Yes, sir,--the fire-engine house. No other place was _quaint_ enough. No
other place lent itself to decoration probabilities--or somethin' like
that. She turned her back flat on the church an' went round to empty
stores, lookin' for _quaint-ity_. One while I thought she'd hev us in
the Chinese laundry, she seemed that took with the tomato-coloured
signs on the walls. But, finally, she lit on the engine-house; an' when
she see the big, bare engine-room, with the big, shinin' engine in it,
an' harnesses hangin' from them rough board beams in a kind of avenoo,
an' the board walls all streaked down, she spatted her hands an' 'lowed
we'd hev our Java there. 'What a dear, quaint place,' s's she,--'so
_flexible_!' She held out about the harnesses bein' so quaintly
picturesque an' the fire-engine a piece o' resistance--or somethin' like
that. An' she rents the room, without ay, yes, no, nor boo. My way of
thinkin', a chairman ought to hev boo for a background, even if she _is_
chairman. That's where she wants the statue an' the nut butter an' the
cap an' gown. Can we borrow 'em of you?"
"The engine-house!" I repeated incredulously. "You cannot mean the
fire-engine house, Calliope?"
"I do," Calliope said firmly, "the quaint, flexible fire-engine house.
They ain't been a fire in Friendship in over two years, so Mis' Johnson
says we ain't got that to think of--an' I donno as we hev. An' they
never use the engine any more, now they've got city water, excep' for
fires in the country, and then nobody ever gets in to give the alarm
till the house is burned down an' no need to bother goin'. Even if they
do get in in some sort of season, the department has to go to the mayor
to get a permit to go outside the city limits. It was so when the
Topladys' barn burned. Timothy told 'em, when they come gallopin' up
after it was most done smokin', that if they had held off a little
longer they could have been a sight of help to him in shinglin' the new
one. Oh, no, they ain't much of any danger of our being disturbed by a
fire in them two hours to-night. Anyhow, they can't be a fire. Mis'
Oliver Wheeler Johnson said so."
We laughed like children as we loaded my "Java" stuffs on the wagon.
Calliope was a valiant helper to Mrs. Johnson, and so I told her. She
was standing in the wagon box, one arm about my palm, the other free for
driving.
"I'm the chairman o' the refreshments, too," she confessed. "Oh, well.
Yourself you can boss round, you know," she threw back, smiling;
"anybody can do that. But your feelin's you're some cramped about
runnin'."
It is certain that Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson was signally unfitted for
a future in Friendship Village. She was a woman of some little world in
which she had moved before she came to us, and in the two worlds she
perceived no difference. Or, where she saw a difference, she sought to
modify it by a touch when a breath would have been too much, and the
only factor of potency would have been a kind of potency of spirit,
which she did not possess.
The Oliver Wheeler Johnsons had moved to Friendship only three months
before, and nobody had looked for them at church on their first Sunday.
"Movin' so, you want your Sabbath to take some rest in, an' you ain't
expected to dress yourself up an' get out to Sunday service an' face
strangers," the village said--and when the two walked into church while
the responses were being made nearly everybody lost the place.
They were very young, and they were extremely well dressed.
"He's got on one o' the long coats," comment ran after church, "an' he's
got a real soft-speakin' voice. But he seems to know how to act."
And, "I declare, nice white gloves an' a nineteen-inch baby-blue ostrich
feather durin' movin' seems some like puttin' on."
And, "The back of her dress fits her just like the front, an' I must say
she knows it. No pullin' down the jacket or hitchin' the strings forward
for _her_, when she stands up!"
As Miggy, who first told me about that day, had said, "That Sunday
morning, Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson was the belle of the congregation."
After service that day, instead of going directly home or waiting to be
addressed, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had spoken to the woman with
whom she had been seated. It was Mis' Postmaster Sykes.
"Thank you so much," Mrs. Johnson said, "for letting us share your pew.
May I present my husband? We have come to Friendship to live, and we
shall be coming here to church. And I shall want to join your Ladies'
Aid Society and your Missionary Circle and, perhaps, be in the
Sunday-school right away. I--I think I'll be less homesick--"
"Actually," Mis' Sykes said afterward, "she took my breath clear away
from me. I never heard of such a thing. Of course, we're real glad to
hev our newcomers Christian people, but we want quiet Christians. An'
did you notice how she was when I give her an introduction around? Why,
she up an' out with somethin' to say to everybody. Just a neat little
'How d' do' wouldn't do for her to remark. I always suspicion them
talkative-at-first kind. It's like they'd been on the stage or brought
up in a hotel."
