S——s——s!Yow! Yow! Yow!Who's——all——right?Mr. N——o——rdm——a——n!
S——s——s!Yow! Yow! Yow!Who's——all——right?Mr. N——o——rdm——a——n!
S——s——s!Yow! Yow! Yow!Who's——all——right?Mr. N——o——rdm——a——n!
S——s——s!
Yow! Yow! Yow!
Who's——all——right?
Mr. N——o——rdm——a——n!
And then there was a great burst of yelling, and the whole seven boys came dropping out of trees and scrambling up from under the fence, and they ran off down the street, still yelling about him. Seems the ice-cream cones had made a hit.
Then—just for one little minute—I saw the real Nick Nordman that I remembered. His face broke into a broad, pleased grin, and he shoved his hat onto the back of his head, and he slapped his leg so that you could hear it. "Why," says he, "the durn little kids!"
We all dressed up in the best we had for the luncheon. Lucy Hackett come for me. She had on a clean, pretty print dress, and she looked awful nice.
"Oh, Lucy," I says to her right off, "ain't it toobad about Nick? He ain't no more like he use' to be than a motor is like a mule."
Lucy, she flushed up instant. "I thought," says she, "he was real improved."
"Land, yes, improved!" I says. "Improved out of all recognizing him."
She staggered me some by giving a superior smile. "Of course," she says, "he's all city ways now. Of course he is."
Yes, of course he was. I thought of her words over and over again during that lunch. His private car had a little table fitted in most every seat and laid, all white, with pretty dishes and silver and flowers. Electric fans were going here and there. The lights were lighted, though it was broad day and broader. The porter, in a white coat, was frisking round with ice and glasses. But, most magnificent of all, was Mr. Nicholas Nordman, standing in the middle of the aisle in pure white serge.
"So pleased," says he. "So very pleased. Now thisisgood of you all to come."
I s'pose what we done was to chat; that, I figger, would be the name of it. But when he set us all down to the little tables, four and four, a deathlike silence fell on the whole car. It was hard enough to talk anyhow. Add to that the interestingness of all this novelty, and not one of us could work up a thing to say.
Mr. Nordman took the minister and Lucy Hackettand me to his table, being we were all odd ones, and begun to talk benevolent about the improvements that a little town of this size ought to have.
"I s'pose they have grand parks and buildings in the cities, Nick?" says Lucy.
"Haven't you ever been to see them?" says he—oh, so kind!
"Never," says she. "But I've heard about them."
He sat staring out the car window across the Pump pasture, where the shadows were all laying nice. "City life is intensely interesting," says he. "Intensely so."
"As interesting as the time you stole Grandpa Toplady's grapes?" I says. I couldn't help it.
He tapped on the table. "Let us be in order for a few minutes," he says. He needn't of. We were in order already; we hadn't been anything else. Nobody was speaking a word hardly. But everybody twisted round and looked at him as he got onto his feet.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he says, and looked at us once round. "I have summoned you here for a purpose. On this, the occasion of my first visit back to my boyhood's home, I feel that I should—and, indeed, I most earnestly desire to—mark the time by some small token. Therefore, after some conversation about the matter during the forenoon, and much thought before my coming, I have decided toset aside ten thousand dollars from to-day to be used for your town in a way which a committee—of which I hope that you, my guests of the day, will be appointed members—may decide. For park purposes, playgrounds, pavements—what you will; I desire to make this little acknowledgment to my native town, to this the home of my boyhood. I thank you."
He set down and, after a minute, everybody burst out and spatted their hands.
And then Silas Sykes, that is our professional leading citizen, got to his feet and accepted in the name of the town. Some of the other men said a little about the needs of the town; and Eppleby Holcomb, he got up and proposed a toast to the host. And by that time, the sun had got around considerable and it was blazing hot there on the side track, and us ladies in our black silks begun to think, longing, of our side piazzas and our palm-leaf fans.
We filed down the aisle and shook the hand of Mr. Nicholas Nordman and thanked him, individual and formal, both for the lunch and the big gift, and got out. But Lucy Hackett burst out talking, with the tears in her eyes. "Nick!" she says. "Oh, Nick, it was wonderful! Oh, it was the most wonderful time I ever had in my life—the luncheon with everything so pretty—prettier'n I ever saw things before; and then the present to the town. Ten thousand dollars! Oh, none of us can be happyand grateful enough. And to think it's you that's done it, Nick—to think it's you!"
"Thank you, Miss Lucy," says he, "thank you; you are very good, I'm sure."
But I noticed that he wasn't so much formal now as he was lifeless; and I was wondering if he hadn't had a good time to his own luncheon party or what, when I heard something out on the platform, and then there come a-walking in a regular procession. It was all seven of the small boys again, and from seven to fourteen more besides, done up clean, with shoes on and here and there a collar.
"Is it time?" they says.
Nick Nordman stood with his hands in his pockets and grinned down on them. And it came to me to be kind of jealous of the boys, because he was with them just the way he ought to have been with us—and wasn't. But he was going off that night, with his car to be hitched onto the Through; and there wasn't any time for anybody to say any more, or be any different. So Lucy and I said good-by to him and left him there with the boys, dragging out together an ice-cream freezer into the middle of the gray private car.
I'd just got the door locked up that night about nine o'clock, and was seeing to the window catches before I went upstairs, when there come a rap to my front door.
"Who's there?" says I, with my hand on the bolt.
"It's Nick Nordman, Calliope."
"Land!" says I, letting him in. "I thought you'd gone off hitched to the Through."
"I was," he says, "but I ain't. I'm going to wait till five in the morning. And I'm going to talk over something with you."
Sheer through being flabbergasted, I led him past the parlor and out into the dining room and lit the lamp there. I'd been sewing there and things were spread on every chair. Think of receiving a millionaire in a place like that! But he never seemed to notice. He dropped right down on the machine cover that was standing up on end. And he put his elbow on the machine, and his head on his hand.
"Calliope," he says, "it ain't the way I thought it'd be. I wanted to come back here," he says. "I been thinking about it and planning on it for years. But it ain't like what I thought."
