"I had promised Insley to run in the Cadozas' after the meeting, and see
the little boy; and Mis' Emmons having to go home before she started
back to the Proudfits', Christopher walked along with me. When we got
out to the end of Daphne Street, Insley overtook us on his way out to
the Cadozas', too.
"His shoes were some muddy, and I guessed that he had been where of late
he'd spent as much time as he could spare, both when he was in the
village and when he was over to Indian Mound. Without digging down into
his eyes, the same as some do to folks that's in trouble, I had sensed
that there had come down on him everybody's hour of cutting something
out of life, which is as elemental a thing to do as dying is, and I
donno but it's the same kind as dying is besides. And he had been taking
his hour in the elemental way, wanting to be alone and to kind of get
near to the earth. I mean tramping the hills, ploughing along the narrow
paths close to the barb' wire fences, plunging into the little groves.
The little groves have such an' I-know look of understanding all about
any difficulty till you walk inside of them, when all to once they stop
seeming to know about your special trouble and begin another kind of
slow soothing, same as summing things up will soothe you, now and then.
"Chris chattered to him, lovable.
"'I had some peppermenges,' he says, 'and I like hot ice-cream, too.
Don't you? Can you make that?' he inquires, slipping his hand in
Insley's.
"Of course this made a pang--when you're hurt, 'most everything makes a
pang. And this must of brought back that one evening with Robin that he
would have to remember, and all the little stupid jokes they'd had that
night must of rose up and hit at him, with the awful power of the little
things that don't matter one bit and yet that matter everything.
"'What can _you_ make, Chris?' Insley says to him. 'Can you make candy?
And pull it--like this?'
"'Once a lady stirred me some an' cut it up in squares,' Chris
explained, 'but I never did make any. My mama couldn't make candy, I
guess, but she could make all other things--pancakes an' mittens an'
nice stove fires my mama could make. The bag we got the salt in--she
made me two handkerchiefs out of that bag,' he ended proudly.
"'Did she--did she?' Insley tempted him on.
"'Yes,' Chris went on, hopping beside him, 'but now I've got to hurry
an' be a man, 'cause litty boys ain't very good things. Can you make
po'try?' he wound up.
"'Why, Chris--can you?' Insley asked.
"'Well, when I was comin' along with my daddy that night I made one,'
the child says. And when Insley questions him a little he got this much
more out of him. 'It started, "Look at the trees so green an' fair,"' he
says, 'but I forget the rest.'
"'Do you want to be a poet when you grow up?' Insley ask' him.
"'Yes, I do,' the child says ready. 'I think I'll be that first an' then
I'll be the President, too. But what I'd rather be is the sprinkler-cart
man, wouldn't you?'
"'Conceivably,' Insley says, and by the look on his face I bet his hand
tightened up on the child's hand.
"'At Sodality,' I says, 'he just told them he was going to drive loads
of hay. He's made several selections.'
"He looked at me over the child's head, and I guess we was both
thinking the same thing: Trust nature to work this out alone?
'Conceivably,' again. But all of a sudden I know we both burned to help
to do it. And as Insley talked to the child, I think some touch of his
enterprise come back and breathed on him. In them few last days I
shouldn't wonder if his work hadn't stopped soaring to the meaning of
spirit and sunk down again to be just body drudgery. He couldn't ever
help having his old possessing love of men, and his man's strong
resolution to keep a-going, but I shouldn't wonder if the wings of the
thing he meant to do had got folded up. And Christopher, here, was sort
of releasing them out again.
"'How's the little Cadoza boy?' I ask' him pretty soon.
"'He's getting on,' he says. 'Dr. Barrows was down yesterday--he wants
him for a fortnight or so at the hospital in town, where he can have
good care and food. His mother doesn't want him to go. I hoped you'd
talk with her.'
"Before we got to the Cadoza house Insley looked over to me, enigmatish.
'Want to see something?' he says, and he handed me a letter. I read it,
and some of it I knew what it meant and some of it I didn't. It was
from Alex Proudfit, asking him up to Proudfit House to the house party.
" ... Ain't it astonishing how awful festive the word 'house party'
sounds. 'Party' sounds festive, though not much more so than 'company'
or 'gathering' that we use more common. 'Ball,' of course, is real
glittering, and paints the inside of your head into pictures,
instantaneous. But a house party--maybe it's because I never was to one;
maybe it's because I never heard of one till late in life; maybe it's
because nobody ever had one before in Friendship Village--but that word
give me all the sensation that 'her golden coach' and 'his silver
armour' and 'good fairy' used to have for me when I was a little girl.
'House party!' Anything shiny might happen to one of them. It's like
you'd took something vanishin', like a party, and just seized onto it
and made it stay longer than Time and the World ever intended. It's like
making a business of the short-lived.
"Well, some of Alex's letter went about like this:--
"'Join us for the whole time, do,' it says, and it went on about there
being rather an interesting group,--'a jolly individualist,' I recollect
he says, 'for your special benefit. He'll convert you where I couldn't,
because he's kept his love for men and I haven't. And of course I've
some women--pretty, bless them, and thank the Lord not one of them
troubling whether she loves mankind or not, so long as men love her. And
there you have Nature uncovered at her task! I shall expect you for
every moment that you can spare....' I remember the wording because it
struck me it was all so like Alex that I could pretty near talk to it
and have it answer back.
"'Tell me,' Insley says, when I handed the letter back to him, 'you
know--him. Alex Proudfit. Does he put all that on? Is it his mask? Does
he feel differently and do differently when folks don't know?'
