"He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons,To tie up my bonny brown ha—ir."
"He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons,To tie up my bonny brown ha—ir."
"He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons,To tie up my bonny brown ha—ir."
"He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons,
To tie up my bonny brown ha—ir."
Pink chambray and the love of blue ribbons and Miss Lydia Eider in her dress that was "dressmaker-made." These I turned in my mind, and I found myself thinking of my visit to the town in the next week, for which Madame Josephine was preparing; and of how certain elegancies are there officially recognized instead of being merely divined by the wistful amateur in color and textile. How Calliope and Hannah would have delighted, I thought idly, in the town's way of pretty things to wear, such as Josephine could make; the way that Lydia Eider knew, in her frocks that were "dressmaker-made." Indeed, Calliope and Hannah and Lydia Eider had been physically cast in the same mold of prettiness and of proportion, but only Lydia had come into her own.
And then Calliope came down, and she was bringing a long, white box. She sat before me with the box on her knee and I saw that she was flushing like a girl.
"I expect," she said, "you'll think I'm real worldly-minded. I dunno. Mebbe I am. But when I get out in company and see everybody wearing the dark shades like they do here in Friendshipso's their dresses won't show dirt, I declare I want to stand up and tell 'em: 'Colors! Colors! What'd the Lord put colors in the world for? Burn up your black and brown and gray and get into somethin'happy-colored, and see the difference it'll make in the way you feel inside.' I get so," Calliope said solemnly, "that when I put on my best black taffeta with the white turnovers, I declare I could slit it up the back seam. And I've felt that way a long time. And that's what made me—"
She fingered the white box and lifted the cover from a mass of tissue-paper.
"When Uncle Ezra Marsh died sixteen years ago last Summer," she said, "he left me a little bit of money—just a little dab, but enough to mend the wood-shed roof or buy a new cook-stove or do any of the useful things that's always staring you in the face. And I turned my back flat on every one of them. And I put the money in my pocket and went into the city. And there," said Calliope breathlessly, "I bought this."
She unwrapped it from its tissues, and it was yards and yards of lustrous, exquisite soft silk, colored rose-pink, and responding in folds almost tenderly to the hand that touched it.
"It's mine," Calliope said, "mine. My dress. And I haven't ever hed the sheer, moral courage to get it made up."
And that I could well understand. For thoughCalliope's delicacy of figure and feature would have been well enough become by the soft pink, Friendship would have lifted its hands to see her so and she would instantly have been "talked about."
"Seems to me," Calliope said, smoothing the silk, "that if I could have on a dress like this I'd feel another kind of being—sort o' free and liberty-like. Of course," she added hurriedly, "I know well enough a pink dress ain't what-you-might-say important. But land, land, how I'd like one on me in company! Ain't it funny," she added, "in the city nobody'd think anything of my wearing it. In the city they sort of seem to know colors ain't wicked, so's they look nice. I use' to think," Calliope added, laughing a little, "I'd hev it made up and go to town and wear it on the street. All alone. Even if it was a black street. I guess you'll think I'm terrible foolish."
But with that the idea which had come to me vaguely and as an impossibility, took shape; and I poured it out to Calliope as a thing possible, desirable, inevitable.
"Calliope!" I said. "Bring the silk to my house. Let Madame Josephine make it up. And next week come with me to the city—for the opera. We will have a box—and afterward supper—and you shall wear the pink gown—and a long, black silk coat of mine—"
"You're fooling—you'refooling!" Calliope cried, trembling.
But I made her know how in earnest I was; for, indeed, on the instant my mind was made up that the thing must be, that the lonely pink dress must see the light and with it Calliope's shy hopes, long cherished. And so, before I left her, it was arranged. She had agreed to come next morning to my house, if Madame Josephine were willing, bringing the rose-pink silk.
"Me!" she said at last. "Why, me! Why, it's enough to make all theme'sI've been turn over in their graves. And I guess they hev turned and come trooping out, young again."
Then, as she stood up, letting the soft stuff unwind and fall in shining abandon, we heard a little noise—tapping, insistent. It was very near to us—quite in the little passage; and as Calliope turned with the silk still in her arms the door swung back and there stood Grandma Hawley. She was leaning on her thick stick, and her gray lace cap was all awry and a mist of the fine, driving rain was on her gray hair.
"I got m' feet wet," she said querulously. "M' feet are wet. Lyddy's gone to Mis' Sykes's. I comeback to stay a spell till it dries off some—"
"Grandma!" Calliope cried, hurrying to her, "I didn't hear you come in. I never heard you.Come out by the kitchen fire and set your feet in the oven."
Calliope had tossed the silk on the table and had run to the old woman with outstretched hand; but the outstretched hand Grandma Hawley did not see. She stood still, looking by Calliope with a manner rather than an expression of questioning.
"What is't?" she asked, nodding direction.
Calliope understood, and she slightly lifted her brows and her thin shoulders, and seemed to glance at me.
"It's some pink for a dress, gramma," she said.
Grandma Hawley came a little nearer, and stood, a neat, bent figure in rusty black, looking, down at the sumptuous, shining lengths. Then she laid her brown, veined hand upon the silk—and I remember now her fingers, being pricked and roughened by her constant needle, caught and rubbed on the soft stuff.
"My soul," she said, "it's pink silk."
She lifted her face to Calliope, the perpetual trembling of her head making her voice come tremulously.
"That's what Abe Hawley was always talkin' when I married him," she said. "'A pink silk dress fer ye, Minnie. A fine pink silk to set ye off,' s' 'e over an' over. I thought I was a-goin' to hev it. I hed the style all picked out in my head.I know I use' to lay awake nights an' cut it out. But, time the cookin' things was paid for, the first baby come—an' then the other three to do for. An' Abe he didn't say pink silk after the fourth. But I use' to cut it out in the night, fer all that. I dunno but I cut it out yet, when I can't get to sleep an' my head feels bad. My head ain't right. It bothers me some, hummin' and ringin'. Las' night m' head—"
"There, there, gramma," said Calliope, and took her arm. "You come along with me and set your feet in the oven."
