Right into the pretty wooded pasture, starting from a point a little
way down the road from the old house, they projected a roadway which
swept round, horseshoe fashion, till it met itself again within a
space of some twenty yards or so; and this sweep made a
frontage--upon its inclosed bit of natural, moss-turfed green,
sprinkled with birch and pine and oak trees, and with gray
out-croppings of rock here and there--for the twenty houses, behind
which opened the rest of the unspoiled, irregular, open slope and
swell and dingle of the hill-foot tract that dipped down at one
reach, we know, to the river.
The trees, and shrubs, and vines, and ferns, and stones, were left
in their wild prettiness; only some roughness of nature's wear and
tear of dead branches and broken brushwood, and the like, were taken
away, and the little footpaths cleared for pleasant walking.
There were all the little shady, sweet-smelling nooks, just as they
had been; all the little field-parlors, opening with their winding
turns between bush and rock, one into another. The twenty households
might find twenty separate places, if they all wanted to take a
private out-door tea at once.
The cellars were dug; the frames were up; workmen were busy with
brick and mortar, hammer and plane; two or three buildings were
nearly finished, and two--the two standing at the head of the
Horseshoe, looking out at the back into the deepest and pleasantest
wood-aisle, where the leaves were reddening and mellowing in the
early October frost, and the ferns were turning into tender
transparent shades of palest straw-color--were completed, and had
dwellers in them; the cheeriest, and happiest, and coziest of
neighbors; and who do you think these were?
Miss Waite and Delia, of course, in one house; and with them,
dividing the easy rent and the space that was ample for four women,
were Lucilla Waters and her mother. In the other, were Kenneth and
Rosamond Kincaid and Dorris.
Kenneth and Rosamond had been married just three weeks. Rosamond had
told him she would begin the world with him, and they had begun.
Begun in the simple, true old-fashioned way, in which, if people
only would believe it, it is even yet not impossible for young men
and women to inaugurate their homes.
They could not have had a place at Westover, and a horse and buggy
for Kenneth to go back and forth with; nor even a house in one of
the best streets of Z----; and down at East Square everything was
very modern and pretentious, based upon the calculation of rising
values and a rush of population.
But here was this new neighborhood of--well, yes,--"model houses;" a
blessed Christian speculation for a class not easily or often
reached by any speculations save those that grind and consume their
little regular means, by forcing upon them the lawless and arbitrary
prices of the day, touching them at every point in their _living_,
but not governing correspondingly their income, as even the
hod-carrier's and railroad navvy's daily pay is reached and ruled to
meet the proportion of the time.
They would be plain, simple, little-cultured people that would live
there: the very "betwixt and betweens" that Rosamond had used to
think so hardly fated. Would she go and live among them, in one of
these little new, primitive homes, planted down in the pasture-land,
on the outskirts? Would she--the pretty, graceful, elegant
Rosamond--live semi-detached with old Miss Arabel Waite?
That was just exactly the very thing she would do; the thing she did
not even let Kenneth think of first, and ask her, but that, when
they had fully agreed that they would begin life somehow, in some
right way together, according to their means, she herself had
questioned him if they might not do.
And so the houses were hurried in the building; for old Miss Arabel
must have hers before the winter; (it seems strange how often the
change comes when one could not have waited any longer for it;) and
Kenneth had mill building, and surveying, and planning, in East
Square, and Mr. Roger Marchbanks' great gray-stone mansion going up
on West Hill, to keep him busy; work enough for any talented young
fellow, fresh from the School of Technology, who had got fair hold
of a beginning, to settle down among and grasp the "next things"
that were pretty sure to follow along after the first.
Dorris has all Ruth's music scholars, and more; for there has never
been anybody to replace Miss Robbyns, and there are many young girls
in Z----, and down here in East Square, who want good teaching and
cannot go away to get it. She has also the organ-playing in the new
church.
She keeps her morning hours and her Saturdays to help Rosamond; for
they are "coöperating" here, in the new home; what was the use,
else, of having coöperated in the old? Rosamond cannot bear to have
any coarse, profane fingers laid upon her little household
gods,--her wedding-tins and her feather dusters,--while the first
gloss and freshness are on, at any rate; and with her dainty handling,
the gloss is likely to last a long while.
Such neighbors, too, as the Waites and Waterses are! How they helped
in the fitting up, running in in odd half hours from their own
nailing and placing, which they said could wait awhile, since they
weren't brides; and such real old times visiting as they have
already between the houses; coming and taking right hold, with
wiping up dinner plates as likely as not, if that is the thing in
hand; picking up what is there, as easily as "the girls" used to
help work out some last new pattern of crochet, or try over music,
or sort worsteds for gorgeous affghans for the next great fair!
