THE Town Hall was crowded and exceedingly hot. As Charity marched into
it third in the white muslin file headed by Orma Fry, she was conscious
mainly of the brilliant effect of the wreathed columns framing the
green-carpeted stage toward which she was moving; and of the unfamiliar
faces turning from the front rows to watch the advance of the
procession.
But it was all a bewildering blur of eyes and colours till she found
herself standing at the back of the stage, her great bunch of asters and
goldenrod held well in front of her, and answering the nervous glance
of Lambert Sollas, the organist from Mr. Miles's church, who had come up
from Nettleton to play the harmonium and sat behind it, his conductor's
eye running over the fluttered girls.
A moment later Mr. Miles, pink and twinkling, emerged from the
background, as if buoyed up on his broad white gown, and briskly
dominated the bowed heads in the front rows. He prayed energetically and
briefly and then retired, and a fierce nod from Lambert Sollas warned
the girls that they were to follow at once with “Home, Sweet Home.” It
was a joy to Charity to sing: it seemed as though, for the first time,
her secret rapture might burst from her and flash its defiance at the
world. All the glow in her blood, the breath of the summer earth,
the rustle of the forest, the fresh call of birds at sunrise, and the
brooding midday languors, seemed to pass into her untrained voice,
lifted and led by the sustaining chorus.
And then suddenly the song was over, and after an uncertain pause,
during which Miss Hatchard's pearl-grey gloves started a furtive
signalling down the hall, Mr. Royall, emerging in turn, ascended the
steps of the stage and appeared behind the flower-wreathed desk. He
passed close to Charity, and she noticed that his gravely set face wore
the look of majesty that used to awe and fascinate her childhood. His
frock-coat had been carefully brushed and ironed, and the ends of his
narrow black tie were so nearly even that the tying must have cost him
a protracted struggle. His appearance struck her all the more because it
was the first time she had looked him full in the face since the night
at Nettleton, and nothing in his grave and impressive demeanour revealed
a trace of the lamentable figure on the wharf.
He stood a moment behind the desk, resting his finger-tips against it,
and bending slightly toward his audience; then he straightened himself
and began.
At first she paid no heed to what he was saying: only fragments of
sentences, sonorous quotations, allusions to illustrious men,
including the obligatory tribute to Honorius Hatchard, drifted past her
inattentive ears. She was trying to discover Harney among the notable
people in the front row; but he was nowhere near Miss Hatchard, who,
crowned by a pearl-grey hat that matched her gloves, sat just below the
desk, supported by Mrs. Miles and an important-looking unknown lady.
Charity was near one end of the stage, and from where she sat the other
end of the first row of seats was cut off by the screen of foliage
masking the harmonium. The effort to see Harney around the corner of the
screen, or through its interstices, made her unconscious of everything
else; but the effort was unsuccessful, and gradually she found her
attention arrested by her guardian's discourse.
She had never heard him speak in public before, but she was familiar
with the rolling music of his voice when he read aloud, or held forth
to the selectmen about the stove at Carrick Fry's. Today his inflections
were richer and graver than she had ever known them: he spoke slowly,
with pauses that seemed to invite his hearers to silent participation in
his thought; and Charity perceived a light of response in their faces.
He was nearing the end of his address... “Most of you,” he said, “most of
you who have returned here today, to take contact with this little place
for a brief hour, have come only on a pious pilgrimage, and will go back
presently to busy cities and lives full of larger duties. But that is
not the only way of coming back to North Dormer. Some of us, who went
out from here in our youth... went out, like you, to busy cities and
larger duties... have come back in another way--come back for good. I am
one of those, as many of you know....” He paused, and there was a sense
of suspense in the listening hall. “My history is without interest, but
it has its lesson: not so much for those of you who have already
made your lives in other places, as for the young men who are perhaps
planning even now to leave these quiet hills and go down into the
struggle. Things they cannot foresee may send some of those young men
back some day to the little township and the old homestead: they may
come back for good....” He looked about him, and repeated gravely: “For
GOOD. There's the point I want to make... North Dormer is a poor little
place, almost lost in a mighty landscape: perhaps, by this time, it
might have been a bigger place, and more in scale with the landscape,
if those who had to come back had come with that feeling in their
minds--that they wanted to come back for GOOD... and not for bad... or
just for indifference....
