"By messenger the next day noon come a letter for me that made me laugh
a little and that made me a little bit mad, too. This was it:--
"'Dear Calliope:
"'Come up and help straighten things out, do. This place breathes
desolation. Everything is everywhere except everything which
everyone wants, which is lost. Come at once, Calliope, pray, and
dine with me to-night and give me as much time as you can for a
fortnight. I'm having some people here next week--twenty or so for
over the Fourth--and a party. A company, you know! I need you.
"'ALEX PROUDFIT.'
"It was so exactly like Alex to send for me just plain because he wanted
me. Never a word about if I was able or if I wasn't putting up berries
or didn't have company or wasn't dead. I hadn't heard a sound from him
in the two years or more that he'd been gone, and yet now it was just
'Come,' like a lord. And for that matter like he used to do when he was
in knickerbockers and coming to my house for fresh cookies, whether I
had any baked or not. But I remember actually baking a batch for him one
day while he galloped his pony up and down the Plank Road waiting for
them. And I done the same way now. I got my work out of the way and went
right up there, like I'd always done for that family in the forty years
I could think back to knowing them, when I was a girl. I guessed that
Alex had lit down sudden, a day or so behind his telegram to the
servants; and I found that was what he had done.
"Proudfit House stands on a hill, and it looks like the hill had
billowed up gentle from underneath and had let some of the house flow
down the sides. It was built ambitious, of the good cream brick that
gives to a lot of our Middle West towns their colour of natural flax in
among the green; it had been big in the beginning, and to it had been
added a good many afterthoughts and postscripts of conservatory and
entrance porch and sun room and screened veranda, till the hill couldn't
hold them all. The house was one of them that was built fifty years ago
and that has since been pecked and patted to suit modern uses, pinched
off here and pulled off there to fit notions refining themselves
gradual. And all the time the house was let to keep some nice, ugly
things that after a while, by mere age and use-to-ness, were finally
accepted wholesale as dignified and desirable. The great brown mansard
roof, niched and glassed in two places for statues--and having them,
too, inside my memory and until Mr. Alex pulled them down; the scalloped
tower on a wing; the round red glass window on a stairway--these we all
sort of come to agree to as qualities of the place that couldn't be
changed no more'n the railroad track. Tapestries and water-colours and
Persian carpets went on inside the house, but outside was all the little
twists of a taste that had started in naked and was getting dressed up
by degrees.
"Since the marriage of her daughter Clementina, Madame Proudfit had
spent a good deal of time abroad, and the house had been shut up. This
shutting up of people's houses always surprises me. When I shut up my
house to go away for a couple of months or so, I just make sure the
kitchen fire is out, and I carry the bird down to Mis' Holcomb's, and I
turn the key in the front door and start off. But land, land when
Proudfit House is going to be shut, the servants work days on end. Rugs
up, curtains down, furniture covered and setting around out of place,
pictures and ornaments wrapped up in blue paper--I always wonder _why_.
Closing my house is like putting it to sleep for a little while, but
closing Proudfit House is some like seeing it through a spasm and into a
trance. They done that to the house most every summer, and I used to
think they acted like spring was a sort of contagion, or a
seventeen-year locust, or something to be fumigated for. I supposed that
was the way the house looked when Alex got home to it, and of course a
man must hate it worse than a woman does, because he doesn't know which
end to tell them to take hold of to unravel. So I went right up there
when he sent for me--and then it was a little fun, too, to be on the
inside of what was happening there, that all the village was so curious
about.
"He'd gone off when I got there, gone off on horseback on some business,
but he'd left word that he'd be back in a little while, and would I help
him out in the library. I knew what that meant. The books was all out of
the shelves and packed in paper, and he wanted me to see that they got
back into their right places, like I'd done many and many a time for his
mother. So I worked there the whole afternoon, with a couple of men to
help me, and the portrait of Linda Proudfit on the wall watching me like
it wanted to tell me something, maybe about the way she went off and
died, away from home; and a little after four o'clock a servant let
somebody into the room.
"I looked up expecting to see Alex, and it surprised me some to see
Insley instead. But I guessed how it was: that Alex Proudfit being a
logical one to talk over Friendship Village with, Insley couldn't lose a
day in bringing him his letter.
"'Well, Miss Marsh,' says he, 'and do you live everywhere, like a good
fairy?'
"I thought afterwards that I might have said to him: 'No, Mr. Insley.
And do you appear everywhere, like a god?' But at the time I didn't
think of anything to say, and I just smiled. I'm like that,--if I like
anybody, I can't think of a thing to say back; but to Silas Sykes I
could talk back all day.
"We'd got the room part in order by then, and Insley sat down and looked
around him, enjoyable. It was a beautiful room. I always think that that
library ain't no amateur at its regular business of being a vital part
of the home. Some rooms are awful amateurs at it, and some ain't no more
than apprentices, and some are downright enemies to the house they're
in. But that library I always like to look around. It seems to me, if I
really knew about such things, and how they ought to be, I couldn't
like that room any better. Colour, proportion, window, shadow--they was
all lined up in a kind of an enjoyable professionalism of doing their
best. The room was awake now, too--I had the windows open and I'd
started the clock. Insley set looking around as if there was sighs
inside him. I knew how, down in New England, his father's home sort of
behaved itself like this home. But after college, he had had to choose
his way, and he had faced about to the new west, the new world, where
big ways of living seemed to him to be sweeping as a wind sweeps. He had
chose as he had chose, and I suppose he was glad of that; but I knew the
room he had when he was in town, at Threat Hubbelthwait's hotel, must be
a good deal like being homesick, and that this library was like coming
home.
"'Mr. Proudfit had just returned and would be down at once,' the man
come back and told him. And while he waited Insley says to me:
"'Have you seen anything of the little boy to-day, Miss Marsh?'
"I was dying to answer back: 'Yes, I see Miss Sidney early this
morning,' but you can't answer back all you die to. So I told him yes,
I'd seen all three of them and they was to be up in the city all day to
buy some things for Christopher. Mis' Emmons and Robin was both to come
up to Proudfit House to Alex's house party--seems they'd met abroad
somewheres a year or more back; and they was going to bring Christopher,
who Mis' Emmons didn't show any sign of giving up while her plan,
whatever it was, was getting itself thought over. So they'd whisked the
child off to the city that day to get him the things he needed. And
there wasn't time to say anything more, for in come Alex Proudfit.
"He was in his riding clothes--horseback dress we always call it in the
village, which I s'pose isn't city talk, proper. He was long and thin
and brown, and sort of slow-moving in his motions, but quick and nervous
in his talk; and I don't know what there was about him--his clothes, or
his odd, old-country looking ring, or the high white thing wound twice
around his neck, or his way of pronouncing his words--but he seemed a
good deal like a picture of a title or a noted man. The minute you
looked at him, you turned proud of being with him, and you pretty near
felt distinguished yourself, in a nice way, because you was in his
company. Alex was like that.
"'I don't like having kept you waiting,' he says to Insley. 'I'm just
in. By Jove, I've left Topping's letter somewhere--Insley, is it? thank
you. Of course. Well, Calliope, blessings! I knew I could count on you.
How are you--you look it. No, don't run away. Keep straight on--Mr.
Insley will pardon us getting settled under his nose. Now what can I get
you, Mr. Insley? If you've walked up, you're warm. No? As you will. It's
mighty jolly getting back--for a minute, you know. I couldn't stop here.
How the devil do you stop here all the time--or do you stop here all the
time?...' All this he poured out in a breath. He always had talked fast,
but now I see that he talked more than fast--he talked foreign.
"'I'm here some of the time,' says Insley; 'I hoped that you were going
to be, too.'
"'I?' Alex said. 'Oh, no--no. I feel like this: while I'm in the world,
I want it at its best. I want it at its latest moment. I want to be
living _now_. Friendship Village--why, man, it's living half a century
ago--anyway, a quarter. It doesn't know about A.D. nineteen-anything. I
love the town, you know, for what it is. But confound it, I'm living
_now_.'
"Insley leaned forward. I was dusting away on an encyclopædia, but I see
his face and I knew what it meant. This was just what he'd been hoping
for. Alex Proudfit was a man who understood that the village hadn't
caught up. So he would want to help it--naturally he would.
"'I'm amazed at the point of view,' Alex went on. 'I never saw such
self-sufficiency as the little towns have. In England, on the continent,
the villages know their place and keep it, look up to the towns and all
that--play the peasant, as they are. Know their betters. Here? Bless
you. Not a man down town here but will tell you that the village has got
everything that is admirable. They believe it, too. Electric light,
water, main street paved, cemetery kept up, "nice residences,"
telephones, library open two nights a week, fresh lettuce all
winter--fine, up-to-date little place! And, Lord, but it's a back-water.
