MOTHER.

P. S. If he puts out his hand he means you should kiss his hand

then he won't cry. Don't forget, then he won't cry.

P. S. When he can't get to sleep he can get to sleep if you rub the

back of his neck."

I remember how the Brother-man looked at me when we'd got it spelled

out.

"Oh," he said--and then he said a name that sounded like somebody

calling to its Father from inside the dark.

I hate to think of what I said. I said it kind of mechanical and wooden,

the way we get to be from shifting the burdens off our own backs where

they belong, onto somebody else's back--and doing it second-nature, and

as if we were constructed slanting so that burdens could slip off. What

I said was:

"I suppose we'd better tell the conductor."

"Tell the conductor!" said he, wondering. "What on earth for?"

"I dunno," says I, some taken back. I suppose I'd had some far notion of

telling him because he wore a uniform.

"What do we want to tell him for?" this Brother-man repeated. "_We_

know."

Oh, but that's come back to me, time and time again, when I've thought

I needed help in taking care of somebody, or settling something, or

doing the best way for folks. "What do we want to tell the conductor or

anybody else for? _We_ know." And ten to one we are the one who can do

the thing ourselves.

"But what are we going to do?" I said. I think that his eyes were the

kind of eyes that just make you say "What are _we_ going to do?" and not

"What are _you_ going to do?" or "What are _they_ going to do?"--same as

most folks start to say, same as I had started.

For the first time the Brother-man looked helpless--but he spoke real

firm.

"Keep him," he says, simple.

"Keep him!" I said over--since I had lived quite a while in a world

where those words are not common.

He looked down thoughtful at the little chap who was lying there,

contented, going here and there with his fists, and looking up at the

lights as if he was reflecting over the matter some himself.

"The conductor," said the Brother-man, "would telegraph, and most likely

find the mother. If he was efficient enough, he might even get her

arrested. And what earthly good would that do to the child? Our concern

is with this little old man here, with his life hanging on his shoulders

waiting to be lived. Isn't it?" he asked, simple. And in a minute, he

added: "I always hoped that this would never happen to me--because when

it does happen, there's only one thing to do: Keep them." And he added

in another minute: "I don't know--I ought to look at it that I've been

saved the trouble of going out and finding a way to help--" only you

understand, his words came all glossy and real different from mine.

I tell you, anybody like that makes all the soul in you get up and

recognize itself as _being_ you; and your body and what it wants and

what it is afraid of is no more able to run you then than a pinch of

dirt would be, sprinkled on your wings. Before I knew it, my body was

keeping quiet, like a child that's been brought up well. And my soul was

saying whatever it pleased.

"I'm a woman," I said, "and alone in the world. I'm the one to take

him."

"I'm alone in the world too," he said, "and I'm a man. So I'm just as

able to care for him as you are. I'll keep him."

Then he looked down the car, kind of startled, and began smiling, slow

and nice.

"On my word," he said, "I'd forgotten that besides being a man I'm about

to be a guest. And this little old chap wasn't included in the

invitation."

I looked out the window to see where we were getting, and there we were

drawing over the Flats outside Friendship Village, and the brakeman

came to the door and shouted the name. When I hear the name that way,

and when I see the Fair ground and the Catholic church steeple and the

canal bridge and the old fort and the gas house, it's always as sweet as

something new, and as something old, and it's something sweeter than

either. It makes me feel happy and good and like two folks instead of

one.

"Look here," I said, brisk, "this is where I get off. This is home. And

I'm going to take this baby with me. You go on to your visiting

place--so be you'll help me off," I says, "with my baby and my bundles

that's for half of Friendship Village."

"Friendship Village!" he said over, as if he hadn't heard the man call.

"Is this Friendship Village? Why, then this," he said, "is where I'm

going too. This is where the Proudfits live, isn't it?" he said--and he

said some more, meditative, about towns acting so important over having

one name and not another, when nobody can remember either name. But I

hardly heard him. He was going to the Proudfits'. And without knowing

how I knew it, I knew all over me, all of a sudden, who he was: That he

was the Novel-and-Poem man himself.

"You _can't_ be him!" I said aloud. I don't know what I was looking

for--a man with wings or what. But it wasn't for somebody like this--all

simple and still and every day--like stars coming out. "You can't be

him," says I, mentioning his name. "He was to get here this afternoon on

the Through."

