get gray
hair ? I didn't know they done it when their hair
was gray/
" We all looked, an' sure enough, the woman's
hair was white. 'Afternoon Toilette for Elderly
Woman,' it said underneath, plain as plain. Always
before the plates hed all been young an' smilin' an'
party-seemin', an' we'd thought of all that as past
an' done for, with us, along with all the other things
that didn't come true. But here was a woman
grayer than any of us, an' yet lookin' as live as
if she'd been wearin' a housework dress.
"'Why,' says Mis' Sykes, starin', c that must be
a new thing this season. I never heard of a woman
well along in years wearin' anything but brown or
navy blue or gray, besides black.' Mis' Sykes
is terribly dressy, but even she never yet got any-
wheres inside the rainbow, except in a bow at the
chin.
" c My,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss,
wistful, c wouldn't it seem like heaven to be able to
wear colours without bein' talked about?'
"An' Mis' Mayor Uppers her that her hus-
band grew well off bein' mayor, an' never'd been
back to Friendship Village since he was put out of
office, she says low :
" c You ladies that has husbands to keep thinkin'
156 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
well of you, I should think you'd think about this
thing. Men/ she says, ( loves the light shades/
" At that Mis' Toplady turned around on us, an'
we see her eyes expressin' i-dees.
" c Ladies,' says she, impressive, c Mis' Uppers
is right. We hadn't ought to talk back or show
mad. We ladies of the Sodality had ought to be
able to get our own way peaceable, just by takin' it,
the way the Lord give women the weapons to do.'
" We see that somethin' was seethin' in her mind,
but we couldn't work our way to what it was.
" ( Ladies,' says she, an' stepped up on the
wooden step to Lyddy's dressmakin' shop, c has the
husbands of any one of us seen us, for twenty years,
dressed in the light shades ? '
" I didn't hev any husband to answer for, but I
could truthfully say of the rest that you'd think
black an' brown an' gray an' navy had exhausted the
Lord's ingenuity, for all the attention they'd paid to
any other colour He'd wove with.
" c Let's the Sodality get up an evenin' party, an 1
hev it in post-office hall, an' invite our husbands
an' buy new dresses light shades an' some lace,'
says Mis' Toplady, lettin' the i-dee drag her along,
main strength.
" Mis' Sykes was studyin' the fashion-plate
hungry, but she stopped an' stepped up side o' Mis'
Toplady.
EVENING DRESS 157
" < Well, sir,' she said, ' I donno but 'twould help
us to work the pavin' of Daphne Street. Why,
Silas Sykes, for one, is right down soft-hearted about
clothes. He always notices which one of their
waists the choir's got on. I heard him say once he
wasn't goin' to church again till they bought some-
thin' new.'
" Mis' Holcomb nodded. c Five years ago,' she
said, c I went up to the city with Eppleby. An' I
saw him turn around to look after a woman. I'll
never forget the sensation it give me like I was
married to a man that wasn't my husband. The
woman had on a light pink dress. I know I come
home an' bought a pink collar ; I didn't think I
could go any farther, because she was quite young.
Do you s'pose . . .'
" Mis' Toplady pointed at Lyddy's fashion-plate.
' I should go,' she says, 'just as far as my money
would let me go.'
" Mis' Uppers stood lookin' down to the walk.
c The mayor,' she says she calls him ( the mayor '
yet c was terrible fond o' coloured neckties. He
was rill partial to green ones. Mebbe I didn't
think enough about what that meant . . .'
" Mis' Toplady came down off the step. < Every
man is alike,' says she, decided. c Most of us Friend-
ship ladies thinks if we give 'em a clean roller towel
we've done enough towards makin' things pretty ;
158 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
an' I think it's time, as wives, we took advantage of
the styles/
"'An',' says Mis' Sykes, the president, rill
dreamy for her, but firm, c I think so, too.'
" I tell you, we all walked home feelin' like we'd
hed a present me too, though I knew very well I
couldn't hev a light dress, an' I didn't hev any hus-
band. You start out thinkin' them are the two
principal things, but you get a-hold o' some others,
if you pay attention. Still, I judged the ladies was
on the right track, for men is men, say what who
will. All but Threat Hubbelthwait. We passed
the hotel an' heard him settin' in there by the bar
scrapin' away on ' Can A Little Child Like Me ? '
We took shame to him, an' yet I know we all
looked at each other sort of motherly, like he was
some little shaver, same as he sung, an' performin'
most fool.
" It don't take us ladies long to do things, when
our minds is made. Especially it don't when
Mis' Timothy Toplady is chairman of the Enter-
tainment Committee, or the Doin' Committee of
whatever happens, like she was that time. First,
we found out they was plenty enough nun's veilin'
in the post-office store, cheap an' wide an' in stock
an' all the light shades ; an' I bought all the dresses,
noons, of the clerk, so Silas wouldn't suspect
me not hevin' any husband to inquire around,
EVENING DRESS 159
like they do. Then we hired the post-office
hall, vague, without sayin' for what an' that
pleased Silas that gets the rent. An' then we give
the invitations, spectacular, through the Friendship
Daily to the Sodality's husbands, for the next Tues-
day night. We could do it that quick, not bein'
dependent on dressmakers same as some. The
ladies was all goin' to make their dresses themselves,
an' the dresses wa'n't much to do to make. No-
body bothered a very great deal about how we
should make 'em, the principal thing bein' the colour;
Mis' Toplady's was blue, like the fashion-plate ;
Mis' Holcomb's pink, like the woman in the city ;
Mis' Uppers' green, like the mayor's necktie, an' so
on. I made me up a dress out o' the spare-room
curtains white, with a little blue flower in it, an' a
new blue ribbon belt. But Mis' Sykes, she went
to work an' rented a dress from the city, for that one
night. That much she give out about it, an' would
give out no more. That woman loves a surprise.
She's got a rill pleasant mind, Mis' Sykes has, but
one that does enjoy jerkin' other people's minds
up, an most anything'll do for the string.
" For all we thought we hed so much time, an' it
was so easy to do, the afternoon o' the party we went
'most crazy. We'd got up quite a nice little cold
supper Mis' Hubbelthwait had helped us, she
bein' still at large, an' Threat fiddlin'. We planned
160 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
meat loaf an* salad an* pickles an' jelly, an* scalloped
potatoes for the hot dish, an* ice cream an* cake,
enough in all for thirty folks : fifteen husbands an*
fifteen Sodality, or approximatish. An* we planned
to go to the hall in the afternoon an* take our dresses
there, an* sly em* up and leave *em, an* put *em on
after we'd got there that night, so*s nobody*s hus-
bands should suspect. But when we all came in the
afternoon, an* the decoratin* with greens an* festoons
of cut paper an* all was to do, there Mis* Toplady,
that was to make scalloped potatoes, hadn*t got her
sleeves in yet, an* she was down to the hall tryin* to
do both ; an* Mis* Holcomb, that was to make the
salad dressing, had got so nervous over her collar
that she couldn't tell which edge she*d cut for the
top. But the rest of us was ready, an* Mis' Sykes's
dress had come from the city, an* we all, Mis' Top-
lady an' Mame too, hed our dresses in boxes in the
post-office hall kitchen cupboards. An' we done
the decoratin', an* it looked rill lovely, with the long
tables laid ready at each side, an* room for bein* a
party left in between 'em.
" Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb
left the hall about five o'clock to go home an* lay
out Silas's an' Timothy's an' Eppleby's best clothes
for 'em the rest hed done it at noon. Mis' Hub-
belthwait was goin' over to the hotel to get some
dishes out, an' I went with her to help. The bar
EVENING DRESS 161
was to the back, where Threat set an' slep' an' fiddled,
an' Mis' Hubbelthwait was goin' to slip in still an*
sly the dishes out to me. A good many of the
hotel dishes was her individual weddin' presents, so
she didn't think wrong of her conscience.
* " We was all five hurryin' along together, rehearsin'
all we'd got to do before six-thirty, when we heard
a funny sound. We listened, an' we thought they
must be testin' the hose. But when we got to
Lyddy's shop, where the street kitters off some in
a curve, we looked ahead an' we see it wasn't that.
" It's an automobile," says Mis' Toplady. c My
land,' she says, c it ain't only one. It's two.'
" An' we see it was. There come the two of 'em,
ploughin' along through the awful sand of Daphne
Street, that was fit for no human locomotive, unless
ostriches. When the Proudfits are here, that's the
only one in the village with an automobile, they
understand the sand, and they'd put on the whole
steam and tear right along through it. But strangers
would go careful, for fear they'd get stuck, an' so
they got it, like you do. An' them two big red cars
was comin* slow, the dust like cloaks an' curtains
billowin' up behind. They looked quite wild, in-
cludin' the seven folks in each one that was laughin'
an* callin' out. An' by the time they'd come up to
us, us four ladies of the Sodality an' Mis' Hubbel-
thwait was lined up on the walk watchin' 'em. They
162 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
stopped an' one of 'em hailed us, leanin' past his
driver.
" c I beg your pardon/ he says, c is this the street
to the best hotel?'
" It was Mis' Toplady that answered him, rill col-
lected. c They's only one street in town,' says she,
an' they's only one hotel, an' that they ain't now.'
" c Can you tell me how soon there will be one ? '
says the man. c By dinner-time, I hope.'
" We all felt kind of delicate about answerin' this,
an' so Mis' Hubbelthwait herself spoke up.
c Threat's drunk an' fiddlin', she says. c They's no
tellin' when Friendship Village will ever hev a hotel
again.'
" Both automobiles was listenin' by then, an'
though some of 'em laughed out sort o' rueful, not
many of 'em see the funny.
" c Gad,' one of the men says, c how about the
bird an' the bottle we were to send back to Bonner,
sittin' by his tire in the desert, a ways back ? Don't
tell us there's no place,' he says, where we can find
dinner, twenty-one of us and the three chauf *
that word.
" Mis' Toplady shook her head. c They ain't a
place big enough to seat twenty-one, even if they
was the food to feed 'em ' she begun, an' then she
stopped an' looked 'round at us, as though she was
thinkin' somethin'.
EVENING DRESS 163
" c Oh, come now/ says the man, he was good-
lookin' an' young, an* merry-seemin', c Oh, come
now/ he said, f I am sure that the ladies of Friend-
ship could cook things such as -never man yet ate.
We are sta-arving/ he says, humorous. c Can't you
do something for us ? We'll give you/ he winds up,
genial, c two dollars a plate for a good, home-cooking
dinner for the twenty-four of us. What do you
say ?'
" Mis' Toplady whirled toward us sort o' wild.
f Is two dollars times twenty-four, forty-eight
dollars ? ' says she, low.
" An' we see it was, though Mis' Holcomb was
still figurin' it out in the palm of her other hand,
while we stood gettin' glances out of each other's
eyes, an' sendin' 'em, give for take. We see, quick
as a flash, what Mis' Toplady was thinkin' about.
An' it was about that hall, all festooned with greens
an' cut paper, an' the two long tables laid ready, an'
the veal loaf an' scalloped potatoes an' ice-cream for
thirty. An' when Mis' Sykes, that usually speaks,
stood still, an' didn't say one word, but just nodded
a little bit, sort o' sad, Mis' Toplady, that was chair-
man o' the Entertainment Committee, done like she
does sometimes she took the whole thing into her
own hands an' just settled it.
" c Why, yes/ she says to 'em, rill pleasant, c if
you want to come up to post-office hall at half-past
1 64 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
six,' she says, c the Friendship Married Ladies'
Cemetery Improvement Sodality will serve you your
supper, nice as the nicest, for two dollars a head/
" ' Good ! ' the men all sings out, an* the women
spats their hands soft, an' one of 'em says somethin'
to the merry-seemin' man.
" ' Oh, yes,' he says then, c couldn't we all break
into this hotel an' floss up a bit before dinner ? '
" Mis' Hubbelthwait stepped out towards 'em.
" c I was thinkin' of that,' says she. c My hus-
band,' she says, dignified, c is settin' in the bar
practisin' his violin. He he does that sometimes,
an' we don't bother him. But the bar is at the
back. I can let you in, still, the front way to the
rooms, if you want. An' I'll be there myself to
wait on you.'
" An' that was what they done, somebody takin'
one o' the cars back for the other car, an' the rest of
us fair breakin' into a run toward post-office hall.
" c My land,' says Mis' Toplady, almost like a
groan, c what hev we done ? '
" It was a funny thing to do, we see it afterward.
But I tell you, you can't appreciate the influence o'
that forty-eight dollars unless you've tried to earn
money in a town the size o' Friendship Village.
Sodality hardly ever made more than five dollars
to its ten-cent entertainments an' that for a big
turn-out on a dry night. An* here was the price
EVENING DRESS 165
of about nine such entertainments give us outright,
an' no extra work, an* rill feet-achin' weather. I
say it was more than flesh an' blood or wives could
stand. We done it automatic, like you contradict
when it's necessary.
" But there was the men to reckon with.
"'What'll Timothy an' Silas an' Eppleby
. . .' Mis' Toplady says, an' stops, some bothered
an* some rill pained.
"I judged, not havin' any husband to be doin'
the inquirin', it wasn't polite for me to laugh. But
I couldn't hardly help it, thinkin' o' them fifteen
hungry men an' the supper et away from 'em, just
William Nilly.
" Mis' Sykes, we remembered afterwards, never
said a word, but only kep' up with us back to the
hall.
" Back to the hall, where the rest o' the Sodality
was, we told 'em what we'd done beginnin' with
the forty-eight dollars, like some kind o' weapon.
But I tell you, we hadn't reckoned without knowin'
our hostesses, head an' heart. An' they went in
pell mell, pleased an' glad as we was, an' plannin'
like mad.
" The first need was more food to make up that
supper to somewheres near two dollars' worth
feedin' your husband is one thing an' gettin' up a
two-dollar meal is another. But we collected that
166 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
all in pretty sudden : leg o' lamb, left from the
Holcombs' dinner an' only cut off of one side; the
Sykes's roast o' veal, the same ; three chickens for
soup the Libertys hed just dressed for next day
company dinner ; big platter of devilled eggs chipped
in from Mis' Toplady ; a jar o' doughnuts, a
steamer o' cookies, a fruit-cake a year old we
just made out our list an' scattered to empty out all
our pantries.
cc By six o'clock we was back in the hall, an' all the
food with us. But nobody hed met nobody's hus-
band yet, an' nobody wanted to. We didn't quite
know how we was goin' to do, I guess but done
is done, an' to do takes care of itself.
" c Hadn't we ought to 'a' sent word to the men ? '
says Mis' Holcomb, for the third or fourth time.
C I sneaked around so's not to pass Eppleby's office,
but I declare I feel mean. He'll hev to eat sauce
an' plain bread-an'-butter for his supper. An' most
o' the men-folks the same. 'Seems though some-
body'd ought to send 'em word an' not let 'em
come up here, all washed an' dressed.'
" c Well,' says Mis' Toplady, cuttin' cake with
her lips shut tight an' talkin' anyway, c I kind o'
thought leave 'em come up. I bet they'd rather
be in it than out of it, every one of 'em, an' who
knows they might be some supper left ? An' we
can all '
EVENING DRESS 167
"An* at that Mis' Toplady faces round from
cuttin' the cake : c My land, my land/ she says,
sort o' hushed, c why, doin' this, we can't none of us
wear our new dresses ! '
" An' at that we looked at each other, each one
sort of accusin', an' I guess all our hearts givin'
one o' them sickish thumps. An' Mis' Sykes, her
that hed been so still, snaps back :
" c I wondered what you thought I'd rented my
dress from the city for at Three Dollars a night!
" I tell you, that made a hush in the middle of the
plannin'. We'd forgot all about our own dresses,
an' that was bad enough, with the hall all hired an'
everything all ready, an' every chance in the world
of everybody's husband's findin' out about the dresses
before we could get up another Sodality party, same
way. But here was Mis' Sykes, three dollars out,
an mebbe wouldn't be able to rent her dress again
at all.
" c I did want Silas,' Mis' Sykes says then, wist-
ful, c to see me in that dress. Silas an' I have been
married so long,' she says, c that I often wonder if
I seem like a person to him at all. But in that
dress from the city, I think I would.'
" We was each an' all ready to cry, an' I dunno
but we would hev done it though we was all
ready to serve, too : coffee made, potatoes pipin'
hot, veal an' lamb het up an' smellin' rich, chicken
1 68 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
soup steamin', an' all. But just that very minute
we heard some of 'em comin' in the hall an' the
one c ready ' conquered the other c ready/ like it
will, an' we all made a rush, part curious an' part
nerves, to peek through the little servin' window
from the kitchen.
" What do you think we saw ? It was the auto-
mobile folks, hungry an' got there first. In they'd
come, women laughin', men jokin', all makin' a
lark out o' the whole thing. An' if the women
wasn't, every last one of 'em, wearin' not the
clothes they hed come in, but light pink an' light
blue an' white an' flowered things, an' all like
that.
" Mis' Hubbelthwait burst in on us while we was
lookin'. 'They hed things in their trunk at the
back o' the automobile,' says she. ( They says
they wanted to floss up for dinner, an' floss up
they hev. They look like Lyddy's fashion sheets,
one an' all.'
" At that Mis' Sykes, a-ceasin' to peek, she drops
her tray on the bare floor an' begun untyin' her
apron. c Quick ! ' she raps out, c Mis' Hubbel-
thwait, you go an' set 'em down. An' every one o'
you into them togs of ours! Here's the chance
to wear 'em here an' now,' she says, c an' leave
them folks see we know how to do things here in
Friendship Village as good as the best.'
EVENING DRESS 169
"Well, bein' as she had rented the dress, an*
three dollars hed to be paid out anyhow, an* bein'
as she was president, an' bein' as we was all hank-
erin' in our hearts, we didn't need much urgin'.
We slammed the servin' window shut an' set chairs
against both doors, an 1 we whisked out of our regular
dresses like wild.
" ' Oh, land my land, the sleeves the sleeves
ain't in mine ! ' says Mis' Toplady, sort o' glazed,
an' speakin' in a wail. But we encouraged her up
to pin 'em in, which she done, an' it couldn't be told
from stitches. Poor Mame Holcomb's collar that
wasn't on yet we turned in for her V-shape, so's her
dress was low, like the best. An' Mis' Uppers,
that was seasonin' the chicken soup like none of us
could, her we took turns in dressin' in her green.
An' I'd got into my spare-room curtains, somehow,
just as Mis' Hubbelthwait come shoving at that
door.
" ' The men the men ! ' says she, painful.
' They're all out here Silas an' Timothy an'
Eppleby an' all. They've all heard about it the
automobiles went to the post-office for their mail,
an' Silas told 'em enjoyable about Threat, an' the
automobiles told him where they was goin' to eat.
An' they've come, thinkin' they's enough for all,
an' they're out here now.'
" Mis' Toplady groaned a little, agonized an*
iyo FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
stifled, but rill firm. c Tell 'em, then/ says she, c to
come back up here, like men, an* help'
" Then we heard a little rustle, soft an' silky an'
kind o' pink-soundin', an' we looked around, an'
there, from where she had been dressin' herself over
behind the kitchen boiler all alone, Mis' Postmaster
Sykes stepped out. My land, if she wasn't in a
white dress, a little low in the neck, an' elbow sleeves,
an' all covered solid as crust with glitterin' silver
spangles.
" c Let's tell 'em ourselves,' she says, c come on
all of you. Let's take out the first course, an' tell
the men what we want 'em to do.'
" We made Mis' Sykes go first, carry in' high the
tureen of chicken soup. An' on one side of her
walked Mis' Timothy Toplady, in blue, with the
wafers, an' on the other Mis' Holcomb-that-was-
Mame-Bliss, in pink, with the radishes. An' neither
one of 'em could hardly help lookin' at Mis' Sykes's
dress all the way out. An' back of 'em went the
rest o' the ladies, all in pink an' blue an' white an'
pale green nun's veilin' that they'd made, an' car-
ryin' the water-pitchers an' ice an' celery an' like
that. An' me, I hung back in the kitchen watchin'
an' lovin' 'em every one an' almost lovin' Timothy
Toplady an' Silas Sykes an' Eppleby when they
looked on an' saw.
" Mis' Sykes set the soup down in front o' the
EVENING DRESS 171
merry-seemin' man for him to serve it. An' then
she crossed over an* spoke to Silas, an* swep' up
ahead of him in that spangly dress, the other ladies
followin' an' noddin' bright when they passed the
men, an' motionin' 'em toward the back o' the hall.
An' back the men all come into the kitchen, followin'
as they was asked to do, an' orderly through bein*
dazed. Silas an' Timothy an' Eppleby was first, an'
Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' Mame went up to
'em together.
cc I'll never forget that minute. I thought the
men was goin' to burst out characteristic an' the
whole time be tart, an' I shut both doors an' the
servin' window careful. An' instead o' that, them
three men stood there just smilin' a little an lookin'
surprised an' agreeable ; an' the other husbands,
either takin' the cue or feelin' the same, done like-
wise, too. An' when Mame Bliss says, sort o'
tremblin' Eppleby bein' the gentlest husband
in Friendship Village, an' known to be : c How do
you like us, Eppleby ? ' Eppleby just nods an'
wrinkles up his eyes an' smiles at her, like he meant
lots more. An' he says, c Why didn't you never
wear that dress before, Mame ? '
"An' c Well, Timothy?' says Mis' Toplady,
sort o' masterful, an' fully expectin' to hev to master.
But Timothy Toplady, he just rubs his hands an'
looks at her sort o' wonderin', an' he says, ' Blisterin'
172 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Benson, you look as good as the city folks, Amandy
all light, an* loose made, an* stylish '
" But Silas Sykes, he just stood lookin' at his
wife an' lookin'. Of course she did hev the advan-
tage, bein' her spangles shone so. An' Silas looked
at her an' looked, just as if her bein' his wife didn't
make him admire her any the less. An' Mis' Sykes,
she was rill pink an' pleased an' breathless, an' I guess
she could see she seemed like a person to Silas, the
way she'd wanted to.
" It all went off splendid. The men stayed an'
dished in the kitchen an' helped carry away from the
tables the forty-eight dollars completin' their
respect an' we ladies done the servin'. An' I tell
you, we served 'em with an air, 'count o' bein' well
dressed, like they was, an' knowin' it. An' we knew
the automobile folks appreciated it we could tell
by the way they kep' lookin' at us. But of course
we all understood Mis' Sykes looked the best, an'
we let her do all the most prominent things
bringin' in the first dish of everything an' like that,
so's they could hev a good look.
" When it was over, the merry-seemin' man
stood up an' made a little speech o' thanks, rill
courteous an' sweet, an' like he knew how to act.
An' when he was through we, one an' all, nudged
Mis' Sykes to reply, an' she done so, the two tables
EVENING DRESS 173
listening an* the Sodality standin' in between, an* the
Sodality's husbands crowdin' in both kitchen doors
to listen.
" Mis' Sykes says, rill dignified, an' the light
catchin' in her spangles : c We're all very much
obliged, I'm sure, for our forty-eight dollars clear.