"Well," I says, soothing, "of course that's always the way when anybody comes back. They's changes. Things ain't the same. Folks has gone away—"
He cut me short off. "Oh," he says, "it ain't that. I expected that. There were enough folks here. It's something else. When I went away from here twenty years ago, I had just thirty-six dollars to go on. Now I've come back, and I don't mind telling you that I've got not far from six hundred thousand invested. Well, from the time I wentoff, I used to plan how I'd come back some day, just about like I have come back, and see folks, and give something to the town, and give a lunch like I did to-day. I've laid awake nights planning it. And I liked to think about it."
"Well," I says, "and you've done it."
He didn't pay attention. "You remember," he says, "how I used to live over on the Slew with my uncle in the house that wasn't painted? He'd got together a cow somehow, and I use' to carry the milk. I never owned a pair of shoes till I was fifteen and earned them, and I never went to school after I was twelve. And when I went to the city I begun at the bottom and lived on nothing and went to night school and got through the whole works up to pardner for them I used to sweep out for. When I got my first ten thousand I thought: 'That's what I'm going to give that little old town—when I get enough more.' Well, I've done it, and I ain't got no more satisfaction out of it than if I'd thrown it in the gutter. And that"—he looked at me solemn—"was," says he, "the durndest, stiffest luncheon I ever et at."
"Well," I says, "of course—"
"When I think," he says, "of the way I planned it—with the men all coming around me, and slapping me on the back, and being glad to see me—"
"Oh, Nick!" I says. "Nick Nordman!Wasthat what you wanted?"
He looked at me in perfect astonishment. "Why," says he, "ain't that what anybody wants?"
I rose right up on my feet and I went over and put out my hand to him. "Why, Nick," I says, "don't you see? We was afraid of you.Iwas afraid of you. I froze right up and give up telling you about folks hanging themselves and all sorts of interesting things because I thought you wouldn't care. Why, they don't know you care!"
"Don't know I care?" says he. "But ain't I showed 'em—ten thousand dollars' worth?"
"Oh," I says, "that way! Yes, they know that way. In dollars they know; but they don't know in feelings. It's them," I says, "that counts." I set down by him, right on a pile of my new sewing. "Look here," I says, "Nick Nordman, if that's the way you feel about coming back and about the village, let's you and me fix up some way to make folks know you feel that way."
His face lit up. "How?" says he, doubting.
I thought a minute. I don't know why it was, but all at once there flashed into my head the way he had been with the boys, and the way the boys had been to him; that was what he was wanting, and that was what had been lacking, and that was what he didn't know how to make come. And he was lonesome for it.
"It ought to be," says I, feeling my way in my own head, "some way that'll make folks—Oh,Nick," I says, jumping up, "I know the very thing!"
Pitcairn's Circus that wintered not twenty miles from us, and that had got so big and successful that it hadn't been to Friendship Village before in twenty years! And this year, when they'd wanted to come, the council had put the license so high that they refused it. And yet, one morning, we woke up to find the town plastered up and down with the big flaming bill posters of Pitcairn's Circus itself. The town had all it could do to believe in its own good luck. But there was no room to doubt. There they were:
BALLET OF TWELVE HUNDRED
Tremendous Pageant and Spectacle OfEsther, the Beautiful Queenmagnificent costumes, regal women,gorgeous jewels, diverting dancers,solos and ensembles
A HUNDRED TRAINED RIDERS,A HUNDRED ACROBATS, A HUNDREDANIMALS FROM THE HEART OF THEWILD HILLS
ANIMALS TRAINED—ANIMALS SAVAGE—ANIMALS WONDERFUL
Gigantic Street Parade
FREE!FREE!FREE!
The whole town planned to turn out. There was to be no evening performance, and I schemed to have us all take our lunch—a whole crowd of us—andgo over to the Pump pasture right from the parade, and spread it under the big maple, and see the sights while we et. I broached it to Mis' Toplady and Timothy and Eppleby and Marne Holcomb and Postmaster and Mis' Sykes, and some more—Mis' Arnet and Mis' Sturgis and Mis' Hubbelthwait; and they, all of them, and Lucy and me, fell to planning on who'd take what, and running over to each other's houses about sweet pickles and things we hadn't thought of, and we had a real nice old-fashioned time.
I'll never forget the day. It was one of the regular circus days, bright and blue and hot. Lucy Hackett and I went down to see the parade together; and we watched it, as a matter of course, from the window where I'd watched circus parades when I was a little girl. The horses, the elephants, the cages closed and the cages opened, the riders, the bands, the clowns, the calliope—that I was named for, because a circus with one come to town the day I was born—had all passed when, to crown and close the whole, we saw coming a wagon of the size and like we had not often beheld before.
It was red, it had flags, pennons, streamers, festoons, balloons. Continually up from it went daylight firecrackers. From the sides of it fell colored confetti. And it was filled, not with circus folks, dressed gorgeous, but with boys. And we knew them! Laughing, jigging, frantic with joy—wesaw upward of a hundred Friendship Village boys. As the wagon passed us and we stared after it, suddenly the clamor of shouting inside it took a kind of form. We begun, Lucy and I, to recognize something. And what was borne back to us perfectly clamorous was:
S——s——s!Yow! Yow! Yow!Who's——all——right?Mr. N——o——rdm——a——n!
S——s——s!Yow! Yow! Yow!Who's——all——right?Mr. N——o——rdm——a——n!
S——s——s!Yow! Yow! Yow!Who's——all——right?Mr. N——o——rdm——a——n!
S——s——s!
Yow! Yow! Yow!
Who's——all——right?
Mr. N——o——rdm——a——n!
"What in time are they yelling?" says a woman at the next window.
"Some stuff," says somebody else.
Lucy and I just looked at each other. Lucy was looking wild. "Calliope," says she, "how'd they come to yell that—that that they said?"
"Oh, I dunno," I says serene; "I could yell that too—on general principles. Couldn't you?" I says to her.
And Lucy blushed burning, rosy, fire red—on general principles, I suppose.
We were all to meet at the courthouse with our lunches and go right out to the Pump pasture. The tents were up already, flags were flying every which way, and folks were running all over, busy.
"Like somebody was giving a party," I says.
Lucy never said a word. She'd gone along, kind of breathless, all the way down. All us that know each other best were there. And we were dying toget into each other's lunches and see what each other had brought. So Jimmy Sturgis went to building fire for the coffee, and Eppleby went off for water, and Silas Sykes, that don't like to do much work, he says:
"Timothy, supposing we go along down and buy all our tickets and avoid the rush?"