With all its improvements the whole _idea_ of modern life somehow
escapes it--music and art, drama, letters, manners, as integral parts of
everyday living--what does it know of them? It thinks these things are
luxuries, outside the scheme of real life, like monoplanes. Jove, it's
delicious!'
"He leaned back, laughing. Insley must have felt his charm. Alex always
was fascinating. His eyes were gray and sort of hobnobbed with your
own; his square chin just kind of threatened a dimple without breaking
into one; his dark hair done clusters like a statue; and then there was
a lot of just plain charm pouring off him. But of course more than with
this, Insley was filled with his own hope: if Alex Proudfit understood
some things about the village that ought to be made right, it looked to
him as though they might do everything together.
"'Why,' Insley says, 'you don't know--you don't know how glad I am to
hear you say this. It's exactly the thing my head has been full of....'
"'Of course your head is full of it,' says Alex. 'How can it help but be
when you're fast here some of the time? If you don't mind--what is it
that keeps you here at all? I don't think I read Topping's letter
properly....'
"Insley looked out from all over his face.
"'I stay,' he says, 'just because all this _is_ so. It needs somebody to
stay, don't you think?'
"'Ah, yes, I see,' says Alex, rapid and foreign. 'How do you mean,
though? Surely you don't mean renouncing--and that sort of thing?'
"'Renouncing--no!' says Insley. 'Getting into the game.'
"He got his enthusiasm down into still places and outlined what he
meant. It was all at the ends of his fingers--what there was to do if
the town was to live up to itself, to find ways to express the everyday
human fellowship that Insley see underneath everything. And Alex
Proudfit listened, giving that nice, careful, pacifying attention of
his. He was always so polite that his listening was like answering. When
Insley got through, Alex's very disagreeing with him was sympathizing.
"'My dear man,' says he--I remember every word because it was something
I'd wondered sometimes too, only I'd done my wondering vague, like you
do--'My dear man, but are you not, after all, anticipating? This is just
the way Nature works--beating these things into the heads and hearts of
generations. Aren't you trying to do it all at once?'
"'I'm trying to help nature, to be a part of nature--exactly,' says
Insley, 'and to do it here in Friendship Village.'
"'Why,' says Alex, 'you'll be talking about facilitating God's plan
next--helping him along, by Jove.'
"Insley looks at him level. 'I mean that now,' he says, 'if you want to
put it that way.'
"'Good Lord,' says Alex, 'but how do you know what--what he wants?'
"'Don't you?' says Insley, even.
"Alex Proudfit turned and touched a bell. 'Look here,' he says, 'you
stay and dine, won't you? I'm alone to-night--Calliope and I are. Stay.
I always enjoy threshing this out.'
"To the man-servant who just about breathed with a well-trained stoop of
being deferential, his master give the order about the table. 'And,
Bayless, have them hunt out some of those tea-roses they had in bloom
the other day--you should see them, Calliope. Oh, and, Bayless, hurry
dinner a bit. I'm as hungry as lions,' he added to us, and he made me
think of the little boy in knickerbockers, asking me for fresh cookies.
"He slipped back to their topic, ranking it right in with tea-roses. In
the hour before dinner they went on 'threshing it out' there in that
nice luxurious room, and through the dinner, too--a simple, perfect
dinner where I didn't know which to eat, the plates or the food, they
was both so complete. Up to Proudfit House I can hardly ever make out
whether I'm chewing flavours or colours or shapes, but I donno as I
care. Flavours, thank my stars, aren't the only things in life I know
how to digest.
"First eager, then patient, Insley went over his ground, setting forth
by line and by line, by vision and by vision, the faith that was in
him--faith in human nature to come into its own, faith in the life of a
town to work into human life at its best. And always down the same road
they went, they come a-canterin' back with Alex Proudfit's 'Precisely.
It is precisely what is happening. You can't force it. You mustn't force
it. To do the best we can with ourselves and to help up an under dog or
two--if he deserves it--that's the most Nature lets us in for. Otherwise
she says: "Don't meddle. I'm doing this." And she's right. We'd bungle
everything. Believe me, my dear fellow, our spurts of civic
righteousness and national reform never get us anywhere in the long run.
In the long run, things go along and go along. You can't stop them. If
you're wise, you won't rush them.'
"At this I couldn't keep still no longer. We was at the table then, and
I looked over to Alex between the candlesticks and felt as if he was
back in knickerbockers again, telling me God had made enough ponies so
he could gallop his all day on the Plank Road if he wanted to.
"'You and Silas Sykes, Alex,' I says, 'have come to the same motto.
Silas says Nature is real handy about taking her course so be you don't
yank open cocoons and buds and like that.'
"'Old Silas,' says Alex. 'Lord, is he still going on about everything?
Old Silas....'
"'Yes,' I says, 'he is. And so am I. Out by my woodshed I've got a
Greening apple tree. When it was about a year old a cow I used to keep
browst it down. It laid over on the ground, broke clean off all but one
little side of bark that kept right on doing business with sap, like it
didn't know its universe was sat on. I didn't get time for a week or two
to grub it up, and when I did go to it, I see it was still living,
through that little pinch of bark. I liked the pluck, and I straightened
it up and tied it to the shed. I used to fuss with it some. Once in a
storm I went out and propped a dry-goods box over it. I kept the earth
rich and drove the bugs off. I kind of got interested in seeing what it
would do next. What it done was to grow like all possessed. It was
twenty years ago and more that the cow come by it, and this year I've
had seven bushels of Greenings off that one tree. Suppose I hadn't tied
it up?'
"'You'd have saved yourself no end of trouble, dear Calliope,' says
Alex, 'to say nothing of sparing the feelings of the cow.'
"'I ain't so anxious any more,' says I, 'about sparing folks' feelings
as I am about sparing folks. Nor I ain't so crazy as I used to be about
saving myself trouble, either.'
"'Dear Calliope,' says Alex, 'what an advocate you are. Won't you be my
advocate?'
"He wouldn't argue serious with me now no more than he would when he was
in knickerbockers. But yet he was adorable. When we got back to the
library, I went on finishing up the books and I could hear him being
adorable. He dipped down into the past and brought up rich things--off
down old ways of life in the village that he'd had a part in and then
off on the new ways where his life had led him. Java--had Insley ever
been in Java? He must show him the moonstone he got there and tell him
the story they told him about it. But the queerest moonstone story was
one he'd got in Lucknow--so he goes on, and sends Bayless for a cabinet,
and from one precious stone and another he just naturally drew out
romances and adventures, as if he was ravelling the stones out into
them. And then he begun taking down some of his old books. And when it
come to books, the appeal to Insley was like an appeal of friends, and
he burrowed into them musty parchments abundant.
"'By George,' Insley says once, 'I didn't dream there were such things
in Friendship Village.'
"'Next thing you'll forget they're in the world,' says Alex,
significant. 'Believe me, a man like you ought not to be down here, or
over to Indian Mound, either. It's an economic waste. Nature has fitted
you for her glorious present and you're living along about four decades
ago. Don't you think of that?...'
"Then the telephone on the library table rang and he answered a call
from the city. 'Oh, buy it in, buy it in, by all means,' he directs.
'Yes, cable to-night and buy it in. That,' he says, as he hung up, 'just
reminds me. There's a first night in London to-night that I've been
promising myself to see.... What a dog's life a business man leads. By
the way,' he goes on, 'I've about decided to put in one of our plants
around here somewhere--a tannery, you know. I've been off to-day looking
over sites. I wonder if you can't give me some information I'm after
about land around Indian Mound. I'm not saying anything yet,
naturally--they'll give other people a bonus to establish in their
midst, but the smell of leather is too much for them. We always have to
surprise them into it. But talk about the ultimate good of a town ... if
a tannery isn't that, what is it?'
"It was after nine o'clock when I got the books set right--I loved to
handle them, and there was some I always looked in before I put them up
because some of the pictures give me feelings I remembered, same as
tasting some things will--spearmint and caraway and coriander. Insley,
of course, walked down with me. Alex wanted to send us in the
automobile, but I'm kind of afraid of them in the dark. I can't get it
out of my head that every bump we go over may be bones. And then I guess
we both sort of wanted the walk.
"Insley was like another man from the one that had come into the library
that afternoon, or had been talking to us at Mis' Emmons's the night
before. Down in the village, on Mis' Emmons's hearth, with Robin sitting
opposite, it had seemed so easy to know ways to do, and to do them.