I had her other arm, and we turned toward the kitchen. And we were hushed as if we had heard some futile, unfulfilled wish of the dead still beating impotent wings.
In the kitchen doorway Hannah Hager was standing. She must have seen that glowing, heaped-up silk on the table, but it did not even hold her glance. For she had heard what Grandma Hawley had been saying, and it had touched her, who was so jealously devoted to the old woman, perhaps even more than it had touched Calliope and me.
"Miss Marsh, now," Hannah tried to say, "shall I put the butter that's left in the cookin'-butter jar?" And then her little features were caught here and there in the puckers of a very child's weeping, and she stood before us as a child might stand, crying softly without covering her face. She held out ahand to the old woman, and Calliope and I let her lead her to the stove. My heart went out to the little maid for her tears and to Calliope for the sympathy in her eyes.
Grandma Hawley was talking on.
"I must 'a' got a little cold," she said plaintively. "It always settles in my head. My head's real bad. An' now I got m' feet wet—"
To Madame Josephine, the modiste who sometimes comes to me with her magic touch, transforming this and that, I confided something of my plans for Calliope, asked her if she would do what she could. Her kindly, emotional nature responded to the situation as to a kind of challenge.
"Bien!" she cried. "We shall see. You say she is slim—petite—with some little grace?Bien!"
So when, next day, Calliope arrived at my house with her parcel brought forth for the first time in sixteen years, she found madame and me both tip-toe with excitement. And from some bewildering plates madame explained how she would cut and suit and "correct" mademoiselle.
"The effect shall be long, slim, excellent. Soft folds from one's waist—so. From one's shoulder—so. A line of velvet here and here and down.Bien!Mademoiselle will look younger thaneveryone!Ifmademoiselle would wave ze hair back a ver' little—so?" the French woman delicately advanced.
"Ma'moiselle," returned Calliope recklessly, "will do anything you want her to, short of a pink rose over one ear. My land, I never hed a dress before that I didn't hev to skimp the pattern and make it up less according to my taste than according to my cloth."
That day I sent to the city for a box at the opera. I chose "Faust," and smiled as I planned to sing the Jewel Song for Calliope before we went, and to laugh at her in her surprising rôle of Butterfly. "Ah, je ris de me voir si belle." A lower proscenium box, a modest suite at a comfortable hotel, a little supper, a cab—I planned it all for the pleasure of watching her; and all this would, I knew, be given its significance by the wearing of the anomalous, rosy gown. And I loved Calliope for her weakness as we love the whip-poor-will for his little catching of the breath.
On the day that our tickets came Calliope appeared before me in some anxiety.
"Calliope," I said, without observing this, "our opera box is, so to speak, here."
But instead of the light in her face that I had expected:
"What night?" she abruptly demanded.
"For 'Faust,' on Wednesday," I told her.
And instead of her delight of which I had made sure:
"Will the six-ten express get us in the city too late?" she wanted to know.
And when I had agreed to the six-ten express:
"It's all right then," she said in relief. "They can hev it a little earlier and take the six-ten themselves instead of the accommodation. Hannah and Henry's going to get married a' Wednesday," she explained. "I hev to be here for that."
Then she told me of the simple plan for Hannah Hager's marriage to her good-looking giant. Naturally, Grandma Hawley could not think of "giving Hannah a wedding," so these poor little plans had been for some time wandering about unparented.
"Iwanted," Calliope said, "she should be married in the church with Virginia creeper on the pew arms, civilized. But Hannah said that'd be putting on airs and she'd be so scairt she couldn't be solemn. Mis' Postmaster Sykes, she invited her real cordial to be married in her sitting-room, but Hannah spunked up and wouldn't. 'A sitting-room weddin',' s' she to me, private, ''d be like bein' baptized in the pantry. A parlor,' s' she, ''s the only true place for a wedding. And I haven't no parlor, so we'll go to the minister's and stand up inhisparlor. Do you think,' s' she to me, real pitiful, 'Henry can respec' me with no place to set m' foot in to bemarried but jus' the public parsonage?' Poor little thing! Her wedding-dress is nothing but a last year's mull with a sprig in, either. And her traveling-dress to go to the city is her reg'lar brown Sunday suit."
"And they are going to the minister's?" I asked.
"Well, no," Calliope answered apologetically. "I asked them to be married at my house. I never thought about the opera when I done it. I never thought about anything but that poor child. I guess you'll think I'm real flighty. But I always think when two's married in the parsonage and the man pays the minister, it's like the bride is just the groom's guest at the cer'mony. And it ain't real dignified for her, seems though."
I knew well what this meant: That Calliope would have "asked in a few" and "stirred up" this and that delectable, and gone to no end of trouble and an expense which she could ill afford. Unless, as she was wont to say: "When it comes to doing for other people there ain't such a word as 'afford.' You just go ahead and do it and keep some rational yourself, and theafford'll sort o' bloom out right, same's a rose."
So for Hannah, Calliope had caused things to "bloom right, same's a rose," as one knew by Hannah's happy face. On Tuesday she was helping at my house ("Brides always like extry money,"Calliope had advanced when I had questioned the propriety of asking her to iron on the day before her marriage) and, on going unexpectedly to the kitchen I came on Hannah with a patent flat-iron in one hand and a piece of beeswax in the other, and Henry, her good-looking giant, was there also and was frankly holding her in his arms. I liked him for his manly way when he saw me and most of all that he did not wholly release her but, with one arm about her, contrived a kind of bow to me. But it was Hannah who spoke.
"Oh, ma'am," she said shyly, "Ihopeyou'll overlook. We've hed an awful time findin' any place to keep company, only walkin' 'round the high-school yard!"
