I told you about--where I got picked up."
The little bride nodded, her eyes softening almost maternally. It was as
if that story were her own, the story of Allen, the little stray child
picked up on the streets of the City by that good woman whom Chris had
never seen. But the name of Sarah Ernestine was like a charm to Chris,
for the woman had been to Allen father and mother both.
Chris bent down swiftly to his hands, closed over her own, and kissed
them.
"Oh, Allen," she said, with a curious wistfulness, "will you _always_,
always be just like you are now?"
"Well, I should say I would," he answered gently. "They's nobody like
you anywheres, Chris. Mis' Chris, Mis' Allen Martin."
"Don't it scare you to say it?" she demanded.
"Yes, sir, it does," he confessed. "It's like sayin' your own name over
the telephone. What about you? Will _you_ always, too?"
"Yes," she said, "always. Only--"
"Only what?" he repeated anxiously.
"Oh," she said, "don't let's let any outside things come between us,
Allen--like they do, like with Bess and Opie,--business and
sewin',--that's what I'm afraid of," she ended vaguely.
"Well," he said, "I guess we ain't much afraid of each other, honey. I
guess we're just afraid of what could come between us."
A voice, unconvincing, unimportant, a part of the inessential aspect of
alien things, detached itself from the accompaniment in the next room,
saying something responsible and plaintive about only an hour till train
time.
"An hour," Allen said over, and put his arms about her, with boyish
awkwardness for the sake of the crisp muslin gown that had so terrified
him. She rose and stood beside him, and he waited for a moment looking
up in her face. "Chris," he said, "I'm scared of this one hour even.
Till train time."
"I'll hurry up and get the hour done as quick as I can," she promised
him gayly.
"Honestly, now--" said Chris's mother from the vague and indeterminate
region where she moved.
"Right off, Mis' Mother!" Allen said, and knew that she was in the
doorway, with the bridesmaids laughing beside her. And then he went down
the stairway, his first radiant moment gone by.
In the dining room the messenger was waiting. The messenger had arrived,
in the clear cold of the night, from a drive across the Caledonia hills,
and some one had sent him to that deserted room to warm himself. But
Allen found him breathing on his fingers and staring out the frosty
window into the dark. It was Jacob Ernestine, brother to the woman who
had brought up Allen and had been kind to him when nobody else in the
world was kind. For years Sarah Ernestine had been "West"--and with that
awful inarticulacy of her class, mere distance had become an impassable
gulf and the Silence had taken her. Allen had not even known that she
meant to return. And now, Jacob told him, she was here, at his own home
back in the hills--Sarah and a child, a little stray boy, whom she had
found and befriended as she had once befriended Allen. And she was
dying.
"She didn't get your letter, I guess," the old man said, "'bout gettin'
married. She come to-day, so sick she couldn't hold her head up. I see
she didn't know nothin' 'bout your doin's. I didn't let her know. I jus'
drove in, like split, to tell you, when the doctor went. He says she
can't--she won't ... till mornin'. I thought," he apologized wistfully,
"ye'd want to know, anyways, so I jus' drove in."
"That was all right," Allen said. "You done right, Jacob."
Then he stood still for a moment, looking down at the bright figures of
the carpet. Jacob lived twelve miles back in the hills.
"How'd you come?" Allen asked him briefly.
"I've got the new cutter," the old man answered, with a touch of eager
pride. "I'll drive ye."
Then some one in the parlour caught sight of the bridegroom, and they
all called to him and came where he was, besieging him with
good-natured, trivial talk. The old man waited, looking out the window
into the dark. He had known them all since they were children, and their
merrymaking did not impress him as wholly real. Neither, for that
matter, did Allen's wedding. Besides, his own sister was dying--somehow
putting an end to the time when he and she had been at home together.
That was all he had thought of during his drive to town, and hardly at
all of Allen and his wedding. He waited patiently now while Allen got
the wedding guests back to the parlour, and then slipped away from them,
and came through the dining room to the stair door.
"Stay there a minute," Allen bade him shortly, and went back to the
upper floor and to Chris's door again.
It was her mother who answered his summons this time, and Allen's manner
and face checked her words. Before he had done telling her what had
happened, Chris herself was on the threshold, already in sober brown, as
one who has put aside rainbows and entered on life. She had a little
brown hat in one hand, and for the other hand he groped out and held it
while he told her, as well as he could.
