FOOTNOTE:[8]Copyright, 1917,Woman's Home Companion.
[8]Copyright, 1917,Woman's Home Companion.
[8]Copyright, 1917,Woman's Home Companion.
When a house in the neighborhood has been vacant for two years, and all of a sudden the neighborhood sees furniture being moved into that house, excitement, as Silas Sykes says, reigns supreme and more than supreme.
And so it did in Friendship Village when the Oldmoxon House got a new tenant, unbeknownst. The excitement was specially strained because the reason Oldmoxon House had stood vacant so long was the rent. And whoever had agreed to the Twenty Dollars was going to be, we all felt, and as Mis' Sykes herself put it, "a distinct addition to Friendship Village society."
It was she gave me the news, being the Sykeses are the Oldmoxon House's nearest neighbors. I hurried right over to her house—it was summer-warm and you just ached for an excuse to be out in it, anyway. We drew some rockers onto her front porch where we could get a good view. The Oldmoxon double front doors stood open, and the things were being set inside.
"Serves me right not to know who it is," says Mis' Sykes. "I see men working there yesterday,and I never went over to inquire what they were doing."
"A body can't do everything that's expected of them," says I, soothing.
"Won't it be nice," says Mis' Sykes, dreamy, "to have that house open again, and folks going and coming, and maybe parties?" It was then the piano came out of the van, and she gave her ultimatum. "Whoever it is," she says, pointing eloquent, "will be a distinct addition to Friendship Village society."
There wasn't a soul in sight that seemed to be doing the directing, so pretty soon Mis' Sykes says, uneasy:
"I don't know—would it seem—how would it be—well, wouldn't it be taking a neighborly interest to step over and question the vans a little?"
And we both of us thought it would be in order, so we did step right over to inquire.
Being the vans had come out from the City, we didn't find out much except our new neighbor's name: Burton Fernandez.
"The Burton Fernandezes," says Mis' Sykes, as we picked our way back. "I guess when we write that name to our friends in our letters, they won't think we live in the woods any more. Calliope," she says, "it come to me this: Don't you think it would be real nice to get them up a reception-surprise, and all go there some night as soon as they get settled, and take our own refreshments, and getacquainted all at once, instead of using up time to call, individual?"
"Land, yes," I says, "I'd like to do that to every neighbor that comes into town. But you—" says I, hesitating, to her that was usually so exclusive she counted folks's grand-folks on her fingers before she would go to call on them, "what makes you—"
"Oh," says Mis' Sykes, "you can't tell me. Folks's individualities is expressed in folks's furniture. You can't tell me that, with those belongings, we can go wrong in our judgment."
"Well," I says, "Ican't go wrong, because I can't think of anything that'd make me give them the cold shoulder. That's another comfort about being friends to everybody—you don't have to decide which ones you want to know."
"You're so queer, Calliope," says Mis' Sykes, tolerant. "You miss all the satisfaction of being exclusive. And you can'taffordnot to be."
"Mebbe not," says I, "mebbe not. But I'm willing to try it. Hang the expense!" says I.
Mis' Sykes didn't waste a day on her reception-surprise. I heard of it right off from Mis' Holcomb and Mis' Toplady and two-three more. They were all willing enough, not only because any excitement in the village is like a personal present to all of us, but because Mis' Sykes was interested. She's got a real gift for making folks think her way is the way. She's a real leader. Everybody wears astraw hat contented till, somewheres near November, Mis' Sykes flams out in felt, and then you begin right off to feel shabby in your straw, though new from the store that Spring.
"It does seem like rushing things a little, though," says Mis' Holcomb to me, very confidential, the next day.
"Not for me," I says. "I been vaccinated."
"What do you mean?" says she.
"Not even the small-pox can make me snub them," I explains.
"Yes, but Calliope," says Mis' Toplady in a whisper, "suppose it should turn out to be one of them awful places we read about. They have good furniture."
"Well," says I, "in that case, if thirty to forty of us went in with our baskets, real friendly, and done it often enough, I bet we'd either drive them out or turn them into better neighbors. Where's the harm?"
"Calliope," says Mame Holcomb, "don't you draw the linenowheres?"
"Yes," I says, mournful. "Them on Mars won't speak to me—yet. But short of Mars—no. I have no lines up."
We heard from the servant that came down on Tuesday and began cleaning and settling, that the family would arrive on Friday. We didn't get much out of him—a respectable-seeming colored man butreticent, very. The fact that the family servant was a man finished Mis' Sykes. She had had a strong leaning, but now she was bent, visible. And with an item that appeared Thursday night in the Friendship VillageEvening Daily, she toppled complete.
"Professor and Mrs. Burton Fernandez," theSupper Table Jottingssaid, "are expected Friday to take possession of Oldmoxon House, 506 Daphne street. Professor Fernandez is to be engaged for some time in some academic and scholastic work in the City. Welcome, Neighbors."
"Let's have our reception-surprise for them Saturday night," says Mis' Sykes, as soon as she had read the item. "Then we can make them right at home, first thing, and they won't need to tramp into church, feeling strange, Next-day morning."
"Go on—do it," says I, affable.
Mis' Sykes ain't one to initiate civic, but she's the one to initiate festive, every time.
Mis' Holcomb and Mis' Toplady and me agreed to bake the cakes, and Mis' Sykes was to furnish the lemonade, being her husband keeps the Post-office store, and what she gets, she gets wholesale. And Mis' Sykes let it be known around that on Saturday night we were all to drop into her house, and go across the street together, with our baskets, to put in a couple of hours at our new neighbors', and make them feel at home. And everybody was looking forward to it.
I've got some hyacinth bulbs along by my side fence that get up and come out, late April and early May, and all but speak to you. And it happened when I woke up Friday morning they looked so lovely, I couldn't resist them. I had to take some of them up, and set them out in pots and carry them around to a few. About noon I was going along the street with one to take to an old colored washerwoman I know, that never does see much that's beautiful but the sky; but when I got in front of Oldmoxon House, a thought met me.
"To-day's the day they come," I said to myself. "Be kind of nice to have a sprig of something there to welcome them."
So my feet turned me right in, like your feet do sometimes, and I rang the front bell.
"Here," says I, to that colored servant that opened the door, "is a posy I thought your folks might like to see waiting for them."
He started to speak, but somebody else spoke first.
"How friendly!" said a nice-soft voice—I noticed the voice particular. "Let me thank her."
There came out from the shadow of the hall, a woman—the one with the lovely voice.