My heart was still warm within me at the little scene as I went upstairs to see Calliope in her final fitting of the rose-pink gown, the work on which had gone on apace. And I own that, as I saw her standing before my long triple mirrors, I was amazed. The rosy gown suited the little body wonderfully and with her gray hair and delicate brightness of cheeks, she looked like some figure on a fan, exquisitely and picturesquely painted. The gown was, as Calliope had said that a gown should be, "all nice, slim lines and folds laid in in the right places, and little unexpected trimmings like you wouldn't think of having them if you wasn't real up in dress." It was a triumph for skillful madame,who had wrought with her impressionable French heart as well as with her scissors.
Calliope laughed as she looked over-shoulder in the mirrors.
"My soul," she said, "I feel like a sparrow with a new pink tail! I declare, the dress looks more like Lyddy Eider herself than it looks like me. Do you think I look enough like me so's you'd sense itwasme?"
"Mademoiselle," said Madame Josephine simply, "has a look of another world."
"I wish't I could see it on somebody," Calliope said wistfully; and since I was far too tall and madame not sufficiently "slendaire," Calliope cried:
"There's Hannah! She's downstairs helping, ain't she? Couldn't Hannah come upstairs a minute and put it on? We're most of a size!"
And indeed they were, as I had noted, cast in the same mold of proportion and prettiness.
So, with madame just leaving for the city, and I obliged to go down to the village, Calliope and Hannah Hager were left alone with the rose-pink silk gown, which fitted them both. Ought I not to have known what would happen?
And yet it came as a shock to me when, an hour later, as I passed Calliope's gate on my way home, she ran out and stood before me in some unusual excitement.
"Do they take back your opera boxes?" she demanded.
"No," I assured her, "they do not. Nor," I added suspiciously, "do folk take back their promises, you know, Calliope!"
"Well," she said miserably, "I expec' I've done wrong by you. The righter you try to do by some folks seems 's though the wronger it comes down on others. Oh," she cried, "I wish't I always knew what was right! But I can't go to the opera and I can't sit in the box. Yes, sir—I guess you'll think I'm real flighty and I dunno but what I am. But I've give my pink silk dress to Hannah Hager for her wedding. And I've lied some. I've said I meant she should hev it all along!"
The news that Calliope was to "give Hannah Hager a wedding" was received in Friendship with unaffected pleasure. Every one liked the tireless little thing, and those who could do so sent something to Calliope's house for a wedding-gift. These things Calliope jealously kept secret, intending not to let Hannah see them until the very hour of the ceremony. But when on Wednesday, some while before the appointed time, I went to the house, Calliope took me to the dining-room where the gifts were displayed.
"Some of 'em's real peculiar," she confided; "someof 'em's what I call pick-up presents—things from 'round the house, you know. Mis' Postmaster Sykes she sent over the rug with the running dog on, and she's hed it in her parlor in a dark corner for years an' Hannah must have cleaned it many's the time. Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss sent her old drop-leaf mahogany table, being she's got a new oak. The Liberty girls sent two of their chickens, live, for the wedding lunch, and I dassent to kill them—I'm real queer like that—so I hed to send for the groom, and he run up noon-hour and done it. And so on. But quite a few things are new—the granite iron and the drip coffee-pot and the sweeper's all new. And did you hear what Gramma Hawley done? Drew five dollars of her burial money out of the savings bank and give it to Hannah right out. You know how Gramma fixed it—she had Zittelhof figger up her funeral expenses and she banked the sum, high and dry, and left herself just bare enough to live on coming in. But now she drew the five out and give Zittelhof to understand he'd hev to skimp some on her coffin. Hannah told me, crying like a child at the i-dee."
Calliope paused impressively, and shook her head at space.
"But wouldn't you have thought," she demanded, "that Lyddy Eider might have give Hannah a little something to wear? One of her old dresses for street would have sent Hannah cloud-high, and over.I s'pose you heard what she did send? Mis' Postmaster Sykes run over to tell me. A man from the city come up by trolley sense noon to-day, bringing a rug from Lyddy. Well, of course a rug's a rug," Calliope admitted, "but it ain't a dress, seem's though. Hannah knows about Gramma's an' Lyddy's, but she don't know a word about the other presents. I do admire a surprise."
As for me, I, too, love a surprise. And that was why I had sent to the station a bag packed for both Calliope and me; and I meant, when the wedding guests should have gone, to take no denial, but to hurry Calliope into her "black grosgrain with the white turnovers," and with her to catch the six-ten express as we had planned aforetime. For pink silk might appear and disappear, but "Faust" would still be "Faust."
There were ten guests at Hannah's wedding, friends of hers and of Henry's, pleasantly excited, pleasantly abashed.
"And not one word do they know about the pink silk," Calliope whispered me. "Hannah's going to come with it on—I let her take my tan ulster to wear over her, walking through the streets, so. Do you know," she said earnestly, "if it wasn't for disappointing you I wouldn't feel anything but good about that dress?"
"Ah, well, I won't be disappointed," I prophesied confidently.
Grandma Hawley was last to arrive. And the little old woman was in some stress of excitement, talking incessantly and disconnectedly; but this we charged to the occasion.
"My head ain't right," she said. "It ain't been right for a while back—it hums and rings some. When I went in the room I thought it was my head the matter. I thought I didn't see right. But I did—I did, Hannah said I did. My head felt some better this mornin', an' that was there, just the same. I thought I'd be down flat on my back when I got m' feet wet, but I'd be all right if m' head wa'n't so bad. I must tell Hannah what I done. Why don't Hannah come?"
Hannah was, as a matter of fact, somewhat late at her wedding. We were all in some suspense when we saw her at last, hurrying up the street with Henry, who had gallantly called to escort her; and Calliope and I went to the door to meet her.
But when Hannah entered in Calliope's tan ulster buttoned closely about her throat, she was strangely quiet and somewhat pale and her eyes, I was certain, were red with weeping.
"Is Gramma here?" she asked at once, and, at our answer, merely turned to hurry upstairs where Calliope and I were to adjust the secret wedding-gown and fasten a pink rose in her hair. And, as we went, Henry added still further to our anxietyby calling from the gay little crowd about him a distinctly soothing:
"Now, then. Now, then, Hannah!"