“Gentlemen, let us look at things as they are. Some of us have come back
to our native town because we'd failed to get on elsewhere. One way or
other, things had gone wrong with us... what we'd dreamed of hadn't come
true. But the fact that we had failed elsewhere is no reason why we
should fail here. Our very experiments in larger places, even if they
were unsuccessful, ought to have helped us to make North Dormer a larger
place... and you young men who are preparing even now to follow the call
of ambition, and turn your back on the old homes--well, let me say this
to you, that if ever you do come back to them it's worth while to come
back to them for their good.... And to do that, you must keep on loving
them while you're away from them; and even if you come back against your
will--and thinking it's all a bitter mistake of Fate or Providence--you
must try to make the best of it, and to make the best of your old town;
and after a while--well, ladies and gentlemen, I give you my recipe for
what it's worth; after a while, I believe you'll be able to say, as I
can say today: 'I'm glad I'm here.' Believe me, all of you, the best way
to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.”
He stopped, and a murmur of emotion and surprise ran through the
audience. It was not in the least what they had expected, but it moved
them more than what they had expected would have moved them. “Hear,
hear!” a voice cried out in the middle of the hall. An outburst of
cheers caught up the cry, and as they subsided Charity heard Mr. Miles
saying to someone near him: “That was a MAN talking----” He wiped his
spectacles.
Mr. Royall had stepped back from the desk, and taken his seat in the row
of chairs in front of the harmonium. A dapper white-haired gentleman--a
distant Hatchard--succeeded him behind the goldenrod, and began to
say beautiful things about the old oaken bucket, patient white-haired
mothers, and where the boys used to go nutting... and Charity began again
to search for Harney....
Suddenly Mr. Royall pushed back his seat, and one of the maple branches
in front of the harmonium collapsed with a crash. It uncovered the end
of the first row and in one of the seats Charity saw Harney, and in the
next a lady whose face was turned toward him, and almost hidden by the
brim of her drooping hat. Charity did not need to see the face. She knew
at a glance the slim figure, the fair hair heaped up under the hat-brim,
the long pale wrinkled gloves with bracelets slipping over them. At the
fall of the branch Miss Balch turned her head toward the stage, and in
her pretty thin-lipped smile there lingered the reflection of something
her neighbour had been whispering to her....
Someone came forward to replace the fallen branch, and Miss Balch and
Harney were once more hidden. But to Charity the vision of their two
faces had blotted out everything. In a flash they had shown her the
bare reality of her situation. Behind the frail screen of her lover's
caresses was the whole inscrutable mystery of his life: his relations
with other people--with other women--his opinions, his prejudices, his
principles, the net of influences and interests and ambitions in which
every man's life is entangled. Of all these she knew nothing, except
what he had told her of his architectural aspirations. She had always
dimly guessed him to be in touch with important people, involved in
complicated relations--but she felt it all to be so far beyond her
understanding that the whole subject hung like a luminous mist on the
farthest verge of her thoughts. In the foreground, hiding all else,
there was the glow of his presence, the light and shadow of his face,
the way his short-sighted eyes, at her approach, widened and deepened
as if to draw her down into them; and, above all, the flush of youth and
tenderness in which his words enclosed her.
Now she saw him detached from her, drawn back into the unknown, and
whispering to another girl things that provoked the same smile of
mischievous complicity he had so often called to her own lips. The
feeling possessing her was not one of jealousy: she was too sure of
his love. It was rather a terror of the unknown, of all the mysterious
attractions that must even now be dragging him away from her, and of her
own powerlessness to contend with them.
She had given him all she had--but what was it compared to the other
gifts life held for him? She understood now the case of girls like
herself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, but
their all was not enough: it could not buy more than a few moments....
The heat had grown suffocating--she felt it descend on her in smothering
waves, and the faces in the crowded hall began to dance like the
pictures flashed on the screen at Nettleton. For an instant Mr. Royall's
countenance detached itself from the general blur. He had resumed his
place in front of the harmonium, and sat close to her, his eyes on her
face; and his look seemed to pierce to the very centre of her confused
sensations.... A feeling of physical sickness rushed over her--and then
deadly apprehension. The light of the fiery hours in the little house
swept back on her in a glare of fear....
She forced herself to look away from her guardian, and became aware that
the oratory of the Hatchard cousin had ceased, and that Mr. Miles was
again flapping his wings. Fragments of his peroration floated through
her bewildered brain.... “A rich harvest of hallowed memories.... A
sanctified hour to which, in moments of trial, your thoughts will
prayerfully return.... And now, O Lord, let us humbly and fervently give
thanks for this blessed day of reunion, here in the old home to which we
have come back from so far. Preserve it to us, O Lord, in times to come,
in all its homely sweetness--in the kindliness and wisdom of its old
people, in the courage and industry of its young men, in the piety and
purity of this group of innocent girls----” He flapped a white wing in
their direction, and at the same moment Lambert Sollas, with his fierce
nod, struck the opening bars of “Auld Lang Syne.” ...Charity stared
straight ahead of her and then, dropping her flowers, fell face downward
at Mr. Royall's feet.