"Daddy!"
The dark was so thick with hurrying rain that the child's voice was
drowned. So he splashed forward a few steps in the mud and puddles of
the highway and plucked at the coat of the man tramping before. The man
took a hand from a pocket and stooped somewhat to listen, still plodding
ahead.
"Daddy! It's the hole near my biggest toe. My biggest toe went right
through that hole an' it chokes my toe awful."
The man suddenly squatted in the mud, presenting a broad, scarcely
distinguishable back.
"Climb up," he commanded.
The boy wavered. His body ached with weariness, his feet were sore and
cold, something in his head was numb. But in a moment he ran on, two
steps or three, past the man.
"Nope," he said, "I'm seeing if I could walk all the way. I could--yet.
I just told you 'bout my toe, daddy, 'cause I _had_ to talk about it."
The man said nothing, but he rose and groped for the child's arm and
got it about the armpit, and, now and then as they walked, he pulled the
shoulder awkwardly upward, trying to help.
After a time of silence the rain subsided a little, so that the child's
voice was less like a drowned butterfly.
"Daddy," he said, "what's velvet?"
"I dunno, sonny. Some kind of black cloth, I guess. Why?"
"It came in my head," the child explained. "I was tryin' to think of
nice things. Velvet sounds like a king's clothes--but it sounds like a
coffin too. I didn't know if it's a nice thing."
This, the man understood swiftly, was because _her_ coffin had been
black velvet--the coffin which he had had no money to buy for her, for
his wife and the boy's mother, the coffin which had been bought with the
poor fund of a church which he had never entered. "What other nice thing
you been thinkin' of?" he asked abruptly.
"Circus. An' angels. An' ice-cream. An' a barrel o' marbles. An' bein'
warm an' clean stockin's an' rocked...."
"My God!" said the man.
The child looked up expectantly.
"Did he say anything back?" he inquired eagerly.
"Not a word," said the man in his throat.
"Lemme try," said the child. "God--oh, God--_God dear_!" he called into
the night.
From the top of the hill on the edge of the Pump pasture which in that
minute they had reached, they suddenly saw, cheery and yellow and alive,
the lamps of Friendship Village, shining in the valley; and away at one
side, less in serene contemplation than in deliberate withdrawal, shone
the lights of a house set alone on its hill.
"Oh, daddy, daddy--look at the lights!" the child cried. "God didn't say
nothin' with words. Maybe he talks with lights instead of 'em."
The man quickened his steps until, to keep pace with him, the little boy
broke into uneven running.
"Is those lights where we're goin', daddy?" he asked.
"That's where," said the man. He put his hand in his pocket and felt for
the fifteen cents that lay there, wrapped in paper. The fancied odour
and warmth of something to drink caught at him until he could hardly
bear the longing.
But before he could get to the drink he must do something else. The man
had been fighting away the thought of what he meant to do. But when they
entered the village and were actually upon its main street, lonely in
the rainy, eight o'clock summer dusk, what he meant to do had to be
faced. So he began looking this way and that for a place to leave the
child. There was a wagon shop. Old wagons stood under the open shed,
their thills and tongues hanging, not expectant of journeys like those
of new wagons, but idle, like the worn arms of beaten men. Some men, he
thought, would leave the boy there, to sleep under a seat and be found
in the morning; but he was no such father as that, he reflected
complacently. He meant to leave the boy in a home, give him a fair
start. There was a little house with a broken picket fence--someway she
wouldn't have liked him to be there; _she_ always liked things nice. He
had never been able to give the boy much that was nice, but now, he said
to himself, he would take nothing second rate. There was a grocery with
a light above stairs where very likely the family lived, and there, too,
was a dry stairway where the child could sit and wait until somebody
came--no, not there either.... "The best ain't none too good for the
little fellow," thought the man.
"Dad-_ee_!" cried the child suddenly.
He had run a few steps on and stood with his nose against the misty pane
of Abagail Arnold's Home Bakery. Covered with pink mosquito-netting were
a plate of sugar rolls, a fruit cake, a platter of cream puffs, and a
tall, covered jar of shelled nuts.