Up in Calliope's tiny chamber Hannah turned and faced us, still with that manner of suppressed and escaping excitement. And when we would have helped with the ulster she caught at its collar and held it about her throat as if, after all, she were half minded to depart from the place and let her good-looking giant be married alone.
"Oh, Miss Marsh, ma'am," she said, trembling, "oh, Miss Marsh. I can't dare tell you what I done."
With that she broke down and cried, and Calliope promptly took her in her arms, as I think that she would have liked to take the whole grieving world. And now, as she soothed her, she began gently to unbutton the tan ulster, and Hannah let her take it off. But even the poor child's tears had not prepared us for what was revealed.
Hannah had come to her wedding wearing, not the rose-pink silk, but the last year's mull "with the sprig in."
"Well, sir!" cried Calliope blankly. "Well, Hannah Hager—"
The little maid sat on the foot of the bed, sobbing.
"Oh, Miss Marsh, ma'am," she said, "you know—don't you know, ma'am?—how I was so gladabout the dress you give me't I was as weak as a cat all over me. All las' night in the evenin' I was like a trance an' couldn't get my supper down, an' all. An' Gramma, she was over to Mis' Sykes's to supper an' hadn't seen it. An' Gramma an' I sleep together, an' I went an' spread the dress on the bed, an' I set side of it till Henry come. An' I l-left it there to hev him go in an' l-look at it. An' we was in the kitchen a minute or two first. An' nex' we knew, Gramma, she stood in the inside door. An' I thought she was out of her head she was so wild-like an' laughin' an' cryin'. An' she set down on a chair, an' s' she: 'He's done it. He's done it. He's kep' his word. Look—look on my bed,' s' she, 'an' see if I ain't seen it right. Abe Hawley,' s' she, 'he's sent me my pink silk dress he wanted to, out o' the grave!'"
Hannah's thin, rough little hands were clinched on her knee and her eyes searched Calliope's face.
"Oh, Miss Marsh, ma'am," she said, "she was like one possessed, beggin' me to look at it an' tell her if it wasn't so. She thought mebbe it might be her head. So I went an' told her the dress was hers," the little maid sobbed. "I was scairt she'd make herself sick takin' on so. An' afterwardsI couldn't a-bear to tell her any different. Ma'am, if you could 'a' seen her! She took her rocker an' set by the bed all hours, kind o' gentlin' the silk with her hands. An' she wouldn't go to bed an'disturb it off, an' I slep' on the dinin'-room lounge with the shawl over me. An' this m-mornin' she went on just the same. An' after dinner Lyddy sent a man from town with a rug for me, an' I set on the back stoop so's not to see him, I was cryin' so. An' when I come in Gramma hed shut the bedroom door an' gone. I couldn't trust me even to l-look in the bedroom for fear I'd put it on. An' I couldn't take it away from her—I couldn't. Not with all she's done for me, an' the five dollars an' all. Oh, Miss Marsh, ma'am—" Hannah ended helplessly.
It seemed to me that I had never known Calliope until that moment.
"Gracious," she said to Hannah calmly, "crying that way for a little pink silk dress, and Henry waiting for you downstairs! Wipe up your eyes this instant minute, Hannah, and get to 'I will'!"
I think that this attitude of Calliope's must have tranquillized the wildest. In spite of the reality of the tragedy, it was no time at all until, having put the pink rose in Hannah's hair, anyway, Calliope and I led the little bride downstairs. For was there not a reality of happiness down there?
"After all, Henry was marrying you and not the dress, you know," Calliope reminded her on the landing.
"That's what he keeps a-sayin'," consented Hannah with a wan little smile, "but oh, ma'am—" she added, for Hannah was all feminine.
And when the "I will" had been said, I loved the little creature for taking Grandma Hawley in her arms.
"Did they tell you what I done?" the old woman questioned anxiously when Hannah kissed her. "I was savin' it to tell you, an' it went out o' my head. An' I dunno—did you know what I done?" she persisted.
But the others crowded forward with congratulation and, as was their fashion, with teasing; and presently I think that even the rosy gown was forgotten in Hannah's delight over her unexpected gifts. The graniteware, the sweeper, the rug with the running dog—after all, was ever any one so blessed?
And as I watched them—Hannah and her great, good-looking adoring giant—I who, like Calliope, love a surprise, caught a certain plan by its shining wings and held it close. They say that when one does this such wings bear one away—and so it proved.
I found my chance and whispered my plan to Hannah, half for the pastime of seeing the quickening color in her cheek and the light in her eyes. Then I told the giant, chiefly for the sake of noting how some mischievous god smote him with a plague of blushes. And they both consented—and that is the way when one clings to the wings of a plan.
So it came about that in the happy bustle of the parting, as Hannah in her "regular brown Sundaysuit" went away on Henry's arm, they two and I exchanged glances of pleasant significance. Then, when every one had gone, I turned to Calliope with authority.
"Put on," I bade her, "your black grosgrain silk with the white turnovers—and mind you don't slit it up the back seam!"
"I'm a-goin' to do my dishes up," said Calliope. "Can't you set a spell and talk it over?"
"Hurry," I commanded, "or we shall miss the six-ten express!"
"What do you mean?" she asked in alarm.
"Leave everything," said I. "There's a box waiting for us at the opera to-night. And supper afterward."
"You ain't—" she said tremulously.
"I am," I assured her firmly, "and so are you. And Hannah and Henry are going with us. Hurry!"
"He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons"
"He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons"
"He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons"
"He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons"
is, in effect, the spirit of the "Ah, je ris de me voir si belle" of "Marguerite" when she opens the casket of jewels. As we sat, the four of us, in the dimness of the opera box—Calliope in her black silk with the white turnovers, Hannah in her "regular brown Sunday suit," and Henry and I, it seemed to me that Marguerite's song was really concerningthe delight of rose-pink silk. And I found myself grieving anew for the innocent hopes that had been dissolved, immaterial as Abe Hawley's message from the grave.