An' we think perhaps you'd like to know what the
money is goin' toward. It's goin',' she says, e towards
the pavin' of the main street of our little city.'
" Silas Sykes was lookin' out the servin' window
like it was a box. ' What's that ? ' says he, more of
him comin' out of the window, f what's that you
say?'
"An' they was a little wave o' moves an' mur-
murs all around him like when somethin' is goin' to
happen an' nobody knows what ; an' I know the
Sodality caught its breath, for, as Mis' Toplady
always says, the dear land knows what men will do.
" With that up springs the merry-seemin' man,
his face all beamin', an* he says loud an' clear an'
drowndin' out everything else : ' Hear, hear ! Like-
wise, here an' now. I move that we as one man,
an' that man's automobile having lately come up
the main street of Friendship Village do ourself
contribute to this most worthy end. Get to work,'
says he. ' Think civic thoughts ! '
" He slid the last roll off its plate, an* he laid
somethin' in paper money on it, an' he started it
174 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
down the table. An 1 every man of 'em done as he
done. An' I tell you, when we see Mis' Hubbel-
thwait's bread plate pilin' with bills, an' knew what
it was for, we couldn't help the whole Sodality
couldn't help steppin' forwards, close to the table,
an' standin' there an' holdin' our breaths. An' the
men, back there in the kitchen, they hushed up
when they see the money, an' they kep' hushed.
Land, land, it was a great minute ! I like to think
about it.
"An' when the plate come back to the merry-
seemin' man, he took it an' he come over towards
us with it in his hand, an' we nudged Mis' Sykes
to take the money. An' she just lifted up the glit-
ter part of her skirt an' spread it out an' he dropped
the whole rustlin' heap on to the spangles. An' the
rest of us all clapped our hands, hard as we could,
an' right while we was doin' it we heard somethin'
else deeper an' more manly than us. An' there
was the men streamin' out o' the kitchen doors, an'
Silas Sykes high in the servin' window an' every
one of 'em was clappin', too.
" I tell you, we was glad an' grateful. An' we
was grateful, too, when afterwards they was plenty
enough supper left for the men-folks. An' when we
all set down together around that table, Mis' Sykes
at the head an' the plate o' bills for a centrepiece,
Mis' Toplady leaned back, hot an' tired, an' seein'
EVENING DRESS 175
if both her sleeves was still pinned in place, an* she
says what we was all thinkin' :
" c Oh, ladies/ she says, * we can pave -streets an*
dress in the light shades even if we ain't young, like
the run o' the fashion-plates. Ain't it like comin'
to life again ? ' she says."
XI
UNDERN
I HAVE a guest who is the best of the three kinds
of welcome guests. Of these some are like a new
rug which, however fine and unobtrusive it be, at
first changes the character of your room so that
when you enter you are less conscious of the room
than of the rug. Some guests are like flowers on
the table, leaving the room as it was save for their
sweet, novel presence. And some guests are like a
prized new book, unread, from which you simply
cannot keep away. Of these last is my guest whom
my neighbour calls the New Lady.
My neighbour and Elfa and Miggy and Little
Child and I have all been busy preparing for her.
Elfa has an almost pathetic fondness for " company,"
I think it is that she leads such a lonely life
in the little kitchen-prison that she welcomes even
the companionship of more-voices-in-the-next-room.
I have tried to do what I can for Elfa, but you
never help people very much when you only try
to do what you can. It must lie nearer the heart
than that. And I perfectly understand that the
176
UNDERN 177
magazines and trifles of finery which I give to her,
and the flowers I set on the kitchen clock shelf,
and the talks which, since my neighbour's uncon-
scious rebuke, I have contrived with her, are about
as eflFectual as any merely ameliorative means of
dealing with a social malady. For Elfa is suffering
from a distinct form of the social malady, and not be-
ing able to fathom it, she knows merely that she is
lonely. So she has borrowed fellowship from her
anticipation of my guest and of those who next
week will come down from the town ; and I know,
though she does not know, that her jars of fresh-
fried cakes and cookies, her fine brown bread and
her bowl of salad-dressing, are her utmost expression
of longing to adjust the social balance and give to
herself companionship, even a kind of household.
Little Child to-day came, bringing me a few first
sweet peas and Bless-your-Heart, Bless-your-Heart
being her kitten, and as nearly pink as a cat can be
and be still a cat.
" To lay in the New Lady's room," she remarked,
bestowing these things impartially upon me.
Later, my neighbour came across the lawns with
a plate of currant tarts and a quarter of a jelly cake.
" Here," she said, " I don't know whether you
like tarts or not. They're more for children, I
always think. I always bake 'em, and the little
round child fried cakes, too, and I put frosting faces
1 78 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
on the cookies, and such things. It makes my
husband and I seem more like a family," she ex-
plained, "and that's why I always set the dining-
room table. As long as we ain't any little folks
running around, I always tell him that him and I
would be eating meat and potatoes on the kitchen
drop-leaf like savages if I didn't pretend there was
more of us, and bake up for 'em."
Miggy alone does not take wholly kindly to
the New Lady idea, though I assure her that our
mornings are to remain undisturbed.
" Of course," she observed, while in the New
Lady's honour she gathered up strewn papers, " I
know I'll like her because she's your friend. But
I don't know what folks want to visit for. Don't
you s'pose that's why the angels don't come back
because they know everything, and they know what
a lot of extra work they'd make us ? "
In Miggy the tribal sense seems to have run
itself out. Of the sanctity of the individual she
discerns much ; but of the wider sanctities she has
no clear knowledge. Most relationships she seems
to regard, like the love of Peter, as " drawbacks,"
save only her indefinite consciousness of that one
who is " not quite her sister " the little vague
Margaret. And this, I think, will be the leaven.
Perhaps it is the universal leaven, this consciousness.
I was glad that the New Lady was to arrive in
UNDERN 179
the afternoon. Sometimes I think that the village
afternoon is the best time of all. It is no wonder
that they used to call that time " undern." If they
had not done so, the word must have grown of its
own will perhaps it did come to life with no past,
an immaculate thing, so like its meaning that it
could not help being here among us. I know very
well that Sir John Mandeville and others used
" undern " to mean the third hour, or about nine in
the morning, but that may have been because at first
not every one recognized the word. Many a fairy
thing wanders for a long time on earth, patiently
putting up with other connotations than its own.
Opportunism, the subconscious mind, personality,
evolution itself, all these are still seeking their full
incarnations in idea. No wonder " undern " was
forced for a long while to mean morning. But nine
o'clock in the morning ! How, after all, was that
possible ? You have only to say it over undern,
undern, undern, to be heavenly drowsy with sum-
mer afternoon. The north of England recognized
this at last and put the word where it belongs; and I
have, too, the authority of the lady of Golden Wing:
" Undern cometh after noon,
Golden Wings will be here soon. . . ."
One can hardly stop saying that, once one is started.
I should like to go on with it all down the page.
i8o FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
I was thinking of these things as I drove to the
station alone to meet the New Lady. The time
had taken on for me that pleasant, unlike-itself as-
pect which time bears in any mild excitement, so
that if in the moment of reading a particularly
charming letter one can remember to glance up and
look the room in the face, one may catch its other
expression, the expression which it has when one is
not looking. So now I caught this look in the village
and an air of Something-different-is-going-to-hap-
pen, such as we experience on holidays. Next
week, when the New Lady's friends come down to
us for two days, I dare say, if I can remember to
look for it, that the village will have another ex-
pression still. Yet there will be the same quiet
undern though for me it is never a commonplace
time. Indeed, usually I am in the most delighted
embarrassment how to spend it. In the mornings now
Miggy being willing I work, morning in the true
democracy being the work time ; afternoon the time
for recreation and the more specialized forms of
service and a little rest ; the evening for delight, in-
cluding the delight of others. Not every one in
the village accepts my afternoon and evening classi-
fications. I am constantly coming on people mak-
ing preserves after mid-day, and if I see a light in a
kitchen window after nine at night I know that
somebody is ironing in the cool of the day. But
UNDERN 181
usually my division of time is the general division,
save that as in the true democracy service is
not always recognized as service. Our afternoons
may be spent in cutting carpet rags, or in hemming
linen, or sewing articles for an imminent bazaar, and
this is likely to be denominated " gettin' through
little odd jobs," and accounted in a measure a self-
indulgence. And if evening delight takes the form
of gardening and later a flame of nasturtiums or
dahlias is carried to a friend, nobody dreams that
this is not a pleasant self-indulgence too, and it is so
regarded. With these things true is it not as if a
certain hope abroad in the world gave news of itself?
Near the Pump pasture I came on Nicholas
Moor who rings the Catholic bell and is in-
terested in celluloid and who my neighbour had
told me would doubtless come to me, bringing his
little sheaf of cc writin's." I had not yet met him,
though I had seen in the daily paper a vagrant
poem or two over his name I remember a help-
less lyric which made me think of a gorgeous green
and gold beetle lying on its back, unable to recover
its legs, but for all that flashing certain isolated iri-
descent colours. My heart ached for Nicholas, and
when I saw him now going across the pasture his
loneliness was like a gap in things, one of the places
where two world-edges do not quite meet. There
are so many pleasant ways to do and the boy seemed
1 82 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
to know how to do none of them. How can he be
lonely in the village ? For myself, if I decide of
an afternoon to take my work and pay a visit, I am
in a pleasant quandary as to which way to turn. If
I go to the west end of Daphne Street, there are at
least five families among whom to choose, the other
four of whom will wonder why I did not come to
them. Think of knowing five families in two blocks
who would welcome one's coming and even feel a
little flattering bitterness if one chose the other four !
If I take a cross street, I am in the same difficulty.
And if I wish to go to the house of one of my
neighbours, my motives clash so seriously that I
often sit on my porch and call to whoever chances
to be in sight to come to me. Do you wonder that,
in town, the moment I open my address book I feel
smothered? I recover and enjoy town as much as
anybody, but sometimes in a stuffy coupe, hurrying
to get a half-dozen of the pleasantest calls " done,"
I surprise a companion by saying : would now that
it were undern on Daphne Street !
I told this to the New Lady as we drove from
the station. The New Lady is an exquisite little
Someone, so little that it is as if she had been drawn
quickly, in a single delicate curving line, and then
left, lest another stroke should change her. She
understands the things that I say in the way that
I mean them ; she is the way that you always think
UNDERN 183
the people whom you meet are going to be, though
they so seldom are ; like May, she is expectation
come alive. What she says fits in all the crannies
of what you did not say and have always known, or
else have never thought of before and now never
can forget. She laughs when she should laugh,
and never, never when somebody else should laugh
alone. When you tell her that you have walked
eight miles and back, she says "And back! " with just
the proper intonation of homage. She never tells
a story upon the heels of your own little jest so
swiftly that it cannot triumphantly escape. When
you try to tell her something that you have not
quite worked out, she nods a little and you see that
she meant it before you did. She enters every mo-
ment by its gate and not over its wall, though she
frequently wings her way in instead of walking.
Also, she is good to look at and her gowns are as
meet as the clouds to the sky and no less distract-
ing than the clouds are at their very best. There is
no possible excuse for my saying so much about her,
but I like to talk of her. And I like to talk to her
as I did when we left the station and I was rambling
on about undern.
The New Lady looked about with a breath of
content.
" No wonder," she said, " you like to pretend
Birthday, in New York/'
1 84 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
It is true that when I am there where, next to the
village, I like best to live, I am fond of this pretence.
It is like the children's game of " Choosing " before
shop windows, only it is extensive and not, as cream
puffs and dolls and crumpets in the windows dictate
to the children, purely intensive. Seeing this man
and that woman in the subway or the tea-room
or the cafe or the car, I find myself wondering if it
is by any chance their birthdays ; and if it is, I am
always wishing to deal out poor little gifts at which
I fancy they would hardly look. To the lithe idle
blond woman, elbows on table ; to the heavy-lidded,
engagement-burdened gentlewoman ; to the busy,
high-eyebrowed man in a cab ; to the tired, slow-
winking gentleman in his motor; to the thick-
handed labourer hanging to his strap, I find myself
longing to distribute these gifts : a breakfast on our
screened-in porch in the village, with morning-glories
on the table; a full-throated call of my oriole a
June call, not the isolated reminiscent call of August ;
an hour of watering the lawn while robins try to
bathe in the spray ; a morning of pouring melted
paraffin on the crimson tops of moulds of currant
jelly ; a yellow afternoon of going with me to " take
my work and stay for supper." I dare say that none
of my chosen beneficiaries would accept ; but if I
could pop from a magic purse a crop of caps and
fit folk, willy nilly, I wonder if afterward, even if
UNDERN 185
they remembered nothing of what had occurred, they
might not find life a little different.
" If it was my birthday," said the New Lady, " I
would choose to be driven straight away through
that meadow, as if I had on wings."
That is the way she is, the New Lady. Lacking
wings of her own she gives them to many a situa-
tion. Straightway I drove down into the Pump
pasture and across it, springy soil and circus-trodden
turf and mullein stalks and ten-inch high oak trees.
" Let's let down the bars," said the New Lady,
" and drive into that next meadow. If it is a sea,
as it looks, it will be glad of your company."
It was not a sea, for as we drove through the
lush grass the yellow and purple people of the
meadow came marching to meet us, as dignified as
garden flowers, save that you knew, all the time,
that wild hearts were beating beneath the rainbow
tassels. It was a meadow with things to say, but
with finger on lip as a meadow should be and as
a spirit must be. The meadow seemed to wish to
say : "It is all very pleasant for you there in the
village to admire one another's wings, but the real
romance is in the flight." I wondered if it were
not so that it had happened that one day a part
of the village had got tired waiting, and had broken
off and become something free, of which the meadow
was the body and its secret was the spirit. But
1 86 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
then the presence of the New Lady always sets me
wondering things like this.
" Why," I said to her suddenly, "spring has gone!
I wonder how that happened. I have been waiting
really to get hold of spring, and here it is June."
" June-and-a-half," assented the New Lady, and
touched the lines so that we came to a standstill in
the shade of a cottonwood.
" This way," she said and added softly, as one
who would not revive a sadness, her own idea of the
matter.
' Where did Spring die ? I did not hear her go
Down the soft lane she painted. All flower still
She moved among her emblems on the hill
Touching away their burden of old snow.
Was it on some great down where long winds flow
That the wild spirit of Spring went out to fill
The eyes of Summer ? Did a daffodil
Lift the pale urn remote where she lies low ?
" Oh, not as other moments did she die,
That woman-season, outlined like a rose.
Before the banner of Autumn's scarlet bough
The Summer fell ; and Winter, with a cry,
Wed with March wind. Spring did not die like those ;
But vaguely, as if Love had prompted, ' Now.' '
The New Lady's theory does not agree with that
of Little Child. I am in doubt which to accept.
But I like to think about both.
UNDERN 187
And when the New Lady had said the faint re-
quiem, we drove on again and the next moment had
almost run down Nicholas Moor, lying face down-
ward in the lush grass.
I recognized him at once, but of course the New
Lady did not do so, and she leaned from the cart,
thoroughly alarmed at the boy's posture and, as he
looked up, at his pallor.
" Oh, what is the matter ? " she cried, and her
voice was so heavenly pitying that one would have
been willing to have most things the matter only to
hear her.
Nicholas Moor scrambled awkwardly to his feet,
and stood abashed, looking as strangely detached
from the moment as if he had fallen from a frame
and left the rest of the picture behind.
" Nothing. I just like to be here," he was sur-
prised into saying.
The New Lady sat down and smiled. And her
smile was even more captivating than had been her
late alarm.
" So do I," she told him heartily. " So do I.
What do you like about it, best ? "
I do not think that any one had ever before
spoken to Nicholas so simply, and he answered,
chord for chord.
" I guess I guess I like it just on account of
its being the way it is," he said.
1 88 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
"That is a very, very nice reason," the New
Lady commented. " Again, so do I."
We left him, I remember, looking about as if he
were seeing it all for the first time.
As we drove away I told my New Lady about
Nicholas, and she looked along her own thought
and shook her head.
" There must be hundreds of them," she said,
"and some are poets. But most of them are only
lonesome. I wonder which Nicholas is ? "
We lingered out-of-doors as long as we might,
because the touch of the outdoors was so compan-
ioning that to go indoors was a distinct good-by.
Is it so with you that some Days, be they never so
sunny, yet walk with you in a definite reserve and
seem to be looking somewhere else ; while other
Days come to you like another way of being your-
self and will not let you go ? I know that some
will put it down to mood and not to the Day at
all ; but, do what I will, I cannot credit this.
It was after five o'clock when we drove into the
village, and all Daphne Street was watering its lawns.
Of those who were watering some pretended not to
see us, but I understood that this they accounted
the etiquette due to a new arrival. Some bowed
with an excess of cordiality, and this I understood
to be the pleasant thought that they would show my
guest how friendly we all are. And some laid down
UNDERN 189
the hose and came to the sidewalk's edge to meet
the New Lady then and there.
Of these were Mis' Postmaster Sykes an' Mis'
Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss and my neighbour.
" Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," Mis' Post-
master Sykes said graciously to the New Lady.
" I must say it seems good to see a strange face
now an' then. I s'pose you feel all travel dust
an' mussed up ? "
And at Mis' Holcomb's hitching post:
" Pleased to meet you," said Mis' Holcomb. " I
was saying to Eppleby that I wondered if you'd
come. Eppleby says, c I donno, but like enough
they've went for a ride somewheres.' Lovely day,
ain't it ? Been to the cemetery ? "
I said that we had not been there yet, and,
" Since it's kept up it makes a real nice thing to
show folks," Mis' Holcomb said. " I s'pose you
wouldn't come inside for a bite of supper, would
you ? "
My neighbour bless her! had on a black
wool dress to do honour to my guest.
" It's nice for the neighbours to see company
comin' and goin'," she said cordially, " though
of course we don't have any of the extra work.
But I guess everybody likes extra work of this
kind."
And as we drove away :
1 9 o FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" Good-by," she cried, " I hope you'll have a
good night's rest and a good breakfast."
When I looked at the New Lady I saw her eyes
ever so slightly misted.
"Spring didn't die," she said as Little Child
had said. " Spring knew how to keep alive. It
got down in these people's hearts."
Yes, the New Lady is a wholly satisfactory guest.
She even pretended not to notice Peter's father
who, as we alighted, came singing by, and bowed
to us, his barren old face lighted with a smile, as a
vacant room is lighted, revealing the waste. If I
had some one staying with me who had smiled at
Peter's father or at any one, or who did not see the
village as it is, I think I should be tempted to do
as my neighbour did to me that morning : pick
three carnation pinks for her and watch her go
away.
XII
THE WAY THE WORLD IS
WAS it not inevitable that poor, lonely Nicholas
Moor should have sought out my New Lady ? A
night or two after her arrival he saw her again, at a
supper in the church " lecture-room." He was
bringing in a great freezer of ice-cream and when
she greeted him he had all but dropped the freezer.
Then a certain, big obvious deacon whose garden
adjoined my own had come importantly and snatched
the burden away, and the boy had stood, shamefast,
trying to say something ; but his face was lighted as
at a summons. So the New Lady had divined his
tragedy, the loneliness which his shyness masked as
some constant plight of confusion.
" Come and see me sometime," she had impul-
sively bidden him. " Do you know where I am
staying ? "
Did he know that ! Since he had seen her in the
meadow had he known anything else ? And after
some days of hard trying he came one night, arriving
within the dusk as behind a wall. Even in the twi-
light, when he was once under the poplars, he did
191
1 92 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
not know what way to look. To seem to look
straight along the road was unnatural. To seem to
look out across the opposite fields was hypocrisy.
To look at the house which held the New Lady was
unthinkable. So, as he went in at the gate and up
the fern-bordered walk, he examined the back of his
hand near, and then a little farther away. As he
reached the steps he was absorbedly studying his
thumb.
From a place of soft light, shed through a pink
box shade on the table, and of scattered willow
chairs and the big leaves of plants, the New Lady
came toward him.
" You did come ! " she said. " I thought you
wouldn't, really."
With the utmost effort Nicholas detached one
hand from his hat brim and gave it her. From
head to foot he was conscious, not of the touch of
her hand, little and soft, but of the bigness and
coarseness of his own hand.
" I hated to come like everything," he said.
At this of course she laughed, and she went back
to her willow chair and motioned him to his. He
got upon it, crimson and wretched.
" As much as that ! " she observed.
" You know I wanted to come awfully, too," he
modified it, " but I dreaded it like sixty. I I
can't explain . . ." he stumbled.
THE WAY THE WORLD IS 193
" Don't," said the New Lady, lightly, and took
pity on him and rang a little bell.
She thought again how fine and distinguished he
was, as he had seemed to her on the day when she
had first spoken to him. He sat staring at her, try-
ing to realize that he was on the veranda with her,
hearing the sound of the little bell she had rung.
He had wanted something like this, wistfully, pas-
sionately. Miserable as he was, he rested in the
moment as within arms. And the time seemed dis-
tilled in that little silver bell-sound and the intimacy
of waiting with her for some one to come.
He knew that some one with a light footfall
did come to the veranda. He heard the New Lady
call her Elfa. But he saw only her hands, plump
and capable and shaped like his own, moving among
the glasses. After which his whole being became
absorbed in creditably receiving the tall, cool tumbler
on the tray which the capable hands held out to him.
A period of suspended intelligence ensued, until he
set the empty glass on the table. Then the little
maid had gone, and the New Lady, sipping her own
glass, was talking to him.
"You were lying on the grass that day," she said,
" as if you understood grass. Not many do under-
stand about grass, and almost nobody understands
the country. People say, c Come, let us go into the
country/ and when they get there is it the country
i 9 4 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
they want at all ? No, it is the country sports, the
country home, everything but the real country.
They play match games. They make expeditions,
climb things in a stated time, put in a day at a stated
place. I often think that they must go home leav-
ing the country aghast that they could have come
and gone and paid so little heed to it. Presently we
are going to have some charming people out here
who will do the same thing."
So she talked, asking him nothing, even her eyes
leaving him free. It seemed to him, tense and alert
and ill at ease as he listened, that he, too, was talking
to her. From the pressing practicalities, the self-im-
portant deacon, the people who did not trouble to talk
to him, his world abruptly escaped, and in that world
he walked, an escaped thing too, forgetful even of
the little roll of verses which he had dared to bring.
Yet when she paused, he looked out at her shrink-
ingly from under his need to reply. He did not
look at her face, but he looked at her hands, so little
that each time he saw them they were a new surprise
and alien to him. He looked away from them to
the friendliness of her smile. And when he heard
himself saying detached, irrelevant things, he again
fell to studying one of his own hands, big and coarse
and brown. Oh, he thought, the difference between
her and him was so hopelessly the difference in their
hands.
THE WAY THE WORLD IS 195
In an absurdly short time the need to be gone
was upon him ; but of this he could not speak, and
he sat half unconscious of what she was saying,
because of his groping for the means to get away.
Clearly, he must not interrupt her to say that he
must go. Neither could he reply to what she said
by announcing his intention. And yet when he
answered what she said, straightway her exquisite
voice went on with its speech to him. How, he
wondered, does anybody ever get away from any-
where ? If only something would happen, so that
he could slip within it as within doors, and take his
leave.