"Hustle up--you!" said the man roughly, and took him by the arm again.
"I was comin'," said the little boy.
Why not leave the child at the bakery? No--a house. It must be a house,
with a porch and a front stair and big upstairs rooms and a look of
money-in-the-bank. He was giving care to the selection. It was as if he
were exercising some natural paternal office, to be scrupulously
discharged. Music issued from the wooden saloon building with the false
two-story front and the coloured windows; from a protesting piano a
dance tune was being furiously forced, and, as the door swung open, the
tap and thud of feet, the swell of voices and laughter, the odour of the
spirits caught at the cold and weary man. "Hurry along--hurry along!" he
bade the boy roughly. That was where he would come back afterward, but
first he must find the right place for the boy.
Vaguely he was seeking for that section of the village which it would
call "the residence part," with that ugly and naked appropriation of the
term which excludes all the humbler homes from residence-hood at all.
But when he had turned aside from the main street he came upon the First
Church, with lights streaming from the ground-glass windows of the
prayer-meeting room, and he stood still, staring up at it.
She had cared a good deal about that sort of thing. Churches did
good--it was a church that had buried her when he could not. Why not
there? Why not leave the child there?
He turned aside and mounted the three wooden steps and sat down, drawing
the boy beside him. Grateful for a chance to rest, the child turned
sidewise and dropped his head heavily on his father's arm. There was
light enough for the father to see the thick, wet hair on the babyish
forehead.
"I did walked all the way, didn't I?" the child said triumphantly.
"You bet you did," said his father absently.
Since the boy's mother had died only three months had passed, but in
that time had been crowded for the child a lifetime of physical misery.
Before that time, too, there had been hunger and cold and the torture of
the continual quarreling between that mother, sickly, half-fed,
irritable, and this father, out of work and drunken. Then the mother had
died, and the man had started out with the boy, seeking new work where
they would not know his old vice. And in these three months, for the
boy's sake, that old vice had been kept bound. For the boy's sake he had
been sober and, if the chance had come, he would have been industrious.
But, save for odd jobs, the chance never came; there seemed to be a kind
of ineffectualness in the way he asked for work which forbade him a
trial. Then one day, after almost three months of the struggle, he had
waked to the old craving, to the need, the instant need, for liquor. He
had faced the situation honestly. He knew, or thought he knew, his power
of endurance. He knew that in a day or two he would be worsted, and that
there would follow a period of which, afterward, he would remember
nothing. Meanwhile, what of the boy? He had a fondness for the boy, and
there remained to the man some shreds of decency and even of tradition.
He would not turn him over to the "authorities." He would not cast him
adrift in the city. He resolved to carry him to the country, to some
near little town where, dimly it seemed to him, the people would be
more likely to take him in. "They have more time--an' more room--an'
more to eat," he sought to explain it to himself. So he had walked, and
the child had walked, from the City to Friendship Village. He must find
a place to leave him: why not leave him here on the church steps,
"outside the meetin'?"
"Don't you go to sleep, kiddie," he said, and shook him lightly.
"I was jus' restin' my eye-flaps. Eye-things. _What_ are they, daddy?"
"Eye-lids."
"Yes. Them. They're tired, too," said the child, and smiled--the sleepy
smile which gave his face a baby winsomeness. Then he snuggled in the
curve of arm, like a drowsy, nosing puppy.
The father sat looking down on him, and in his breast something pulled.
In these three months he had first become really acquainted with the
boy, had first performed for him little personal offices--sewed on a
button or two, bought him shoes, bound up a hurt finger. In this time,
too, he had first talked with him alone, tried to answer his questions.
"Where _is_ my mamma, an' will she rock somebody else?" "Are you going
to be my daddy till you die, an' _then_ who'll be?" "What is the biggest
thing everybody knows? Can I know it too?"... Also, in these three
months, at night he had gone to sleep, sometimes in a bed, oftener in a
barn, now and again under the stars, with the child breathing within his
reach, and had waked to keep him covered with his own coat. Now he was
going to end all this.