Then the curtain fell on the third act and the soft thunder of applause spent itself and the lights leaped up. And immediately I was aware of a conspicuously high-pitched voice at the door of the box, a voice which carried with it some consciousness of elaborate self-possession.
"Really!" said the voice. "Of all people! My dear Hannah—and Calliope Marsh! You butterflies—"
I looked up, and at first all that I saw was a gown which "laid smooth down—and then all to once it'd slimpse into folds, soft as soft—and didn't pucker nor skew nor hang wrong"; a gown that was "dressmaker made"; a gown, in short, such as Lydia Eider "always hed on." And there beside us stood Lydia Eider herself, wearing some exquisite, priceless thing of pink chiffon and old lace, with a floating, glittering scarf on her arms.
I remember that she seemed some splendid, tropic bird alight among our nun-like raiment. A man or two, idling attendance, were rapidly and perfunctorily presented to us—one, who was Lydia's adopted brother, showing an amused cordiality to Henry. And I saw how the glasses were instantly turned from pit and boxes toward her—this girlwho, with Calliope and Hannah, had been cast in one mold of prettiness and proportion and who alone of the three, as I thought, had come into her own.
And Lydia said:
"Willyou tell me how on earth Grandma Hawley came to send me a pink silk dress to-day? You didn't know! But she did—on my honor. It came this afternoon by the man I sent out to you, Hannah. And so decently made—how can it have happened? Made for me too—positively I can wear it—though nearly everything I have is pink. But how did Grandma come to do it? Andwheredid she get it? And why—"
She talked on for a little, elaborating, wondering. But I fancy that she must have thought us uncommonly stupid, for none of us had the faintest suggestion to offer. We listened, and murmured a bit about the health of Grandma Hawley, and Henry said some hesitating thanks, in which Hannah barely joined, for the wedding gift of the rug, but none of us gave evidence. And at last, with some gracious word, Lydia Eider left the box, trailing her pink chiffon skirts and saying the slight good-by which utterly forgets one.
But when she had gone, Calliope laughed, softly and ambiguously and wholly contagiously, so that Hannah, whose face had begun to pucker like a child's, unwillingly joined her. And then, partly because of Henry's reassuring, "Now then, nowthen, Hannah," and partly at the touch of his big hand and in the particular, delicious embarrassment which comes but once, Hannah tremulously spoke her conclusion:
"I don't care," she said, "I don't care! I'mglad—for Gramma."
Calliope sat smiling, looking, in her delicate color and frailty and the black and white of her dress, like some one on a fan, exquisitely and appropriately painted.
"I was thinking," she said brightly to Hannah, "going without a thing is some like a jumping tooth. It hurts you before-hand, but when it's gone for good all the hurt sort of eases down and peters out and can't do you any more harm."
But I think they both knew that this was not all. For some way, outside the errantry of prettiness and proportion, Calliope and Hannah too had come into their own.
I looked at Calliope, her face faintly flushed by the unwonted hour; at Hannah, rosy little bride; and at her adoring giant over whom some god had cast the usual spell of wedding blushes.
Verily, I thought, would not one say there is rose pink enough in the world for us all?
As the curtain rose again Calliope leaned toward me. "I don't believe any dress," she said, "pink silk or any other kind, ever dressed up so many folks's souls!"
FOOTNOTE:[7]Copyright, 1913, The Delineator.
[7]Copyright, 1913, The Delineator.
[7]Copyright, 1913, The Delineator.
When they went to South America for six months, the Henslows, that live across the street from me, wanted to rent their cottage. And of course, being a neighbor, I wanted them to get the fifteen dollars a month. But—being the cottage was my neighbor—I couldn't help, deep down in my inner head, feeling kind of selfish pleased that it stood vacant a while. It's a chore to have a new neighbor in the summer. They always want to borrow your rubber fruit-rings, and they forget to return some; and they come in and sit in the mornings when you want to get your work out of the way before the hot part of a hot day crashes down on you. I can neighbor agreeable when the snow flies, but summers I want my porch and my rocker and my wrapper and my palm-leaf fan, and nobody to call on. And—I don't want to sound less neighborly than I mean to sound—I don't want any real danger of being what you might say called-on—not till the cool of the day.
Then, on a glorious summer morning, right out of a clear blue sky, what did I see but two trunksplopped down on the Henslows' porch! I knew they were never back so soon. I knew the two trunks meant renters, and nothing but renters.
"I'll bet ten hundred thousand dollars one of them plays the flute and practices evenings," I says.
I didn't catch sight of them till the next morning, and then I saw him head for the early train into the city, and her stand at the gate and watch him. And, my land, she was in a white dress and she didn't look twenty years old.
So I went right straight over.
"My dear," I says, "I dunno what your name is, but I'm your neighbor, and I dunno what more we need than that."
She put out her hand—just exactly as if she was glad. She had a wonderful sweet, loving smile—and she smiled with that.
So I says: "I thought moving in here with trunks, so, you might want something. And if I can let you have anything—jars or jelly-glasses or rubber rings or whatever, why, just you—"
"Thank you, Miss Marsh," she says. "I know you're Miss Marsh—Mrs. Henslow told me about you."
"The same," says I, neat.
"I'm Mrs. Harry Beecher," she says. "I—we were just married last week," she says, neat as a biography.
"So you was!" I says. "Well, now, you justlet me be to you what your folks would want me to be, won't you?" says I. "Feel," I says, "just like you could run in over to my house any time, morning, noon or night. Call on me for anything. Come on over and sit with me if you feel lonesome—or if you don't. My side porch is real nice and cool and shady all the afternoon—"
And so on. And wasn't that nice to happen to me, right in the middle of the dead of summer, with nothing going on?
If you have lived in the immediate neighborhood of a bride and groom, you know what I am going to tell about.