Everything seemed possible, as if the whole stiff-muscled universe could
be done things to if only everybody would once say to it: _Our_
universe. But now, after his time with Alex, I knew how everything had
kind of _tightened_, closed in around him, shot up into high walls.
Money, tanneries, big deals by cable, moonstones from Java, they almost
made me slimpse too, and think, What's the use of believing Alex
Proudfit and me belong to the same universe? So I guessed how Insley was
feeling, ready to believe that he had got showed up to himself in his
true light, as a young, emotioning creature who dreams of getting
everybody to belong together, and yet can't find no good way. And Alex
Proudfit's parting words must of followed him down the drive and out on
to the Plank Road:--
"'Take my advice. Don't spend yourself on this blessed little hole. It's
dear to me, but it _is_ a hole ... eh? You won't get any thanks for it.
Ten to one they'll turn on you if you try to be one of them. Get out of
here as soon as possible, and be in the real world! This is just
make-believing--and really, you know, you're too fine a sort to throw
yourself away like this. Old Nature will take care of the town in good
time without you. Trust her!'
"Sometimes something happens to make the world seem different from what
we thought it was. Them times catch all of us--when we feel like we'd
been let down gentle from some high foot-path where we'd been going
along, and instead had been set to walk a hard road in a silence that
pointed its finger at us. If we get really knocked down sudden from a
high foot-path, we can most generally pick ourselves up and rally. But
when we've been let down gentle by arguments that seem convincing, and
by folks that seem to know the world better than we do, then's the time
when there ain't much of any rally to us. If we're any good, I s'pose we
can climb back without rallying. Rallying gives some spring to the
climb, but just straight dog-climbing will get us there, too.
"It was a lovely July night, with June not quite out of the world yet.
There was that after-dark light in the sky that makes you feel that the
sky is going to stay lit up behind and shining through all night, as if
the time was so beautiful that celestial beings must be staying awake to
watch it, and to keep the sky lit and turned down low.... We walked
along the Plank Road pretty still, because I guessed how Insley's own
thoughts was conversation enough for him; but when we got a ways down,
he kind of reached out with his mind for something and me being near by,
his mind clutched at me.
"'What if it _is_ so, Miss Marsh?' he says. 'What if the only thing for
us to do is to tend to personal morality and an occasional lift to an
under dog or two--"if he deserves it." What if that's all--they meant us
to do?'
"It's awful hard giving a reason for your chief notions. It's like
describing a rose by the tape-measure.
"'Shucks!' I says only. 'Look up at the stars. I don't believe it.'
"He laughed a little, and he did look up at them, but still I knew how
he felt. And even the stars that night looked awful detached and able to
take care of themselves. And they were a-shining down on the Plank Road
that would get to be Daphne Street and go about its business of leading
to private homes--_private_ homes. The village, that little cluster of
lights ahead there, seemed just shutting anybody else out, going its own
way, kind of mocking anybody for any idea of getting really inside it.
It was plain enough that Insley had nothing to hope for from Alex
Proudfit. And Alex's serene sureness that Nature needed nobody to help,
his real self-satisfied looking on at processes which no man could
really hurry up--my, but they made you feel cheap, and too many of
yourself, and like none of you had a license to take a-hold. For a
second I caught myself wondering. Maybe Nature--stars and streets and
processes--_could_ work it out without us.
"Something come against my foot. I pushed at it, and then bent over and
touched it. It was warm and yieldy, and I lifted it up. And it was a
puppy that wriggled its body unbelievable and flopped on to my arm its
inch and a quarter of tail.
"'Look at,' I says to Insley, which, of course, he couldn't do; but I
put the little thing over into his hands.
"'Well, little brother,' says he. 'Running away?'
"We was just in front of the Cadozas', a tumble-down house halfway
between Proudfit House and the village. It looked like the puppy might
belong there, so we turned in there with it. I'd always sort of dreaded
the house, setting in back among lilacs and locusts and never lit up.
When I stopped to think of it, I never seemed to remember much about
those lilacs and locusts blooming--I suppose they did, but nobody caught
them at it often. Some houses you always think of with their lilacs and
locusts and wisteria and hollyhocks going all the time; and some you
never seem to connect up with being in bloom at all. Some houses you
always seem to think of as being lit up to most of their windows, and
some you can't call to mind as showing any way but dark. The Cadozas'
was one of the unblossoming, dark kind, and awful ramshackle, besides.
I always use' to think it looked like it was waiting for some kind of
happening, I didn't know what. And sometimes when I come by there in the
dark, I used to think: It ain't happened yet.
"We went around to the back door to rap, and Mis' Cadoza opened it--a
slovenly looking woman she is, with no teeth much, and looking like what
hair she's got is a burden to her. I remember how she stood there
against a background of mussy kitchen that made you feel as if you'd
turned something away wrong side out to where it wasn't meant to be
looked at.
"'Is it yours, Mis' Cadoza?' I says, Insley holding out the puppy.
"'Murder, it's Patsy,' says Mis' Cadoza. 'Give 'm here--he must of
followed Spudge off. Oh, it's you, Miss Marsh.'
"Over by the cook stove in the corner I see past her to something that
made me bound to go inside a minute. It was a bed, all frowzy and
tumbled, and in it was laying a little boy.
"'Why,' I says, 'I heard Eph was in bed. What's the matter with him?'
And I went right in, past his mother, like I was a born guest. She drew
off, sort of grudging--she never liked any of us to go there, except
when some of them died, which they was always doing. 'Come in and see
Eph, Mr. Insley,' I says, and introduced him.
"The little boy wasn't above eight years old and he wasn't above six
years big.... He was laying real still, with his arms out of bed, and
his little thin hands flat down on the dark covers. His eyes, looking up
at us, watching, made me think of some trapped thing.
"'Well, little brother,' says Insley, 'what's the trouble?'
"Mis' Cadoza come and stood at the foot of the bed and jerked at the top
covers.
"'I've put him in the bed,' she says, 'because I'm wore out lifting him
around. An' I've got the bed out here because I can't trapse back an'
forth waitin' on him.'
"'Is he a cripple?' asks Insley, low. I liked so much to hear his
voice--it was as if it lifted and lowered itself in his throat without
his bothering to tell it which kind it was time to do. And I never heard
his voice make a mistake.
"'Cripple?' says Mis' Cadoza, in her kind of undressed voice. 'No. He
fell in a tub of hot water years ago, and his left leg is witherin' up.'
"'Let me see it,' says Insley, and pulled the covers back without
waiting.
"There ain't nothing more wonderful than a strong, capable, quick human
hand doing something it knows how to do. Insley's hands touched over the
poor little leg of the child until I expected to see it get well right
there under his fingers. He felt the cords of the knee and then looked
up at the mother.
"'Haven't they told you,' he says, 'that if he has an operation on his
knee, you can have a chance at saving the leg? I knew a case very like
this where the leg was saved.'
"'I ain't been to see nobody about it,' says Mis' Cadoza, leaving her
mouth open afterwards, like she does. 'What's the good? I can't pay for
no operation on him. I got all I can do to keep 'm alive.'
"Eph moved a little, and something fell down on the floor. Mis' Cadoza
pounced on it.
"'Ain't I forbid you?' she says, angry, and held out to us what she'd
picked up--a little dab of wet earth. 'He digs up all my house plants,'
she scolds, like some sort of machinery grating down on one place
continual, 'an' he hauls the dirt out and lays there an' makes
_figgers_. The idear! Gettin' the sheets a sight....'
"The child looked over at us, defiant. He spoke for the first time, and
I was surprised to hear how kind of grown-up his voice was.
"'I can get 'em to look like faces,' he says. 'I don't care what _she_
says.'
"'Show us,' commands Insley.
"He got back the bit of earth from Mis' Cadoza, and found a paper for
the crumbs, and pillowed the boy up and sat beside him. The thin, dirty
little hands went to work as eager as birds pecking, and on the earth
that he packed in his palm he made, with his thumb nail and a pen handle
from under his pillow, a face--a boy's face, that had in it something
that looked at you. 'But I can never get 'em to look the same way two
times,' he says to us, shy.
"'He's most killed my Lady Washington geranium draggin' the clay out
from under the roots,' Mis' Cadoza put in, resentful.
"Insley sort of sweeps around and looks acrost at her, deep and gentle,
and like he understood about her boy and her geranium considerable
better than she did.
"'He won't do it any more,' he says. 'He'll have something better.'
"The boy looked up at him. 'What?' he asks.
"'Clay,' says Insley, 'in a box. With things for you to make the clay
like. Do you want that?'
