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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Friendship Village, by Zona Gale
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Friendship Village
+
+Author: Zona Gale
+
+Release Date: September 17, 2008 [EBook #26644]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Garcia, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
+
+                             BY ZONA GALE
+
+             AUTHOR OF "THE LOVES OF PELLEAS AND ETTARRE"
+
+
+NEW YORK
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1908
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+Copyright, 1908,
+By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+
+Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1908.
+
+_Norwood Press
+J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
+Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._
+
+
+
+
+To
+EDITH, HARRIET, AND MUSA
+AND THE TWO FOR WHOM IT COMES TOO LATE
+GEORGIA AND HELEN
+THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY INSCRIBED
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+
+Friendship Village is not known to me, nor are any of its people, save
+in the comradeship which I offer here. But I commend for occupancy a
+sweeter place. For us here the long Caledonia hills, the four rhythmic
+spans of the bridge, the nearer river, the island where the first birds
+build--these teach our windows the quiet and the opportunity of the
+"home town," among the "home people." To those who have such a bond to
+cherish I commend the little real home towns, their kindly, brooding
+companionship, their doors to an efficiency as intimate as that of fairy
+fingers. If there were shrines to these things, we would seek them. The
+urgency is to recognize shrines.
+
+Portage, Wisconsin,
+September, 1908.
+
+Certain of the following chapters have appeared in _The Outlook, The
+Broadway Magazine, The Delineator, Everybody's, and Harper's Monthly
+Magazine_. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous permission
+to reprint these chapters.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+       I. The Side Door
+
+      II. The Début
+
+     III. Nobody Sick, Nobody Poor
+
+      IV. Covers for Seven
+
+       V. The Shadow of Good Things to Come
+
+      VI. Stock
+
+     VII. The Big Wind
+
+    VIII. The Grandma Ladies
+
+      IX. Not as the World Giveth
+
+       X. Lonesome--I
+
+      XI. Lonesome--II
+
+     XII. Of the Sky and Some Rosemary
+
+    XIII. Top Floor Back
+
+     XIV. An Epilogue
+
+      XV. The Tea Party
+
+     XVI. What is That in thine Hand?
+
+    XVII. Put on thy Beautiful Garments
+
+   XVIII. In the Wilderness a Cedar
+
+     XIX. Herself
+
+      XX. The Hidings of Power
+
+
+
+
+Friendship Village
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE SIDE DOOR
+
+
+It is as if Friendship Village were to say:--
+
+"There is no help for it. A telephone line, antique oak chairs, kitchen
+cabinets, a new doctor, and the like are upon us. But we shall be
+mediæval directly--we and our improvements. Really, we are so now, if
+you know how to look."
+
+And are we not so? We are one long street, rambling from sun to sun,
+inheriting traits of the parent country roads which we unite. And we are
+cross streets, members of the same family, properly imitative, proving
+our ancestorship in a primeval genius for trees, or bursting out in
+inexplicable weaknesses of Court-House, Engine-House, Town Hall, and
+Telephone Office. Ultimately our stock dwindles out in a slaughter-yard
+and a few detached houses of milkmen. The cemetery is delicately put
+behind us, under a hill. There is nothing mediæval in all this, one
+would say. But then see how we wear our rue:--
+
+When one of us telephones, she will scrupulously ask for the number, not
+the name, for it says so at the top of every page. "Give me one-one,"
+she will put it, with an impersonality as fine as if she were calling
+for four figures. And Central will answer:--
+
+"Well, I just saw Mis' Holcomb go 'crost the street. I'll call you, if
+you want, when she comes back."
+
+Or, "I don't think you better ring the Helmans' just now. They were
+awake 'most all night with one o' Mis' Helman's attacks."
+
+Or, "Doctor June's invited to Mis' Sykes's for tea. Shall I give him to
+you there?"
+
+The telephone is modern enough. But in our use of it is there not a
+flavour as of an Elder Time, to be caught by Them of Many Years from
+Now? And already we may catch this flavour, as our Britain
+great-great-lady grandmothers, and more, may have been conscious of the
+old fashion of sitting in bowers. If only they were conscious like that!
+To be sure of it would be to touch their hands in the margins of the
+ballad books.
+
+Or we telephone to the Livery Barn and Boarding Stable for the little
+blacks, celebrated for their self-control in encounters with the
+Proudfits' motor-car. The stable-boy answers that the little blacks are
+at "the funeral." And after he has gone off to ask his employer what is
+in then, the employer, who in his unofficial moments is our neighbour,
+our church choir bass, our landlord even, comes and tells us that, after
+all, we may have the little blacks, and he himself brings them round at
+once,--the same little blacks that we meant all along. And when, quite
+naturally, we wonder at the boy's version, we learn: "Oh, why, the
+blacks was standin' just acrost the street, waitin' at the church door,
+hitched to the hearse. I took 'em out an' put in the bays. I says to
+myself: 'The corp won't care.'" Someway the Proudfits' car and the
+stable telephone must themselves have slipped from modernity to old
+fashion before that incident shall quite come into its own.
+
+So it is with certain of our domestic ways. For example, Mis' Postmaster
+Sykes--in Friendship Village every woman assumes for given name the
+employment of her husband--has some fine modern china and much solid
+silver in extremely good taste, so much, indeed, that she is wont to
+confess to having cleaned forty, or sixty, or seventy-five
+pieces--"seventy-five pieces of solid silver have I cleaned this
+morning. You can say what you want to, nice things are a _rill_ care."
+Yet--surely this is the proper conjunction--Mis' Sykes is currently
+reported to rise in the night preceding the days of her house cleaning,
+and to take her carpets out in the back yard, and there softly to sweep
+and sweep them so that, at their official cleaning next day, the
+neighbours may witness how little dirt is whipped out on the line. Ought
+she not to have old-fashioned silver and egg-shell china and drop-leaf
+mahogany to fit the practice? Instead of daisy and wild-rose patterns in
+"solid," and art curtains, and mission chairs, and a white-enamelled
+refrigerator, and a gas range.
+
+We have the latest funeral equipment,--black broadcloth-covered
+supports, a coffin carriage for up-and-down the aisles, natural palms to
+order, and the pulleys to "let them down slow"; and yet our individual
+funeral capacity has been such that we can tell what every woman who has
+died in Friendship for years has "done without": Mis' Grocer Stew, her
+of all folks, had done without new-style flat-irons; Mis' Worth had used
+the bread pan to wash dishes in; Mis' Jeweller Sprague--the _first_ Mis'
+Sprague--had had only six bread and butter knives, her that could get
+wholesale too.... And we have little maid-servants who answer our bells
+in caps and trays, so to say; but this savour of jestership is
+authentic, for any one of them is likely to do as of late did Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss's maid,--answer, at dinner-with-guests, that
+there were no more mashed potatoes, "_or else_, there won't be any left
+to warm up for your breakfasts." ... And though we have our daily
+newspaper, receiving Associated Press service, yet, as Mis' Amanda
+Toplady observed, it is "only _very_ lately that they have mentioned in
+the _Daily_ the birth of a child, or anything that had anything of a
+_tang_ to it."
+
+We put new wine in old bottles, but also we use new bottles to hold our
+old wine. For, consider the name of our main street: is this Main or
+Clark or Cook or Grand Street, according to the register of the main
+streets of towns? Instead, for its half-mile of village life, the Plank
+Road, macadamized and arc-lighted, is called Daphne Street. Daphne
+Street! I love to wonder why. Did our dear Doctor June's father name it
+when he set the five hundred elms and oaks which glorify us? Or did
+Daphne herself take this way on the day of her flight, so that when they
+came to draught the town, they recognized that it _was_ Daphne Street,
+and so were spared the trouble of naming it? Or did the Future
+anonymously toss us back the suggestion, thrifty of some day of her own
+when she might remember us and say, "_Daphne Street!_" Already some of
+us smile with a secret nod at something when we direct a stranger, "You
+will find the Telegraph and Cable Office two blocks down, on Daphne
+Street." "The Commercial Travellers' House, the Abigail Arnold Home
+Bakery, the Post-office and Armoury are in the same block on Daphne
+Street." Or, "The Electric Light Office is at the corner of Dunn and
+Daphne." It is not wonderful that Daphne herself, foreseeing these
+things, did not stay, but lifted her laurels somewhat nearer
+Tempe,--although there are those of us who like to fancy that she is
+here all the time in our Daphne-street magic: the fire bell, the tulip
+beds, and the twilight bonfires. For how else, in all reason, has the
+name persisted?
+
+Of late a new doctor has appeared--one may say, has abounded: a surgeon
+who, such is his zeal, will almost perform an operation over the
+telephone and, we have come somewhat cynically to believe, would prefer
+doing so to not operating at all. As Calliope Marsh puts it:--
+
+"He is great on operations, that little doctor. Let him go into any
+house, an' some o' the family, seems though, has to be operated on,
+usually inside o' twelve hours. It'll get so that as soon as he strikes
+the front porch, they'll commence sterilizin' water. I donno but some'll
+go an' put on the tea-kettle if they even see him drive past."
+
+_Why_ within twelve hours, we wonder when we hear the edict? Why never
+fourteen hours, or six? How does it happen that no matter at what stage
+of the malady the new doctor is called, the patient always has to be
+operated on within twelve hours? Is it that everybody has a bunch and
+goes about not knowing it until he appears? Or is he a kind of basanite
+for bunches, and do they come out on us at the sight of him? There are
+those of us who almost hesitate to take his hand, fearing that he will
+fix us with his eye, point somewhere about, and tell us, "Within twelve
+hours, _if_ you want your life your own." But in spite of his skill and
+his modernity, in our midst there persist those who, in a scientific
+night, would die rather than risk our advantages.
+
+Thus the New shoulders the Old, and our transition is still swift enough
+to be a spectacle, as was its earlier phase which gave over our Middle
+West to cabins and plough horses, with a tendency away from wigwams and
+bob-whites. And in this local warfare between Old and New a chief figure
+is Calliope Marsh--who just said that about the new doctor. She is a
+little rosy wrinkled creature officially--though no other than
+officially--pertaining to sixty years; mender of lace, seller of
+extracts, and music teacher, but of the three she thinks of the last as
+her true vocation. ("I come honestly by that," she says. "You know my
+father before me was rill musical. I was babtized Calliope because a
+circus with one come through the town the day't I was born.") And with
+her, too, the grafting of to-morrow upon yesterday is unconscious; or
+only momentarily conscious, as when she phrased it:--
+
+"Land, land, I like New as well as anybody. But I want it should be put
+in the Old kind o' gentle, like an _i_-dee in your mind, an' not sudden,
+like a bullet in your brain."
+
+In her acceptance of innovations Calliope symbolizes the fine Friendship
+tendency to scientific procedure, to the penetration of the unknown
+through the known, the explication of mystery by natural law. And when
+to the bright-figured paper and pictures of her little sitting room she
+had added a print of the Mona Lisa, she observed:--
+
+"She sort o' lifts me up, like somethin' I've thought of, myself. But I
+don't see any sense in raisin' a question about what her smile means. I
+told the agent so. 'Whenever I set for my photograph,' I says to him, 'I
+always have that same silly smile on my face.'"
+
+With us all the Friendship idea prevails: we accept what Progress sends,
+but we regard it in our own fashion. Our improvements, like our
+entertainments, our funerals, our holidays, and our very loves, are but
+Friendship Village exponents of the modern spirit. Perhaps, in a
+tenderer significance than she meant, Calliope characterized us when she
+said:--
+
+"This town is more like a back door than a front--or, givin' it full
+credit, _anyhow_, it's no more'n a side door, with no vines."
+
+For indeed, we are a kind of middle door to experience, minus the fuss
+of official arriving and, too, without the old odours of the kitchen
+savoury beds; but having, instead, a serene side-door existence,
+partaking of both electric bells and of neighbours with shawls pinned
+over their heads.
+
+Only at one point Calliope was wrong. There are vines, with tendrils and
+flowers and many birds.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE DÉBUT
+
+
+Mrs. Ricker, "washens, scrubben, work by the day or Our," as the sign of
+her own lettering announced, had come into a little fortune by the death
+of her first husband, Al Kitton, early divorced and late repentant. Just
+before my arrival in Friendship she had bought a respectable frame house
+in the heart of the village,--for a village will have a heart instead of
+having a boulevard,--and with her daughter Emerel she had set up a
+modest establishment with Ingrain carpets and parlour pieces, and a bit
+of grass in front. Thus Emerel Kitton--we, in our simple, penultimate
+way, called it Kitten--became a kind of heiress. She had been christened
+Emma Ella, but her mother, of her love of order, had tidied the name to
+Emerel, and Friendship had adopted the form, perhaps as having about it
+something pleasing and jewel-like. Though Emerel was in the thirties at
+the time of her inheritance, she was still pretty, shy, conformable; and
+yet there was no disguising that she was nearly a spinster when, as soon
+as the white house was settled, Mrs. Ricker issued invitations to her
+daughter's coming-out party.
+
+     You aRe Invite
+           to A
+     Comen Out Recep
+    Next wenesday Night at eigt
+     At Her Home
+     Emma Ella Kitton
+   Mrs. Ricker and Kitton
+     Pa
+
+the invitations said, and the "Pa" was divined to imply "Please answer."
+
+"It's Kitton's money an' it's his daughter. I hed to hev him in it
+somehow," Mrs. Ricker explained her double signature. "You see," she
+added, "up till now I ain't never been situate' so's Emerel _could_ come
+out. I've always wanted to give her things, too, but 't seems like when
+I've tried, everything's shook its fist at me. It ain't too late. Emerel
+looks just like she did fifteen years ago, don't she?"
+
+It was at once observed that if Emerel shared her mother's enthusiasm
+for the project, she did not betray it. But then no one knew much about
+Emerel save that she was engaged, and had been so for some years, to big
+Abe Daniel, the Methodist tenor, a circumstance wholly unconsidered in
+the scheme of her début.
+
+Quite simply and with happy pride, Mrs. Ricker and Kitton issued her
+invitations to every one in the village who had ever employed her. And
+the village was divided against itself.
+
+"How can we?" Mis' Postmaster Sykes demanded, "I ask you. There's things
+to omit an' there's things to observe. We should be The Laughing Stock."
+
+"The Laughing Stock," variously echoed her followers.
+
+On the other hand:--
+
+"Land, o' course we'll all go," Mis' Amanda Toplady comfortably settled
+it, "an' take Emerel a deboo present, civilized. The dear child."
+
+And to that many of us gladly assented, Timothy, big Amanda's little
+husband, going so far as to add:
+
+"I do vum, the Sykeses feels the post-office like it was that much
+oats."
+
+A day later Timothy's opinion seemed, he thought, to be verified. Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes issued "written invites to an evening party, hot supper
+and like that," as Friendship communicated it, to be given on the very
+night of Emerel's début.
+
+Friendship was shaken. Never in the history of the village had two
+social affairs been set for the same hour. Indeed, more than one hostess
+had postponed an impending tea-party or thimble party or "afternoon
+coffee" or "five o'clock supper" on hearing that another was planned for
+the same day. And now, when there were those of us anxious to "do
+something nice" for hard-working little Mrs. Ricker, the Sykeses had
+deliberately sought the forbidden ground. And Society dare not deny Mis'
+Sykes, for besides "being who she was" ("She's the leader in Friendship
+if they _is_ a leader," we said, emphatically implying that there was
+none), she kept two maids,--little young thing and a _rill_ hired
+girl,--entertained "above the most," put out her sewing and wore, we
+kept in the back of our minds, a bar pin, solid, with "four solitaires"
+in it. And, "Oh, you know," Calliope Marsh admitted to me later, "Mis'
+Sykes is rilly a great society woman. They isn't anybody's funeral that
+she don't get to ride to the cemet'ry."
+
+Mrs. Ricker and Kitton accepted the situation with fine philosophy.
+
+"Of course," she said, "the whole town can dance to the Sykeses'
+fiddlin' if they want. But it's a pretty pass if they do let anybody
+step in before me that's washed for 'em an' cleaned their houses years
+on end."
+
+My own course was pleasantly simple. Mrs. Ricker and Kitton had included
+me on her list, accredited, no doubt, because a few weeks earlier she
+had helped me to settle my belongings in Oldmoxon house, and since then
+had twice swept for me, and was to come in a day or two to do so again.
+As I had instantly accepted her invitation, I had no choice when Mis'
+Sykes's "written invite" came, even though when it arrived Mis' Sykes
+herself was calling on me.
+
+"Well said," she observed, when she saw a neighbour's little girl, her
+temporary servitor, coming up my walk with the invitations in a paper
+bag to be kept clean, "I meant to get my call made on you before your
+invite got here. I hope you'll overlook taking us both together. I've
+meant to call on you before, but I declare it looked like a mountain to
+me to get started out. Don't you find your calls a rill chore?"
+
+But Mis' Sykes's visit was, she confessed, "Errand as well as Call."
+
+"The Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality," she told
+me, as she rose to go, "is to our wits' end to get up a new
+entertainment. We want to give something, and we want it should be rill
+new and spicey, but of course it has to be pretty quiet, owing to the
+Cause--the Dead, so. It bars us from home-talent evenings or festivals
+or like that. And the minute I saw the inside o' your house it come to
+me: of course you know your house is differ'nt from Friendship. If I'd
+been shot out of a gun into it, I wouldn't 'a' sensed I was in
+Friendship at all. You've got nice things, all carved an' hard to dust.
+The Oldmoxons use' to do a lot o' entertainin', an' everybody remembers
+it, an' the house has been shut quite some time. Well, now, you've been
+ask' to join the Sodality. An' if you was to announce an Evening Benefit
+for it, here in your home, the whole town'd come out to it hot-foot.
+We're owin' Zittelhof on Eph Cadoza's coffin yet, an' I shouldn't wonder
+an' that one evening would pay him all off _and_, same time, get you
+rill well acquainted. Don't you think it's a nice _i_-dea?"
+
+As I had come to Friendship chiefly to get away from everywhere, I
+thought that I had never heard such a bad plan. But inasmuch as I was
+obliged to refuse outright one invitation of my visitor's, about the
+other I weakly temporized and promised to let her know. And she went
+away, deploring my hasty acceptance of Mrs. Ricker and Kitton, although,
+"How could you tell?" she strove to excuse me. "A person coming to a
+strange town so, _of course_ they accept all their invitations good
+faith. And then her signing her name that way might mislead you. It
+gives a rill sensation of a hyphen. But still, the spelling--after all
+you'd ought--"
+
+She looked at me with tardy suspicion.
+
+"Some geniuses can't spell very well, you know," I defended my
+discrimination.
+
+"That's so," she admitted brightly; "I see you're literary."
+
+The next morning the other principal, Mrs. Ricker and Kitton, arrived to
+keep her engagement with me. She was a little woman, suggesting wire,
+which gave and sprang when she moved, and paper, which crackled when she
+laughed. Her speech was all independence, confidence, self-possession;
+but in her silences I have seldom seen so wistful a face as hers.
+
+In response to my question:--
+
+"Oh," Mrs. Ricker and Kitton said brightly, "everything's goin' fine. I
+s'pose the town's still decidin' between us, but up to now I ain't had
+but one regrets that can't come--that's Mis' Stew. She wrote it was on
+account o' domestic affliction, an' I hadn't heard what, so I went right
+down. 'Seems nobody had died--she ain't much of any family, anyway. But
+she'd wrote her letter out of a letter book, an' the only one she could
+find regrettin' an invite give domestic affliction for the reason. She
+said she didn't know a letter like that hed to be true, an' I don't know
+as it does, either."
+
+She stood silent for a moment, searching my face.
+
+"Look-a-here," she said; "they's somethin' I thought of. Mebbe you've
+heard of it bein' done in the City somewheres. Do you s'pose folks'd be
+willin' to send Emerel's an' my funeral flowers to the comin' out party
+_instead_?"
+
+"Funeral...?" I doubted.
+
+"Grave flowers," she explained. "You know, they're a perfect waste so
+far's the General Dead is concerned. An' land knows, the fam'ly don't
+sense 'em much more. Anyway, Emerel an' I ain't got any fam'ly. An' if
+folks'd be willin' to send us what flowers they would send us if we died
+_now_, then they'd do us some good. We'll never want 'em more'n we do
+now, dead or alive. 'Least, I won't. Emerel, she don't seem to care. But
+do you think it'd be all right if I was to mention it out around?"
+
+My desire to have this happen I did my best not to confuse with a
+disinterested opinion. But indeed Mrs. Ricker and Kitton was seldom in
+need of an opinion, as was proved that night by the appearance of this
+notice in the Friendship _Daily_:--
+
+     All that would give flowers when dead please send same anyhow and
+     not expected to send same if we do die afterwards.
+
+     MRS. RICKER AND KITTON.
+
+All of Friendship society which intended to accept Mis' Sykes's
+invitation hastened with relieved eagerness to follow with flowers its
+regrets to the "comen out recep." For every one was genuinely attached
+to the little laundress and interested in her welfare--up to the point
+of sacrificing social interests in the eyes of the Sykeses. Friendship
+gardens were rich with Autumn, cosmos and salvia and opulent asters, and
+on the morning of the two parties this store of sweetness was rifled for
+the débutante. By noon Mrs. Ricker and Kitton was saying in awe, "Nobody
+in Friendship ever had this many flowers, dead, or alive, or rich." And
+although some of us grieved that Mis' Postmaster Sykes had shown what
+she named her good-will by ordering from the town a pillow of white
+carnations (but with no "wording"), Mrs. Ricker and Kitton received even
+this suggestive token with simple-hearted delight.
+
+"It'll look lovely on the lamp shelf," she observed. "I've often planned
+how nice my parlour'd trim up for a funeral."
+
+In the preparation for the two events, the one unconcerned and
+unconsulted appeared to be the débutante herself. We never said
+"Emerel's party"; we all said "Mis' Ricker's party." We knew that Mrs.
+Ricker and Kitton was putting painstaking care on Emerel's coming-out
+dress, which was to be a surprise, but otherwise Emerel was seldom even
+mentioned in connection with her début. And whenever we saw her, it was
+as Friendship had seen her for two years,--walking quietly with Abe
+Daniel, her betrothed.
+
+"It's doin' things kind o' backwards," Calliope Marsh said, "engaged
+first an' comin' out in society afterwards. But I donno as it's any more
+backwards than ridin' to the cemet'ry feet first. What's what all
+depends on what you agree on for What. If it ain't your soul you mean
+about," she added cryptically.
+
+The Topladys and others of us who united to uphold Emerel, and
+especially to uphold Emerel's mother, could not but realize that the
+majority of Friendship society had regretted to decline the début party,
+and had been pleased to accept the hospitality of the Postmaster
+Sykeses. I dare say that this may have been partly why, in the usual
+self-indulgence of challenge, I put on my prettiest frock for the party
+and prepared to set out somewhat early, hoping for the amusement of
+sharing in the finishing touches. But as I was leaving my house Calliope
+Marsh arrived, buttoned tightly in her best gray henrietta, her cheeks
+hot with some intense excitement.
+
+"Well," she said without preface, "they've done it. Emerel Kitton's
+married. She's just married Abe at the parsonage to get out o' bein'
+debooed. They've gone to take the train now."
+
+No one could fail to see what this would mean to Mrs. Ricker and Kitton,
+and, rather than the newly married Emerel, it was she who absorbed our
+speculation.
+
+"Mis' Ricker just slimpsed," Calliope told me. "I says to her: 'Look
+here, Mis' Ricker, don't you go givin' in. Your kitchen's a sight with
+the good things o' your hand--think o' that,' I told her; 'think how you
+mortgaged your very funeral for to-night, an' brace yourself up,' An'
+she says, awful pitiful: 'I _can't_, Calliope,' she says. ''T seems like
+this slips the pins right out. They ain't nothin' to deboo with now,
+anyway,' she told me. 'How can I?'"
+
+"Oh, poor Mrs. Ricker!" I exclaimed.
+
+Calliope looked at me intently.
+
+"Well," she said, "that's what I run in about. You're a stranger just
+fresh come here. You ain't met folks much yet. An' Mis' Sykes, she's
+just crazy to get a-hold o' you an' your house for the Sodality. An' the
+only thing I could think of for Mis' Ricker--well, would you stand up
+with Mis' Ricker to-night an' shake all their hands? An' sort o' leave
+her deboo for _you_, you might say?"
+
+I think that I loved Calliope for this even before she understood my
+assent. But she added something which puzzled me.
+
+"If I was you," she observed, "I'd do somethin' else to-night, too. You
+could do it--or I could do it for you. You don't expect to let Mis'
+Sykes hev the Sodality here, do you?"
+
+"I might have had it here," I said impulsively, "if she had not done
+this to poor little Mrs. Ricker."
+
+"Would--would you give me the lief to say that?" Calliope asked
+demurely.
+
+I had no objection in the world to any one knowing my opinion of Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes's proceeding,--"one of her preposterousnesses,"
+Calliope called it,--and I said so, and set off for Mrs. Ricker's, while
+Calliope herself flew somewhere else on some last mission. And, "Mis'
+Sykes'd ought to be showed," she called to me over-shoulder. "That
+woman's got a sinful pride. She'd wear fur in August to prove she could
+afford to hev moths!"