"It ain't fair to the kid not to. It ain't fair to cart him around like
this," he said over and over, defending himself before some dim
dissenter.
The boy suddenly swung back from his father's arm and looked up in his
face. "Will--will there be any supper till morning?" he asked.
You might have thought that the man did not hear, he sat so still
looking down the wet road-ruts shining under the infrequent lamps.
Hunger and cold, darkness and wet and ill-luck--why should he not keep
the boy from these? It was not deserting his child; it was giving him
into better hands. It did not occur to him that the village might not
accept the charge. Anything would be better than what he himself had to
give. Hunger and cold and darkness....
"You stay still here a minute, sonny," said the man.
"You goin' 'way?" the child demanded.
"A minute. You stay still here--right where you are," said the man, and
went into the darkness.
The little boy sat still. He was wide awake now that he was alone; the
walls of the dark seemed suddenly to recede, and instead of merely the
church steps there was the whole black, listening world to take account
of. He sat alert, trying to warm each hand on the cold wrist of its
fellow. Where had his father gone? To find them a place to stay? Suppose
he came back and said that he had found them a home; and they should go
to it; and it would have a coal stove and a bedstead, and a pantry with
cookies and brown sugar in the jars. And a lady would come and cook
molasses candy for him....
All this time something was hurting him intolerably. It was the foot,
and the biggest toe, and the hole that was "choking" _him_. He fumbled
at his shoe laces, but they were wet and the shoes were wet and sodden,
and he gave it up. Where had his father gone? How big the world seemed
when he was gone, and how _different_ the night was. And when the lady
had the molasses candy cooked, like in a story, she would cool it at the
window and they would cut it in squares....
As suddenly as he had gone, his father reappeared from the darkness.
"Here," he said roughly, and thrust in the child's hands a paper bag.
And when he had opened it eagerly there were sugar rolls and cream puffs
and a piece of fruit cake and some shelled nuts. Fifteen cents' worth of
food, badly enough selected, in all conscience, but--fifteen cents'
worth. The fifteen cents which the man had been carrying in his pocket,
wrapped in paper.
"Now set there," said his father, "an' eat 'em up. An' listen, son. Set
there till folks come out from in there. Set there till they come out.
An' here's somethin' I'm puttin' in your coat pocket--see? It's a paper.
Don't you look at it. But when the folks come out from in there--an' ask
you anything--you show 'em that. Remember. Show 'em that."
In the prayer-meeting room the reed organ sent out some trembling,
throaty chords, and the little group in there sang an old melody. It was
strange to the man, as he listened--
"Break thou the bread of life
To me, to me--"
but, "That's it," he thought, "that's it. Break it to him--I can't. All
I can give him is stuff in a paper bag, an' not always that. Now you
break it to him--"
"Dad-_ee_!" cried the child. "You!"
Startled, the man looked down at him. It was almost like a counter
charge. But the child was merely holding out to him half his store. The
man shook his head and went down the steps to the sidewalk and turned to
look back at the child munching happily from the paper sack. "Break it
to him--break it to him--God!" the father muttered, as he might have
used a charm.
Again the child looked out expectantly.
"Did he say anything back?" he asked eagerly.
"Not a word--not a word," said the man again. This time he laughed,
nervously and foolishly. "But mebbe he will," he mumbled
superstitiously. "I dunno. Now, you set there. An' then you give 'em the
paper--an' go with anybody out o' the church that asks you. Dad may not
get back for--quite a while...."
The man went. The child, deep in the delight of a cream puff, wondered
and looked after him troublously, and was vaguely comforted by the
murmur of voices beyond the doors.
"Why, God didn't answer back because he was to the church meeting," the
child thought, when he heard the people moving about within.
I
"Inside the church that night," Calliope Marsh is wont to tell it, "the
Friendship Married Ladies Cemetery Improvement Sodality was having one
of our special meetings, with hot chocolate and ice lemonade and two
kinds of wafers. There wasn't a very big attendance, account of the
rain, and there was so much refreshments ready that us ladies was urgin'
the men to have all they wanted.
