"And," said I, "unless I'm very much mistaken, in the same way that all the ancient lovers loved their ladies, Peter loves you."
"Thatway?" said Miggy, laying her hand on the manuscript.
"That way," said I. And a very good way it was, too.
Miggy put up both hands with a manner of pointing 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, watching her across the fallen manuscript of ancient romances. 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 likethat?"
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.
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 ending. 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 something—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 unconscionably.
"My!" she said, "I should think everybody would want to be Secretary."
I must turn aside to tell of Allen and Christopha, 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 already there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As Miggy had told me, she herself was one ofChristopha'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-wedding 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 sufficiently simple to know it for herself.
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'sme. I feel afraid of you—Allen. You're—differ'nt."
He laughed tenderly, confidently.
"Boo!" 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. "Andthe presents. My!"
"Well, and company," she reminded him,"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 youalways, 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."
"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? Willyoualways, 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 something 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.
"Right off, Mis' Mother!" Allen said, and knew that she was in the doorway, with the bridesmaids 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 some one 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 become 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. I 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... till mornin'. I thought," he apologized wistfully, "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 sister 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,and went back to the upper 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 words. Before he had done telling her what had happened, Chris herself was on the threshold, already in sober brown, 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.
"Not with Jacob, though," Chris was saying decisively. "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. "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 Caledonia 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, naïve 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. Buttheirsdon't seem like anything, side of ours!"
"That's so, too," assented Allen. "And theirsain'tanything 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, "and thenthink. 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 Hubbelthwait 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't it?" said Allen, looking 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'mafraid!"
"What? On the Plank Road?" he wanted to know, missing her meaning.
"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, "weain'tthem."
"We might get like 'em," she insisted. "How can you tell? Folks just do get that way or they just don't. How can youtell?"
"I s'pose that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, thoughtfully.
"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, withbracelets. And him drunk all the time, 'most. How can you tell how things'll turn out? Oh, Allen, Iam! 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 troubled woman was still 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 back 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 was made. As it was made, too,of that shadowy, hovering fear for the future, 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 exclaimed when they saw Jacob's cottage.
"It just is—it's 'leven o'clock now," Allen answered, and gave the horse to the old man; and they two went within.
The light in the room, like the lights back in the valley, 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 drunkenness at the Hubbelthwaits', the poverty at the Howells', 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, and with a mystery 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 Christopha 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 knowing the process, showed him thenature 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, naïve as the first bird. Almost before she knew that she meant to do so, Chris stooped, with a wondering word, and took him in her arms. He clung to her and she sat in the rocking chair near the window 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.
"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 abouthim," 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—I 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 nearness. 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'sfoot 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 something 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 himfor a little,—but Allen knew, without at all being able to define it, her plaintive, burdened manner, the burdened manner of the irresponsible. Still puzzling 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.
"There's Hopkins's," Chris said presently, nodding 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-morrow. 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 sleeping 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 awakewhile 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—couldwe?" 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 guessthat'llbe all right!"
"How muchshe'dof 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—couldwe, 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 Hubbelthwaits and them. Somehow it don't seem as if wecould!"
"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. Butwhen 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 Allen 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.
When I opened my door this morning, the Outdoors 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 thatnowwasnow,—that delicate, fleeting Now, that very coquette of time, given and withdrawn. 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 iftoSomething, 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 beenrejoicing 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 anybody an' a meat-chopper with a peanut-butter attachment 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."
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.
"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: 'I'll give that little piece two months to carry the sail she's carryin' here to-day; four monthsto hev folks tired of her, an' six months to get herself the cold 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' 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 Johnson had told abouttheirJava entertainment intheirchurch at home, that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was president of the society, had appointed her chairman of the Java entertainment committee.
"And," Calliope informed me, "she's picked out the engine-house for it. Yes, sir,—the fire-engine house. No other place wasquaintenough. 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' forquaint-ity. One while I thought she'd hev us in the Chinese laundry, she seemed that took withthe 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. 'What a dear, quaint place,' s's she,—'soflexible!' 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 sheischairman. 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 themayor 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 standing 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; "anybody 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 Village. 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 havebeen 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. "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 forher, 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 WheelerJohnson 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 Christians. 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 '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 something." 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 inevitablenineteen-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 frowning 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 repeated, "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 joiningwith 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, thebooths 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 probabilities," as Calliope had vaguely quoted; it had been a roller-skating rink, utilized by the fire-department on the decline of the pastime, and there was, as Mrs. Johnson'spièce de résistance, 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 uswithHaltwhile 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 garlanded 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 innumerable 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 somewhat marred the Eastern effect. And within, Ifound 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 yourself, 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."
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 borrow 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 ofsetyou 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, "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 hera's. That reala-soundin'akind," she explained vaguely.
"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," Calliope dismissed Mr. Oliver Wheeler Johnson positively; "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, arranging, 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 refreshments, "Mis' Johnson jus' put up her little chin an' says, 'What! ain't we no lemons for the tea?'"
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 overconfident 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"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, rollicking 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 withHaltthat 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 innumerable 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 adorning outlying counters swept away, and all the "decoration 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 thepièce de résistance, 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 thepièce de résistancehad to be used. And Jimmy is in the fire-department, so that the company galloped 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, youwill 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 indignation, as she afterward said, "kind of crystallized 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,myidea, 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 thepièce de résistancehad taken before them. Little 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' PostmasterSykes 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 itdidtick, 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 yourself."
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!"
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 become 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 theCustodian herself—likes this way of pretending a freedom 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 village heard that her maid—who always offended by talking almost in a whisper—had once or twice excused her mistress to callers, every one shut lips and hardened hearts and said some folk actedveryfunny 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.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 hesell!" 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 settled 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 phaëton from Jimmy Sturgis and came home from the city to take his wife to drive. Between shutters the village 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 acquaintances 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 doctor 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 allthat keeps some folks frombein' 'em. Well, so I ask' him. 'Doctor Heron,' s'I, 'is that Mis' Johnson real sick, or is she just sickish?' He looks at me an'—'Looks pretty sick, don't she?' s'e. 'Well,' s'I, 'I've seen folks look real rich that wa'n't it by right-down pocketbook evidence.' 'Been to see her?' s'e. 'No,' s'I, short. '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 possessed 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.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?"
"I s'pose," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, majestically, "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 thesocial 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 themselves. But I remember how, instead, our imminent 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 boiling over" again in the old distaste.
But when we reached the little cottage of the Johnsons, our varied motives for the visit were abruptly merged in a common anxiety. For DoctorHeron'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 doorway 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 sudden 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 thatgreat 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 tête-à-tête 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 wingsbefore 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.Herbaby. 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 appeared 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.