+
+The Ricker parlour was a garden which sloped gently, as a garden should,
+for the house was old and the parlour floor sagged toward the entrance
+so that the front of the organ was propped on wooden blocks. The room
+was bedizened with flowers, in dishes, tins, and gallon jars, so that it
+seemed some way an alien thing, like a prune horse. On the lamp shelf
+was the huge white carnation pillow, across which the hostess had
+inscribed "welcom," in stems.
+
+Within ten minutes of the appointed hour all those who had been pleased
+to accept were in the rooms, and Mrs. Ricker and Kitton and I, standing
+among the funeral flowers, received the guests while Calliope, hovering
+at the door, gave the key with: "Ain't you heard? Emerel's a bride
+instead of a debbytant. Ain't it a rill joke? Married to-night an' we're
+here to celebrate. Throw off your things." Then she hopelessly involved
+them in a presentation to me, and between us we contrived to elide Mrs.
+Ricker and Kitton from all save her perfunctory office, until her voice
+and lips ceased their trembling. Poor little hostess, in her starched
+lawn which had seemed to her adequate for her unpretentious rôle of
+mother! All her humour and independence and self-possession had left
+her, and in their stead, on what was to have been her great night, had
+settled only the immemorial wistfulness.
+
+Although I did not then foresee it, the guests that evening were
+destined to point me to many meanings, like sketches in the note-book of
+a patient Pen. I am fond of remembering them as I saw them first: the
+Topladys, that great Mis' Amanda, ponderous, majestic, and suggesting
+black grosgrain, her beaming way of whole-hearted approval not quite
+masking the critical, house-wife glances which she continually cast; and
+little Timothy, her husband, who, in company, went quite out of his head
+and could think of nothing to say save "Blisterin' Benson, what I think
+is this: ain't everything movin' off nice?" Dear Doctor June, pastor
+emeritus of Friendship, since he was so identified with all the village
+interests that not many could tell from what church he had retired. (At
+each of the three Friendship churches he rented a pew, and contributed
+impartially to their beneficences; and, "seems to me the Lord would of,"
+he sometimes apologized for this.) Photographer Jimmy Sturgis, who stood
+about with one eye shut, and who drove the 'bus, took charge of the
+mail-bags, conducted a photograph gallery, and painted portraits. ("The
+Dead From Photos a specialty," was tacked on the risers of the stairs
+leading to his studio.) And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, who was an
+invalid and "very, very seldom got out." (Not, I was to learn, an
+invalid because of ill health, but by nature. She was an invalid as
+other people are blond or brunette, and no more to be said about it.)
+Miss Liddy Ember, the village seamstress, and her beautiful sister
+Ellen, who was "not quite right," and whom Miss Liddy took about and
+treated like a child until the times when Ellen "come herself again,"
+and then she quite overshadowed in personality little busy Miss Liddy.
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and Eppleby Holcomb, and the "Other"
+Holcombs; Mis' Doctor Helman, the Gekerjecks, who "kept the drug store,"
+and scented the world with musk and essences. ("Musk on one handkerchief
+and some kind o' flower scent on your other one," Mis' Gekerjeck was
+wont to say, "then you can suit everybody, say who who will.")--These
+and the others Mrs. Ricker and Kitton and I received, standing before
+the white carnation pillow. And I, who had come to Friendship to get
+away from everywhere, found myself the one to whom they did honour, as
+they were to have honoured Emerel.
+
+When the hour for supper came, Mrs. Ricker and Kitton excused herself
+because she must "see to gettin' it on to the plates," and Mis' Toplady,
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, Calliope, and I "handed." We had all
+lent silver and dishes--indeed, save at Mis' Sykes's (and of course at
+the Proudfits' of Proudfit estate), there is rarely a Friendship party
+at which the pantries of the guests are not represented, an arrangement
+seeming almost to hold in anticipation certain social and political
+ideals. (If the telephone yields us an invitation from those whom we
+know best, we always answer: "Thank you. I will. What do you want me to
+send over?" Is there such a matter-of-course federation on any
+boulevard?) And after the guests had been served and the talk had been
+resumed, we four who had "handed" sat down, with Mrs. Ricker and Kitton,
+at meat, at a corner of the kitchen table.
+
+"Everything tastes like so much chips to me when I hev company, anyhow,"
+the hostess said sadly, "but to-night it's got the regular salt-pork
+taste. When I'm nervous or got delegates or comin' down with anything, I
+always taste salt pork."
+
+"Well, everything's all of a whirl to me," Calliope confessed, "an' I
+should think your brains, Mis' Ricker, 'd be fair rarin' 'round in your
+head."
+
+"Who didn't eat what?" Mrs. Ricker and Kitton asked listlessly. "I meant
+to keep track when the plates come out, but I didn't. Did they all take
+a-hold rill good?"
+
+"They wa'n't any mincin' 't _I_ see," Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss
+assured her. "Everything you had was lovely, an' everybody made 'way
+with all they got."
+
+We might have kept indefinitely on at these fascinating comparisons, but
+some unaccountable stir and bustle and rise of talk in the other rooms
+persuaded our attention. ("Can they be goin' _home_?" cried that great
+Mis' Amanda Toplady. "If they are, I'll go bail Timothy Toplady started
+it." And, "I bet they've broke the finger bowl," Mrs. Ricker and Kitton
+prophesied darkly.) And then we all went in to see what had happened,
+but it was what none of us could possibly have forecast: Crowding in the
+parlour, overflowing into the sitting room, still entering from the
+porch, were Postmaster and Mis' Postmaster Sykes and _all_ their guests.
+
+It was quite as if Wishes had gathered head and spirited them there. I
+remember the white little face of Mrs. Ricker and Kitton, luminously
+gratified to the point of triumph; and Mis' Sykes's brisk and cordial
+"No reason why we shouldn't go to two receptions in an evening, like
+they do in the City, Mis' Ricker, is they?" And the aplomb of the
+hostess's self-respecting, corrective "_An'_ Kitton. 'Count of Al bein'
+so thoughtful in death." And then to my amazement Mis' Postmaster Sykes
+turned to me and held out both hands.
+
+"I _am_ so _glad_," she said, almost in the rhythm of certain exhausts,
+"that you've decided to hev Sodality at your house. You must just let me
+take a-hold of it for you and _run_ it. And I'm going to propose your
+name the very next meeting we hev, can't I?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I walked home with Calliope when we had left Mrs. Ricker and Kitton,
+tired but triumphant. ("Land," the hostess said, "now it's turned out so
+nice, I donno but I'm rill pleased Emerel's married. I'd hate to think
+o' borrowin' all them things over again for a weddin'.") And in the dark
+street Calliope said to me:--
+
+"You see what I done, I guess. I told you Mis' Sykes was reg'lar
+up-in-arms about usin' your house--though I think the rill reason is she
+wants to get upstairs in it. You know how some are. So I marched myself
+up there before the party, an' I told her you wasn't goin' to hev
+Sodality sole because you thought she'd been so mean to Mis' Ricker. An'
+I give her to understand sharp off 't she'd better do what she did do if
+she wanted you in the Sodality at all. 'An',' s'I, 'I donno what she'll
+think o' you anyway, not knowin' enough to go to two companies in one
+evenin', like the City, even if one is your own.' She see reason. You
+know, Mis' Sykes an' I are kind o' connections, but you can make even
+your relations see sense if you go at 'em right. I donno," Calliope
+ended doubtfully, "but I done wrong. An' yet I feel good friends with my
+backbone too, like I'd done right!"
+
+And it was so that having come to Friendship Village to get away from
+everywhere, I yet found myself abruptly launched in its society,
+committed to its Sodality, and, best of all, friends with Calliope
+Marsh.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+NOBODY SICK, NOBODY POOR
+
+
+Two days before Thanksgiving the air was already filled with white
+turkey feathers, and I stood at a window and watched until the
+loneliness of my still house seemed like something pointing a mocking
+finger at me. When I could bear it no longer I went out in the snow, and
+through the soft drifts I fought my way up the Plank Road toward the
+village.
+
+I had almost passed the little bundled figure before I recognized
+Calliope. She was walking in the middle of the road, as in Friendship we
+all walk in winter; and neither of us had umbrellas. I think that I
+distrust people who put up umbrellas on a country road in a fall of
+friendly flakes.
+
+Instead of inquiring perfunctorily how I did, she greeted me with a
+fragment of what she had been thinking--which is always as if one were
+to open a door of his mind to you instead of signing you greeting from a
+closed window.
+
+"I just been tellin' myself," she looked up to say without preface,
+"that if I could see one more good old-fashion' Thanksgivin', life'd
+sort o' smooth out. An' land knows, it needs some smoothin' out for me."
+
+With this I remember that it was as if my own loneliness spoke for me.
+At my reply Calliope looked at me quickly--as if I, too, had opened a
+door.
+
+"Sometimes Thanksgivin' _is_ some like seein' the sun shine when you're
+feelin' rill rainy yourself," she said thoughtfully.
+
+She held out her blue-mittened hand and let the flakes fall on it in
+stars and coronets.
+
+"I wonder," she asked evenly, "if you'd help me get up a Thanksgivin'
+dinner for a few poor sick folks here in Friendship?"
+
+In order to keep my self-respect, I recall that I was as ungracious as
+possible. I think I said that the day meant so little to me that I was
+willing to do anything to avoid spending it alone. A statement which
+seems to me now not to bristle with logic.
+
+"That's nice of you," Calliope replied genially. Then she hesitated,
+looking down Daphne Street, which the Plank Road had become, toward
+certain white houses. There were the homes of Mis' Mayor Uppers, Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and the Liberty sisters,--all substantial
+dignified houses, typical of the simple prosperity of the countryside.
+
+"The only trouble," she added simply, "is that in Friendship I don't
+know of a soul rill sick, nor a soul what you might call poor."
+
+At this I laughed, unwillingly enough. Dear Calliope! Here indeed was a
+drawback to her project.
+
+"Honestly," she said reflectively, "Friendship can't seem to do anything
+like any other town. When the new minister come here, he give out he was
+goin' to do settlement work. An' his second week in the place he come to
+me with a reg'lar hang-dog look. 'What kind of a town is this?' he says
+to me, disgusted. 'They ain't nobody sick in it an' they ain't nobody
+poor!' I guess he could 'a' got along without the poor--most of us can.
+But we mostly like to hev a few sick to carry the flowers off our house
+plants to, an' now an' then a tumbler o' jell. An' yet I've known weeks
+at a time when they wasn't a soul rill flat down sick in Friendship.
+It's so now. An' that's hard, when you're young an' enthusiastic, like
+the minister."
+
+"But where are you going to find your guests then, Calliope?" I asked
+curiously.
+
+"Well," she said brightly, "I was just plannin' as you come up with me.
+An' I says to myself: 'God give me to live in a little bit of a place
+where we've all got enough to get along on, an' Thanksgivin' finds us
+all in health. It looks like He'd afflicted us by lettin' us hev nobody
+to do for.' An' then it come to me that if we was to get up the
+dinner,--with all the misery an' hunger they is in the world,--God in
+His goodness would let some of it come our way to be fed. 'In the
+wilderness a cedar,' you know--as Liddy Ember an' I was always tellin'
+each other when we kep' shop together. An' so to-day I said to myself
+I'd go to work an' get up the dinner an' trust there'd be eaters for
+it."
+
+"Why, Calliope," I said, "Calliope!"
+
+"I ain't got much to do with, myself," she added apologetically;
+"the most I've got in my sullar, I guess, is a gallon jar o'
+watermelon pickles. I could give that. You don't think it sounds
+irreverent--connectin' God with a big dinner, so?" she asked anxiously.
+
+And, at my reply:--
+
+"Well, then," she said briskly, "let's step in an' see a few folks that
+might be able to tell us of somebody to do for. Let's ask Mis' Mayor
+Uppers an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, an' the Liberty girls."
+
+Because I was lonely and idle, and because I dreaded inexpressibly going
+back to my still house, I went with her. Her ways were a kind of
+entertainment, and I remember that I believed my leisure to be infinite.
+
+We turned first toward the big shuttered house of Mis' Mayor Uppers, to
+whom, although her husband had been a year ago removed from office,
+discredited, and had not since been seen in Friendship, we yet gave her
+old proud title, as if she had been Former Lady Mayoress. For the
+present mayor, Authority Hubblethwaite, was, as Calliope said,
+"unconnect'."
+
+I watched Mis' Uppers in some curiosity while Calliope explained that
+she was planning a dinner for the poor and sick,--"the lame and the sick
+that's comfortable enough off to eat,"--and could she suggest some poor
+and sick to ask? Mis' Uppers was like a vinegar cruet of mine, slim and
+tall, with a little grotesquely puckered face for a stopper, as if the
+whole known world were sour.
+
+"I'm sure," she said humbly, "it's a nice i-dea. But I declare, I'm put
+to it to suggest. We ain't got nobody sick nor nobody poor in
+Friendship, you know."
+
+"Don't you know of anybody kind o' hard up? Or somebody that, if they
+ain't down sick, feels sort o' spindlin'?" Calliope asked anxiously.
+
+Mis' Uppers thought, rocking a little and running a pin in and out of a
+fold of her skirt.
+
+"No," she said at length, "I don't know a soul. I think the church'd
+give a good deal if a real poor family'd come here to do for. Since the
+Cadozas went, we ain't known which way to look for poor. Mis' Ricker
+gettin' her fortune so puts her beyond the wolf. An' Peleg Bemus, you
+can't _get_ him to take anything. No, I don't know of anybody real
+decently poor."
+
+"An' nobody sick?" Calliope pressed her wistfully.
+
+"Well, there's Mis' Crawford," admitted Mis' Uppers; "she had a spell o'
+lumbago two weeks ago, but I see her pass the house to-day. Mis' Brady
+was laid up with toothache, too, but the _Daily_ last night said she'd
+had it out. An' Mis' Doctor Helman did have one o' her stomach attacks
+this week, an' Elzabella got out her dyin' dishes an' her dyin' linen
+from the still-room--you know how Mis' Doctor always brings out her nice
+things when she's sick, so't if she should die an' the neighbours come
+in, it'd all be shipshape. But she got better this time an' helped put
+'em back. I declare it's hard to get up anything in the charity line
+here."
+
+Calliope sat smiling a little, and I knew that it was because of her
+secret certainty that "some o' the hunger" would come her way, to be
+fed.
+
+"I can't help thinkin'," she said quietly, "that we'll find somebody.
+An' I tell you what: if we do, can I count on you to help some?"
+
+Mis' Mayor Uppers flushed with quick pleasure.
+
+"Me, Calliope?" she said. And I remembered that they had told me how the
+Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality had been unable
+to tempt Mis' Uppers to a single meeting since the mayor ran away. "Oh,
+but I couldn't though," she said wistfully.
+
+"No need to go to the table if you don't want," Calliope told her. "Just
+bake up somethin' for us an' bring it over. Make a couple o' your cherry
+pies--did you get hold of any cherries to put up this year? Well, a
+couple o' your cherry pies an' a batch o' your nice drop sponge cakes,"
+she directed. "Could you?"
+
+Mis' Mayor Uppers looked up with a kind of light in her eyes.
+
+"Why, yes," she said, "I could, I guess. I'll bake 'em Thanksgivin'
+mornin'. I--I was wonderin' how I'd put in the day."
+
+When we stepped out in the snow again, Calliope's face was shining.
+Sometimes now, when my faith is weak in any good thing, I remember her
+look that November morning. But all that I thought then was how I was
+being entertained that lonely day.
+
+The dear Liberty sisters were next, Lucy and Viny and Libbie Liberty. We
+went to the side door,--there were houses in Friendship whose front
+doors we tacitly understood that we were never expected to use,--and we
+found the sisters down cellar, with shawls over their heads, feeding
+their hens through the cellar window, opening on the glassed-in coop
+under the porch.
+
+In Friendship it is a point of etiquette for a morning caller never to
+interrupt the employment of a hostess. So we obeyed the summons of the
+Liberty sisters to "come right down"; and we sat on a firkin and an
+inverted tub while Calliope told her plan and the hens fought for
+delectable morsels.
+
+"My grief!" said Libbie Liberty, tartly, "where you goin' to _get_ your
+sick an' poor?"
+
+Mis' Viny, balancing on the window ledge to reach for eggs, looked back
+at us.
+
+"Friendship's so comfortable that way," she said, "I don't see how you
+can get up much of anything."
+
+And little Miss Lucy, kneeling on the floor of the cellar to measure
+more feed, said without looking up:--
+
+"You know, since mother died we ain't never done anything for holidays.
+No--we can't seem to want to think about Thanksgiving or Christmas or
+like that."
+
+They all turned their grave lined faces toward us.
+
+"We want to let the holidays just slip by without noticin'," Miss Viny
+told us. "Seems like it hurts less that way."
+
+Libbie Liberty smiled wanly.
+
+"Don't you know," she said, "when you hold your hand still in hot water,
+you don't feel how hot the water really is? But when you move around in
+it some, it begins to burn you. Well, when we let Thanksgiving an'
+Christmas alone, it ain't so bad. But when we start to move around in
+'em--"
+
+Her voice faltered and stopped.
+
+"We miss mother terrible," Miss Lucy said simply.
+
+Calliope put her blue mitten to her mouth, but her eyes she might not
+hide, and they were soft with sympathy.
+
+"I know--I know," she said. "I remember the first Christmas after my
+mother died--I ached like the toothache all over me, an' I couldn't bear
+to open my presents. Nor the next year I couldn't either--I couldn't
+open my presents with any heart. But--" Calliope hesitated, "that second
+year," she said, "I found somethin' I could do. I saw I could fix up
+little things for other folks an' take some comfort in it. Like mother
+would of."
+
+She was silent for a moment, looking thoughtfully at the three lonely
+figures in the dark cellar of their house.
+
+"Your mother," she said abruptly, "stuffed the turkey for a year ago the
+last harvest home."
+
+"Yes," they said.
+
+"Look here," said Calliope; "if I can get some poor folks together,--or
+even _one_ poor folk, or hungry,--will you three come over to my house
+an' stuff the turkey? The way--I can't help thinkin' the way your mother
+would of, if she'd been here. An' then," Calliope went on briskly,
+"could you bring some fresh eggs an' make a pan o' custard over to my
+house? An' mebbe one o' you'd stir up a sunshine cake. You must know how
+to make your mother's sunshine cake?"
+
+There was another silence in the cellar when Calliope had done, and for
+a minute I wondered if, after all, she had not failed, and if the
+bleeding of the three hearts might be so stanched. It was not
+self-reliant Libbie Liberty who spoke first; it was gentle Miss Lucy.
+
+"I guess," she said, "I could, if we all do it. I know mother would of."
+
+"Yes," Miss Viny nodded, "mother would of."
+
+Libbie Liberty stood for a moment with compressed lips.
+
+"It seems like not payin' respect to mother," she began; and then shook
+her head. "It ain't that," she said; "it's only missin' her when we
+begin to step around the kitchen, bakin' up for a holiday."
+
+"I know--I know," Calliope said again. "That's why I said for you to
+come over in my kitchen. You come over there an' stir up the sunshine
+cake, too, an' bake it in my oven, so's we can hev it et hot. Will you
+do that?"
+
+And after a little time they consented. If Calliope found any sick or
+poor, they would do that.
+
+"We ain't gettin' many i-dees for guests," Calliope said, as we reached
+the street, "but we're gettin' helpers, anyway. An' some dinner, too."
+
+Then we went to the house of Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss--called
+so, of course, to distinguish her from the "Other" Holcombs.
+
+"Don't you be shocked at her," Calliope warned me, as we closed Mis'
+Holcomb's gate behind us; "she's dreadful diff'r'nt an' bitter since
+Abigail was married last month. She's got hold o' some kind of a Persian
+book, in a decorated cover, from the City; an' now she says your soul is
+like when you look in a lookin'-glass--that there ain't really nothin'
+there. An' that the world's some wind an' the rest water, an' they ain't
+no God only your own breath--oh, poor Mis' Holcomb!" said Calliope. "I
+guess she ain't rill balanced. But we ought to go to see her. We always
+consult Mis' Holcomb about everything."
+
+Poor Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss! I can see her now in her
+comfortable dining room, where she sat cleaning her old silver, her
+thin, veined hands as fragile as her grandmother's spoons.
+
+"Of course, you don't know," she said, when Calliope had unfolded her
+plans, "how useless it all seems to me. What's the use--I keep sayin' to
+myself now'-days; what's the use? You put so much pains on somethin',
+an' then it goes off an' leaves you. Mebbe it dies, an' everything's all
+wasted. There ain't anything to tie to. It's like lookin' in a glass all
+the while. It's seemin', it ain't bein'. We ain't certain o' nothin' but
+our breath, an' when that goes, what hev you got? What's the use o'
+plannin' Thanksgivin' for anybody?"
+
+"Well, if you're hungry, it's kind o' nice to get fed up," said
+Calliope, crisply. "Don't you know a soul that's hungry, Mame Bliss?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No," she said, "I don't. Nor nobody sick in body."
+
+"Nobody sick in body," Calliope repeated absently.
+
+"Soul-sick an' soul-hungry you can't feed up," Mis' Holcomb added.
+
+"I donno," said Calliope, thoughtfully, "I donno but you can."
+
+"No," Mis' Holcomb went on; "your soul's like yourself in the glass:
+they ain't anything there."
+
+"I donno," Calliope said again; "some mornin's when I wake up with the
+sun shinin' in, I can feel my soul in me just as plain as plain."
+
+Mis' Holcomb sighed.
+
+"Life looks dreadful footless to me," she said.
+
+"Well," said Calliope, "sometimes life _is_ some like hearin'
+firecrackers go off when you don't feel up to shootin' 'em yourself.
+When I'm like that, I always think if I'd go out an' buy a bunch or two,
+an' get somebody to give me a match, I could see more sense to things.
+Look here, Mame Bliss; if I get hold o' any folks to give the dinner
+for, will you help me some?"
+
+"Yes," Mis' Holcomb assented half-heartedly, "I'll help you. I ain't
+nobody much in family, now Abigail's done what she has. They's only
+Eppleby, an' he won't be home Thanksg'vin this year. So I ain't nothin'
+else to do."
+
+"That's the _i_-dee," said Calliope, heartily; "if everything's foolish,
+it's just as foolish doin' nothin' as doin' somethin'. Will you bring
+over a kettleful o' boiled potatoes to my house Thanksgivin' noon? An'
+mash 'em an' whip 'em in my kitchen? I'll hev the milk to put in.
+You--you don't cook as much as some, do you, Mame?"
+
+Did Calliope ask her that purposely? I am almost sure that she did. Mis'
+Holcomb's neck stiffened a little.
+
+"I guess I can cook a thing or two beside mash' potatoes," she said, and
+thought for a minute. "How'd you like a pan o' 'scalloped oysters an'
+some baked macaroni with plenty o' cheese?" she demanded.
+
+"Sounds like it'd go down awful easy," admitted Calliope, smiling. "It's
+just what we need to carry the dinner off full sail," she added
+earnestly.
+
+"Well, I ain't nothin' else to do an' I'll make 'em," Mis' Holcomb
+promised. "Only it beats me who you can find to do for. If you don't get
+anybody, let me know before I order the oysters."
+
+Calliope stood up, her little wrinkled face aglow; and I wondered at her
+confidence.
+
+"You just go ahead an' order your oysters," she said. "That dinner's
+goin' to come off Thanksgivin' noon at twelve o'clock. An' you be there
+to help feed the hungry, Mame."
+
+When we were on the street again, Calliope looked at me with her way of
+shy eagerness.
+
+"Could you hev the dinner up to your house," she asked me, "if I do
+every bit o' the work?"
+
+"Why, Calliope," I said, amazed at her persistence, "have it there, of
+course. But you haven't any guests yet."
+
+She nodded at me through the falling flakes.
+
+"You say you ain't got much to be thankful for," she said, "so I thought
+mebbe you'd put in the time that way. Don't you worry about folks to eat
+the dinner. I'll tell Mis' Holcomb an' the others to come to your
+house--an I'll get the food an' the folks. Don't you worry! An' I'll
+bring my watermelon pickles an' a bowl o' cream for Mis' Holcomb's
+potatoes, an' I'll furnish the turkey--a big one. The rest of us'll get
+the dinner in your kitchen Thanksgivin' mornin'. My!" she said, "seems
+though life's smoothin' out fer me a'ready. Good-by--it's 'most noon."
+
+She hurried up Daphne Street in the snow, and I turned toward my lonely
+house. But I remember that I was planning how I would make my table
+pretty, and how I would add a delicacy or two from the City for this
+strange holiday feast. And I found myself hurrying to look over certain
+long-disused linen and silver, and to see whether my Cloth-o'-Gold rose
+might be counted on to bloom by Thursday noon.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+COVERS FOR SEVEN
+
+
+"We'll set the table for seven folks," said Calliope, at my house on
+Thanksgiving morning.
+
+"Seven!" I echoed. "But where in the world did you ever find seven,
+Calliope?"
+
+"I found 'em," she answered. "I knew I could find hungry folks to do for
+if I tried, an' I found 'em. You'll see. I sha'n't say another word.
+They'll be here by twelve, sharp. Did the turkey come?"
+
+Yes, the turkey had come, and almost as she spoke the dear Liberty
+sisters arrived to dress and stuff it, and to make ready the pan of
+custard, and to "stir up" the sunshine cake. I could guess how the
+pleasant bustle in my kitchen would hurt them by its holiday air, and I
+carried them off to see my Cloth-o'-Gold rose which had opened in the
+night, to the very crimson heart of it. And I told them of the seven
+guests whom, after all, Calliope had actually contrived to marshal to
+her dinner. And in the midst of our almost gay speculation on this, they
+went at their share of the task.