"I guess I've got to go, Chrissie," he ended miserably.
She met his eyes, her own soft with sympathy for the plight of the other
woman.
"Well, yes," she said quietly, "of course we've got to go."
He looked at her breathlessly. That possibility had not crossed his
mind.
"You!" he cried. "You couldn't go, dear. Twelve miles out in Caledonia,
cold as it is to-night. You--"
In spite of her sympathy, she laughed at him then.
"Did you honestly think I wouldn't?" she asked, in a kind of wonder.
"Well, I'm sure--" began her mother. But the two bridesmaids manifestly
heard the Word again, for they talked with her both at once.
"Not with Jacob, though," Chris was saying decisively. "You help father
and the boys get out our cutter, Allen."
Allen strode past the mother and lifted his wife's face in his hands.
"Do you mean it?" he demanded. "Will you go--in the cold--all that long
way--"
"You Silly!" she answered, and drew away from him and set the little
brown hat on her head.
The road lay white before them, twelve miles of snow and stars to
Jacob's cottage among the Caledonia hills. Jacob had gone on--from the
crest of the rise by the Corner church they saw him and heard the faint
signalling of his bells. It was a place, that rise by the Corner church
on the edge of the village, where two others in such case might have
drawn rein to look at Everything, stretching before, rhythmic crest and
shallow, and all silent and waiting. But not these two, incurious as the
gods, naïve as the first lovers. Only, though of this they were
unconscious, they saw things a little differently that night.
"Look!" said the girl, with a sign to the lowlands, expressive with
lights. "So many folks's houses--homes, all started. I s'pose it was
just as big a thing for them. But _theirs_ don't seem like anything,
side of ours!"
"That's so, too," assented Allen. "And theirs _ain't_ anything side of
ours!" he maintained stoutly.
"No, sir," she agreed, laughing.
Then she grew suddenly grave, and fell silent for a little, her eyes
here and there on the valley lights, while Allen calculated aloud the
time of the arrival at Jacob's house.
"Allen!" she said at last.
"Here!" he answered. "I'm here, you bet."
"Just look at the lights," she said seriously, "and then _think_.
There's Bess and Opie--not speakin' to each other. Over there's the
Hubbelthwait farm that they've left for the hotel--an' Threat
Hubbelthwait drunk all the time. An' Howells's, poor and can't pay, and
don't care if they can't, and quarrels so folks can hear 'em from the
road. And the Moneys', that's so ugly to the children, and her findin'
fault, and him can't speak without an oath. That only leaves the
Topladys' over there that's real, regular people. And she kind o' bosses
him."
"Well, now, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, looking at the lights with
a difference.
Chris's right hand was warm in his great-coat pocket, and she suddenly
snuggled close to him, her chin on his shoulder.
"Oh, Allen," she said, "I'm _afraid_!"
"What? On the Plank Road?" he wanted to know, missing her meaning.
"All them folks started out with presents, and a house, like us," she
said, "and with their minds all made up to bein' happy. But just look at
'em."
"Well," said Allen, reasonably, "we _ain't_ them."
"We might get like 'em," she insisted. "How can you tell? Folks just do
get that way or they just don't. How can you _tell_?"
"I s'pose that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, thoughtfully.
"Mother's got a picture of the Hubbelthwaits when they was married,"
Chris pursued. "Her in white an' slippers and bracelets, and him slick
as a kitten's foot. Think of her now, Allen, with _bracelets_. And him
drunk all the time, 'most. How can you tell how things'll turn out? Oh,
Allen, I _am_! I'm afraid."
He bent to her face and laid his own against hers, glowing and cold and
with fresh, warm lips.
"Let's just try to be happy and keep ourselves happy," he said.
The troubled woman was still in her face, but at his touch the fears
went a little away, and the valley lights being already left behind
among the echoes of the bells, they forgot both the lights and their
shadows and drifted back to talk about the new house and the presents,
and the dinners and suppers and breakfasts together. For these were the
stuff of which the time was made. As it was made, too, of that shadowy,
hovering fear for the future, and the tragic pity of their errand, and
of sad conjecture about the little stray child whom Sarah Ernestine had
brought.
"That ain't it a'ready, is it?" Christopha exclaimed when they saw
Jacob's cottage.
"It just is--it's 'leven o'clock now," Allen answered, and gave the
horse to the old man; and they two went within.