Miss Arabel is apt to come in after dinner, and have a dab at the
plates; she knows she interrupts nothing then; and she "has never
been used to sitting talking, with gloves on and a parasol in her
lap." And now she has given up trying to make impossible biases, she
has such a quantity of time!
It was the matter of receiving visits from her friends who _did_ sit
with their parasols in their laps, or who only expected to see the
house, or look over wedding presents, that would be the greatest
hindrance, Rosamond realized at once; that is, if she would let it;
so she did just the funniest thing, perhaps, that ever a bride did
do: she set her door wide open from her pretty parlor, with its
books and flowers and pictures and window-draperies of hanging
vines, into the plain, cozy little kitchen, with its tin pans and
bright new buckets and its Shaker chairs; and when she was busy
there, asked her girl-friends right in, as she had used to take them
up into her bedroom, if she were doing anything pretty or had
something to show.
And they liked it, for the moment, at any rate; they could not help
it; they thought it was lovely; a kind of bewitching little play at
keeping house; though some of them went away and wondered, and said
that Rosamond Holabird had quite changed all her way of living and
her position; it was very splendid and strong-minded, they supposed;
but they never should have thought it of her, and of course she
could not keep it up.
"And the neighborhood!" was the cry. "The rabble she has got, and is
going to have, round her! All planks and sand, and tubs of mortar,
now; you have to half break your neck in getting up there; and when
it is settled it will be--such a frowze of common people! Why the
foreman of our factory has engaged a house, and Mrs. Haslam, who
actually used to do up laces for mamma, has got another!"
That is what is said--in some instances--over on West Hill, when the
elegant visitors came home from calling at the Horseshoe. Meanwhile,
what Rosamond does is something like this, which she happened to do
one bright afternoon a very little while ago.
She and Dorris had just made and baked a charming little tea-cake,
which was set on a fringed napkin in a round white china dish, and
put away in the fresh, oak-grained kitchen pantry, where not a crumb
or a slop had ever yet been allowed to rest long enough to defile or
give a flavor of staleness; out of which everything is tidily used
up while it is nice, and into which little delicate new-made bits
like this, for next meals, are always going.
The tea-table itself,--with its three plates, and its new silver,
and the pretty, thin, shallow cups and saucers, that an Irish girl
would break a half-dozen of every week,--was laid with exquisite
preciseness; the square white napkins at top and bottom over the
crimson cloth, spread to the exactness of a line, and every knife
and fork at fair right angles; the loaf was upon the white carved
trencher, and nothing to be done when Kenneth should come in, but to
draw the tea, and bring the brown cake forth.
Rosamond will not leave all these little doings to break up the
pleasant time of his return; she will have her leisure then, let her
be as busy as she may while he is away.
There was an hour or more after all was done; even after the
Panjandrums had made their state call, leaving their barouche at the
heel of the Horseshoe, and filling up all Rosamond's little
vestibule with their flounces, as they came in and went out.
The Panjandrums were new people at West Hill; very new and very
grand, as only new things and new people can be, turned out in the
latest style pushed to the last agony. Mrs. Panjandrum's dress was
all in two shades of brown, to the tips of her feathers, and the
toes of her boots, and the frill of her parasol; and her carriage
was all in two shades of brown, likewise; cushions, and tassels,
and panels; the horses themselves were cream-color, with dark
manes and tails. Next year, perhaps, everything will be in
pansy-colors,--black and violet and gold; and then she will probably
have black horses with gilded harness and royal purple tails.
It was very good of the Panjandrums, doubtless, to come down to the
Horseshoe at all; I am willing to give them all the credit of really
admiring Rosamond, and caring to see her in her little new home; but
there are two other things to be considered also: the novel kind of
home Rosamond had chosen to set up, and the human weakness of
curiosity concerning all experiments, and friends in all new lights;
also the fact of that other establishment shortly to branch out of
the Holabird connection. The family could not quite go under water,
even with people of the Panjandrum persuasion, while there was such
a pair of prospective corks to float them as Mr. and Mrs. Dakie
Thayne.
The Panjandrum carriage had scarcely bowled away, when a little
buggy and a sorrel pony came up the road, and somebody alighted with
a brisk spring, slipped the rein with a loose knot through the
fence-rail at the corner, and came up one side of the two-plank
foot-walk that ran around the Horseshoe; somebody who had come home
unexpectedly, to take his little wife to ride. Kenneth Kincaid had
business over at the new district of "Clarendon Park."