"I am Mrs. Fernandez—this is good of you," she said, and put out her hands for the plant.
I gave it to her, and I don't believe I looked surprised, any more than when I first saw the picturesof the Disciples, that the artist had painted their skin dark, like it must have been. Mrs. Fernandez was dark too. But her people had come, not from Asia, but from Africa.
Like a flash, I saw what this was going to mean in the village. And in the second that I stood there, without time to think it through, something told me to go in, and try to get some idea of what was going to be what.
"May I come inside now I'm here?" I says.
She took me into the room that was the most settled of any. The piano was there, and a good many books on their shelves. As I remember back now, I must just have stood and stared at them, for impressions were chasing each other across my head like waves on a heaving sea. No less than that, and mebbe more.
"I was trying to decide where to put the pictures," she said. "Then we shall have everything settled before my husband gets home to-morrow."
We talked about the pictures—they were photographs of Venice and of Spain. Then we talked about the garden, and whether it was too late for her to plant much, and I promised her some aster plants. Then I saw a photograph of a young girl—it was her daughter, in Chicago University, who would be coming home to spend the Summer. Her son had been studying to be a surgeon, she said.
"My husband," she told me, "has some work todo in the library in the City. We tried to live there—but we couldn't bear it."
"I'm glad you came here," I told her. "It's as nice a little place as any."
"I suppose so," she says only. "As nice as—any."
I don't think I stayed half an hour. But when I came out of there I walked away from Oldmoxon House not sensing much of anything except a kind of singing thanksgiving. I had never known anything of her people except the kind like our colored wash-woman. I knew about the negro colleges and all, but I guess I never thought about the folks that must be graduating from them. I'd always thought that there might be somebody like Mis' Fernandez, sometime, a long way off, when the Lord and us his helpers got around to it. And here already it was true of some of them. It was like seeing the future come true right in my face.
When I shut the gate of Oldmoxon House, I see Mis' Sykes peeking out her front door, and motioning to me. And at the sight of her, that I hadn't thought of since I went into that house, I had all I could do to keep from laughing and crying together, till the street rang with me. I crossed over and went in her gate; and her eye-brows were all cocked inquiring to take in the news.
"Go on," she says, "and tell me all there is totell. Is it all so—the name—and her husband—and all?"
"Yes," I says, "it's all so."
"I knew it when I see her come," says Mis' Sykes. "Her hat and her veil and her simple, good-cut black clothes—you can't fool me on a lady."
"No," I says. "You can't fool me, either."
"Well now," says Mis' Sykes, "there's nothing to hinder our banging right ahead with our plan for to-morrow night, is there?"
"Nothing whatever," I says, "to hinder me."
Mis' Sykes jerked herself around and looked at me irritable.
"Why don't you volunteer?" says she. "I hate to dig the news out of anybody with the can-opener."
I'd have given a good deal to feel that I didn't have to tell her, but just let her go ahead with the reception surprise. I knew, though, that I ought to tell her, not only because I knew her through and through, but because I couldn't count on the village. We're real democratic in the things we know about, but let a new situation stick up its head and we bound to the other side, automatic.
"Mis' Sykes," I says, "everything that we'd thought of our new neighbor is true.Also, she's going to be a new experience for us in a way we hadn't thought of. She's dark-skinned."
"A brunette," says Mis' Sykes. "I see that through her veil—what of it?"
"Nothing—nothing at all," says I. "You noticed then, that she's colored?"
I want to laugh yet, every time I think how Mis' Postmaster Sykes looked at me.
"Colored!" she says. "You mean—you can't mean—"
"No," I says, "nothing dangerous. It's going to give us a chance to see that what we've always said could be true sometime, away far off, is true of some of them now."
Mis' Sykes sprang up and began walking the floor.
"A family like that in Oldmoxon House—and my nearest neighbors," says she, wild. "It's outrageious—outrageious."
I don't use my words very good, but I know better than to say "outrageious." I don't know but it was her pronouncing it that way, in such a cause, that made me so mad.
"Mis' Sykes," I says, "Mis' Fernandez has got a better education than either you or I. She's a graduate of a Southern college, and her two children have been to colleges that you and I have never seen the inside of and never will. And her husband is a college professor, up here to study for a degree that I don't even know what the lettersstands for. In what," says I, "consists your and my superiority to that woman?"
"My gracious," says Mis' Sykes, "ain't you got no sense of fitness to you. Ain't she black?"
"Her skin ain't the same color as ours, you're saying," I says. "Don't it seem to you that that reason had ought to make a cat laugh?"
Mis' Sykes fair wheeled on me. "Calliope Marsh," says she, "the way you set your opinions against established notions is an insult to your kind."
"Established notions," I says over after her. "'Established notions.' That's just it. And who is it, of us two, that's being insulting to their kind now, Mis' Sykes?"
She was looking out the window, with her lips close-pressed and a thought between her narrowed eye-lids.
"I'll rejoin 'em—or whatever it is you call it," she says. "I'll rejoin 'em from living in that house next to me."
"Mis' Sykes!" says I. "But their piano and their book-cases and their name are just the same as yesterday. You know yourself how you said folks's furniture expressed them. And it does—so be they ain't using left-overs the way I am. I tell you, I've talked with her, and I know. Or rather I kept still while she told me things about Venice and Granadawhere she'd been and I hadn't. You've got all you thought you had in that house, and education besides. Are you the Christian woman, Mis' Sykes, to turn your nose up at them?"
"Don't throw my faith in my face," says she, irritable.
"Well," I says, "I won't twit on facts. But anybody'd think the Golden Rule's fitted neat onto some folks to deal with, and is left flap at loose ends for them that don't match our skins. Is that sense, or ain't it?"
"It ain't the skin," she says. "Don't keep harping on that. It's them. They're different by nature."
Then she says the great, grand motto of the little thin slice of the human race that's been changed into superiority.
"You can't change human nature!" says she, ticking it out like a clock.
"Can't you?" says I. "Can'tyou? I'm interested. If that was true, you and I would be swinging by our tails, this minute, sociable, from your clothes-line."
By this time she didn't hear anything anybody said back—she'd got to that point in the argument.
"If," she says, positive, "if the Lord had intended dark-skinned folks to be different from what they are, he'd have seen to it by now."
I shifted with her obliging.
"Then," says I, "take the Fernandez family, in the Oldmoxon House. They're different. They're more different than you and I are. What you going to do about it?"
Mis' Sykes stamped her foot. "How do you know," she says, "that the Lord intended them to be educated? Tell me that!"