We let them go, and occupied ourselves spreading down the cloth, and cutting up cake and veal loaf, and opening up pickles and jell. The maple shade came down nice on the cloth, and appetizing little picnic smells of potato salad and other things begun getting out around, and the whole time was cozy and close up to. We were just disposing the deviled eggs in a mound in the middle, when Silas Sykes and Timothy come fair running up the slope.
"My dum!" says Silas. "They won't leave us buy no tickets. They say the show is free."
"Free!" says most everybody but me in chorus.
"They say they ain't no ticket wagon, and they ain't going to be," says Silas. "What you going to make out that?"
"Blisterin' Benson!" says Timothy Toplady. "What I think is this, they're kidding us."
Lucy stood opening up a little bag she had.
"Here's one of the slips they threw round this morning," she says; "I dunno—"
She had it out and we studied it. We'd all seen them blowing round the streets, but nobody had paidany attention. She held it out and they all stared at it:
FRIENDSHIP VILLAGEIS INVITED TO COME TO THE CIRCUSTHIS AFTERNOONFREENO TICKETS ON SALEFREE ADMISSIONFORFRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
"My gracious," says Mis' Sykes, "I never heard of such a thing since the world began."
"Land, land!" says Mis' Toplady. "But what does itmean?"
"Whatdoesit mean?" says Silas Sykes. "What are we all being a party to?"
"I guess it'swhoare we being a party to, Silas," I says, mild.
They all looked at me. And then they looked where I was looking, and I was looking at something hard. Coming out of the main tent was a mass of struggling, wriggling, dancing humanity—little humanity—in short, the boys that had rode in the big wagon. And walking in the midst of them was a man.
At first not even I recognized him. He had his coat off, and his collar was turned in, his hat was on the back of his head, and he was smiling throughout his whole face, which was red.
"Look-at!" says I. "I guess that's who we're the party to—all of us."
"What do youmean?" Silas says again.
"I mean," says I, "that Nick Nordman's had this whole circus come here to the village and give it to us free. And I say, let's us rush down there and drag him up here to eat with us!"
It came to them so sudden that they all moved off like one man, and, as we started together, not caring who stole the whole lunch that we left laying idle under the tree, I turned and took a look at Lucy.
Land, she looked as I haven't seen her look in twenty years! Her head was back, her eyes were bright, her face was bright, and she didn't know one of us was there. She just went down the slope, running.
We came on him as he was distributing nickels destined for the peanut man that had just got his wagon going, savory. Nick didn't see us till we were right there, and then the nicest shamefaced look come over him, and he threw the rest of the nickels among the boys and left them scrambling, and met us.
"Nick Nordman!Isthis your doings?" Silas plumped it at him, accusing.
"Gosh, no!" says Nick, grinning like a schoolboy. "It's the kids' doin's."
And when a millionaire can say "Gosh" like he said it, you can't feel remote from him. Nobodycould. Oh, how we talked at him, all round, a good many at a time. And I think everything there was to say, we said it. Anyway, I can't think of any exclamation to speak of that we left unexclaimed.
We all streamed up the slope, Silas near walking backward most of the way to take in the full magnitude of it. We sat down round the potato salad and the deviled eggs and the veal loaf, beaming. And it made a real nice minute.
Oh, and it was no time till we got to living over the old days. And it was no time till Timothy and Eppleby were rolling over, recalling this and bringing back that. It was no time at all till every one of us was back twenty-five to thirty years, and telling about it. And Lucy, that I'd maneuvered should sit by Nick, I caught her looking across at me kind of superior, and as if she could have told me, all the while, that something or other was so!
"Let's us drink him a toast," says Timothy Toplady when we got through. "Look-at here: To Nicholas Nordman, the big man of Friendship Village."
"Yes, sir!" says Silas Sykes. "And to Nicholas Nordman, that's give us ten thousand dollarsanda circus!"
"No, sir!" says Eppleby Holcomb, sudden. "None of them things. Let's us drink just to Nick Nordman, that's come back home!" He up with his hand, and it came down on Nick Nordman'sshoulder with a sound you could have heard all acrost the grounds.
And as he did that, just for a fraction of nothing, Nick Nordman met my eyes. And we both knew what we both knew.
Just then the band struck up, and the people were already pouring in the pasture, so we scrabbled things up and all started for the tent. Nick was walking with Lucy.
"Lucy," I heard him say, "you look near enough like you used to, for you to be you!"
She looked like a girl as she answered him. "Youareyou, Nick," she says, simple and neat and direct.
And me—I walked along, feeling grand. I kind of felt what all of us was feeling, and what everybody was going to feel down there in the big tent, when they knew. But far, far more, I sensed the thing that Nick Nordman, walking there with us, with about a hundred and fifty boys all waiting to sit down side of him at his circus—the thing that Nick Nordman had found out.
"God bless you, Calliope," says he, when he got a chance.
"Oh!" I says. "He has. He has! He's made folks so awful nice—when they just let it show through!"
"The poor little thing," says I. "Well, mustn't we be good to her?"
"Mustn't we?" says Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, wiping her eyes.
"Must we not?" says Mis' Silas Sykes—that would correct your grammar if the house was on fire.
My niece's daughter Letty had lost her father and her mother within a year, and she was coming to spend the summer with me.
"She's going to pick out the style monument she wants here in town," I says, "and maybe buy it."
"Poor thing! That'll give her something to put her mind on," says Mis' Sykes.
George Fred come in just then to fill my wood-box—his father was bound he should be named George and his mother hung out for Fred, so he got both onto him permanent. He was going to business college, and choring it for near the whole town. He used to swallow his supper and rush like mad from wood-box to cow all over the village. Nights when I heard a noise, I never thought it was a burglar any more. I turned over again and thought:"That's George Fred cutting somebody's grass." I never see a man more bent on getting himself educated.
"George Fred," I says, "my grandniece Letty is coming to live with me. She's lost her folks. I thought we'd kind of try to be good to her."
"Trust me," says George Fred. "My cousin Jed, he lost his folks too. I can tell her about him."
The next day Letty came. I hadn't seen her for years. My land! when she got off the train, I never saw plainer. She was a nice little thing, but plain eyes, plain nose, plain mouth, and her hair—that was less than plain. But she was so smiling and so gentle that the plain part never bothered me a minute.
"Letty," says I, "welcome home." Mis' Merriman and Mis' Sykes had gone to the depot with me.