Drives, and livery-stable bills, were no part of the items allowed
for, in the programme of these young people's living; therefore
Rosamond put on her gray hat, with its soft little dove's breast,
and took her bright-striped shawl upon her arm, and let Kenneth lift
her into the buggy--for which there was no manner of need except
that they both liked it,--with very much the feeling as if she were
going off on a lovely bridal trip. They had had no bridal trip, you
see; they did not really want one; and this little impromptu drive
was such a treat!
Now the wonders of nature and the human mind show--if I must go so
far to find an argument for the statement I am making--that into a
single point of time or particle of matter may be gathered the
relations of a solar system or the experiences of a life; that a
universe may be compressed into an atom, or a molecule expanded into
a macrocosm; therefore I expect nobody to sneer at my Rosamond as
childishly nappy in her simple honeymoon, or at me for making
extravagant and unsupported assertions, when I say that this hour
and a half, and these four miles out to Clarendon Park and
back,--the lifting and the tucking in, and the setting off, the
sitting side by side in the ripe October air and the golden
twilight, the noting together every pretty turn, every flash of
autumn color in the woods, every change in the cloud-groupings
overhead, every glimpse of busy, bright-eyed squirrels up and down
the walls, every cozy, homely group of barnyard creatures at the
farmsteads, the change, the pleasure, the thought of home and
always-togetherness,--all this made the little treat of a country
ride as much to them, holding all that any wandering up and down the
whole world in their new companionship could hold,--as a going to
Europe, or a journey to mountains and falls and sea-sides and
cities, in a skimming of the States. You cannot have more than there
is; and you do not care, for more than just what stands for and
emphasizes the essential beauty, the living gladness, that no
_place_ gives, but that hearts carry about into places and baptize
them with, so that ever afterward a tender charm hangs round them,
because "we saw it _then_."
And Kenneth and Rosamond Kincaid had all these bright associations,
these beautiful glamours, these glad reminders, laid up for years to
come, in a four miles space that they might ride or walk over,
re-living it all, in the returning Octobers of many other years. I
say they had a bridal tour that day, and that the four miles were as
good as four thousand. Such little bits of signs may stand for such
high, great, blessed things!
"How lovely stillness and separateness are!" said Rosamond as they
sat in the buggy, stopping to enjoy a glimpse of the river on one
side, and a flame of burning bushes on the other, against the dark
face of a piece of woods that held the curve of road in which they
stood, in sheltered quiet. "How pretty a house would be, up on that
knoll. Do you know things puzzle me a little, Kenneth? I have almost
come to a certain conclusion lately, that people are not meant to
live apart, but that it is really everybody's duty to live in a
town, or a village, or in some gathering of human beings together.
Life tends to that, and all the needs and uses of it; and yet,--it
is so sweet in a place like this,--and however kind and social you
may be, it seems once in a while such an escape! Do you believe in
beautiful country places, and in having a little piece of creation
all to yourself, if you can get it, or if not what do you suppose
all creation is made for?"
"Perhaps just that which you have said, Rose." Rosamond has now,
what her mother hinted once, somebody to call her "Rose," with a
happy and beautiful privilege. "Perhaps to escape into. Not for one,
here and there, selfishly, all the time; but for the whole, with
fair share and opportunity. Creation is made very big, you see, and
men and women are made without wings, and with very limited hands
and feet. Also with limited lives; that makes the time-question, and
the hurry. There is a suggestion,--at any rate, a necessity,--in
that. It brings them within certain spaces, always. In spite of all
the artificial lengthening of railroads and telegraphs, there must
still be centres for daily living, intercourse, and need. People
tend to towns; they cannot establish themselves in isolated
independence. Yet packing and stifling are a cruelty and a sin. I do
not believe there ought to be any human being so poor as to be
forced to such crowding. The very way we are going to live at the
Horseshoe, seems to me an individual solution of the problem. It
ought to come to pass that our towns should be built--and if built
already, wrongly, _thinned out_,--on this principle. People are
coming to learn a little of this, and are opening parks and squares
in the great cities, finding that there must be room for bodies and
souls to reach out and breathe. If they could only take hold of some
of their swarming-places, where disease and vice are festering, and
pull down every second house and turn it into a garden space, I
believe they would do more for reform and salvation than all their
separate institutions for dealing with misery after it is let grow,
can ever effect."
"O, why _can't_ they?" cried Rose. "There is money enough,
somewhere. Why can't they do it, instead of letting the cities grow
horrid, and then running away from it themselves, and buying acres
and acres around their country places, for fear somebody should come
too near, and the country should begin to grow horrid too?"