I sat looking down at her three-ply Ingrain carpet for a minute or two. Then I got up, and asked her for her chocolate frosting receipt.
"I'm going to use that on my cake for to-morrow night," I says. "And do you want me to help with the rest of the telephoning?"
"What do you mean?" she says, frigid. "You don't think for a minute I'm going on with that, I hope?"
"On with it?" I says. "Didn't you tell me you had the arrangements about all made?"
She sunk back, loose in her chair. "I shall be the Laughing Stock,—the Laughing Stock," she says, looking wild and glazed.
"Yes," says I, deliberate, determined and serene, "they'll say you were going to dance around and cater to this family because they've moved into the Oldmoxon House. They'll say you wanted to make sure, right away, to get in with them. They'll repeat what you've been saying about the elegant furniture, in good taste. And about the academic andscholastic work being done. And about these folks being a distinct addition to Friendship Village society—"
"Don't, Calliope—oh, don't!" said Mis' Sykes, faint.
"Well, then," I says, getting up to leave, "go on ahead and act neighborly to them, the once, and decide later about keeping it up, as you would with anybody else."
It kind of swept over me—here we were, standing there, bickering and haggling, when out there on the planet that lay around Daphne Street were loose ends of creation to catch up and knit in.
"My gracious," I says, "I ain't saying they're all all right, am I? But I'm saying that as fast as those that try to grow, stick up their heads, it's the business of us that tootle for democracy, and for evolution, to help them on."
She looked at me, pitying.
"It's all so much bigger than that, Calliope," she says.
"True," says I, "for if some of them stick up their heads, it proves that more of them could—if we didn't stomp 'em down."
I got out in the air of the great, gold May day, that was like another way of life, leading up from our way. I took in a long breath of it—and that always helps me to see things big.
"One Spring," I says, "One world—one God—one life—one future. Wouldn't you think we could match ourselves up?"
But when I got in my little house, I looked around on the homely inside of it—that always helps me to think how much better things can be, when we really know how. And I says:
"Oh, God, we here in America got up a terrible question for you to help us settle, didn't we? Well,helpus! And help us to see, whatever's the way to settle anything, that giving the cold shoulder and the uplifted nose to any of the creatures you've made ain't the way to settlenothing. Amen."
Next morning I was standing in my door-way, breathing in the fresh, gold air, when in at the gate came that colored man of Mis' Fernandez's, and he had a big bouquet of roses. Not roses like we in the village often see. They were green-house bred.
"Mis' Fernandez's son done come home las' night and brung 'em," says the man.
"Her son," I says, "from college?"
"No'm," says the man. "F'om the war."
"From the what?" I says.
"F'om the war," he says over. "F'om U'pe."
He must have thought I was crazy. For a minute I stared at him, then I says "Glory be!" and I began to laugh. Then I told him to tell Mis' Fernandez that I'd be over in half an hour to thank her myself for the flowers, and in half an hour Iwas going up to her front door. I had to make sure.
"Your son," I says, forgetting all about the roses, "he's in the American army?"
"He was," she said. "He fought in France for eighteen months. Now he has been discharged."
"Oh," I says to myself, "that arranges everything. It must."
"Perhaps you will let me tell you," she said. "He comes back to us wearing the cross of war."
"The cross of war!" I cried. "That they give when folks save folks in battle?" I said it just like saving folks is the principal business of it all.
"My son did save a wounded officer in No-man's land," she told me. "The officer—he was a white man."
"Oh," I says, and I couldn't say another word till I managed to ask her if her son had been in the draft.
"No," she said. "He volunteered April 7, 1917."
It wasn't until I got out in the street that I remembered I hadn't thanked her for the roses at all. But there wasn't time to think of that.
I headed straight for Mis' Silas Sykes. She looked awful bad, and I don't think probably she'd slept a wink all night. I ask' her casual how the reception was coming on, and she kind of began to cry.
"I don't know what you hector me for like this," she says. "Ain't it enough that I've got to call folks up to-day and tell them I've made a fool of myself?"
"Not yet," I says. "Not yet you ain't made one of yourself, Mis' Sykes. That's to come, if any. It is hard," I says, "to do the particular thing you'll have to do. There's them," I says crafty, "as'll gloat."
"I thought about them all night long," she says, her breath showing through her words.
"Then think no more, Mis' Sykes," I says, "because there's a reason over there in that house why we should go ahead with our plan—and it's a reason you can't get around."
She looked at me, like one looking with no hope. And then I told her.
I never saw a woman so checkered in her mind. Her head was all reversed, and where had been one notion, another bobbed up to take its place, and where the other one had been previous, a new one was dancing.
"But do they do that?" she ask'. "Do they give war-crosses tonegroes?"
"Why not?" I says. "France don't care because the fore-fathers of these soldiers were made slaves by us. She don't lay it up againstthem. That don't touch their bravery. England never has minded dark skins—look at her East Indians andEgyptians that they say are everywhere in London. Nobody cares but us. Of course France gives negroes crosses of war when they're brave—why shouldn't she?"
"My gracious," Mis' Sykes says, "but what'll folks say here if we do go ahead and recognize them?"
"Recognizehim!" I cried. "Mis' Sykes—are you going to let him offer up his life, and go over to Europe and have his bravery recognized there, and then come back here and get the cold shoulder from you—are you? Then shame on us all!" I says.
Then Mis' Sykes said the things folks always say: "But if we recognize them, what about marriage?"
"See here," says I, "there's thousands and thousands of tuberculosis cases in this country to-day. And more hundreds of thousands with other diseases. Do we set the whole lot of them apart, and refuse to be decent to them, or do business with them, because they ought not to marry our girls and boys? Don't you see how that argument is just an excuse?"
"All the same," said Mis' Sykes, "it might happen."
"Then make a law against inter-marriage," I says. "That's easy. Nothing comes handier than making a new law. But don't snub the whole race—especially those that have risked their lives for you, Mis' Sykes!"
She stared at me, her face looking all triangular.
"It's for you to show them what to do," I pressed her. "They'll do what you do."
Mis' Sykes kind of stopped winking and breathing.
"I could make them do it, I bet you," she says, proud.
"Of course you could," I egged her on. "You could just take for granted everybody meant to be decent, and carry it off, matter-of-fact."
She stood up and walked around the room, her curl-papers setting strange on her proud ways.
"Don't figger on it, Mis' Sykes," I says. "Just think how much easier it is to be leading folks into something they ain't used to than to have them all laughing at you behind your back for getting come up with."