Something did happen. By way of the garden,
and so to a side door, there arrived those whose
garden adjoined, the big, obvious, self-important
deacon, and behind him Three Light Gowns. The
little maid Elfa came showing them through the
house, in the pleasant custom of the village. And
when the New Lady, with pretty, expected mur-
murings, rose to meet them, Nicholas got to his feet
confronting the crisis of saying good-by, and the
moment closed upon him like a vise. He heard his
voice falter among the other voices, he saw himself
under the necessity to take her hand and the deacon's
hand, and the hands, so to speak, of the Three
Light Gowns ; and this he did as in a kind of unprac-
tised bewildering minuet.
196 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
And then he found his eyes on a level with eyes
that he had not seen before blue eyes, gentle,
watching, wide and a fresh, friendly little face
under soft hair. It was Elfa, taking away the empty
glasses. And the boy, in his dire need to ease the
instant, abruptly and inexplicably held out his hand
to her too. She blushed, sent a frightened look to
the New Lady, and took the hand in hers that was
plump and capable, with its strong, round wrist
And the little maid, being now in an embarrassment
like his own, the two hands clung for a moment, as
if they had each the need.
" Good night," she said, trembling.
" Good night," said the New Lady, very gently.
" Oh, good night ! " burst from the boy as he fled
away.
It was Elfa who admitted him at his next coming.
The screened porch was once more in soft light from
the square rose shade, and the place had the usual
pleasant, haunted air of the settings of potentialities.
As if potentiality were a gift of enchantment to
human folk.
The New Lady was not at home, Elfa told him,
in her motherly little heart pitying him. And at
the news he sat down, quite simply, in the chair in
which he had sat before. He must see her. It
was unthinkable that she should be away. To-
THE WAY THE WORLD IS 197
night he had meant to have the courage to leave
with her his verses.
On the willow table lay her needlework. It was
soft and white beyond the texture of most clouds,
and she had wrought on it a pattern like the lines on
a river. As his eyes rested on it, Nicholas could
fancy it lying against her white gown and upon it
her incomparable hands. Some way, she seemed
nearer to him when he was not with her than when,
with her incomparable hands and her fluent speech,
she was in his presence. When she was not with him,
he could think what to say to her. When he stood
before her the thought of his leave-taking on that
veranda seized upon him, so that he caught his
breath in the sharp thrust of mortified recollection,
and looked away and up. ^
His eyes met those of Elfa, who was quietly sit-
ting opposite.
" How they must all have laughed at me. You
too ! " he said.
" Why ? " she asked.
" That last time I was here. Shaking hands that
way," he explained.
" I didn't laugh," she unexpectedly protested ; " I
cried."
He looked at her. And this was as if he were
seeing her for the first time.
"Cried?" he repeated.
198 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
cc Nobody ever shakes hands with me/' Elfa told
him.
He stared at her as she sat on the edge of her
chair, her plump hands idle on her apron.
" No," he admitted, " no, I don't suppose they
do. I didn't think "
But he had not thought of her at all.
" By the door all day I let in hand-shakes," she
said, " an' then I let 'em out again. But I don't
get any of 'em for me."
That, Nicholas saw, was true enough. Even he
had been mortified because he had taken her hand.
" Once," Elfa said, " I fed a woman at the back
door. An' when she went she took hold o' my
hand, thankful. An' then you done it too like it
was a mistake. That's all, since I worked out. I
don't know folks outside much, only some that don't
shake hands, 'count of seemin' ashamed to."
" I know," said Nicholas.
" Sometimes," she went on, cc folks come here an'
walk in to see her an' they don't shake. Ain't
it funny when folks can an' don't? When they
come from the city to-morrow, the whole house '11
shake hands, but me. Once I went to prayer-
meetin' an' I hung around waitin' to see if somebody
wouldn't. But they didn't any of 'em. It was
rainin' outside an' I guess they thought I come with
somebody's rubbers."
THE WAY THE WORLD IS 199
Nicholas looked at her a little fearfully. It had
seemed to him that in a great world of light he had
always moved in a little hollow of darkness and
detachment. Were there, then, other hollows like
that? Places to which outstretched hands never
penetrate ? A great understanding possessed him.
and he burst out in an effort to express it.
" You're a funny girl," he said.
She flushed, and suddenly lifted one hand and
looked at it. Nicholas watched her now intently.
She studied the back of her hand, turned it, and sat
absorbedly examining her little thumb. And Nicho-
las felt a sudden sense of understanding, of gladness
that he understood. As he felt when he was afraid
and wretched, so Elfa was feeling now.
He leaned toward her.
" Don't feel afraid," he said gently.
She shook her head.
" I don't," she said ; " I don't, truly. I guess
that's why I stayed here now. She won't be back
till ten I ought to have said so before. You
you won't want to wait so long."
He rose at once. And now, being at his ease,
his head was erect, his arms naturally fallen, his face
as confident and as occupied by his spirit as when
he lay alone in the meadows.
"Well, sir," he said, "let's shake hands again !"
She gave him her hand and, in their peculiarly
200 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
winning upward look, her eyes blue, wide, watch-
ful, with that brooding mother watchfulness of some
women, even in youth. And her hand met his in
the clasp which is born of the simple, human long-
ing of kind for kind.
" Good-by," she answered his good-by, and they
both laughed a little in a shyness which was a way
of delight.
In the days to follow there flowed in the boy's
veins a tide of novel sweetness. And now his
thoughts eluded one another and made no chain, so
that when he tried to remember what, on that first
evening, the New Lady and he had talked about,
there came only a kind of pleasure, but it had no
name. Everything that he had to do pressed upon
him, and when he could get time he was away to
the meadow, looking down on the chimneys of that
house, and swept by a current that was like a sing-
ing. And always, always it was as if some one were
with him.
There came a night when he could no longer
bear it, when his wish took him to itself and carried
him with it. Those summer dusks, warm yellow
with their moon and still odorous of spring, were
hard to endure alone. Since the evening with her,
Nicholas had not seen the New Lady save when,
not seeing him, she had driven past in a phaeton.
At the sight of her, and once at the sight of Elfa
THE WAY THE WORLD IS 201
from that house, a faintness had seized him, so that
he had wondered at himself for some one else, and
then with a poignancy that was new pain, new joy,
the new life, had rejoiced that he was himself. So,
when he could no longer bear it, he took his even-
ing way toward the row of poplars, regretting the
moonlight lest by it they should see him coming.
And ,to-night he had with him no verses, but only
his longing heart.
He had no intimation of the guests, for the win-
dows at that house were always brightly lighted,
and until he was within the screened veranda the
sound of voices did not reach him. Then from the
rooms there came a babel of soft speech and laugh-
ter, and a touch of chords ; and when he would have
incontinently retreated, the New Lady crossed the
hall and saw him.
She came to the doorway and greeted him, and
Nicholas looked up in the choking discomfort of
sudden fear. She was in a gown that was like her
needlework, mysteriously fashioned and intricate
with shining things which made her infinitely re-
mote. The incomparable little hands were quite
covered with jewels. It was as if he had come to
see a spirit and had met a woman.
" How good of you to come again," she said.
" Come, I want my friends to meet you."
Her friends ! That quick crossing of words within
202 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
there, then, meant the presence of her friends from
the city.
" I couldn't! I came for a book I'll get it
some other time. I've got to go now ! " Nicholas
said.
Then, " Bettina Bettina ! " some one called
from within, and a man appeared in the hallway,
smiled at sight of the New Lady, dropped his glass
at sight of Nicholas, bowed, turned away oh,
how should he know that her name was Bettina
when Nicholas had not known !
This time he did not say good night at all. This
time he did not look at his great hand, which was
trembling, but he got away, mumbling something,
his retreat graciously covered by the New Lady's
light words. And, the sooner to be gone and out
of the moonlight that would let them see him go,
he struck blindly into the path that led to the side
gate of the garden. The mortification that chains
spirit to flesh and tortures both held him and tor-
tured him. For a breath he imagined himself up
there among them all, his hands holding his hat,
imagined having to shake hands with them : and
somehow this way of fellowship, this meeting of
hands outstretched for hands, seemed, with them,
the supreme ordeal, the true symbol of his alien
state from them and from the New Lady. No
doubt she understood him, but for the first time
THE WAY THE WORLD IS 203
Nicholas saw that this is not enough. For the first
time he saw that she was as far away from him as
were the others. How easy, Nicholas thought pite-
ously, those people in her house all found it to act
the way they wanted to ! Their hands must be like
her hands. . . .
He got through the garden and to the side gate.
And now the old loneliness was twofold upon him
because he had known what it is to reach from the
dark toward the light ; yet when he saw that at the
gate some one was standing, he halted in his old
impulse to be on guard, hunted by the fear that
this would be somebody alien to him. Then he
saw that it was no one from another star, but
Elfa.
" Oh . . ." he said, and that, too, was what she
said, but he did not hear. Not from another star
she came, but from the deep of the world where
Nicholas felt himself alone.
" I was just going away," he explained.
For assent she stepped a little back, saying noth-
ing. But when Nicholas would have passed her it
was as if the immemorial loneliness and the seeking
of forgotten men innumerable stirred within him in
the ache of his heart, in the mere desperate wish to
go to somebody, to be with somebody, to have some-
body by the hand.
He turned upon Elfa almost savagely.
204 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" Shake hands ! " he said.
Obediently she put out her hand, which of itself
stayed ever so briefly, within his. He held it, feel-
ing himself crushing it, clinging to it, being possessed
by it. Her hand was, like his, rough from its work,
and it was something alive, something human, some-
thing that answered. And instantly it was not Elfa
alone who was there companioning him, but the dark
was quick with presences, besieging him, letting him
know that no one alive is alone, that he was some-
how one of a comrade company, within, without,
encompassing. And the boy was caught up by the
sweet will outside his own will and he never knew
how it was that he had Elfa in his arms.
" Come here. Come here . . ." he said.
To Elfa, in her loneliness threaded by its own
dream, the moment, exquisite and welcome as it was,
was yet as natural as her own single being. But to
the boy it was not yet the old miracle of one world
built from another. It was only the answer to the
groping of hands for hands, the mere human call to
be companioned. And the need to reassure her
came upon him like the mantle of an elder time.
" Don't feel afraid," he said.
Her eyes gave him their winning upward look,
and it was as if their mother watchfulness answered
him gravely :
" I don't. I don't, truly."
THE WAY THE WORLD IS 205
And at this she laughed a little, so that he joined
her; and their laughter together was a new delight.
Across the adjoining lawn Nicholas could see in
the moonlight the moving figure of the big deacon,
a Light Gown or two attending. A sudden surpris-
ing sense of safety from them overswept the boy.
What if they did come that way ! What, he even
thought, if those people in the house were to come
by ? Somehow, the little hollow of dark in which
he had always walked in the midst of light was as
light as the rest of the world, and he was not afraid.
And all this because Elfa did . not stir in his arms,
but was still, as if they were her harbour. And then
Nicholas knew what they both meant.
"Elfa!" he cried, "do you . . . ?"
" I guess I must . . ." she said, and knew no
way to finish that.
" Love me ? " said Nicholas, bold as a lion.
" I meant that too," Elfa said.
Between the New Lady's house and the big, ob-
vious deacon's lawn the boy stood, silent, his arms
about the girl. So this was the way the world is,
people bound together, needing one another, wanting
one another, stretching out their hands. ...
" Why, it was you I wanted ! " Nicholas said won-
deringly.
XIII
HOUSE HOLDRY
"AFTER supper" in the village is like another
room of the day. On these summer nights we all
come out to our porches to read the daily paper, or
we go to sit on the porch of a neighbour, or we
walk about our lawns in excesses of leisure, giving
little twitches to this green and to that. "In our
yards " we usually say. Of these some are so tiny
that the hammocks or the red swinging-chairs find
room on the planting spaces outside the walks, and
there men smoke and children frolic and call across
the street to one another. And this evening, as I
went down Daphne Street to post my letters, I saw
in process the occasional evening tasks which I have
noted, performed out-of-doors : at the Sykeses'
cucumbers in preparation for to-morrow's pickles ; a
bushel of over-ripe cherries arrived unexpectedly at
the Herons' and being pitted by hand ; a belated
needle-task of Mis' Holcomb's finishing itself in the
tenuous after-light. This fashion of taking various
employments into the open delights me. If we
have peas to shell or beans to string or corn to husk,
206
HOUSEHOLDRY 207
straightway we take them to the porch or into the
yard. This seems to me to hold something of
the grace of the days in the Joyous Garde, or on
the grounds of old chateaux where they embroid-
ered or wound worsted in woodland glades, or of
colonial America, where we had out our spinning
wheels under the oaks. When I see a great shining
boiler of gasoline carried to the side yard for the
washing of delicate fabrics, I like to think of it as
done out-of-doors for the charm of it as much as
for the safety. So Nausicaa would have cleansed
with gasoline !
It was sight of the old Aunt Effie sewing a seam
in Mis' Holcomb's dooryard which decided me
to go to see Miggy. For I would not willingly be
where Aunt Effie is, who has always some tragedy
of gravy-scorching or dish-breaking to tell me. I
have been for some time promising to go to see
Miggy in her home, and this was the night to do
so, for the New Lady went home to-day and I have
been missing her sorely. There is a kind of minus-
New Lady feeling about the universe.
At the same moment that I decided for Miggy,
Peter rose out of the ground. I wonder if he can
have risen a very little first? But that is one of
those puzzles much dwelt upon by the theologians,
and I will not decide. Perhaps the thought of
Miggy is a mighty motive on which Peter's very
208 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
being is conditioned. Anyway, there he was, sud-
denly beside me, and telling me some everyday
affair of how little use in the cannery were Shorty
Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade,
whose houses we were passing. And to his talk
of shop I responded by inviting him to go with me
to see Miggy. Would he go ? He smiled his
slow smile, with that little twist of mouth and lift-
ing of brow.
"This is like finding an evening where there
wasn't one before," he said.
The little house where Miggy lives has a copper
beech in the dooryard these red-leaved trees
seem to be always in a kind of hush at their own
difference. The house is no-colour, with trimmings
of another no-colour for contrast, and the little
front porch looks like something that has started
to run out the front door and is being sternly
snatched backward. The door stood ajar no
doubt for the completion of this transaction and
no one was about. We rapped, for above the bell
push was a legend of Aunt Effie's inscribing, say-
ing : " Bell don't ring." For a moment our sum-
mons was unanswered. Then Miggy cajled from
upstairs.
" I'll be down in a minute," she said. " Go right
in, both of you, and wait for me will you ? "
To take the cards of one's visitors from a butler
HOUSEHOLDRY 209
of detached expression or from a maid with inquisi-
tive eyelashes is to know nothing of the charm of
this custom of ours of peeping from behind an
upper curtain where we happen to be dressing, and
alone in the house, at the ringing of the doorbell,
and of calling down to a back which we recognize
an informal "Oh, go right in and wait for me a
minute, will you ? " In this habit there is survival
of old tribal loyalties and hospitalities ; for let the
back divined below be the back of a stranger, that
is to say, of a barbarian, and we stay behind our
curtains, silent, till it goes away.
In the sitting room at Miggy's house a little hand
lamp was burning, the fine yellow light making near
disclosures of colour and form, and farther away
formulating presences of shadow. Aunt Effie had
been at her sewing, and there were yards of blue
muslin billowing over a sunken arm-chair and a
foam of white lining on the Brussels-covered couch.
The long blue cotton spread made the big table
look like a fat Delft sugar bowl, and the red curtains
were robbed of crude colour and given an obscure
rosy glow. A partly finished waist disguised the
gingerbread of the what-not, one forgot the carpet,
the pictures became to the neutral wall what words
which nobody understands are to ministering music.
And on the floor before the lounge lay Little Child
and Bless-your-Heart, asleep.
210 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
At first I did not see the child. It was Peter
who saw her. He stooped and lifted her, the
kitten still in her arms, and instead of saying any of
the things a woman might have said, Peter said
" Well . . ." with a tenderness in his voice such as
women can give and more. For a man's voice-to-a-
child gets down deeper than happiness. I suppose
it is that the woman has always stayed with the
child in the cave or the tent or the house, while the
man has gone out to kill or to conquer or to trade ;
and the ancient crooning safety is still in the woman's
voice, and the ancient fear that he may not come
back to them both is in the voice of the man.
When Peter lifted Little Child in his arms, I
wished that Miggy had been there to hear.
" What's it dreaming about ? " Peter said.
"'Bout Miggy," said Little Child sleepily, and
she snuggled in Peter's coat collar.
" Dream about Peter too ! " Peter commanded.
" Well, / will," promised Little Child o' Dreams,
and drifted off.
Peter sank awkwardly down to the floor and
held her so, and he sat there stroking Bless-your-
Heart and looking as if he had forgotten me, save
that, cc Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie
Wade that I was telling you about," he remarked
once irrelevantly, "they've each got -a kiddie or so/*
Miggy came downstairs and, " I'm a surprise,"
HOUSEHOLDRY 211
she said in the doorway, and stood there in a sheer
white frock a frock which said nothing to make
you look, but would not let you look away ; and it
had a little rhyme of lace on this end and on that.
It was the frock that she had made herself she
told me so afterward, but she did not mention it
before Peter, and I liked her the better for that.
When I hear women boast of these things I always
wonder why, then and there, I should not begin to
recite a sonnet I have turned, so as to have a hand
in things. To write an indifferent sonnet is much
less than to make a frock which can be worn, but
yet I should dislike infinitely to volunteer even so
little as a sonnet or a quatrain. In any case, it
would be amazing taste for me to do so ; while " I
made it myself" I hear everywhere in the village,
especially in the presence of the Eligible. But I
dare say that this criticism of mine is conditioned by
the fact that my needle-craft cell got caught in the
primal protozoan ooze and did not follow me.
" Miggy ! Oh, Miggery ! " said Peter, softly.
He had made this name for a sort of superlative
of her.
" Like me ? " inquired Miggy. I wonder if even
the female atom does not coquette when the sun
strikes her to shining in the presence of her atom
lord?
You know that low, emphatic, unspellable thing
ziz FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
which may be said by the throat when a thing is
liked very much ? When one makes it, it feels
like a vocal dash in vocal italics. Peter did that,
very softly.
" Well," said Miggy, " I feel that dressed-up that
I might be cut out of paper. What are you doing
down there, Peter ? "
He glanced down mutely, and Miggy went round
the table and saw what he held.
" Why," she said, " that great heavy girl, Peter.
Give her to me."
Miggy bent over Peter, with her arms outstretched
for the child. And Peter looked up at her and en-
joyed the moment.
" She's too heavy for you to lift," he said, with
his occasional quiet authority. " I'll put her where
you want her."
"Well, it's so hot upstairs," Miggy hesitated.
cc It's past her bedtime, but I hate to take her up
there."
" Undress her down here," said I. "The Delft
sugar bowl shuts you off a fine dressing-room. And
let her sleep for a while on the couch."
So Miggy went for the little nightgown, and
Peter, with infinite pains, got to his feet, and detached
Bless-your-Heart and deposited her on the table,
where she yawned and humped her back and lay
down on an unfinished sleeve and went to sleep
HOUSEHOLD RY 213
again. And when Miggy came down, she threw a
light quilt and a pillow near the couch and sat
behind the table and held out her arms.
" Now ! " she said to Peter, and to me she said,
" I thought maybe you'd spread her up a bed there
on the couch."
"Let Peter," said I. " I've another letter I
ought to have written. If I may, I'll write that here
while you undress her."
"Well," said Miggy, "there's some sheets of letter-
paper under the cover of the big Bible. And the
ink I guess there's some in the bottle is on top
of the organ. And the pen is there behind the
clock. And you'd ought to find a clean envelope
in that pile of newspapers. I think I saw one there
the other day. You spread up her bed then,
Peter."
I wrote my letter, and Peter went at the making
up of the lounge, and Miggy sat behind the table
to undress Little Child. And Little Child began
waking up. It touched me infinitely that she who in
matters of fairies and visionings is so wise and old
should now, in her sleepyhood, be just a baby again.
"I won't go bed," she said.
" Oh," said Miggy, " yes. Don't you feel all the
little wingies on your face ? They're little dream
wings, and the dreams are getting in a hurry to be
dreamed."
2i 4 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" I do' know those dreams," said Little Child,
" I do' want those dreams. Where's Bless-your-
Heart?"
" Dreaming," said Miggy, "all alone. Goodness,
I believe you've got a little fever."
Peter stopped flopping the quilt aimlessly over
the lounge and turned, and Miggy laid the back of
her hand on Little Child's cheek and beneath her
chin. The man watched her anxiously as, since the
world began, millions of men have looked down at
this mysterious pronouncement of the woman.
" She has ? " he said. " She'd ought not to have
any milk, then, had she ? " he added vaguely. It
seemed to me that Miggy must have paused for a
moment to like Peter for this wholly youthful,
masculine eagerness to show that he knew about
such things.
" I'll fix her something to take," said Miggy,
capably. " No, dear. The other arm. Straighten
elbow."
" I want my shoes an' stockin's on in bed," Little
Child observed. She was sitting up, her head
drooping, her curls fastened high with a hairpin of
Miggy's. " An' I want my shirtie on. An' all my
clothes. I won't go bed if you don't."
Miggy laughed. "Bless-your-Heart hasn't got
her clothes on," she parried.
" Ain't she got her furs on any more ? " demanded
HOUSEHOLD RY 215
Little Child, opening her eyes. " She has, too. She
has not, too, took a bath. An' I won't have no
bath," she went on. " I'm too old for 'em."
At that she would have Bless-your-Heart in her
arms, and there was some argument arising from her
intention to take the kitten in one hand all the way
through her nightgown sleeve. And by this time
sleepy hood tears were near.
"Dont curl your toes under so," said Miggy,
struggling with a shoe. " Peter, do go on. You'll
never have it done."
Whereat Peter flapped the quilt again ; and
" I will curl my toes up. That's what I want to
do. I want to curl 'em up ! " said Little Child.
And now the sleepyhood tears were very near.
"Goodness," said Miggy, Suddenly, "to-morrow
is Sunday. I'll have to do her hair up for curls.
Peter ! " she cried, " stop waving that quilt, and
tear me off a strip of that white lining there."
" Yes, Fit have curls," said Little Child, unex-
pectedly, " because that is so becunning to me."
But she was very sleepy, and when Peter had
been sent for the brush from the kitchen shelf, her
head was on Miggy's shoulder, and Miggy looked
at Peter helplessly.
" Give her to me," said Peter, and took the child
and laid the kitten at large upon the floor; and
then, holding Little Child's head in the hollow of
216 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
his arm, he sat down before Miggy, leaning toward
her, and all the child's soft brown hair lay on his
sleeve.