+
+The three moved about their offices gravely at first, Libbie Liberty
+keeping her back to us as she worked, Miss Viny scrupulously intent on
+the delicate clatter of the egg-beater, Miss Lucy with eyes downcast on
+the sage she rolled. I noted how Calliope made little excuses to pass
+near each of them, with now a touch of the hand and now a pat on a
+shoulder, and all the while she talked briskly of ways and means and
+recipes, and should there be onions in the dressing or should there not
+be? We took a vote on this and were about to chop the onions in when
+Mis' Holcomb's little maid arrived at my kitchen door with a bowl of
+oysters which Mis' Holcomb had had left from the 'scallop, an' wouldn't
+we like 'em in the stuffin'? Roast turkey stuffed with oysters! I saw
+Libbie Liberty's eyes brighten so delightedly that I brought out a jar
+of seedless raisins and another of preserved cherries to add to the
+custard, and then a bag of sweet almonds to be blanched and split for
+the cake o' sunshine. Surely, one of us said, the seven guests could be
+preparing for their Thanksgiving dinner with no more zest than we were
+putting into that dinner for their sakes.
+
+"Seven guests!" we said over and again. "Calliope, how did you do it?
+When everybody says there's nobody in Friendship that's either sick or
+poor?"
+
+"Nobody sick, nobody poor!" Calliope exclaimed, piling a dish with
+watermelon pickles. "Land, you might think that was the town motto.
+Well, the town don't know everything. Don't you ask me so many
+questions."
+
+Before eleven o'clock Mis' Mayor Uppers tapped at my back door, with two
+deep-dish cherry pies in a basket, and a row of her delicate, feathery
+sponge cakes and a jar of pineapple and pie-plant preserves "to chink
+in." She drew a deep breath and stood looking about the kitchen.
+
+"Throw off your things an' help, Mis' Uppers," Calliope admonished her,
+one hand on the cellar door. "I'm just goin' down for some sweet
+potatoes Mis' Holcomb sent over this morning, an' you might get 'em
+ready, if you will. We ain't goin' to let you off now, spite of what
+you've done for us."
+
+So Mis' Mayor Uppers hung up her shawl and washed the sweet potatoes.
+And my kitchen was fragrant with spices and flavourings and an odorous
+oven, and there was no end of savoury business to be at. I found myself
+glad of the interest of these others in the day and glad of the stirring
+in my lonely house. Even if their bustle could not lessen my own
+loneliness, it was pleasant, I said to myself, to see them quicken with
+interest; and the whole affair entertained my infinite leisure. After
+all, I was not required to be thankful. I merely loaned my house, cosey
+in its glittering drifts of turkey feathers, and the day was no more and
+no less to me than before, though I own that I did feel more than an
+amused interest in Calliope's guests. Whom, in Friendship, had she found
+"to do for," I detected myself speculating with real interest as in the
+dining room, with one and another to help me, I made ready my table. My
+prettiest dishes and silver, the Cloth-o'-Gold rose, and my
+yellow-shaded candles made little auxiliary welcomes. Whoever Calliope's
+guests were, we would do them honour and give them the best we had. And
+in the midst of all came from the City the box with my gift of hothouse
+fruit and a rosebud for every plate.
+
+"Calliope!" I cried, as I went back to the kitchen, "Calliope, it's
+nearly twelve now. Tell us who the guests are, or we won't finish
+dinner!"
+
+Calliope laughed and shook her head and opened the door for Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, who entered, followed by her little maid,
+both laden with good things.
+
+"I prepared for seven," Mis' Holcomb said. "That was the word you sent
+me--but where you got your seven sick an' poor in Friendship beats me.
+I'll stay an' help for a while--but to me it all seems like so much
+monkey work."
+
+We worked with a will that last half-hour, and the spirit of the kitchen
+came upon them all. I watched them, amused and pleased at Mis' Mayor
+Uppers's flushed anxiety over the sweet potatoes, at Libbie Liberty
+furiously basting the turkey, and at Miss Lucy exclaiming with delight
+as she unwrapped the rosebuds from their moss. But I think that Mis'
+Holcomb pleased me most, for with the utensils of housewifery in her
+hands she seemed utterly to have forgotten that there is no use in
+anything at all. This was not wonderful in the presence of such a
+feathery cream of mashed potatoes and such aromatic coffee as she made.
+_There_ was something to tie to. Those were real, at any rate, and
+beyond all seeming.
+
+Just before twelve Calliope caught off her apron and pulled down her
+sleeves.
+
+"Now," she said, "I'm going to welcome the guests. I can--can't I?" she
+begged me. "Everything's all ready but putting on. I won't need to come
+out here again; when I ring the bell on the sideboard, dish it up an'
+bring it in, all together--turkey ahead an' vegetables followin'. Mis'
+Holcomb, you help 'em, won't you? An' then you can leave if you want.
+Talk about an old-fashion' Thanksgivin'. My!"
+
+"Who _has_ she got?" Libbie Liberty burst out, basting the turkey. "I
+declare, I'm nervous as a witch, I'm so curious!"
+
+And then the clock struck twelve, and a minute after we heard Calliope
+tinkle a silvery summons on the call-bell.
+
+I remember that it was Mis' Holcomb herself--to whom nothing
+mattered--who rather lost her head as we served our feast, and who was
+about putting in dishes both her oysters and her macaroni instead of
+carrying in the fair, brown, smoking bake pans. But at last we were
+ready--Mis' Holcomb at our head with the turkey, the others following
+with both hands filled, and I with the coffee-pot. As they gave the
+signal to start, something--it may have been the mystery before us, or
+the good things about us, or the mere look of the Thanksgiving snow on
+the window-sills--seemed to catch at the hearts of them all, and they
+laughed a little, almost joyously, those five for whom joy had seemed
+done, and I found myself laughing too.
+
+So we six filed into the dining room to serve whomever Calliope had
+found "to do for." I wonder that I had not guessed before. There stood
+Calliope at the foot of the table, with its lighted candles and its
+Cloth-o'-Gold rose, and the other six chairs were quite vacant.
+
+"Sit down!" Calliope cried to us, with tears and laughter in her voice.
+"Sit down, all six of you. Don't you see? Didn't you know? Ain't we
+soul-sick an' soul-hungry, all of us? An' I tell you, this is goin' to
+do our souls good--an' our stomachs too!"
+
+Nobody dropped anything, even in the flood of our amazement. We managed
+to get our savoury burden on the table, and some way we found ourselves
+in the chairs--I at the head of my table where Calliope led me. And we
+all talked at once, exclaiming and questioning, with sudden thanksgiving
+in our hearts that in the world such things may be.
+
+"I was hungry an' sick," Calliope was telling, "for an old-fashion'
+Thanksgivin'--or anything that'd smooth life out some. But I says to
+myself, 'It looks like God had afflicted us by not givin' us anybody to
+do for.' An' then I started out to find some poor an' some sick--an'
+each one o' you knows what I found. An' I ask' myself before I got home
+that day, 'Why not them an' me?' There's lots o' kinds o' things to do
+on Thanksgivin' Day. Are you ever goin' to forgive me?"
+
+I think that we all answered at once. But what we all meant was what
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said, as she sat flushed and smiling
+behind the coffee-cups:--
+
+"I declare, I feel something like I ain't felt since I don't know when!"
+
+And Calliope nodded at her.
+
+"I guess that's your soul, Mame Bliss," she said. "You can always feel
+it if you go to work an' act as if you got one. I'll take my coffee
+clear."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE SHADOW OF GOOD THINGS TO COME
+
+
+The Friendship accommodation reaches the village from the City at six
+o'clock at night, and we call the train the Dick Dasher, because Dick
+Dasher is its engineer. We "come out on the Dick Dasher" and we "go in
+on the Through"; but the Through is a kind of institution, like
+marriage, while the Dick Dasher is a thing more intimate, like one's
+wedding. It was one winter night on the latter that I hardly heeded what
+I overheard.
+
+"The Lord will provide, Delia," Doctor June was saying.
+
+"I ain't sure," came a piping answer, "as they is any Lord. An' don't
+you tell anybody 'bout seein' me on this train. I'm goin' on
+through--west."
+
+    "Thy footfall is a silver thing,
+    West----west!"
+
+I said over to the beat of the wheels, but the words that I said over
+were more insistent than the words that I heard. I was watching the eyes
+of a motor-car carrying threads of streaming light, moving near the
+track, swifter than the train. It belonged, as I divined, to the
+Proudfits of Friendship, and it was carrying Madame Proudfit and her
+daughter Clementina, after a day of shopping and visiting in the town.
+And when I saw them returning home in this airy fashion,--as if they
+were the soul and I in the stuffy Dick Dasher were the body,--I renewed
+a certain distaste for them, since in their lives these Proudfits seemed
+goblin-like, with no interest in any save their own picturesque
+flittings. But while I shrugged at myself for judging them and held
+firmly to my own opinion, as one will do, I was conscious all the time
+of the gray minister in the aisle of the rocking coach, holding clasped
+in both hands his big carpet-bag without handles. Over it I saw him
+looking down in grieved consternation at the little woman huddled in the
+rush seat.
+
+"No Lord!" he said, "no Lord! Why, Delia More! You might as well say
+there ain't no life in your own bones."
+
+"So they isn't," she answered him grimly. "They keep on a-goin' just to
+spite me."
+
+"Delia More--_De_-lia More," the wheels beat out, and it was as if I had
+heard the name often. Already I had noticed the woman. She had a kind of
+youth, like that of Calliope, who had journeyed in town on the Through
+that morning and who had somewhat mysteriously asked me not to say that
+she had gone away. But Calliope's persistent youthfulness gives her a
+claim upon one, while on this woman whom Doctor June perplexedly
+regarded, her stifled youth imposed a forlorn aloofness, made the more
+pathetic by her prettiness.
+
+No one but the doctor himself was preparing to leave the train at
+Friendship. He balanced in the aisle alone, while the few occupants of
+the car sat without speaking--men dozing, children padding on the panes,
+a woman twisting her thin hair tight and high. Doctor June looked at
+those nearest to be sure of their tired self-absorption, but as for me,
+who sat very near, I think he had long ago decided that I kept my own
+thoughts and no others, since sometimes I had forgotten to give him back
+a greeting. So it was in a fancied security which I was loath to be
+violating, that he opened his great carpet-bag and took out a book to
+lay on the girl's knee.
+
+"Open it," he commanded her.
+
+I saw the contour of her face tightened by her swiftly set lips as she
+complied.
+
+"Point your finger," he went on peremptorily. She must have obeyed, for
+in a kind of unwilling eagerness she bent over the page, and the doctor
+stooped, and together in the blurring light of the kerosene lamp in the
+roof of the coach they made out something.
+
+"... the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very
+image of the things ..." I unwillingly caught, and yet not wholly
+unwillingly either. And though I watched, as if much depended upon it,
+the great motor-car of the Proudfits vanishing before us into the dark,
+I could not forbear to glance at the doctor, who was nodding, his kind
+face quickening. But the girl lifted her eyes and laughed with
+deliberate scepticism.
+
+"I don't take any stock," she said, and within me it was as if something
+answered to her bitterness.
+
+"No--no. Mebbe not," Doctor June commented with perfect cheerfulness.
+"Some folks take fresh air, and some folks like to stay shut up tight.
+But--'the shadow of good things to come.' I'd take that much stock if I
+was you, Delia."
+
+As he laid the book back in his bag, the train was jolting across the
+switches beside the gas house, and the lights of Friendship were all
+about the track.
+
+"Why don't you get off?" he reiterated, in his tone a descending scale
+of simple hospitality. "Come to our house and stop a spell. Come for
+tea," he added; "I happen to know we're goin' to hev hot griddle-cakes
+an' sausage gravy."
+
+She shook her head sharply and in silence.
+
+Doctor June stood for a moment meditatively looking down at her.
+
+"There's a friend of yours at our house to-day, for all day," he
+observed.
+
+"I ain't any friends," replied the girl, obstinately, "without you mean
+_use'_ to be. An' I don't know if I had then, either."
+
+"Yes. Yes, you have, Delia," said Doctor June, kindly. "He was asking
+about you last time he was here--kind of indirect."
+
+"_Who?_" she demanded, but it was as if something within her wrung the
+question from her against her will.
+
+"Abel Halsey," Doctor June told her, "Abel Halsey. Remember him?"
+
+Instead of answering she looked out the window at the Friendship Depot
+platform, and:--
+
+"Ain't he a big minister in the City?" I barely heard her ask.
+
+"No," said Doctor June; "dear me, no. Abel's still gypsyin' it off in
+the hills. I expect he's out there by the depot with the busses now,
+come to meet me in his buggy. Better let him take us all home to
+griddle-cakes, Delia?" he pressed her wistfully.
+
+"I couldn't," she said briefly. And, as he put out his hand silently,
+"Don't you let _any_body know't you saw me!" she charged him again.
+
+When he was gone, and the train was slackening in the station, she moved
+close to the window. If I had been lonely.... I must have caught a
+certain cheer in the look of the station and in the magnificent, cosmic
+leisure of the idlers: in Photographer Jimmy Sturgis, in his leather
+coat, with one eye shut, stamping a foot and waiting for the mail-bag;
+in old Tillie, known up and down the world for her waffles, and
+perpetually peering out between shelves of plants and wax fruit set
+across the window of the "eating-house"; in Peleg Bemus, wood-cutter,
+stumping about the platform on his wooden leg, wearing modestly the
+prestige he had won by his flute-playing and by his advantage of
+New York experience--"a janitor in the far east, he was," Timothy
+Toplady had once told me; in Timothy Toplady himself, who always
+meets the trains, but for no reason unless to say an amazed and
+reproachful--"Blisterin' Benson! not a soul wants off here"; and in Abel
+Halsey, that itinerant preacher, of whom Doctor June had spoken. Abel
+was a man of grace, Bible-taught, passioning for service, but within him
+his gentle soul burned to travel, and his white horse, Major Mary, and
+his road wagon and his route to the door of many a country church were
+the sole satisfactions of his wanderlust; and next to these was his
+delight to be at a railway station when any train arrived, savouring the
+moment of some silent familiarity with distance. I delighted in them
+all, and that night, as I looked, I wondered how it would seem to me if
+I were returning to it after many years; and I could imagine how my
+heart would ache.
+
+As the train moved on, the girl whom Doctor June had called Delia More
+turned her head, manifestly to follow for a little way each vanishing
+light and figure; and as the conductor came through the car and she
+spoke to him, I saw that she was in a tingle of excitement.
+
+"You sure," she asked, "that you stop to the canal draw?"
+
+"Uh?" said the conductor, and when he comprehended, "Every time," he
+said, "every time. You be ready when she whistles." He hesitated,
+manifestly in some curiosity. "They ain't a house in a mile f'om there,
+though," he told her.
+
+"I know that," she gave back crisply.
+
+When I heard her speaking of the canal draw, I found myself wondering;
+for a woman is not above wonder. There, where the trains stopped just
+perceptibly I myself was wont to leave them for the sake of the mile
+walk on the quiet highroad to my house. That, too, though it chanced to
+be night, for I am not afraid. But I wondered the more because other
+women do fear, and also because mine was the only house between the
+canal draw and Friendship Village; and manifestly the shortest way to
+reach the village would have been to alight at the station. But I held
+my peace, for the affairs of others should be to those others an
+efficient disguise; and moreover, the greater part of one's wonder is
+wont to come to naught.
+
+Yet, as I seemed to follow this woman out upon the snow and the train
+kept impersonally on across the meadows, I could not but see that her
+bags were many and looked heavy, and twice she set them down to
+rearrange. I think a ghost of the road could have done no less than ask
+to help her. And I did this with an abruptness of which I am unwilling
+master, though indeed I had no need to assume impatience, for I saw that
+my quiet walk was spoiled.
+
+When I spoke to her, she started and shrank away; but there was an
+austerity in the lonely white road and in the country silence which must
+have chilled a woman like her; and her bags were many and seemed heavy.
+
+"Much obliged to you," she said indistinctly. "I'd just as li've you
+should take the basket, if you want."
+
+So I lifted the basket and trudged beside her, hoping very much that she
+would not talk. For though for my own comfort I would walk far to avoid
+treading on a nest, or a worm, or a magenta flower (and I loathe
+magenta), yet I am often blameful enough to wound through the sheerest
+bungling those who talk to me when I would rather be silent.
+
+The night was one clinging to the way of Autumn, and as yet with no
+Winter hinting. The air was mild and dry, and the sky was starry. I am
+not ashamed that on a quiet highroad on a starry night I love to be
+silent, and even to forget concerns of my own which seem pressing in the
+publicity of the sun; but I am ashamed, I own, to have been called to
+myself that night by a little choking breath of haste.
+
+"I can't go--so fast," my companion said humbly; "you might jest--set
+the basket down anywheres. I can--"
+
+But I think that she can hardly have heard my apology, for she stood
+where she had halted, staring away from me. We were opposite the
+cemetery lying in its fence of field stone and whitewashed rails.
+
+"O my soul, my soul!" I heard her say. "I'd forgot the graveyard, or I
+couldn't never 'a' come this way."
+
+At that she went on, her feet quickening, as I thought, without her
+will; and she kept her face turned to me, so that it should be away from
+that whitewashed fence. And now because of the wound she had shown me, I
+walked a little apart in the middle of the road for my attempt at
+sympathy. So we came to the summit of the hill, and there the dark
+suddenly yielded up the distance. The lamps of the village began to
+signal, lights dotted the fields and gathered in a cosey blur in the
+valley, and half a mile to westward the headlight that marked the big
+Toplady barn and the little Toplady house shone out as if some one over
+there were saying something.
+
+"You live here in Friendship?" the girl demanded abruptly.
+
+I could show her my house a little way before us.
+
+"Ever go inside the graveyard?" she asked.
+
+Sometimes I do go there, and at that answer she walked nearer to me and
+spoke eagerly.
+
+"Air all the tombstones standin' up straight, do you know?" she said.
+"Hev any o' their headstones fell down on 'em?"
+
+This I could answer too, definitely enough; for Friendship Cemetery, by
+the vigilance of the Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality, is
+kept in no less scrupulous order than the Friendship parlours.
+
+"Well, that's a relief," she said; "I couldn't get it out o' my head."
+Then, because she seemed of those on whom silence lays a certain
+imaginary demand, "My mother an' father an' sister's buried there," she
+explained. "They're in there. They all died when I was gone. An' I got
+the notion that their headstones had tipped over on to 'em. Or Aunt
+Cornie More's, maybe."
+
+Aunt Cornie More. I knew that name, for they had told me about her in
+Friendship, so that her name, and that of the Oldmoxons, in whose former
+house I lived, and many others were like folk whom one passes often and
+remembers. I had been told how Aunt Cornie More had made her own shroud
+from her crocheted parlour curtains, lest these fall to a later wife of
+her octogenarian husband; and how as she lay in her coffin the curtain's
+shell-stitch parrot "come right acrost her chest." This woman beside me
+had called her "Aunt" Cornie More. And then I remembered the name which
+Doctor June had spoken on the train and the wheels had measured.
+
+"Delia More!" I said, involuntarily, and regretted it as soon as I had
+spoken. But, indeed, it was as if some legend woman of the place walked
+suddenly beside me, like the quick.
+
+Who in Friendship had not heard the name, and who, save one who keeps
+her own thoughts and forgets to give back greeting, would not on the
+instant have remembered it? Delia More's stepsister, Jennie Crapwell,
+had been betrothed to a carpenter of Friendship, and he was at work on
+their house when, a month before the wedding-day, Delia and that young
+carpenter had "run away." Who in Friendship could not tell that story?
+But before I had made an end of murmuring something--
+
+"I might 'a' known they hadn't done talkin' yet," Delia More said
+bitterly. "They say it was like that when Calliope Marsh's beau run off
+with somebody else,--for ten years the town et it for cake. Well, they
+ain't any of 'em goin' to get a look at me. I don't give anybody the
+chance to show me the cold shoulder. You can tell 'em I was here if you
+want. They can scare the children with it."
+
+"I won't tell," I said.
+
+She looked at me.
+
+"Well, I can't help it if you do," she returned. "I'm glad enough to
+speak to somebody, gettin' back so. It's fourteen year. An' I was fair
+body-sick to see the place again."
+
+At this she asked about Friendship folk, and I answered as best I might,
+though of what she inquired I knew little, and what I did know was
+footless enough for human comfort. As to the Topladys, for example, I
+had no knowledge of that one who had earned his money in bricks and had
+later married a "foreigner"; but I knew Mis' Amanda, that she had hands
+dimpled like a baby giant's, and that she carried a blue parasol all
+winter to keep the sun from her eyes. I could not tell whether Liddy
+Ember had been able to afford skilled treatment for her poor, queer,
+pretty little sister, but I knew that Ellen Ember, with her crown of
+bright hair, went about Friendship streets singing aloud, and leaping up
+to catch at the low branches of the curb elms, and that she was as
+picturesque as a beautiful grotesque on a page of sober text. I had not
+learned where the Oldmoxons had moved, but I knew of them that they had
+left me a huge fireplace in every room of my house. I could have
+repeated little about Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, save that her
+black week-day cloak was lined with wine broadcloth, and that she wore
+it wrong side outward for "best." And of whether Abigail Arnold's
+children had turned out well or ill, I was profoundly ignorant; but I
+remembered that she had caused a loaf of bread to be carved on the
+monument of her husband, the home baker. And so on. But these were not
+matters of which I could talk to the hungry woman beside me.
+
+Then, to my amazement, when I mentioned the Proudfits,--those great and
+rich Proudfits whose motor had raced by our train,--Delia More would
+have none of them.
+
+"I do' want to hear about 'em," she said. "I know about 'em. I use' to
+play with Miss Clementina an' Miss Linda when we were little things. I
+use' to live with the Proudfits then, an' go to school. They were good
+to me--time an' time again they've told me their home was mine, too. But
+_now_--it wouldn't be the same. I know 'em. They always were cruel proud
+an' cruel pious. Mis' Proudfit, she use' to set up goodness an' worship
+it like a little god."
+
+This judgment startled me, and yet to its import I secretly assented.
+For though I barely had their acquaintance, Madame Proudfit and her
+daughter Clementina were thorns to me too, so that I had had no pleasure
+in giving them back their greetings. Perhaps it was that they alone in
+Friendship sounded for me a note of other days--but whatever it was,
+they were thorns to me; and I remember how, once more, something within
+me seemed to answer to this woman's bitterness.
+
+None the less, since of the Proudfits I could give her some fragment of
+account, I did so, to forge for Delia More what link I might between her
+present and her past. And it was knowledge which all Friendship shared.
+
+"You knew," I said, "that Miss Linda does not come here now, because she
+married against the wish of her family."
+
+Delia More looked up at me. But though I saw that now she softened
+somewhat, I had no relish for giving to her anything of the sad romance
+of beautiful Linda Proudfit (as they said) and the poor young clerk of
+nobody knew where, who, a dozen years before, had fled away together
+"into the storm."
+
+"Then there is Calliope Marsh," I ventured, to turn my thought not less
+than hers. But Delia More did not answer, and at this I was puzzled, for
+I think that Calliope has lived in Friendship since the beginning, when
+she and Liddy Ember were partners in their little "modiste" shop. "You
+will recall Calliope?" I pressed the matter.
+
+And at that, "Yes. Oh, yes," she said, and would say no more. And
+because Calliope had forbidden me, I did not mention that I had seen her
+on the train that morning, and that she was absent from Friendship, but
+it grieved me that this stranger should be indifferent to anything about
+her.
+
+I would have passed my own gate, because the basket was heavy and
+because I knew that the girl was crying. But she remembered how I had
+shown her my house, and there she detained me and caught at her basket,
+in haste to be gone. So I, who feel upon me a weak necessity to do a
+bidding, watched her go down the still road; yet I could not let her go
+away quite like that, and before I had meant to do so I called to her.
+
+"Delia More!" I said--as familiarly as if she had been some other
+expression of myself.
+
+I saw her stop, but I did not go forward. I lifted my voice a little,
+for by the distance between us I was less ill at ease than I am in the
+usual personalities of comfort.
+
+"I heard that on the train," I said then awkwardly,--and I was the more
+awkward that I was not persuaded of any reason in my words,--"that about
+'the shadow of good things to come.' Maybe it meant something."
+
+Delia More's thin, high-pitched voice came back to me, expressing all my
+unvoiced doubt.
+
+"Tisn't like," she said. "I never take any stock."
+
+Then I looked at my dark house in a kind of consternation lest it had
+heard me trying to give comfort, for within those walls I had sometimes
+spoken almost as this woman spoke. But it occurred to me that even the
+drowned should throw immaterial ropes to any who struggle in dark
+waters.
+
+It will not be necessary, I hope, to say that I followed Delia More that
+night from no faintest wish to know what might happen to her. For I have
+a weak desire for peace of mind, and I would rather have forgotten her
+story. I followed because the quiet highroad was so profoundly lonely,
+and the country silence is ambiguous, and I cannot bear to think of a
+woman abroad alone in the dark. I cannot bear to think of myself abroad
+alone in the dark, though I go quite without fear; but certain other
+women have fear, and this one was crying. I kept well behind her, and as
+soon as she reached the village, I meant to lose sight of her and
+return, for a village is guardian enough. But when we had passed the
+bleak meadow of the slaughter-house and the wide, wet-smelling wood yard
+and had reached the first cottage on Daphne Street, I was startled to
+see her unlatch that cottage gate and enter the yard. And I was suddenly
+sadly apprehensive, for the cottage was the home of Calliope, who that
+morning had left the village and had asked me to say nothing about it.