It wasn't the highest motive—but then, I only used it for a finishing touch. And for a tassel I says, moving off rapid:
"Now I'm going home to stir up my cake for the party."
She didn't say anything, and I went off up the street.
I remember it was one of the times when it came to me, strong, that there's something big and near working away through us, to get us to grow in spite of us. In spite of us.
And when I had my chocolate cake baked, I laydown on the lounge in my dining-room, and planned out how nice it was going to be, that night....
There was a little shower, and then the sun came back again; so by the time we all began to move toward Mis' Sykes's, between seven and eight, everything was fresh and earth-smelling and wet-sweet green. And there was a lovely, flowing light, like in a dream.
Whenever I have a hard thing to do, be it housecleaning or be it quenching down my pride, I always think of the way I see Mis' Sykes do hers. Dressed in her best gray poplin with a white lace yoke, and hair crimped frontandback, Mis' Sykes received us all, reserved and formal—not with her real society pucker, but with her most leader-like look.
Everybody was there—nobody was lacking. There must have been above fifty. I couldn't talk for trying to reckon how each of them would act, as soon as they knew.
"Blistering Benson," says Timothy Toplady, that his wife had got him into his frock-tail coat that he keeps to be pall-bearer in, "—kind of nice to welcome in another first family, ain't it?"
Mis' Sykes heard him. "Timothy Toplady, you ain't enough democracy to shake a stick at," she says, regal; and left him squenched, but with his lips moving.
"I'm just crazy to get upstairs in the OldmoxonHouse," says Mis' Hubbelthwait. "How do you s'pose they've got it furnished?"
"They're thinking more about the furniture of their heads than of their upstairs chambers," snaps back Mis' Sykes. And I see anew that whatever Mis' Sykes goes into, she goes into up to her eyes, thorough and firm.
"Calliope," she says, "you might run over now and see how they're situated. And be there with them when we come."
I knew that Mis' Sykes couldn't quite bear to make her speech with me looking at her, so I waited out in the entry and heard her do it—I couldn't help that. And honest, I think my respect for her rose while she done so, almost as much as if she'd meant what she said. Mis' Sykes is awful convincing. She can make you wish you'd worn gloves or went without, according to the way she's done herself; and so it was that night, in the cause she'd taken up with, unbeknownst.
She rapped on the table with the blue-glass paper weight.
"Friends," she says, distinct and serene, and everybody's buzzing simmered down. "Before we go over, I must tell you a little about our new—neighbors. The name as you know is Fernandez—Burton Fernandez. The father is a college professor, now in the City doing academic and scholastic work to a degree, as they say. The daughter is in one ofour great universities. The mother, a graduate of a Southern college, has traveled extensive in Venice and—and otherwise. I can't believe—" here her voice wobbled just for an instant, "I can't believe that there is one here who will not understand the significance of our party when I add that the family happens to be colored. I am sure that you will agree with me—withme—that these elegant educations merit our approbation."
She made a little pause to let it sink in. Then she topped it off. She told them about the returned soldier and the cross of war.
"If there is anybody," said she—and I knew how she was glancing round among them; "if there is anybody who can't appreciatethat, we'll gladly excuse them from the room."
Yes, she done it magnificent. Mis' Sykes carried the day, high-handed. I couldn't but remember, as I slipped out, how in Winter she wears ear-muffs till we've all come to consider going without them is affected.
I ran across the street, still in that golden, pouring light. In the Oldmoxon House was a surprise. Sitting with Mrs. Fernandez before the little light May fire, was her husband, and a slim, tall girl in a smoky brown dress, that was their daughter, home from her school to see her brother. Then the soldier boy came in. Even yet I can't talk much about him: A slight, silent youth, that had left his senioryear at college to volunteer in the army, and had come home now to take up his life as best he could; and on the breast of his uniform shone the little cross, won by saving his white captain, under fire.
I sat with them before their hearth, but I didn't half hear what they said. I was looking at the room, and at the four quiet folks that had done so much for themselves—more than any of us in the village, in proportion—and done it on paths none of us had ever had to walk. And the things I was thinking made such a noise I couldn't pay attention to just the talk. Over and over it kept going through my head: In fifty years.In fifty years!
At last came the stir and shuffle I'd been waiting for and the door-bell rang.
"Don't go," they said, when I sprang up; and they followed me into the hall. So there we were when the door opened, and everybody came crowding in.
Mis' Sykes was ahead, and it came to me, when I saw how deathly pale she was, that a prejudice is a living thing, after all—not a dead thing; and that to them that are in its grasp, your heart has got to go out just as much as to them that suffer from it.
I waved my hand to them all, promiscuous, crowding in with their baskets.
"Neighbors," I says, "here's our new neighbors. Name yourselves gradual."
They set their baskets in the hall, and came intothe big room where the fire was. And I was kind of nervous, because our men are no good on earth at breaking the ice, except with a pick; and our women, when they get in a strange room, are awful apt to be so taken up looking round them that they forget to work up anything to say.
But I needn't have worried. No sooner had we sat down than somebody spoke out, deep and full. Standing in the midst of us was Burton Fernandez, and it was him. And his voice went as a voice goes when it's got more to carry than just words, or just thoughts.
"My friends," he said, "I cannot bear to have you put yourselves in a false position. When you came, perhaps you didn't know. I mean—did you think, perhaps, that we were of your race?"
It was Mis' Sykes who answered him, grand and positive, and as if she was already thinking up her answer when she was born.
"Certainly not," she says. "We were informed—all of us." Then I saw her get herself together for something tremenjus, that should leave no doubt in anybody's mind. "What of that?" says she.
He stood still for a minute. He had deep-set eyes and a tired face that didn't do anything to itself when he talked. But his voice—that did. And when he began to speak again, it seemed to me that the voice of his whole race was coming through him.
"My friends," he said, "how can we talk of otherthings when our minds are filled with just what this means to us?"
We all kept still. None of us would have known how to say it, even if we had known what to say.
He said: "I'm not speaking of the difficulties—they don't so much matter. Nothing matters—except that even when we have made the struggle, then we're despised no less. We don't often talk to you about it—it's the surprise of this—you must forgive me. But I want you to know that from the time I began my school life, there have been many who despised, and a few who helped, but never until to-night have there been any of your people with the look and word of neighbor—never once in our lives until to-night."
In the silence that fell when he'd finished, I sat there knowing that even now it wasn't like he thought it was—and I wished that it had been so.
He put his hand on his boy's shoulder.
"It's for his sake," he said, "that I thank you most."