But if you haven't, try to rent your next house—if you rent—or try to buy your next home—if you buy—somewhere in the more-or-less neighborhood of a bride and groom. Because it's an education. It's an education in living. No—I don't believe I mean that the way you think I mean it at all. I mean it another way.
To be sure, there were the mornings, when I saw them come out from breakfast and steal a minute or two hanging round the veranda before he had to start off. That was as nice as a picture, and nicer. I got so I timed my breakfast so's I could be watering my flower-beds when this happened, and not miss it. He usually pulled the vines over better, or weeded a little near the step, or tinkered with the hinge of the screen, or fussed with the bricks wherethe roots had pushed them up. And she sat on the steps and talked with him, and laughed now and then with her little pretty laugh. (Not many women can laugh as pretty as she did—and we all ought to be able to do it. Sometimes I wish somebody would start a school to teach pretty laughing, and somebody else would make us all go to it.) And I knew how they were pretending that this was really their own home, and playing proprietor and householder, just like everybody else. And of course that was pleasurable to me to see—but that wasn't what I meant.
Nor I didn't mean times when she'd be out in the garden during the day, and the telephone bell would ring, and she would throw things and head for the house, running, because she thought it might be him calling her up from the city. Most usually it was. I always knew it had been him when she came back singing.
And then there were the late afternoons, say, almost an hour before the first train that he could possibly come on and that now and then he caught. Always before it was time for that she would open her front door that she'd had closed all day to keep her house cool, and she'd bring her book or her sewing out on the porch, and never pay a bit of attention to either, because she sat looking up the street. There was only a little bit of shade on her porch that time in the afternoon, and I used to want to askher to come over on my cool, shady side porch, but I had the sense not to. I sort of understood how she liked to sit out there where she was, on their own porch, waiting for him. Then he'd come, and she'd sit out in the garden and read to him while he dug in the beds, or she'd sew on the porch while he cut the grass—well, now, it don't sound like much as I tell it, does it?—and yet it used to look wonderful sweet to me, looking across the street.
But as I said, it wasn't any of these times, nor yet the long summer evenings when I could just see the glimmer of her white dress on the porch or in the garden, or their shadows on the curtain, rainy evenings; no, it wasn't these times that made me wish for everybody in the world that they lived next door to a bride and groom. But the thing I mean came to me all of a sudden, when they hadn't been my neighbors for a week. And it came to me like this:
One night I'd had them over for supper. It had been a hot day, and ordinarily I'm opposed to company on a hot day; but some way havingthemwas different. And then I didn't imagine she was so very used to cooking, and I got to thinking maybe a meal away from home would be a rest.
And after supper we'd been walking around my yard, looking at my late cosmos and wondering whether it would get around to bloom before the frost. And they had been telling me how they meantto plant their garden when they got one of their own. I liked to keep them talking about it, because his face lit up so young and boyish, and hers got all soft and bright; and they looked at each other like they could see that garden planted and up and growing and pretty near paid for. So I kept egging them on, asking this and that, just to hear them plan.
"One whole side of the wall," said he, "we'll have lilacs and forsythia."
She looked at him. "I thought we said hollyhocks there," she said.
"Well, don't you remember," he said, "we changed that when you said you'd planned, ever since you were a little girl to have lilacs and forsythia on the edge of your garden?"
"Well—so I did," she remembered. "But I thought you said you liked hollyhocks best?"
"Maybe I did," says he. "I forget. I don't know but I did for a while. But I think of it this way now."
She laughed. "Why," she said, "I was getting topreferhollyhocks."
I noticed that particular. Then we came round the corner of the house. And the street looked so peaceful and lovely that I knew just how he felt when he said:
"Let's us three go and take a drive in the country. Can't we? We could get a carriage somewhere, couldn't we?"
And she says like a little girl, "Oh, yes, let's. But don't you s'pose we could rent a car here from somebody?"
I liked to look at his look when he looked at her. He done it now.
"A car?" he said. "But you're nervous when I drive. Wouldn't you rather have a horse?"
"Well, but you'd rather have a car," she said. "And I'd like to know you were liking that best! And, truly, I don't think I'd care much—now."
Then I took a hand. "You look here," I says. "I'd really ought to step down to Mis' Merriman's to a committee meeting. I've been trying to make myself believe I didn't need to go, but I know I ought to. And you two take your drive."
They fussed a little, but that was the way we arranged it. I went off to my meeting before I saw which they did get to go in. But that didn't make any difference. All the way to the meeting I kept thinking about lilacs and hollyhocks and horses and cars. And I saw what had happened to those two: they loved each other so much that they'd kind of lost track of the little things that they thought had mattered so much, and neither could very well remember which they had really had a leaning towards of all the things.
"It's a kind ofeach-otherness!" I says to myself. "It's a new thing. That ain't giving-upness.Giving-upness is when you still want what you give up. This is something else. It's each-otherness. And you can't get it till youcare."
But then I thought of something else. It wasn't only them—it was me! It was like I had caught something from them. For of course I'd rather have gone driving with those two than to have gone to any committee meeting, necessary or not. But I knew now that I'd been feeling inside me that of course they didn't want an old thing like me along, and that of course they'd rather have their drive alone, horseorautomobile. And so I'd kind of backed out according. Being with them had made me feel a sort of each-otherness too. It was wonderful. I thought about it a good deal.
And when I came home and see that they'd got back first, and were sitting on the porch with no lights in the house yet, except the one burning dim in the hall, I sat upstairs by my window quite a while. And I says to myself:
"If only there was a bride and groom in every single house all up and down the streets of the village—"
And I could almost think how it would be with everybody being decent to each other and to the rest, just sheer because they were all happy.
Picture how I felt, then, when not six weeks later, on a morning all yellow and blue and green, and tied onto itself with flowers, little Mrs. Bride camestanding at my side door, knocking on the screen, and her face all tear-stained.
"Gracious, now," I says, "did breakfast burn?"
She came in. She always wore white dresses and little doll caps in the morning, and she sit down at the end of my dining-room table, looking like a rosebud in trouble.