When she first came to the Ladies' Aid and the missionary meetings, Mrs.
Johnson "said something." She was "up to her feet" three or four times
at each session with suggestion, information, or description of how they
did in her home church. And some way I think that what chiefly separated
her from the village was the way that inevitable nineteen-inch blue
ostrich plume on the little woman's hat bobbed and won attention and was
everywhere at once. Or, perhaps--such creatures of wax we are to our
impressions--it may have been little Mrs. Johnson's mere way of lifting
her small, pointed chin when she talked, and of frowning and
over-emphasizing. Or it may have been that she stood with her hands
clasped behind her in what seemed to Friendship exaggerated ease, or
that she smiled arbitrarily and ingratiatingly as she talked when there
was absolutely nothing at which to smile. I think that these made her
seem as alien to us as, in varied measure, certain moral defects might
have done.
Moreover, she mentioned with familiarity objects and usages of which
Friendship Village knew nothing: Carriage shoes, a new cake of soap for
each guest, some kind of ice served, it was incredulously repeated, "in
the middle o' the meal!" She innocently let fall that she sent to the
city for her letter-paper. She had travelled in a state-room on a train,
and she said so. She knew a noted woman. She used, we saw from the
street, shaded candles on the table when she and her husband were at
supper alone. She thought nothing of ordering Jimmy Sturgis and the bus
to take her down town to her marketing on a rainy day. She had inclined
to blame the village that Daphne Street was not paved, instead of
joining with the village to blame somebody else. Above all, she tried
to buy our old furniture. I do not know that another might not have done
all these quite without giving offence, and, indeed, rather have left us
impressed with her superior familiarity with an envied world. But by the
time of the Java entertainment Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had
innocently alienated half Friendship Village. And this morning Calliope
merely voiced what I knew to be the sentiment of most of Mrs. Johnson's
neighbours and acquaintances. For these people are the kindly of earth;
but they are of earth, where reign both the centrifugal and centripetal
forces,--and the control is not always so swift as science and the human
heart could wish.
At five o'clock to-day--the day set for the Java evening
entertainment--I made my way to the engine-house. This was partly
because I wished to be as much as possible with Calliope during her few
days in the village, and partly it was because the affair would belong
to the class of festivity which I am loath to miss, and I think that,
for Friendship's sake, I will never willingly pass by a "hall" in which
is to be found a like diversion. Already on the great room, receiving
its final preparation, had descended something of the excited spirit of
the evening: the heat, the insufficient light, the committee members'
shrill, rollicking children sliding on the floor, the booths which in
all bazaars contain with a precision fairly bewildering the same class
of objects; and the inevitable sense of hurry and silk waists and aching
feet and mustn't-take-your-change-back. But to all these things the Java
engine-house affair would add an element of novelty, almost a flavour of
romance. Certainly the room lent itself to "decoration probabilities,"
as Calliope had vaguely quoted; it had been a roller-skating rink,
utilized by the fire-department on the decline of the pastime, and there
was, as Mrs. Johnson's _pièce de résistance_, the fire-engine.
I had never before been in the engine-house--you know how there will be
commonplace enough spots in your own town to which you never go: the
engine-house, the church belfry, the wood yard, upstairs over this store
and that, and grocery cellars whose sloping trap-doors, open now and
then to the walk, are as alien as the inside of the trunks of your
trees. When I stepped in the engine-house, it seemed insistently a place
in which I had never been before. And this may have been partly because
the whole idea of a village fire-department is to me singular: the
waiting horses and ladders and hose, whose sole reason for being is
merely ameliorative, and never human and preventive; that pealing of the
sharp, peculiar, terrifying alarm and summons first imprinting something
on the very air, stabbing us with _Halt_ while we count the bell
strokes for the ward, and then clanging the wild fury of the
quick-stroke command to help.