"'Drink both kinds, Timothy,' Mis Toplady says to her husband,
persuadin'; 'it'll have to be throwed away if somebody don't drink it
up.'
"'Lord, Amandy,' says Timothy, testy, 'I do hate to be sicked on to my
food like that. It takes away my appetite, same as poison would.'
"'They always do it,' says Jimmy Sturgis, morose. 'My wife'll say to me,
"Jimmy, eat up them cold peas. They'll spoil if you don't," and, "Jimmy,
can't you make 'way with them cold pancakes?" Till I wish't I could
starve.'
"'Well, if you hadn't et up things,' says Mis' Sturgis, mild, 'we'd of
been scrappin' in the poor-house by now. I dunno but I'd ruther scrap
where I am.'
"'Sure!' says Postmaster Silas Sykes, that always pours oil on troubled
waters except when the trouble is his own; and then he churns them.
"'I dunno what ailed me in business meeting to-night,' says Mis'
Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I declare, I was full as nervous as a
witch. I couldn't keep my feet still anywheres.'
"'The fidgets,' comprehends Mis' Uppers, sympathetic. 'I get 'em in my
feet 'long toward night sometimes. Turn an' twist an' shift--I know the
feeling. Whenever my feet begin that, I always give right up an' take
off my shoes an' get into my rubbers.'
"'Well, I wish't I had some rubbers now,' says Mis' Mayor Uppers. 'I
wore my best shoes out to tea an' come right from tea here, like a
maniac. An' now look at me, in my Three Dollar-and-a-half kids an' the
streets runnin' rivers.'
"'You take my rubbers,' Mis' Timothy Toplady offered. 'I've set with 'em
on all evening because I always get 'em mixed up at Sodality, an' I
declare the water'll feel good to my poor feet.'
"'No, no, don't you trouble,' says Mis' Uppers. 'I'll just slip my shoes
off an' track that one block in my stocking feet. Then I'll put 'em in
good, hot water an' go to bed. I wouldn't of come out to-night at all
if it hadn't of been for the professor.'
"'For goodness' sakes,' I says, 'don't call him that. You know how he
hates it.'
"'But I do like to say it,' Mis' Uppers insists, wistful. 'He's the only
professor I ever knew.'
"'Me either,' I says--and I knew how she felt.
"Just the same, we was getting to like Mr. Insley too much to call him
that if he didn't want it, or even 'doctor' that was more common, though
over to Indian Mound College, half way between us and the City, he is
one or both, and I dunno but his name tapers off with capital letters,
same as some.
"'I just came over here to work,' he told us when we first see him. 'I
don't profess anything. And "doctor" means teacher, you know, and I'm
just learning things. Must you have a formal title for me? Won't Mr.
do?'
"Most of the College called him just 'Insley,' friendly and approving,
and dating back to his foot-ball days, and except when we was speaking
to him, we commonly got to calling him that too. A couple of months
before he'd come over from the College with a letter of introduction
from one of the faculty to Postmaster Silas Sykes, that is an alderman
and our professional leading citizen. The letter from the College said
that we could use Mr. Insley in any local civic work we happened to be
doing.
"'Civic work?' Silas says to him, thoughtful. 'You mean shuttin' up
saloons an' like that?'
"'Not necessarily,' he told him. 'Just work with folks, you know.'
"'Well-a, settin' out bushes?' Silas asks.
"'Whatever you're most interested in, Mr. Sykes,' says he. 'Isn't there
some organization that's doing things here?'
"Silas wasn't interested in so very much of anything except Silas. But
the word 'organization' helped him out.
"'There's the Friendship Married Ladies Cemetery Improvement Sodality,'
says he. 'That must be the very kind of a thing you mean.'
"Insley laughed a little, but he let Mis' Sykes, that loves new things
and new people, bring him to our next evening meeting in the church
parlors, and he'd been back several times, not saying much, but just
getting acquainted. And that rainy night, when the men met with us to
talk over some money raising for Sodality, we'd asked him to come over
too. We all liked him. He had a kind of a used-to-things way, and you
felt like you'd always known him or, for the time you hadn't, that
you'd both missed something out; and he had a nice look too, a look that
seemed to be saying 'good morning' and to be beginning a fine, new
day--the best day yet.