I should have liked to watch them then. And I
should have liked Calliope and Mis' Toplady and
my neighbour to see them those three who of all
the village best understood mystery. I know that
Peter did not take his eyes from Miggy's face as she
brushed and wound the curls. How could he?
and Miggy, "sweet as boughs of May" in that
white frock, her look all motherly intent upon her
task. She was very deft, and she had that fine
mother-manner of caring for the child with her
whole hand instead of tipsifingers. I would see a
woman infinitely delicate in the touching of flowers
or tea-cups or needlework, but when she is near a
child, I want her to have more than delicacy. I was
amazed at Miggy's gentleness and her pretty air of
accustomedness. And when Little Child stirred,
Miggy went off into some improvised song about a
little black dog that got struck with a wagon and
went Ki yi ki yi ad infinitum, and Miggy
seemed to me to have quite the technical mother-air
of tender abstraction.
" How dark her hair is growing," she said.
"It's just the colour of yours," said Peter, "and
the little curls on the edges. They're like yours,
too."
HOUSEHOLDRY 217
" My hair ! " Miggy said deprecatingly. " You've
got rather nice hair, Peter, if only it wouldn't stick
up that way at the back."
" I know it sticks up," Peter said contritely. " I
do every way to make it stay down. But it
won't."
"It makes you look funny," observed Miggy,
frankly.
" Well," he told her, " if you wouldn't ever make
me go 'way from you, you wouldn't ever need to see
the back of my head."
" That would be just what would turn your head,"
she put it positively. " Peter, doesn't your arm
ache, holding her so ? "
He looked down at his arm to see, and, " I
wouldn't care if it did," he replied, in some surprise.
"No. It feels good. Oh, Miggy do you do
this every night? "
" I don't always curl her hair," said Miggy, " but
I always put her to bed. If ever Aunt Effie un-
dresses her, she tells her she may die before morning,
so she'd better say her prayer, pretty. Goodness,
she hasn't said her prayer yet, either."
" Isn't she too sleepy ? " asked Peter.
" Yes," Miggy answered ; " but she feels bad in
the morning if she doesn't say it. You know she
thinks she says her prayer to mother, and that
mother waits to hear her.
2i8 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Miggy looked up fleetingly at her mother's pic-
ture on the wall one of those pale enlargements
of a photograph which tell you definitely that the
subject is dead.
" I do' want any other curls on me," announced
Little Child, suddenly.
"Just one more, dear," Miggy told her, "and
then we're through. Turn her head a little, Peter."
" No," said Little Child. "Now I'm -all curly."
And, "Yes, Precious. Be still on Peter's arm
just a minute more," said Miggy at the same time.
And, " If you say anything more, I'll kiss you,"
said Peter, to whom it might concern.
" Kiss me ? " said Little Child. " I won't be."
"Somebody's got to be," said Peter, with decision.
" Now, our prayer," ruled Miggy suddenly, and
rose. " Come, dear."
Peter looked up in Miggy's face.
" Let her be here," he said. " Let her be here."
He lifted Little Child so that she knelt, and her
head drooped on his shoulder. He had one arm
about her and the other hand on the pink, upturned
soles of her feet. The child put out one hand blindly
for Miggy's hand. So Miggy came and stood
beside Peter, and together they waited for the little
sleepy voice.
It came with disconcerting promptness.
"Now I lay me down to sleep for
HOUSEHOLDRY 219
Jesus' sake Amen," prayed Little Child in
one breath.
" No, sweetheart," Miggy remonstrated, with her
alluring emphasis on " sweet." " Say it right, dear."
"Now I lay me is Bless-your-Heart sayin'
hers ? " demanded Little Child.
" Couldn't you get along without her, when
you're so sleepy ? " Miggy coaxed.
" Mustn't skip nights," Little Child told her.
"Bless-your-Heart might die before morning."
So Miggy found Bless-your-Heart under the
couch, and haled her forth, and laid her in Little
Child's arms. And Peter put his face close, close to
Little Child's, and shut his eyes.
" Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord
my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I
pray the Lord my soul to take who'll I bless to-
night ? " said Little Child.
" Aunt Effie," Miggy prompted.
"Bless Aunt Effie," said Little Child, "and
Miggy and Bless-your-Heart and New Auntie"
(she meant me. Think of her meaning me !) " and
the man that gave me the peanuts, and bless Stella's
party and , make 'em have ice-cream, and bless my
new shoes and my sore finger. For Jesus' sake,
Amen."
Little Child drew a long breath and stirred to
get down, but Peter did not move.
220 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" And bless Peter," Miggy said.
" No," said Little Child, " He needn't. Peter's
nice 'miff."
Peter got to his feet with Little Child in his arms,
and his face was glowing, and he looked at Miggy
as if she were what he meant whenever he said
" universe." But Miggy had gone to the couch,
and was smoothing the quilt that Peter had wrinkled
in all directions, and patting the pillow that Peter
had kneaded into a hard ball.
" You lay her down," she said.
Peter did so, setting the kitten on the floor, and
then bending low over the couch, looking in the
upturned face as the little dark head touched the
pillow and sought its ease, and her hand fell from
where it had rested on his shoulder. And he
stooped and kissed her cheek more gently than he
had ever done anything.
" I want my drink o' water," said Little Child,
and opened her eyes ; and now from the couch she
could see me. " Tell me a story," she commanded
me, drowsily.
I did not go to her, for who am I that I should
have broken that trio ? But when Miggy and
Peter took the lamp and went away to the kitchen
for the drink of water and for some simple remedy
for the fever which Miggy had noted or fancied,
I sat beside Little Child and said over something
HOUSEHOLDRY 221
that had been persistently in my mind as I had
watched Miggy with her :
" I like to stand in this great air
And see the sun go down ;
It shows me a bright veil to wear
And such a pretty gown.
Oh, I can see a playmate there
Far up in Splendour Town ! "
Little Child began it with me, but her voice
trailed away. I thought that in the darkness were
many gentle presences Little Child's tender breath-
ing, the brushing wings of hurrying dreams, and
perhaps that other " not quite my sister," but a
shadowy little Margaret.
Afterward, Miggy and Peter and I sat together
for a little while, but Peter had fallen in a silence.
And presently Aunt Effie came home, and on the
porch which seemed not yet to have escaped
she told us about having broken hep needle and left
her shears at her neighbour's. While Peter ran over
to Mis' Holcomb's for the shears, I had a word with
Miggy.
" Mi ggy ! " I Sai d 3 " don't you see ? "
" See what ? " she wanted to know, perversely.
" How Peter would love to have Little Child,
too ? " I said.
She laughed a little, and was silent ; and laughed
again.
222 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" He was funny and nice," she admitted ; " and
wasn't Little Child funny not to bless him ? "
" Because he is nice enough," I reminded her.
Miggy laughed once more I had never seen
her in so tender and feminine a mood. And this
may have been partly due to the new frock, though
I cannot think that it was entirely this. But ab-
ruptly she shook her head.
" Peter's father went by just before you came in,"
she said. " He couldn't hardly walk. What if
I was there to get supper for him when he got
home? I never could I never could . . ."
By the time Peter and I were out alone on
Daphne Street again, the sitting rooms in all the
houses were dark, with a look of locked front doors
as if each house had set its lips together with,
" We are a home and you are not."
Peter looked out on all this palpable house-
holdry.
"See the lights upstairs," he said; "everybody's
up there, hearing their prayers and giving 'em fever
medicine. Yes, sir, Great Scott ! Shorty Burns
and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade they ain't
good for a thing in the cannery. And yet they
know . ."
XIV
POSTMARKS
BETWEEN church service and Sunday School we of
the First church have so many things to attend to
that no one can spare a moment.
" Reverent things, not secular," Calliope explains,
"plannin' for church chicken-pie suppers an' Christ-
mas bazaars and like that ; but not a word about a
picnic, not even if they was to be one o' Monday
sunrise."
To be sure, this habit of ours occasionally causes
a contretemps. As when one morning Mis' Toplady
arrived late and, in a flurry, essayed to send up to
the pulpit by the sexton a Missionary meeting notice
to be read. Into this notice the minister plunged
without the precaution of first examining it, and so
delivered aloud :
" See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags.
*' See Abigail about enough forks for her table.
" Look around for my rubbers.
"Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."
223
224 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Not until he reached the fourth item was the min-
ister stopped by the agonized rustle in a congrega-
tion that had easily recognized Mis' Toplady's
"between services" list of reminder, the notice of the
forthcoming meeting being safe in her hymn book.
Still we persist in our Sabbath conferences when
" everybody is there where you want 'em an* every-
body can see everybody an* no time lost an* no
party line listening"; and it is then that those who
have been for some time away from the village
receive their warmest welcome. I am not certain
that the "I must get down to church and see every-
body" of a returned neighbour does not hold in fair
measure the principles of family hood and of Christ's
persuadings to this deep comradeship.
It was in this time after church that we welcomed
Calliope one August Sunday when she had unex-
pectedly come down from town on the Saturday
night. And later, when the Sunday-school bell had
rung, I waited with her in the church while she
looked up her Bible, left somewhere in the pews.
When she had found it, she opened it in a manner
of eager haste, and I inadvertently saw pasted to the
inside cover a sealed letter, superscription down, for
whose safety she had been concerned. I had asked
her to dine with me, and as we walked home to-
gether she told me about the letter and what its
sealed presence in her Bible meant.
POSTMARKS 225
" I ain't ever read it," Calliope explained to me
wistfully. " Every one o' the Ladies' Foreign Mis-
sionary Circle has got one, an' none of us has ever
read 'em. It ain't my letter, so to say. It's one o'
the Jem Pitlaw collection. The postmark," she im-
parted, looking up at me proudly, " is Bombay,
India."
At my question about the Jem Pitlaw collection
she laughed deprecatingly, and then she sighed.
("Ain't it nice," she had once said to me, "your
laughs hev a sigh for a linin', an' sighs can hev
laughin' for trimmin'. Only trouble is, most folks
want to line with trimmin's, an' they ain't rill dur-
able, used that way.")
"Jem Pitlaw," Calliope told me now, "used to
be schoolmaster here the kind that comes from
Away an' is terrible looked up to on that account,
but Jem deserved it. He knew all there was to
know, an' yet he thought we knew some little
things, too. We was all rill fond of him, though
he kept to himself, an' never seemed to want to fall
in love, an' not many of us knew him well enough
to talk to at all familiar. But when he went off
West on a vacation, an' didn't come back, an' never
come back, an' then died, Friendship Village mourned
for him, sincere, though no crape, an' missed him
enormous.
"He'd had a room at Postmaster Sykes's that
Q
226 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
was when he was postmaster first an' they was still
humble an* not above the honest penny. An* Jem
Pitlaw left two trunks an* a sealed box to their
house. An* when he didn't come back in two
years, Silas Sykes moved the things out of the
spare room over to the post-office store loft. An*
there they set, three years on end, till we got word
Jem was dead the very week o' the Ladies' For-
eign Missionary Circle's Ten Cent Tropical Fete.
Though, rilly, the Tropical Fete wasn't what you
might say c tropical.' It was held on the seven-
teenth of January, an' that night the thermometer
was twenty-four degrees below on the bank corner.
Nor it wasn't rilly what you might say a Fete, either.
But none o' the Circle regretted them lacks. A lack
is as good as a gift, sometimes.
" We'd started the Foreign Missionary Circle
through Mis' Postmaster Sykes gettin' her palm.
I donno what there is about palms, but you know
the very name makes some folks think thoughts
'way outside their heads, an' not just stuffy-up in-
side their own brains. When I hear c palm,' I sort
o' feel like my i-dees got kind o' wordy wings an'
just went it without me. An' that was the way with
more than me, I found out. Nobody in Friendship
Village hed a palm, but we'd all seen pictures an'
hankered like you do. An' all of a sudden Mis'
Sykes got one, like she gets her new hat, sometimes,
POSTMARKS 227
without a soul knowin' she's thinkin' c hat ' till she
flams out in it. Givin' surprise is breath an* bread
to that woman. She unpacked the palm in the
kitchen, an' telephoned around, an' we all went over
just as we was an' set down there an' looked at it
an' thought ' Palm ' ! You can't realize how we
felt, all of us, if you ain't lived all your life with
nothin' but begonias an' fuchsias from November
to April, an' sometimes into May. But we was all
mixed up about 'em, now we see one. Some hed
heard dates grew on palms. Others would have it
it was cocoanuts. Still more said they was natives
of the equator, an' give nothin' but shade. So it
went. But after a while Mis' Timothy Toplady
spoke up with that way o' comin' downstairs on
her words an' rilly gettin' to a landin' :
" c They's quite a number o' things/ she says,
c that I want to do so much it seems like I can't die
without doin' 'em. But I guess prob'ly I will die
without. Folks seems to drop off leavin' lots of
doin's undone. An' one o' my worst is, I want to
see palm trees growin' in hot lands big spiky
leaves pointin' into the blue sky like fury. 'Seems
if I could do that,' s'she, c I'd take in one long
breath that'd make me all lungs an' float me up an'
off.'
" We all laughed, but we knew what she meant
well enough, because we all felt the same way. I
228 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
think most North folks do like they was cocoa-
nuts an' dates in our actions, 'way back. An* so
we was all ready for Mis' Toplady's idee when it
come which is the most any idee can expect:
CfC I tell you what,' s'she, 'le's hev a Ladies'
Foreign Missionary Circle, an' get read up on them
tropical countries. The only thing I really know
about the tropics is what comes to me unbeknownst
when I smell my tea rose. I've always been
meanin' to take an interest in missions,' says she.
" So we started it, then an' there, an' she an' I
was the committee to draw out a constitution an'
decide what officers should be elected an' do the
general creatin'. We made it up that Mis' Sykes
should be the president that woman is a born
leader, and, as a leader, you can depend on the very
back of her head. An' at last we went off to the
minister that then was to ask him what to take up.
" c M ost laudable,' s'he, when he'd heard. < Well,
now, what country is it you're most interested in ? '
he says. c Some island of the sea, I s'pose ? ' he
asks, bright.
" c We're interested in palms/ Mis' Timothy
Toplady explained it to him frank, c an' we want to
study about the missionaries in some country where
they's dates an' cocoanuts an oaseses.'
" He smiled at that, sweet an' deep I know it
seemed to me as if he knew more about what we
POSTMARKS 229
wanted than we knew ourselves. Because they's
some ministers that understands that Christianity
ain't all in theibottle labelled with it. Some of it is
labelled c ointment/ an' some c perfume/ an' some
just plain kitchen flavourin'. An' a good deal of it
ain't labelled at all.
" I forget what country it was we did study. But
they was nine to ten of us, an' we met every week,
an' I tell you the time wa'n't wasted. We took
things in lavish. I know Mis' Holcomb-that-was-
Mame-Bliss said that after belongin' to the Ladies'
Foreign Missionary Circle she could never feel the
same absent-minded sensation again when she dusted
her parlour shells. An' Mis' Toplady said when she
opened her kitchen cabinet an' smelt the cinnamon
an' allspice out o' the perforated tops, 'most always,
no matter how mad she was, she broke out in a
hymn, like c When All Thy Mercies,' sheer through
knowin' how allspice was born of God an' not made
of man. An' Mis' Sykes said when she read her
Bible, an' it talked about India's coral strand, it
seemed like, through knowin' what a reef was, she
was right there on one, with her Lord. I felt the
same way, too though I'd always felt the same
way, for that matter I always did tip vanilla on
my handkerchief an' pretend it was flowers an' that
I'd gone down South for the cold months. An' it
got so that when the minister give out a text that
230 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
had geography in it, like the Red Sea, or Beer-elim,
or c a place called The Fair Haven/ the Ladies
Foreign Missionary Circle would look round in our
seats an' nod to each other, without it showing be-
cause we knew that we knew, extra special, just what
God was talkin' about. I tell you, knowledge makes
you alive at places where you didn't know there was
such a place.
"In five months' time we felt we owed so much
to the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle that it was
Mis' Sykes suggested we give the Ten Cent Tropi-
cal Fete, an' earn five dollars or so for missions.
" c We know a great deal about the tropics now/
she says, ( an' I propose we earn a missionary thank-
offering. Coral an' cocoanuts an' dates an' spices
isn't all the Lord is interested in, by any means/
s'she. c An' the winter is the time to give a tropic
fete, when folks are thinkin' about warm things
natural.'
" We voted to hev the fete to Mis' Sykes's be-
cause it was too cold to carry the palm out. We
went into it quite extensive figs an' dates an'
bananas an' ginger for refreshments, an' little nigger
dolls for souvenirs, an' like that. It was quite a
novel thing for Friendship, an' everybody was takin'
an interest an' offerin' to lend Japanese umbrellas
an' Indian baskets an' books on the South Sea, an'
a bamboo chair with an elephant crocheted in the
POSTMARKS 231
tidy. An' then, bein' as happenings always crowd
along in flocks, what come that very week o' the
fete but a letter from an old aunt of Jem Pitlaw's,
out West. An' if Jem hadn't been dead almost
ever since he left Friendship ! an' the aunt wrote
that we should sell his things to pay for keepin' 'em,
as she was too poor to send for 'em an' hadn't any
room if she wasn't.
" I donno whether you know what rill excitement
is, but if you don't, you'd ought to drop two locked
trunks an' a sealed box into a town the size o' Friend-
ship Village, an' leave 'em there goin' on five years,
an' then die an' let 'em be sold. That'll show you
what a pitch true interest can get het up to. All of a
sudden the Tropical Fete was no more account than
the telephone ringin' when a circus procession is
going by. Some o' the Ladies' Missionary was rill
indignant, an' said we'd ought to sue for repairin'
rights, same as when you're interfered with in busi-
ness. Mis' Sykes, she done her able best, too, but
nothin' would do Silas but he must offer them things
for sale on the instant. c The time,' s'he, firm, ' to
do a thing is now, while the interest is up. An' in
this country,' s'he, " now " don't stay " now "
more'n two minutes at a time/
" So he offered for sale the contents of them three
things the two trunks an' the sealed box unsight,
unseen, on the day before the Fete was to be. Only
232 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
one thing interfered with the c unsight, unseen ' busi-
ness: the sealed box had got damp an* broke open,
an' what was inside was all showin'.
" Mis' Sykes an' I saw it on the day o' the sale.
Most o' the Circle was to her house finishin' up the
decorations for the Fete so's to leave the last day
clear for seein' to the refreshments, an' her an' I run
over to the post-office store for some odds an' ends.
Silas had brought the two trunks an' the box down
from the loft so to give 'em some advertisin'. An'
lookin' in the corner o' the broke box we could see,
just as plain as plain, was letters. Letters in bunches,
all tied up, an' letters laid in loose they must 'a'
been full a hundred of 'em, all lookin' mysterious an*
ready to tell you somethin', like letters will. I know
the looks o' the letters sort o' went to my head, like
the news of Far Off. An' I hated seein' Jem's
trunks there, with his initials on, appearin' all trust-
in' an' as if they thought he was still alive.
" But that wasn't the worst. They was three
strangers there in the store travellin' men that had
just come in on the Through, an' they was hangin'
round the things lookin' at 'em, as if they had the
right to. This town ain't very much on the buy,
an' we don't hev many strangers here, an' we ain't
rill used to 'em. An' it did seem too bad, I know
we thought, that them three should hev happened in
on the day of a private Friendship Village sale that
POSTMARKS 233
didn't concern nobody else but one, an 1 him dead.
An* we felt this special when one o' the men took
a-hold of a bunch o' the letters, an* we could see
the address of the top one, to Jem Pitlaw, wrote
thin an* tiny-fine, like a woman. An* at that Mis'
Sykes says sharp to her husband :
" c Silas Sykes, you ain't goin' to sell them letters ? '
" c Yes, ma'am, I am/ Silas snaps, like he hed a
right to all the letters on earth, bein j he was post-
master of Friendship Village. c Letters/ Silas give
out, ' is just precisely the same as books, only they
ain't been through the expense of printin'. No dif-
fer'nce. No difFer'nce ! ' Silas always seems to
think repeatin' a thing over'll get him somewheres,
like a clock retickin' itself. c An'/ he says, ' I'm goin'
to sell 'em for what they'll bring, same as the rest o'
the things, an' you needn't to say one word.' An'
bein' as Silas was snappin', not only as a postmaster
but as a husband, Mis' Sykes, she kep' her silence.
Matrimony an' politics both in one man is too
much for any woman to face.
" Well, we two went back to Mis' Sykes's all het
up an' sad, an' told the Circle about Jem Pitlaw's
letters. An' we all stopped decoratin' an' set down
just where we was an talked about what an awful
thing it seemed. I donno as you'll sense it as strong
as we did. It was more a feelin' than a wordin'.
Letters bein' sold an' read out loud an' gettin'
234 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
known about. It seemed like lookin' in somebody's
purse before they're dead.
" c I should of thought/ Mis' Sykes says, c that
Silas regardin' bein' postmaster as a sacred office
would have made him do differ'nt. An' I know
he talked that right along before he got his appoint-
ment. " Free Private Secretary to the People," an'
" Trusted Curator of Public Communication," he
put it when he was goin' around with his petition,'
says she, grievin'.
CC Well,' says Mis' Amanda Toplady I rec'lect
she hed been puttin' up a big Japanese umbrella,
an' she looked out from under it sort o' sweet an'
sincere an' dreamy c you've got to be a woman an*
you've got to live in a little town before you know
what a letter really is. I don't think these folks
that hev lots o' mail left in the front hall in the
mornin' an' sometimes get one that same after-
noon knows about letters at all. An' I don't
believe any man ever knows, sole except when he's
in love. To sense what a letter is you've got to be
a woman without what-you-may-say much to enjoy ;
you've got to hear the train whistle that might bring
you one ; you've got to calculate how long it'll take
'em to distribute the mail, an' mebbe hurry to get
your bread mixed, or your fried-cakes out o' the
lard, or your cannin' where you can leave it an*
then go change your shoes an' slip on another skirt,
POSTMARKS 235
an' poke your hair up under your hat so's it won't
show, an' go down to the post-office in the hot sun,
an' see the letter through the glass, there in your
own box, waitin' for you. That minute, when your
heart comes up in your throat, I tell you, is gettin'
a letter.'
" We all knew this is so every one of us.
" c It's just like that when you write 'em, only felt
differ' nt,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss.
c I do mine to my sister a little at a time I keep
it back o' the clock in the kitchen an' hide the pen-
cil inside the clock door, so's it won't walk off, the
way pencils do at our house. An' then, right in
the midst of things, be it flour or be it suds, I can
scratch down what comes in my head, till I declare
sometimes I can hardly mail it for readin' it over
an' thinkin' how she'll like to get it.'
" f My, my ! ' says Mis' Sykes, reminiscent,
c 'specially since Silas has been postmaster an' we've
had so much to do with other people's letters, I've
been so hungry for letters of my own that I've
wrote for samples. I can do that with a level con-
science because, after all, you do get a new dress
now an' then. But I couldn't answer advertise-
ments, same as some, when I didn't mean true
just to get the letters back. That don't seem to
me rill honest.'
" An' then I owned up.
236 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" c Last we.ek, when I paid my taxes/ I says, c I
whipped out o' the clerk's office quick, sole so's
he'd hev to mail me my tax receipt. But he didn't
do it. He sent it over by their hired girl that
noon. I love letters like I do my telephone bell
an' my friends,' I know I says.