"That alone would prove I'm I," he said, merry. "I always miss the

Throughs."

Think of that.... There I'd been riding all that way beside him, talking

to him as familiar as if he had been just folks.

It seems a dream when I think of it now. The Proudfits' automobile was

there for him too--because he had telegraphed that he would take the

next train--as well as for me and the chocolate peppermints and the red

candles. And so, before I could think about me being me sure enough,

there I was in the Proudfits' car, glassed in and lit up, and a

stranger-baby in my arms; and beside me the Novel-and-Poem man that was

the Brother-man too,--the man that had made me talk through walls with

everything there is. Oh, and how I wanted to tell him! And when I tried

to tell him what he had meant to me, how do you guess it came out of my

brain?

"I've read your book," says I, like a goose.

But he seemed real sort of pleased. "I've been honored," he said,

gentle.

I looked up at him; and I knew how he knew already that I didn't know

all the hard parts in the book, and all the big words, and some of the

little nice things he had tried to work out to suit him. And it seemed

as if any praise of mine would only make him hurt with not being

appreciated. Still, I wanted my best to say something out of the

gratitude in me.

"It--helped," I said; and couldn't say more to save me.

But he turned and looked down at me almost as he had looked at the

little chap.

"That is the only compliment I ever try to get," he said to me, as grave

as grave.

And at that I saw plain what it was that had made him seem so much like

a friend, and what had made me think to call him the Brother-man. Why,

he was folks, like me. He wasn't only somebody big and distinguished and

name-in-the-paper. He was like those that you meet all the time, going

round the streets, talking to you casual, coming out of their houses

quiet as stars coming out. He was folks and a brother to folks; and he

knew it, and he seemed to want to keep letting folks know that he knew

it. He wasn't the kind that goes around thinking "Me, me, me," nor even

"You and me." It was "_You and me and all of us_" with the Brother-man.

"Isn't it strange," he says once, while we rode along, "that what all

these streets and lights and houses are for, and what the whole world is

for is helped along by taking just one little chap and bringing him

up--bringing him up?" And he looked down at the baby, that was drowsing

off in my arms, as if little chaps in general were to him windows into

somewhere else.

The Proudfit house was lamps from top to bottom, but I could see from

the glass vestibule that the big rooms were all empty, and I thought

mebbe they hadn't had dinner yet, being they have it all unholy hours

when most folks's is digested and ready to let them sleep. But when we

stepped in the hall I heard a little tip-tap of strings from up above,

and it was from the music-room that opens off the first stair-landing,

and dinner was over and they were all up there; and the Piano Lady and

the Violin Man were gettin' ready to play. Madame Proudfit had heard the

car, and came down the stairs, saying a little pleased word when she saw

the Brother-man. She looked lovely in black lace, and jewels I didn't

know the name of, and she was gracious and glad and made him one of the

welcomes that stay alive afterwards and are almost _people_ to you to

think about. The Brother-man kissed her hand, and he says to her, some

rueful and some wanting to laugh:

"I'm most awfully sorry about the train, Madame Proudfit. But--I've

brought two of us to make up for being so late. Will--will that not do?"

he says.

Madame Proudfit looked over at me with a smile that was like people

too--only her smile was like nice company and his was like dear

friends; and then she saw the baby.

"Calliope!" she said, "what on earth have you been doing now?"

"She hasn't done it. I did it," says the Brother-man. "Look at him! You

rub the back of his neck when he won't sleep."

Madame Proudfit looked from him to me.

"How utterly, extravagantly like both of you!" Madame Proudfit said.

"Come in the library and tell me about it."

We went in the big, brown library, where nothing looked as if it would

understand about this, except, mebbe, some of the books--and not all of

them--and the fire, that was living on the hearth, understanding all

about everything. I sat by the fire and pulled back the little chap's

blanket and undid his coat and took his bonnet off; his hair was all

mussed up at the back and the cheek he'd slept on was warm-red. Madame

Proudfit and the Brother-man stood on the hearth-rug, looking down. Only

she was looking from one star to another, and the Brother-man and I, we

were on the same star, looking round.