"He'd set there kind of broodin' the most of that evening, drinking
whatever anybody brought him, but not putting his mind to it so very
much; but it was a bright broodin', an' one that made you think of
something that's going to open and not just of something that's shut up.
You can brood both ways, but the effect is as different as a bud from a
core.
"'Speakin' of money raisin' for Sodality,' says Silas Sykes, kind of
pretend hearty and pretend casual, like he does, 'why don't Sodality
make some money off'n the Fourth of July? Everybody else is.'
("Sodality always speaks of itself and of the Cemetery real intimate,
without the _the_, an' everybody's got to doing it.)
"Us ladies all set still and kept still. The Fourth of July, that was
less than a week off, was a sore point with us, being we'd wanted a
celebration that would _be_ a celebration, and not merely a money-raiser
for the town.
"'Oh, I say canvass, house to house,' says Timothy. 'Folks would give
you a dime to get you off'n the front porch that wouldn't come out to a
dime entertainment, never.'
"'Why not ask them that's got Dead in their own families, to pay out for
'em, an' leave them alone that's got livin' mouths to feed?' says Threat
Hubbelthwait, querulous. Threat ain't no relations but his wife, and he
claims to have no Dead of his own. I always say they must be either
living or dead, or else where's Threat come in? But he won't admit it.
"'What you raisin' money for anyhow?' asks Eppleby Holcomb, quiet.
Eppleby always keeps still a long time, and then lets out something
vital.
"As a matter of fact, Sodality didn't have no real work on hand,
Cemetery lookin' real neat and tasty for Cemetery, and no immediate dead
coming on as far as we could know; but we didn't have much of anything
in the treasury, either. And when we didn't have any work on hand, we
was in the habit of raising money, and when we'd got some money earnt,
we was in the habit of devising some nice way to spend it. And so we
kept Sodality real alive.
"'Well, there may not be any active dead just now,' Mis' Sykes explains
it, 'but they are sure to die and need us. We had two country funerals
to pay for last year. Or I might say, one an' a half, one corpse
contributing half enough for his own support in Cemetery.'
"With that Insley spoke up, kind of firm and nice, with muscles in his
tone, like he does:
"'What's the matter with doing something with these folks before they
die?' he asks.
"I guess we all looked kind of blank--like when you get asked _why_
Columbus discovered America and all you know how to answer is just the
date he done so on.
"'Well-a,' says Mis' Sykes, 'do what?'
"'Mustn't there be something to do with them, living, if there's
everything to be done for them, dead?' Insley asks.
"'Well-a' says Mis' Sykes, 'I don't know that I understand just how you
mean that. Perhaps the Mission Band--'
"'No,' says Insley. 'You. Us.'
"I never knew a man to say so little and yet to get so much said.
"'Well-a,' says Mis' Sykes, 'of course Sodality was formed with the idee
of caring for Cemetery. You see that lets in the Dead only.'
"'Gosh,' says Eppleby Holcomb, 'how exclusive.' But I don't know as
anybody heard him but me.
"'I know,' says Insley, slow. 'Well, at any rate, perhaps there are
things that all of us Living might do together--for the sake, say, of
earning some money for the Dead. There'd be no objection to that, would
there?'
"'Oh, no,' says Mis' Sykes. 'I'm sure nobody could take exception to
_that_. Of course you always have to earn money out of the living.'
"Insley looked at us all kind of shy--at one and another and another of
us, like he thought he might find some different answer in somebody's
eyes. I smiled at him, and so did Mis' Toplady, and so did Eppleby; and
Mis' Eleanor Emmons, the widow-lady, lately moved in, she nodded. But
the rest set there like their faces was on wrong side out and didn't
show no true pattern.
"'I mean,' he says, not quite knowing how to make us understand what he
was driving at, 'I mean, let's get to know these folks while they are
alive. Aren't we all more interested in folks, than we are in their
graves?'