" An' there was all that hundred letters or so
letters that somebody had put love in for Jem Pit-
law, an' that he'd read love out of an' saved 'em
there they was goin' to be sold for all Friendship
Village to read, includin' some that hadn't even
known him, mebbe more than to speak to.
" We wasn't quite through decoratin' when supper
time come, so we stayed on to Mis' Sykes's for a
pick-up lunch, et in the kitchen, an' finished up
afterwards. Most of 'em could do that better than
they could leave their work an' come down again
next mornin' men-folks can always get along for
supper, bein' it's not a hot meal.
" c Ain't it wonderful,' says Mis' Toplady, thought-
ful, c here we are, settin' 'round the kitchen table at
Mis' Postmaster Sykes's in Friendship Village. An'
away off in Arabia or Asia or somewhere that I
ain't sure they is any such place, is somebody set-
tin' that never heard of us nor we of him, an' he's
goin' to hev our five dollars from the Tropical Fete
to-morrow night, an' put it to work doin' good.'
" ' It makes sort of a connection, don't it ? ' says
POSTMARKS 237
Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. c There they
are an' here we are. Ain't it strange ? 'Seems like
our doin' this makes us feel nearer to them places.
I donno but that/ says she, noddin', c is the start
of what it means about the lion and the lamb layin*
down together.'
" c Oh ! ' says Mis' Toplady, f I tell you the
Foreign Missionary Circle has been next best to
goin. 'Seems sometimes as if I've 'most been
somewheres an' seen palms a-growin' an' a-wavin' an*
a red sky back. Don't it to you ? I've dreamed o'
them places all my life, an' I ain't never had any-
thing but Friendship Village, an' I don't know now
that Arabia an' Asia an* India is rilly fitted in, the
way they look on the map. An' so with some more.
But if so be they are, then,' she says, c we owe it to
the Foreign Missionary Circle that we've got that
far towards seein' 'em.'
" An' we all Agreed, warm, excep* Mis' Sykes,
who was the hostess an* too busy to talk much;
but we knew how she felt. An' we said some more
about how wonderful things are, there in Mis' Sykes's
kitchen while we et.
" Well, when we got done decoratin* after supper,
we all walked over to the post-office store to the
sale the whole Circle of us. Because, of course, if
the letters was to be sold there wasn't any harm in
seein' who got 'em, an' in knowin' just how mean
238 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
who was. Then, too, we was interested in what was
in the two trunks. We was quite early early
enough to set along on the front rows of breakfast-
food boxes that was fixed ready. An* in the very
frontmost one was Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an'
Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, an' me.
" But we see, first thing when we got into the
store, that they was strangers present. The three
travellin' men that Mis' Sykes an' I had noticed that
afternoon was still in town, of course, an' there they
was to the sale, loungin' along on the counter each
side o' the cheese. We couldn't bear their bein'
there. It was our sale, an' they wasn't rill sure to
understand. To us Mr. Pitlaw hed been Mr. Pit-
law. To them he was just somebody that hed been
somebody. I didn't like it, nor they didn't none o'
the Ladies' Missionary like it. We all looked at
each other an' nodded without it showin', like we do,,
an' we could see we all felt the same.
"Silas was goin' to officiate himself that man
has got the idee it's the whistle that runs the boat.
They had persuaded him to open the trunks an' sell
the things off piecemeal, an' he see that was rilly the
only way to do it. So when the time come he broke
open the two trunks an' he wouldn't let anybody
touch hasp or strap or hammer but himself. It
made me sort of sick to see even the trunk things of
Mr. Pitlaw's come out a pepper an' salt suit, a
POSTMARKS 239
pair of new suspenders, a collar an' cuff case * the
kind that you'd recognize was a Christmas present ;
a nice brush an' comb he'd kept for best an* never
used, a cake of pretty-paper soap he'd never opened,
a bunch o' keys, an' like that. You know how it
makes you feel to unpack even your own things that
have been put away a good while ; it's like thinkin'
over forgot thoughts. Well, an' this was worse.
Jem Pitlaw, that none of us had known well enough
to mention familiar things to, was dead he was
dead ; an' here we were, lookin' on an' seein' the
things that was never out of his room before, an*
that he'd put in there, neat an* nice, five years
back, to be took out, he thought, in a few weeks.
Quite a lot of us felt delicate, but some got be-
hind the delicate idee an* made it an excuse for
not buyin' much. They's all kinds to a sale
did you ever notice ? Timothy Toplady, for in-
stance I donno but he's all kinds in his single
self. 'Seems he couldn't bring himself to bid on a
thing but Jem Pitlaw's keys.
" ( Of course nobody knows what they'll fit/ says
he, disparaging c so to buy 'em don't seem like bein'
too familiar with Mr.. Pitlaw/ s'he, rill pleased with
himself.
"But Mis' Sykes whispers to me:
" c Them keys'll go dirt cheap, an' Timothy
knows it, an' a strange key may come in handy
240 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
any minute. Timothy's reasons never whip to a
froth/ s'she, cold.
" But I guess she was over-critical because of
gettin' more fidgety, like we all did, the nearer Silas
got to the letters. He hed left the letters till the
last. An* what with folks peekin' in the box since
he'd brought it down, an' what with handlin' what
was ready to spill out, most of 'em by then was in
plain sight. An' there I se.e more o' them same
ones little thin writin', like a woman's. We 'most
all noticed it. An' I couldn't keep my eyes off of
'em. 'Seemed like she might be somebody with
soft ways that ought to be there, savin' the letters,
wardin' off the heartache for Mr. Pitlaw an' mebbe
one for herself.
" An* right while I was lookin' Silas turned to the
box and cleared his throat, important as if he was
the whistle for New York City, an' he lifted up the
bunch of the letters that had the little fine writin' on
top, just the way Mr. Pitlaw had tied 'em up with
common string.
" c Oh ! ' says Mis' Toplady and Mis' Sykes, each
side of me, the one c oh ! ' strong an' the other low,
but both c oh's ' meanin' the same thing.
" c Now, what,' says Silas, brisk, c am I bid for
this package of nice letters here ? Good clear writin',
all in strong condition, an' no holes in, just as firm
an' fresh,' s'he, c as the day they was dropped into
POSTMARKS 241
the mail. What am I bid for 'em ? ' he asks, his
eyebrows rill expectant.
" Not one of the travellin' men had bid a thing.
They had sat still, just merely loungin' each side the
cheese, laughin' some, like men will, among each
other, but not carin' to take any part, an* we ladies
felt rill glad o' that. But all of a sudden, when
Silas put up the bunch o' letters, them three men
woke up, an* we see like lightnin' that this was what
they hed been waitin* for.
" c Twenty-five cents ! ' bids one of 'em, decisive.
" There was a movement of horror spread around
the Missionary Circle at the words. Sometimes it's
bad enough to hev one thing happen, but often it's
worse to hev another occur. Even Silas looked a
little doubtful, but to Silas the main chance is al-
ways the main thing, an' instantly he sec that these
men, if they got in the spirit of it, would run them
letters up rill high just for the fun of it. An' Silas
was like some are : he felt that money is money.
" So what did he do but begin cryin' the goods up
higher holdin' the letters in his hands, that little,
thin writin' lookin' like it was askin' somethin'.
" c Here we hev letters,' says Silas, c letters from
Away. Not just business letters, to judge by the
envelopes an' I allow, gentlemen,' says Silas, face-
tious, 'that, bein' postmaster of Friendship Village,
I'm as good a judge of letters as there is a-goin'.
242 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Here we hev some intimate personal letters offered
for sale legitimate by their heiress. What am I bid ? '
asks he.
" c Thirty-five cents ! '
" c Fifty cents ! ' says the other two travellin' gen-
tlemen, quick an* in turn.
" c Seventy-five cents ! ' cries out the first, gettin'
in earnest though they was all laughin' at hevin*
somethin' inspirin' to do.
" But Silas merely caught a-hold of the mood they
was in, crafty, as if he'd been gettin' the signers to
his petition while they was feelin' good.
" c One moment, gentlemen ! ' s'he. c Do you
know what you're biddin' on ? I ain't told you the
half yet/ s'he. < I ain't told you,' s'he, c where
these letters come from.'
" With that he hitches his glasses an' looked at
the postmarks. An' he read 'em off. Oh, an'
what do you guess them postmarks was ? I'll never
forget the feelin' that come over me when I heard
what he was sayin', turnin' back in under the string
to see. For the stamps on the letters was foreign
stamps. The postmarks was foreign postmarks.
An' what Silas read off was : Bombay, Calcutta,
Delhi, Singapore oh, I can't begin to remember
all the names nor to pronounce 'em, but I think
they was all in India, or leastwise in Asia. Think
of it ! in Asia, that none of the Ladies' Foreign
POSTMARKS 243
Missionary Circle bed been sure there was such a
place.
" I know how we all looked around at each other
sudden, with the same little jump in the chest as
when we remember we've got bread in the oven past
the three-quarters, or when we've left the preserves
on the blaze while we've done somethin' else an*
think it's burnin', or when we've cut out both
sleeves for one arm an' ain't got any more cloth.
I mean it was that intimate, personal jump, like
when awful, first-person things have happened.
An' I tell you what, when the Ladies' Missionary
feels a thing, they feel it strong an' they act it sud-
den. It's our way, as a Circle. An' in that look
that went round among us there was hid the nod
that knows what each other means.
" ( One dollar! ' shouts one o' the travellin' men.
" An' with that we all turned, like one solid hu-
man being, straight towards Mis' Postmaster Sykes,
that was our president an' a born leader besides, an'
the way we looked at her resembled a vote.
" Mis' Sykes stood up, grave an' scairt, though
not to show. An' we was sure she'd do the right
thing, though we didn't know what the right thing
was; but we felt confidence, I know, in the very
pattern on the back of her shawl. An' she says,
clear:
" c I'd like to be understood to bid for the whole
244 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
box o' Mr. Pitlaw's letters, includin' the bunch
that's up. An' I bid five dollars/
" Of course we all knew in a minute what that
meant: Mis' Sykes was biddin' with the proceeds
of the Ten Cent Tropical Fete that was to be. But
we see, too, that this was a missionary cause if there
ever was one, an* they waVt one of us that thought
it irregular, or grudged it, or looked behind.
" I don't know whether you know how much five
dollars rilly is like you sense it when you've spoke
it to a sale, or put it on a subscription paper in
Friendship. There wasn't a sound in that store,
everybody was so dumfounded. But none was so
much as Silas Sykes. Silas was so surprised that
he forgot that he was in public.
" c My King ! ' says he, unexpected to himself.
c What you say in', Huldy? You ain't biddin' that
out o' your allowance, be you? ' says he. Silas likes
big words in the home.
" c No, sir,' says she, crisp, back, c I ain't. I can't
do miracles out of nothin'. But I bid, an* you'll
get your money, Silas. An' I may as well take the
letters now.'
" With that she rose up an' spread out her shawl
almost broodin', an' gathered that box o' Jem Pit-
law's into her two arms. An' with one motion all
the rest o' the Ladies' Missionary got up behind her
an' stalked out of the store, like a big bid is sole all
POSTMARKS 245
there is to an auction. An' they let us go. Why,
there wasn't another thing for Silas Sykes to do but
let be as was. Them three men over by the cheese
just laughed, an' said out somethin' about no gentle-
man outbiddin' a lady, an' shut up, beat, but pre-
tendin' to give in, like some will.
"Just before we all got to the door we heard
somebody's feet come down off'n a cracker-barrel
or somethin', an' Timothy Toplady's voice after us,
shrill-high an' nervous :
" c Amanda,' s'he, c you ain't calculatin' to help
back up this tomfoolishness, I hope ? '
"An' Mis' Amanda says at him, over her shoulder:
cc c If I was, that'd be between my hens an' me,
Timothy Toplady,' says she.
"An' the store door shut behind us not mad, I
remember, but gentle, like c Amen.'
" We took the letters straight to Mis' Sykes's an'
through the house to the kitchen, where there was a
good hot fire in the range. It was bitter cold out-
doors, an' we set down around the stove just as we
was, with the letters on the floor in front o' the hearth.
An' when Mis' Sykes hed got the bracket lamp lit,
she turned round, her bonnet all crooked but 'her
face triumphant, an' took off a griddle of the stove
an' stirred up the coals. An' we see what was in
her mind.
" c We can take turns puttin' 'em in,' she says.
246 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" But I guess it was in all our minds what Mis'
Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss says, wistful :
" ( Don't you think/ she says, c or do you think,
it'd be wrongin' Mr. Pitlaw if we read over the
postmarks out loud first?'
" We divided up the bunches an' we set down
around an' untied the strings, an', turn in an' turn
out, we read the postmarks off. 'Most every one of
'em was foreign oh, I can't begin to tell you
where. It was all mixed up an' shinin' of names
we'd never heard of before, an' names we had heard
in sermons an' in the Bible Egypt an' Greece an'
Rome an' isles o' the sea. Mis' Toplady stopped
right in the middle o' hers.
" c Oh, I can't be sure I'm pronouncin' 'em right/
she says, huntin' for her handkerchief, c but I guess
you ladies get the/^/ o' the places, don't you ? '
" An' that was just it : we did. We got the feel
of them far places that night like we never could hev
hed it any other way. An' when we got all through,
Mis' Toplady spoke up again but this time it was
like she flew up a little way an' lit on somethin'.
" c It ain't likely/ she says, c that we'll ever, any
of us, hev a letter of our own from places like these.
We don't get many letters, an' what we do get come
from the same old towns, over an' over again, an'
quite near by. Do you know/ she says, c I believe
this Writin' here ' she held out the tiny fine writ-
POSTMARKS 247
ing that was like a woman with soft ways c would
understand if we each took one of her letters an*
glued it together here an' now an' carried it home
an' pasted it in our Bibles. She went travellin' off
to them places, an' she must have wanted to; an' she
would know what it is to want to go an' yet never
get there.'
" I think Mis' Amanda was right we all thought
so. An' we done what she mentioned, an' made our
choice o' postmarks. I know Mis' Amanda took
Cairo.
" ' 'Count of the name sort o' picturin' out a palm
tree a-growin' an' a-wavin' against a red sky,' she
says, when she was pinnin' her shawl clear up over
her hat to go out in the cold. c Think of it,' she
says ; c she might 'a' passed a palm the day she
wrote it. Ain't it like seein' 'em grow yourself? '
..." Mebbe it all wasn't quite regular," Calliope
added, " though we made over five dollars at the Ten
Cent Fete. But the minister, when we told him,
he seemed to think it was all right, an' he kep'
smilin', sweet an' deep, like we'd done more'n we
had done. An' I think he knew what we meant
when we said we was all feelin' nearer, lion an*
lamb, to them strange missionary countries. Be-
cause oh, well, sometimes, you know," Calliope
said, " they's things that makes you feel nearer to far-
away places that couldn't hev any postmark at all."
XV
PETER
LAST night in my room there was no sleeping,
because the moon was there. It is a south room,
and when the moon shines on the maple floor with
its white cotton rugs and is reflected from the smooth
white walls, to step within is like entering an open
flower. Who could sleep in an open flower? I
might sleep in a vast white petunia, because petunias
do not have as much to say to me as do some other
flowers. But in the bell of a lily, as in the bell of
the sky or in my moonlit room, I should wish my
thought to stay awake and be somebody. Be Some-
body. On these nights, it is as if one had a friend
in one's head conferring with one. And I think of
this comrade as Her, the Custodian of me, who
lives deep within and nearly comes outside to this
white porch of the moon.
I like to light my candle and watch its warm rays
mix with the blue-white beams from without. There
would have been a proper employment for a wizard:
248
PETER 249
to diffuse varying ^substantialities, such as these,
and to look within them, as within a pool a pool
free of its basin and enjoying the air. Yes, they
were an unimaginative race, wizards. When will
the era of white art come, with aesthetic witches and
wizards who know our modern magics of colour and
form and perception as a mere basis for their sorcer-
ies ? Instead of pottering with thick, slab gruel and
mediaeval newts' eyes, think what witches they will
be ! Sometimes I think that they are already
arriving. The New Lady told me the most delight-
ful thing about a Thought of hers that she saw . . .
but it was such an elusive thing to tell and so much
of it I had to guess, because words have not yet
caught up with fancies, that it is hard to write down.
Besides, perhaps you know. And if you did not
know, you would skip this part anyway. So I
merely mention that she mentioned the coming alive
of a thought of hers which helped her spirit to
grow, quite without her will. Very likely you under-
stand other wizardries. An excellent place to think
them out must be the line where candle rays meet
moonbeams, but there is no such discoverable line,
just as there is no discoverable line between the
seeing and the knowing, where the Custodian dwells.
... By all of which I am merely showing you what
the moon can do to one's head and that it is no
great wonder that one cannot sleep.
FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
"Ain't the moon kind of like a big, shinin' brain/'
Calliope said once, " an' moonlight nights it gets in
your head and thinks for you."
So last night when I went in my room I did not
try to sleep ; nor did I even light my candle. I
went straight to a window and opened it the one
without a screen. I would not live in a house that
did not have certain windows which one could open
to let in the moon, or the night, or the living out-of-
doors, with no screens to thwart their impulse.
Suppose that sometime Diana well, suppose what
you will that is sensible, no moon can shine through
a screen. Really, it cannot do its best through even
an open window. And this was why I gave up try-
ing to make it do so and went downstairs again
which is the earthly and rational of floating out into
that utter beauty as I wanted to float.
Of going out into such a night I would like to
write for a long time, as I would like to keep on
breathing lilies-of-the-valley and never have done.
I think, though, that " into " such a night is not the
word ; to go' out upon the night is the essential ex-
perience. For, like a June day, a moonlit night of
itself will not let us inside. We must know some
other way of entrance. And I suspect that some of
us never quite find the way I wonder if we are
missed ?
I stepped round the house to the open ocean of
PETER 251
light that broke on soft shores of leaf and line,
solemnizing, magnifying. It was like a glimpse
into something which, afterward and afterward, is
going to be. The defmiteness of its premonitory
message was startling. As when on seeing once
that something had happened on my birthday, 1 500,
I felt as if I had heard from a kind of twin-time,
so now I understood that this night was the birth-
day of far-off, immortal moments of my own, yet to
be lived ... so friendly near we are to the im-
measurable kindred.
And there, from the shadow of the flowering cur-
rant bush, which just now is out of flower and fallen
in meditative quiet a man arose. My sharp fear,
as savage a thing as if the world were ten thousand
years younger, or as if I were a ptarmigan and he a
cougar was only momentary. For the cougar
began to apologize and I recognized him.
"Why," I said, " Peter."
" Yes'm," said he, " I couldn't help being here
for a little while."
" Neither could I, Peter," I told him.
These were remarkable admissions of ours, for a
large part of evening in the village is an uninhabi-
table part of day and, no matter in what splendour
of sky it comes/is a thing to be shut outside ex-
perience. If we relate being wakened by something
that goes bang, we begin it, "In the middle of the
252 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
night, about twelve o'clock ; " and, " They have a
light in their house 'most every night till midnight,"
is a bit of sharp criticism not lightly to be lived down.
But now it was as if Peter were a part of the time
itself, and outlaw too, if the evening was outlaw.
" I'm glad I saw you," Peter said as if we were
here met by chance in the usual manner. " I
wanted to see you and tell you : I'm going away
to be gone right along."
" Why," I said again, " Peter ! "
" You'd go too," he said simply.
cc I should want to go," I told him, "but I doubt
if I would go. Where are you going ? "
" They want to put in a cannery at Marl. It'd
be a branch. I'd run it myself."
I did not miss the implication of the conditional
mood. And Marl. What wonderful names they
give to some of the towns of this world. That
word makes a picture all of white cornices and white
wings of buildings and bright fasades. I dare say
from the railroad track the real town of Marl shows
an unpainted livery barn and a blue barber shop,
but the name sounds like the name of a chapter of
travel, beginning : To-day we drove to Marl to see
the queen. Or the cataract. Or the porch of the
morning.
" Why are you going, Peter ? " I drove in the peg
for him.
PETER 253
" I guess you know," he said. " It's all Miggy
with me."
I knew that he wanted before all else to tell some-
body, to talk to somebody, to have somebody know.
"Tell me, Peter," I said.
And now Peter told me how things were with
him. If I should repeat what he said you would
be scornful, for it was so little. It was broken and
commonplace and set with repetition. It was halt-
ing and unfinished, like the unformed writing of a
boy. But in his words I felt the movings of life
and destiny and death more than I feel them when
I think about the rushing of the stars. He loved
her, and for him the world became a transparent
plane wherein his soul moved as simply as his body.
Here was not only a boy longing for a girl. Here
was not only a man, instinct with the eager hope of
establishing a home. Here was something not un-
like this very moon-washed area won from the il-
limitable void, this area where we stood and spoke
together, this little spot which alone was to us
articulate with form and line and night sounds. So
Peter, stumbling over his confession of love for
Miggy, was like the word uttered by destiny to ex-
plicate its principle. It mattered not at all what
the night said or what Peter said. Both were
celestial.
These moments when the soul presses close to
254 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
its windows are to be understood as many another
hint at the cosmic Dawn, May, the firmament,
.radio-activity, theistic evolution, a thousand manifes-
tations of the supernal. In this cry of enduring spirit
it was as if Peter had some intimacy with all that has
no boundaries. I hardly heard his stumbling words.
I listened to him down some long avenue of hearths
whose twinkling lights were like a corridor of stars.
And all this bright business was to be set at
naught because Miggy would have none of it.
" She seems to like me," Peter said miserably,
" but I guess she'd like me just as well if I wasn't
me. And if I was right down somebody else, I
guess she'd like me a good deal better. She don't
like my hands nor the way my hair sticks up at
the back. She thinks of all such things. I wouldn't
care if she said all her words crooked. I'd know
what she meant."
I knew the difference. To him she was Miggy.
To her he was an individual. He had never in her
eyes graduated from being a person to being him-
self.
" Calliope says," I told him, " that she likes
almond extract better than any other kind, but that
she hardly ever gets a bottle of almond with
which she does not find fault. She says it's the
same way with people one loves."
Peter smiled he is devoted to Calliope, who
PETER 255
alone in the village has been friendly with his father.
Friendly. The rest of the village has only been
kind.
" Well," he tried to put it, " but Miggy never
seems to be thinking of me as me y only when she's
finding fault with me. If she'd only think about
me, even a little, the way I think about her. If
she'd only miss me or want me or wonder how the
house would seem if we were married. But she
don't care she don't care."
" She says, you know," I ventured, " that she
can't ask you to support Little Child too."
" Can't she see," he cried, " that the little thing
only makes me love her more ? Don't she know
how I felt the other night when she let me help
her that way ? She must know. It's just an
excuse "
He broke off and his hands dropped.
"Then there's her other reason," he said, " I
guess you know that. I can't blame her for it.
But even with that, it kind of seems as if, if she
loved me "
" Yes," I said, " Peter, it does seem so."