The light in the room, like the lights back in the valley, was as if
some great outside influence here and there should part the darkness to
win a little stage for a scene of the tragedy: in the valley, for the
drunkenness at the Hubbelthwaits', the poverty at the Howells', the ill
nature at the Moneys'; and here, in Jacob's cottage, for death. There
was no doubt of the quality of the hour in the cottage. The room was
instinct with the outside touch. Already it was laid upon the woman in
the bed, and with a mystery and authority not unlike that which had come
upon Christopha in her marriage hour and was upon her still.
The woman knew Allen, smiled at him, made him understand her
thankfulness that he had come. At Christopha she looked kindly and quite
without curiosity. Some way, that absence of curiosity at what was so
vital to him gripped Allen's heart, and without his knowing the process,
showed him the nature of death. The neighbour who had been with the
sick woman slipped outside, and as she went she patted Chris's shoulder;
and Allen felt that she understood, and he was dumbly grateful to her.
Allen sat by the bed and held the hand of his foster-mother; and Chris
moved about the room, heating water for a little pot of tea. And so it
was Chris who first saw the child. He was sitting at the end of the wood
box, on the floor before the oven--that little stray boy whom Sarah
Ernestine had picked up as she had once picked up Allen. He looked up at
Christopha with big, soft eyes, naïve as the first bird. Almost before
she knew that she meant to do so, Chris stooped, with a wondering word,
and took him in her arms. He clung to her and she sat in the rocking
chair near the window where stood Jacob's carnation plant. And she tried
both to look at the child and to love him, at the same time.
"See, Allen," she said, "this little boy!"
The child looked over his shoulder at Allen, his little arms leaning on
Christopha's breast. And very likely because he had felt strange and
lonely and now was taken some account of, he suddenly and beautifully
smiled, and you would have loved him the more for the way he did that.
The woman, lying with closed eyes, understood and remembered.
"Allen," she said, "that's little John. You find him--a home
somewheres. If you can...."
"Why, yes, mother, we'll do that. We can do that, I guess. Don't you
worry any about _him_," said Allen.
"He's all alone. I donno his name, even.... But you be good to him,
Allen, will you?" she said restlessly. "I found him somewheres."
"Like me," Allen said.
She shook her head feebly.
"Worse," she said, "worse. I knew I couldn't--do much. I just--thought I
could keep him from bein' wicked--mebbe."
"Like you did me, mother, I guess," the boy said.
Then she opened her eyes.
"Allen!" she said clearly. "Oh, if I did! When I think how mebbe I done
that--_I ain't afraid to die_."
Jacob Ernestine came in the room and stood rubbing one hand on the back
of the other. He saw the kettle's high column of steam and looked
inquiringly at Chris. But she sat mothering the little silent boy, who
looked at her gravely, or smiled, or pulled at her collar, responsive to
her touch as she was thrillingly responsive to his nearness. So Jacob
lifted the kettle to the back of the stove, moved his carnation plant a
little away from the frost of the pane, and settled himself at the
bed's foot to watch. And when, after a long time, the child fell
asleep, Chris would not lay him down. Allen would have taken him, and
Jacob came and tried to do so, but she shook her head and they let her
be. She sat so still, hour after hour, that at last she herself dozed;
and it seemed to her, in a manner of dreaming, that the carnation plant
on the window-sill had lifted and multiplied until something white and
like fragrance filled the room; and this, then, she dreamed, was what
death is, death in the room for the woman. Or might it not be the
perfume of her own bridal bouquet, the carnations which she had carried
that night? But then the child stirred, and Christopha roused a little,
and after all, the sense of flowers in the room was the sense of the
little one in her arms. As if many things mean one thing.
It was toward dawn that the end came, quite simply and with no manner of
finality, as if one were to pass into another chamber. And after that,
as quickly as might be, Christopha and Allen made ready to drive back to
the village for the last bitter business of all.
Allen, in the barn with Jacob, wondered what he must do. Allen was
sore-hearted at his loss, grateful for the charge that he had been
given; but what was he to do? The child ought not to stay in Jacob's
cottage. If Chris's mother would take him for a little,--but Allen
knew, without at all being able to define it, her plaintive, burdened
manner, the burdened manner of the irresponsible. Still puzzling over
this, he brought the cutter to the side door; and the side door opened,
and Chris came out in the pale light, leading the little boy--awake,
warmly wrapped, ready for the ride.