Mis' Sykes was equal to that, too.
"In the name of our whole town," she says to that young soldier, "we thankyoufor what you've done."
He just nodded a little, and nobody said anything more. And it came to me that most everything is more so than we most always suppose it to be.
When Mis' Toplady don't know quite what to do with a minute, she always brings her hands together in a sort of spontaneous-sounding clap, and kind of bustles her shoulders. She done that now.
"I motion I'll take charge of the refreshments," she says. "Who'll volunteer? I'm crazy to see what-all we've brought."
Everybody laughed, and rustled, easy. And I slipped over to the daughter, standing by herself by the fire-place.
"You take, don't you?" I ask' her.
"'Take?'" she says, puzzled.
"Music, I mean," I told her. (We always mean music when we say "take" in Friendship Village.)
"No," she says, "but my brother plays, sometimes."
The soldier sat down to the piano, when I asked him, and he played, soft and strong, and something beautiful. His cross shone on his breast when he moved. And me, I stood by the piano, and I heard the soul of the music come gentling through his soul, just like it didn't make any difference to the music, one way or the other....
Music. Music that spoke. Music that sounded like laughing voices.... No, for it was laughing voices....
I opened my eyes, and there in my dining-room, by the lounge, stood Mis' Toplady and Mis'Holcomb, laughing at me for being asleep. Then they sat down by me, and they didn't laugh any more.
"Calliope," Mis' Toplady says, "Mis' Sykes has been round to everybody, and told them about the Oldmoxon House folks."
"And she took a vote on what to do to-night," says Mame Holcomb.
"Giving a little advice of her own, by the wayside," Mis' Toplady adds.
I sat up and looked at them. With the soldier's music still in my ears, I couldn't take it in.
"You don't mean—" I tried to ask them.
"That's it," says Mis' Toplady. "Everybody voted to have a public meeting to honor the soldiers—the colored soldier with the rest. But that's as far as it will go."
"But he don't want to be honored!" I cried. "He wants to be neighbored—the way anybody does when they're worth it."
"Mis' Sykes says," says Mis' Toplady, "that we mustn't forget what is fitting and what isn't."
And Mis' Holcomb added: "She carried it off grand. Everybody thinks just the way she does."
My reception-surprise cake stood ready on the table. After a while, we three sat down around it, and cut it for ourselves. But all the while we ate, that soldier's music was still playing for me; and what hadn't happened was more real for me than the things that were true.
When the New Race comes—those whom Hudson calls "that blameless, spiritualized race that is to follow"—surely they will look back with some sense of actual romance upon the faint tapers which we now light, both individual and social tapers. They will make their allowance for us, as do we for the ambiguous knights of chivalry. And while the New Race will shudder at us—at our disorganization with its war, its poverty and its other crime—yet I think that they will love us a little for our ineffectual ministries, as already we love them for exceeding our utmost dream.
Don't you love a love-story; starting right before your eyes as casual as if it was preserves getting cooked or parsley coming up? It doesn't often happen to me to see one start, but once it did. It didn't start like anything at all that was going to be anything, but just still and quiet, same as the stars come out. I guess that's the way most great things move, isn't it? Still and quiet, like stars coming out. Or similar to stars.
It was the time of the Proudfits' bigwhat-they-called week-end parties, and it was the Saturday of the biggest of them, when a dozen city people came down to Friendship Village for the lark. And with them was to come a Piano Lady and a Violin Man—and a man I'd known about in the magazines, a Novel-and-Poem Man that writes the kind of things that gets through all the walls between you and the world, so's you can talk to everything there is. I was crazy to see the Novel-and-Poem Man—from behind somewheres, though, so's he wouldn't see me and look down on me. And when Miss Clementina Proudfit asked me to bring her out some things from the city Saturday night, chocolate peppermints and red candles and like that, and said she'd send the automobile to the train for me to fetch up the things and see the decorations, I was real pleased. But I was the most excited about maybe seeing the Poem-and-Novel Man.
"What's he like, Miss Clementina?" I ask' her. "When I hear his name I feel like when I hear the President's. Or even more that way."
"I've never met him," she says. "Mother knows him—he's her lion, not mine."
"He writes lovely things," I says, "things that makes you feel like everybody's way of doing is only lukewarm, and like you could just bring yourself to a boil to do good and straighten things out in the world, no matter what the lukewarm-way folks thought."
Miss Clementina looked over to me with a wonderful way she had—beautiful face and beautiful eyes softening to Summer.
"I know—know," she says; "I dread meeting him, for fear he doesn't mean it."
I knew what she meant. You can mean a thing you write in a book, or that you say in talk, or for other folks to do. But meaning it forlivingit—that's different.
I came out from the city that night on the accommodation, tired to death and loaded down with bundles for everybody in Friendship Village. Folks used to send into town by me for everythingbutstoves and wagons, though I wouldn't buy anything there except what you can't buy in the village: lamb's-wool for comforters, and cut-glass and baby-pushers, and shrimps—that Silas won't keep in the post-office store, because they don't agree with his stomach. Well, I was all packages that night, and it was through dropping one in the seat in front of me that I first saw the little boy.
He was laying down, getting to sleep if he could and pulling his eyes open occasional to see what was going on around him. His mother had had the seat turned, and she sat there beyond him, facing me, and I noticed her—flat red cheeks, an ostrich feather broke in the middle, blue and red stone rings on three fingers, and giving a good deal of attention to studying the folks around her. She was thekind of woman you see and don't look back to, 'count of other things interesting you more.
But the little boy, he was different. He wasn't more than a year old, and he didn't look that—and his cheeks were flushed and his eyelashes and mouth made you think "My!" I remember feeling I didn't see how the woman could keep from waking him up, just to prove he was hers and she could if she wanted to.
Instead of that, all she did was continually to get up and go out of the car. Every station we stopped at—and the accommodation acts like it was made for the stations and not the stations for it—she was up and out, as if the town was something swimming up to the car-door to speak to her. She'd leave the baby asleep in the seat, and I wondered what would happen if he woke up while she was gone, and started to roll. She stayed every time up till after the train started—I didn't wonder it made her cold, and that after a bit she put on her coat before she went. And once or twice she carried out her valise with her, as if she might have expected somebody to be there to get it. "Mebbe she's got somebody's laundry," thinks I, "and mebbe a stranger has asked her to bring it out on the train and she can't remember what station it's to be put off at." They send things to stations along the way a lot on the accommodation—everybody being neighbors, so.