We told her what had happened, some of his telling and some of mine. It

came over me, while we were doing it, that what had sounded so sensible

and sure in the train and in the automobile and in our two hearts

sounded different here in the Proudfits' big, brown library, with

Madame Proudfit in black lace and jewels I didn't know the name of,

listening. But then I looked up in the Brother-man's face and I got

_right back_, like he was a kind of perpetual telegraph, the feeling of

its being sensible and the _only_ sensible thing to do. Sensible in the

sense of your soul being sensible, and not just your being sensible like

your neighbors.

"But, my dear, dear children," Madame Proudfit says, and stopped. "My

_dear_ children," she says on, "what, exactly, are you going to do with

him?"

"Keep him!" says the Brother-man prompt, and beamed on her as if he had

said the one possible answer.

"But--keep him!" says Madame Proudfit. "How 'keep him'? Be practical.

What are you going to do?"

It makes you feel real helpless when folks in black lace tell you to be

practical, as if that came before everything else--especially when their

"practical" and your "practical" might as well be in two different

languages. And yet Madame Proudfit is kind and good too, and she

understands that you've got to help or you might as well not be alive;

and she gives and gives and gives. But _this_--well, she saw the need

and all that, but her way that night would have been to give money and

send the little chap away. You know how some are. They can understand

everything good and kind--up to a certain point. And that point is,

_keep him_. They can't seem to get past that.

"_Keep him!_" she says. "Make your bachelor apartment into a nursery? Or

you, Calliope, leave him to mind the house while you are canvassing? Be

practical. What, _exactly_, are you going to do?"

Then the Brother-man frowned a little--I hadn't known he could, but I

was glad he knew how.

"Really," he said, "I haven't decided yet on the cut of his

knickerbockers, or on what college he shall attend, or whether he shall

spend his vacations at home or abroad. The details will get themselves

done. I only know I mean to _keep him_."

She shook her head as if she was talking to a foreign language; then we

heard somebody coming--a little rustle and swish and afterwards a voice.

These three things by themselves would have made somebody more

attractive than some women know how to be. I'll never forget how she

seemed when she came to the door--Miss Clementina, waiting to speak with

her mother and not knowing anybody else was with her.

Honest, I couldn't tell what her dress was--and me a woman that has

turned her hand to dressmaking. It was all thin, like light, and it had

all little ways of hanging that made you know you never could make one

like it, so's you might as well enjoy yourself looking and not fuss

with trying to remember how it was put together. But her dress wasn't so

much like light as her face. Miss Clementina's face--oh, it was like the

face of a beautiful woman that somebody tells you about, and that you

never do get to see, and if you did, like enough she might not be so

beautiful after all--but you always think of her as being the way you

mean when you say "beautiful." Miss Clementina looked like that. And

when I saw her that night I could hardly wait to have her face and eyes

soften all to Summer, that wonderful way she had.

"Oh, Miss Clementina," I says, "I've got a baby. At least, he's only

half mine. I mean--"

Then, while she was coming toward us along the lamp-light, as if it was

made to bring her, the little chap began waking up. He stirred, and

budded up his lips, and said little baby-things in his throat, and begun

to cry, soft and lonesome, as if he didn't understand. Oh, isn't it

true? A baby's waking-up minute, when it cries a little and don't know

where it is, ain't that like us, sometimes crying out sort of blind to

be took care of? And when the little thing opened his eyes, first thing

he saw was Miss Clementina, standing beside him. And what did that

little chap do instead of stopping crying but just hold out one hand

toward her, and kind of bend across, same as if he meant something.

With that the Brother-man, that Madame Proudfit hadn't had a chance yet

to present to Miss Clementina, he says to her all excited:

"He wants you to kiss his hand! Kiss his hand and he'll stop crying!"

Miss Clementina looked up at him like a little question, then she

stooped and kissed the baby's hand, and we three watched him perfectly

breathless to see what he would do. And he done exactly what that

up-hill note had said he would--he stopped crying, and he done more than

it said he would--he smiled sweet and bright, and as if he knew

something else about it. And we three looked at each other and at him,

and we smiled, too. And it made a nice minute.