"The boy kind of curled down in his pillow and come as near to shuffling
as he could in the bed, and he hadn't an idea what to say. But I tell
you, his eyes, they wasn't like any trapped thing any more; they was
regular _boy's_ eyes, lit up about something.
"'Mrs. Cadoza,' Insley says, 'will you do something for me? We're trying
to get together a little shrubbery, over at the college. May I come in
and get some lilac roots from you some day?'
"Mis' Cadoza looked at him--and looked. I don't s'pose it had ever come
to her before that anybody would want anything she had or anything she
could do.
"'Why, sure,' she says, only. 'Sure, you can, Mr. What's-name.'
"And then Insley put out his hand, and she took it, I noted special. I
donno as I ever see anybody shake hands with her before, excep' when
somebody was gettin' buried out of her house.
"When we got out on the road again, I noticed that Insley went swinging
along so's I could hardly keep up with him; and he done it sort of
automatic, and like it was natural to him. I didn't say anything. If
I've learned one thing living out and in among human beings, it's that
if you don't do your own keeping still at the right time, nobody else is
going to do it for you. He spoke up after a minute like I thought he
would; and he spoke up buoyant--kind of a reverent buoyant:--
"'I don't believe we're discharged from the universe, after all,' he
says, and laughed a little. 'I believe we've still got our job.'
"I looked 'way down the Plank Road, on its way to its business of being
Daphne Street, and it come to me that neither the one nor the other
stopped in Friendship Village. But they led on out, down past the wood
lots and the Pump pasture and across the tracks and up the hill, and
right off into that sky that somebody was keeping lit up and turned down
low. And I said something that I'd thought before:
"'Ain't it,' I says, 'like sometimes everybody in the world come and
stood right close up beside of you, and spoke through the walls of you
for something inside of you to come out and be there with them?'
"'That's it,' he says, only. 'That's it.' But I see his mind nipped onto
what mine meant, and tied it in the right place.
"When we got to Mis' Emmons's corner, I turned off from Daphne Street
to go that way, because I'd told her I'd look in that night and see what
they'd bought in town. It was late, for the village, but Mis' Emmons
never minded that. The living-room light was showing through the
curtains, and Insley, saying good night to me, looked towards the
windows awful wistful. I guessed why. It was part because he felt as if
he must see Robin Sidney and they must talk over together what Alex
Proudfit had said to him. And part it was just plain because he wanted
to see her again.
"'Why don't you come in a minute,' I says, 'and ask after Christopher?
Then you can see me home.'
"'Wouldn't they mind it being late?' he asks.
"I couldn't help smiling at that. Once Mis' Emmons had called us all up
by telephone at ten o'clock at night to invite us to her house two days
later. She explained afterwards that she hadn't looked at the clock for
a week, but if she had, she might have called us just the same. 'For my
life,' she says, 'I _can't_ be afraid of ten o'clock. Indeed, I rather
like it.' I told him this, while we was walking in from her gate.
"'Mrs. Emmons,' he says, when she come to the door, 'I've come because I
hear that you like ten o'clock, and so do I. I wanted to ask if you've
ever been able to make it last?'
"'No,' she says. 'I prefer a new one every night--and this one to-night
is an exceptionally good one.'
"She always answered back so pretty. I feel glad when folks can. It's
like they had an extra brain to 'em.
"Insley went in, and he sort of filled up the whole room, the way some
men do. He wasn't so awful big, either. But he was pervading.
Christopher had gone to bed, and Robin Sidney was sitting there near a
big crock of hollyhocks--she could make the centre and life of a room a
crock full of flowers just as you can make it a fireplace.
"'Come in,' she says, 'and see what we bought Christopher. I wanted to
put him in black velvet knickerbockers or silver armour, but Aunt
Eleanor has bought chiefly khaki middies. She's such a sensible
relative.'
"'What are we going to do with him?' Insley asks. I loved the way he
always said 'we' about everything. Not 'they' or 'you,' but always,
'What are _we_ going to do.'
"'I'll keep him awhile,' Mis' Emmons says, 'and see what develops. If I
weren't going to Europe this fall--but something may happen. Things do.
Calliope,' she says to me, 'did I buy what I ought to have bought?'
"I went over to see the things spread out on the table, and Insley
turned round to where Robin was. I don't really believe he had been very
far away from where she was since the night before, when Christopher
come. And he got right into what he had to say, like he was impatient
for the sympathy in her eyes and in her voice.
"'I must tell you,' he says. 'I could hardly wait to tell you. Isn't it
great to be knocked down and picked up again, without having to get back
on your own feet. I--wanted to tell you.'
"'Tell me,' she says. And she looked at him in her nice, girl way that
lent him her eyes in good faith for just a minute and then took them
back again.
"'I've been to see Alex Proudfit,' he said. 'I've dined with him.'
"I don't think she said anything at all, but Insley went on, absorbed in
what he was saying.
"'I talked with him,' he says, 'about what we talked of last night--the
things to do, here in the village. I thought he might care--I was
foolish enough for that. Have you ever tried to open a door in a solid
wall? When I left there, I felt as if I'd tried just that. Seriously,
have you ever tried to talk about the way things are going to be and to
talk about it to a perfectly satisfied man?'
"Robin leaned forward, but I guess he thought that was because of her
sympathy. He went right on:--
"'I want never to speak of this to anyone else, but I can't help telling
you. You--understand. You know what I'm driving at. Alex Proudfit is a
good man--as men are counted good. And he's a perfect host, a
fascinating companion. But he's a type of the most dangerous selfishness
that walks the world--'
"Robin suddenly laid her hand, just for a flash, on Insley's arm.
"'You mustn't tell me,' she says. 'I ought to have told you before. Alex
Proudfit--I'm going to be Alex Proudfit's wife.'
V
"In the next days things happened that none of us Friendship Village
ladies is likely ever to forget. Some of the things was nice and some
was exciting, and some was the kind that's nice after you've got the
introduction wore off; but all of them was memorable. And most all of
them was the kind that when you're on the train looking out the car
window, or when you're home sitting in the dusk before it's time to
light the lamp, you fall to thinking about and smiling over, and you
have them always around with you, same as heirlooms you've got ready for
yourself.
"One of these was the Fourth of July that year. It fell a few days after
Alex Proudfit come, and the last of the days was full of his guests
arriving to the house party. The two Proudfit cars was racking back and
forth to the station all day long, and Jimmy Sturgis, he went near crazy
with getting the baggage up. I never see such a lot of baggage. 'Land,
land,' says Mis' Toplady, peeking out her window at it, 'you'd think
they was all trees and they'd come bringing extra sets of branches,
regular forest size.' Mis' Emmons and Robin and Christopher went up the
night before the Fourth--Mis' Emmons was going to do the chaperoning,
and Alex had asked me to be up there all I could to help him. He knows
how I love to have a hand in things. However, I couldn't be there right
at first, because getting ready for the Fourth of July was just then in
full swing.
"Do you know what it is to want to do over again something that you
ain't done for years and years? I don't care what it is--whether it's
wanting to be back sitting around the dinner table of your home when you
was twelve, and them that was there aren't there now; or whether it's
rocking in the cool of the day on the front porch of some old house that
got tore down long ago; or whether it's walking along a road you use' to
know every fence post of; or fishing from a stream that's dried up or
damned these twenty years; or eating spice' currants or pickle' peaches
that there aren't none put up like them now; or hearing a voice in a
glee club that don't sing no more, or milking a dead cow that _wasn't_
dead on the spring mornings you mean about--no, sir, I don't care what
one of them all it happens to be, if you know what it is to want to do
it again and can't, 'count of death and distance and long-ago-ness,
then I tell you you know one of the lonesomest, hurtingest feelings the
human heart can, sole outside of the awful things. And that was what had
got the matter with me awhile ago.
"It had come on me in the meeting of townspeople called by Silas Sykes a
few weeks before, to discuss how Friendship Village should celebrate the
Fourth. We hadn't had a Fourth in the village in years. Seeing the
Fourth and the Cemetery was so closely connected, late years, Sodality
had took a hand in the matter and had got fire-crackers and pistols
voted out of town, part by having family fingers blowed off and clothes
scorched full of holes, and part through Silas and the other dealers
admitting they wan't no money in the stuff and they'd be glad to be
prevented by law from having to sell it. So we shut down on it the year
after little Spudge Cadoza bit down on a cap to see if it'd go off, and
it done so. But we see we'd made the mistake of not hatching up
something to take the place of the noise, because the boys and girls all
went off to the next-town Fourths and come home blowed up and scorched
off, anyway. And some of the towns, especially Red Barns, that we can
see from Friendship Village when it's clear, was feeling awful touchy
and chip-shouldered towards us, and their two weekly papers was saying
we borrowed our year's supply of patriotism off the county, and sponged
on public spirit, and like that. So the general Friendship feeling was
that we'd ought to have a doings this year, and Postmaster Sykes, that
ain't so much public spirited as he is professional leading
citizen,--platform introducer of all visiting orators and so on,--he
called a mass-meeting to decide what to do.