Well, when we got to the Junction, out she went again, cloak and valise and all. But I didn't think much about her then, because at the Junction it's always all excitement, being that's where they switch the parlor car off the train, and whoever is in it for Friendship Village has to come back in the day coach for the rest of the way, and be just folks. And among those that came back that night was the Brother-man.
I dunno if you'll know what I mean by that name for him. Some men are just men, like they thought God made them just for the pleasure of making them. And some men are flying around like they wanted to prove that the Almighty didn't make a mistake when He created them. But there are some men that just live like God hadn't made them so much as that they're a piece of Him, and they haven't forgotten it and they feel kindly toward all the other pieces. Well, this man was one of the Brother-men. I knew it the minute I saw him.
By the time he came in the car, moving leisurely and like getting a seat wasn't so interesting as most other things, there wasn't a seat left, excepting only the turned one in front of the little chap asleep. The man looked around idle for a minute and see that they wasn't cloak or valise keeping that seat, and he sat down and opened the book he'd had his finger in the place all the time, and allowed to read.
There's consid'rable switching to do at theJunction, time we get started; and the jolts and bounces did just exactly what I thought they would do—woke the little chap up. From before the train started he begun stirring and whimpering—that way a baby does when it wants nothing in the world but a hand to be laid on it. Isn't it as if its mother's hand was a kind of healing that big folks forget about needing? By the time the train was out on the road in earnest, the little chap, he was in earnest, too. And he just what-you-might-say yelled. But no mother came. They wasn't a mother's hand with big red and blue rings on three fingers to lay on the little boy's back. And there wasn't a mother of him anywhere's in sight.
In a minute or two the Brother-man looked up. He hadn't seemed to see the baby before or to sense that hewasa baby. And he looked at him crying and he laid his book down and he looked all around him, perplexish, and then he looked over to me that was looking at him perplexish, too. And being he was a man and I wasn't, I got right up and went round there and picked the little chap up in my arms and sat down with him.
"His ma went out of the car somewheres," I explained it.
He had lifted his hat and jumped up, polite as if he was the one I'd picked up. And he stood looking down at me.
"I wonder if I couldn't fetch her," he says—and his voice was one of the voices that most says an idea all alone. I mean you'd most have known what he meant if he'd just spoke along without using any words—oh, well, I dunno if that sounds like anything, but I guess you know the kind I mean. The Novel-and-Poem Man's stories are the same kind, being they say so much that never does get set up in type.
The baby didn't stop crying at all—seems as though your hands don't have the right healing unless—unless—well, it didn't stop nor even halt. And so I says, hesitating, I says: "You wouldn't know her," I says. "I been watching her. I could find her better—if so be you wouldn't mind taking the baby."
The Brother-man put out his arms. I remember I looked up in his face then, and he was smiling—and his smile talked the same as his voice. And his face was all full of what he meant. He had one of those Summer faces like Miss Clementina's—just a general liking of the minute and a special liking for all the world. And what he said made me think of Summer, too:
"Mind?" says he. "Why it's like putting your cap over a butterfly."
He took the little fellow in his arms, and it was then that I first sensed how beautiful the Brother-man was—strong and fine and quiet, like he done whatever he done, and said whatever he said,all over him, soul and all, and didn't just speak with his muscles, same as some. And the baby, he was beautiful, too, big and fine and healthy and a boy, only not still a minute nor didn't know what quiet meant. But he stopped crying the instant the man took him, and they both looked at each other like—oh, like they were more alike than the years between them wanted to let them think. Isn't it pitiful and isn't it wonderful—when two folks meet? Big or little, nice or horrid, pleasant or cross, famous or ragged or talking or scairt—it don't make any differ'nce. They're just brother-pieces, broke off the same way. That was how the Brother-man looked down at the little chap, and I dunno but that was how the little chap looked up at him. Because the little thing threw out his arms toward him, and we both see the letter under his blanket pinned to his chest.
All of a sudden, I understood what had happened—almost without the use of my brain, as you do sometimes.
"Sit down a minute," I said to the Brother-man. "I guess mebbe this letter tells where she is."
And so it did. It was written in pencil, spelled irregular and addressed uphill, and the direction told the story even before the letter did. "To Anybody," the direction was. And the inside of the letter said:
"Take care of my Baby. I ain't fit and never was and now don't think to be anywheres long. Don't look for me.The baby would be best off with anybody but me, and don't think to be anywheres long and so would be orphant quite soon sure. He ain't no name so best not put mine except.Mother.P. S. If he puts out his hand he means you should kiss his hand then he won't cry. Don't forget, then he won't cry.P. S. When he can't get to sleep he can get to sleep if you rub the back of his neck."
"Take care of my Baby. I ain't fit and never was and now don't think to be anywheres long. Don't look for me.The baby would be best off with anybody but me, and don't think to be anywheres long and so would be orphant quite soon sure. He ain't no name so best not put mine except.
Mother.
P. S. If he puts out his hand he means you should kiss his hand then he won't cry. Don't forget, then he won't cry.
P. S. When he can't get to sleep he can get to sleep if you rub the back of his neck."
I remember how the Brother-man looked at me when we'd got it spelled out.
"Oh," he said—and then he said a name that sounded like somebody calling to its Father from inside the dark.
I hate to think of what I said. I said it kind of mechanical and wooden, the way we get to be from shifting the burdens off our own backs where they belong, onto somebody else's back—and doing it second-nature, and as if we were constructed slanting so that burdens could slip off. What I said was:
"I suppose we'd better tell the conductor."
"Tell the conductor!" said he, wondering. "What on earth for?"
"I dunno," says I, some taken back. I suppose I'd had some far notion of telling him because he wore a uniform.
"What do we want to tell him for?" this Brother-man repeated. "Weknow."
Oh, but that's come back to me, time and timeagain, when I've thought I needed help in taking care of somebody, or settling something, or doing the best way for folks. "What do we want to tell the conductor or anybody else for?Weknow." And ten to one we are the one who can do the thing ourselves.
"But what are we going to do?" I said. I think that his eyes were the kind of eyes that just make you say "What arewegoing to do?" and not "What areyougoing to do?" or "What aretheygoing to do?"—same as most folks start to say, same as I had started.
For the first time the Brother-man looked helpless—but he spoke real firm.
"Keep him," he says, simple.
"Keep him!" I said over—since I had lived quite a while in a world where those words are not common.
He looked down thoughtful at the little chap who was lying there, contented, going here and there with his fists, and looking up at the lights as if he was reflecting over the matter some himself.