"Because the growing and the crowding and the striving of the city
_make_ so much of the money, little wife! Because to keep everybody
fairly comfortable as the world goes along, there could not be so
many separate piles laid up; it would have to be used more as it
comes, and it could not come so fast. If nobody cared to be very
rich, and all were willing to live simply and help one another, in
little 'horseshoe neighborhoods,' there wouldn't be so much that
looks like grand achievement in the world perhaps; but I think maybe
the very angels might show themselves out of the unseen, and bring
the glory of heaven into it!"
Kenneth's color came, and his eyes glowed, as he spoke these words
that burst into eloquence with the intensity of his meaning; and
Rosamond's face was holy-pale, and her look large, as she listened;
and they were silent for a minute or so, as the pony, of his own
accord, trotted deliberately on.
"But then, the beauty, and the leisure, and all that grows out of
them to separate minds, and what the world gets through the
refinement of it! You see the puzzle comes back. Must we never, in
this life, gather round us the utmost that the world is capable of
furnishing? Must we never, out of this big creation, have the piece
to ourselves, each one as he would choose?"
"I think the Lord would show us a way out of that," said Kenneth. "I
think He would make His world turn out right, and all come to good
and sufficient use, if we did not put it in a snarl. Perhaps we can
hardly guess what we might grow to all together,--'the whole body,
fitly joined by that which every joint supplieth, increasing and
building itself up in love.' And about the quietness, and the
separateness,--we don't want to _live_ in that, Rose; we only want
it sometimes, to make us fitter to live. When the disciples began to
talk about building tabernacles on the mountain of the vision,
Christ led them straight down among the multitude, where there was a
devil to be cast out. It is the same thing in the old story of the
creation. God worked six days, and rested one."
"Well," said Rose, drawing a deep breath, "I am glad we have begun
at the Horseshoe! It was a great escape for me, Kenneth. I am such a
worldly girl in my heart. I should have liked so much to have
everything elegant and artistic about me."
"I think you do. I think you always will. Not because of the
worldliness in you, though; but the _other_-worldliness, the sense
of real beauty and truth. And I am glad that we have begun at all!
It was a greater escape for me. I was in danger of all sorts of
hardness and unbelief. I had begun to despise and hate things,
because they did not work rightly just around me. And then I fell
in, just in time, with some real, true people; and then you came,
with the 'little piece of your world,' and then I came here, and saw
what your world was, and how you were making it, Rose! How a little
community of sweet and generous fellowship was crystallizing here
among all sorts--outward sorts--of people; a little community of the
kingdom; and how you and yours had done it."
"O, Kenneth! I was the worst little atom in the whole crystal! I
only got into my place because everybody else did, and there was
nothing else left for me to do."
"You see I shall never believe that," said Kenneth, quietly. "There
is no flaw in the crystal. You were all polarized alike. And
besides, can't I see daily just how your nature draws and points?"
"Well, never mind," said Rose. "Only some particles are natural
magnets, I believe, and some get magnetized by contact. Now that we
have hit upon this metaphor, isn't it funny that our little social
experiment should have taken the shape of a horseshoe?"
"The most sociable, because the most magnetic, shape it could take.
You will see the power it will develop. There's a great deal in
merely taking form according to fundamental principles. Witness the
getting round a fireside. Isn't that a horseshoe? And could half as
much sympathy be evolved from a straight line?"
"I believe in firesides," said Rose.
"And in women who can organize and inform them," said Kenneth.
"First, firesides; then neighborhoods; that is the way the world's
life works out; and women have their hands at the heart of it. They
can do so much more there than by making the laws! When the life is
right, the laws will make themselves, or be no longer needed. They
are such mere outside patchwork,--makeshifts till a better time!"
"Wrong living must make wrong laws, whoever does the voting," said
Rosamond, sagely.
"False social standards make false commercial ones; inflated
pretensions demand inflated currency; selfish, untrue domestic
living eventuates in greedy speculations and business shams; and all
in the intriguing for corrupt legislation, to help out partial
interests. It isn't by multiplying the voting power, but by
purifying it, that the end is to be reached."
"That is so sententious, Kenneth, that I shall have to take it home
and ravel it out gradually in my mind in little shreds. In the mean
while, dear, suppose we stop in the village, and get some little
brown-ware cups for top-overs. You never ate any of my top-overs?
Well, when you do, you'll say that all the world ought to be brought
up on top-overs."