"Welcome home, child," says Mis' Merriman, and wiped her eyes! Mis' Merriman is human, but tactless.
"Welcome home, you poor thing," says Mis' Sykes, and she sniffed. Everything Mis' Sykes does she ought to have picked out to do the way she didn't.
But Letty, she took it serene enough. While we were getting her trunk, Mis' Sykes whispered to me:
"Are you sure she's the right niece? She ain't got on a stitch of mourning."
Sure enough, she hadn't. She wore a little blue dress.
"Like enough she couldn't afford it," says Mis' Merriman. And we thought that must be it.
They were both to stay for supper, and they'd each brought a little present for my niece. When she opened them, one was a black-edged handkerchief and the other was a package of mixed flower-seeds to plant next spring in her cemetery lot. Mis' Sykes and Mis' Merriman were both ready to cry all the while she untied them. But Letty smiled, serene, and thanked them, serene too, and put a pink aster from the table in her dress, and said, couldn't we go out and look at my flowers? And we went, Mis' Sykes and Mis' Merriman folding up their handkerchiefs and exchanging surprised eyebrows.
At the back door we came, plain in the face, on George Fred, whittling up my shavings.
"Two baskets of shavings, Miss Marsh, or one?"
"I guess," says I, "you'll earn your education better if you bring me in two."
George Fred never smiled. "I ain't earning my education any more, Miss Marsh," he says. "I've give it up. I can't make it go—not and chore it."
"Then you can't be a bookkeeper, George Fred?" I says.
"I've took a job delivering for the post-office store."
"Tell me about it, won't you?" says Letty.
George Fred told her a little about it, whittling my shavings.
"There ain't enough cows and grass and wood-boxes in the village to make it go, seems though," he ends up.
Then he rushed into the house with my stuff, and headed for the Sykes's cow that we could hear lowing.
We talked about George Fred while we looked at the flowers, Letty all interested in both of them, and then we came back and sat on the front porch.
"Dear child," says Mis' Sykes, "wouldn't it be a comfort to you, now that you're among friends, to talk about your folks? What was it they died of? Was they sick long?"
Letty looked over to her, sweet and serene.
"Beautiful things happened while they were sick," she said. "A little child across the street used to come every morning with a flower or a fresh egg. Then there was an old man who picked every rose in his garden and sent them in. And a club there hired a singer who was at the theater to come and serenade them, just a few days before. Oh, so many beautiful things happened!"
Mis' Sykes and Mis' Merriman sat still. This isn't the way we talk about sickness in the village. We always tell symptoms and treatments and pain and last words and funeral preparations, right up to the time the hearse backs up to the door.
"She acts the queerest, to me, for a mourner," says Mis' Sykes, when she went for her shawl.
Next morning we went down, Letty and me, to pick out the monument. Letty, she priced them, and then she figured some on a card. Then she walked over and priced some more things, and then she came out. I s'posed she was going to think about it.
"Didn't she cry when she picked out the monument?" says Mis' Sykes to me over the telephone that noon.
"I didn't see her," says I, truthful.
That night, after he got the last cow milked, I see George Fred, in his best clothes, coming in our front gate. He was coming, I see, to do what I said—help be good to Letty and cheer her up.
"Miss Letty," says he, "I know just how you feel. My cousin Jed, he lost his folks a year ago. They took down with the typhoid, and they suffered frightful—"
"I'm so sorry, Mr. Fred," says Letty.
I explained. "Fred," says I, "is his other front name. His final name is Backus."
She colored up pretty, and went right on—it was curious: she hadn't been with me twenty-four hours hardly, and yet she didn't look a bit plain to me now.
"Mr. Backus," Letty says, "I've been thinking. Miss Marsh and I have got a little money we're not using. Don't you want to borrow it, and keep on at business college, and pay us back when you can?"
"Gosh!" says George Fred.
If I hadn't been aiming to be a lady, I dunno what I might have said similar.
They talked about it, and then George Fred went off, walking some on the ground and some in the air. "Letty!" says I, then, "where in this world—"
"Why," says Letty, "I'm going to get just headstones instead of a monument—and leave that boy be a bookkeeper instead of a delivery boy. Father and mother—" it was the only time I heard her catch her breath sharp—"would both rather. I know it."
Before breakfast next morning, I ran over to Mis' Sykes's and Mis' Merriman's, and told them.
"Like enough she done something better than buy mourning, too," says Mis' Merriman.
It was the first and only time in my life I ever see Mis' Silas Sykes's eyes fill up with tears.
"Why, my land," she says, "she'susingher sorrow."
And all of a sudden, the morning and the world meant something more. And Letty, that we were going to be so good to, had brought us something like a present.
FOOTNOTE:[4]Copyright, 1914,Woman's Home Companion.
[4]Copyright, 1914,Woman's Home Companion.
[4]Copyright, 1914,Woman's Home Companion.
I laid the letter up on the clock-shelf where I could see it while I did my dishes. I needed it there to steady me. I didn't have to write my answer till after dinner, because it wouldn't go out until the four o'clock mail anyway. I kind of left the situation lie around me all the morning so I could sense it and taste it and, you might say, be steeped in it, and get so I could believe.
Me—a kind of guest housekeeper for six months in a beautiful flat in the city—with two young married folks and a little baby to amuse myself with, and the whole world sitting around me, expansive, and waiting for me to enjoy it. It seemed as if the Golden Plan folks always think is going to open up for them had really opened now for me.
How I kept from baking my doughnuts and frying my sponge-cakes in lard, I dunno, but I did—sheer through instinct, I guess. And then I wrote my letter and took it down to the post-office. Go? Wouldn't I go? My letter just said:
"Ellen dear, you ridiculous child, did you think I could wobble for a single second? I'd made up my mind beforeI got down the first page. I'll be there Monday night. Do you care if I wear your table-spread for dress-up, when I get there? All I've got is everyday—or not so much so. And for your wanting me, I'll say thank you when I get there.Calliope."
"Ellen dear, you ridiculous child, did you think I could wobble for a single second? I'd made up my mind beforeI got down the first page. I'll be there Monday night. Do you care if I wear your table-spread for dress-up, when I get there? All I've got is everyday—or not so much so. And for your wanting me, I'll say thank you when I get there.
Calliope."
On my way to mail my letter I came on Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, downtown to get something for supper. And I told them all about it.