"Where you goin' to take him to, Chrissie?" Allen asked breathlessly.
"Some of the neighbours, I guess, ain't we?" she answered. "I donno. I
thought we could see. He mustn't be left here--now."
"No, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen only. "He mustn't."
The three drove out together into the land lying about the gate of dawn.
A fragment of moon was in the east. There was about the hour something
primitive, as if, in this loneliest of all the hours, the world reverted
to type, remembered ancient savage differences, and fell in the primal
lines.
"Allen," Chris said, "you'll miss her. I mean miss knowin' she's alive."
"Yes," the boy said, "I'll miss knowin' she's alive."
"Well, we must try to settle what to do with the little boy," she
suggested hastily.
"Yes," he assented, "that's right. We've got to settle that," and at
this they fell silent.
"There's Hopkins's," Chris said presently, nodding toward the home of
the neighbour who had waited their coming to Jacob's cottage. "But
she'll hev to be over there lots to-day and to-morrow. And she was kep'
up so late it don't hardly seem as if we'd ought to stop and ask her."
"No," Allen said, "I donno as it does, really."
"There's Cripps's," she suggested a little farther on, "but they ain't
up yet. I donno's 'twould do to roust 'em up."
"No," Allen agreed, "best not do that, I guess." Christopha looked over
the great fields.
"My!" she said, "you'll miss her--miss thinkin' of her bein' somewheres.
Allen! Where do you s'pose she is?"
"I thought o' that," said Allen, soberly.
"Goodness!" said Christopha, and shivered, and suddenly drew the child
close to her. He was sleeping again. And it was so, with his little body
between them, that she could no longer keep her hand warm in Allen's
greatcoat pocket. But above the child's head her eyes and Allen's would
meet, and in that hour the two had never been so near. Nearer they were
than in the talk about the new house, and the presents, and the dinners
and suppers and breakfasts together.
They passed the farmhouses that looked asleep, and the farmhouses that
looked watchfully awake while their owners slept. It would not be well
to knock at these, still and sombre-windowed. And though there were
lights at the Moneys' and at the Howells' and at the Hubbelthwait farm,
and even at Bess and Opie's, their gates, by common consent, were also
passed. Nor did they stop at the Topladys'.
"They're real, regular people with a grown son," Chris said of them
vaguely, "and it don't seem hardly fair to give 'em little John, too!"
"Little John," Allen said over wonderingly. When they called him that
the child seemed suddenly a person, like themselves. Their eyes met
above his head.
"Allen!" Chris said.
"What? What is it?" he asked eagerly.
"Could--do you think--could _we_?" she demanded.
"My!" he answered, "I been a-wishin'--"
Involuntarily he drew rein. They were on the rise by the Corner church
at the edge of the village. The village, rhythmic crest of wall and
shallow of lawn, lay below them, and near the little Triangle park would
be their waiting house.
"Did you mean have him live with us?" Allen made sure.
"Yes, I did," Chris said, "if we had the money."
"Well!" said the boy, "well, I guess _that'll_ be all right!"
"How much _she'd_ of liked it," said Chris.
"Wouldn't she, though," Allen assented; "wouldn't she? And you heard
what she said--that about keepin' him from bein'--wicked?
Chrissie--_could_ we, you and me? This little fellow?"
Chris lifted her face and nodded.
"I ain't afraid," she said simply.
"I ain't either," her husband said.
As if, in this new future, there were less need of fear than in the
future which had sought to "try to be happy and keep ourselves happy."
They looked down where their house would be, near the gate of the coming
dawn. And--as two others in such case might have seen--it was as if they
were the genii of their own mysterious future, a future whose solution
trembled very near. For with the charge of the child had come a courage,
even as the dead woman had known, when she thought of her charge of
Allen, that she was not afraid to die.
"Allen," said Chris, stumblingly, "it don't seem as if we could get like
the Howells' an' the Hubbelthwaits and them. Somehow it don't seem as if
we _could_!"
"No," said Allen, "we couldn't. That's so, ain't it?"
Above little John's head their eyes met in a kind of new betrothal, new
marriage, new birth. But when he would have driven on, Allen pulled at
the reins again, and,
"Chrissie," he said suddenly, "if afterwards--there should be
anybody--else. I mean for us. Would--would you keep on lovin' this
little kiddie, too?"