Rosamond was very particular about her little brown-ware cups. They
had to be real stone,--brown outside, and gray-blue in; and they
must be of a special size and depth. When they were found, and done
up in a long parcel, one within another, in stout paper, she carried
it herself to the chaise, and would scarcely let Kenneth hold it
while she got in; after which, she laid it carefully across her lap,
instead of putting it behind upon the cushion.
'You see they were rather dear; but they are the only kind worth
while. Those little yellow things would soak and crack, and never
look comfortable in the kitchen-closet. I give you very fair
warning, I shall always want the best of things but then I shall
take very fierce and jealous care of them,--like this.'
And she laid her little nicely-gloved hand across her homely
parcel, guardingly.
How nice it was to go buying little homely things together! Again,
it was as good and pleasant,--and meant ever so much more,--than if
it had been ordering china with a monogram in Dresden, or glass in
Prague, with a coat-of-arms engraved.
When they drove up to the Horseshoe, Dakie Thayne and Ruth met them.
They had been getting "spiritual ferns" and sumach leaves with
Dorris; "the dearest little tips," Ruth said, "of scarlet and
carbuncle, just like jets of fire."
And now they would go back to tea, and eat up the brown cake?
"Real Westover summum-bonum cake?" Dakie wanted to know. "Well, he
couldn't stand against that. Come, Ruthie!" And Ruthie came.
"What do you think Rosamond says?" said Kenneth, at the tea-table,
over the cake. "That everybody ought to live in a city or a village,
or, at least, a Horseshoe. She thinks nobody has a right to stick
his elbows out, in this world. She's in a great hurry to be packed
as closely as possible here."
"I wish the houses were all finished, and our neighbors in; that is
what I said," said Rosamond. "I should like to begin to know about
them, and feel settled; and to see flowers in their windows, and
lights at night."
"And you always hated so a 'little crowd!'" said Ruth.
"It isn't a crowd when they _don't_ crowd," said Rosamond. "I can't
bear little miserable jostles."
"How good it will be to see Rosamond here, at the head of her court;
at the top of the Horseshoe," said Dakie Thayne. "She will be quite
the 'Queen of the County.'"
"Don't!" said Rosamond. "I've a very weak spot in my head. You can't
tell the mischief you might do. No, I won't be queen!"
"Any more than you can help," said Dakie.
"She'll be Rosa Mundi, wherever she is," said Ruth affectionately.
"I think that is just grand of Kenneth and Rosamond," said Dakie
Thayne, as he and Ruth were walking home up West Hill in the
moonlight, afterward. "What do you think you and I ought to do, one
of these days, Ruthie? It sets me to considering. There are more
Horseshoes to make, I suppose, if the world is to jog on."
"_You_ have a great deal to consider about," said Ruth,
thoughtfully. "It was quite easy for Kenneth and Rosamond to
see what they ought to do. But you might make a great many
Horseshoes,--or something!"
"What do you mean by that second person plural, eh? Are you shirking
your responsibilities, or are you addressing your imaginary
Boffinses? Come, Ruthie, I can't have that! Say 'we,' and I'll face
the responsibilities and talk it all out; but I won't have anything
to do with 'you!'"
"Won't you?" said Ruth, with piteous demureness. "How can I say
'we,' then?"
"You little cat! How you can scratch!"
"There are such great things to be done in the world Dakie," Ruth
said seriously, when they had got over that with a laugh that lifted
her nicely by the "we" question. "I can't help thinking of it."
"O," said Dakie, with significant satisfaction. "We're getting on
better. Well?"
"Do you know what Hazel Ripwinkley is doing? And what Luclarion
Grapp has done? Do you know how they are going among poor people, in
dreadful places,--really living among them, Luclarion is,--and
finding out, and helping, and showing how? I thought of that
to-night, when they talked about living in cities and villages.
Luclarion has gone away down to the very bottom of it. And somehow,
one can't feel satisfied with only reaching half-way, when one
knows--and might!"
"Do you mean, Ruthie, that you and I might go and _live_ in such
places? Do you think I could take you there?"
"I don't know, Dakie," Ruth answered, forgetting in her earnestness,
to blush or hesitate for what he said;--"but I feel as if we ought
to reach down, somehow,--_away_ down! Because that, you see, is the
_most_. And to do only a little, in an easy way, when we are made so
strong to do; wouldn't it be a waste of power, and a missing of the
meaning? Isn't it the 'much' that is required of us, Dakie?"
They were under the tall hedge of the Holabird "parcel of ground,"
on the Westover slope, and close to the home gates. Dakie Thayne put
his arm round Ruth as she said that, and drew her to him.
"We will go and be neighbors somewhere, Ruthie. And we will make as
big a Horseshoe as we can."