Mis' Toplady hunched her shawl farther up her back and sighed abundant.
"Ain't that just grand, Calliope?" says she. "To think you're going to do something you ain't been doing all your days."
That was the point, and she knew it.
"I says to Timothy the other night," she went on, "I says, 'Don't you wish I had something to tell you about, or you had something to tell me about, that we both of us didn't know by heart, forward and back?'"
"Eppleby and me, too," says Mis' Holcomb, "I wish to the land we could do something—or be something—that would give a body something to kind of—relate to each other."
"I know," I says. "Husbands and wivesisawful simultaneous, I always think."
But I didn't say anything more, being I wasn't married to one; and they didn't say anything more, being they was.
Mis' Holcomb waved her cheese at me, cheerful.
"Be gay for us!" says she, and then went home to cook supper for her hungry family.
And so did I, wishing with all my heart that the two of them—that hadn't seen over the rim of home in thirty years—could have had my chance.
When I got to the city that night it was raining—rather, it was past raining and on up to pouring. So I got in a taxi to go up to Ellen's—a taxi that was nothing but an automobile after all, in spite of its foreign name, ending in a letter that no civilized name ought to end in. And never, never, not if I live till after my dying day, will I forget my first look at that living-room of theirs—in the apartment building, as big as a ship, and as lighted up as our church at Christmas-time, which was where Ellen and Russell lived.
A pretty maid let me in. I remember I went in by her with my eyes on her white embroidery cap, perked up on her head and all ironed up, saucy as a blue jay's crest.
"Excuse me," I says to her over my shoulder, "I've read about them, but yours is the first one I ever saw. My dear, you look like a queen in a new starched crown."
She was an awful stiff little thing—'most as stiff as her head-piece. She never smiled.
"What name?" she says, though—and I see she was friendlier than I'd thought.
"Why, mine's Calliope Marsh," I says, hearty. "What's yours?"
She looked so funny—I guess not many paid her much attention.
"Delia," she says. "You're expected," she says, and opened the inside door.
The room was long and soft and wine-colored, with a fire burning in the fireplace, and more lamps than was necessary, but that altogether didn't make much more light than one, only spread it out more. The piano was open, and there was a vase of roses—in Winter! They seemed to have them, I found out later, as casual as if there was a combined wedding and funeral in the house all the time. But they certainly made a beautiful picture.
But all this I sort of took in out of my eyes' four corners, while the rest of me looked at what was before the fire.
A big, low-backed chair was there, as fat and soft as a sofa. And in it was Ellen, in a white dress—in Winter! She wore them, I saw after a while, as casual as if she was at a party, perpetual. But there was something else there in a white dress, too, sitting on her lap, with his pink, bare feet stretched out to the blaze. And he was laughing, and Ellen was, too, at Russell, her husband, sitting on the floor, and aiming his head right at the baby's stomach, to hear him laugh out like—oh, like bluebells must be doing in the Spring.
"Pretty enough to paint," says I—which was the first they knew I was there.
It was a shame to spoil it, but Ellen and Russell sprang up, and tried to shake hands with me, though I wasn't taking the slightest notice of them. It was the baby I was engaged in. I'd never seen him before. In fact, I'd never seen Ellen and Russell since they were married two years before and went off to Europe, and lived on a peak of the Alps where the baby was born.
They took me to a gray little room that was to be mine, and I put on a fresh lace collar and my cameo pin and my best back comb. And then dinner was ready—a little, round white table with not one living thing on it but lace and roses and glass and silver.
"Why," says I, before I got through with my melon that came first, "why, you two must be perfectly happy, ain't you?"
And Ellen says, looking over to him:
"Perfectly, absolutely, radiantly happy. Yes, I am."
And this is what Russell done. He broke his bread, and nodded to both of us promiscuous, and he says:
"Considerable happier than any decent man has a right to be, I'm thinking."
I noticed that incident particular. And when I look back on it now, I know that that very firstevening I begun noticing other things. I remember the talk went on about like this:
"Ellen," says Russell, "the dog show opened yesterday. They've got some great little pups, I hear. Aren't you going in?"
"Why—I am if you are," says Ellen.
"Nonsense," says Russell, "I can run in any time, but I can't very well meet you there in the middle of the day. You go in yourself."
"Well, I only enjoy it about a third as much to go alone," says she.
"The dogs don't differ when I'm along, you know, lady," says he, smiling.
"You know that isn't what I mean," she says.
And she looked over at him, and smiled at his eyes with her eyes. But I saw that he looked away first, sort of troubled. And I thought:
"Why, she acts as if not enjoying things when he ain't along is a kind of joyful sacrifice, that would please any man. I wonder if it does."
It happened two-three times through dinner. She hadn't been over to see some kind of a collection, and couldn't he come home some night early and take her? He couldn't promise—why didn't she go herself and tell him about it?
"You wouldn't have said that three years ago," she says, half fun, half earnest, and waited for him to deny it. But he didn't seem to sense what was expected of him, and he just et on.
Ain't it funny how you can sort of see things through the pores of your skin? By the time dinner was over, I knew most as much about those two as if I had lived in the house with them a week.
He was wonderful tender with her, though. I don't mean just in little loverlike ways, saying things and calling her things and looking at her gentle. I mean in ways that don't have to be said or called or looked, but that just are. To my mind they mean a thousand times more. But I thought that in her heart she sort of hankered for the said and called and looked kind. And of course theyarenice. Nice, but not vital like the other sort. If you had to get along without one, you know which one would be the one.
When we went into the other room, Ellen took me to look at the baby, in bed, asleep, same as a kitten and a rosebud and a little yellow chicken, and all the things that you love even the names of. And when we went back, Ellen went to the piano and begun to play rambley things but low so's you could hardly hear them across the room, on account of the baby. I sank down and was listening, contented, and thinking of the most thinkable things I knew, when she looked over her shoulder.
"Russell," she says, "if you'll come and turn the music, I'll do that new Serenade."
Russell was on a couch, stretched out with a newspaper and his pipe, and I dunno if I ever seen a manlook more luxurious. But he got up, sort of a one-joint-at-a-time fashion, and came slumping over, with his hair sticking out at the back. He stood and turned the music, with his pipe behind him. And when she'd got through, he says:
"Very pretty, indeed. Now I'll just finish my article, I guess, dear."