"The conductor," said the Brother-man, "would telegraph, and most likely find the mother. If he was efficient enough, he might even get her arrested. And what earthly good would that do to the child? Our concern is with this little old man here, with his life hanging on his shoulders waiting to be lived. Isn't it?" he asked, simple. And in a minute, headded: "I always hoped that this would never happen to me—because when it does happen, there's only one thing to do: Keep them." And he added in another minute: "I don't know—I ought to look at it that I've been saved the trouble of going out and finding a way to help—" only you understand, his words came all glossy and real different from mine.
I tell you, anybody like that makes all the soul in you get up and recognize itself asbeingyou; and your body and what it wants and what it is afraid of is no more able to run you then than a pinch of dirt would be, sprinkled on your wings. Before I knew it, my body was keeping quiet, like a child that's been brought up well. And my soul was saying whatever it pleased.
"I'm a woman," I said, "and alone in the world. I'm the one to take him."
"I'm alone in the world too," he said, "and I'm a man. So I'm just as able to care for him as you are. I'll keep him."
Then he looked down the car, kind of startled, and began smiling, slow and nice.
"On my word," he said, "I'd forgotten that besides being a man I'm about to be a guest. And this little old chap wasn't included in the invitation."
I looked out the window to see where we were getting, and there we were drawing over the Flats outside Friendship Village, and the brakeman cameto the door and shouted the name. When I hear the name that way, and when I see the Fair ground and the Catholic church steeple and the canal bridge and the old fort and the gas house, it's always as sweet as something new, and as something old, and it's something sweeter than either. It makes me feel happy and good and like two folks instead of one.
"Look here," I said, brisk, "this is where I get off. This is home. And I'm going to take this baby with me. You go on to your visiting place—so be you'll help me off," I says, "with my baby and my bundles that's for half of Friendship Village."
"Friendship Village!" he said over, as if he hadn't heard the man call. "Is this Friendship Village? Why, then this," he said, "is where I'm going too. This is where the Proudfits live, isn't it?" he said—and he said some more, meditative, about towns acting so important over having one name and not another, when nobody can remember either name. But I hardly heard him. He was going to the Proudfits'. And without knowing how I knew it, I knew all over me, all of a sudden, who he was: That he was the Novel-and-Poem man himself.
"Youcan'tbe him!" I said aloud. I don't know what I was looking for—a man with wings or what. But it wasn't for somebody like this—all simple and still and every day—like stars comingout. "You can't be him," says I, mentioning his name. "He was to get here this afternoon on the Through."
"That alone would prove I'm I," he said, merry. "I always miss the Throughs."
Think of that.... There I'd been riding all that way beside him, talking to him as familiar as if he had been just folks.
It seems a dream when I think of it now. The Proudfits' automobile was there for him too—because he had telegraphed that he would take the next train—as well as for me and the chocolate peppermints and the red candles. And so, before I could think about me being me sure enough, there I was in the Proudfits' car, glassed in and lit up, and a stranger-baby in my arms; and beside me the Novel-and-Poem man that was the Brother-man too,—the man that had made me talk through walls with everything there is. Oh, and how I wanted to tell him! And when I tried to tell him what he had meant to me, how do you guess it came out of my brain?
"I've read your book," says I, like a goose.
But he seemed real sort of pleased. "I've been honored," he said, gentle.
I looked up at him; and I knew how he knew already that I didn't know all the hard parts in the book, and all the big words, and some of the little nice things he had tried to work out to suit him.And it seemed as if any praise of mine would only make him hurt with not being appreciated. Still, I wanted my best to say something out of the gratitude in me.
"It—helped," I said; and couldn't say more to save me.
But he turned and looked down at me almost as he had looked at the little chap.
"That is the only compliment I ever try to get," he said to me, as grave as grave.
And at that I saw plain what it was that had made him seem so much like a friend, and what had made me think to call him the Brother-man. Why, he was folks, like me. He wasn't only somebody big and distinguished and name-in-the-paper. He was like those that you meet all the time, going round the streets, talking to you casual, coming out of their houses quiet as stars coming out. He was folks and a brother to folks; and he knew it, and he seemed to want to keep letting folks know that he knew it. He wasn't the kind that goes around thinking "Me, me, me," nor even "You and me." It was "You and me and all of us" with the Brother-man.
"Isn't it strange," he says once, while we rode along, "that what all these streets and lights and houses are for, and what the whole world is for is helped along by taking just one little chap and bringing him up—bringing him up?" And he looked down at the baby, that was drowsing off in my arms,as if little chaps in general were to him windows into somewhere else.
The Proudfit house was lamps from top to bottom, but I could see from the glass vestibule that the big rooms were all empty, and I thought mebbe they hadn't had dinner yet, being they have it all unholy hours when most folks's is digested and ready to let them sleep. But when we stepped in the hall I heard a little tip-tap of strings from up above, and it was from the music-room that opens off the first stair-landing, and dinner was over and they were all up there; and the Piano Lady and the Violin Man were gettin' ready to play. Madame Proudfit had heard the car, and came down the stairs, saying a little pleased word when she saw the Brother-man. She looked lovely in black lace, and jewels I didn't know the name of, and she was gracious and glad and made him one of the welcomes that stay alive afterwards and are almostpeopleto you to think about. The Brother-man kissed her hand, and he says to her, some rueful and some wanting to laugh:
"I'm most awfully sorry about the train, Madame Proudfit. But—I've brought two of us to make up for being so late. Will—will that not do?" he says.
Madame Proudfit looked over at me with a smile that was like people too—only her smile was likenice company and his was like dear friends; and then she saw the baby.
"Calliope!" she said, "what on earth have you been doing now?"
"She hasn't done it. I did it," says the Brother-man. "Look at him! You rub the back of his neck when he won't sleep."
Madame Proudfit looked from him to me.
"How utterly, extravagantly like both of you!" Madame Proudfit said. "Come in the library and tell me about it."
We went in the big, brown library, where nothing looked as if it would understand about this, except, mebbe, some of the books—and not all of them—and the fire, that was living on the hearth, understanding all about everything. I sat by the fire and pulled back the little chap's blanket and undid his coat and took his bonnet off; his hair was all mussed up at the back and the cheek he'd slept on was warm-red. Madame Proudfit and the Brother-man stood on the hearth-rug, looking down. Only she was looking from one star to another, and the Brother-man and I, we were on the same star, looking round.