+What if this poor creature had fled to Calliope for sanctuary, only to
+find locked doors? So I waited in the shadow of a warehouse like a
+bandit; and I raged at the thought of having possibly to harbour this
+stranger among the books of my quiet home.
+
+Then suddenly I saw a light shining brightly in Calliope Marsh's
+cottage, and some one wearing a hat came swiftly and drew down a shade.
+On the instant the matter was clear to me, who have a genius for certain
+ways of a busybody. Calliope must have known that this poor girl was
+coming; Calliope's warning to me to keep silence must have been a way of
+protection to her. And here to Calliope's cottage Delia More had come
+creeping, whom all Friendship would hold in righteous distaste. But I
+alone of all Friendship knew that she was here, "fair body-sick to see
+the place again."
+
+I turned back to the highroad, pretending great wrath that I should be
+so keen over the doings of any, and that my walk should have been
+spoiled because of her. But there are times when wrath is difficult. And
+do what I would, there came some singing in my blood, and like a
+busybody, I found myself standing still in the road fashioning a plan.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+STOCK
+
+
+It was as if Time and the Hour were my allies, for at once I was aware
+of a cutter driven smartly from the village, and I recognized the
+Topladys' sorrel. At my signal the cutter drew up beside me, and it held
+Timothy Toplady on his way home from the station. I asked him what
+o'clock it was, and when he had found a match to light his huge silver
+watch--
+
+"Blisterin' Benson!" he said ruefully, "it's ha'-past six, an' me late
+with the chores again. I'm hauled an' sawed if it hain't _always_ ha'
+past six. They don't seem to be no times in between."
+
+"Mr. Toplady," I said boldly, "let us get up a surprise party on
+Calliope Marsh--you and Mrs. Toplady and me."
+
+I had learned that he was loath to oppose a suggestion and that he
+always preferred to agree, but I had not hoped for enthusiasm.
+
+"That's the _i_-dea," said Timothy, heartily. "I do admire a surprise.
+But what I think is this," he added, "when'll we hev it?"
+
+"To-night," I proposed boldly.
+
+"Whew!" Timothy whistled. "Sudden for General--eh? Suits me--suits me.
+Better drive out home with me an' break it to Amanda," he cried.
+
+I smiled as I sat beside him, noting that his enthusiasm was very like
+relief. For if any one was present, he well knew that his masterful
+Amanda would say nothing of his tardiness. And so it was, for as we
+entered the kitchen she entirely overlooked her husband in her amazement
+at seeing me.
+
+"Forevermore!" that great Amanda said, turning from her stove of savoury
+skillets; "ain't you the stranger? Timothy says only to-day, speakin' o'
+you, 'She ain't ben here for a week,' s'e. 'Week!' s'I; 'it's goin' on
+_two_.' I'm a great hand to keep track. Throw off your things."
+
+At that I began to feel her influence. Mis' Toplady is so huge and
+capable that her mere presence will modify my judgments; and instantly I
+fell wondering if I was not, after all, come on a fool's errand. She is
+like Athena. For I can think about Athena well enough, but if I were
+really to stand before her, I am certain that the project in which I
+implored her help would be sunk in my sudden sense of Olympus.
+
+Not the less, I made my somewhat remarkable proposal with some show of
+assurance, and I should have counted on Mis' Toplady's sympathy, which
+ripens at less than a sigh. In Friendship you but mention a possible
+charity, visit, or new church carpet, and the enthusiasm will react on
+the possibility, and the thing be done. It is the spirit of the West,
+the pioneer blood in the veins of her children, expressing itself (since
+there are of late no forests to conquer) in terms of love of any
+initiative. We love a project as an older world would approve the
+civilizing reasons for that project. Mis' Amanda plunged into the
+processes of the party much as she would have felled a tree. It warmed
+my heart to hear her.
+
+"We'd ought to hev a hot supper--what victuals'll we take?" she said.
+"Land, yes, oysters, o' course, an' we'll all chip in an' take
+plenty-enough crackers. We might as well carry dishes from here, so's to
+be sure an' hev what we want to use. At Mis' Doctor Helman's su'prise we
+run 'way short o' spoons, an' Elder Woodruff finally went out in the
+hall an' drank his broth, an' hid his bowl in the entry. Mis' Helman
+found it, an' knew it by the nick. That reminds me--who'll we ask?"
+
+"Mrs. Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss," said I, promptly, "and Abigail
+Arnold, and Doctor June, and Abel Halsey."
+
+"An' the Proudfits," Mis' Amanda went on.
+
+"Suppose," said I, with high courage, "that we do not ask the Proudfits
+at all?"
+
+Mis' Amanda threw up her giant hands.
+
+"Not ask the Proudfits?" she said. "Why, my land a' livin', the minister
+hardly has church in the church without the Proudfits get an invite."
+
+"Calliope mends their fine lace for them," I reminded her, feeling
+guilty. "They wouldn't care to come, Mrs. Amanda, would they?"
+
+But of course I was remembering Delia More's "But _now_--I know 'em.
+They worship goodness like a little god." And that night I was not
+minded to have them about, for it might befall that it would be
+necessary to understand other things as well.
+
+"Miss Linda would 'a' cared to," said Mis' Amanda, thoughtfully, "but I
+donno, myself, about Mis' Proudfit an' Miss Clementina--for sure."
+
+So bold an innovation as the Proudfits' omission, however, moved Timothy
+Toplady to doubt.
+
+"They might not come," he said, frowning and looking sidewise, "but what
+I think is this, will they like bein' left out?"
+
+His masterful Amanda instantly took the other side.
+
+"Land, Timothy!" she said, "you _be_ one!"
+
+I have heard her say that to him again and again, and always in a tone
+so skilfully admiring that he looked almost gratified. And we mentioned
+the Proudfits no more.
+
+So Calliope Marsh's surprise party came about. When supper was over, the
+table was "left setting," while pickles and cookies and "conserve" were
+packed in baskets; and presently the Topladys and I were stealing about
+the village inviting to festivity. I love to remember how swiftly Daphne
+Street took on an air of the untoward. Kitchens were left dark,
+unaccustomed lights flashed in upper chambers, some went scurrying for
+oysters before the post-office store should be closed, and some spread
+the news, eager to share in the holiday importance. I love to remember
+our certainty, so reasonably established, that they would all join us as
+infallibly as children will join in jollity. No one refused, no one
+hesitated; and when, at eight o'clock, the Topladys and I reached the
+rendezvous in the Engine-House entry, every one was there before
+us--save only, of course, the Proudfits.
+
+"Where's the Proudfits? Ain't we goin' to wait for the Proudfits?" asked
+more than one; and some one had seen the Proudfit motor come flashing
+through the town from the Plank Road, empty. At all of which I kept a
+guilty silence; and I had by then not a little guilt to bear, since I
+was becoming every moment more doubtful of my undertaking. For at heart
+these people are the kindly of earth, and yet they are prone, as Delia
+More had said of the Proudfits, "to worship goodness like a little god,"
+nor do they commonly broaden their allegiance without distinguished
+precedent. And how were we to secure this?
+
+Every one was there--the little gray Doctor June, flitting about as
+quietly as a moth, and all those of whom Delia More had asked me: Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, wearing her cloak wine broadcloth side out
+to honour the occasion; Abigail Arnold, with a huge basket of
+gingerbread and jumbles from her home bakery; Photographer Jimmy
+Sturgis, and even Mis' Sturgis, in a faint aroma of caraway which she
+nibbled incessantly; Liddy Ember, and poor Ellen, wearing her
+magnificent hair like a coronet, and standing wistfully about, with her
+hand, palm outward, persistently covering her mouth; and Abel Halsey,
+who was to leave at midnight for a lonely cross-country ride into the
+hills. And as they stood, gossiping and eager, the women bird-observant
+of one another's toilettes, I own myself to have felt like an alien
+among them, remembering how I alone knew that Calliope Marsh was not
+even in the village.
+
+Very softly we lifted the latch of Calliope's gate and trooped in her
+little dark yard.
+
+"Blisterin' Benson!" Timothy Toplady whispered, "ef the house hain't
+pocket-dark, front _and_ back. What ef she's went in the country?"
+
+"Sh--h!" whispered his great Amanda, masterfully. "It's the shades down.
+I'm nervous as a witch. My land! if the front door ain't open a foot!"
+
+Though there are no locked doors in Friendship, I had feared that
+Calliope's cottage door would now be barred, and that Delia More would
+answer no formal summons. At sight of the unguarded entrance I had a
+sick fear that she had in some way heard of our coming and fled away,
+leaving the door ajar in her haste. But when we had footed softly across
+the porch and peered in the dark passage, we saw at its farther end a
+crack of light.
+
+"Might as well step ri' down to the dinin' room--that's where she sets,"
+Mis' Amanda said in her whisper, which is gigantic too.
+
+The passage smelled of the oilcloth on the floor and of a rubber
+waterproof which I brushed. And I shrank back beside the waterproof and
+let the others go on. For, after all, to that woman within I was a
+stranger, and these were her friends of old time. So it was Mis' Amanda
+who opened the dining-room door.
+
+I could see that the room was cheery with a red-shaded hanging-lamp, and
+shelves of plants, and a glowing fire in the great range. A table was
+covered with red cotton and laid with dishes. Also, there was the
+fragrance of toast, so that one wished to enter. And in a rocking-chair
+sat Delia More. She stared up in a kind of terror at the open door, and
+then turned shrinkingly to some one who sat beside her. But at that one
+beside her I looked and looked again, for her rich fur cloak had fallen
+where she had let it fall; and there, sitting with Delia More's hand in
+hers, was that great Madame Proudfit of the Proudfit estate.
+
+"For the land!" Mis' Amanda said. "For the land...."
+
+But she was not looking at Madame Proudfit. And hardly seeing her, as I
+could guess, that great Mis' Amanda went forward, holding out her arms.
+
+"Delia More!" she cried, "Delia More!"
+
+I saw Abel Halsey's pale, luminous face as he pushed past Timothy and
+strode within and crossed to her; and I remember Abigail Arnold and Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and how they followed Abel with little
+sharp cries which must have been a kind of music. And with them went
+Ellen Ember, as if, secretly, she were wiser than we knew. And while the
+others blocked the passage or crowded into the room, according to the
+nature which was theirs, some one came from the cellarway and paused,
+smiling, on the threshold. And it was Miss Clementina Proudfit, with
+eggs in her hands.
+
+"Wait!" I heard Delia's sharp, piping voice then; "wait!"
+
+She rose, one thin little hand pressed tensely along her cheek. But the
+other hand Madame Proudfit held in both her own as she, too, rose beside
+her. And with them Abel stood, facing the rest.
+
+"O, Abel Halsey--Abel Halsey ..." Delia said, "an' Mame Bliss--nor you,
+Abigail, don't you, any of you, come in yet. I got somethin' to tell
+you."
+
+"But shake hands first, Delia," cried Abel Halsey, and Delia looked up
+at him, in her face a sudden, incredulous thankfulness which flushed it,
+brow and cheek, and won it to a way of beauty. But she did not give him
+her hand. And before she could speak again Miss Clementina put down the
+eggs, and, with some little stir of silk, she took a step or two steps
+toward us.
+
+"Ah," she said, "let us not wait for anything--it has been so long since
+we have met! Delia has just told mother and me all about these
+years--and you don't know how splendid we think she has been and how
+brave in great trouble. Come in, everybody, and let's make her welcome
+home!"
+
+Madame Proudfit said nothing, but she nodded and smiled at Delia More,
+and it seemed to me that in the Proudfits' way with Delia, their
+beautiful Linda had won a kind of presence with them after all. And in
+the moment's hush the toast, propped on a fork before the coals in the
+range, suddenly blazed up in blue flame at the crust.
+
+"Somebody save the toast!" cried Clementina and smiled very brightly.
+
+They needed no more. Timothy Toplady sprang at the toast, and already
+Abel Halsey and Doctor June were shaking Delia's hand; and Mis' Amanda,
+throwing her shawl back over her shoulders from its pin at her throat,
+enveloped Delia in her giant arms. And the others came pushing forward,
+on their faces the smiles which, however they had faltered in the
+passage seeking a precedent, I make bold to guess bodied forth the
+gentle, hesitant spirit which informed them.
+
+As for me, I waited without, even after the others had entered. And as I
+lingered, the outer door was pushed open to admit some late comer who
+whisked down the passage and stood in the dining-room doorway. It was
+Calliope.
+
+"Delia More!" she cried; "didn't I tell you how it'd be if you'd only
+let 'em know? An' Mis' Proudfit, you here? I been worried to death on
+account o' forgettin' to take home your cream lace waist I mended."
+
+Madame Proudfit's voice lowered the high key of the others talking in
+chorus.
+
+"We drove over to get it, Calliope," she said. "And here we found our
+Delia More."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At eleven o'clock that night, as I sat writing a letter in which the
+spirit of what had come to pass must have breathed--as a spirit will
+breathe--Calliope Marsh tapped at my door; and she had a little basket.
+
+"Here," she said, "I brought you this. It's some o' everything we hed.
+An'--I'm obliged for my s'prise," she added, squeezing my hand in the
+darkness. "I surmised first thing, most, when Delia described you. No;
+land, no!--Delia don't suspicion you got it up. She don't think of it
+bein' anybody but just God--an' I donno's 'twas. An' that's what Abel
+thinks--wa'n't Abel splendid? You know 'bout Abel--an' Delia? You know
+he use' to--he wanted to--that is, he was in--oh, well, no. Of course
+you wouldn't know. Well, Delia don't suspicion you--but she said I
+should tell you something. 'You tell her,' she says to me, 'you tell her
+I say I guess I take stock now,' she says; 'tell her that: I guess I
+take stock now.'"
+
+At this my heart leaped up so that I hardly know what I said in answer.
+
+"Delia's out here now," Calliope called from the dark steps. "The
+Proudfits brought us. Delia's goin' home with 'em--to stay."
+
+Thus I saw the eyes of the Proudfits' motor, with the threads of
+streaming light, about to go skimming from my gate. And in that kindly
+security was Delia More.
+
+"Calliope," I cried after her because I could not help it, "tell Delia
+More I take stock, too!"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE BIG WIND
+
+
+Of Abel Halsey, that young itinerant preacher, I learned more on a
+December day when Autumn seemed to have come back to find whether she
+had left anything. Calliope and I were resting from a racing walk up the
+hillside, where the squat brick Leading Church of Friendship overlooks
+the valley pastures and the village. Calliope walks like a girl, and
+with our haste and the keen air, her wrinkled cheeks were as rosy as
+youth.
+
+"Don't it seem like some days don't belong to any month, but just whim
+along, doin' as they please?" Calliope said. "Months that might be
+snowin' an' blowin' the expression off our face hev days when they sort
+o' show summer hid inside, secret an' holy. That's the way with lots o'
+things, ain't it? That's the way," she added thoughtfully, "Abel feels
+about the Lord, I guess. Abel Halsey,--you know."
+
+They had told me how Abel, long ordained a minister of God, had
+steadfastly refused to be installed a pastor of any church. He was a
+devout man, but the love of far places was upon him, and he lived what
+Friendship called "a-gypsyin'" off in the hills, now to visit a sick
+man, now to preach in a country schoolhouse, now to marry, or bury, or
+help with the threshing. These lonely rides among the hills and his
+custom of watching a train come in or rush by out of the distance were
+his ways of voyaging. Perhaps, too, his little skill at the organ gave
+him, now and then, an hour resembling a journey. But in his first youth
+he had meant to go away in earnest--far away, to the City or some other
+city. Also, though Calliope did not speak of it again, and I think that
+the others kept a loyal silence because of my strangerhood, I had known,
+since the home coming of Delia More, that Abel Halsey had once had
+another dream.
+
+"You wasn't here when the new church was built," Calliope said, looking
+up at the building proudly. "That was the time I mean about Abel. You
+know, before it was built we'd hed church in the hall over the
+Gekerjeck's drug store; an' because it was his hall, Hiram Gekerjeck, he
+just about run the church,--picked out the wall paper, left the stair
+door open Sundays so's he could get the church heat, till the whole
+service smelt o' ether, an' finally hed church announcements printed as
+a gift, _but_ with a line about a patent medicine o' his set fine along
+at the bottom. He said that was no differ'nt than advertisin' the
+printin'-offices that way, like they do. But it was that move made Abel
+Halsey--him an' Timothy Toplady and Eppleby Holcomb an' Postmaster
+Sykes, the three elders, set to to build a church. An' they done it too.
+An' to them four I declare it seemed like the buildin' was a body
+waitin' for its soul to be born. From the minute the sod was scraped off
+they watched every stick that went into it. An' by November it was all
+done an' plastered an' waitin' its pews--an' it was a-goin' to be
+dedicated with special doin's--music from off, an' strange ministers,
+an' Reverend Arthur Bliss from the City. I guess Abel an' the elders hed
+tacked printed invites to half the barns in the county.
+
+"I rec'lect it was o' Wednesday, the one next before the dedication, an'
+windy-cold an' wintry. I'd been havin' a walk that day, an' 'long about
+five o'clock, right about where we are, I'd stood watchin' the sunset
+over the Pump pasture there, till I was chilled through. The smoke was
+rollin' out o' the church chimney because they was dryin' the plaster,
+an' I run in there to get my hands warm an' see how the plaster was
+doin'. An' inside was the three elders, walkin' 'round, layin' a finger
+on a sash or a post--the kind o' odd, knowledgeable way men has with new
+buildin's. The Ladies' Aid had got the floor broom-clean, an' the
+lamp-chandelier filled an' ready; an' the foreign pipe-organ that the
+Proudfits had sent from Europe was in an' in workin' order, little
+lookin'-glass over the keyboard an' all. It seemed rill home-like, with
+the two big stoves a-goin', an' the floor back of 'em piled up with the
+chunks Peleg Bemus had sawed for nothin'. Everything was all redded up,
+waitin' for the pews.
+
+"Timothy Toplady was puttin' out his middle finger stiff here an' there
+on the plaster.
+
+"'It's dry as a bone,' he says, 'but what I say is this, le's us leave a
+fire burn here all night, so's to be sure. I'd hate like death to hev
+the whole congregation catchin' cold an' takin' Hiram Gekerjeck's
+medicine.'
+
+"I rec'lect Eppleby Holcomb looked up sort o' dreamy--Eppleby always
+goes round like he'd swallowed his last night's sleep.
+
+"'The house o' God,' he says over; 'ain't that curious? Nothin' about it
+to indicate it's the house o' God but the shape--no more'n's if 'twas a
+buildin' where the Holy Spirit never come near. An' yet right here in
+this place we'll mebbe feel the big wind an' speak with Pentecostal
+tongues.'
+
+"''T seems like,' says Postmaster Sykes, thoughtful, ''t seems like we'd
+ought to hev a little meetin' o' thanks here o' Sat'day night--little
+informal praise meetin' or somethin.'
+
+"Timothy shakes his head decided.
+
+"'Silas Sykes, what you talkin'?' he says. 'Why, the church ain't
+dedicated yet. A house o' God,' s'e, 'can't be used for no purpose
+whatsoever without it's been dedicated.'
+
+"'So it can't--so it can't,' says the postmaster, apologetic, knowin' he
+was in politics an' that the brethren was watchin' him, cat to mouse,
+for slips.
+
+"'I s'pose that's so,' says Eppleby, doubtful. But he's one o' them that
+sort o' ducks under situations to see if they're alike on both sides,
+an' if they ain't, he up an' questions 'em. Timothy, though, he was
+differ'nt. Timothy was always goin' on about constituted authority, an'
+to him the thing was the thing, even if it was another thing.
+
+"'That's right,' he insists, his lips disappearin' with certainty. 'I
+s'pose we hadn't reely ought even to come in here an' stan' 'round, like
+we are.'
+
+"He looks sidlin' over towards me, warmin' my hands rill secular by the
+church stove. An' I felt like I'd been spoke up for when somebody says
+from the door:--
+
+"'You better just bar out the carpenters o' this world, friends, an'
+done with it!'
+
+"It was Abel Halsey, standin' in the entry, lookin' as handsome as the
+law allows. An' I see he happened to be there because the Through was
+about due,--that's the one that don't stop here,--an' you can always get
+a good view of it from this slope. You know Abel never misses watchin' a
+fast train go 'long, if he can help himself.
+
+"'What's the i-dea?' Abel says. 'How can you pray at all in closets an'
+places that ain't been dedicated? I shouldn't think they'd be holy
+enough, 's'e.'
+
+"'That,' says the postmaster, sure o' support, 'ain't the question.'
+
+"'I thought it couldn't be,' says Abel, amiable. 'Well, what is the
+question? Whether prayer is prayer, no matter where you're prayin'?'
+
+"'Oh, no,' says Eppleby Holcomb, soothin', 'it ain't that.'
+
+"'I thought it couldn't be that,' says Abel. 'Is it whether the Lord is
+in dedicated spots an' nowheres else?'
+
+"'Abel Halsey,' Timothy tarts up, 'you needn't to be sacrilegious.'
+
+"'But,' says Abel, 'the question is, whether _you_'re sacrilegious to
+deny a prayer-meetin' or any other good use to the church or to any
+other place, dedicated or not. Well, Timothy, I think you are.'
+
+"Timothy clears his throat an' dabs at the palm of his hand with his
+other front finger. But before he could lay down eternal law, we sort o'
+heard, almost before we knew we heard, folks hurryin' past out here on
+the frozen ground. An' they was shoutin', like questions, an' a-shoutin'
+further off. We looked out, an' I can remember how the whole slope up
+from the village there was black with folks.
+
+"We run outside, an' I know I kep' close by Abel Halsey. An' I got hold
+o' what had happened when somebody yelled an answer to his askin'. You
+probably heard all about that part. It was the day the Through Express
+went off the track down there in the cut beyond the Pump pasture.
+
+"We run with the rest of 'em, me keepin' close to Abel, I guess because
+he's got a way with him that makes you think he'd know what to do no
+matter what. But when he was two-thirds o' the way acrost the pasture,
+he stops short an' grabs at my sleeve.
+
+"'Look here,' he says, 'you can't go down there. You mustn't do it. We
+donno what'll be. You stay here,' he says; 'you set there under the
+cottonwood.'
+
+"You kind o' _haf_ to mind Abel. It's sort o' grained in that man to hev
+folks disciple after him. I made him promise he'd motion from the fence
+if he see I could help any, an' then I se' down under that big tree down
+there. I was tremblin' some, I know. It always seems like wrecks are
+somethin' that happen in other states an' in the dark. But when one's on
+ground that you know like a book an' was brought up on,--when it's in
+the daylight, right by a pasture you've been acrost always an' where
+you've walked the ties,--well, I s'pose it's the same feelin' as when a
+man you know cuts up a state's prison caper; seem's like he _can't_ of,
+because you knew him.
+
+"Half the men o' Friendship run by me, seems though. The whole town'd
+been rousted up while we was in the church talkin' heresy. An' up on the
+high place on the road there I see Zittelhof's undertaking wagon, with
+the sunset showin' on its nickel rails. But not a woman run past me.
+Ain't it funny how it's men that go to danger of rail an' fire an'
+water--but when it's nothin' but birth an' dyin' natural, then it's for
+women to be there.
+
+"When I'd got about ready to fly away, waitin' so, I see Abel at the
+fence. An' he didn't motion to me, but he swung over the top an' come
+acrost the stubble, an' I see he hed somethin' in his arms. I run to
+meet him, an' he run too, crooked, his feet turnin' over with him some
+in the hard ground. The sky made his face sort o' bright; an' I see he'd
+got a child in his arms.
+
+"He didn't give her to me. He stood her down side o' me--a little thing
+of five years old, or six, with thick, straight hair an' big scairt
+eyes.
+
+"'Is she hurt, Abel?' I says.
+
+"'No, she ain't hurt none,' he answers me, 'an' they's about seventeen
+more of 'em, her age, an' they ain't hurt, either. Their coach was
+standin' up on its legs all right. But the man they was with, he's stone
+dead. Hit on the head, somehow. An',' Abel says, 'I'm goin' to throw 'em
+all over the fence to you.'
+
+"The little girl jus' kep' still. An' when we took her by each hand, an'
+run back toward the fence with her, her feet hardly touchin' the ground,
+she kep' up without a word, like all to once she'd found out this is a
+world where the upside-down is consider'ble in use. An' I waited with
+her, over there this side the cut, hearin' 'em farther down rippin' off
+fence rails so's to let through what they hed to carry.
+
+"Time after time Abel come scramblin' up the sand-bank, bringin' 'em two
+'t once--little girls they was, all about the age o' the first one, none
+of 'em with hats or cloaks on; an' I took 'em in my arms an' set 'em
+down, an' took 'em in my arms an' set 'em down, till I was fair movin'
+in a dream. They belonged, I see by their dress, to some kind of a home
+for the homeless, an' I judged the man was takin' 'em somewheres, him
+that Abel said'd been killed. Some'd reach out their arms to me over the
+fence--an' some was afraid an' hung back, but some'd just cling to me
+an' not want to be set down. I can remember them the best.