"'_Folks_,' Timothy Toplady says over, meditative, like he'd heard of
members, customers, clients, murderers and the like, but never of folks.
"'I mean,' Insley says again, 'oh, any one of a dozen things. For
instance, do something jolly that'll give your young people something to
do evenings--get them to help earn the money for Cemetery, if you want
to,' he adds, laughing a little.
"'There's goin' to be a Vigilance Committee to see after the young folks
of Friendship Village, nights,' says Silas Sykes, grim.
"'You might have town parties, have the parties in schools and in the
town hall,' Insley goes on, 'and talk over the Cemetery that belongs to
you all, and talk over the other things besides the Cemetery that belong
to you all. Maybe I could help,' he adds, 'though I own up to you now
I'm really more fond of folks--speaking by and large--than I am of
tombstones.'
"He said a little more to us, about how folks was doing in the world
outside the village, and he was so humorous about it that they never
knew how something inside him was hopping with hope, like I betted it
was, with his young, divine enthusiasm. And when he'd got done he
waited, all grave and eager, for somebody to peep up. And it was, as it
would be, Silas Sykes who spoke first.
"'It's all right, it's all right,' says he, 'so long as Sodality don't
go meddling in the village affairs--petitionin' the council and
protestin' an' so on. That gets any community all upset.'
"'That's so,' says Timothy, nodding. 'Meetin', singin' songs, servin'
lemonade an' plantin' things in the ground is all right enough. It helps
on the fellow feelin' amazin'. But pitchin' in for reforms and things--'
Timothy shook his head.
"'As to reforms,' says Insley, 'give me the fellowship, and the reforms
will take care of themselves.'
"'Things is quite handy about takin' their course, though,' says Silas,
'so be we don't yank open the cocoons an' buds an' others.'
"'Well,' says Mis' Uppers, 'I can't do much more, Professor. I'm drove
to death, as it is. I don't even get time to do my own improvin' round
the place.' Mis' Uppers always makes that her final argument. 'Sew for
the poor?' I've heard her say. 'Why, I can't even get my own fall sewing
done.'
"'Me, too,' and, 'Me, either,' went round the circle. And, 'I can't do a
great deal myself,' says Mis' Sykes, 'not till after my niece goes
away.'
"I thought, 'I shouldn't think you could tend to much of anything else,
not with Miss Beryl Sessions in the house.' That was the Sykes's niece,
till then unknown to them, that we'd all of us heard nothing but, since
long before she come. But of course I kept still, part because I was
expecting an unknown niece of my own in a week or so, and your unknown
relatives is quite likely to be glass houses.
"'Another thing,' says Mis' Hubbelthwait, 'don't let's us hold any
doin's in this church, kicking up the new cork that the Ladies' Aid has
just put down on the floor. It'll all be tracked up in no time, letting
in Tom, Dick, and Harry.'
"'Don't let's get the church mixed up in anything outside, for pity's
sakes,' says Silas. 'The trustees'll object to our meeting here, if we
quit working for a dignified object and go to making things mutual,
promiscuous. Churches has got to be church-like.'
"'Well, Silas,' says Eppleby Holcomb, that hadn't been saying anything,
'I donno as some of us could bring ourselves to think of Christ as real
Christ-like, if he come back the way he use' to be.'
"Insley sat looking round on them all, still with his way of saying good
morning on a good day. I wondered if he wasn't wishing that they'd hang
on that way to something worth hanging to. For I've always thought, and
I think now, that they's a-plenty of stick-to-itiveness in the world;
but the trouble is, it's stuck to the wrong thing.
"The talk broke up after that, like somebody had said something in bad
taste; and we conversed around in groups, and done our best to make
'way with the refreshments. And Insley set talking to Mis' Eleanor
Emmons, the new widow, lately moved in.
"About Mis' Emmons the social judgment of Friendship Village was for the
present hanging loose. This was partly because we didn't understand her
name.