And yet in my heart I am certain that the reason
is not at all that Miggy cannot love him I re-
member the woman-softening of her face that fore-
noon when she found the spirit of the old romances
in the village. I am not even certain that the reason
256 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
is that she does not love Peter now I remember
how tender and feminine she was the other night
with Peter and Little Child. I think it is only that
the cheap cynicism of the village which nobody
means even when it is said ! has taught her badly ;
and that Life has not yet touched her hand, has not
commanded " Look at me," has not bidden her
follow with us all.
I looked into the bright bowl of the night which
is alternately with one and against one in one's mood
of emprise ; the bright bowl of the night inverted as
if some mighty genii were shaking the stars about like
tea-leaves to fortune the future. What a pastime
that for a wizard !
"Oh, Peter," I said, cc //*one were a wizard!"
" I didn't understand," said Peter.
" How pleasant it would be to make folk love
folk," I put it.
He understood that. "Wouldn't it, though?"
he assented wistfully. So does everybody under-
stand. Wouldn't it, though ! Oh, don't you wish
you could?
In the silence which fell I kept on looking at those
starry tea-leaves until I protest that a thought awoke
in my mind as if it wanted to be somebody. Be
Somebody. It was as if it came alive, quite without
my will, so that almost I could see it. It was a
friend conferring in my head. Perhaps it was the
PETER 257
Custodian herself, come outside to that white porch
of the moon.
" Peter," I said, " I think I'm going to tell you a
story."
For I longed to make him patient with Miggy,
as men, who understand these things first, are not
always patient with women, who often and often
understand too late.
He listened to the story as I am setting it down
here the story of the New Village. But in it I
could say nothing of how, besides by these things
celestial, cosmic, I was touched by the simple, human
entreaty of the big, baffled man and that about his
hands and the way his hair sticks up at the back.
XVI
THE NEW VILLAGE
ONCE upon a time there was a village which might
have been called The-Way-Certain-Folk-Want-It-
Now. That, however, was not its name it had a
proper, map-sounding name. And there every one
went to and fro with a fervour and nimbleness which
proved him to be skilfully intent upon his own
welfare.
The village had simple buildings and white walls,
lanes and flowering things and the flow of pure
air. But the strange thing about the town was
that there each inhabitant lived alone. Every house
had but one inmate and he well content. He liked
everything that he owned and his taste was all-suffi-
cient and he took his pleasure in his own walls and
loved best his own ways. The day was spent in
lonely selling or lonely buying, each man pitted
against all others, and advantage and disadvantage
were never equal, but yet the transactions were
dreary, lacking the picturesqueness of unlicensed
spoliation. The only greeting which folk exchanged
258
THE NEW VILLAGE 259
in passing was, " Sir, what do you do for yourself? "
There were no assemblings of the people. The
town kept itself alive by accretion from without.
When one died another appeared and took his place
gladly, and also others arrived, like precept added to
precept and not like a true flowering. There were
no children. And the village common was over-
grown and breast-high with weeds. When the day
was done every one retired to his own garden and
saw his flowers blossoming for him and answering
to the stars which came and stood over his head.
There was in the town an epidemic of the intensive,
only the people thought of it as the normal, for
frequently epidemics are so regarded.
In one soul the contagion did not prevail. The
soul was the lad Matthew, whose body lived on the
town's only hill. When others sat at night in their
gardens Matthew was wont to go up an airy path
which he had made to the upper spaces and there
wander conjecturing about being alive. For this
was a detail which he never could take wholly for
granted, in the manner in which he had become
wonted to door-mats, napkin-rings, oatmeal, and
mirrors. Therefore he took his thought some way
nearer to the stars, and there he found so much
beauty that he longed to fashion it to something,
to create of it anew. And as he opened his heart
he began to understand that there is some one of
2 6o FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
whom he was the offspring. As he was compan-
ioned by this idea, more and more he longed for
things to come nearer. Once, in his walking a
hurrying bird brushed his face, grew confused,
fluttered at his breast, and as he would have closed
it in his hands he found that the bird was gone and
his hands were empty, but beneath them his own
heart fluttered and throbbed like a thing apart.
One night, so great was the abstraction of the
boy, that instead of taking the upper path he fared
down into the town. It was a curious way to do
to go walking in the town as if the thing were com-
mon property, but then the walls were very high
and the gates were fast closed and bound round
with creeping things, which grow very quickly.
Matthew longed to enter these gardens, and he
wondered who lived in the houses and what might
be in their hearts.
Amazingly, at the turn of a white wall, a gate was
opened and she who had opened it leaned into the
night as if she were looking for something. There
was a fluttering in the breast of Matthew so that he
looked down to see if the bird had come back. But
no bird was there. And it smote him that the
lady's beauty, and surely her goodness, were great
enough so that of them something might be created,
as he would fain have created marvels from the sky.
" I would like to make your beauty into some-
THE NEW VILLAGE 261
thing other," he said to her. " I cannot think whether
this would be a song or a picture or a vision."
She looked at him with as much pleasure as if he
had been an idea of her own.
"Tell me about my beauty," she bade him.
" What thing is that ? "
"Nay, that will take some while," Matthew said.
" If I do that, I must come in your garden."
Now, such a thing had never happened in the
town. And as this seemed why it never happened,
it seemed likely to go on never happening indefi-
nitely. But loneliness and the longing to create and
the conjecture about life have always been as potent
as battles ; and beauty and boredom and curiosity
have had something to do with history as well.
"Just this once, then," said the lady, and the
gate closed upon the two.
Here was a garden like Matthew's own, but in-
definitely atmosphered other. It spoke strangely
of a wonted presence, other than his own. In his
own garden he fitted as if the space for him were
niched in the air, and he went as a man accustomed
will go without thinking. But here he moved free,
making new niches. And whereas on his own
walks and plots he looked with lack-lustre eye as a
man looks on his own gas-jet or rain pipe, now
Matthew looked on all that he saw as on strange
flame and sweet waters. And it was not the shrubs
262 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
and flowers which most delighted him, but it was
rather on a garden bench the lady's hat and gloves
and scissors.
" How pleasing ! " said he, and stopped before
them.
" Do you find them so ? " asked the lady.
And when he told her about her beauty, which
was more difficult to do than he had imagined and
took a longer time, she said :
" There can be no other man in the world who
would speak as you speak/'
On which he swore that there was no man who
would not speak so, and likewise that no man
could mean one-half what he himself meant. And
he looked long at her house.
"In those rooms," he said, "you go about. I
wish that I could go about there."
But that frightened her a little.
" In there," he said, " are the lamps you light,
the plates you use, the brush that smooths your
hair. How strange that is."
" Does it seem strange ? " she asked.
" Sometime I will go there," said he, and with
that he thought that the bird once more was flutter-
ing at his breast. And again there was no bird.
When the time was come that he must leave her,
this seemed the most valiant thing to do that ever
he had done. It was inconceivable to accept that
THE NEW VILLAGE 263
though now she was with him, breathing, sentient,
yet in another moment he would be out alone in the
empty night. Alone. For the first time the word
became a sinister thing. It meant to be where she
was not.
" How is this to go on," he said, " I living where
you do not live ? "
But she said, " Such things have never been any
other way," and closed the gate upon him.
It is a mighty thing when one who has always
lived alone abruptly finds himself to have a double
sense. Here is his little box of ideas, neatly classi-
fied, ready for reference, which have always methodic-
ally bobbed out of their own will the moment they
were mentioned. Here are his own varieties of im-
pression ready to be laid like a pattern upon what-
ever presents itself to be cut out. Here are his
tastes, his sentiments, his beliefs, his longings, all
selected and labelled and established. And abruptly
ideas and impressions and tastes are thrown into rapt
disorder while he wonders what this other being
would think, and his sentiment glows like a lamp,
his belief embraces the world, his longing becomes
only that the other being's longing be cast in counter-
part. When he walks abroad, the other's step ac-
companies him, a little back, and invisible, but as
authentic as his own. When he thinks, his thought,
without his will, would share itself. All this is a
264 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
new way of consciousness. All this makes two uni-
verses where one universe had previously been com-
petent to support life.
Back on his hill Matthew went through his house
as if he were seeing it for the first time. There was
the garden that he had planted, and she was not
walking there. There was his window, and she was
not looking from it ; his table, and she was not sit-
ting beside it ; his book which he could not read
for wondering if she had read. All the tools of his
home, what could they not become if she touched
them ? The homely tasks of the cupboard, what joy
if she shared them ? But what to do ? He thought
that it might be something if they exchanged
houses, so that he could be where she had been,
could use what she had used, could think of her in
her setting. But yet this did not wholly delight
him, either.
And now his house stifled him, so that he rushed
out upon that airy path of his that he had made to
reach the upper spaces, and he fled along, learning
about being alive. Into the night he went, farther
than ever he had gone before, till the stars looked
nearer to him than houses commonly look, and
things to think about seemed there waiting for
him.
So it adventured that he came abruptly upon the
New Village. It lay upon the air as lightly as if
THE NEW VILLAGE 265
strong, fair hands were uniting to bear it up, and
it was not far from the stars and the clear places.
Before he understood its nearness, the night was, so
to say, endued with this village, and he entered upon
its lanes as upon light.
This was a town no larger than his own and no
more fortuned of Nature. Here were buildings
not too unlike, and white walls and flowering things
and the flow of pure air. But here was also the
touch of bells. And he saw that every one went to
and fro in a manner of quiet purpose that was like a
garment.
" Sir, what do you do for yourself? " he asked
courteously of one who was passing.
The citizen gave him greeting.
" I make bread for my family," said he, " and, it
may be, a dream or two."
Matthew tried hard to perceive, and could make
nothing of this.
" Your family," he said, " what thing is that ? "
The citizen looked at him narrowly.
" I see that you rebuke me," said he, gently ; cc but
I, too, labor for the community, so that the day
shall become a better day."
" Community," said Matthew. " Now I know
not at all what that may be, either."
Then the man understood that here was one who
would learn about these things, and in the New
266 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Village such a task is sacred and to be assumed on
the moment by any to whom the opportunity pre-
sents. So the man took Matthew with him.
" Come," he said, " this is the day when we meet
together."
" Together," said Matthew, and without knowing
why he liked what he felt when he said that.
They went first to the market-place, trodden of
many feet, and about it a fair green common planted
in gracious lines. Here Matthew found men in
shops that were built simply and like one another
in fashion, but with pleasant devices of difference,
and he found many selling together and many buy-
ing, and no one was being robbed.
" How can these things be ? " he asked. " Here
every man stands with the others."
" Inside of all things," the citizen answered, " you
will find that it is so written."
On the common many were assembled to name
certain projects and purposes: the following of
paths to still clearer spaces, the nurturing of certain
people, ways of cleanliness, purity of water, of milk,
wide places for play, the fashioning of labour so that
the shrines within be not foregone, the freeing of
fountains, the planting of green things.
" Why will all this be ? " asked Matthew. " For
these things a man does in his own garden or for
his own house, and no other interferes."
THE NEW VILLAGE 267
" Nay, but look deep within all things, Friend,"
the citizen said, " and you will never find it written
so."
" Friend," repeated Matthew, "friend . . ."
Then the citizen went to his own house, and
Matthew with him. The wall was no wall, but a
hedge, and the garden was very beautiful. And Id,
when they went in, there came tumbling along the
path little beings made in the image of the citizen
himself. And with them a woman of exceeding
beauty and power, which the little ones also bore.
As if the citizen had chosen her beauty and power
to make them into something other.
It was as it had been when the bird was fluttering
and beating at the boy's breast, but he did not even
heed.
"Tell me!" he cried. "These do they live
here with you ? Are they yours ? "
" We are one another's," said the citizen.
Matthew sat among them, and to pleasure him
they did many sweet tasks. They brought him to
eat and drink in the garden. The woman gave
quiet answers that had in them something living,
and alive, too, some while after she had spoken.
(" So she could answer," Matthew thought, " and
better, too, than that.") And the children brought
him a shell, a pretty stone, a broken watch, and a
little woolly lamb on three wheels, and the fourth
268 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
wheel missing. The lamb had a sound to make by
squeezing, and this sound Matthew made a great
many times, and every time the children laughed.
And when they did that Matthew could think of
nothing to say that seemed a thing to be said, but
he was inscrutably elated, and did the trick again.
And when he rose to take his leave:
" Is it for them that you make bread and a dream
or two ? " he asked.
He knew that he should always like to remember
the citizen's smile as he answered.
They stood at the opening of the hedge and folk
were going by.
" Are they not jealous of you ? " Matthew asked.
"They have families and bread and dreams of
their own," said the citizen. " Every house is filled
with them."
Matthew looked breathlessly along the street of
the New Village, and he saw men, as they went,
giving one another greeting : " Friend, is much ac-
complished ? " or, " Peace to you, Friend." And
they talked together, and entered gardens where
were those who came to meet them or who waited
within. They were a fine company, moving as
to some secret way of being, and as if they had all
looked deep within to see how it is written. And as he
watched, something in Matthew would have cried
out that he, too, was offspring of their Father, that
THE NEW VILLAGE 269
for all this had he too been created, and that for this
would he live, joying and passioning and toiling in
the common destiny. But when he spoke, all that
he could say was :
" Every man, then, may sit down now with a
lamb with three wheels and the fourth wheel
missing . . ."
On which he ceased for very shame. But the
citizen understood and smiled once more, and said
to him : " Come you here again, Brother."
With that word Matthew was off, down from the
clear upper spaces, to where, lonely on its hill, his
own house stood among its lonely neighbours. And
Matthew strode shouting down the deserted streets
and calling at every gate ; and, it being now day,
every one came forth to his lonely toil.
Matthew went and stood on the common
where the weeds were high, and so amazed were the
folk that they came about him, each suspecting the
other of secret connivance in this strange business.
For nothing had ever been done so.
" Men and brothers," cried Matthew, " it is not
so that it was meant. I pray you look deep within,
and see how the meaning was written. Is it that
you should live, each pitted against another, wound-
ing the other, advantaging himself? Join now each
his hand with that of a neighbour. His neighbour.
Make the thing of which, it seems, the world is made ;
270 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
a family. Let the thing come alive which is greater
than the family: the community. Oh, my com-
rades, let us work together for the coming of the
kingdom of God."
In the murmur that rose were the words which
have been spoken since time began :
"It is not so that it was done in the old time . . ."
" It is not seemly that we change . . ."
" If every one did this . . . but we cannot do it
alone."
" Have you thought what will become of our
business ? "
And again and yet again : " It is not so that it
was done in the old time."
And when the most would have none of it,
Matthew made his way sadly through the throng
of whom were many who smiled (kindly !) to
the edge of the common, where stood a woman,
trembling.
" Come," he said.
She went with him, and she with many little
frightened breaths, but he had no pity, for he read
deep within and saw that it was written that she
wanted none. When they reached her own house,
she would have entered.
cc Go we in here," she besought him, " I will show
you the rooms where I go about and the lamps that
I light."
THE NEW VILLAGE 271
" We are past all that now," said Matthew, gently,
" I will not go on living where you do not live."
He took her to his own house, through the gar-
den that he had planted. He made her look from
his window, sit by his table, open his books ; and he
bade her to a little task at the cupboard and laughed
for joy that she performed it.
" Oh, come away," he cried. " And now we will
go quickly to the New Village, that one which I
have found or another, where men know all this
happiness and more."
But she stood there by Matthew's cupboard and
shook her head.
" No," she said gravely, " here we will stay, you
and I, in your house. Here we will live and it
may be there is a handful of others who understand.
And here we will do what we can."
" But I must show you," Matthew cried, " the
way the others live the things they strive for:
the following of paths to clearer spaces, the free-
ing of shrines."
" All that," she said, " we will do here."
" But," he urged, " you must see how else they do
the shell, the pretty stone, the watch, the woolly
lamb on three wheels and one wheel missing. . . ."
"All that," she said, "is in my heart."
Matthew looked in her face and marvelled, for he
saw that beside her beauty there was her power, and
272 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
to that he bowed himself as to a far voice. And
again it was as when the bird was at his breast, but
now he knew what this would be.
So they live there in Matthew's house. And a
handful besides understand and toil for the fairer
order. And this will come ; and then that New
Village, in the clear upper spaces, will hang just
above every village nay, will come down to clothe
it like a garment.
When I had done,
" Peter," I said I nearly called him Matthew !
"these are the things that Miggy does not un-
derstand. And that she will understand."
He knew. He said nothing; but he knew how
it is written.
" Peter," I said, " I suppose Miggy will never
have been to your house ? "
I knew that she could not have been there.
" Some day soon," I said " before you go away
ask us to come there. I should like her to sit
by your table and look from your window."
For how can one be sure that divine non-inter-
ference is always divine ?
Peter drew his breath long.
"Would you?" he said; "would you? So
many times I've thought maybe that would make
her think of me as if I was me."
THE NEW VILLAGE 273
Yes, that might help. If only Miggy knew how
to shake hands as Elfa shook hands with Nicholas
Moor, that might help, too. How did it begin,
this pride of individualism in a race which does not
know its own destiny save as the great relation-
ships, human and divine, can reveal that destiny?
But Peter knows ! And the hope of the world is
that so many do know.
Since he said his grateful good night and rushed
away, I have been trying to readjust my impression
of Peter. For I can no longer think of him in
connection with Miggy and the cannery and my
neighbour's lawn and the village. Now he is a fig-
ure ranging the ample intervals of a field fraternal
to the night and to the day. Fraternal, too, to
any little moon-washed area, won from the void,
where it is easy to be in conference with the spirit
without and within. Truly, it is as if the meaning
of the universe were passioning for the comradeship
of hearts that can understand.
XVII
ADOPTION
THE big window of my sitting room is an isle of
sirens on whose shore many of my bird neighbours
are continually coming to grief. For, from without,
the window makes a place of soft skies and seductive
leaves where any bird might think to wing a way.
And in that mirrored deep there is that curious at-
mosphere which makes In-a-looking-glass a better
thing than the room which it reflects an elusive
sense which Little Child might call Isn't-any-such-
pl'aceness. I think that I might call it so too.
And so, evidently, the birds would call it, for they
are always trying to find there some path of flight.
A morning or two ago, when I heard against the
pane the soft thud of an eager little body, I hurried
out to see lying under the window an oriole. It
was too terrible that it should have been an oriole.
For days I had seen him hanging here and there,
back downward, on this limb and that, and heard
his full-throated note ringing from the innermost
air, so that the deeps of air could never again be
274
ADOPTION 275
wholly alien to me. And now he lay, his wings
outstretched, his eyes dim, his breast hardly mov-
ing. I watched him, hoping for the breath to begin
to flutter and labour. But though the great Nature
was with him, herself passioning in all the little
fibres to keep life pulsing on, yet her passion was
not enough ; and while I looked the little life went
out.
... I held the tiny body in my hand, and it
was almost as if the difference between living and
not living slipped through my fingers and was gone.
If only that one within me, who watches between
the seeing and the knowing, had been a little quicker,
I might almost have understood. . . .
" Them little things go out like a match," said
my neighbour.
She was standing on the other side of the box
hedge, and I caught a look on her face that I had
seen there once or twice before, so that my heart
had warmed to her ; and now, because of that
look, she fitted within the moment like the right
word.
" It don't seem like anybody could mean 'em to
die before their time," she said. " Ain't it almost as
if it happened when Everything somehow couldn't
help it?"
It was this, the tragedy of the Unfulfilled Inten-
tion, that was in my mind while I hollowed the
276 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
little grave under the hedge. And when we had
finished, my neighbour, who had stepped informally
over the box to help me, looked up with a return
of that fleeting expression which I had noted.
" I guess we've found one now for sure," she
said.
" Found one ? " I puzzled. .
" I thought you knew," she told me. " I thought
everybody knew we've been looking for one so
long. For a baby."
She never had told me and no one had told me,
but I loved her for thinking that all the world knew.
There are abroad a multitude of these sweet sus-
picions as well as the sad misgivings of the hunted.
She had simply let me know, that early morning in
the garden, her sorrow that there was " no little
thing runnin' round." And now she told me for
how long they had been trying to find one to adopt,
consciously serving no social need, but simply hun-
gering for a child whom they could " take to." It
was a story of fruitless visits to the homes in the
city, the news sent of this little waif or that, all
proving too old or of too sad an inheritance. To
me it would seem that the more tragic the inheri-
tance the more poignantly sounds the cry for foster-
folk. And this may be extreme, I know, but virtue,
I find, does not lie exclusively in the mean, either.
It lies partly in one's taste in extremes. However,
ADOPTION 277
this special extreme I find not generally believed in
as I believe in it ; and my neighbour, not sharing it,
had waited on with empty arms.
And now, after all the long hoping, she had
found a baby a baby who filled all the require-,
ments and more. First of all, he was a boy ;
second, he was of healthful Scotch parentage ; third,
he was six weeks old ; and, fondest I could see in
my neighbour's heart, he was good to look at.
When she told me this she produced, from beneath
her apron, a broken picture post-card. The baby
was lying on a white blanket spread on the grass,
and he was looking up with the intentness of some
little soul not yet embodied ; or as if, having been
born, some shadow-thing, left over from his source
of shadows, yet detained his attention. " William,"
it said beneath the picture.
" But I shall call him Kenneth," my neighbour
said; " I've always meant to. I don't want he should
be called after his father, being he isn't ours, you
might say. But he is ours," she added in a kind of
challenge. " He's going after him to-morrow to the
city " and now " he " meant her husband, in that
fine habit of use by these husbands and wives of the
two third persons singular to mean only each other,
in a splendid, ultimate, inevitable sense, authentic as
the " we " of a sovereign, no more to be mistaken.
" I'd go too," she added, " but we're adopting the
278 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
baby with the egg money we've saved it for years
for when the time come. And one fare to the city
and back is a lot of eggs. I thought I'd rather wait
for him here and have the ticket money to spend on
the clothes."
She was on her way, I thought I guessed, to carry
her good news to our friends in the village, for she
bore that same air which I have noted, of being im-
permanent and subject to flight. And as she left
me she turned to give me one of those rare compli-
ments which are priceless.
" You come over this afternoon," she said, " and
I'll show you what little things I've made."
I remember another compliment. It was when,
in town, a charming little woman, a woman all of
physical curves and mental tangents, had been tell-
ing a group of us about a gay day in a four-in-hand.
She had not looked at me because for that sort of
woman, as well as for others, I lack all that which
would make them take account of my presence;
but when in the four-in-hand she came to some
mention of the road where the accident had nearly
occurred (" Oh, it was a beautiful road," she said,
" the river on one side, and the highlands, and a
whole mob of trees,") she turned straight upon me
through her description as consistently as she had
neglected me when she described the elbow-bits of
the leaders and the boots of the woman on the box-
ADOPTION 279
seat. It may have been a chance, but I have always
hugged it to me.