To-day the great glittering fire-engine, flanked by hose-cart and
hook-and-ladder wagon, occupied almost wonderingly the head of the room
which had been invaded, and an inspired committee had garlanded the
engine with paper roses and American flags. The flag of the Netherlands,
copied from a dictionary and wrought in red-white-and-blue cambric with
a silver crown, drooped meditatively from the smoke-stack; a scarlet fez
and a peacock-feather fan hung on the supply hose; and on the
tongue-bracer was fixed a pink sofa cushion from Mis' Amanda Toplady's
parlour, with an olive Indian gentleman in a tinsel zouave jacket
stamped on the cover. On the two big sliding doors, back of which stood
the fire company's horses, were tacked innumerable Javanese trifles more
picturesque than authentic; and on outlying booths and tables there were
others. Directly before the engine was to be the tea-table, where Mis'
Postmaster Sykes was to serve Java tea from a Java canister, loaned by
the Post-office store.
As soon as I entered I sought out Calliope's booth, a huge affair
constructed of rugs whose red-tongued, couchant dogs and bounding fawns
somewhat marred the Eastern effect. And within, I found myself in a
circle of the Friendship women whom I know best--all of them tired with
that deadly tiredness born of a day's work at a church fair of any
nation. But at once I saw that it was not merely fatigue which was
disquieting them.
Calliope was leaning against a bit of Bagelen blue, loaned by the new
minister's wife. And she said to me as if, I thought, in explanation of
what I was to hear,--"I guess we're all pretty tired. Most of us look
like we wanted to pant. I'm all of a shake, myself."
When Mis' Postmaster Sykes spoke unsmilingly, I understood:--
"It ain't the bein' tired," she disclaimed; "tired I can stand an' hev
stood since my own birth. But it's the bein' commanded 'round--me,
_commanded_--by that little I'm-the-one-an'-you-do-as-I-say out there!"
"Land-a-livin' an' a-dyin'!" said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "I
declare if I know whether I'm on foot or on horseback. It's bad enough
to hev to run a fair, without you've got to be run yourself, too. Ain't
it enough for Mis' Johnson to be made chairman without her wantin' to
boss besides? She might as well say to me, 'Mis' Holcomb, you do
everything the opposite way from the way you've just done it,' an' hev
it over with."
Mis' Amanda Toplady--even that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda--shook her
head.
"Mis' Johnson surely acts used to bein' bowed down to," she admitted;
"she seems fair bent on lordin' it. My land, if she wasn't bound to
borrow my Tea rose plant that's just nearin' ready to bud."
Calliope laughed, a little ruefully, and wholly in sympathy.
"Honest," she said, "I guess what's the matter with all of us ain't so
much what she does as the particular way she does it. It's so with some
folks. They just seem to sort of _set_ you all over, when you come near
'em--same as the cold does to gravy. We'd all ought to wrostle with the
feelin', I expect."
"I expect we had," said Mis' Holcomb, "but you could wrostle all your
days with vinegar an' it'd pucker your mouth same way."
"Funny part," Calliope observed, "everybody feels just alike about her.
When she skips around so sort o' momentous, we all want to dodge. I felt
sorry for her, first, because I thought she was in for nervous
prostration. But after a while I see it wasn't disease--it was just her
feelin' so up an' down significant, you might say."
"I donno," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "but it's part the way
she says her _a_'s. That real _a_-soundin' _a_ kind," she explained
vaguely.
"She's so right an' left cuffy--I guess that's the whole thing,"
Calliope put it in her rich idiom.
"Well," said Mis' Amanda, sadly, "there must be somethin' we could like
her for, even if it was only her husband."
"He ain't what I'd call much, either," Calliope dismissed Mr. Oliver
Wheeler Johnson positively; "he's got too soft-speakin' a voice. I like
a man's voice to rumble up soft from his chest an' not slip down thin
from his brain."
I remember that I listened in a great wonder to these women whom I had
seen at many an office of friendliness to strangers and aliens. Yet as I
looked across the floor at that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson--who,
in the hat with the blue plume, was everywhere, directing, altering,
objecting, arranging, commanding and, especially, doing over--I most
unwillingly felt much as they felt. If only Mrs. Johnson had not
continually lifted her little pointed chin. If only she had not
perpetually and ingratiatingly smiled when there was nothing at which to
smile at all.
Then Abigail Arnold hurried up to us with a tray of cups for the Java
tea.
"Calliope," she said to the chairman of the refreshments, "Mis' Johnson
jus' put up her little chin an' says, 'What! ain't we no lemons for the
tea?'"