"Mis' Sykes, she was awful interested, too, through being a born leader
and up in arms most of the time to do something new. And this year she
was anxious to get up something fancy to impress her niece with--the new
niece that was coming to visit her, and that none of us had ever see,
and that the Sykes's themselves had only just developed. Seems she was
looking for her family tree and she wrote to Mis' Sykes about being
connect'. And the letter seemed so swell, and the address so
mouth-melting and stylish that Mis' Sykes up and invited her to
Friendship Village to look herself up in their Bible, Born and Died
part.
"The very night of that public mass-meeting Miss Beryl Sessions--such
was the niece's name--come in on the Through, and Mis' Sykes, she
snapped her up from the supper table to bring her to the meeting and
show her off, all brimming with the blood-is-thicker-than-water
sentiments due to a niece that looked like that. For I never see
sweller. And being in the Glee Club I set where I got a good view when
Mis' Sykes rustled into the meeting, last minute, in her best black
cashmere, though it was an occasion when the rest of us would wear our
serges and alapacas, and Mis' Sykes knew it. All us ladies see them both
and took in every stitch they had on without letting on to unpack a
glance, and we see that the niece was wearing the kind of a dress that
was to ours what mince-pie is to dried apple, and I couldn't blame Mis'
Sykes for showing her off, human.
"Silas had had Dr. June open the meeting with prayer, and I can't feel
that this was so much reverence in Silas as that he isn't real
parliamentary nor yet real knowledgeable about what to do with his
hands, and prayer sort of broke the ice for him. That's the way Silas
is.
"'Folks,' says he, 'we're here to consider the advisability of bein'
patriotic this year. Of having a doings that'll shame the other towns
around for their half-an'-half way of giving things. Of making the
glorious Fourth a real business bringer. Of having a speech that'll
bring in the country trade--the Honourable Thaddeus Hyslop has been
named by some. And of getting our city put in the class of the wide
awake and the hustlers and the up-to-date and doing. It's a grand chance
we've passed up for years. What are we going to do for ourselves this
year? To decide it is the purpose of this mass-meetin'. Sentiments are
now in order.'
"Silas set down with a kitterin' glance to his new niece that he was
host and uncle of and pleased to be put in a good light before, first
thing so.
"Several men hopped up--Timothy Toplady saying that Friendship Village
was a city in all but name and numbers, and why not prove it to the
other towns? Jimmy Sturgis that takes tintypes, besides running the 'bus
and was all primed for a day full of both--'A glorious Fourth,' says he,
'would be money in our pockets.' And the farm machinery and furniture
dealers, and Gekerjeck, that has the drug store and the ice-cream
fountain, and others, they spoke the same. Insley had to be to the
college that night, or I don't believe the meeting would have gone the
way it did go. For the first line and chorus of everything that all the
men present said never varied:--
"'The Fourth for a business bringer.'
"It was Threat Hubbelthwait that finally made the motion, and he wasn't
real sober, like he usually ain't, but he wound up on the key-note:--
"'I sold two hundred and four lunches the last Fourth we hed in
Friendship Village,' says he, pounding his palm with his fist, 'an' I
move you that we celebrate this comin' Fourth like the blazes.'
"And though Silas softened it down some in putting it, still that was
substantially the sentiment that went through at that mass-meeting, that
was real pleased with itself because of.
"Well, us ladies hadn't taken no part. It ain't our custom to appear
much on our feet at public gatherings, unless to read reports of a
year's work, and so that night we never moved a motion. But we looked at
each other, and us ladies has got so we understand each other's
eyebrows. And we knew, one and all, that we was ashamed of the men and
ashamed of their sentiments. But the rest didn't like to speak out,
'count of being married to them. And I didn't like to, 'count of not
being.
"But when they got to discussing ways and means of celebrating, a woman
did get onto her feet, and a little lilt of interest run round the room
like wind. It was Miss Beryl Sessions, the niece, that stood up like
you'd unwrapped your new fashion magazine and unrolled her off'n the
front page.
"'I wonder,' says she--and her voice went all sweet and chirpy and
interested, 'whether it would amuse you to know some ways we took to
celebrate the Fourth of July last year at home ...' and while the men
set paying attention to her appearance and thinking they was paying
attention to her words alone, she went on to tell them how 'at home' the
whole town had joined in a great, Fourth of July garden party on the
village 'common,' with a band and lanterns and fireworks at night, and a
big marquee in the middle, full of ice-cream. 'We made it,' she wound
up, 'a real social occasion, a town party with everybody invited. And
the business houses said that it paid them over and over.'
"Well, of course that went with the men. Land, but men is easy tamed, so
be the tameress is somebody they ain't used to and is gifted with a good
dress and a kind of a 'scalloped air. But when she also has some idea of
business they go down and don't know it. 'Why, I should think that'd
take here like a warm meal,' says Timothy Toplady, instant--and I see
Mis' Amanda Toplady's chin come home to place like she'd heard Timothy
making love to another woman. 'Novel as the dickens,' says Simon
Gekerjeck. 'Move we adopt it.' And so they done.
"While they was appointing committees I set up there in the Glee Club
feeling blacker and blacker. Coming down to the meeting that night, I
recollect I'd been extra gentle in my mind over the whole celebration
idea. Walking along in the seven-o'clock light, with the sun shining
east on Daphne Street and folks all streaming to the town-meeting, and
me sensing what it was going to be for, I'd got all worked up to 'most a
Declaration of Independence lump in my throat. When I went in the door
to the meeting, little Spudge Cadoza and some other children was hanging
around the steps and Silas Sykes was driving them away; and it come to
me how deathly ridiculous that was, to be driving _children_ away from a
meeting like that, when children is what such meetings is for; and I'd
got to thinking of all the things Insley was hoping for us, and I'd been
real lifted up on to places for glory. And here down had come the men
with their talk about a _paying_ Fourth, and here was Miss Beryl
Sessions showing us how to celebrate in a way that seemed to me real
sweet but not so very patriotic. It was then that all of a sudden it
seemed to me I'd die, because I wanted so much to feel the way I'd use
to feel when it was going to be the Fourth o' July. And when they sung
'Star Spangled Banner' to go home on and all stood up to the sentiment,
I couldn't open my mouth. I can't go folks that stands up and carols
national tunes and then talks about having a Fourth that'll be a real
business bringer.
"'What'd you think of the meeting?' says Mis' Toplady, low, to me on the
way out.
"'I think,' says I, frank, 'it was darn.'
"'There's just exactly what we all think,' says Mis' Toplady, in a
whisper.
"But all the same, preparations was gone into head first. Most of us was
put on to from one to five committees--I mean most of them that works.
The rest of the town was setting by, watching it be done for them,
serene or snarling, according to their lights. Of course us ladies
worked, not being them that goes to a meeting an' sets with their mouths
shut and then comes out and kicks at what the meetin' done. Yet, though
we wan't made out of that kind of meal, we spoke our minds to each
other, private.
"'What under the canopy _is_ a marquee?' asks Mis' Amanda Toplady, when
we met at her house to plan about refreshments.
"Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss spoke right up.
"'Why, it's a finger ring,' she says. 'One of them with stones running
the long way. The minister's wife's got a blue stone one....'
"'Finger ring!' says Mis' Mayor Uppers, scornful. 'It's a title. That's
what it is. From England.'
"We looked at them both, perplexish. Mis' Holcomb is always up on
things--it was her that went into short sleeves when the rest of us was
still crocheting cuff turnovers, unconscious as the dead. But Mis'
Uppers had been the Mayor's wife, and though he'd run away, 'count o'
some money matter, still a title is a title, an' we thought Mis' Uppers
had ought to know.
"Then Abagail Arnold, that keeps the home bakery, she spoke up timid. 'I
see,' she says, 'in the _Caterer's Gazette_ a picture called "Marquee
Decorated for Fête." The picture wan't nothing but a striped tent. Could
a tent have anything to do with it?'
"'Pity sakes, no,' says Mis' Uppers. 'This is somethin' real city done,
Abagail.'