My neighbour's house is small, and her little up-
stairs rooms are the half- story with sloping ceilings
and windows which extend from the floor to the top
of one's head. It gives me a curious sense of over-
familiarity with a window to be as tall as it is. I feel
that I have it at advantage and that I am using it
with undue intimacy. When I was a little girl I
used to creep under the dining-room table and sit
there, looking up, transfixed at the difference. A
new angle of material vision, the sight of the other
side of the shield, always gives me this pause. But
whereas this other aspect of things used to be
a delight, now, in life, I shrink a little from avail-
ing myself of certain revelations. I have a great
wish to know things, but I would know them
otherwise than by looking at their linings. I think
that even a window should be sanctioned in its
reticences.
Before a black walnut commode my neighbour
knelt that afternoon, and I found that it was filled
with the things which she had made for the baby,
when they should find him. These she showed to
me they were simple and none too fine, and she
had made them on her sewing-machine in the in-
tervals of her busy life. For three years she had
wrought at them, buying them from the egg money.
28o FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
I wondered if this secret pastime of garment-making
might not account for my impression of her that
she must always be off to engage in something
other. Perhaps it was this occupation, always call-
ing her, which would not let her appear fixed at
garden-watering or festival. I think that it may
be so of any who are " pressed in the spirit " to
serve, to witness to any truth: that is their voca-
tion and every other is an avocation, a calling away
from the real business of life. For this reason it is
my habit to think of the social workers in any divi-
sion of the service, family or town or state or
church, as Vocationists. It is they who are follow-
ing the one great occupation. The rest of us are
avocationists. In my neighbour I perceived one
of the great comrade company of the Vocationists,
unconscious of her banner, but because of some
sweet, secret piping, following, following . . .
" I've always thought I'd get to do a little em-
broidering on a yoke or two," she said, " but so far
I couldn't. Anyway I thought I could do the plain
part and running the machine before he came. The
other I could sit by the crib and do. Embroidery
seems sort o' baby-watchin' work, don't it ? "
When I left her I walked across the lawns to my
home in a sense of security and peace. With
increasing thousands consciously striving and pas-
sioning to help, and thousands helping because of
ADOPTION 281
the unconscious spirit within them, are there not
many windows in the walls ?
" He " was to go by the Accommodation early next
morning to bring home the baby. Therefore when,
just before seven o'clock, I observed my neighbour's
husband leave his home and join Peter at his gate as
usual, I went at once to see if something was amiss.
My neighbour was having breakfast as her custom
was " after the men-folks were out of the way."
At all events she was pretending to eat. I saw in
her eyes that something was troubling her, but she
greeted me cheerfully. I sat by the sewing-machine
while she went on with her pretence at breakfast.
" The little thing's sick," she said. " Last night
we got the despatch. c Baby in hospital for day or
two. Will advise often/ it had in it. I'm glad
they put that in. I'll feel better to know they'll
get good advice."
I sat with her for a long time, regardless of my
work or that Miggy was waiting for me. I was
struck by the charm of matter-of-fact hopefulness
in my neighbour, not the deliberate forcing of hope,
but the simple expectation that nothing tragic would
occur. But for all that she ate no breakfast, and I
knew well the faint, quite physical sickness that she
must have endured since the message came.
"I'm going to get his basket ready to-day," she
said. " I never did that, two reasons. One was, it
282 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
seemed sort of taking too much for granted, like
heating your spider before the meat wagon drives
up. The other reason was I needed the basket for
the clothes."
I stayed with her while she made ready the
clothes-basket, lining it with an old muslin curtain,
filling it with pillows, covering it with the afghan
from the parlour couch. Then, in a shoe box
edged with the curtain's broad ruffle, she put an
array of little things : the brush from the spare-
room bureau, the pincushion from her own work-
basket, a sachet bag that had come with a last
year's Christmas gift, a cake of " nice soap " which
she had kept for years and never unwrapped be-
cause it was so expensive. And then she added a
little glass-stoppered bottle of white pills.
" I don't know what they're for," she said. " I
found them when I housecleaned, and there was so
many of 'em I hated to throw 'em away. Of
course I'll never use J em, but they look sort of nice
in there so white and a glass cork don't you
think so ? "
She walked with me across the lawn and stood
brooding, one hand across her mouth, looking down
at the disturbance so slight ! in the grass
where we had laid the bird. And on her face was
the look which, each time that I saw it there, drew
me nearer to her.
ADOPTION 283
" 'Seems as if I'd ought to be there to the hospi-
tal," she said, " doing what I can. Do you s'pose
they'll take good care of him ? I guess they know
more about it than I do. But if I could get hold
of him in my arms it seems as if I could help 'em."
I said what I could, and she went away to her
house. And for the first time since I had known
her she did not seem put upon to be back at some
employment. These times of unwonted idleness
are terrible to witness. I remember a farmer whom
I once saw in the afternoon, dressed in his best,
waiting in the kitchen for the hour of his daughter's
wedding, and I wondered that the great hands did
not work of their own will. The lost aspect of cer-
tain men on holidays, the awful inactivity of the day
of a funeral, the sad idleness of old age, all these are
very near to the tragedy of negation. Work, the
positive, the normal, the joyous, is like an added
way of being. I thought that I would never again
marvel at my neighbour for being always on the
edge of flight to some pressing occupation. Why
should she not be so ? with all that there is to be
done. Whether we rush about, or conceal the need
and rush secretly, is a detail of our breeding ; the
need is to get things done, to become by doing.
And while for myself I would prefer the accom-
plishment of not seeming to hurry, as another is
accomplished at the harp, yet I own that I would
284 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
cheerfully forego the pretty grace rather than find
myself without some slight degree of the robust
proficiency of getting things done.
" If you're born a picture in a book/' Calliope
once said, " it's all very well to set still on the page
an' hold your hands. But if you're born anyways
human at all, stick up your head an' start out for
somewhere."
My neighbour rarely comes to my house. And
therefore, though she is to me so familiar a figure in
her garden, when next morning I found her await-
ing me in my sitting room, she seemed strange to
me. Perhaps, too, she was really strange to me that
day.
" My baby died," she said.
She stood there looking at me, and I knew that
what she said was true, but it seemed to me for a
moment that I could not have it so.
" He died yesterday in the evening," she told me.
" I just heard this morning, when the telegraph office
opened. I dressed myself to go after him, but he s
gone."
" To go after him? " I repeated.
She nodded.
"He was in the charity part. I was afraid they'd
bury him in the potter's field and they wouldn't mark
it, and that I couldn't never tell which one it was.
So I want to get him and have him buried here.
ADOPTION 285
He didn't want I should go he thought it'd be too
much for me. But I was bound to, so he says he'd
go. They'd ought to get here on the Five o'Clock
this afternoon. Oh, if I'd went yesterday, do you
think it would 'a' been any different?"
There I could comfort her. I did not think it
would have been different. But when I tried to tell
her how much better it was this way than that the
baby should first have come to her and then have
sickened, she would have none of it.
" I've never held him once," she said. " Do you
s'pose anything could be worse than that? I'd
rather have got hold of him once, no matter what."
It touched me unutterably, the grief of this mother
who was no mother. I had no knowledge what to
say to her. But I think that what she wanted most
was companionship. She went to one and another
and another of our neighbours to whom she had
shown so happily the broken post-card picture, and
to them in the same way she took the news :
" My baby died."
And I was amazed to find how in this little time,
the tentacles of her heart having fastened and clung,
she had made for herself, without ever having seen
the child, little things to tell about him : His eyes
were so bright; the sun was shining and the picture
was made out-of-doors, yet the eyes were opened
wide. They were blue eyes had she told us?
286 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Had we noticed the hands in the picture? And the
head was a beautiful shape. . . . All this seemed
to me marvellous. For I saw that no woman ever
mourns for any child dumbly, as a bird mourns a
fledgling, but even if she never sees it, she will yet
contrive some little tender ways to give it person-
ality and to cherish it.
They did their best to comfort her, the women of
the village. But many of them had lost little chil-
dren of their own, and these women could not regard
her loss as at all akin to theirs. I think that this my
neighbour felt ; and perhaps she dimly felt that to me
her grief, hardly less than theirs, brimmed with the
tragic disaster of the unfulfilled and bore, besides, its
own peculiar bitterness. In any case I was of those
who, that afternoon, went out to the cemetery to
await the coming of my neighbour and " him " and
their little burden. Calliope was there, and Mis*
Amanda Toplady and Miggy ; and when it was time
to go Little Child was with me, so she went too.
For I am not of those who keep from children
familiarity with death. Familiarity with the ways
of death I would spare them, but not the basic
things, primal as day.
" I don't want to give a real funeral,"my neighbour
had said. "I just want the few that I tell to happen
out there to the cemetery, along about five. And
then we'll come with him. It seems as if it'll hurt less
ADOPTION 287
that way. I couldn't bear to see a whole line driv-
ing along, and me look back and know who it was
for."
The cemetery had the dignity and serenity of a
meadow, a meadow still somewhat amazed that it
had been for a while distracted from its ancient uses,
but, after all, perceiving no permanent difference in
its function. I am never weary of walking down
these grassy streets and of recounting their strange-
nesses. As that of the headstone of David Bib-
ber's wives, one stone extending across the heads of
the two graves and at either end of the stone two
Gothic peaks from whose inner slopes reach two
marble hands, clasped midway, and,
SACRED TO THE WIVES OF DAVID BIBBER
inscribed below, the wifely names not appearing in
the epitaph. And that of Mark Sturgis who, the
village said, had had the good luck to marry two
women named Dora ; so he had erected a low monu-
ment to " Dora, Beloved Wife of Mark Sturgis,
Jr." ("But how mixin'it must be to the ghosts!"
Calliope said.) And of the young girl of a former
Friendship family of wealth, a girl who sleeps beneath
a monument on which stands a great figure of a
young woman in a white marble dress made with
three flounces. (" Honest," Calliope had put it,
288 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
"you can't hardly tell whether it's a tomb or a valen-
tine/')
But these have for me an interest less of the
bizarre than of the human, and nothing that is human
was alien to that hour.
We waited for them by the new little grave, the
disturbance so slight ! in the earth where we
would lay the stranger baby. Our hands were rilled
with garden flowers Calliope had drawn a little
hand cart laden with ferns and sweet-brier, and my
dear Mis' Amanda Toplady had cut all the half-
blown buds from her loved tea rose.
" It seems like a little baby wasn't real dead that
I hadn't helped lay out," said that great Mis' Amanda,
trying to find her handkerchief. " Oh, I wish't it was
alive. It seems like such a little bit of comin' alive
to ask the Lord ! "
And as the afternoon shadows drew about us
with fostering arms,
" Out-Here knows we feel bad more than Down
Town, don't it ? " said Little Child.
I have always thought very beautiful that village
custom of which I have before spoken, which pro-
vides that the father and mother of a little baby who
dies may take it with them in a closed carriage to the
grave. It was so that my neighbour and her hus-
band brought their baby to the cemetery from the
station, with the little coffin on their knees.
ADOPTION 289
On the box beside the driver Peter was riding.
We learned afterward that he had appeared at the
station and had himself taken that little coffin from
the car. "So then it didn't have to be on the truck
at all/' my neighbour noted thankfully when she told
me. I think that it must be this living with only a
street or two between folk and the open country
which gives these unconscious sharpenings of sensi-
bility often, otherwhere, bred only by old niceties of
habit.
So little Kenneth was buried, who never had the
name save in unreality ; whom my neighbour had
never tended ; who lived for her only in dream and
on that broken post-card and here in the hidden
dust. It made her grief so sad a thing that her
arms did not miss him ; nor had he slipped from
any usage of the day ; nor was any link broken
with the past ; only the plans that had hung in air
had gone out, like flames which had kindled noth-
ing. Because of this she sorrowed from within
some closed place at which her husband could only
guess, who stood patiently without in his .embar-
rassed concern, his clumsy anxiety to do what
there was to be done, his wondering distress at his
wife's drooping grief. But her sorrow was rooted
in the love of women for the " little young thing,
runnin' round," for which she had long passioned.
" Oh, God, who lived in the spirit of the little
290 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
Lord Jesus, live Thou in this child's spirit, and it
in Thee, world without end," Doctor June prayed.
And Little Child whispered to me and then went to
let fall a pink in the grave. " So if the flower gets
to be an angel flower, then they can go round to-
gether," she explained.
When I looked up there were in the west the
first faint heraldings of rose. And against it stood
Miggy and Peter, side by side, looking down this
new way of each other's lives which took account
of sorrow. He said something to her, and she
nodded, and gave him her white hollyhocks to lay
with the rest. And as they turned away together
Little Child whispered to me, pulling herself, by
my arm, to high tiptoe :
" That little child we put in the sunset/' she said,
nodding to the west, "it's there now. It's there
now ! "
Perhaps it was that my heart was filled with the
tragedy of the unfulfilled intention, perhaps it was
that I thought that Little Child's whispering was
true. In any case I hastened my steps, and as we
passed out on the road I overtook Miggy and Peter.
" Peter," said I, " may Miggy and I come to pay
you that visit now, on the way back ? "
Miggy looked startled.
" It's supper time," she objected.
Who are we that we should interrupt a sunset, or
ADOPTION 291
a situation, or the stars in their courses, merely to
sup ? Neither Miggy nor I belong to those who
do so. Besides, we had to pass Peter's very door.
I said so, and all the time Peter's face was glowing.
" Hurry on ahead," I bade him, " and Miggy and
Little Child and I will come in your house to call."
He looked at me gratefully, and waited for good
night to my neighbour, and went swiftly away down
the road toward the sunset.
" Oh, goody grand, goody grand," Little Child
went on softly, in an invocation of her own to some
secret divinity of her pleasure. " Oh, that little
child we put there, it's talkin' to the sky, an' I guess
that makes sunset be ! "
My neighbour was looking back across the tran-
quil meadow which might have been deep with sum-
mer hay instead of mounded to its sad harvest.
" I wish," she said, " I could have had his little
grave in my garden, same as you would a bird.
Still I s'pose a cemet'ry is a cemet'ry and had ought
to be buried in. But oh, I can't tell you how glad
I am to have him here in Friendship Village. It's
better to think about, ain't it ? "
But the thing that gripped my heart was to see
her, beside her husband, go down the road and not
hurry. All that bustling impermanence was fallen
from her. I think that now I am becoming thank-
ful for every one who goes busily quickening the day
292 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
with a multitude, yes, even with a confusion, of
homely, cheerful tasks.
Miggy slipped her hand within my arm.
" Did you think of it? " she said. " IVe been, all
the time. It's most the same with her as it would
be to me if I'd lost her. You know . . . that little
Margaret. I mean, if she should never be/'
As when one hears the note of an oriole ringing
from the innermost air, so now it seems to me that
after these things the deeps of air can never again be
wholly alien to me.
XVIII
AT PETER'S HOUSE
I WONDERED somewhat that Peter did not come
out of his house to fetch us. He was not even about
the little yard when we went up the walk, though he
knew that we must arrive but a few moments after he
did. Little Child ran away to pick Bouncing Bet
and Sweet Clover in the long, rank grass of the un-
kept garden. And Miggy and I went and stood on
the porch before Peter's door, and I knew what I
intended.
" Rap ! " I said to Miggy.
She looked at me in surprise I have not often
commanded her like that. But I wanted to see her
stand at Peter's door asking for admission. And I
think that Peter had wanted it too and that this
was why he had not come to the gate to fetch us.
I guessed it by the light on his face when, in the
middle of Miggy's knock, he caught open the door.
I like to remember his face as it looked at that
moment, with the little twist of mouth and lifting
of brow which gave him a peculiar sweetness and
293
294 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
naivete, curiously contradicted by the way his eyes
were when they met Miggy's.
" How long it took you," he said. " Come in.
Come in."
We went in, and I looked at Miggy. For I did
not want her to step in that house as she would have
stepped in a house that was just a house. Is it not
wonderful how some front doors are Front Doors
Plus ? I do not know plus what that is one of
those good little in-between things which we know
without always naming. But there are some front
doors which are to me boards and glass and a tinkling
cymbal bell ; while other doors of no better archi-
tecture let me within dear depths of homes which
are to houses what friends are to inhabitants. It
was so that I would have had Miggy go within
Peter's house, not as within doors, but as within
arms.
We entered directly from the porch into the
small parlour the kind of man's parlour that
makes a woman long to take it on her lap and tend
it. There were no curtains. Between the windows
was a big table filled with neat piles of newspapers
and weeklies till there should be time to look them
over. The shelf had a lamp, not filled, a clock,
not going, and a pile of seed catalogues. On two
walls were three calendars with big hollyhocks and
puppies and ladies in sunbonnets. The entire inner
AT PETER'S HOUSE 295
wall was occupied by a map of the state why does
a man so cherish a map of something, hung up
somewhere ? On the organ -was a row of blue
books what is it that men are always looking
for in blue books ? In a corner, on the floor, stood
a shotgun. The wood stove had been "left up" all
summer to save putting it up in the fall this
business of getting a stove on rollers and jacking
it up and remembering where it stood so that the
pipe will fit means, in the village, a day of annual
masculine sacrifice to the feminine foolishness of
wanting stoves down in summer. There was noth-
ing disorderly about the room ; but it was dressed
with no sash or hair ribbon or coral beads, as a man
dresses his little girl.
" We don't use this room much," Peter said.
" We sit in here sometimes in summer, but I think
when a man sits in his parlour he always feels like
he was being buried from it, same as they're used
for."
"Why " said Miggy, and stopped. What
she was going to say it was not important to know,
but I was glad that she had been going to say it.
Something, perhaps, about this being a very pretty
room if there were somebody to give it a touch or
two.
Peter was obviously eager to be in the next room,
and that, he explained, would have been the dining
296 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
room, only he had taken it for his own, and they
ate in the kitchen. I think that I had never heard
him mention his father at all, and this " we " of his
now was a lonelier thing than any lonely " I."
" This is my room," he said as we entered it.
" It's where I live when I'm not at the works.
Come and let me show you."
So Peter showed Miggy his room, and he showed
it to me, too, though I do not think that he was
conscious of that. It was a big room, bare of floor
and, save for the inescapable flowery calendar, bare
of walls. There was a shelf of books not many,
but according to Peter's nature sufficiently well-se-
lected to plead for him : " Look at us. Who could
love us and not be worth while ?" bad enough logic,
in all conscience, to please any lover. Miggy hardly
looked at the books. She so exasperatingly took it
for granted that a man must be everything in general
that it left hardly anything for him to be in particu-
lar. But Peter made her look, and he let me look
too, and I supplied the comments and Miggy occa-
sionally did her three little nods. The writing table
Peter had made from a box, and by this Miggy was
equally untouched. All men, it appeared, should be
able to make writing tables from boxes. With the
linen table cover it was a little different this Peter's
mother had once worked in cross-stitch for his room,
and Miggy lifted an end and looked at it.
AT PETER'S HOUSE 297
" She took all those stitches for you ! " she said.
" There's one broken," she showed him.
" I can mend that," Peter said proudly, " I'll show
you my needle kit."
At this she laughed out suddenly with, " Needle
kit! What a real regular old bachelor you are,
aren't you ? "
"I can't help that," said Peter, with "and the
same cannot be said for you " sticking from the
sentence.
On the table lay the cannery account books, and
one was open at a full page of weary little figures.
"Is this where you sit nights and do your work
and read ? " Miggy demanded.
" Right here," Peter told her, " every night of
the year, 'most. Except when I come to see you."
Miggy stood looking at the table and the wooden
chair.
" That's funny," she remarked finally, with an
air of meditative surprise ; " they know you so much
better than I do, don't they ? "
" Well," Peter said gravely, " they haven't been
thought about as much as you have, Miggy that's
one thing."
" Thinking's nothing," said Miggy, merrily ;
"sometimes you get a tune in your head and you
can't get it out."
" Sit down at the table," said Peter, abruptly.
298 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" Sit down ! " he repeated, when her look questioned
him. " I want to see you there."
She obeyed him, laughing a little, and quite in the
woman's way of pretending that obedience is a
choice. Peter looked at her. It is true that he
had been doing nothing else all the while, but now
that she sat at the table his table he looked
more than before.
" Well," he said, " well, well." As a man says
when he has a present and has no idea what to say
about it.
Peter's photographs were on the wall above the
table, and Peter suddenly leaned past Miggy and
took down the picture of his mother and put it in
her hand, without saying anything. For the first
time Miggy met his eyes.
" Your mother," she said, " why, Peter. She
looked oh, Peter, she looked like you ! "
Peter nodded. " Yes, I do look like she did,"
he said ; " I'm always so glad."
" She knew you when you were a little bit of a
baby, Peter," Miggy advanced suddenly.
Peter admitted it gravely. She had.
" Well," said Miggy, as Peter had said it. " Well."
There was a picture of Peter's father as a young
man, black, curly-haired, black-moustached, the
cheeks slightly tinted in the picture, his hands laid
trimly along his knees. The face was weak, empty,
AT PETER'S HOUSE 299
but it held that mere confidence of youth which al-
ways gives a special sting to the grief of unfulfil-
ment. Over this they passed, saying nothing. It
struck me that in the delicacy of that silence it was
almost as if Miggy shared something with Peter.
Also, it struck me pleasantly that Miggy's indiffer-
ence to the personalities of divers aunts in straight
bangs and long basques was slightly exaggerated,
especially when, " I never thought about your hav-
ing any aunts," she observed.
And then Peter took down a tiny picture of the
sort we call in the village " card size," and gave it to
her.
" Guess who," he said.
It was a little boy of not more than five, in a
straight black coat dress, buttoned in the front and
trimmed with broad black velvet strips, and having
a white scalloped collar and white cuffs. One hand
was resting on the back of a camp-chair and the
other held a black helmet cap. The shoes had
double rows of buttons, and for some secret reason
the photographer had had the child laboriously cross
one foot negligently over the other. The fine head,
light-curled, was resting in the horns of that ex-device
that steadied one out of all semblance to self. But
in spite of the man who had made the picture, the
little boy was so wholly adorable that you wanted
to say so.
300 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" Peter ! " Miggy said, " It's you"
I do not know how she knew. I think that I
would not have known. But Miggy knew, and her
knowing made me understand something which evi-
dently she herself did not understand. For she
looked at the picture and looked at it, a strange,
surprised smile on her face. And,
" Well, well, well" she said again. " I never
thought about that before. I mean about you.
Then." .
" Would would you want that picture, Miggy ? "
Peter asked ; " you can have it if you do."
"Can I really?" said Miggy. "Well, I do
want it. Goodness . . ."
" I always kind of thought," Peter said slowly,
" that when I have a son he'll look something like
that. He might, you know."
Peter was leaning beside her, elbows on the table,
and Miggy looked up at him over the picture of the
childj and made her three little nods.
" Yes," she said, " you would want your little boy
to look like you."
" And I'd want him named Peter. It's a homely
old name, but I'd want him to have it."
" Peter isn't a homely name," said Miggy, in a
manner of surprise. " Yes, of course you'd want
him "
The sentence fell between them unfinished. And
AT PETER'S HOUSE 301
I thought that Miggy's face, still somewhat saddened
by the little Kenneth and now tender with its look
for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing
of colour. But then I saw that this would be the
light of the sunset on her cheeks, for now the West
was become a glory of rose and yellow, so that it
held captive her eyes. It is too frail a thing for me
to have grasped by sense, but the Moment seemed
to say and could give no reason that our sunset
compact Miggy kept then without remembering the
compact.