He went back to his couch. And she got up, kind of quick, and walked over and stared into the fire. And I got up and went over and stared out the window. It seemed kind of indelicate to be looking, when I knew so well what was happening in that room.
For she'd forgot he was a person. She was thinking that he was just another one of her. And that seems to me a terrible thing for any human being to get to thinking about another, married to them or not though they be.
When I looked out the window, I needed new words. I hadn't realized the elevator had skimmed up so high with me—and done it in the time it would have taken the Emporium elevator, home, to go the two stories. But we were up ten, I found afterward. And there I was looking the city plain in the face. Rows and rows and fields of little lights from windows that were homes—and homes—and homes. I'd never seen so many homes in my life before, at any one time. And it came over me, as I looked, that in all the hundreds of them I waslooking at, and in the thousands that lay stretched out beyond, the same kind of thing must have gone on at some time or other, or be going to go on, or be going on now, like I saw clear as clear was going on with Ellen and Russell.
It was the third night I was there that the thing happened. I was getting along fine. I did the ordering and the managing and took part care of the baby and mended up clothes and did the dozens of things that Ellen wasn't strong enough to do. Delia and I had got to be real good friends by the second day.
Russell came home that third night looking fagged out. He was never nervous or impatient—I noticed that about him. I'd never once seen him take it out in his conversation with his wife merely because he had had a hard day. We'd just gone in from the dining-room when Russell, instead of lighting his pipe and taking his paper, turned round on the rug, and says:
"Dear, I think I'll go over to Beldon's a while to-night."
She was crossing the floor, and I remember how she turned and looked at him.
"Beldon's?" she said. "Have—have you some business?"
"No," Russell says. "He wanted me to come in and have a game of billiards."
"Very well," she says only, and she went and sat down by the fire.
He got into his coat, humming a little under his breath, and then he came over and stooped down and kissed her. She kissed him, but she hardly turned her head. And she didn't turn her head at all as he went out.
When he'd gone and she heard the apartment door shut, Ellen fairly frightened me. She sank down in the big chair where I had first seen her, and put her head on its arm, and cried—cried till her little shoulders shook, and I could hear her sobs. "Ellen," I says, "what is it?" Though, mind you, I knew well enough.
She put her arms round my neck as I kneeled down beside her. "Oh, Calliope, Calliope!" she says. "It's the end of things."
"End," says I, "of what?"
She looked in my face, with the tears streaming down hers. "Didn't you realize," she says, "that that is the first time my husband ever has left me in the evening—when he didn't have to?"
I saw that I had to be as wise as ten folks and as harmless as none, if I was to help her—and help him. And all at once I felt as if Iwasten folks, and as if I'd got to live up to them all.
Because I didn't underestimate the minute. No woman can underestimate that minute when it comesto any other woman. For out of it there are likely to come down onto her the issues of either life or death; and the worst of it is that, ten to one, she never once sees that it's in her power, maybe, to say whether it shall be life or death that comes.
"What of it?" I says, as calm as if I didn't see anything at all, instead of seeing more than she saw, as I know I did.
She stared at me. "Don't you understand," she says, "what it means?"
"Why, it means," says I, "that he wants a game of billiards, the way any other man does, once in a while."
She shook her head, mournful.
"Three years ago this Winter," says she, "only three short years ago, every minute of the world that Russell had free, he wanted to spend with me. That Winter before we were married, do you suppose that anybody—anybody could have got him to play billiards with him if he could have been with me?"
I thought it over. "Well," I says, "no. Likely not. But then, you see, he couldn't be with you every evening—and that just naturally give him some nights off."
"'Some nights off,'" she says. "Oh, if you thinkthatis the way he looks at it—There is no way in this world that I would rather spend my evenings," she says, "than to sit here with my husband."
"Yes," I says, "I s'pose that's true. I s'posethat's true of most wives. And it's something they've got to get over thinking is so important."
She gasped. "Get over—" she says. "Then," says she, "they'll have to get over loving their husbands."
"Oh, dear, no, they won't—no, they won't," says I. "But they'll have to get over thinking that selfishness is love—for one thing. Most folks get them awful mixed—I've noticed that."
But she broke down again, and was sobbing on the arm of the chair. "To think," she says over, "that now it'll never, never be the same again. From now on we're going to be just like other married folks!"
That seemed to me a real amazing thing to say, but I saw there wasn't any use talking to her, so I just let her cry till it was time to go and feed the baby. And then she sat nursing him, and breathing long, sobbing breaths—and once I heard her say, "Poor, poor little Mother's boy!" with all the accent on the relationship.
I walked back into the middle of the long, soft, wine-colored room, trying to think if I s'posed I'd got so old that I couldn't help in a thing like this, for I have a notion that there is nothing whatever that gets the matter that you can't help some way if you're in the neighborhood of it.
Delia was just shutting the outside door of the apartment. And she came trotting in with her little, formal, front-door air.
"Two ladies to see you, Miss Marsh," she says. "Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb."
No sooner said than heard, and I flew to the door, all of a tremble.
"For the land and forevermore," says I. "Where from and what for?"
There they stood in the doorway, dressed, I see at first glance, in the very best they'd got. Mis' Holcomb, that is the most backward-feeling of any of our women, was a step behind Mis' Toplady, and had hold of her arm. And Mis' Toplady was kind of tiptoeing and looking round cautious, to see if something not named yet was all right.
"There ain't any company, is there?" she says, in a part-whisper.
"No," says I, "not a soul. Come on in."
"Well," says she, relaxing up on her bones, "I asked the girl, and she says she'd see. What's the use ofbeinga hired girl if you don't know who you've let in?"
"Sit down," says I, "and tell me what you're doing here, and why you've come. Is anything the matter? I see there ain't, though—with you in your best clothes. Throw off your things."
"Calliope," says Mis' Holcomb, "you'd never guess." She leaned forward in her chair. "We ain't come up for a single thing," says she, "not a thing!"
Mis' Toplady leaned forward, too. "And thefare a dollar and ninety-six cents each way," says she, "and us a-staying at a hotel!"
"Go on," says I. "How long you going to be here?"
"Oh, mercy, only to-night," Mis' Holcomb says. "Why, the room is two-fifty just for us to sleep in it. I told him we shouldn't be setting in it a minute, but I guess he didn't believe me."
"Well, go on," says I. "Tell me what you've come for?"
Mis' Toplady leaned back and looked round her and sighed—and anybody could of told that her sigh was pleased and happy.