"'Well,' I says, slow, 'I donno. He gives the Cadozas their rent, but
when Mis' Cadoza went to thank him, once, he sent down word for her to
go and see his agent.'
"He nodded, and I'd never heard him speak bitter before. 'That's it,' he
says, 'that's it. That's the way we bungle things....'
"We'd got almost to the Cadozas' when we heard an automobile coming
behind us, and as we stood aside to let it go by, Robin's face flashed
past us at the window. Mis' Emmons was with her, that Robin had come
down after. Right off the car stopped and Robin jumped out and come
hurrying back towards us. I'll never forget the minute. We met right in
front of the old tumble-down Cadoza house with the lilacs so high in the
front yard that the place looked pretty near nice, like the rest of the
world. It was a splendid afternoon, one that had got it's gold persuaded
to burst through a gray morning, like colour from a bunch of silver
buds; and now the air was all full of lovely things, light and little
wind and late sun and I donno but things we didn't know about. And
everyone of them seemed in Robin's face as she came towards us, and
more, too, that we couldn't name or place.
"I think the mere exquisite girlishness of her come home to Insley as
even her strength and her womanliness, that night he talked with her,
had not moved him. I donno but in the big field of his man's dream, he
had pretty near forgot how obvious her charm was. I'm pretty sure that
in those days when he was tramping the hills alone, the thing that he
was fighting with was that he was going to lose her companioning in the
life they both dreamed. But now her hurrying so and her little faint
agitation made her appeal a new thing, fifty times as lovely, fifty
times as feminine, and sort of filling in the picture of herself with
all the different kinds of women she was in one.
"So now, as he stood there with her, looking down in her face, touching
her friendly hand, I think that was the first real, overhauling minute
when he was just swept by the understanding that his loss was so many
times what he'd thought it was going to be. For it was her that he
wanted, it was her that he would miss for herself and not for any dear
plans of work-fellowship alone. She understood his dream, but there was
other things she understood about, too. A man can love a woman for a
whole collection of little dear things--and he can lose her and grieve;
he can love her for her big way of looking at things, and he can lose
her and grieve; he can love her because she is his work-fellow, and he
can lose her and grieve. But if, on top of one of these, he loves her
because she is she, the woman that knows about life and is capable of
sharing all of life with him and of being tender about it, why then if
he loses her, his grieving is going to be something that there ain't
rightly no name for. And I think it was that minute there in the road
that it first come to Insley that Robin was Robin, that of all the many
women that she was, first and most she was the woman that was capable
of sharing with him all sides of living.
"'I wanted ...' she says to him, uncertain. 'Oh, I wish very much that
you would accept the invitation to some of the house party. I wanted to
tell you.'
"'I can't do that,' he answers, short and almost gruff. 'Really I can't
do that.'
"But it seemed there was even a sort of nice childishness about her that
you wouldn't have guessed. I always think it's a wonderful moment when a
woman knows a man well enough to show some of her childishness to him.
But a woman that shows right off, close on the heels of an introduction,
how childish she can be, it always sort o' makes me mad--like she'd told
her first name without being asked about it.
"'Please,' Robin says, 'I'm asking it because I wish it very much. I
want those people up there to know you. I want--'
"He shook his head, looking at her, eyes, mouth, and fresh cheeks, like
he wished he was able to look at her face _all at once_.
"'At least, at least,' she says to him rapid, then, 'you must come to
the party at the end. You know I want to keep you for my friend--I want
to make you our friend. That night Aunt Eleanor is going to announce my
engagement, and I want my friends to be there.'
"That surprised me as much as it did him. Nobody in the village knew
about the engagement yet except us two that knew it from that night at
Mis' Emmons's. I wondered what on earth Insley was going to say and I
remember how I hoped, pretty near fierce, that he wasn't going to smile
and bow and wish her happiness and do the thing the world would have
wanted of him. It may make things run smoother to do that way, but
smoothness isn't the only thing the love of folks for folks knows about.
I do like a man that now and then speaks out with the breath in his
lungs and not just with the breath of his nostrils. And that's what
Insley done--that's what he done, only I'm bound to say that I do think
he spoke out before he knew he was going to.
"'That would be precisely why I couldn't come,' he said. 'Thank you, you
know--but please don't ask me.'
"As for Robin, at this her eyes widened, and beautiful colour swept her
face. And she didn't at once turn away from him, but I see how she stood
looking at him with a kind of a sharp intentness, less of wonder than of
stopping short.
"Christopher had run to the automobile and now he come a-hopping back.
"'Robin!' he called. 'Aunt Eleanor says you haf to be in a dress by
dinner, and it's _now_.'
"'Do come for dinner, Mr. Insley,' Mis' Emmons calls, as Robin and
Christopher went to join him. 'We've got up a tableau or two for
afterward. Come and help me be a tableau.'
"He smiled and shook his head and answered her. And that reminded me
that I'd got to hurry like wild, as usual. It was most six o'clock
then,--it always _is_ either most six o'clock or most noon when I get
nearest to being interested,--and that night great things was going to
be going on. Mis' Sykes and Mis' Toplady and the School Board and I was
going to have a tableau of our own.
"But for all that I couldn't help standing still a minute and looking
after the automobile. It seemed as bad as some kind of a planet,
carrying Robin off for forever and ever. And I wasn't so clear that I
fancied its orbit.
"'I've got a whole string of minds not to go to that party myself,' I
says, meditative.
"But Insley never answered. He just come on around the Cadozas' house.