"'My land, was her husband a felon or a thief or what that she don't use
his name?' everybody asked everybody. 'What's she stick her own name in
front of his last name like that for? Sneaked out of usin' his Christian
name as soon as his back was turned, _I_ call it,' said some. 'My land,
I'd use my dead husband's forename if it was Nebuchadnezzar. _My_
opinion, we'd best go slow till she explains herself.'
"But I guess Insley had more confidence.
"'You'll help, I know?' I heard him say to Mis' Emmons.
"'My friend,' she says back, 'whatever I can do I'll do. It's a big job
you're talking about, you know.'
"'It's _the_ big job,' says Insley, quiet.
"Pretty soon Mis' Toplady got up on her feet, drawing her shawl up her
back.
"'Well,' she says, 'whatever you decide, count on me--I'll always do for
chinkin' in. I've got to get home now and set my bread or it won't be
up till day _after_ to-morrow. Ready, Timothy? Good night all.'
"She went towards the door, Timothy following. But before they got to
it, it opened, and somebody come in, at the sight of who Mis' Toplady
stopped short and the talk of the rest of us fell away. No stranger,
much, comes to Friendship Village without our knowing it, and to have a
stranger walk unbeknownst into the very lecture-room of the First Church
was a thing we never heard of, without he was a book agent or a
travelling man.
"Here, though, was a stranger--and such a stranger. She was so
unexpected and so dazzling that it shot through my head she was like a
star, taking refuge from all the roughness and the rain outside--a star,
so it come in my head, using up its leisure on a cloudy night with
peepin' in here and there to give out brightness anyway. The rough, dark
cheviot that the girl wore was sort of like a piece of storm-cloud
clinging about that brightness--a brightness of wind-rosy face and blowy
hair, all uncovered. She stood on the threshold, holding her wet
umbrella at arm's length out in the entry.
"'I beg your pardon. Are you ready, Aunt Eleanor?' she asked.
"Mis' Eleanor Emmons turned and looked at her.
"'Robin!' she says. 'Why, you must be wet through.'
"'I'm pretty wet,' says the girl, serene, 'I'm so messy I won't come in.
I'll just stop out here on the steps. Don't hurry.'
"'Wait a minute,' Mis' Emmons says. 'Stay where you are then, please,
Robin, and meet these people.'
"The girl threw the door wide, and she stepped back into the vestibule,
where her umbrella had been trailing little puddles; and she stood there
against the big, black background of the night and the village, while
Mis' Emmons presented her.
"'This is my niece, Miss Sidney,' she told us. 'She has just come to me
to-day--for as long as I can keep her. Will you all come to see her?'
"It wasn't much the way Mis' Sykes had done, singing praises of Miss
Beryl Sessions for weeks on end before she'd got there; nor the way I
was doing, wondering secret about my unknown niece, and what she'd be
like. Mis' Emmons introduced her niece like she'd always been one of us.
She said our names over, and we went towards her; and Miss Sidney leaned
a little inside the frame of the doorway and put out her hand to us
all, a hand that didn't have any glove on and that in spite of the rain,
was warm.
"'I'm so sorry,' she says, 'I'm afraid I'm disgracing Aunt Eleanor. But
I couldn't help it. I love to walk in the rain.'
"'That's what rain is for,' Insley says to her; and I see the two change
smiles before Mis' Hubbelthwait's 'Well, I do hope you've got some good
high rubbers on your feet' made the girl grave again--a sweet grave, not
a stiff grave. You can be grave both ways, and they're as different from
each other as soup from hot water.
"'I have, thank you,' she says, 'big storm boots. Did you know,' she
adds, 'that somebody else is waiting out here? Somebody's little bit of
a beau? And I'm afraid he's gone to sleep.'
"We looked at one another, wondering. Who was waiting for any of us?
'Not me,' one after another says, positive. 'We've all raced home alone
from this church since we was born,' Mis' Uppers adds, true enough.
"We was curious, with that curiosity that it's kind of fun to have, and
we all crowded forward into the entry. And a little to one side of the
shining lamp path was setting a child--a little boy, with a paper bag in
his arms.