"We worked on what we could, but we all felt kind of lost and left out
of it, and like we was tinkering with tools we didn't know the names of
and a-making something we wasn't going to know how to use. And when the
article about our Fourth flared out in the _Friendship Daily_ and Red
Barns and Indian Mound weeklies, we felt worse than we had before:
'Garden Party.' 'All Day Fête.' '_Al Fresco_ Celebration,' the editors
had wrote it up.
"'All _what_?' says Mis' Uppers, listening irritable to the last one. 'I
can't catch that word no more'n a rabbit.'
"'It's a French word,' Mis' Holcomb told her, superior. 'Seems to me
I've heard it means a failure. It's a funny way to put it, ain't it? I
bet, though, that's what it'll be.'
"But the men, my, the men thought they was doing things right. The
Committee on Orator, with Silas for rudder, had voted itself Fifty
Dollars to squander on the speech, and they had engaged the Honourable
Thaddeus Hyslop, that they'd hoped to, and that was formerly in our
legislature, to be the orator of the day; they put up a platform and
seats on the 'common'--that wan't nothing but the market where loads of
wood stood to be sold; they was a-going to cut evergreens and plant them
there for the day; the Committee on Fireworks was a-going to buy set
pieces for the evening; they was a-going to raise Ned. Somebody that was
on one of the committees wanted to have some sort of historic scenes,
but the men wouldn't hear to it, because that would take away them that
had to do the business in the stores; no caluthumpians, no grand basket
dinner--just the garden party, real sweet, with Miss Beryl Sessions and
a marquee full of ice-cream that the ladies was to make.
"'It sounds sort of sacrilegious to me,' says Mis' Holcomb, 'connectin'
the Fourth up with society and secular doin's. When I was young, my
understandin' of a garden party would of been somethin' worldly. Now it
seems it's patriotic. Well, I wonder how it's believed to be in the
sight of the Lord?'
"But whether it was right or whether it was wrong, none of it rung like
it had ought to of rang. They wan't no _glow_ to it. We all went around
like getting supper on wash-day, and not like getting up a meal for
folks that meant a lot to us. It wan't going to be any such Fourth as
I'd meant about and wanted to have come back. The day come on a pacing,
and the nearer it come, the worse all us ladies felt. And by a few days
before it, when our final committee meeting come off in Abagail Arnold's
home bakery, back room, 'count of being central, we was all blue as the
grave, and I donno but bluer. We set waiting for Silas that was having
a long-distance call, and Abagail was putting in the time frosting dark
cakes in the same room. We was most all there but the niece Miss Beryl
Sessions. She had gone home, but she was coming back on the Fourth in an
automobile full o' city folks.
"'The _marquee's_ come,' says Mis' Holcomb, throwing out the word
clickish.
"Nobody said anything. Seems it _was_ a tent all along.
"'Silas has got in an extra boy for the day,' says Mis' Sykes,
complacent. 'It's the littlest Cadoza boy, Spudge. He's goin' to walk up
an' down Daphne Street all day, with a Prize Coffee board on his back.'
"'Where's Spudge's Fourth comin' in?' I couldn't help askin'.
"Mis' Sykes stared. She always could look you down, but she's got a much
flatter, thicker stare since her niece come. 'What's them kind o' folks
_for_ but such work?' says she, puckering.
"'Oh, I donno, I donno,' says I. 'I thought mebbe they was partly made
to thank the Lord for bein' born free.'
"'How unpractical you talk, Calliope,' she says.
"'I donno that word,' says I, reckless from being pent up. 'But it
seems like a liberty-lovin' people had ought to hev _one_ day to love
liberty on an' not tote groceries and boards and such.'
"'_Don't it!_' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, explosive.
"'What you talking?' says Mis' Sykes, cold. 'Don't you know the Fourth
of July can be made one of the best days of the year for your own town's
good? What's that if it ain't patriotic?'
"'It's Yankee shrewd,' says I, snapping some, 'that's what it is. It
ain't Yankee spirited, by a long shot.'
"'"_By a long shot_,"' quotes Mis' Sykes, withering. She always was
death on wording, and she was far more death after her niece come. But I
always thought, and I think now, that correcting your advisary's grammar
is like telling him there's a smooch on his nose, and they ain't either
of them parliamental _or_ decent.
"Mis' Uppers sighed. 'The whole thing,' says she, candid, 'sounds to me
like Fourth o' July in Europe or somewheres. No get-up-an'-get anywheres
to it. What do they do in Europe on the Fourth o' July, anyway?' she
wondered. 'I donno's I ever read.'
"'I donno, either,' says Mis' Holcomb, dark, 'but I bet you it's one of
these All Frost celebrations--or whatever it is they say.'
"Mis' Toplady set drying her feet by Abagail's stove, and she looked
regular down in the mouth. 'Well, sir,' she said, 'a Fourth o' July all
rosettes an' ribbins so don't sound to me one bit like the regular
Fourth at all. It don't sound to me no more'n the third--or the fifth.'
"I was getting that same homesick feeling that I'd had off and on all
through the getting ready, that hankering for the old kinds of Fourths
of Julys when I was a little girl. When us girls had a quarter apiece to
spend, and father'd cover the quarter with his hands on the gate-post
for us to guess them; and when the boys picked up scrap-iron and sold
old rubbers to get their Fourth money. It wan't so much what we used to
do that I wanted back as it was the _feeling_. Why, none of our spines
use' to be laid down good and flat in our backs once all day long. And I
wisht what I'd wisht more than once since the mass-meeting, that some of
us ladies had of took hold of that Fourth and had run it so's 'twould of
been like you mean 'way inside when you say 'The Fourth of July'--and
that death and distance and long-ago-ness is awful in the way of.
"'We'd ought to of had a grand basket dinner in the Depot Woods,' I
says, restless.
"'An' a p'rade,' says Mis' Toplady. 'I donno nothin' that makes me feel
more patriotic than the minute before the p'rade comes by.'
"'An' children in the Fourth somehow,' Mis' Uppers says. 'Land, children
is who it's for, anyhow,' she says, like I'd been thinking; 'an' all
we've ever done for 'em about it is to leave 'em kill 'emselves with
it.'
"Well, it was there, just there, and before Mis' Sykes could dicker a
reply that in come tearing her husband from his long-distance
telephoning, and raced into the room like he hadn't a manner in his kit.
"'We're all over with,' Silas shouts. 'It's all done for! Thaddeus
Hyslop is smashed an' bleedin'. He can't come. We ain't got no speech.
His automobile's turned over on top of his last speakin' place.
Everybody else that ain't one-horse is sure to be got for somewheres
else. Our Fourth of July is rooned. We're done for. The editor's gettin'
it in the _Weekly_ so's to warn the county. We'll be the Laughing Stock.
Dang the luck!' says Silas; 'why don't some o' you say somethin'?'
"But it wasn't all because Silas was doing it all that the men didn't
talk, because when he'd stopped, they all stood there with their mouths
open and never said a word. Seems to me I did hear Timothy Toplady bring
out, 'Blisterin' Benson,' but nobody offered nothing more fertile. That
is, nobody of the men did. But 'most before I got my thoughts together I
heard two feet of a chair come down onto the floor, and Mis' Amanda
Toplady stood up there by Abagail's cook stove, and she took the griddle
lifter and struck light on the side of the pipe.
"'Hurrah!' she says. 'Now we can have a real Fourth. A Fourth that does
as a Fourth is.'
"'What you talkin', Amanda Toplady?' says Silas, crisp; and ''Mandy,
what the blazes do you mean?' says Timothy, her lawful lord. But Mis'
Toplady didn't mind them, nor mind Mis' Sykes, that was staring at her
flat and thick.
"'I mean,' says Mis' Toplady, reckless, 'I been sick to death of the
idea of a Fourth with no spirit to it. I mean I been sick to death of a
Fourth that's all starched white dresses an' company manners an' no
hurrahs anywheres about it. An' us ladies, most all of us, feels the
same. We didn't like to press in, bein' you men done the original
plannin', an' so not one of us has said "P'rade," nor nothin' else to
you. But now that your orator has fell through on himself, you men just
leave us ladies in on this thing to do more'n take orders, an' you
needn't be the Laughin' Stock o' nothin' an' nobody. I guess you'll all
stand by me. What say, ladies?'
"Well, sir, you'd ought to of heard us. We joined in like a patch of
grasshoppers singing. They wasn't one of us that hadn't been dying to
get our hands on that Fourth and make it a Fourth full of unction and
oil of joy, like the Bible said, and must of meant what we meant.
"'Oh, ladies,' I remember I says, fervent, 'I feel like we could make a
Fourth o' July just like stirrin' up a white cake, so be we was let.'