Calliope compressed her lips and lifted their thin line tight and high.
"Lemins," she replied, "ain't necessarily found in Java. I've a good big
mind to go home to bed."
Then we saw little Mrs. Johnson's blue linen dress hurrying toward us
with the waving line of the blue feather above her, like a last little
daring flourish by the artist of her. She was really very pretty and
childish, with a manner of moving in wreaths and lines and never in
solids. Her little feet twinkled along like the signature to the pretty
picture of her. But yet she was not appealing. She was like an
overconfident child whom you long to shut in a closet. Yes, I understand
that I sound like a barbarian in these days of splendid corrective
treatment of children who are studied and not stormed at. And in this
treatment I believe to the uttermost. And yet, overconfidence in a child
is of all things the most--I will amend what I said: Mrs. Oliver Wheeler
Johnson was like an overconfident child whom you long to shut in a
closet because of your ignorance of what else on earth to do. No doubt
there is a better way, but none of us knew it. And she came toward us
intent, every one felt, on some radical change in arrangements, though
the big room was now in the pink of appointment and ready to be left
while the committee went home to sup on "just sauce and
bread-and-butter," and to don silk waists.
We saw little Mrs. Johnson hurrying toward us, upon a background of the
great, patient room, all-tolerant of its petty bedizening. And then Mrs.
Johnson, we in Calliope's booth, the sliding, rollicking children, and
all the others about stood still, at the sharp, peculiar terrifying
alarm and summons which seemed to imprint something on the very air,
stabbing us with _Halt_ that we might count the bell strokes for the
ward, and clanging a wild fury of the quick-stroke command to help. For
the first time in two years the Friendship fire alarm was sounding from
the tower above our heads.
There was a panting sweep and scurry for the edges of the room, as
instantly a gong on the wall sounded with the alarm, and the two big
sliding doors went back, scattering like feathers the innumerable
Javanese trifles that had been tacked there. Forward, down the rug-hung
vista, plunged the two big horses of the department. We saw the Java
tea-table borne to earth, the Javanese exhibits adorning outlying
counters swept away, and all the "decoration probabilities" vanish in
savage wreck. Then the quaintly picturesque harnesses fell to the
horses' necks, their hoofs trampled terrifyingly on the loose boards of
the floor, and forth from the yawning doors the horses pounded, dragging
the _pièce de résistance_, with garlands on its sides, the pink zouave
cushion crushed beneath it, and the flag of the Netherlands streaming
from the stack. Horses rushed thither in competition, came thundering at
the doors, and galloped to place before the two carts. I think not a
full minute can have been consumed. But the ruin of the Java
entertainment committee's work was unbelievably complete. Though there
had been not a fire in Friendship Village in two years, that night, of
all nights, Jimmy Sturgis's "hay-barn," for the omnibus horses, "took it
on itself," it was said, "to go to work an' burn up." And Jimmy's barn
is outside the city limits, so that the _pièce de résistance_ had to be
used. And Jimmy is in the fire-department, so that the company galloped
informally to the rescue without the benefit of the mayor's authority.
As the last of the department disappeared, and the women of the
committee stood looking at one another--tired with the deadly tiredness
of a day such as theirs--a little blue linen figure sprang upon a chair
and clasped her hands behind her, and a blue ostrich feather lifted and
dipped as she spoke.
"Quickly!" Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson cried. "All hands at work now!
Mrs. Sykes, will you set up the tea-table? You can get more dishes from
my house. Mrs. Toplady, this booth, please. You can make it right in no
time. Mrs. Holcomb, you will have to do your booth entirely over--you
can get some things from my house. Miss Marsh--ah, Calliope Marsh, you
must go to my house for my lace curtains--"
She smiled ingratiatingly and surely arbitrarily, for we all knew full
well that there was absolutely nothing to smile at. And with that
Calliope's indignation, as she afterward said, "kind of crystallized and
boiled over." I remember how she stood, hugging her thin little arms and
speaking her defiance.
"I donno how you feel, Mis' Johnson," she said dryly, "but, _my_ idea,
Bedlam let loose ain't near quaint enough for a Java entertainment. Nor
I don't think it's what you might say real Java, either. Things here
looks to me too flexible. I'm goin' home an' go to bed."