"Oh, Miss Marsh," she says, "it isn't any laughing matter. Something's happened between us. We've spoke cross to each other."
"Well, well," I says, "what was that for?"
I s'posed maybe he'd criticized the popovers, or something equally universal had occurred.
"Thatwas it," she says. "We've spoke cross to each other, Miss Marsh."
And then it came to me that it didn't seem to be bothering her at all what it was about. The only thing that stuck out for her was that they'd spoke cross to each other.
"So!" I says. "And you've got to wait all day long before you can patch it up. Why don't you call him up?" I ask her. "It's only twenty cents for the three minutes—and you can get it all in that."
She shook her head. "That's the worst of it," she says. "I can't do it. Neither can he. I'm not that sort—to be able to give in after I've been mad and spoke harsh. I'm—I'm afraid neither of us will, even when he gets home."
Then I sat up straight. This, I see, was serious—most as serious as she thought.
"What's the reason?" says I.
"I dunno," she says. "We're like that—both of us. We're awful proud—no matter how much we want to give in, we can't."
I sat looking at her.
"Call him up," I says.
She shook her head again and made her pretty mouth all tight.
"I couldn't," she says. "I couldn't."
She seemed to like to sit and talk it over, kind of luxurious. She told me how it began—some twopenny thing about screens in the parlor window. She told me how one thing led to another. I let her talk and I sat there thinking. Pretty soon she went home and she never sung once all day. It didn't seem as if anybody's screens were worth that.
I'm not one that's ashamed of looking at anything I'm interested in. When it came time for the folks from the afternoon local, I sat down in my parlor behind the Nottinghams. I saw she never came out to the gate. And when he came home I could see her white dress out in the back garden where she was pretending to work.
He sat down on the front porch and smoked, and seemed to read the paper. She came in the house after a while, and finally she appeared in the front door for three-fourths of a second.
"Your supper's ready for you," I heard her say. And then I knew, certain sure, how they were both sitting there at their table not speaking a word.
I ate my own supper, and I felt like a funeral was going on. It kills something in me to have young folks, or any folks, act like that. And when I went back in the parlor I saw him on the front porch again, smoking, and her on the side porch playing with the kitten.
"It's the first death," I says. "It's their first kind of death. And I can't stand it a minute longer."
So when I saw him start out pretty soon to go downtown alone—I went to my front gate and I called to him to come over. He came—a fine, close-knit chap he was, with the young not rubbed out of his face yet, and his eyes window-clear.
"The catch on my closet-door don't act right," I says. "I wonder if you'll fix it for me?"
He went up and done it, and I ran for the tools for him and tried to get my courage up. When he got through and came down I was sitting on my hall-tree.
"Mr. Groom," I says—that was my name for him—"I hope you won't think I'm interferingtoomuch, but I want to speak to you serious about your wife."
"Yes," he says, short.
I went on, never noticing: "I dunno whetheryou've took it in, but there seems to be something wrong with her."
"Wrong with her?" he says.
"Yes, sir," I says. "And I dunno but awfully wrong. I've been noticing lately." (I didn't sayhowlately.)
"What do you mean?" says he, and sat down on the bottom step.
"Don't you see," I says, "that she don't look well? She don't act no more like herself than I do. She hasn't," says I, truthful, "half the spirit to her to-day that she had when you first came here to the village."
"Why—no," he says, "I hadn't noticed—"
"You wouldn't," says I. "You wouldn't be likely to. But it seems to me that you ought to be warned—and be on your guard."
"Warned!" he says, and I saw him get pale—I tell you I saw him get pale.
"I'm not easy alarmed," I told him. "And when I see anything serious, it ain't in my power to stand aside and not say anything."
"Serious," he says over. "Serious? But, Miss Marsh, can you give me any idea—"
"I've give you a hint," says I, "that it's something you'd ought to be mighty careful about. I dunno's I can do much more; I dunno's I ought to do that. But if anything should happen—"
"Good heavens!" he says. "You don't think she's that bad off?"
"—if anything should happen," I went on, calm, "I didn't want to have myself to blame for not having spoke up in time. Now," says I, brisk, "you were just going downtown. And I've got a taste of jell I want to take over to her. So I won't keep you."
He got up, looking so near like a tree that's had its roots hacked at that I 'most could have told him that I didn't mean the kind of death he was thinking of at all. But I didn't say anything more. And he thanked me, humble and grateful and scared, and went off downtown. He looked over to the cottage, though, when he shut my gate—I noticed that. She wasn't anywhere in sight. Nor she wasn't when I stepped up onto her porch in a minute or two with a cup-plate of my new quince jell that I wanted her to try.
"Hello," I says in the passage. "Anybody home?"
There was a little shuffle and she came out of the dining-room. There was a mark all acrost her cheek, and I judged she'd been lying on the couch out there crying.
"Get a teaspoon," says I, "and come taste my new receipt."
She came, lack-luster, and like jell didn't makemuch more difference than anything else. We sat down, cozy, in the hammock, me acting like I'd forgot everything in the world about what had gone before. I rattled on about the new way to make my jell and then I set the sample on the sill behind the shutter and I says:
"I just had Mr. Groom come over to fix the latch on my closet-door. I dunno what was wrong with it—when I shut it tight it went off like a gun in the middle of the night. Mr. Groom fixed it in just a minute."
"Oh, he did," says she, about like that.
"He's awful handy with tools," I says. And she didn't say anything. And then says I:
"Mrs. Bride, we're old friends by now, ain't we?"
"Why, yes," says she, "and good friends, I hope."
"That's what I hope," I says. "And now," I went on, "I hope you won't think I'm interfering too much, but I want to speak to you serious about your husband."
"My husband?" says she, short.
I went on, never noticing. "I don't know whether you've took it in, but there seems to be something wrong with him."
"What do you mean?" she says, looking at me.
"Well, sir," I says, "I ain't sure. I can't tell just how wrong it is. But something is ailing him."
"Why, I haven't noticed anything," she says, and come over to a chair nearer to me.