We told her what had happened, some of his telling and some of mine. It came over me, while we were doing it, that what had sounded so sensible and sure in the train and in the automobile and in our two hearts sounded different here in theProudfits' big, brown library, with Madame Proudfit in black lace and jewels I didn't know the name of, listening. But then I looked up in the Brother-man's face and I gotright back, like he was a kind of perpetual telegraph, the feeling of its being sensible and theonlysensible thing to do. Sensible in the sense of your soul being sensible, and not just your being sensible like your neighbors.
"But, my dear, dear children," Madame Proudfit says, and stopped. "Mydearchildren," she says on, "what, exactly, are you going to do with him?"
"Keep him!" says the Brother-man prompt, and beamed on her as if he had said the one possible answer.
"But—keep him!" says Madame Proudfit. "How 'keep him'? Be practical. What are you going to do?"
It makes you feel real helpless when folks in black lace tell you to be practical, as if that came before everything else—especially when their "practical" and your "practical" might as well be in two different languages. And yet Madame Proudfit is kind and good too, and she understands that you've got to help or you might as well not be alive; and she gives and gives and gives. Butthis—well, she saw the need and all that, but her way that night would have been to give money and send the little chap away. You know how some are. They canunderstand everything good and kind—up to a certain point. And that point is,keep him. They can't seem to get past that.
"Keep him!" she says. "Make your bachelor apartment into a nursery? Or you, Calliope, leave him to mind the house while you are canvassing? Be practical. What,exactly, are you going to do?"
Then the Brother-man frowned a little—I hadn't known he could, but I was glad he knew how.
"Really," he said, "I haven't decided yet on the cut of his knickerbockers, or on what college he shall attend, or whether he shall spend his vacations at home or abroad. The details will get themselves done. I only know I mean tokeep him."
She shook her head as if she was talking to a foreign language; then we heard somebody coming—a little rustle and swish and afterwards a voice. These three things by themselves would have made somebody more attractive than some women know how to be. I'll never forget how she seemed when she came to the door—Miss Clementina, waiting to speak with her mother and not knowing anybody else was with her.
Honest, I couldn't tell what her dress was—and me a woman that has turned her hand to dressmaking. It was all thin, like light, and it had all little ways of hanging that made you know you never could make one like it, so's you might as well enjoyyourself looking and not fuss with trying to remember how it was put together. But her dress wasn't so much like light as her face. Miss Clementina's face—oh, it was like the face of a beautiful woman that somebody tells you about, and that you never do get to see, and if you did, like enough she might not be so beautiful after all—but you always think of her as being the way you mean when you say "beautiful." Miss Clementina looked like that. And when I saw her that night I could hardly wait to have her face and eyes soften all to Summer, that wonderful way she had.
"Oh, Miss Clementina," I says, "I've got a baby. At least, he's only half mine. I mean—"
Then, while she was coming toward us along the lamp-light, as if it was made to bring her, the little chap began waking up. He stirred, and budded up his lips, and said little baby-things in his throat, and begun to cry, soft and lonesome, as if he didn't understand. Oh, isn't it true? A baby's waking-up minute, when it cries a little and don't know where it is, ain't that like us, sometimes crying out sort of blind to be took care of? And when the little thing opened his eyes, first thing he saw was Miss Clementina, standing beside him. And what did that little chap do instead of stopping crying but just hold out one hand toward her, and kind of bend across, same as if he meant something.
With that the Brother-man, that MadameProudfit hadn't had a chance yet to present to Miss Clementina, he says to her all excited:
"He wants you to kiss his hand! Kiss his hand and he'll stop crying!"
Miss Clementina looked up at him like a little question, then she stooped and kissed the baby's hand, and we three watched him perfectly breathless to see what he would do. And he done exactly what that up-hill note had said he would—he stopped crying, and he done more than it said he would—he smiled sweet and bright, and as if he knew something else about it. And we three looked at each other and at him, and we smiled, too. And it made a nice minute.
"Clementina," said Madame Proudfit, like another minute that wasn't so very well acquainted with the one that was being, and then she presented the Brother-man. But instead of a regular society, say-what-you-ought-to-say answer to her greeting, the Brother-man says to her:
"Miss Proudfit, you shall arbitrate! Somebody left him to this lady and me—or to anybody like, or unlike us—on the train. Shall we find his own mother that has run away from him? Or shall we send him to an institution? Or shall we keep him? Which way," he says, smiling, "is the way thatisthe way?"
She looked up at him as if she knew, clear inside his words, what he was talking about.
"Are you," she ask' him, half merry, but all in earnest too, "are you going to decide with your heart or your head?"
"Why, with my soul, I hope," says the Brother-man, simple.
Miss Clementina nodded a little, and I saw her face all Summer-soft as she answered him.
"Then," she said, "almost nobody will tell you so, but—there's only one way."
"I know it," says he, gentle.
"I know it," says I, solemn.
We three stood looking at each other from close on the same star, knowing all over us that if you decide a thing with your head you'll probably shift a burden off; if you decide with your heart you'll probably give, give, give, like Madame Proudfit does, to pay somebody else liberal to take the burden; but if you decide it with your soul, you give your own self to whatever is going on. And you know that's the way thatisthe way.
All of a sudden, as if words that were not being said had got loose and were saying themselves anyway, the music—that had been tip-tapping along all the while since we came—started in, sudden and beautiful, with the Piano Lady and the Violin Man playing up there in the landing room. I don't know whether it was a lullaby—though I shouldn't be surprised if it was, because I think sometimes in this world things happen just like they were beingstage-managed by somebody that knows. But anyway—oh, it had a lullaby sound, a kind-of rocking, tender, just-you-and-me meaning; that ain't so very far from the you-and-me-and-all-of-us meaning when they're both said right and deep down.
I looked up at Miss Clementina and the Brother-man—as you do look up when some nice little thing has happened that you think whoever you're with will understand. But they didn't look back at me. They looked over to each other. They looked over to each other, swift at the first, but lasting long, and with the faces of both of them softening to Summer. And the music went heavenly-ing on, into the room, and into living, and into everything, and it was as if the whole minute was turned into its own spirit and then was said out in a sound.
Miss Clementina and the Brother-man looked away and down at the little chap that Miss Clementina was holding his hand. It was as if there was a pulse in the room—the Great Pulse that we all beat to, and that now and then we hear. But those two didn't see me at all; and all of a sudden I understood, how there was still another star that I didn't know anything about, and that they two were standing there together, they two and the little chap—but not me. Oh, it was wonderful—starting the way great things start, still and quiet like stars coming out. So still that they didn't either of them know it. And I felt as if everything wassome better and some holier than I had ever known.