+
+"Abel, when he come with the last ones, he off with his coat like I with
+my ulster, an' as well as we could we wrapped four or five of 'em
+up--one that was sickly, an' one little delicate blonde, an' a little
+lame girl, an' the one--the others called her Mitsy--that'd come over
+the fence first. An' by then half of 'em was beginnin' to cry some. An'
+the wind was like so many knives.
+
+"'Where shall we take 'em to, Abel?' I says, beside myself.
+
+"'Take 'em?' he says. 'Take 'em into the church! Quick as you can. This
+wind is like death. Stay with 'em till I come.'
+
+"Somehow or other I got 'em acrost that pasture. When I look at the Pump
+pasture now, in afternoon like this, or in Spring with vi'lets, or when
+a circus show's there, it don't seem to me it could 'a' been the same
+place. I kep' 'em together the best I could--some of 'em beggin' for
+'Mr. Middie--Mr. Middie,' the man, I judged, that was dead. An' finally
+we got up here in the road, an' it was like the end o' pain to be able
+to fling open the church door an' marshal 'em through the entry into
+that great, big, warm room, with the two fires roarin'.
+
+"I got 'em 'round the nearest stove an' rubbed their little hands an'
+tried not to scare 'em to death with wantin' to love 'em; an' all the
+while, bad as I felt for 'em, I was glad an' glad that it was me that
+could be there with 'em. They was twenty,--when I come to count 'em so's
+to keep track,--twenty little girls with short, thick hair, or soft,
+short curls, an' every one with something baby-like left to 'em. An'
+when we set on the floor round the stove, the coals shone through the
+big open draft into their faces, an' they looked over their shoulders to
+the dark creepin' up the room, an' they come closer 'round me--an' the
+closest-up ones _snuggled_.
+
+"Well, o' course that was at first, when they was some dazed. But as
+fast as their blue little hands was warm an' pink again, one or two of
+'em begun to whimper, natural an' human, an' up with their arm to their
+face, an' then begun to cry right out, an' some more joined in, an' the
+rest pipes up, askin' for Mr. Middie. An' I thought, 'Sp'osin' they
+_all_ cried an' what if Abel Halsey stayed away hours.' I donno. I done
+my best too. Mebbe it's because I'm use' to children with my heart an'
+not with my ways. Anyhow, most of 'em was cryin' prime when Abel finally
+got there.
+
+"When he come in, I see Abel's face was white an' dusty, an' he had his
+other coat off an' gone too, an' his shirt-sleeves was some tore. But he
+comes runnin' up to them cryin' children an' I wish't you could 'a' seen
+his smile--Abel's smile was always kind o' like his soul growin' out of
+his face, rill thrifty.
+
+"'Why, you little kiddies!' s'e, 'cryin' when you're all nice an' warm!
+Le's see now,' he says grave. 'Anybody here know how to play
+Drop-the-handkerchief? If you do,' he tells 'em, 'stand up _quick_!'
+
+"They scrambled 'round like they was beetles an' you'd took up the
+stone. They was all up in a minute, an' stopped cryin', too. With that
+he catches my handkerchief out o' my hand an' flutters it over his head
+an' runs to the middle o' the room.
+
+"'Come on!' he says. 'Hold o' hands--every one o' you hold o' hands. I'm
+goin' to drop the handkerchief, an' you'd better hurry up.'
+
+"That was talk they knew. They was after him in a secunt an' tears
+forgot,--them poor little things,--laughin' an' hold o' hands, an'
+dancin' in a chain, an' standin' in a ring. An' when he hed 'em like
+that, an' still, Abel begun runnin' 'round to drop the handkerchief; an'
+then he turns to me.
+
+"'Only two killed, thank God,' he says as he run; 'the conductor an'
+M-i-d-d-l-e-t-o-n,' he spells it, an' motions to the children with the
+handkerchief so's I'd know who Middleton was. 'An' not a scrap o' paper
+on him,' he goes on, 'to tell what home he brought the children from or
+where he's goin' with 'em. Their mileage was punched to the City--but we
+don't know where they belong there, an' the conductor bein' gone too.
+The poor fellow that had 'em in charge never knew what hurt him. Hit
+from overhead, he was, an' his skull crushed....'
+
+"It was so dark in the church by then we could hardly see, but the
+children could keep track o' the white handkerchief. He let it fall
+behind the little girl he'd brought me first,--Mitsy,--an' she catches
+it up an' sort o' squeaks with the fun an' runs after him. An' while he
+doubles an' turns,--
+
+"'They've telegraphed ahead,' he says, 'to two or three places in the
+City. But even if we hear right off, we can't get 'em out o' Friendship
+to-night. They'll hev to stay here. The Commercial Travellers' Hotel an'
+the Depot House has both got all they can do for--some of 'em hurt
+pretty bad. They couldn't either hotel take 'em in....'
+
+"Then he lets Mitsy catch him an' he ups with her on his shoulder an'
+run with her on his back, his face lookin' out o' her blue, striped
+skirts.
+
+"'We'll hev to house 'em right here in the church,' he says.
+
+"'Here?' says I; 'here in the church?'
+
+"'You know Friendship,' he says, hoppin' along. 'Not half a dozen houses
+could take in more'n two extry, even if we hed the time to canvass. An'
+we _ain't_ the time. They want their s-u-p-p-e-r right now,' he spells
+it out, an' lit out nimble when Mitsy dropped the handkerchief back o'
+the little blond girl. Then he let the little blond girl catch them, and
+he took her on his shoulders too, an' they was both shoutin' so 't he
+hed to make little circles out to get where I could hear him.
+
+"'I've seen Zittelhof,' he told me. 'He was down there with his wagon.
+He'll bring up enough little canvas cots from the store. An' I thought
+mebbe you'd go down to the village an' pick up some stuff they'll
+need--bedding an' things. An' get the women here with some supper. Come
+on now,' he calls out to 'em; 'everybody in a procession an' _sing_!'
+
+"He led 'em off with
+
+    "'King William was King James's son,'
+
+an' he sings back to me, for the secunt line,
+
+    "'Go _now_, go _quick_, I bet they're starved!'
+
+"So I got into my coat, tryin' to think where I should go to be sure o'
+not wastin' time talkin'. Lots o' folks in this world is willin', but
+mighty few can be quick.
+
+"I knew right off, though, where I'd find somebody to help. The
+Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality was meetin'
+that afternoon with Mis' Toplady, an' I could cut acrost their
+pasture--" Calliope nodded toward the little Toplady house and the big
+Toplady barn--"an' that's what I done. An' when I got near enough to the
+house to tell, I see by the light in the parlour that they was still
+there. An' I know when I got into the room, full as I was o' news o'
+them little children an' the wreck an' the two killed an' all them that
+was hurt--there was the Sodality settlin' whether the lamb's wool
+comforter for the bazaar should be tied with pink for daintiness or
+brown for durability.
+
+"'_Dainty!_' says I, when I got my breath. 'They's sides to life makes
+me want to pinch that word right out o' the dictionary same as I would a
+bug,' I says.
+
+"That was funny, too,"--Calliope added thoughtfully, "because I like
+that word, speakin' o' food an' ways to do things. But some folks get to
+livin' the word same's if it was the law.
+
+"I guess they thought I was crazy," she went on, "but I wasn't long
+makin' 'em understand. An' I tell you, the way they took it made me love
+'em all. If you want to love folks, just you get in some kind o'
+respectable trouble in Friendship, an' you'll see so much lovableness
+that the trouble'll kind o' spindle out an' leave nothin' but the love
+doin' business. My land, the Sodality went at the situation head first,
+like it was somethin' to get acrost before dark. An' so it was.
+
+"I remember Mis' Photographer Sturgis: 'There!' she says, 'most cryin'.
+'If ever I take only a pint o' milk, I'm sure as sure to want more
+before the day's out. None of us is on good terms with each other's
+milkman. _Where_ we goin' to get the milk,' she says, 'for them poor
+little things?'
+
+"'Where?' says Mis' Toplady--you know how big an' comfortable an'
+settled she is--'_Where?_ Well, you needn't to think o' where. I expect
+the Jersey won't be milked till I go an' milk her,' she says, 'but she
+gives six quarts, nights, right along now, an' sometimes seven. Now
+about the bread.'
+
+"Mis' Postmaster Sykes use' to set sponge twice a week, an' she offered
+five loaves out o' her six baked that day. Mis' Holcomb had two loaves
+o' brown bread an' a crock o' sour cream cookies. An' Libbie Liberty
+bursts out that they'd got up their courage an' killed an' boiled two o'
+their chickens the day before an' none o' the girls'd been able to touch
+a mouthful, bein' they'd raised the hens from egg to axe. Libbie said
+she'd bring the whole kettle along, an' it could be het on the church
+stove an' made soup of. So it went on, down to even Liddy Ember, that
+was my partner an' silly poor, an' in about four minutes everything was
+provided for, beddin' an' all.
+
+"Mis' Toplady had flew upstairs, gettin' out the linen, an' she was
+comin' down the front stairs with her arms full o' sheets an' pillow
+slips when through the front door walks Timothy Toplady, come in all
+excited an' lookin' every which way. Seems he'd barked his elbow in the
+rescue work an' laid off for liniment.
+
+"'Oh, Timothy,' says his wife, 'them poor little children. We've been
+plannin' it all out.'
+
+"'Who's goin' to take 'em in?' says Timothy, tryin' to roll up his
+overcoat sleeve for fear the Sodality'd be put to the blush if he got to
+his elbow any other way.
+
+"'They're all warm in the church,' Mis' Toplady says; 'we're goin' to
+leave 'em there. Zittelhof's goin' to take up canvas cots. We're gettin'
+the bedding together,' she told him.
+
+"Timothy looked up, sort o' wild an' glazed.
+
+"'Canvas cots,' s'e, 'in the house o' the Lord?'
+
+"'Why, Timothy,' says his wife, helpless, 'it's all warm there now, an'
+we don't know what else. We thought we'd carry up their supper to 'em--'
+
+"'Supper,' says Timothy, 'in the house o' the Lord?'
+
+"Then Mis' Toplady spunks up some.
+
+"'Why, yes,' she says; 'I'm goin' to milk the Jersey an' take up the two
+pails.'
+
+"Timothy waves his barked arm in the air.
+
+"'Never!' s'e. 'Never. We elders'll never consent to that, not in this
+world!'
+
+"At that we all stood around sort o' pinned to the air. This hadn't
+occurred to nobody. But his wife was back at him, rill crispy.
+
+"'Timothy Toplady,' s'she, 'they use churches for horspitals an'
+refuges,' she says.
+
+"'They do,' says Timothy, solemn, 'they do, in necessity, an' war, an'
+siege. But here's the whole o' Friendship Village to take these children
+in, an' it's sacrilege to use the house o' God for any purpose whatever
+while it's waitin' its dedication. It's stealin', he says, 'from the
+Lord Most High.'
+
+"I never see anybody more het up. We all tried to tell him. Nobody in
+Friendship has a warm spare room in winter, without it's the Proudfits,
+an' they was in Europe an' their house locked. Mebbe six of us, we
+counted up afterwards, could 'a' took in two children to sleep in a cold
+room, or one child to sleep with some one o' the family. But as Abel
+said, where was the time to canvass round? An' what could we do with the
+other little things? But Timothy wouldn't listen to nothin'.
+
+"'Amanda,' s'e in a married voice, 'what I say is this, I forbid you to
+carry a drop o' Jersey milk or any other kind o' milk up to that
+church.'
+
+"With that he was out the front door an' liniment forgot.
+
+"Mis' Sykes spatted her hands.
+
+"'He'll find Silas Sykes an' Eppleby,' she says to Mis' Holcomb. 'Quick.
+Le's us get our hands on my bread an' your cookies. Them poor little
+things--'way past their supper hour.'
+
+"'An' none of 'em got mothers,' says Mis' Sturgis, 'just left 'round
+with lockets on, I sp'ose, an' wrecked an' hungry....'
+
+"'An' one o' 'em lame,' Mame Holcomb puts in, down on her knees tryin'
+to sort out her overshoes. The Sodality never could tell its own
+overshoes.
+
+"Well, they scattered so quick it made you think o' mulberry leaves,
+some years, in the first frost--an' I was left alone with Mis' Toplady.
+
+"'Here,' she says to me then, all squintin' with firmness, 'you take
+along all the linen an' comfortables you can lug. Timothy didn't mention
+them. An' _leave the rest to me_.'
+
+"I went over that in my mind while I stumbled along back to the church,
+loaded down. But I couldn't make much out of it. I knew Timothy Toplady:
+that he was meek till he turned an' then it was look out. An' I knew,
+too, that Timothy could run Silas Sykes, the postmaster's political
+strength, like you've noticed, makin' him kind o' wobbled in his own
+judgment of other things. I didn't know how Eppleby Holcomb'd be--it
+might turn out to be one o' the things he'd up an' question, civilized,
+but I wa'n't sure. Anyhow, the cream cookies an' the two loaves wasn't
+so vital as them five loaves o' bread.
+
+"When I got back to the church, here it was all lit up. Abel had lit the
+chandelier on a secular scene! Bless 'em, it surely was secular, though,
+accordin' to my lights, it was some sacred too. Six or seven of the
+little things was buildin' a palace out o' the split wood, with the
+little lame girl for queen. The little blonde an' the one that was rill
+delicate lookin' had gone to sleep by the stove on Abel's overcoat.
+Mitsy, she run from somewheres an' grabbed my hand. An' Abel had the
+rest over by the other stove tellin' 'em stories. I heard him say
+dragon, an' blue velvet, an' golden hair.
+
+"I hadn't more'n got inside the door before Zittelhof's wagon come with
+the cots. An' Mis' Zittelhof was with him, her arms full o' bedclothes
+she'd gathered up around from folks. I never said a word to Abel about
+the trouble with Timothy. I donno if Abel rilly heard us come in, he was
+so excited about his dragon. An' Mis' Zittelhof an' I began makin' up
+the cots. On the first one I laid the two babies that was asleep on the
+floor. They never woke up. Their little cheeks was warm an' pink, an'
+one of 'em had some tears on it. When I see that, I clear forgot the
+church wasn't dedicated, an' I thanked God they was there, safe an' by a
+good fire, with somebody 'tendin' to 'em.
+
+"The bed-makin' an' the story-tellin' an' the palace-buildin' went on,
+an' I kep' gettin' exciteder every minute. When the door opened, I
+couldn't tell which was in my mouth, my heart or my tongue. But it was
+only Libbie Liberty with the big iron kettle o' chicken broth an' a
+basket o' cups an' spoons. She se' down the kettle on the stove an'
+stirred up the fire under it, an' it was no time before the whole church
+begun to smell savoury as a kitchen. An' then in walks Mis' Holcomb with
+her brown bread an' cream cookies. An' we fair jumped up an' down when
+Mis' Sykes come breathin' in the door with them five loaves o' wheat
+bread safe, an' butter to match.
+
+"Still, we _was_ without milk. There wasn't a sign o' Mis' Toplady. An'
+any minute Timothy might get there with Silas in tow. Mis' Sykes was
+nervous as a witch over it, an' it was her proposed we set the children
+up on the cots an' begin' feedin' 'em right away. I run down the room to
+tell Abel, an' then I hed to tell him _why_ we'd best hurry.
+
+"Abel laughs a little when he heard about it.
+
+"'Dear old Timothy,' he says, 'servin' his God accordin' to the dictates
+of his own notions. Wait a minute till I release the princess.'
+
+"When he said that, I was afraid he must be telling a worldly story with
+royalty in. An' I begun to get troubled myself. But I heard him end it:
+'So the Princess found her kingdom because she learnt to love every
+living thing. She saved the lives of the hare an' the goldfinch. An'
+don't you ever let any living thing suffer one minute and maybe you'll
+find out some of the things the Princess knew.' An', royalty or not, I
+felt all right about Abel's story-telling after that.
+
+"Then we all brisked round an' begun settin' the children up on the
+cots--two or three to a cot, with one of us to wait on 'em. An' both the
+little sleepy ones woke up, too. An' when we sliced an' spread the bread
+an' dished the hot chicken broth an' see how hungry they all seemed, I
+declare if one of us could feel wicked. The little things'd begun to
+talk some by then, an' they chatted soft an' looked up at us, an' that
+little Mitsy--she'd got so she'd kiss me every time I'd ask her. An' I
+was perfectly shameless. I donno's the poor little thing got enough to
+eat. But sometimes when things go blue--I like to think about that. I
+guess we was all the same. Our principal feelin' was how dear they was,
+an' to hurry up before Timothy Toplady got there, an' how we wish't we
+hed more milk.
+
+"Then all of a sudden while we was flyin' round, I happened to go past
+the front door, an' I heard a noise in the entry. I thought o' Timothy
+an' Silas, comin' with sheriffs an' firearms an' I didn't know
+what--Silas havin' politics back of him, so; an' I rec'lect I planned,
+wild an' contradictory, first about callin' an instantaneous
+congregational meetin' to decide which was right, an' then about
+telegraphin' to the City for constituted authority to do as we was
+doin', an' then about Abel fightin' Timothy an' Silas both, if it come
+rilly necessary.
+
+"I got hold o' Mis' Sykes an' Mame Holcomb, an' told 'em quiet.
+'Somethin's the matter outside there,' I says to 'em, kind o' warnin',
+'an' I thought you two'd ought to know it.' An' we all three come 'round
+by the entry door, careless, an listened. An' the noise kep' up, kind o'
+soft an' obstinate, an' we couldn't make it out.
+
+"'We'd best go out there an' see,' says Mis' Sykes, low; 'the dear land
+knows what men _will_ do.'
+
+"So we watched our chance an' slipped out--an' I guess, for all our high
+ways, we was all three wonderin' inside, was we rilly doin' right. You
+know your doubts come thick when there's a noise in the entry. But Mis'
+Sykes acted as brave as two, an' it was her shut the door to behind us.
+
+"An' there, right by that stone just outside the entry o' the church,
+set Mis' Timothy Toplady, _milkin' her Jersey cow_.
+
+"We could just see her, dim, by the light o' the transom. She was on the
+secunt pail, an' that was two-thirds full. She hed her back toward us,
+an' she didn't hear us. She set all wrapped up in a shawl, a basket o'
+cups side of her, an' the Jersey standin' there, quiet an' demure. An'
+beyond, in the cut an' movin' acrost the Pump pasture, it was thick with
+lanterns.
+
+"But before we three'd hed time to burst out like we wanted to, we sort
+o' scrooched back again. Because on the other side o' the cow we heard
+Timothy Toplady's voice. He'd just got there, some breathless, an' with
+him, we see, was Eppleby.
+
+"'Amanda,' says Timothy, 'what in the Dominion o' Canady air you doin'?'
+
+"'I shouldn't think you would know,' says Mis' Toplady, short. 'You
+don't do enough of it.'
+
+"She hed him there. Timothy always _will_ go down to the Dick Dasher an'
+shirk the chores.
+
+"'Amanda,' says Timothy, 'you've disobeyed me flat-footed.'
+
+"'No such thing,' s'she, milkin' away like mad for fear he'd use force;
+'I ain't carried a drop o' milk here. I've drove it,' she says.
+
+"Timothy groaned.
+
+"'Milkin' in the church,' he says.
+
+"'No, sir,' says Amanda, back at him; 'I'm outside on the sod, an' you
+know it.'
+
+"An' then my hopes sort o' riz, because I thought I heard Eppleby
+Holcomb laugh soft--sort of a half-an'-half chuckle. Like he'd looked
+under the situation an' see it wasn't alike on both sides. An' 't the
+same time Mis' Toplady, she changed her way, an',--
+
+"'Timothy,' s'she, 'you hungry?'
+
+"'I'm nigh starved,' says Timothy. 'It must be eight o'clock,' s'e, 'but
+I ain't the heart to think o' that.'
+
+"'No,' s'she, 'so you ain't. Not with them poor babies in there
+hungrier'n you be an' nowheres to go.'
+
+"With that she got done milkin' an' stood up an' picked up her two
+pails--we could smell the sweet, warm milk from where we was.
+
+"'Timothy,' s'she, 'the worst sacrilege that's done in _this_ world is
+when folks turns their backs on any little bit of a chance that the Lord
+gives 'em to do good in, like He told 'em. Who was it, I'd like to know,
+said, "Suffer little children"? Who was it said, "Feed my lambs"? No
+"when" or "where" about that. Just _do it_. An' no occasion to hem an'
+haw about it, either. The least you can do for your share in this, as I
+see it, is to keep your silence and drive the cow back home. The oven's
+full o' bake' sweet potatoes an' they must be just nearin' done.'
+
+"I see Timothy start to wave his arms an' I donno what he would 'a' said
+if it hadn't been settled for 'im. For then, like it was right out o'
+the sky, the church organ begun to play soft. For a minute we all looked
+up, like the Shepherds must of when the voices of the night told 'em the
+spirit o' God was in the world, born in a little child. It was Abel,--I
+knew right away it was Abel,--an' he was just gentlin' round soft on the
+keys, kind o' like he was askin' a blessin' an' rockin' a cradle an'
+doin' all the little nice things music can. An' with that Mis' Sykes,
+she throws open the church door.
+
+"I'll never forget how it looked inside--all warm an' lamp-lit an' with
+them little things bein' fed an' chatterin' soft. An' up in the loft set
+Abel, playin' away on the foreign organ before it'd been dedicated. An'
+then he begun singin' low--an' there's somethin' about Abel 't you just
+_haf_ to listen, whatever he says or does. Even Timothy hed to
+listen--though I think he was some struck dumb, too, an' that kep' him
+controlled for a minute--like it will. An' Abel sung:--
+
+    "'The Lord is my Shepherd--I shall not want.
+    He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,
+    He leadeth me--He leadeth me beside the still waters.
+    He restoreth my soul....'
+
+"An' at the first line, before we'd rilly sensed what it was he said,
+every one o' them little children in the midst o' their supper slips off
+the edge o' the cots an' kneeled down there on the bare floor, just like
+they'd been told to. Oh, wasn't it wonderful? An' yet it wasn't--it
+wasn't. We found out, when folks come for 'em the next mornin', it was
+the children's prayer that they sung every day o' their lives at their
+Good Shepherd's Orphans' Home--soft an' out o' tune an' with all their
+little hearts, just as they went ahead an' sung it with Abel, clear to
+the end. I guess they didn't know everybody don't kneel down all over
+the world when they hear the Twenty-third Psalm.
+
+"Abel seen 'em in the little lookin'-glass over the keyboard. An' when
+he'd got done he set there perfectly still with his head down. An' Mis'
+Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb an' Eppleby an' I bowed our heads too, out there
+in the entry. An' so, after a minute, did Timothy. I couldn't help
+peekin' to see.
+
+"An' then, when the children was all a-rustlin' up, Mis' Toplady she
+jus' hands her two pails o' milk over to Timothy.
+
+"'You take 'em in,' she says to him, her eyes swimmin'. 'I've come off
+without my handkerchief.'
+
+"Timothy looks round him, kind o' helpless, but Eppleby stood there an'
+pats him on the arm.
+
+"'Go in--go in, brother,' Eppleby says gentle. 'I guess the church's
+been dedicated. I feel like we'd heard the big wind--an' I guess, mebbe,
+the Pentecostal tongues.'
+
+"An' Timothy--he's an awful tender-hearted man in spite o' bein' so
+notional--Timothy just went on in with the milk, without sayin'
+anything. An' Eppleby side of him. An' we 'most shut the door on Silas
+Sykes, comin' tearin' up on account o' Timothy leavin' him urgent word
+to come, without explainin' why. An' when Silas see the inside o' the
+church, all lit up an' chicken supper for the children an' the other two
+elders there with the milk, he just rubs his hands an' beams like he see
+his secunt term. I donno's it'd ever enter Silas Sykes's head't there
+was anything wrong with anything, providin' somebody wasn't snappin' him
+up for it. I guess it's like that in politics.
+
+"We took the milk around an', bake' sweet potatoes forgot, Timothy stood
+up by the stove, between Eppleby an' Silas, an' watched us--an' the
+Jersey must 'a' picked her way home alone. An' Abel, he just set there
+to the organ, gentlin' 'round soft on the keys so it made me think o'
+God movin' on the face o' the waters. An' movin' on the face of
+everything else too, dedicated or not. It was like we'd felt the big
+wind, same as Eppleby said. An' somethin' in it kind o' hid, secret an'
+holy."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE GRANDMA LADIES
+
+
+Two weeks before Christmas Friendship was thrown into a state of holiday
+delight. Mrs. Proudfit and her daughter, Miss Clementina, issued
+invitations to a reception to be given on Christmas Eve at Proudfit
+House, on Friendship Hill. The Proudfits, who had rarely entertained
+since Miss Linda went away, lived in Europe and New York and spent
+little time in the village, but, for all that, they remained citizens in
+absence, and Friendship always wrote out invitations for them whenever
+it gave "companies." The invitations the postmaster duly forwarded to
+some Manhattan bank, though I think the village had a secret conviction
+that these were never received--"sent out wild to a bank in the City,
+so." However, now that old courtesies were to be so magnificently
+returned, every one believed and felt a greater respect for the whole
+financial world.