It almost startled me when out in the unkept
garden Little Child began to sing. We had nearly
forgotten her and we could not see her, so that
she might have been any other little child wander-
ing in the sweet clover, or merely a little voice com-
ing in with the western light :
"I like to stand in this great air
And see the sun go down.
It shows me a bright veil to wear
And such a pretty gown.
Oh, I can see a playmate there
Far up in Splendour Town ! "
" Look here," said Peter to Miggy ; and I went
over to the sunset window and let them go on alone.
He led her about the room, and she still had the
little picture in her hand. From the bureau, with
its small array of cheap brushes and boxes, she
302 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
turned abruptly away. I think that she may have
felt as I felt about the splash of rose on the rose-
breasted grosbeak's throat that I ought not to have
been looking. Beyond was a little old dry-goods box
for odds and ends, a box which must have known, with
a kind of feminine intelligence, that it ought to be
covered with cretonne. On this box Miggy knelt
to read Peter's high school diploma, and she stopped
before a picture of the house where he was born.
"Was it there?" she asked. "Doesn't that seem
funny?" Which manifestly it did not seem. ^ Is
that where your violin lives ?" she asked, when they
came to its corner surely a way of betrayal that
she had thought of it as living somewhere else.
And all the while she carried the picture in her
hand, and the sunset glorified the room, and Little
Child was singing in the garden.
" Peter," said Miggy, "I don't believe a man who
can play the violin can sew. Give me the needle
kit. I'm going to mend the table cover may I ?"
Might she ! Peter, his face shining, brought out
his red flannel needle-book he kept it on the
shelf with his shaving things ! and, his face shin-
ing more, sat on a creaking camp-chair and watched
her.
" Miggy," he said, as she caught the threads skil-
fully together, " I don't believe I've ever seen you
sew. I know I never have."
AT PETER'S HOUSE 303
" This isn't sewing," Miggy said.
" It's near enough like it to suit me," said Peter.
He drew a breath long, and looked about him. I
knew how he was seeing the bare room, lamp-lighted,
and himself trying to work in spite of the longing
that teased and possessed him and bade him give it
up and lean back and think of her ; or of tossing on
the hard couch in the tyranny of living his last hour
with her and of living, too, the hours that might
never be. And here she was in this room his
room. Peter dropped his head on his hand and
his eyes did not leave her face save to venture an
occasional swift, ecstatic excursion to her fingers.
Simply and all quietly, as Nature sends her gifts,
miracles moved toward completion while Miggy
sewed. The impulse to do for him this trifling ser-
vice was like a signal, and when she took up the
needle for him I think that women whose hands had
long lain quiet stirred within her blood. As for
Peter but these little housewifely things which
enlighten a woman merely tease a man, who already
knows their import and longs for all sweet fragments
of time to be merged in the long possession.
Miggy gave the needle back to Peter and he
took it needle, red book, and hand.
" Miggy ! " he said, and the name on his lips was
like another name. And it was as if she were in
some place remote and he were calling her.
304 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
She looked at him as if she knew the call. Since
the world began, only for one reason does a man
call a woman like that.
"What is it you want?" she said and her
voice was very sweet and very tired.
" I want more of you I " said Peter Gary.
She may have tried to say something, but her
voice trembled away.
" I thought it would be everything your com-
ing here to-day," Peter said. " I've wanted it and
wanted it. And what does it amount to ? Noth-
ing, except to make me wild with wanting you never
to go away. I dread to think of your leaving me
here shutting the door and being gone. If it
was just plain wanting you I could meet that, and
beat it, like I do the things down to the works.
But it isn't that. It's like it was something big
bigger than me, and outside of me, and it gets hold
of me, and it's like it asked for you without my
knowing. I can't do anything that you aren't
some of it. It isn't fair, Miggy. I want more
of you all of you all the time, Miggy, all
the time. . . ."
I should have liked to see Miggy's face when she
looked at Peter, whose eyes were giving her every-
thing and were asking everything of her; but I was
studying the sunset, glory upon glory, to match the
glory here. And the singing of Little Child began
AT PETER'S HOUSE 305
again, like that of a little voice vagrant in the red
west. . . .
"Oh, I can see a playmate there,
Far up in Splendour Town ! ' *
Miggy heard her, and remembered.
" Peter, Peter ! " she cried, " I couldn't I never
could bring us two on you to support."
Peter gave her hands a little shake, as if he would
have shaken her. I think that he would have
shaken her if it had been two or three thousand
years earlier in the world's history.
" You two ! " he cried ; " why, Miggy, when we
marry do I want or do you want that it should
stay just you and me ? We want children. I want
you for their mother as much as I want you for my
wife."
It was the voice of the paramount, compelling
spirit, the sovereign voice of the Family, calling
through the wilderness. Peter knew, this fine, vital
boy seeking his own happiness ; he gropingly under-
stood this mighty thing, and he was trying his best
to serve it. And, without knowing that she knew,
Miggy knew too . . . and the seal that she knew
was in what was in the sunset. And as far removed
from these things as the sunset itself was all Miggy's
cheap cynicism about love and all the triviality of her
criticism of Peter.
Miggy stood motionless, looking at Peter. And
306 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
then, like an evil spell which began to work, another
presence was in the room. ...
Somewhile before I had begun to hear the sound,
as a faint undercurrent to consciousness ; an unim-
portant, unpleasant, insisting sound that somehow
interfered. Gradually it had come nearer and had
interfered more and had mingled harshly with the
tender treble of Little Child. Now, from Peter's
gate the sound besieged my ears and entered the
room and explained itself to us all
" My Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I never know,
You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh "
the " oh " prolonged, undulatory, exploring the
air. . . .
I knew what it was, and they knew. At the
sound of his father's voice, drunken, piteous, Peter
dropped Miggy's hands and his head went down
and he stood silent, like a smitten thing. My own
heart sank, for I knew what Miggy had felt, and I
thought I knew what she would feel now. So here
was another unfulfilled intention, another plan gone
astray in an unperfected order.
Peter had turned somewhat away before he spoke.
" I'll have to go now," he said quietly, " I guess
you'll excuse me."
He went toward the kitchen door ashamed, mis-
erable, all the brightness and vitality gone from
AT PETER'S HOUSE 307
him. I am sorry that he did not see Miggy's face
when she lifted it. I saw it, and I could have sung
as I looked. Not for Peter or for Miggy, but for
the sake of something greater than they, something
that touched her hand, commanded " Look at me,"
bade her follow with us all.
Before Peter reached the door she overtook
him, stood before him, put her hands together
for a moment, and then laid one swiftly on his
cheek.
"Peter," she said, "that don't make any differ-
ence. That don't make any difference."
No doubt he understood her words, but I think
what he understood best was her hand on his cheek.
He caught her shoulders and looked and looked. . . .
"Honest honest, don't it?" he searched her.
You would not have said that her answer to that
was wholly direct. She only let fall her hand
from his cheek to his shoulder, and,
" Peter," she said, "is it like this? "
" Yes," he said simply, " it's like this."
And then what she said was ever so slightly muf-
fled, as if at last she had dropped her head in that
sweet confusion which she had never seemed to
know ; as if at last she was looking at Peter as if he
was Peter.
"Then I don't ever want to be any place where
you aren't," she told him.
3o8 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" Miggy ! " Peter cried, " take care what you say.
Remember he'd live with us."
She made her three little nods.
" So he will," she answered, " so he will. He
and my little sister and all of us."
Peter's answer was a shout.
"Say it out ! " he cried, " say you will. Miggy !
I've got to hear you say it out ! "
" Peter, Peter," she said, " I want to marry you."
He took her in his arms and in the room was the
glory upon glory of the west, a thing of wings and
doors ajar. And strong as the light, there prevailed
about them the soul of the Family, that distributes
burdens, shares responsibilities, accepts what is and
what is to come. Its voice was in the voice of Little
Child singing in the garden, and of old Gary babbling
at the gate. Its heart was the need of Peter and
Miggy, each for the other. I saw in their faces
the fine freedoms of the sunset, that sunset where
Miggy and Little Child and I had agreed that a
certain spirit lives. And it did but tally with the
momentous utterance of these things and of the
evening when Miggy spoke again.
"Go now you go to him," she said, "we'll
wait. And Peter when you come back, I want
to see everything in the room again."
XIX
THE CUSTODIAN
WHEN the river is low, a broad, flat stone lying a
little way from shore at the foot of our lawn becomes
an instrument of music. In the day it plays now a
rhapsody of sun, now a nocturne of cloud, now the
last concerto, Opus Eternal. In the night it becomes
a little friendly murmur, a cradle song, slumber
spell, neighbour to the Dark, the alien Dark who
very likely grows lonely, being the silent sister,
whereas the Light goes on blithely companioned of
us all. But if I were the Dark and owned the
stars, and the potion which quickens conscience, and
the sense of the great Spirit brooding, brooding, I
do not know that I would exchange and be the
Light. Still, the Light has rainbows and toil and
the sun and laughter. . . . After all, it is best to
be a human being and to have both Light and Dark-
ness for one's own. And it is concerning this con-
clusion that the river plays on its instrument of
music, this shallow river
" to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals."
309
3 io FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
I have heard our bank cat-birds in the willows
sing madrigals to the stone-music until I wanted to
be one of them cat-bird, madrigal, shallows, or
anything similar. But the human is perhaps what
all these are striving to express, and so I have been
granted wish within wish, and life is very good.
Life was very good this summer afternoon when
half the village gathered on our lawn above the sing-
ing stone, at Miggy's and Peter's " Announcement
Supper." To be sure, all Friendship Village had
for several days had the news and could even tell
you when the betrothal took place and where ; but
the two were not yet engaged, as Miggy would have
said, " out loud."
" What is engaged ? " asked Little Child, who was
the first of my guests to arrive, and came bringing
an offering of infinitesimal flowers which she finds in
the grass where I think that they bloom for no one
else.
" It means that people love each other very much
I began, and got no further.
" Oh, goody grand," cried Little Child. " Then
I'm engaged, aren't I ? To everybody."
Whenever she leads me in deep water, I am ac-
customed to invite her to a dolphin's back by bid-
ding her say over some song or spell which I have
taught her. This afternoon while we waited on the
lawn and her little voice went among the charmed
THE CUSTODIAN 311
words, something happened which surely must have
been due to a prank of the dolphin. For when she
had taken an accurate way to the last stanza of
" Lucy," Little Child soberly concluded :
" 'She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be ;
But she is in her grave, and what's
The difference to me !' "
But, even so, it was charming to have had the
quiet metre present.
I hope that there is no one who has not sometime
been in a company on which he has looked and
looked with something living in his eyes ; on a com-
pany all of whom he holds in some degree of tender-
ness. It was so that I looked this afternoon on those
who came across the lawn in the pleasant five o'clock
sun, and I looked with a difference from my manner
of looking on that evening of my visit to the village,
when I first saw these, my neighbours. Then I saw
them with delight ; now I see them with delight-and-
that-difference ; and though that difference is, so to
say, partly in my throat, yet it is chiefly deep in my
understanding. There came my Mis' Amanda Top-
lady, with her great green umbrella, which she carries
summer and winter ; Mis' Postmaster Sykes, with
the full-blooming stalk of her tuberose pinned on
her left shoulder; Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-
Bliss in the pink nun's veiling of the Post-office hall
3 i2 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
supper ; and my neighbour, who had consented to
come, with: " I don no as that little thing would
want I should stay home. Oh, but do you know,
that's the worst knowin' that the little thing never
saw me and can't think about me at all ! " And
there came also those of whom it chances that this
summer I have seen less than I should have wished :
the Liberty sisters, in checked print. " It don't seem
so much of a jump out of mournin' into wash goods
as it does into real dress-up cloth," gentle Miss Lucy
says. And Abigail Arnold, of the Home Bakery,
who sent a great sugared cake for to-day's occasion.
" Birthday cakes is correct," she observed, " an' wed-
din' cake is correct. Why ain't engagement cakes
correct especially when folks get along without the
ring? I donno. I always think doin' for folks is
correct, whether it's the style or whether it ain't."
And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, with a new and up-
braiding baby ; Mis' Fire Chief Merriman in " new
black, but not true mournin' now, an' anyway lit up
by pearl buttons an' a lace handkerchief an' plenty
o' scent." And Mis' "Mayor" Uppers who, the
" mayor " not returning to his home and the tickets
for the parlour clock having all been sold, to-day
began offering for sale tickets on the " parlour c suit/
brocade' silk, each o' the four pieces a differ'nt colour
and all as bright as new-in-the-store." And though
we all understood what she was doing and she knew
THE CUSTODIAN 313
that we all knew, she yet drew us aside, one after
another, to offer the tickets for sale privately, and
we slipped the money to her beneath our handker-
chiefs or our fans or our sewing.
We all had our sewing even I have become
pleasantly contaminated and have once or twice es-
sayed eyelets. Though there was but an hour to
elapse before supper-time and the arrival of the " men-
folks," we settled ourselves about the green, making
scallops on towels, or tatting for sheet hems, or
crocheted strips for the hems of pillow-slips. Mis'
Sykes had, as she almost always does have, new work
which no one had ever seen before, and new work is
accounted of almost as much interest as a new waist
and is kept for a surprise, as a new waist should be
kept. Little Child, too, had her sewing ; she was
buttonhole-stitching a wash-cloth and talking like a
little old woman. I think that the little elf children
like best to pretend in this way, as regular, arrant
witches feign old womanhood.
"Aunt Effie is sick," Little Child was telling
Mis' Toplady ; " she is sick from her hair to her
slippers."
I had a plan for Little Child and for us all ; that
after supper she should have leaves in her hair and
on her shoulders and should dance on the sing-
ing stone in the river. And Miggy, whose shy in-
dependence is now become all shyness, was in the
3H FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
house, weaving the leaves, and had not yet appeared
at her party at all.
Then one of those charming things happened
which surely have a kind of life of their own and
wake the hour to singing, as if an event were a river
stone, and more, round which all manner of faint
music may be set stirring.
" Havin' a party when I ain't lookin' ! " cried
somebody. " My, my. I don't b'lieve a word of
what's name this evolution business. I bet you
anything heaven is just gettiri back"
" And there was Calliope, in her round straw hat
and tan ulster, who in response to my card had
hastened her imminent return.
" Yes," she said, when we had greeted her and
put her in a chair under the mulberry tree, " my re-
lation got well. At least, she ain't sick enough to be
cross, so 'most anybody could take care of her now."
Calliope laughed and leaned back and shut her
eyes.
" Land, land," she said, " I got so much to tell
you about I don't know where to begin. It's all
about one thing, too somethin' I've found out."
Mis' Amanda Toplady drew a great breath and
let fall her work and looked round at us all.
"Goodness," she said, "ain't it comfortable
us all settin' here together, nobody's leg broke,
nobody's house on fire, nor none of us dead?"
THE CUSTODIAN 315
" c Us all settin' here together/ ' Calliope re-
peated, suddenly grave amid our laughter, " that's
part of what I'm comin' to. I wonder," she said to
us, " how you folks have always thought of the
City ? Up till I went there to stay this while I
always thought of it as well, as the City an' not
so much as folks at all. The City always meant to
me big crowds on the streets hurryin', hurryin',
eatin', eatin', and not payin' much attention to any-
thing. One whole batch of 'erri I knew was poor
an' lookin' in bakery windows. One whole batch
of 'em I knew was rich an' sayin' there has to be these
distinctions. And some more I knew was good
I always see 'em, like a pretty lady, stoopin' over,
givin'. And some more I knew was wicked an'
I always thought of them climbin' in windows.
And then there was the little bit o' batch that
knows the things I want to know an' talks like I'd
like to talk an' that I'd wanted an' wanted to go up
to the City an' get with.
"Well, then I went. An' the first thing, I see my
relative wa'n't rich nor poor nor bad nor good nor
- the way I mean. Nor her friends that come to
see her, they wan't either. The ones I took for
rich talked economy, an' the ones I thought was
poor spent money, an' the good ones gossiped, an'
they all jabbered about music and pictures that I
thought you couldn't talk about unless you knew
3 i6 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
the 'way-inside-o'-things, like they didn't know.
The kinds seemed all mixed up, and all of 'em far
away an* formal, like oh, like the books in a
library when you can't think up one to draw out.
I couldn't seem to get near to anything.
" Then one night I done what I'd always wanted
to do. I took two dollars an' went to the theatre
alone an' got me a seat. I put on the best I had, an*
still I didn't feel like I was one of 'em, nor one of
much of anybody. The folks on the car wasn't the
way I meant, an' I felt mad at 'em for bein' differ' nt.
There was a smilin' young fellow, all dressed black
an' expensive, an' I thought : c Put you side of Peter
Gary an' there wouldn't be anybody there but Peter.'
And when I got inside the theatre, it was just the
same : one awful collection of dressed-up hair an'
dressed-down backs an' everybody smilin' at some-
body that wasn't me and all seemin' so sure of
themselves. Specially the woman in front of me,
but I guess it always is specially the woman in
front of you. She was flammed out abundant.
She had trimmin's in unexpected places, an' a good
many colours took to do it, an' a cute little chatter to
match. It come to me that she was more than
different from me : she was the otherest a person
can be. An' I felt glad when the curtain went up.
" Well, sir," Calliope said, " it was a silly little
play all about nothin' that you could lay much
THE CUSTODIAN 317
speech to. But oh, they was somethin' in it that
made you get down on your hands and knees in
your own heart and look around in it, and look.
They was an old lady and a young mother and a
child and a man and a girl well, that don't sound
like much special, does it ? And that's just it : it
wasn't much special, but yet it was all of everything.
It made 'em laugh, it made 'em cry, it made me
laugh and cry till I was ashamed and glad and
grateful. And when the lights come up at the end,
I felt like I was kind of the mother to everything,
an' I wanted to pick it up an' carry it off an' keep
care of it. And it come over me all of a sudden
how the old lady and the young mother an' man
an' girl, man an' girl, man an girl was right there in
the theatre, near me, over an' over again ; an' there
I'd been feelin' mad at 'em for seemin' far off. But
they wasn't far off. They'd been laughin' and
cryin', too, an' they knew, just like I knew, what
was what in the world. My, my. If it'd been
Friendship I'd have gone from house to house all
the way home, shakin' hands. An' as it was, I just
had to speak to somebody. An' just then I see the
flammed-out woman in front of me, that her collar
had come open a little wee bit up top not to
notice even, but it give me an excuse. And I
leaned right over to her and I says with all the
sympathy in me :
318 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" c Ma'am, your neck is peepinY
" She looked around surprised and then she
smiled smiled 'most into laughin'. And she
thanked me sweet as a friend an* nodded with it, an*
I thought : Why, my land, you may have a baby
home/ I never had thought of that. An' then I
begun lookin' at folks an' lookin'. An' movin' up
the aisles, there wasn't just a theatre-lettin'-out.
They was folks. And all over each one was the
good little things they'd begun rememberin' now
that the play was over, or the hurt things that had
come back onto 'em again. . . . An' out on the
street it was the same. The folks had all got alive
and was waitin' for me to feel friendly to 'em.
Friendly. The young fellows in the cars was lovers,
just like Peter. An' everybody was just like me,
or anyhow more alike than differ'nt ; and just like
Friendship, only mebbe pronouncin' their words
some differ'nt an' knowin' more kinds of things to
eat. It seems to me now I could go anywhere an'
find folks to be nice to. I don't love Friendship
Village any the less, but I love more things the
same way. Everything, 'most. An* I tell you I'm
glad I didn't die before I found it out that we're
all one batch. Do you see what I mean deep
down inside what I say? " Calliope cried. "Does it
sound like anything to you ? "
To whom should it sound like "anything" if
not to us of Friendship Village ? We know.
THE CUSTODIAN 319
" Honestly," said that great Mis' Amanda Top-
lady, trying to wipe her eyes on her crochet work,
" Whoever God is, I don't believe He wants to keep
it a secret. He's always 'most lettin' us know. I
'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope
was talkin'."
" I 'most knew Who He is right then, while
Calliope was talkin'." ... I said the words over
while the men crossed the lawn, all arriving together
in order to lighten the trial of guesthood: Dear
Doctor June, little Timothy Toplady, Eppleby
Holcomb, Postmaster Sykes, Photographer Jimmie
Sturgis, Peter, and Timothy, Jr., and the others.
Liva Vesey was already in the kitchen with Miggy
and Elfa, and I knew that, somewhere invisible,
Nicholas Moor was hovering, waiting to help dish
the ice-cream. When the little tables, each with
its bright, strewn nasturtiums, were set about the
lawn, Miggy reluctantly appeared from the kitchen.
She was in the white frock which she herself had
made, and she was, as I have said, a new Miggy,
not less merry or less elfin, but infinitely more hu-
man. It was charming, I thought, to see how she
and Peter, far from tensely avoiding each other,
went straight to each other's side. With them at
table were Liva and Timothy, Jr., now meeting
each other's eyes as simply as if eyes were for this
purpose.
3 2o FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
" I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Cal-
liope was talkin' "... I thought again as we stood
in our places and Doctor June lifted his hands
to the summer sky as if He were there, too.
" Father," he said, " bless these young people
who are going to belong to each other Thou
knowest their names and so do we. Bless our be-
ing together now in their honour, and be Thou in
our midst. And bless our being together always.
Amen."
And that was the announcement of Miggy's and
Peter's betrothal, at their Engagement Party.
Little Child, who was sitting beside Calliope,
leaned toward her.
" How long will it take for God to know," she
asked, " after Doctor June sent it up ? "
Calliope put her arm about her and told her.
" Then did He get here since Doctor June in-
vited Him?" Little Child asked.
" You think, 'way deep inside your head, an* see
if He isn't here," I heard Calliope say.
Little Child shut her eyes tightly, and though
she did open them briefly to see what was on the
plate which* they set before her, I think that she
found the truth.
" I 'most know," she said presently. cc Pretty near
I know He is. I guess I'm too little to be sure
nor certain. When I'm big will I know sure ? "
THE CUSTODIAN 321
Yes," Calliope answered, " then you'll know
sure."
" I 'most knew Who He is while Calliope was
talkin' "... I said over once more. And sud-
denly in the words and in the homely talk and in
the happy comradeship I think that I slipped be-
tween the seeing and the knowing, and for a mo-
ment stood very near to the Custodian Himself.
The Custodian Who is in us all, Who speaks, now
as you, now as I, most clearly in our human fellow-
ship, in our widest kinship, in the universal together-
ness. Truly, it is not as my neighbour once said,
for I think that God has many and many to
" neighbour with," if only we would be neighbours.
Presently, as if it knew, that it belonged there,
the sunset came, a thing of wings and doors ajar.
Then Miggy fastened the leaves in Little Child's
hair and led her down to dance on the broad, flat
stone which is an instrument of music. Above the
friendly murmur of the shallows the little elf child
seemed beckoning to us others of the human voices
on the shore. And in that fair light it was as if
the river were some clear highway, leading from
Friendship Village to Splendour Town, where to-
gether we might all find our way.
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