She met his eyes bravely, sweetly.
"Well, you Silly," she said, "of course I would!"
At which Allen laughed joyously, confidently.
"Why, Chris," he cried, "we're married! For always an' always. An'
here's this little old man to see to. Who's afraid?"
Then they kissed each other above the head of the sleeping child, and
drove on toward the village, and toward their waiting house.
VIII
THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT
When I opened my door this morning, the Outdoors was like a thing coming
to meet me. I mean that it was like a person coming to meet me--no, it
was like many persons, hand in hand and, so to speak, mind in mind; a
great company of whom straightway I became one. I felt that swift, good
gladness that _now_ was _now_,--that delicate, fleeting Now, that very
coquette of time, given and withdrawn. I remember that I could not soon
go to sleep on the night of the day on which I learned that the Hebrew
tongue has no present tense. They could not catch at that needle-point
of experience, and we can do so. I like to glory in it by myself when no
one else is thinking of it; to think aside, as if _to_ Something, that
now is being now.... And I long for the time when we shall all know it
together, all the time, and understand its potentialities and let it be
breath and pulse to keep the Spirit Future alive and pure.
It would have been no great wonder if I had been rejoicing past all
reason in the moment. For at that very instant came Calliope Marsh, home
for the Java entertainment which was set for to-night, and driving to my
gate the Sykes's white horse in the post-office store delivery wagon.
And as I saw her, so precisely did she look like herself, that I could
have believed that Now was not Now, but Then, when first I knew her.
Calliope brought the buckled lines informally over the horse's head and
let them fall about the tie post, and ran to me. I am afraid that I am
not going to tell what we said. But it was full of being once more in
the presence of those whom you love. Do you not think that such being
together is a means of actual life transcending both breath and
perception?
When our greeting was done, Calliope sat down on the stair in my hall,
and,
"Hev you got any spare candle-shades an' sherbet glasses, an' pretty
doilies an' lunch cloths an' rugs an' willow chairs an' a statue of
almost anybody an' a meat-chopper with a peanut-butter attachment an' a
cap an' gown like colleges?" she demanded.
And when I told her that I thought I might have some of these things,
"Well," Calliope said, "she wants 'em all. Who do I mean by She? Mis'
Oliver Wheeler Johnson, the personal queen of things."
She leaned forward, hugging her thin little arms, and she looked up at
me from under the brim of her round straw hat.
"I'm in need of grace," she said shortly. "I never felt like this toward
any human being. But I tell you, when that little Mis' Johnson comes
dilly-nippin' around where I am, noddin' her blue ostrich tip, seems my
spine just stiffens out in me like it was going to strike at her, same
as a stick. Do you know the feelin'?"
I answered reluctantly, and not as I should wish to answer; for it is
certain that I, too, have seldom seen Mrs. Johnson without an urgency to
be gone from her little fluttering presence. But Calliope! I could not
imagine Calliope shrinking from any one, or knowing herself alien to
another.
"For sixty years," she answered my thought of her, "I've never known
what it was to couldn't bear anybody, not without I had a reason. They
ain't much of anybody I what you might say don't like, without they're
malicious or ugly a-purpose. Ugly by nature, ugly an' can't help it,
ugly an' don't know it--I can forgive all them. An' Mis' Johnson ain't
ugly at all--she's just a real sweet little slip of a thing, doin' her
hard-workin' best. But when I first see her in church that day, I says
to myself: 'I'll give that little piece two months to carry the sail
she's carryin' here to-day; four months to hev folks tired of her, an'
six months to get herself the cold shoulder all 'round.' An' I hold to
what I said. An' when her baby-blue nineteen-inch feather swings in an'
'round, an' when she tells how things ought to be, I kind o' bristle all
over me. I'm ashamed of it--an' yet, do you know, I like to give in to
it?" Calliope said solemnly. "I donno what's come over me. Hev you heard
where the Java entertainment's put to be?"
I had not heard, nor was I sure just why it was of Java, save that
Friendship is continually giving entertainments with foreign names and
practising a wild imperialism to carry out an effect of foreign parts.
And since, at the missionary meeting which had projected the affair,
Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had told about _their_ Java entertainment in
_their_ church at home, that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady, who
was president of the society, had appointed her chairman of the Java
entertainment committee.