+
+The invitations enclosed the card of Mrs. Nita Ordway, and the name
+sounded for me a note of other days when, before my coming to Friendship
+Village, we two had, in the town, belonged to one happy circle of
+friends.
+
+"I thought at first mebbe the card'd got shoved in the envelope by
+mistake," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. "I know once I got a
+Christmas book from a cousin o' mine in the City, an' a strange man's
+card fell out o' the leaves. I sent the card right straight back to her,
+an' Cousin Jane seemed rill cut up, so I made up my mind I'd lay low
+about this card. But I hear everybody's got 'em. I s'pose it's a sign
+that it's some Mis' Ordway's party too--only not enough hers to get her
+name on the invite. Mebbe she chipped in on the expenses. Give a third,
+like enough."
+
+However that was, Friendship looked on the Christmas party as on some
+unexpected door about to open in its path, and it woke in the morning
+conscious of expectation before it could remember what to expect.
+Proudfit House! A Christmas party! It touched every one as might some
+giant Santa Claus, for grown-ups, with a pack of heart's-ease on his
+back.
+
+When Mrs. Ordway arrived in the village, the excitement mounted. Mrs.
+Nita Ordway was the first exquisitely beautiful woman of the great world
+whom Friendship had ever seen--"beautiful like in the pictures of when
+noted folks was young," the village breathlessly summed her up. To be
+sure, when she and her little daughter, Viola, rode out in the
+Proudfits' motor, nobody in the street appeared to look at them. But
+Friendship knew when they rode, and when they walked, and what they
+wore, and when they returned.
+
+It was a happiness to me to see Mrs. Ordway again, and I sat often with
+her in the music room at Proudfit House and listened to her glorious
+voice in just the songs that I love. Sometimes she would send for her
+little Viola, so that I might sit with the child in my arms, for she was
+one of those rare children who will let you love them.
+
+"I like be made some 'tention to," Viola sometimes said shyly. She was
+not afraid, and she would stay with me hour-long, as if she loved to be
+loved. She was like a little come-a-purpose spirit, to let one pretend.
+
+A day or two after the invitations had been received, I was in my guest
+room going over my Christmas list. Just before Christmas I delight in
+the look of a guest room, for then the bed is spread with a brave array
+of pretty things, and when one arranges and wraps them, the stitches of
+rose and blue on flowered fabrics, the flutter of crisp ribbons, and the
+breath of sachets make one glad. I was lingering at my task when I heard
+some one below, and I recognized her voice.
+
+"Calliope!" I called gladly from the stairs, and bade her come up to me.
+
+Calliope is one of the women in whose presence one can wrap one's
+Christmas gifts. She came into the room, bringing a breath of Winter,
+and she laid aside her tan ulster and her round straw hat, and
+straightway sat down on the rug by the open fire.
+
+"Well said!" she cried contentedly, "a grate fire upstairs! It's one of
+the things that never seems real to me, like a tower on a house. I'd as
+soon think o' havin' a grate fire up a tree an' settin' there, as in my
+chamber. Anyway, when it comes Winter, upstairs in Friendship is just a
+place where you go after something in the bureau draw' an' come down
+again as quick as you can. I s'pose you got an invite to the party?"
+
+"Yes," I said, "and you will go, Calliope?"
+
+But instead of answering me:--
+
+"My land!" she said, "think of it! A party like that, an' not a
+low-necked waist in town, nor a swallow-tail! An' only two weeks to do
+anything in, an' only Liddy Ember for dressmaker, an' it takes her two
+weeks to make a dress. I guess Mis' Postmaster Sykes has got her. They
+say she read her invite in the post-office with one hand an' snapped up
+that tobacco-brown net in the post-office store window with the other,
+an' out an' up to Liddy's an' hired her before she was up from the
+breakfast table. So she gets the town new dress. Mis' Sykes is terrible
+quick-moved."
+
+"What will you wear, Calliope?" I asked.
+
+"Me--I never wear anything but henriettas," she said. "I think the
+plainer-faced you are, the simpler you'd ought to be dressed. I use' to
+fix up terrible ruffled, but when I see I was reg'lar plain-faced I
+stuck to henriettas, mostly gray--"
+
+"Calliope," I said resolutely, "you don't mean you're not going to the
+Proudfit party?"
+
+She clasped her hands and held them, palms outward, over her mouth, and
+her eyes twinkled above them.
+
+"No, sir," she said, "I can't go. You'll laugh at me!" she defended.
+"Don't you tell!" she warned. And finally she told me.
+
+"Day before yesterday," she said, "I went into the City. An' I come out
+on the trolley. An' I donno what possessed me,--I ain't done it for
+months,--but when we crossed the start of the Plank Road, I got off an'
+went up an' visited the Old Ladies' Home. You know I've always thought,"
+she broke off, "--well, you know I ain't a rill lot to do with, an' I
+always had an i-dee that mebbe sometime, when I got older, I might--"
+
+I nodded, and she went on.
+
+"Well, I walked around among 'em up there--canary birds an' plants an'
+footstools--an' the whole thing fixed up so cheerful that it's pitiful.
+Red wall-paper an' flowered curtains an' such, all fair yellin' at you,
+'We're cheerful--cheerful--cheerful!' till I like to run. An' it come
+over me, bein' so near Christmas an' all, what would they do on
+Christmas? So I asked a woman in a navy-blue dress, seein' she flipped
+around like she was the flag o' the place.
+
+"'The south corridor,' she answers,--them's the highest payin"--Calliope
+threw in, "'chipped in an' got up a tree, an' there's gifts for all,'
+s'she. 'The west corridor'--them's the local city ones--'all has friends
+to take 'em away for the day. The east corridor'--they're from farther
+away an' middlin' well-to-do--'all has boxes comin' to 'em from off. But
+the north corridor,' s'she, scowlin' some, 'is rather a trial to us.'
+
+"An' I was waitin' for that. The north corridor is all charity old
+ladies, paid for out o' the fund; an' the president o' the home has just
+died, an' the secretary's in the old country on a pleasure trip, an' the
+board's in a row over the policy o' the home, an' the navy-blue matron
+dassent act, an' altogether it looked like the north corridor was goin'
+to get a regular mid-week Wednesday instead of a Christmas. An' I up an'
+ast' her to take me down to see 'em."
+
+It was easy to see what Calliope had done, I thought: she had promised
+to spend Christmas Eve over there in the north corridor, reading aloud.
+
+"They was nine of 'em," she went on, "nice old grandma ladies, with
+hands that looked like they'd ought to 'a' been tyin' little aprons an'
+cuttin' out cookies an' squeezin' somebody else's hand. There they set,
+with the wall-paper doin' its cheerfulest, loud as an insult,--one of
+'em with lots o' white hair, one of 'em singin' a little, some of 'em
+tryin' to sew or knit some. My land!" said Calliope, "when we think of
+'em sittin' up an' down the world--with their arms all empty--an'
+Christmas comin' on--ain't it a wonder--Well, I stayed 'round an' talked
+to 'em," she went on, "while the navy-blue lady whisked her starched
+skirts some. She seemed too busy 'tendin' to 'em to give 'em much
+attention. An' they looked rill pleased when I talked to 'em about their
+patchwork an' knittin', an' did they get the sun all day, an' didn't the
+canary sort o' shave somethin' off'n the human ear-drum, on his tiptop
+notes? An' when I said that, Grandma Holly--her with lots o' white
+hair--says:--
+
+"'I donno but it does,' she says, 'but I don't mind; I'm so thankful to
+see somethin' around that's _little an' young_.'
+
+"That sort o' landed in my heart. It's just what I'd been thinkin' about
+'em.
+
+"'Little, young things,' s'I, sort o' careless, 'make a lot o' racket,
+you know.'
+
+"At that old Mis' Burney pipes up--her that brought up her daughter's
+children an' her son-in-law married again an' turned her out:--
+
+"'I use' to think so,' she says quiet; 'the noise o' the children use'
+to bother me terrible. When they reely got to goin' I use' to think I
+couldn't stand it, my head hurt me so. But now,' s'she, 'I get to
+thinkin' sometimes I wouldn't mind a horse-fiddle if some of 'em played
+it.'
+
+"'They're lots o' company, the little things,' says old Mis'
+Norris--she'd kep' mislayin' her teeth an' the navy-blue lady had took
+'em away from her that day for to teach her, so I couldn't hardly
+understand what she said. 'Mine was named Ellen an' Nancy,' I made out.
+
+"'Some o' you remember my Sam,'--Mis' Ailing speaks up then, an' she
+begun windin' up her yarn an' never noticed she was ravellin' out her
+mitten,--'he was an alderman,' she was goin' on, but old Mis' Winslow
+cuts in on her:--
+
+"'It don't matter what he was when he was man-grown,' s'she. 'Man-grown
+can get along themselves. It's when they're little bits o' ones,' she
+says.
+
+"'Little!' says Grandma Holly. 'Is it little you mean? Well, my Amy's
+two little feet use' to be swallowed up in my hand--so,' she says,
+shuttin' her hand over to show us.
+
+"Well, so they went on. I give you my word I stood there sort o'
+grippin' up on my elbows. I'd always known it was so--like you do know
+things are so. But somehow when you come to _feel_ they're so, that's
+another thing. And I was feelin' this in my throat 'bout as big as an
+orange. I'd thought their hands looked like they'd ought to be tyin' up
+little aprons, but I never thought o' the hands bein' rill lonesome to
+do the tyin', an' thinkin' about it, too. An' now I understood 'em like
+I see 'em for the first time, rill face to face. Somehow, we ain't any
+too apt to look at people that way," said Calliope. "You see how I mean
+it.
+
+"Then comes the navy-blue woman an' says it's time for their hot milk,
+an' they all looked up, kind o' hopeful. An' I see that the navy-blue
+one had got 'em trained into the i-dee that hot milk was an event. She
+didn't like to hev 'em talk much about the past, she told me, when she
+see what we was speakin' of, because it gener'lly made some of 'em cry,
+an' the i-dee was to keep the spirit of the home bright an' cheerful.
+'So I see,' s'I, dry. An' there was Christmas comin' on, an' nothin' to
+break the general cheerfulness but hot milk. "Well," Calliope said, "I
+s'pose you'll think I'm terrible foolish, but I couldn't help what I
+done--"
+
+"I don't wonder at it," said I, warmly; "you promised to spend Christmas
+Eve with them and read aloud to them, didn't you, Calliope?"
+
+"No!" Calliope cried; "I didn't do that. I should think they'd be sick
+to death o' bein' read aloud to. I should think they'd be sick to death
+bein' cheered up by their surroundin's. No--I invited the whole nine of
+'em to come over an' spend Christmas Eve with me."
+
+"Calliope!" I cried, "but how--"
+
+"I know it," she exclaimed, "I know it. But they're all well an' hardy.
+The charity corridor ain't expected in the infirmary much. An' Jimmy
+Sturgis is goin' to bring 'em over free in the closed 'bus--I'll fill it
+with hot bricks an' hot flat-irons an' bed-quilts. An' my land! you'd
+ought to see 'em when I ask' 'em. I don't s'pose they'd had an invite
+out in years. The navy-blue lady looked like I'd nipped a mountain off'n
+her shoulders, too. An' now," said Calliope, "what on top o' this earth
+will I do with 'em when I get 'em here?"
+
+What indeed? I left my task and sat by her on the rug before the fire,
+and we talked it over. But all the while we talked, I could see that she
+was keeping something back--some plan of which she was doubtful.
+
+"I ain't no money to spend, you know," she said, "an' I won't let
+anybody else spend any for me, for this. Folks has plans enough o' their
+own without mine. But I kep' sayin' to myself, all the way home when my
+knees give down at the i-dee of what I was goin' to do: 'Calliope, the
+Lord says, "_Give._" An' He meant you to give, same's those that hev
+got. He didn't say, "Everybody give but Calliope, an' she ain't got
+much, so she'd ought to be let off." He said, "_Give._"' An' He didn't
+mention all nice things, same's I'd like to give, an' most everybody
+does give--" she nodded toward my bed, brave with its Christmas array.
+"He didn't mention givin' _things_ at all. An' so," said Calliope, "I
+thought o' somethin' else."
+
+She sat with brooding eyes on the fire, her hands clasped about her
+knees.
+
+"The Lord Christ," said Calliope, "didn't hev nothin' of His own. An'
+yet He just give an' give an' give. An' somehow I got the _i_-dee," she
+finished, glancing up at me shyly, "that mebbe Christmas ain't really
+all in your stocking foot, after all. I ain't much to spend, and mebbe
+that sounds some like sour grapes. But it seems like a good many
+beautiful things is free to all, an' that they's ways to do. Well, I've
+thought of a way--"
+
+"Calliope," I said, "tell me what you have really planned for the
+old-lady party. You _have_ planned?"
+
+"Well, yes," she said, "I hev. But mebbe you'll think it ain't anything.
+First I thought o' tea, an' thin bread-an'-butter sandwiches--it seems
+some like a party when you get your bread thin. An' I've got apples in
+the house we could roast, an' corn to pop over the kitchen fire. But
+then I come to a stop. For I ain't nothin' else, an' I've spent every
+cent I _can_ spend a'ready. But yet I did want to show 'em somethin'
+lovely--an' differ'nt from what they see, so's it'd seem as if somebody
+cared, an' as if they'd been _in Christmas_, too. An' all of a sudden it
+come to me, why not invite in a few little children o' somebody's here
+in Friendship? So's them old grandma ladies--"
+
+She shook her head and turned away.
+
+"I expec'," she said, "you think I'm terrible foolish. But wouldn't that
+be givin', don't you think? _Would_ that be anything?"
+
+I have planned, as will fall to us all, many happy ways of keeping
+festival; but I think that never, even in days when I myself was
+happiest, have I so delighted in any event as in this of Calliope's
+proposing. And when at last she had gone, and the dusk had fallen and I
+lighted candles and went back to my pleasant task, some way the stitches
+of pink and blue on flowered fabrics, the flutter of crisp ribbons, and
+the breath of the sachets were not greatly in my thoughts; and that
+which made me glad was a certain shining in the room, but this was not
+of candle-light, or firelight, or winter starlight.
+
+With the days the plans for the Proudfit party--or rather the plans of
+the Proudfit guests--went merrily forward. It was, they said, like "in
+the Oldmoxon days," when the house in which I was now living had been
+the Friendship fairyland. Some take their parties solemnly, some
+joyously, some feverishly; but Friendship takes them vitally, as it
+takes a project or the breath of being. Like the rest of the world, the
+village sank Christmas in festivity. It could not see Christmas for the
+Christmas plans.
+
+Speculation was the delight of meetings, and every one conspired in
+terms of toilettes.
+
+"Likely," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "Mis' Banker Mason'll
+wear her black-an'-white foulard. Them foulards are wonderful
+durable--you can't muss 'em. She got hers when Gramma Mason first hurt
+her back, so's if anything happened she'd be part mournin', an' if
+anything didn't, she'd have a nice dress to wear out places. Ain't it
+real convenient,--white standin' for both companies an' the tomb, so?"
+
+And "Mis' Photographer Sturgis has the best of it, bein' an invalid,
+till a party comes up," said Libbie Liberty. "She gets plenty enough
+food sent in, an' flowers, an' such things, an' she's got nails hung
+full o' what I call sympathy clo'es, to wear durin' sympathy calls. But
+when it comes to a real what you might say dress-up dress, I guess
+she'll hev to be took worse with her side an' stay in the house."
+
+Abigail Arnold contributed:--
+
+"Seems Mis' Doctor Helman had a whole wine silk dress put away with her
+dyin' things. She always thought it sounded terrible fine to hear about
+the dead havin' dress-pattern after dress-pattern laid away that hadn't
+never been made up. So she'd got together the one, but now she an'
+Elzabella are goin' to work an' make it up. I guess Mis' Helman thinks
+her stomach is so much better 't mebbe she'll be spared till after the
+holidays when the sales begin."
+
+Even Liddy Ember had promised to go and to take Ellen, and Ellen went up
+and down the winter streets singing sane little songs about the party,
+save on days when she "come herself again," and then she planned, as
+wildly as anybody, what she meant to wear. And Liddy, whose dream had
+always been to do "reg'lar city dress-makin', with helpers an' plates
+an' furnish the findin's at the shop," and whose lot instead had been to
+cut and fit "just the durable kind," was blithely at work night and day
+on Mis' Postmaster Sykes's tobacco-brown net. We understood that there
+were to be brown velvet butterflies stitched down the skirt, and if her
+Lady Washington geranium flowered in time,--Mis' Sykes was said to lay
+bread and milk nightly about the roots to encourage it,--she was to wear
+the blossom in her hair. ("She'll be gettin' herself talked about,
+wearin' a wreath o' flowers on her head, so," said some.) But then, Mis'
+Sykes was recognized to be "one that picks her own steps."
+
+"Mis' Sykes always dresses for company accordin' to the way she gets her
+invite," Calliope observed. "A telephone invite, she goes in somethin'
+she'd wear home afternoons. Word o' mouth at the front door, she wears
+what she wears on Sundays. Written invites, she rags out in her rill
+_best_ dress, for parties. But _engraved_," Calliope mounted to her
+climax, "a bran' new dress an' a wreath in her hair is the least she'll
+stop at."
+
+But I think that, in the wish to do honour to so distinguished an
+occasion, the temper of Mis' Sykes, and perhaps of Ellen Ember too, was
+the secret temper of all the village.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+"NOT AS THE WORLD GIVETH"
+
+
+I daresay that excitement followed excitement when news of Calliope's
+party got abroad. But of this I knew little, for I spent those next days
+at the Proudfits' with Nita Ordway and little Viola, and though I
+thought often of Calliope, I chanced not to see her again until the
+holidays were almost upon us. In the late afternoon, two days before
+Christmas, I dropped in at her cottage to learn how pleasantly the plans
+for her party matured.
+
+To my amazement I found her all dejection.
+
+"Why, Calliope," I said, "can't the grandma ladies come, after all?"
+
+Yes, they could come; they were coming.
+
+"You are never sorry you asked them?" I pressed her.
+
+No. Oh, no; she was glad she had asked them.
+
+"Something is wrong, though," I said sadly--thinking what a blessed
+thing it is to be so joyous a spirit that one's dejections are bound to
+be taken seriously.
+
+"Well," said Calliope, then, "it's the children. No it ain't, it's
+Friendship. The town's about as broad as a broom straw an' most as deep.
+Anything differ'nt scares 'em like something wore out'd ought to.
+Friendship's got an i-dee that Christmas begins in a stocking an' ends
+off in a candle. It thinks the rest o' the days are reg'lar,
+self-respecting days, but it looks on Christmas like an extry thing,
+thrown in to please 'em. It acts as if the rest o' the year was plain
+cake an' the holidays was the frostin' to be et, an' everybody grab the
+best themselves, give or take."
+
+"Calliope!" I cried--for this was as if the moon had objected to the
+heavens.
+
+"Oh, I know I'd ought not to," she said sadly; "but don't folks act as
+if time was give to 'em to run around wild with, as best suits 'em?
+Three hundred an' 'leven days a year to use for themselves, an' Sundays
+an' Christmas an' Thanksgivin' to give away looks to me a rill fair
+division. But, no. Some folks act like Sundays an' holidays was not only
+the frostin', but the nuts an' candy an' ice-cream o' things--_their_
+ice-cream, to eat an' pass to their own, an' scrape the freezer."
+
+And then came the heart of the matter.
+
+"'T seems," said Calliope, "there's that children's Christmas tree at
+the new minister's on Christmas Eve. But that ain't till ha'-past seven,
+an' I done my best to hev some o' the children stop in here on their
+way, for _my_ little party. An' with one set o' lungs their mas says no,
+they'd get mussed for the tree if they do. I offered to hev 'em bring
+their white dresses pinned in papers, an' we'd dress 'em here--I think
+the grandma ladies'd like that. But their mas says no, pinned in
+papers'd take the starch out an' their hair'd get all over their heads.
+An' some o' the mothers says indignant: 'Old ladies from the poorhouse
+end o' the home--well, I should think not! Children is very easy to take
+things. If you'd hed young o' your own, you'd think more, Calliope,'
+they says witherin'."
+
+Her little wrinkled hands were trembling at the enormity.
+
+"I donno," she added, "but I was foolish to try it. But I did want to
+get a-hold o' somethin' beautiful for them old ladies to see. An', my
+mind, they ain't much so rilly lovely as little young children, together
+in a room."
+
+"But, Calliope," I said in distress, "isn't there even one child you can
+get?"
+
+"No, sir," she said. "Not a one. I been everywhere. You know they ain't
+any poor in Friendship. We're all comfortable enough off to be
+overparticular."
+
+"But wouldn't you think," I said, "at Christmas time--"
+
+"Yes, you would," Calliope said, "you would. You'd think Christmas'd
+make everything kind o' softened up an' differ'nt. Every time I look at
+the holly myself, I feel like I'd just shook hands with somebody
+cordial."
+
+None the less--for Calliope had drunk deep of the wine of doing and she
+never gave up any project--at four o'clock on the day before Christmas I
+saw the closed 'bus driven by Jimmy Sturgis fare briskly past my house
+on its way to the "start of the Plank Road," to the Old Ladies' Home.
+Within, I knew, were quilts and hot stones of Calliope's providing; and
+Jimmy had hung the 'bus windows with cedar, and two little flags
+fluttered from the door. It all had a merry, holiday air as Jimmy shook
+the lines and drew on swiftly through the snow to those wistful nine
+guests, who at last were to be "in Christmas," too.
+
+"If they can't do nothin' else," Calliope had said, "they can talk over
+old times, without hot milk interferin'. But I wish, an' I wish--seem's
+though there'd ought always to be a child around on Star o' Bethlehem
+night, don't it?"
+
+I dined alone that Star of Bethlehem night, and to dine alone under
+Christmas candles is never a cheerful business. The Proudfit car was to
+come for me soon after eight, and at eight I stood waiting at the window
+of my little living room, saying to myself that if I were to drop from
+the air to a deserted country road, I should be certain that it was
+Christmas Eve. You can tell Christmas Eve anywhere, like a sugar-plum,
+with your eyes shut. It is not the lighted houses, or the
+close-curtained windows behind which Christmas trees are fruiting; nor
+yet, in Friendship, will it be the post-office store or the home bakery
+windows, gay with Christmas trappings. But there is in the world a
+subdued note of joyful preparation, as if some spirit whom one never may
+see face to face had on this night a gift of perceptible life. And in
+spite of my loneliness, my heart upleaped to the note of a distant
+sleigh-bell jingling an air of "Home, going Home, Christmas Eve and
+going Home."
+
+Then, when the big Proudfit car came flashing to my door, I had a sweet
+surprise. For from it, through the snowy dark, came running a little
+fairy thing, and Viola Ordway danced to my door with her mother, muffled
+in furs.
+
+"We've been close in the house all day," Mrs. Ordway cried, "and now
+we've run away to get you. Come!"
+
+As for me, I took Viola in my arms and lifted her to my hall table and
+caught off her cloak and hood. I can never resist doing this to a child.
+I love to see the little warm, plump body in its fine white linen emerge
+rose-wise, from the calyx cloak; and I love that shy first gesture,
+whatever it may be, of a child so emerging. The turning about, the
+freeing of soft hair from the neck, the smoothing down of the frock, the
+half-abashed upward look. Viola did more. She laid one hand on my cheek
+and held it so, looking at me quite gravely, as if that were some secret
+sign of brotherhood in the unknown, which she remembered and I, alas!
+had forgotten. But I perfectly remembered how to kiss her. If only, I
+thought, all the empty arms could know a Viola. If only all the empty
+arms, up and down the world, could know a Viola even just at Christmas
+time. If only--
+
+Over the top of Viola's head I looked across at Nita Ordway, and a
+sudden joyous purpose lighted all the air about me--as a joyous purpose
+will. Oh, if only--And then I heard myself pouring out a marvellous
+jumble of sound and senselessness.
+
+"Nita!" I cried, "you are not a Friendship Village mother! You are not
+afraid. Viola is not going to the new minister's Christmas tree. Oh,
+don't you see? It's still early--surely we have time! The grandma ladies
+_must_ see Viola!"
+
+I remember how Nita Ordway laughed, and her answer made me love her the
+more--as is the way of some answers.
+
+"I don't catch it--I don't," she said, "but it sounds delicious. All
+courage, and old ladies, and ample time for everything! If I said, 'Of
+course,' would that do?"
+
+Already I was tying Viola's hood, and next to taking off a child's hood
+I love putting one on--surely every one will have noticed how their
+mouths bud up for kissing. While we sped along the Plank Road toward
+Calliope's cottage, I poured out the story of who were at her house that
+night, and why, and all that had befallen. In a moment the great car,
+devouring its own path of light, set us down at Calliope's gate, and
+Calliope herself, trim in her gray henrietta, her wrinkled face flushed
+and shining, came at our summons. And I pushed Viola in before
+us--little fairy thing in a fluff of white wraps and white furs.
+
+"Look, Calliope!" I cried.
+
+Calliope looked down at her, and I think she can hardly have seen Mrs.
+Ordway and me at all. She smote her hands softly together.
+
+"Oh," she said, "if it isn't! Oh--a child for Star o' Bethlehem night,
+after all!"
+
+She dropped to her knees before Viola, touching the little girl's hand
+almost shyly. There was in Calliope's face when she looked at any child
+a kind of nakedness of the woman's soul; and she, who was so deft, was
+curiously awkward in such a presence.