"Calliope," says she, "we've run away to stay overnight and one day on our chicken money, because we got so dead tired of home."
Mis' Holcomb just giggled out.
"It's a fact," she says. "We thought we'd come while you was here, for an excuse. But we were just sick of home, and that's the truth."
I looked at them, stupefied, or part that. Mis' Toplady and Mame, that's been examples of married contentment for thirty years on end, hand-running! It begun to dawn on me, slow, what this meant, as Mis' Toplady begun to tell me about it.
"You know, Calliope," she says, "the very best home in the world gets—"
Then I jumped up. "Hold on," I says. "You wait a minute. I'll be straight back again."
I run down the hall to the bedroom where Ellen was. She was just laying the baby down—even in my hurry I stopped to think what a heavenly and eternal picture that makes—a mother laying a baby down. There's something in the stooping of her shoulders and the sweep of her skirt and the tender drooping of her face, with the lamp-light on her hair, that makes a picture out of every time a baby is laid in his bed. The very fact that Ellen looked so lovely that way made me all the more anxious to save her.
"Ellen," I says, "come out here, please."
I pulled her along, with her hair all loose and lovely about her face—Ellen was a perfect picture of somebody's wife and a little baby's mother. You never in the world would have thought of her as a human being besides.
So then I introduced them, and I sat down there with them—the two I knew so well, and the one I'd got to know so well so sudden. And two of them were nearly sixty, and one was not much past twenty; but the three of them had so much in common that they were almost like one person sitting there with me, before the fire.
"Now," says I, "Mis' Toplady, go ahead. You needn't mind Ellen. She'll understand."
After a little bit, Mis' Toplady did go ahead.
"Well, sir," Mis' Toplady said, "I dunno what you'll think of us, but this is the way it was. I wassitting home by the dining-room table with Timothy night before last. We had a real good wood fire in the stove, and a tin of apples baking in the top, that smelled good. And the lamp had been filled that day, so the light was extra bright. And there was a little green wood in the fire that sort of sung—and Timothy set with his shoes off, as he so often does evenings, reading his newspaper and warming his stocking feet on the nickel of the stove. And all of a sudden I looked around at my dining-room, the way I'd looked at it evenings for thirty years or more, ever since we went to housekeeping, and I says to myself, 'I hate the sight of you, and I wish't I was somewheres else.' Not that I do hate it, you know, of course—but it just come over me, like it has before. And as soon as my tin of apples was done and I took them into the kitchen, I grabbed my shawl down off the hook, and run over to Mis' Holcomb's. And when I shut her gate, I near jumped back, because there, poking round her garden in the snow in the dark, was Mame!
"So," Mis' Toplady continued, "we hung over the gate and talked about it. And we came to the solemn conclusion that we'd just up and light out for twenty-four hours. We told our husbands, and they took it philosophic. Men understand a whole lot more than you give them credit for. They know—if they're anyrealgood—that it ain't that you ain't fond of them, or that you ain't thankful you're theirwife, but that you've just got to have things that's different and interesting and—and tellable. Anyhow, that's the way Mame and I figgered it out. And we got into our good clothes, and we came up to the city, and went to the hotel, and got us a bowl of hot oyster soup apiece. And then we had the street-car ride out here, and we'll have another going back. And we've seen you. And we'll have a walk past the store windows in the morning before train-time. And I bet when we get home, 'long towards night, our two dining-rooms'll look real good to us again—don't you, Mame?"
"Yes, sir!" Mame says, with her little laugh again. "And our husbands, too!"
I'd been listening to them—but I'd been watching Ellen. Ellen was one of the women that aren't deceived by outside appearances, same as some. Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb didn't look any more like her city friends than a cat's tail looks like a plume, but just the same Ellen saw what they were and what they were worth. And when they got done:
"Do you mean you are going back to-morrow?" she says.
"Noon train," says Mame, "and be home in time to cook supper as natural as life and as good as new."
Ellen kept looking at them, and I guessed what she was thinking: A hundred miles they'd come for a change, and all they'd got was two street-car ridesand a bowl of oyster soup apiece and this call, and they were going home satisfied.
All of a sudden Ellen sat up straight in her chair.
"See," she says, "it's only eight o'clock. Why can't the four of us go to the theater?"
The two women sort of gasped, in two hitches.
"Us?" they says.
Ellen jumped up. "Quick, Calliope," she says. "Get your things on. Delia can stay with the baby. I'll telephone for a taxi. We can decide what to see on the way down. You'll go, won't you?" she asks 'em.
"Go!" says they, in one breath. "Oh—yes,sir!"
In no time, or thereabouts, we found ourselves down-stairs packing into the taxicab. I was just as much excited as anybody—I hadn't been to a play in years. Ellen told us what there was as we went down, but they might have been the names of French cooking for all they meant to us, and we left it to her to pick out where we were to go.
When we followed her down the aisle of the one she picked out, just after the curtain went up, where do you think she took us?Into a box!It was so dark that Mis' Toplady and Mame never noticed until the curtain went down, and the lights came up, and we looked round.
As for me, I could hardly listen to the play. I was thinking of these two dear women from the village,and what it meant to them to have something different to do. But even more, I was watching Ellen, that had set out to make them have a good time, and was doing her best at it, getting them to talk and making them laugh, when the curtain was down. But when the curtain was up, it seemed to me that Ellen wasn't listening to the play so very much, either.
Before the last act, Ellen had to get back to the baby, so we left the two of them there and went home.
"Alone in the box!" says Mame Holcomb, as we were leaving. "My land, and my hat's trimmed on the wrong side for the audience!"
"Do we have to go when it's out?" says Mis' Toplady. "Won't they just leave us set here, on—and on—and on?"
I remember them as I looked back and saw them, sitting there together. And something, I dunno whether it was the wedding-trip poplin dress, or the thought of the two dining-rooms where they'd set for so long, or of the little lark they'd planned, sort of made a lump come and meet a word I was trying to say.
We'd got out to the entry of the box, when somebody came after us, and it was little bit of Mame Holcomb, looking up with eyes bright as a blue jay's at the feed-dish.
"Oh," she says to Ellen, "I ain't half told you—neither of us has—what this means to us. And Iwanted you to know—we both of us do—that the best part is, you so sort ofunderstood."