"Clementina," said Madame Proudfit, like another minute that wasn't so

very well acquainted with the one that was being, and then she presented

the Brother-man. But instead of a regular society,

say-what-you-ought-to-say answer to her greeting, the Brother-man says

to her:

"Miss Proudfit, you shall arbitrate! Somebody left him to this lady and

me--or to anybody like, or unlike us--on the train. Shall we find his

own mother that has run away from him? Or shall we send him to an

institution? Or shall we keep him? Which way," he says, smiling, "is the

way that _is_ the way?"

She looked up at him as if she knew, clear inside his words, what he was

talking about.

"Are you," she ask' him, half merry, but all in earnest too, "are you

going to decide with your heart or your head?"

"Why, with my soul, I hope," says the Brother-man, simple.

Miss Clementina nodded a little, and I saw her face all Summer-soft as

she answered him.

"Then," she said, "almost nobody will tell you so, but--there's only one

way."

"I know it," says he, gentle.

"I know it," says I, solemn.

We three stood looking at each other from close on the same star,

knowing all over us that if you decide a thing with your head you'll

probably shift a burden off; if you decide with your heart you'll

probably give, give, give, like Madame Proudfit does, to pay somebody

else liberal to take the burden; but if you decide it with your soul,

you give your own self to whatever is going on. And you know that's the

way that _is_ the way.

All of a sudden, as if words that were not being said had got loose and

were saying themselves anyway, the music--that had been tip-tapping

along all the while since we came--started in, sudden and beautiful,

with the Piano Lady and the Violin Man playing up there in the landing

room. I don't know whether it was a lullaby--though I shouldn't be

surprised if it was, because I think sometimes in this world things

happen just like they were being stage-managed by somebody that knows.

But anyway--oh, it had a lullaby sound, a kind-of rocking, tender,

just-you-and-me meaning; that ain't so very far from the

you-and-me-and-all-of-us meaning when they're both said right and deep

down.

I looked up at Miss Clementina and the Brother-man--as you do look up

when some nice little thing has happened that you think whoever you're

with will understand. But they didn't look back at me. They looked over

to each other. They looked over to each other, swift at the first, but

lasting long, and with the faces of both of them softening to Summer.

And the music went heavenly-ing on, into the room, and into living, and

into everything, and it was as if the whole minute was turned into its

own spirit and then was said out in a sound.

Miss Clementina and the Brother-man looked away and down at the little

chap that Miss Clementina was holding his hand. It was as if there was a

pulse in the room--the Great Pulse that we all beat to, and that now and

then we hear. But those two didn't see me at all; and all of a sudden I

understood, how there was still another star that I didn't know anything

about, and that they two were standing there together, they two and the

little chap--but not me. Oh, it was wonderful--starting the way great

things start, still and quiet like stars coming out. So still that they

didn't either of them know it. And I felt as if everything was some

better and some holier than I had ever known.

Then Madame Proudfit, she leans out from her star, gracious and benign,

and certain sure that her star was the only one that had eternal truth

inside it; and she spoke with a manner of waving her hand good natured

to all the other little stars, including ours:

"You mad, mad, children!" she said. "You _are_ mad. But you are very

picturesque in your decisions, there's no denying that. He would

probably be better cared for, more scientifically fed, and all that, in

a good, hired, private family. But that's as you see it. Be mad, if you

like--I'm here to watch over you!"

She had quite a nice tidy high point of view about it--but oh, it wasn't

ours. It wasn't ours. We three--the Brother-man and Miss Clementina and

me--we sort of hugged our own way. And the little chap he kept smiling,

like he sort of hugged it too.

So that was the way it was. Miss Clementina and the Brother-man--that

she'd been afraid to meet, 'count of thinking mebbe he didn't mean his

writings for living--were in love from before they knew it. And I think

it was part because they both meant life strong enough for living and

not just for thinking, like the lukewarm folks do.

I kept the little chap with me the three months or so that went by

before the wedding--and I could hardly bear to let him go then.

"Why don't you keep him for them the first year or so?" Friendship

Village ask' me. But there's some things even your own town doesn't

always understand. "It's so unromantic for them to take him now," some

of them even said.

But I says to them what I say now: "There's things that's bigger than

romantic and there's things that's bigger than practical, so be some of

both is mixed in right proportion. And the biggest thing I know in this

world is when folks say over, 'You and me and all of us,' like voices,

speaking to everybody's Father from inside the dark."