+
+"They're out there in the dinin' room," she whispered, "settin' round
+the cook stove. I saw they felt some better out there. Le's us leave her
+go out alone by herself, just the way she is."
+
+And that was what we did. We said something to Viola softly about "the
+poor grandma ladies, with no little girl to love," and then Calliope
+opened the door and let her through.
+
+We peeped for a moment at the lamp-lit crack. The dining room was warm
+and bright, its table covered with red cotton and set with tea-cups,
+shelves of plants blooming across the windows, cedar green on the walls.
+The odour of pop-corn was in the air, and above an open griddle hole
+apples bobbed on strings tied to the stove-pipe wing. And there about
+the cooking range, with its cheery opened hearth, Calliope's Christmas
+guests were gathered.
+
+They were exquisitely neat and trim, in black and brown cloth dresses,
+with a brooch, or a white apron, or a geranium from a window plant worn
+for festival. I recognized Grandma Holly, with her soft white hair, and
+I thought I could tell which were Mis' Ailing and Mis' Burney and Mis'
+Norris. And the faces of them all, the gentle, the grief-marked, even
+the querulous, were grown kindly with the knowledge that somebody had
+cared about their Christmas.
+
+The child went toward them as simply as if they had been friends. They
+looked at her with some murmuring of surprise, and at one another
+questioningly. Viola went straight to the knee of Grandma Holly, who was
+nearest.
+
+"'At lady tied my hood too tight," she referred unflatteringly to me,
+"p'eas do it off."
+
+Grandma Holly looked down over her spectacles, and up at the other
+grandma ladies, and back to Viola. The others gathered nearer, hitching
+forward rocking-chairs, rising to peer over shoulders--breathlessly,
+with a manner of fearing to touch her. But because of the little
+uplifted face, waiting, Grandma Holly must needs untie the white hood
+and reveal all the shining of the child's hair.
+
+"Nen do my toat off," Viola gravely directed.
+
+At that Grandma Holly crooned some single indistinguishable syllable in
+her throat, and then off came the cloak. The little warm, plump body in
+its fine linen emerged, rose-wise, and Viola smoothed down her frock,
+and freed her hair from her neck, and glanced up shyly. By the stir and
+flutter among them I understood that they were feeling just as I feel
+when a little hood and cloak come off.
+
+Viola stood still for a minute.
+
+"I like be made some 'tention to," she suggested gently.
+
+Ah--and they understood. How they understood! Grandma Holly swept the
+little girl in her arms, and I know how the others closed about them
+with smiles and vague unimportant words. Viola sat quietly and happily,
+like a little come-a-purpose spirit to let them pretend. And it was with
+them all as if something long pent up went free.
+
+Calliope left the door and turned toward us.
+
+"Seems like my throat couldn't stand it," she said, ... and it seemed to
+me, as we three sat together in the dim little parlor, that Nita Ordway
+must cherish Viola for us all--for the grandma ladies and Calliope and
+me.
+
+Half an hour later we three went out to the dining room. Viola ran to
+her mother when she entered. Nita took her in her arms and sat beside
+the stove, her cloak slipping from her shoulders, the soft peach tints
+of her gown shot through with shining lines and the light caught in her
+collar of gems. "I did want to get a-hold o' somethin' beautiful for
+them old ladies to see," Calliope had said.
+
+"Oh," said Grandma Holly, and she laid her brown hand on Viola's hand,
+"ain't she _dear an' little an' young_?"
+
+"I wish't she'd talk some," begged old Mis' Norris.
+
+"Ain't she good, though, the little thing?" Mis' Ailing said. "Look at
+how still she sets. Not wigglin' 'round same as some. It was just that
+way with Sam when he was small--he'd set by the hour an' leave me hold
+him--"
+
+A little bent creature, whose name I never learned, sat patting Viola's
+skirt.
+
+"Seems like I'd gone back years," we heard her say.
+
+Grandma Holly held up one half-closed hand.
+
+"Like that," she told them, "my Amy's feet was so little I could hold
+'em like that, an' I see hers is the same way. She's wonderful like Amy
+was, her age."
+
+I cannot recall half the sweet, trivial things that they said. But I
+remember how they told us stories of their own babies, and we laughed
+with them over treasured sayings of long-ago lips, or grieved with them
+over silences, or rejoiced at glad things that had been. Regardless of
+the Proudfit party, we let them talk as they would, and remember. Then
+of her own accord Nita Ordway hummed some haunting air, and sang one of
+the songs that we all loved--the grandma ladies and Calliope and I. It
+was a sleepy song, whose words I have forgotten, but it was in a kind of
+universal tongue which I think that no one can possibly mistake. And out
+of the lullaby came all the little spirits, freed in babyhood or
+"man-grown," and stood at the knees of the grandma ladies, so that I was
+afraid that they could not bear it.
+
+When the song was done, Viola suddenly sat up very straight.
+
+"I got a litty box," she announced, "an' I had a parasol. An' once a boy
+div me a new nail. An' once I didn' feel berry well, but now I am. An'
+once--"
+
+Their laughter was like a caress. Before it was done, we heard a
+stamping without, and there was Jimmy Sturgis, with a spray of holly in
+his old felt hat and the closed 'bus at the door.
+
+We helped Calliope to get their wraps and to fill the 'bus with hot
+stones from the oven and with many quilts, and we made ready a basket of
+pop-corn and apples and of the cedar hung around the little room. They
+stood about us to say good-by, or to tell us some last bit of the news
+of their long-past youth--dear, wrinkled faces framed in broad lines of
+bonnet or hood, and smiling, every one.
+
+"This gray shawl I got on me is the very one I used to wrap Amy in to
+carry her through the cold hall," said Grandma Holly. "My land-a-livin'!
+seems's if I'd been with her to-night, over again!"
+
+Their way of thanks lay among stumbling words and vague repetitions, but
+there was a kind of glory in their grateful faces, and one always
+remembers that.
+
+"Merry Prismas, gramma ladies!" Viola cried shrilly at the 'bus door,
+and within they laughed like mothers as they answered. And Jimmy Sturgis
+cracked his whip, and the sleigh-bells jingled.
+
+Nita Ordway and Viola and I stood for a moment with Calliope at her
+gate.
+
+"Come!" we begged her, "now go with us. We are all late together. There
+is no reason why you should not go with us to the Christmas party."
+
+But Calliope shook her head.
+
+"I'm ever so much obliged to you," she said, "but oh, I couldn't. I've
+hed too rilly a Christmas to come down to a party anywheres."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Nita and Viola and I reached Proudfit House, the guests were all
+assembled, but we knew that Mrs. Proudfit and Miss Clementina would be
+the first to forgive us when they understood.
+
+The big colonial home was bright with scarlet-shaded candles and
+holly-hung walls; there was mistletoe on the sconces, and in the great
+hall there were tuneful strings. On the landing of the stairs stood Mrs.
+Proudfit and Miss Clementina, charmingly pretty in their delicate
+frocks, and wholly gay and gracious. ("They seem lively like in pictures
+where folks don't make a loud sound a-talkin'," said Friendship. "I
+s'pose it's somethin' you learn in the City.") And Friendship wore its
+loyalty like a mantle. Twelve years had passed, and yet one and another
+said under breath and sighed, "If only Miss Linda could 'a' been here,
+too."
+
+All Friendship Village was there, save Abel Halsey, who was at the Good
+Shepherd's Home Christmas tree in the City, and, perhaps one would say,
+Delia More, who had begged to be allowed to help in the kitchen "an' be
+there that way." Even Peleg Bemus was in his place in the orchestra,
+sitting with closed eyes, playing his flute, and keeping audible time
+with his wooden leg,--quite as he did when he played his flute at night,
+on Friendship streets. And there was Mis' Postmaster Sykes, in the
+tobacco-brown net, with butterflies stitched down the skirt and the Lady
+Washington geranium in her hair--and forever near her went little Miss
+Liddy Ember with an almost passionate creative pride in the gown of her
+hand, so that she would murmur her patron an occasional warning: "Mis'
+Sykes, throw back your shoulders, you hev to, to bring out the real set
+o' the basque;" or, "Don't forget you want to give a little hitch to the
+back when you stand up, Mis' Sykes." And to one and another Liddy said
+proudly, "I declare if I didn't get that skirt with the butterflies just
+like a magazine cover." And there, too, was Ellen Ember, wearing a white
+book muslin and a rosy "nubia" that had been her mother's; and Ellen's
+face was uplifted, and of pale distinction under the bronze glory of her
+hair, but all that evening she smiled and sang and wondered, in utter
+absence of the spirit. ("Oh," poor Miss Liddy said, "I do so want Ellen
+to come herself before supper. She won't remember a thing she eats, an'
+she don't have much that's tasty an' good. It'll be just like she missed
+the whole thing, in spite of all the chore o' comin'.") And there were
+Mis' Doctor Helman in her new wine silk; Mis' Banker Mason in the
+black-and-white foulard designed to grace a festival or to respect a
+tomb; Mis' Sturgis, in a put-away dress that was a surprise to every
+one; Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and Eppleby, and the "Other"
+Holcombs; Abigail Arnold, the Gekerjecks, Mis' Toplady and Timothy, even
+Mis' Mayor Uppers--no one was forgotten. And--save poor Ellen--every one
+was aglow with the sweet satisfaction of having sent abroad a brave
+array of pretty things, with stitches of rose and blue on flowered
+fabrics, with the flutter of ribbons, and the breath of sachets, and
+with many a gift of substance to those less generously endowed. To them
+all the delight of the season was in the gifts of their hands and in the
+night's merry-making, and in the joy of keeping holiday. Here, as
+Calliope had said, Christmas, begun in a stocking, was ending in a
+candle.
+
+And yet it was Star of Bethlehem night, the night of Him who "didn't
+mention givin' _things_ at all."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+LONESOME.--I
+
+
+Calliope and I were talking over the Proudfit party, as I had grown to
+like to talk over most things with her, when I said something of two of
+the guests whom I did not remember before to have seen: a little man of
+shy gravity and an extremely pretty girl who, if she looked at any one
+but him, did so quite undetected.
+
+"That's Eb Goodnight," Calliope replied, "him of the new-born spine.
+Wasn't it like the Proudfits to ask them?"
+
+And, at my question:
+
+"Some folks," Calliope said, "has got spines and some folks hasn't. But
+what I say is, nobody can tell which is which. Because now and then the
+soft-spine' kind just hardens up all in a minute same as steel. So when
+I meet a stranger that sort o' sops along through life, limp and floppy,
+I never judge him. I just say, 'You look some like a loose shutter, but
+mebbe you can fair bang the house down, if you rilly get to blowin'.' It
+was that way with Eb Goodnight.
+
+"I donno how it is other places. But I've noticed with us here in
+Friendship--an' I've grown to the town from short dresses to
+bein'-careful-what-I-eat--I've often noticed't when folks seems not to
+have any backbone to speak of, or even when they go 'round sort o'
+crazy--they's usually some other reason, like enough. Sensitive or sick
+or lonesome, or like that. It was so with Eb--an' it was so with Elspie.
+Elspie, though, was interestin' on account o' bein' not only a little
+crazy, but rill pretty besides. But Eb, he was the kind that a
+sign-board is more interestin' than. An' yet--"
+
+With that she paused, looking down some way of her own thought. I knew
+Calliope's "an' yet." It splendidly conceded the entire converse of her
+argument.
+
+"Eb come here to Friendship," she went on, "less public than Elspie did.
+Elspie come official, as an inmate o' the county house. Eb, he sort o'
+crep' in town, like he crep' everywhere else. He introduced himself to
+me through sellin' needles. He walked in on me an' a two-weeks ironin'
+one mornin' with, 'Lemme present myself as Ebenezer Goodnight, sewin'
+needles, knittin' needles, crochet hooks an' shuttles an' anything o'
+that,' an' down he set an' never opened his mouth about his needles
+again. Eb was real delicate, for an agent. He just talked all the time
+about Friendship an' himself. 'The whol' blame' town's kin,' s'e; 'I
+never see such a place. _Every_body's kin, only just me. Air you,' he
+ask' me wistful, 'cousin' of 'em all, too?'
+
+"'Mis' Sprague that's dead was connected up with me by marriage an' Mis'
+Sykes is my mother's secunt cousin,' I owned up.'
+
+"'That's it again,' s'e, sighin'. 'I'm the odd number, dum it,' he says
+sorrowful.
+
+"Well, an' he hed sort of an odd-number way about him, too. He went
+along the street like he didn't belong. I donno if you know what I mean,
+but he was always takin' in the tops o' buildin's an' lookin' at the
+roads an' behavin' like he noticed--the way you don't when you live in a
+town. Yes, Ebenezer Goodnight went around like he see things for the
+first time. An' somehow he never could join in. When he walked up to a
+flock o' men, he stood _side_ of 'em, an' not with 'em. An' he shook
+hands sort o' loose an' temporary like he meant somethin' else. An' he
+just couldn't bear not to agree with you. If he let out't the sky was
+blue an' you said, No, pink, he'd work around till he'd dyed _his_ sky
+pink, too. That man would agree to things he never heard of. Let Peleg
+Bemus be tellin' one o' his eastern janitor adventures, an' Eb'd set an'
+agree with him, past noddin' an' up to words, all about elevators an'
+Ferris boats an' Eyetalians an' things he'd never laid look to. He
+seemed to hev a spine made mostly o' molasses. An' sometimes I think
+your spine's your soul.
+
+"Eb hed been lonelyin' 'round the village a month or so when Sum
+Merriman, that run the big rival business to the post-office store, an'
+was fire chief besides, took him an' his peddler's pack into the dry
+goods end--an' Eb was tickled. He went down first mornin' in his best
+clo'es, a-wearin' both collar an' cuffs. But when somebody remarked on
+the clo'es, he didn't hev backbone enough to keep on wearin' 'em--he
+slimpsed right back to his peddler duds an' done his best to please. An'
+he did please--he made a rill first-rate merchant clear up till June o'
+the year. An' then Sum Merriman, his employer, he went to work an' died.
+
+"Sum died a Tuesday, an', bein' it never rains but it pours, an' piles
+peelin's on ashes, or whatever it is they say, it was the Tuesday that
+the poorhouse burnt down--just like it knew the fire chief was gone. The
+poorhouse use' to be across the track, beyond the cemetery an' quite
+near my house. An' the night it burnt I was settin' on the side stoop
+without anything over my head, just smellin' in the air, when I see a
+little pinky look on the sky beyond the track. It wasn't moon-time, an'
+they wa'n't nothin' to bonfire that time o' year, an' I set still,
+pretendin' it was rose-bushes makin' a ladder an' buildin' a way of
+escape by night. It was such a nice evenin' you couldn't imagine
+anything rilly happenin' bad. But all at once I heard the fire-engine
+bell poundin' away like all possessed--an' then runnin' feet, like when
+they's an accident. I got to the gate just as somebody come rushin'
+past, an' I piped up what was the matter. 'Poorhouse's afire,' s'e.
+'Poorhouse,' s'I. 'My land!' An' I out the gate an' run alongside of
+him, an' he sort o' slowed down for me, courteous.
+
+"Then I noticed it was Eb Goodnight--lonelier'n ever now that his
+employer hed died that day. I'd never see Eb hustle that much before,
+an' the thought went through my head, kind o' wonderin', that he was
+runnin' as if the fire was a real relation o' his an' he was sent for.
+'Know anything else about it?' I ask' him, keepin' up. 'Not much,' s'e,
+'but I guess it's got such a head-start the whol' thing'll go like a
+shell.' An' when we got to the top o' the bank on the other side o' the
+track, we see it was that way--the poorhouse'd got such a head-start
+burnin' that nothin' could save it, though Timothy Toplady, that was
+town marshal an' chairman o' the county board, an' Silas Sykes an'
+Eppleby Holcomb, that was managers o' the poorhouse, an' some more, went
+puffin' past us, yellin', 'Put it out--run fer water--why don't you do
+suthin'?'--an' like that, most beside theirselves.
+
+"'Them poor critturs,' says I, 'oh, my, them poor critturs in the
+home'--for there must 'a' ben twenty o' the county charges all quartered
+in the buildin'. An' when we come to the foot o' the poorhouse hill,
+land, land, I never see such Bedlam.
+
+"The fire had started so soon after dusk that the inmates was all up
+yet. An' they was half of 'em huddled in a bunch by the side-yard stile
+an' half of 'em runnin' 'round wild as anything. The whol' place looked
+like when you hev a bad dream. It made me weak in my knees, an' I was
+winded anyway with runnin', an' I stopped an' leant up against a tree,
+an' Eb, he stopped too, takin' bearin's. An' there I was, plump against
+Elspie, standin' holdin' her arms 'round the tree trunk an' shiverin'
+some.
+
+"'Elspie,' s'I, 'why, you poor child.'
+
+"'No need to rub _that_ in,' s'she, tart. It's the one word the county
+charges gets sensitive about--an' Eb, he seemed to sense that, an' he
+ask' her, hasty, how the fire started. He called her 'Miss,' too, an' I
+judged that 'Miss' was one o' them poultice words to her.
+
+"'I donno,' s'she, 'but don't it look _cheerful_? The yard's all lit up
+nice, like fer comp'ny,' she says, rill pleased.
+
+"It sort o' uncovered my nerves to hear her so unconcerned. I never hed
+understood her--none of us hed. She was from outside the state, but her
+uncle, Job Ore, was on our county board an' he got her into our
+poorhouse--like you can when you're in politics. Then he up an' died an'
+went home to be buried, an' there she was on our hands. She wa'n't rill
+crazy--we understood't she hadn't ben crazy at all up to the time her
+mother died. Then she hadn't no one to go to an' she got queer, an' the
+poorhouse uncle stepped in; an' when he died, he died in debt, so his
+death wa'n't no use to her. She was thirty odd, but awful little an'
+slim an' scairt-lookin', an' quite pretty, I allus thought; an' I never
+see a thing wrong with her till she was so unconcerned about the fire.
+
+"'Elspie,' s'I, stern, 'ain't you no feelin',' s'I, 'for the loss o' the
+only home you've got to your back?'
+
+"'Oh, I donno,' s'she, an' I could see her smilin' in that bright light,
+'oh, I donno. It'll be some place to come to, afterwards. When I go out
+walkin',' s'she, 'I ain't no place to head for. I sort o' circle 'round
+an' come back. I ain't even a grave to visit,' s'she, 'an' it'll be kind
+o' cosey to come up here on the hill an' set down by the ashes--like
+they _belonged_.'
+
+"I know I heard Eb Goodnight laugh, kind o' cracked an' enjoyable, an' I
+took some shame to him for makin' fun o' the poor girl.
+
+"'She's goin' clear out o' her head,' thinks I, 'an' you'd better get
+her home with you, short off.' So I put my arm around her, persuadish,
+an' I says: 'Elspie,' I says, 'you come on to my house now for a spell,'
+I says. But Eb, he steps in, prompter'n I ever knew him--I'd never heard
+him do a thing decisive an' sudden excep' sneeze, an' them he always
+done his best to swallow. 'I'll take her to your house,' he says to me;
+'you go on up there to them women. I won't be no use up there,' he says.
+An' that was reasonable enough, on account o' Eb not bein' the decisive
+kind, for fires an' such.
+
+"So Eb he went off, takin' Elspie to my house, an' I went on up the
+hill, where Timothy Toplady and Silas Sykes an' Eppleby was rushin'
+round, wild an' sudden, herdin' the inmates here an' there, vague an'
+energetic. I didn't do much better, an' I done worse too, because I
+burned my left wrist, long an' deep. When I got home with it, Eb was
+settin' on the front stoop with Elspie, an' when he heard about the
+wrist, he come in an' done the lightin' up. An' Elspie, she fair
+su'prised me.
+
+"'Where do you keep your rags?' s'she, brisk.
+
+"'In that flour chest I don't use,' I says, 'in the shed.'
+
+"My land! she was back in a minute with a soft piece o' linen an' the
+black oil off the clock shelf that I hadn't told her where it was, an'
+she bound up my wrist like she'd created that burn an' understood it up
+an' down.
+
+"'Now you get into the bed,' she says, 'without workin' the rag off. I'm
+all right,' s'she. 'I can lock up. I like hevin' it to do,' she told me.
+
+"But Eb puts in, kind o' eager:--
+
+"'Lemme lock up the shed--it's dark as a hat out there an' you might
+sprain over your ankle,' he says awkward. An' so he done the lockin' up,
+an' it come over me he liked hevin' that little householdy thing to do.
+An' then he went off home--that is, to where he stopped an' hated it so.
+
+"Well, the poorhouse burnt clear to the ground, an' the inmates hed to
+be quartered 'round in Friendship anyhow that night, an' nex' day I
+never see Friendship so upset. I never see the village roust itself so
+sudden, either. Timothy an' the managers was up an' doin' before
+breakfast next mornin', an' no wonder. Timothy Toplady, he had three old
+women to his farm. Silas Sykes, he'd took in Foolish Henzie an' another
+old man for his. An' Eppleby Holcomb, in his frenzy he'd took in _five_,
+an' Mame was near a lunatic with havin' 'em to do for. An' all three men
+bein' at the head o' the burned buildin', they danced 'round lively
+makin' provision, an' they sent telegrams, wild an' reckless, without
+countin' the words. An' before noon it was settled't the poorhouse in
+Alice County, nearest us, should take in the inmates temporary. We was
+eatin' dinner when Timothy an' Silas come in to tell Elspie. I wished
+Eppleby had come to tell her. Eppleby does everything like he was
+company, an' not like he owned it.
+
+"Eb was hevin' dinner with us too. He'd been scallopin' in an' out o'
+the house all the forenoon, an' I'd ask' him to set down an' hev a bite.
+But when he done even that, he done it kind of alien. Peleg Bemus,
+playin' his flute walkin' along the streets nights, like he does, seems
+more a rill citizen than Eb use' to, eatin' his dinner. Elspie, she'd
+got the whol' dinner--she was a rill good cook, an' that su'prised me as
+much as her dressin' my wrist the night before. She'd pampered me
+shameful all that mornin' too, an' I'd let her--when you've lived alone
+so long, it's kind o' nice to hev a person fussin' here an' there, an'
+Elspie seemed to love takin' care o' somebody. I declare, it seemed as
+if she done some things for me just for the sake o' doin' 'em--she was
+that kind. Timothy an' Silas wouldn't hev any dinner,--it was a boiled
+piece, too,--bein' as dinners o' their own was gettin' cold. But they
+set up against the edge o' the room so's we could be eatin' on.
+
+"'Elspie,' says Timothy, 'you must be ready to go sharp seven o'clock
+Friday mornin'.'
+
+"'Go where?' says Elspie. She hed on a black-an'-white stripe o' mine,
+an' her cheeks were some pink from standin' over the cook stove, an' she
+looked rill pretty.
+
+"Timothy, he hesitated. But,--
+
+"'To the Alice County poorhouse,' says Silas, blunt. Silas Sykes is a
+man that always says 'bloody' an' 'devil' an' 'coffin' right out instead
+o' 'bandaged' an' 'the Evil One,' an' 'casket.'
+
+"'Oh!' says Elspie. 'Oh, ...' an' sort o' sunk down an' covered her
+mouth with her wrist an' looked at us over it.
+
+"'The twenty o' you'll take the Dick Dasher,' says Timothy, then, 'an'
+it'll be a nice train ride for ye,' he says, some like an undertaker
+makin' small talk. But he see how Elspie took it, an' so he slid off the
+subjec' an' turned to Eb.
+
+"'Little too early to know who's goin' to take the Merriman store, ain't
+it?' s'he, cheerful. Timothy ain't so everlastin' cheerful, either, but
+he always hearties himself all over when he talks, like he was a bell or
+a whistle an' he hed it to do.
+
+"Eb, he dropped his knife on the floor.
+
+"'Yes, yes,' he says flurried, 'yes, it is--' like he was rushin' to
+cover an' a 'yes' to agree was his best protection.
+
+"'Oh, well, it ain't so early either,' Silas cuts in, noddin' crafty.
+
+"'No, no,' Eb agrees immediate, 'I donno's _'tis_ so very early, after
+all.'
+
+"'I'm thinkin' o' takin' the store over myself,' says Silas Sykes,
+tippin' his head back an' rubbin' thoughtful under his whiskers. 'It'd
+be a good idee to buy it in, an' no mistake,'
+
+"'Yes,' says Eb, noddin', 'yes. Yes, so't would be.'
+
+"'I donno's I'd do it, Silas, if I was you,' says Timothy, frownin'
+judicial. 'Ain't you gettin' some stiff to take up with a new business?'
+But Timothy is one o' them little pink men, an' you can't take his
+frowns much to heart.
+
+"'No,' says Eb, shakin' his head. 'No. No, I donno's I would take it
+either, Mr. Sykes.'
+
+"I was goin' to say somethin' about the wind blowin' now east, now west,
+an' the human spine makin' a bad weathercock, but I held on, an' pretty
+soon Timothy an' Silas went out.
+
+"'Seven o'clock Friday A.M., now!' says Silas, playful, over his
+shoulder to Elspie. But Elspie didn't answer. She was just sittin'
+there, still an' quiet, an' she didn't eat another thing.