Ellen just bent over and kissed her. And when we came out in the hall, all light and red carpet, I see Ellen's eyes were full of tears.
And when we got in the taxicab: "Ellen," I says, "I thank you, too—ever so much. You did understand. So did I."
"I don't know—I don't know," she says "But, Calliope, how in the world do you understand that kind of thing?"
So I said it, right out plain:
"Oh," I says, "I guess sheer because I've seen so much unhappiness, and on up to divorce, come about sole because married folkswillhunt in couples perpetual, and not let themselves be just folks."
When we got home—and we hadn't said much more all the way there—as we opened the living-room door, I saw that we'd got there first, before Russell. I was glad of that. Ellen ran right down the hall to the baby's room, and I took off my things and went down to the end of the room where the couch was, to lay down till she came back.
I must have dozed off, because I didn't hear Russell come in. The first I knew, he was standing with his back to the fire, filling his pipe. So I looked in his face, when he didn't know anybody was looking.
He had evidently walked home, and had come infresh and glowing and full of frosty air, and his cheeks were ruddy. He was smiling a little at something or other, and altogether he looked not a bit like the tired man that had come home that night to dinner.
Then I heard the farther door click, and Ellen's step in the hall.
He looked toward the door, and I saw the queerest expression come in his face. Now, there was Russell, a man of twenty-seven or eight, a grown man that had lived his independent life for years before he had married Ellen. And yet, honestly, when he looked up then, his face and his eyes were like those of a boy that had done something that he had been scolded for. He looked kind of apologetic and explanatory—a look no man ought to be required to look unless for a real reason. It seems so—ignominious for a human being to have to look like that when they hadn't done a thing wrong.
My heart sank some. I thought of the way Ellen had been all slumped down in that easy chair, crying and taking on. And I waited for her to come in, feeling as if all the law and the prophets hung on the next few minutes—and I guess they did.
She'd put on a little, soft house-dress, made you-couldn't-tell-how, of lace, with blue showing through, kind of like clouds and the sky. But it was her face I looked at, because I remembered the set look it had when she'd told Russell good-by. And when I seeher face now there in all that sky-and-clouds effect, honest, it was like a star.
"Hello, dear," she says, kind of sweet and casual, "put a stick of wood on the fire and tell me all about it."
I tell you, my heart jumped up then as much as it would of if I'd heard her say "I will" when they were married. For this was their new minute.
"Sit here," he says, and pulled her down to the big chair, and sat on the low chair beside her, where I'd seen him first. Only now, the baby wasn't there—it was just the two of them.
"Did you beat them all to pieces?" she asks, still with that blessed, casual, natural way of hers.
He smiled, sort of pleased and proud and humble. "I did," he owns up. "You're my wife, and I can brag to you if I want to. I walloped 'em."
He told her about the game, saying a lot of things that didn't mean a thing to me, but that must have meant to her what they meant to him, because she laughed out, pleased.
"Good!" she says. "You play a corking game, if I do say it. Do you know, you look a lot better than you did when you came home to dinner? I hate to see you look tired like that."
"I feel fit as a fish now," says he. "There's something about an evening like that with half a dozen of 'em—it isn't the game. It's the—oh, I don't know. But it kind of—"
He petered off, and she didn't make the mistake of agreeing too hard or talking about it too long. She just nodded, and pretty soon she told him some little thing about the baby. When he emptied his pipe, she said she thought she'd go to bed.
But when she got up, he reached up and pulled her back in the chair again, and moved so that he set with his cheek against hers. And he says:
"I've got something to tell you."
She picked up his hand to lean her head on, and says, "What? Me?"—which I'd noticed was one of the little family jokes, that no family should be without a set of.
"Do you know, Ellen," he said, "to-night, when I went out to go over to Beldon's, I thought you didn't like my going."
"You did?" she says. "What made you think that?"
"The way you spoke—or looked—or kissed me. I don't know. I imagined it, I guess," says he. "And—I've got something to own up."
She just waited; and he said it out, blunt:
"It made me not want to come home," says he.
"Not want to come home?" she says over, startled.
He nodded. "Lacy and Bright both left Beldon's before I did," he says. "I thought probably—I don't know. I imagined you were going to bepolite as the deuce, the way I thought you were when I went out."
"Oh," she says, "was I that?"
"So when Lacy and Bright made jokes about what their wives'd say if they didn't get home, I joined in with them, and laughed at the 'apron strings.' That's what we called it."
She moved a little away. "Did you do that?" she said. "Oh, Russell, I should hate that. I should think any woman would hate it."
"I know," he says. "I'm dead sorry. But I wanted you to know. And, dear—"
He got up and stood before her, with her hands crushed up in his.
"I want you to know," he says, kind of solemn, "that the way you are about this makes me—gladder than the dickens. Not for the reason you might think—because it's going to make it easy to be away when I want to. But because—"
He didn't say things very easy. Most men don't, except for their little bit of courting time.
"Well, thunder," he said, "don't you see? It makes me so sure you're mywife—and not just married to me."
She smiled up at him without saying anything, but I knew how balm and oil were curing the hurt that she thought she'd had that night when he went out.
"I've always thought of our each doing things—and coming home and telling each other about them," he says, vague.
"Ofmydoing things, too?" she asks, quick.
"Why, yes—sure. You, of course," he says, emphatic. "Haven't you seen that I want you to do things sometimes, without me tagging on?"
"Is that the way you look at it?" she says, slow.
He gave her two hands a gay little jerk, and pulled her to her feet.
"Why," he said, "you're a person. And I'm a person. If we really love each other, being married isn't only somethinginstead. It's somethingplus."
"Russell," she says, "how did you find that out?"
"I don't know," he says. "How does anybody find out anything?"
I'll never forget the way Ellen looked when she went close to him.
"By loving somebody enough, I think," she says.
That made him stop short to wonder about something.
"How did you find out, if it comes to that?" he asks.
"What? Me?" she says. "Oh, I found out—by special messenger!"
Think of Mis' Toplady and Mame being that, unbeknownst!
They turned away together, and walked down the room. The fire had burned down, and everythingacted like eleven-o'clock-at-night. It made a nice minute. I like to think about it.
"To-morrow morning," she told him, "I'm going to take Calliope and two friends of hers to the dog show. And you—don't—have—to—come. But you're invited, you know."
He laughed like a boy.
"Well, now, maybe Icandrop in!" says he.