"'What d' you know about managin' a Fourth?' snarls Silas. 'You'll have
us all in the hole. You'll have us shellin' out of our own pockets to
make up--'
"Mis' Toplady whirled on him. 'Would you druther have Red Barns an'
Indian Mound a-jumpin' on you through the weekly press for bein'
bluffers, an' callin' us cheap an' like that, or would you druther not?'
she put it to him.
"'Dang it,' says Silas, 'I never tried to do a thing for this town that
it didn't lay down an' roll all over me. I wish I was dead.'
"'You wan't tryin' to do this thing for this town,' says Mis' Toplady
back at him, like the wind. 'You was tryin' to do it for the _stores_
of this town, an' you know it. You was tryin' to ride the Fourth for a
horse to the waterin' trough o' good business, an' you know it, Silas
Sykes,' says she, 'an' so was Jimmy and Threat an' all of you. The hull
country tries to get behind the Fourth of July an' make money over its
back like a counter. It ain't what was meant, an' us ladies felt it all
along. An' neither was it meant for a garden party day alone, though
_that_,' says Mis' Toplady, gracious, 'is a real sweet side idea. An'
Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Sessions had ought to go on an' run that part of it,
bein' the--tent's here,' she could _not_ bring herself to use that other
word. 'But,' she says, 'that ain't all of a real Fourth, nor yet a
speech ain't, though he did use to be in the legislature. Them things
alone don't make a real flag, liberty-praisin' Fourth, to me nor to none
of us.'
"'Well,' says Silas, sour, 'what you goin' to _do_ if the men decides to
let you try this?'
"'That ain't the way,' says Mis' Toplady, like a flash; 'it ain't for
the men to _let us do_ nothin'. It's for us all to do it together, yoke
to yoke, just like everything else ought to be done by us both, an' no
talk o' "_runnin_'" by either side.'
"'But what's the idee--what's the idee?' says Silas. 'Dang it all,
somebody's got to hev an idee.'
"'Us ladies has got 'em,' says Mis' Toplady, calm. 'An',' says she, 'one
o' the first of 'em is that if we have anything to do with runnin' the
Fourth of our forefathers, then after 10 A.M., all day on that day,
every business house in town has got to shut down.'
"'What?' says Silas, his voice slippin'. 'Gone crazy-headed, hev ye?'
"'No, Silas,' says Mis' Toplady, 'nor yet hev we gone so graspin' that
we can't give up a day's trade to take notice of our country.'
"'Lord Harry,' says Silas, 'you can't get a dealer in town to do it, an'
you know it.'
"'Oh, yes, you can, Silas,' says somebody, brisk. And it was Abagail,
frosting dark cakes over by the side of the room. 'I was goin' to shut
up shop, anyway, all day on the Fourth,' Abagail says.
"'An' lose the country trade in lunches?' yells Silas. 'Why, woman,
you'd be Ten Dollars out o' pocket.'
"'I wan't never one to spend the mornin' thankin' God an' the afternoon
dippin' oysters,' says Abagail. And Silas scrunched. He done that one
year when his Thanksgiving oysters come late, and he knew he done it.
"Well, they went over it and over it and tried to think of some other
way, and tried to hatch up some other speaker without eating up the
whole Fifty Dollars in telephone tolls, and tried most other things. And
then we told them what we'd thought of different times, amongst us as
being features fit for a Fourth in the sight of the Lord and the sight
of men. And they hemmed and they hawed and they give in about as
graceful as a clothes-line winds up when you've left it out in the
sleet, but they did give in and see reason. Timothy last--that's quite
vain of being firm.
"'If we come out with a one-horse doin's, seems like it'd be worse than
sittin' down flat-foot failed,' he mourns, grieving.
"Amanda, his wife, give him one of her looks. 'Timothy,' says she,
'when, since you was married to me, did I ever fail to stodge up a
company dinner or a spare bed or a shroud when it was needed sudden?
When did any of us ladies ever fail that's here? Do you sp'ose we're any
more scant of idees about our own nation?'
"And Timothy had to keep his silence. He knew what she said was the Old
Testament truth. But I think what really swung them all round was the
thought of Red Barns and Indian Mound. Imagination of what them two
weekly papers would say, so be we petered out on our speech and didn't
offer nothing else, was too much for flesh and blood to bear. And the
men ended by agreeing to seeing to shutting every business house in
Friendship Village and they went off to do it,--resolved, but groaning
some, like men will.
"Mis' Sykes, she made some excuse and went, too. 'I'll run the garden
party part,' says she. 'My niece an' I'll do that, an' try our best to
get some novelty into your Fourth. An' we'll preside on the marquee,
like we'd agreed. More I don't say.'
"But the rest of us, we stayed on there at Abagail's, and we planned
like mad.
"We didn't look in no journal nor on no woman's page for something new.
We didn't rush to our City relations for novelties. We didn't try for
this and that nor grasp at no agony whatever. We just went down deep
into the inside of our understanding and thought what the Fourth was and
how them that made it would of wanted it kept. No fingers blowed off nor
clothes scorched up, no houses burned down, no ear-drums busted
out--none of them would of been in _their_ programme, and they wan't in
ours. Some of the things that was in ours we'd got by hearing Insley
tell what they was doin' other places. Some o' the things he suggested
to us. Some o' the things we got by just going back and back down the
years an' _remembering_--not so much what we'd done as the way we use'
to feel, long ago, when the Fourth was the Fourth and acted like it knew
it. Some of the things we got by just reaching forward and forward, and
seeing what the Fourth is going to mean to them a hundred years from
now--so be we do our part. And some of the things we got through sheer
make-shift woman intelligence, that put its heads together and used
everything it had, that had anything to do with the nation, or the town,
or with really living at all the way that first Fourth of July meant
about, 'way down inside.
"Before it was light on the morning of the Fourth, I woke up, feeling
all happy and like I wanted to hurry. I was up and dressed before the
sun was up, and when I opened my front door, I declare it was just like
the glory of the Lord was out there waiting for me. The street was
laying all still and simple, like it was ready and waiting for the
light. Early as it was, Mis' Holcomb was just shaking her breakfast
table-cloth on her side stoop, and she waved it to me, big and billowy
and white, like a banner. And I offs with my apron and waved it back,
and it couldn't of meant no more to either of us if we had been shaking
out the folds of flags. It was too early for the country wagons to be
rattling in yet, and they wan't no other sounds--except a little bit of
a pop now and then over to where Bennie Uppers and little Nick Toplady
was up and out, throwing torpedoes onto the bricks; and then the birds
that was trilling an' shouting like mad, till every tree all up and down
Daphne Street and all up and down the town and the valley was just one
living singing. And all over everything, like a kind of a weave to it,
was that something that makes a Sunday morning and some holiday mornings
better and sweeter and _goldener_ than any other day. I ain't got much
of a garden, not having any real time to fuss in it, but I walked out
into the middle of the little patch of pinks and parsley that I have
got, and I says 'way deep in me, deeper than thinking: 'It don't make no
manner of differ'nce how much of a fizzle the day ends up with, this,
here and now, is the way it had ought to start.'
"Never, not if I live till beyond always, will I forget how us ladies'
hearts was in our mouths when, along about 'leven o'clock, we heard the
Friendship Village Stonehenge band coming fifing along, and we knew the
parade was begun. We was all on the market square--hundreds of us, seems
though. Red Barns and Indian Mound had turned out from side to side of
themselves, mingling the same as though ploughshares was
pruning-hooks--or whatever that quotation time is--both towns looking
for flaws in the day, like enough, but both shutting up about it,
biblical. Even the marquee, with its red and white stripes, showing
through the trees, made me feel good. 'Land, land,' Mis' Toplady says,
'it looks kind of homey and old-fashioned, after all, don't it? I mean
the--tent,' she says--she would _not_ say the other word; but then I
guess it made her kind of mad seeing Mis' Sykes bobbing around in there
in white duck an' white shoes--her that ain't a grandmother sole because
of Nature and not at all through any lack of her own years. Everything
was all seeming light and confident--but I tell you we didn't feel so
confident as we'd meant to when we heard the band a-coming to the tune
o' 'Hail, Columbia! Happy Land.' And yet now, when I look back on that
Independence Day procession, it seems like regular floats is no more
than toy doings beside of it.
"What do you guess us ladies had thought up for our procession,--with
Insley back of us, letting us think we thought it up alone? Mebbe you'll
laugh, because it wan't expensive to do; but oh; I think it was nice.