There was no doubt what the rest meant to do. With one impulse they
turned toward the door as Calliope turned, and silently they took the
way that the _pièce de résistance_ had taken before them. Little Mrs.
Johnson stood on her chair making many gestures; but no one went back.
Calliope looked straight before her.
"My feet ache like I done my thinkin' with 'em," she said, "an' my head
feels like I'd stood on it. An' what's it all for?"
"Regular clock performance," Mis' Postmaster Sykes assented. "We've
ticked hard all day long an' ain't got a thing out of it. I often think
it's that way with my housework, but I did think the Ladies' Missionary
could tick, when it _did_ tick, for eternity. I'm tuckered to the bone."
"Nobody knows," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was Mame-Bliss, "how my poor neck
aches. It's there I suffer first an' most."
Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was walking behind the rest, took three great
steps and caught us up and spoke, a little breathlessly:--
"Land, land," she said, "I guess I'll go home an' pop some corn. Seems
to me it'd smell sort of cosy an' homelike an' soothin' down. It's a
grand thing to smell when you're feelin' far off from yourself."
Calliope laughed a little then.
"Well," she said, "anyhow I ain't got my silk waist to get into--and I
didn't hev a nice one to put on anyway. I was wishin' I had, and now my
wish has come true by bein' took away from me, bodily--like they will.
But just the same--"
She turned on the walk and faced us, and hugged her thin little arms.
"A while ago," she said, "I give that little woman there six months to
get herself the cold shoulder all around. Well, the time ain't up
yet--but both my shoulders feels stone cold!"
IX
THE COLD SHOULDER
There is something more about Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson.
Did you ever look through an old school-book of your own and, say, on
the history picture of Vesuvius in eruption impose your own memory of
Pompeii, visited in these twenty years since you studied about it; and
have you not stared hard at the time between and felt yourself some one
other than that one who once dreamed over the Vesuvius picture? Or,
years after you read the Letters, you have made a little mark below
Cicero's cry from exile, "Oh, that I had been less eager for life!" and
you look at the cry and at the mark, and you and one of these become an
anachronism--but you are not sure which it is that so becomes. So now,
in reading over these notes some while after I have set them down, I am
minded here to give you my look ahead to the end of the summer and to
slip in some account of what happened as a closing of the tale. And I
confess that something about me--perhaps it is the Custodian
herself--likes this way of pretending a freedom from time and of looking
upon its fruit to say which seeds have grown and which have not.
Friendship Village is not superstitious, but when curious coincidences
occur we do, as we say, "take down note." And it did seem like a
judgment upon us that, a little time after the Java fiasco, and while
indignation was yet at high noon, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson fell ill.
At first I think we affected not to know it. When she did not appear at
church, none of us mentioned it for a Sunday or two. Then when some one
casually noted her absence we said, "Oh, wasn't she? Got little cold,
likely." That we saw her no more down town or "brushing up" about her
door we facilely laid to chance. When the village heard that her
maid--who always offended by talking almost in a whisper--had once or
twice excused her mistress to callers, every one shut lips and hardened
hearts and said some folk acted _very_ funny about their calling duties.
But when, at the twelve o'clock breakfast of the new minister's
wife--("Like enough breakfast at noon was a real Bible custom," the
puzzled devotees solved that amazing hour), Mrs. Johnson did not appear,
the village was forced to admit that something must be wrong.
Moreover, against its will the behaviour of young Mr. Johnson was
gravely alarming Friendship. Mr. Johnson was in real estate and
insurance in the city, and this did not impress the village as a serious
business. "Because, what does he _sell_!" as Abigail Arnold said. "We
know he don't own property. He rents the very house they live in. A
doctor's a doctor an' he gives pills, an' a store's a store with the
kind o' thing you need. But it don't seem like that man could make a
real good livin' for her, dealin' vague in nothin' that way." His
income, it was felt, was problematical, and the village had settled it
that what the Oliver Wheeler Johnsons' had was chiefly wedding presents
"an' high-falutin' tastes." But, in the face of the evidence, every
afternoon at three o'clock the young husband ordered a phaëton from
Jimmy Sturgis and came home from the city to take his wife to drive.
Between shutters the village saw that little Mrs. Johnson's face did
look betrayingly pale, and the blue ostrich plume lay motionless on her
bright hair.