"You don't mean," I says, "that you don't notice the change there's been in him?"—I didn't say in how long—"the lines in his face and how different he acts?"
"Oh, no," she says. "Why, surely not!"
"Surelyyes," says I. "It strikes me—it struck me over there to-night—that something is the matter—serious."
"Oh, don't say that," she says. "You frighten me."
"I'm sorry for that," says I. "But it's better to be frightened too soon than too late. And if anything should happen I wouldn't want to think—"
"Oh!" she says, sharp, "what do you think could happen?"
"—I wouldn't want to think," I went on, "that I had suspicioned and hadn't warned you."
"But what can I do—" she began.
"You can watch out," I says, "now that you know. Folks get careless about their near and dear—that's all. They don't notice that anything's the matter till it's too late."
"Oh, dear!" she says. "Oh, if anything should happen to Harry, why, Miss Marsh—"
"Exactly," says I.
We talked on a little while till I heard what I was waiting for—him coming up the street. Inoticed that he hadn't been gone downtown long enough to buy a match.
"I'm going over to Miss Matey's for some pie-plant," I says. "Her second crop is on. Can I go through your back gate? Maybe I'll come back this way."
When I went around their house I saw that she was still standing on the porch and he was coming in the gate. And I never looked back at all—bad as I wanted to.
It was deep dusk when I came back. The air was as gentle as somebody that likes you when they're liking you most.
When I came by the end of the porch I heard voices, so I knew that they were talking. And then I caught just one sentence. You'd think I could have been contented to slip through the front yard and leave them to work it out. But I wasn't. In fact I'd only just got the stage set ready for what I meant to do.
I walked up the steps and laid my pie-plant on the stoop.
"I'm coming in," I says.
They got up and said the different things usual. And I went and sat down.
"You'll think in a minute," says I, "that I owe you both an apology. But I don't."
"What for, dear?" Mrs. Bride says, and took my hand.
I'm an old woman and I felt like their mother and their grandmother. But I felt a little frightened too.
"Is either of you sick?" I says.
Both of them says: "No,Iain't." And both of them looked furtive and quick at the other.
"Well," I says, "mebbe you don't know it. But to-day both of you has had the symptoms of coming down with something. Something serious."
They looked at me, puzzled.
"I noticed it in Mrs. Bride this morning," I says, "when she came over to my house. She looked white, and like all the life had gone out of her. And she didn't sing once all day, nor do any work. Then I noticed it in you to-night," I says to him, "when you walked looking down, and came acrost the street lack-luster, and like nothing mattered so much as it might have if it had mattered more. And so I done the natural thing. I told each of you about something being the matter with the other one. Something serious."
I stood up in front of them, and I dunno but I felt like a fairy godmother that had something to give them—something priceless.
"When two folks," I says, "speak cross to each other and can't give in, it's just as sure a disease as—as quinsy. And it'll be fatal, same as a fever can be. You can hate the sight of me if you want to, but that's why I spoke out like I done."
I didn't dare look at them. I began just there to see what an awful thing Ihaddone, and how they were perfectly bound to take it. But I thought I'd get in as much as I could before they ordered me off the porch.
"I've loved seeing you over here," I says. "It's made me young again. I've loved watching you say good-by in the mornings, and meet again evenings. I've loved looking out over here to the light when you sat reading, and I could see your shadows go acrost the curtains sometimes, when I sat rocking in my house by myself. It's all been something I've liked to know was happening. It seemed as if a beautiful, new thing was beginning in the world—and you were it."
All at once I got kind of mad at the two of them.
"And here for a little tinkering matter about screens for the parlor, you go and spoil all my fun by not speaking to each other!" I scolded, sharp.
It was that, I think, that turned the tide and made them laugh. They both did laugh, hearty—and they looked at each other and laughed—I noticed that. For two folks cannotlook at each other and laugh and stay mad same time. They cannotdo it.
I went right on: "So," I says, "I told you each the truth, that the other one was sick. So you were, both of you. Sick at heart. And you know it."
He put out his hand to her.
"I know it," he says.
"I know too," says she.
"Land!" says I, "you done that awful pretty. If I could give in that graceful about anything I'd go round giving in whether I'd said anything to be sorry for or not. I'd do it for a parlor trick."
"Was it hard, dear?" he says to her. And she put up her face to him just as if I hadn't been there. I liked that. And it made me feel as much at home as the clock.
He looked hard at me.
"Truly," he says, "didn't you mean she looked bad?"
"I meant just what I said," says I. "She did look bad. But she don't now."
"And you made it all up," she says, "about something serious being the matter with him—"
"Made it up!" says I. "No! But what ailed him this morning doesn't ail him now. That's all. I s'pose you're both mad at me," I says, mournful.
He took a deep breath. "Not when I'm as thankful as this," he says.
"And me," she says. "And me."
I looked around the little garden of the Henslows' cottage, with the moon behaving as if everything was going as smooth as glass—don't you always notice that about the moon? What grandmanners it's got? It never lets on that anything is the matter.
He threw his arm across her shoulder in that gesture of comradeship that is most the sweetest thing they do.
They got up and came over to me quick.
"We can't thank you—" she says.
"Shucks," I says. "I been wishing I had something to give you. I couldn't think of anything but vegetables. Now mebbe I've give you something after all—providing you don't go and forget it the very next time," I says, wanting to scold them again.
They walked to the gate with me. The night was black and pale gold, like a great soft drowsy bee.
"You know," I says, when I left them, "peace that we talk so much about—that isn't going to come just by governments getting it. If people like you and me can't keep it—and be it—what hope is there for the nations? Weare'em!"
I'd never thought of it before. I went home saying it over. When I'd put my pie-plant down cellar I went in my dark little parlor and sat down by the window and rocked. I could see their light for a little while. Then it went out. The cottage lay in that hush of peace of a hot summer night. I could feel the peacefulness of the village.
"If only we can get enough of it," I says. "If only we can get enough of it—"