We'd took everything in the town that done the town's work, and we'd run
them all together. We headed off with the fire-engine, 'count of the
glitter--and we'd loaded it down with flags and flowers, and the hook
and ladder and hose-carts the same, wheels and sides; and flags in the
rubber caps of the firemen up top. Then we had the two big sprinkling
carts, wound with bunting, and five-foot flags flying from the seats.
Then come all the city teams drawn by the city horses--nice, plump
horses they was, and rosettes on them, and each man had decorated his
wagon and was driving it in his best clothes. Then come the steam roller
that Friendship Village and Red Barns and Indian Mound owns together and
scraps over some, though that didn't appear in its appearance, puffing
along, with posies on it. Then there was the city electric light repair
wagon, with a big paper globe for an umbrella, and the electric men
riding with their leggings on and their spurs, like they climb the
poles; and behind them the telephone men was riding--because the town
owns its own telephone, too--and then the four Centrals, in pretty
shirtwaists, in a double-seated buggy loaded with flowers--the telephone
office we'd see to it was closed down, too, to have its Fourth, like a
human being. And marching behind them was the city waterworks men, best
bib and tucker apiece. And then we hed out the galvanized garbage wagon
that us ladies hed bought ourselves a year ago, and that wasn't being
used this year count of the city pleading too poison poor; and it was
all scrubbed up and garnished and filled with ferns and drove by its own
driver and the boy that had use' to go along to empty the cans. And then
of course they was more things--some of them with day fireworks shooting
up from them--but not the hearse, though we had all we could do to keep
Timothy Toplady from having it in, 'count of its common public office.
"Well, and then we'd done an innovation--an' this was all Insley's idea,
and it was him that made us believe we could do it. Coming next, in
carriages and on foot, was the mayor and the city council and every last
man or woman that had anything to do with running the city life. They
was all there--city treasurer, clerk of the court, register of deeds,
sheriffs, marshals, night-watchmen, health officer, postmaster, janitor
of the city hall, clerks, secretaries, stenographers, school board, city
teachers, and every one of the rest--they was all there, just like they
had belonged in the p'rade the way them framers of the first Fourth of
July had meant they should fit in: Conscience and all. But some of them
servants of the town had made money off'n its good roads, and some off'n
its saloons, and some off'n getting ordinances repealed, and some off'n
inspecting buildings and sidewalks that they didn't know nothing about,
and some was making it even then by paving out into the marsh; and some
in yet other ways that wasn't either real elbow work nor clean head
work. What else could they do? We'd ask' them to march because they
represented the town, and rather'n own they _didn't_ represent the town,
there they was marching; but if some of them didn't step down Daphne
Street feeling green and sick and sore and right down schoolboy ashamed
of themselves, then they ain't got the human thrill in them that somehow
I _cannot_ believe ever dies clear out of nobody. They was a lump in my
throat for them that had sold themselves, and they was a lump for them
that hadn't--but oh, the differ'nce in the lumps.
"'Land, land,' I says to Mis' Toplady, 'if we ain't done another thing,
we've made 'em remember they're servants to Friendship Village--like
they often forget.'
"'Ain't we?' she says, solemn. 'Ain't we?'
"And then next behind begun the farm things: the threshin' machines and
reapers and binders and mowers and like that, all drawn by the farm
horses and drove by their owners and decorated by them, jolly and gay;
and, too, all the farm horses for miles around--we was going to give a
donated surprise prize for the best kep' and fed amongst them. And last,
except for the other two bands sprinkled along, come the leading
citizens, and who do you guess _they_ was? Not Silas nor Timothy nor
Eppleby nor even Doctor June, nor our other leading business men and our
three or four professionals--no, not them; but the real, true, leading
citizens of Friendship Village and Indian Mound and Red Barns and other
towns and the farms between--the _children_, over two hundred of them,
dressed in white if they had it and in dark if they didn't, with or
without shoes, in rags or out of them, village-tough descended or with
pew-renting fathers, all the same and together, and carrying a flag and
singing to the tops of their voices 'Hail, Columbia,' that the bands
kept a-playing, some out of plumb as to time, but all fervent and
joyous. It was us women alone that got up that part. My, I like to think
about it.
"They swung the length of Daphne Street and twice around the market
square, and they come to a halt in front of the platform. And Doctor
June stood up before them all, and he prayed like this:--
"'Lord God, that let us start free an' think we was equal, give us to
help one another to be free an' to get equal, in deed an' in truth.'
"And who do you s'pose we hed to read the Declaration of Independence?
Little Spudge Cadoza, that Silas had been a-going to hev walk up and
down Daphne Street with a board on his back--Insley thought of him, and
we picked him out a-purpose. And though he didn't read it so thrilling
as Silas would of, it made me feel the way no reading of it has ever
made me feel before--oh, because it was kind of like we'd snapped up the
little kid and set him free all over again, even though he wasn't it but
one day in the year. And it sort of seemed to me that all inside the
words he read was trumpets and horns telling how much them words was
_going_ to mean to him and his kind before he'd had time to die. And
then the Glee Club struck into 'America,' and the whole crowd joined in
without being expected, and the three bands that was laying over in the
shade hopped up and struck in, too--and I bet they could of heard us to
Indian Mound. Leastways to Red Barns, that we can see from Friendship
Village when it's clear.
"The grand basket dinner in the Depot Woods stays in my head as one
picture, all full of veal loaf and 'scalloped potato and fruit salad and
nut-bread and deviled eggs and bake' beans and pickle' peaches and layer
cake and drop sponge-cake and hot coffee--the kind of a dinner that
comes crowding to your thought whenever you think 'Dinner' at your
hungriest. And after we'd took care of everybody's baskets and set them
under a tree for a lunch towards six, us ladies went back to the market
square. And over by the marquee we see the men gathered--all but Insley,
that had slipped away as quick as we begun telling him how much of it
was due to him. Miss Beryl Sessions had just arrived, in a automobile,
covered with veils, and she was introducing the other men to her City
friends. Us ladies sort of kittered around back of them, not wanting to
press ourselves forward none, and we went up to the door of the marquee
where, behind the refreshment table, Mis' Sykes was a-standing in her
white duck.
"'My,' says Mis' Holcomb to her, 'it's all going off nice so far, ain't
it?'
"'They ain't a great deal the matter with it,' says Mis' Sykes, snappy.
"'Why, Mis' Sykes,' says Mis' Uppers, grieving, 'the parade an' the
basket dinner seemed to me both just perfect.'
"'The parade done well enough,' says Mis' Sykes, not looking at her. 'I
donno much about the dinner.'
"And all of a sudden we recollected that she hadn't been over to the
grand basket dinner at all.
"'Why, Mis' Sykes,' says Mis' Toplady, blank, 'ain't you et nothin'?'
"'My niece,' says Mis' Sykes, dignified, 'didn't get here till now. Who
was I to leave in the _tent_? I've et,' says she, cold, 'two dishes of
ice-cream an' two chocolate nut-cakes.'
"Mis' Toplady just swoops over towards her. 'Why, my land,' she says,
hearty, 'they's stuff an' to spare packed over there under the trees.
You go right on over and get your dinner. Poke right into any of our
baskets--ours is grouped around mine that's tied with a red bandanna to
the handle. And leave us tend the marquee. What say, ladies?'
"And I don't think she even sensed she used that name.
"When she'd gone, I stood a minute in the marquee door looking off
acrost the market square, hearing Miss Beryl Sessions and the men
congratulating each other on the glorious Fourth they was a-having, and
the City folks praising them both sky high.
"'Real nice idee it was,' says Silas, with his hands under his best coat
tails. 'Nice, tastey, up-to-date Fourth. And cheap to do.'
"'Yes, we all hung out for a good Fourth this year,' says Timothy,
complacent.
"'It's a simply lovely idea,' says Miss Beryl Sessions, all sweet and
chirpy and interested, 'this making the Fourth a county party and
getting everybody in town, so. But tell me: Whatever made you close your
shops? I thought the Fourth could always be made to pay for itself over
and over, if the business houses went about it right.'
"'Oh, well,' says Silas, lame but genial, 'we closed up to-day. We kind
o' thought we would.'
"But I stood looking off acrost the market square, where the children
was playing, and quoits was being pitched, and the ball game was going
to commence, and the calathumpians was capering, and most of Red Barns
and Indian Mound and Friendship Village was mingling, lion and lamb; and
I looked on along Daphne Street, where little Spudge Cadoza wasn't
walking with a Prize Coffee board on his back,--and all of a sudden I
felt just the way I'd wanted to feel, in spite of all the distance and
long-ago-ness. And I turned and says to the other women inside the
marquee:--
"'Seems to me,' I says, 'as if the Fourth of July _had_ paid for itself,
over and over. Oh, don't it to you?'