+
+"That afternoon she slipped out o' the house somewheres. She didn't hev
+a hat--what few things she did hev hed been burnt. She went off without
+any hat an' stayed most all the afternoon. I didn't worry, though,
+because I thought I knew where she'd gone. But I wouldn't 'a' asked
+her,--I'd as soon slap anybody as quiz 'em,--an' besides I knew't
+somebody'd tell me if I kep' still. Friendship'll tell you everything
+you want to know, if you lay low long enough. An' sure as the world,
+'bout five o'clock in come Mis' Postmaster Sykes, lookin' troubled.
+Folks always looks that way when they come to interfere. Seems't she'd
+just walked past the poorhouse ruins, an' she'd see Elspie settin' there
+side of 'em, all alone--
+
+"'--_singin'_,' says Mis' Sykes, impressive,--like the evil was in the
+music,--'sittin' there singin', like she was all possessed. An' I come
+up behind her an' plumped out at her to know _what_ she was a-doin'. An'
+she says: "I'm makin' a call,"--just like that; "I'm makin' a call,"
+s'she, smilin', an' not another word to be got out of her. '_An'_,' says
+Mis' Sykes, 'let me tell you, I scud down that hill, _one goose
+pimple_.'
+
+"'Let her alone,' says I, philosophic. 'Leave her be.'
+
+"But inside I ached like the toothache for the poor thing--for Elspie.
+An' I says to her, when she come home:--
+
+"'Elspie,' I says, 'why don't you go out 'round some an' see folks here
+in the village? The minister's wife'd be rill glad to hev you come,' I
+says.
+
+"'Oh, I hate to hev 'em sit thinkin' about me in behind their eyes,'
+s'she, ready.
+
+"'What?' says I, blank.
+
+"'It comes out through their eyes,' she says. 'They keep thinkin': Poor,
+poor, poor Elspie. If they was somebody dead't I could go to see,' she
+told me, smilin', 'I'd do that. A grave can't _poor_ you,' she told me,
+'an' everybody that's company to you does.'
+
+"'Well!' says I, an' couldn't, in logic, say no more.
+
+"That evenin' Eb come in an' set down on the edge of a chair,
+experimental, like he was testin' the cane.
+
+"'Miss Cally,' s'e, when Elspie was out o' the room, 'you goin' t' let
+_her_ go with them folks to the Alice County poorhouse?'
+
+"I guess I dissembulated some under my eyelids--bein' I see t' Eb's mind
+was givin' itself little lurches.
+
+"'Well,' s'I, 'I don't see what that's wise I can do besides.'
+
+"He mulled that rill thorough, seein' to the back o' one hand with the
+other.
+
+"'Would you take her to board an' me pay for her board?' s'e, like he'd
+sneezed the _i_-dea an' couldn't help it comin'.
+
+"'Goodness!' s'I, neutral.
+
+"Eb sighed, like he'd got my refusal--Eb was one o' the kind that always
+thinks, if it clouds up, 't the sun is down on 'em personally.
+
+"'Oh,' s'I, bold an' swift, 'you great big ridiculous _man_!'
+
+"An' I'm blest if he didn't agree to that.
+
+"'I know I'm ridiculous,' s'he, noddin', sad. 'I know I'm that, Miss
+Cally.'
+
+"'Well, I didn't mean it that way,' s'I, reticent--an' said no more,
+with the exception of what I'd rilly meant.
+
+"'Why under the canopy,' I ask' him, for a hint, 'don't you take the Sum
+Merriman store, an' run it, an' live on your feet? I ain't any patience
+with a man,' s'I, 'that lives on his toes. Stomp some, why don't you,
+an' buy that store?'
+
+"An' his answer su'prised me.
+
+"'I did ask Mis' Fire Chief fer the refusal of it,' he said. 'I ask' her
+when I took my flowers to Sum, to-day--they was wild flowers I'd picked
+myself,' he threw in, so's I wouldn't think spendthrift of him. 'An' I'm
+to let her know this week, for sure.'
+
+"'Glory, glory, glory,' s'I, under my breath--like I'd seen a rill live
+soul, standin' far off on a hill somewheres, drawin' cuts to see whether
+it should come an' belong to Eb, or whether it shouldn't.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+LONESOME.--II
+
+
+"All that evenin' Eb an' Elspie an' I set by the cook stove, talkin',
+an' they seemed to be plenty to talk about, an' the air in the room was
+easy to get through with what you hed to say--it was that kind of an
+evenin'. Eb was pretty quiet, though, excep' when he piped up to agree.
+'Gettin' little too hot here, ain't it?' I know I said once; an' Eb see
+right off he was roasted an' he spried 'round the draughts like mad. An'
+a little bit afterwards I says, with malice the fourth thought: 'I can
+feel my shoulders some chilly,' I says--an' he acted fair
+chatterin'-toothed himself, an' went off headfirst for the woodpile. I
+noticed that, an' laughed to myself, kind o' pityin'. But Elspie, she
+never noticed. An' when it come time to lock up, I 'tended to my wrist
+an' let them two do the lockin'. They seemed to like to--I could tell
+that. An' Elspie, she let Eb out the front door herself, like they was
+rill folks.
+
+"Nex' day I was gettin' ready for Sum Merriman's funeral,--it was to be
+at one o'clock,--when Elspie come in my room, sort o' shyin' up to me
+gentle.
+
+"'Miss Cally,' 's'she, 'do you think the mourners'd take it wrong if I's
+to go to the funeral?'
+
+"'Why, no, Elspie,' I says, su'prised; 'only what do you want to go
+for?' I ask' her.
+
+"'Oh, I donno,' s'she. 'I'd like to go an' I'd like to ride to the
+graveyard. I've watched the funerals through the poorhouse fence. An'
+I'd kind o' like to be one o' the followers, for once--all lookin'
+friendly an' together so, in a line.'
+
+"'Go with me then, child,' I says. An' she done so.
+
+"Bein' summer, the funeral flowers was perfectly beautiful. They was a
+rill hothouse box from the Proudfits; an' a anchor an' two crosses an' a
+red geranium lantern; an' a fruit piece made o' straw flowers from the
+other merchants; an' seven pillows, good-sized, an' with all different
+wordin', an' so on. The mound at the side o' the grave was piled
+knee-high, an' Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, I heard, said it seemed like
+Sum was less dead than almost anybody 't'd died in Friendship, bein' the
+grave kind o' spoke up, friendly, when you see the flowers. She went
+home rill cheerful from the funeral an' was able to help get the supper
+for the out-o'-town relations, a thing no widow ever thinks of, anyway
+till the next day--though Sum was her second husband, so it was a little
+different than most.
+
+"Well, a few of us waited 'round the cemetery afterwards to fix the
+flowers on the top o' the sod, an' Elspie, she waited with me--fussin'
+quiet with one thing an' another. Eb, he waited too, standin' 'round.
+An' when it come time for us women to lay the set pieces on, I see
+Elspie an' Eb walkin' off toward the top o' the cemetery hill. It's a
+pretty view from there, lookin' down the slope toward the Old Part,
+where nobody remembered much who was buried, an' it's a rill popular
+walk. I liked seein' 'em go 'long together--some way, lookin' at 'em,
+Elspie so pretty an' Eb so kind o' gentle, you could 'a' thought they
+_was_ rill folks, her sane an' him with a spine. I slipped off an' left
+'em, the cemetery bein' so near my house, an' Eb walked home with her.
+'Poor things,' I thought, 'if he _does_ go back to peddlin' an' she
+_has_ to go to the Alice County poorhouse, I'll give 'em this funeral
+afternoon for a bright spot, anyhow.'
+
+"But I'd just about decided that Elspie wa'n't to go to Alice County. I
+hadn't looked the _i_-dee in the face an' thought about it, very
+financial. But I ain't sure you get your best lights when you do that.
+I'd just sort o' decided on it out o' pure shame for the shabby trick o'
+_not_ doin' so. I hadn't said anything about it to Timothy or Silas or
+any o' the rest, because I didn't hev the strength to go through the
+arguin' agony. When the Dick Dasher had pulled out without her, final, I
+judged they'd be easier to manage. An' that evenin' I told Elspie--just
+to sort o' clamp myself _to_ myself; an' I fair never see anybody so
+happy as she was. It made me ashamed o' myself for not doin' different
+everything I done.
+
+"I was up early that Friday mornin', because I judged't when Elspie
+wasn't to the train some o' them in charge'd come tearin' to my house to
+find out why. I hadn't called Elspie, an' I s'posed she was asleep in
+the other bedroom. I was washin' up my breakfast dishes quiet, so's not
+to disturb her, when I heard somebody come on to the front stoop like
+they'd been sent for.
+
+"'There,' thinks I, 'just as I expected. It's one o' the managers.'
+
+"But it wa'n't a manager. When I'd got to the front door, lo an' the
+hold! there standin' on the steps, wild an' white, was the widow o' the
+day before's funeral--Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, lookin' like the grave
+_hed_ spoke up. She'd got up early to go alone to the cemetery, an', my
+house bein' the nearest, she'd come rushin' back to me with her news.
+
+"'Cally!' s'she, from almost before she laid eyes on me, 'Cally!
+Somebody's stole every last one o' the flowers off'n Sum's grave. _An'_
+the ribbins.'
+
+"She was fair beside herself, bein' as the loss hed piled up on a long
+sickness o' Sum's, an' a big doctor's bill consequent, an' she nervous
+anyhow, an' a good deal o' the ribbin tyin' the stems was silk, both
+sides.
+
+"'I'll hev out the marshal,' s'she, wild. 'I'll send for Timothy. They
+can't hev got far with 'em. I'll know,' s'she, defiant, 'whether they's
+anything to the law or whether they ain't.'
+
+"I hed her take some strong coffee from breakfast, an' I got her, after
+some more fumin's an' fustin's, to walk back to the cemetery with me,
+till we give a look around. I do as many quick-moved things as some, but
+I allus try, _first_, to give a look around.
+
+"'An' another thing,' s'I to her, as we set out, 'are you sure, Mis'
+Fire Chief, that you got to the right grave? The first visit, so,' I
+says, 'an' not bein' accustomed to bein' a widow, lately, an' all, you
+might 'a' got mixed in the lots.'
+
+"While she was disclaimin' this I looked up an' see, hangin' round the
+road, was Eb. He seemed some sheepish when he see me, an' he said,
+hasty, that he'd just got there, an' it come over me like a flash't he'd
+come to see Elspie off. An' I marched a-past him without hardly a word.
+
+"We wasn't mor'n out o' the house when we heard a shout, an' there come
+Silas an' Timothy, tearin' along full tilt in the store delivery wagon,
+wavin' their arms.
+
+"'It's Elspie--Elspie!' they yelled, when they was in hearin'. 'She
+ain't to the depot. She'll be left. Where is she?'
+
+"I hadn't counted on their comin' before the train left, but I thought I
+see my way clear. An' when they come up to us, I spoke to 'em, quiet.
+
+"'She's in the house, asleep,' s'I, 'an' what's more, in that house
+she's goin' to stay as long as she wants. But,' s'I, without waitin' for
+'em to bu'st out, 'there's more important business than that afoot for
+the marshal;' an' then I told 'em about Sum Merriman's flowers. 'An','
+s'I, 'you'd better come an' see about that now--an' let Eppleby an' the
+others take down the inmates, an' you go after 'em on the 8.05. It ain't
+often,' s'I, crafty, 'that we get a thief in Friendship.'
+
+"I hed Timothy Toplady there, an' he knew it. He's rill sensitive about
+the small number o' arrests he's made in the village in his term. He
+excited up about it in a minute.
+
+"'Blisterin' Benson!' he says, 'ain't this what they call vandalism?
+Look at it right here in our midst like a city!' says he, fierce--an'
+showin' through some gleeful.
+
+"'Why, sir,' says Silas Sykes, 'mebbe it's them human _goals_. Mebbe
+they've dug Sum up,' he says, 'an mebbe--' But I hushed him up. Silas
+Sykes always grabs on to his thoughts an' throws 'em out, dressed or
+undressed. He ain't a bit o' reserve. Not a thought of his head that he
+don't part with. If he had hands on his forehead, you could tell what
+time he is--I think you could, anyway.
+
+"Well, it was rill easy to manage 'em, they bein' men an' susceptible to
+fascinations o' lawin' it over somethin'. An' we all got into the
+delivery wagon, an' Eb, he come too, sittin' in back, listenin' an'
+noddin', his feet hangin' over the box informal.
+
+"I allus remember how the cemetery looked that mornin'. It was the tag
+end o' June--an' in June cemeteries seems like somewheres else. The
+Sodality hed been tryin' to get a new iron fence, but they hadn't made
+out then, an' they ain't made out now--an' the old whitewashed fence an'
+the field stone wall was fair pink with wild roses, an' the mulberry
+tree was alive with birds, an' the grass layin' down with dew, an' the
+white gravestones set around, placid an' quiet, like other kind o' folks
+that we don't know about. Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, she went right
+through the wet grass, cross lots an' round graves, holdin' up her
+mournin' an' showin' blue beneath--kind o' secular, like her thinkin'
+about the all-silk ribbin at such a time. Sure enough, she knew her way
+to the lot all right. An' there was the new grave, all sodered green,
+an' not a sprig nor a stitch to honour it.
+
+"'_Now!_' says Mis' Merriman, rill triumphant.
+
+"'Land, land!' s'I, seein' how it rilly was.
+
+"Timothy an' Silas, they both pitched in an' talked at once an' bent
+down, technical, lookin' for tracks. But Eb, he just begun seemin'
+peculiar--an' then he slipped off somewheres, though we never missed
+him, till, in a minute, he come runnin' back.
+
+"'Come here!' he says. 'Come on over here a little ways,' he told us,
+an' not knowin' anything better to do we turned an' went after him,
+wonderin' what on the earth was the matter with him an' ready to believe
+'most anything.
+
+"Eb led us past the vault where Obe Toplady, Timothy's father, lays in a
+stone box you can see through the grating tiptoe; an' round by the
+sample cement coffin that sets where the drives meet for advertisin'
+purposes, an' you go by wonderin' whose it'll be, an' so on over toward
+the Old Part o' the cemetery, down the slope of the hill where
+everybody's forgot who's who or where they rest, an' no names, so. But
+it's always blue with violets in May--like Somebody remembered, anyhow.
+
+"When we got to the top o' the hill, we all looked down the slope,
+shinin' with dew an' sunniness, an' little flowers runnin' in the grass,
+thick as thick, till at the foot o' the hill they fair made a garden,--a
+garden about the size of a grave, knee-deep with flowers. From where we
+stood we could see 'em--hothouse roses an' straw flowers, an' set
+pieces, an' a lot o' pillows, an' ribbins layin' out on the grass. An'
+there, side of 'em, broodin' over 'em lovin', set Elspie, that I'd
+thought was in my house asleep.
+
+"Mis' Fire Chief, she wasn't one to hesitate. She was over the hill in a
+minute, the blue edge o' petticoat bannerin' behind.
+
+"'Up-_un_ my word,' s'she, like a cut, 'if this ain't a pretty note.
+What under the sun are you doin' sittin' there, Elspie, with _my_
+flowers?'
+
+"Elspie looked up an' see her, an' see us streamin' toward her over the
+hill.
+
+"'They ain't your flowers, are they?' s'she, quiet. 'They're the dead's.
+I was a-goin' to take 'em back in a minute or two, anyway, an' I'll take
+'em back now.'
+
+"She got up, simple an' natural, an' picked up the fruit piece an' one
+o' the pillows, an' started up the hill.
+
+"'Well, I nev-er,' says Mis' Merriman; 'the very bare brazenness. Ain't
+you goin' to tell me _what_ you're doin' here with the flowers you say
+is the dead's, an' I'm sure what was Sum's is mine an' the dead's the
+same--'
+
+"She begun to cry a little, an' with that Elspie looks up at her,
+troubled.
+
+"'I didn't mean to make you cry,' she says. 'I didn't mean you should
+know anything about it. I come early to do it--I thought you wouldn't
+know.'
+
+"'Do _what_?' says Mis' Merriman, rill snappish.
+
+"Elspie looks around at us then as if she first rilly took us in. An'
+when she sees Eb an' me standin' together, she give us a little
+smile--an' she sort o' answered to us two.
+
+"'Why,' she says, 'I ain't got anybody, anywheres here, dead or alive,
+that _belongs_. The dead is all other folks's dead, an' the livin' is
+all other folks's folks. An' when I see all the graves down here that
+they don't nobody know who's they are, I thought mebbe one of 'em
+wouldn't care--if I kind of--adopted it.'
+
+"At that she sort o' searched into Mis' Merriman's face, an' then
+Elspie's head went down, like she hed to excuse herself.
+
+"'I thought,' she said, 'they must be so dead--an' no names on 'em an'
+all--an' their live folks all dead too by now--nobody'd care much. I
+thought of it yesterday when we was walkin' down here,' she said, 'an' I
+picked out the grave--it's the _littlest_ one here. An' then when we
+come back past where the funeral was, an' I see them flowers--seemed
+like I hed to see how 'twould be to put 'em on _my_ grave, that I'd took
+over. So I come early an' done it. But I was goin' to lay 'em right back
+where they belong--I truly was.'
+
+"I guess none of us hed the least _i_-dea what to say. We just stood
+there plain tuckered in the part of us that senses things. All, that is,
+but one of us. An' that one was Eb Goodnight.
+
+"I can see Eb now, how he just walked out o' the line of us standin'
+there, starin', an' he goes right up to Elspie an' he looks her in the
+face.
+
+"'You're lonesome,' s'he, kind o' wonderin'. 'You're _lonesome_.
+Like--other folks.'
+
+"An' all to once Eb took a-hold o' her elbow--not loose an' temporary
+like he shook hands, but firm an' four-cornered; an' when he spoke it
+was like his voice hed been starched an' ironed.
+
+"'Mis' Fire Chief,' s'he, lookin' round at her, 'I's to let you know
+this week whether I'd take over the store. Well, yes,' he says, 'if
+you'll give me the time on it we mentioned, I'll take it over. An' if
+Elspie'll marry me an' let me belong to her, an' her to me.'
+
+"'Marry you?' says Elspie, understandin' how he'd rilly spoke to her.
+'_Me?_'
+
+"Eb straightened himself up, an' his eyes was bright an' keen as the
+edge o' somethin'.
+
+"'Yes, you,' he says gentle. 'An' me.'
+
+"An' then she looked at him like he was lookin' at her. An' it come to
+me how it'd been with them two since the night they'd locked up my house
+together. An' I felt all hushed up, like the weddin' was beginnin'.
+
+"But Timothy an' Silas, they wa'n't feelin' so hushed.
+
+'Look a-here!' says Timothy Toplady, all pent up. 'She ain't discharged
+from the county house yet.'
+
+"'I don't care a _dum_,' says Eb, an' I must say I respected him for the
+'dum'--that once.
+
+"'Look a-here,' says Silas, without a bit o' delicacy. 'She ain't
+responsible. She ain't--'
+
+"'She is too,' Eb cut him short. 'She's just as responsible as anybody
+can be when they're lonesome enough to die. _I_ ought 'a' know that.
+Shut up, Silas Sykes,' says Eb, all het up. 'You've just et a hot
+breakfast your wife hed ready for you. You don't know what you're
+talkin' about.'
+
+"An' then Eb sort o' swep' us all up in the dust-pan.
+
+"'No more words about it,' s'he, 'an' I don't care what any one o' you
+says--Mis' Cally nor _none_ o' you. So you might just as well say less.
+Tell 'em, Elspie!'
+
+"She looked up at him, smilin' a little, an' he turned toward her, like
+we wasn't there. An' I nudged Mis' Merriman an' made a move, an' she
+turns right away, like she'd fair forgot the funeral flowers. An'
+Timothy an' Silas actually followed us, but talkin' away a good
+deal--like men will.
+
+"None of us looked back from the top o' the hill, though I will own I
+would 'a' loved to. An' about up there I heard Silas say:--
+
+"'Oh, well. I _am_ gettin' kind o' old an' some stiff to take a new
+business on myself.'
+
+"An' Timothy, he adds absent: 'I don't s'pose, when you come right down
+to it, as Alice County'll rilly care a whoop.'
+
+"An' Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, she wipes up her eyes, an', 'It does seem
+like courtin' with Sum's flowers,' she says, sighin', 'but I'm rill glad
+for Eb.'
+
+"An' Eb not bein' there to agree with her, I says to myself, lookin' at
+the mornin' sun on the cemetery an' thinkin' o' them two back there
+among the baskets an' set pieces--I says, low to myself:--
+
+"'Oh, glory, glory, glory.'
+
+"For I tell you, when you see a livin' soul born in somebody's eyes, it
+makes you feel pretty sure you can hev one o' your own, if you try."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+OF THE SKY AND SOME ROSEMARY
+
+
+When the Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality had
+its Evening Benefit at my house, Delia More came to help in the kitchen.
+She steadfastly refused to be a guest. "I'd love bein' 'round there,"
+she said, "over the stove, or that way. But I can't--_can't_ be
+company--yet. When I think of it, it's like a high swing."
+
+So she stayed in the kitchen, and it was characteristic of Friendship
+that when its women learned that she was there, they all went--either
+deliberately or for a drink of water--to speak with her. And they all
+did learn that she was there. "Who you got in the kitchen?" was a part
+of the small talk from guest to hostess. The men stayed "in the other
+part of the house," Doctor June and Eppleby Holcomb sending by me some
+cordial word to Delia. I think that they cannot do these things anywhere
+else with such beautiful delicacy.
+
+When my other guests had taken leave, Calliope stayed to help in the
+search for Mis' Postmaster Sykes's pickle fork and two of Mis' Helman's
+napkins (the latter marked with L because the store had been out of
+_papier-maché_ H's, and it didn't matter what letter so long as you knew
+it meant you) and all the other borrowed articles whose mislaying made
+any Sodality gathering a kind of panic. Moreover, Calliope had been
+helping and we, and Delia, had been far too busy to taste supper.
+
+We would have said that the true life of the evening was done instead of
+just beginning. But when we entered the kitchen, we found Delia More
+serving the supper on an end of the baking table, while warming his
+hands at the range stood Abel Halsey.
+
+"I came in across the track, from the hills," Abel explained to me. "I
+didn't know you had doings till I tied and blanketed--an' I came on in
+anyhow, back way. I'm in luck too. I haven't had supper."
+
+We four sat down in that homely cheer, and before us was the Sodality's
+exquisite cookery. It was good to have Abel there. Since my coming to
+Friendship I had seen him often, and my wonder at him had deepened. He
+was alive to the finger-tips and by nature equipped to conquer through
+sheer mentality, but he seemed deliberately to have fore-gone the prizes
+for the tasks of the lower places. Not only so, but he who understood
+all fine things seemed to regard his tastes as naïveté, and to have won
+away from them, as if he had set "above all wisdom and subtlety" the
+unquenchable spirit which he knew. And withal he was so merry, so human,
+so big, and so good-looking. "Handsome as Calvert Oldmoxon," the older
+ones in Friendship were accustomed to say,--save Calliope, whom I had
+never heard say that,--but I myself, if I had not had my simile already
+selected, would have said "as Abel Halsey." If a god were human, I think
+that Abel would have been very like a god. And to this opinion his
+experiences were continually bearing witness.
+
+That night, for example, he was in the merriest humour, and told us a
+tale of how, that day, the sky had fallen. There had been down on the
+Pump pasture, deep fog, white and thick and folded in, and above him
+blue sky, when he had emerged on the Hill Road and driven on with his
+eyes shut. ("When I need an adventure," he said, "I just trot old Major
+Mary with my eyes shut. Courting death isn't half as costly as they
+think it is.") And when he had opened his eyes, the sky was gone, and
+everything was white and thick and folded in and fabulous. Obviously, as
+he convinced us, the sky had fallen. But he had driven on through it and
+in it, and had found it, as I recall his account, to be made of
+inextinguishable dreams. These, Abel ran on, are on the other side of
+the sky for anybody who claims them, and our sandwiches were, above all
+sandwiches, delicious. He was so merry that Calliope and I, by a nod or
+a smile of understanding, played our rôle of merely, so to say, proving
+that the films were right--for you may have an inspired conversational
+photographer, but unless you are properly prepared chemically he can get
+no pictures. As Calliope had said of her evening with Eb and Elspie,
+"the air in the room was easy to get through with what you had to
+say--it was that kind of evening." Sometimes I wonder if an hour like
+that is real time; or is it, instead, a kind of chronometrical fairy,
+having no real existence on the dial, but only in essence.
+
+As I think of it now the hour, if it was an hour, was simply a
+background for Delia More. For it was not only Calliope and I who
+responded to Abel's light-hearted talk, but, little by little, it was
+Delia too. Perhaps it was that faint spark in her--fanned to life on the
+night of her coming home, so that she "took stock"--which we now divined
+faintly quickening to Abel's humour, his wisdom, even his fancies. Save
+in her bitterness, on that first night, I had not heard her laugh; and
+it was as if something were set free. I could not help looking at her,
+but that did not matter, for she did not see me. She was listening to
+Abel with an almost childish delight in her face; and in her eyes was
+the look of one in a place before unvisited.
+
+Some while after we had moved away from the table and sat together about
+the cooking range, we heard the questioning horn of a motor. We knew
+that it would belong to the Proudfits, since for us in Friendship there
+exists no other motor, and moreover this one was standing at my gate.
+Abel went out there and came back to tell us that the car had been in
+town to fetch the Proudfits' lawyer, and that Madame Proudfit had kindly
+sent it for Delia "and spoilt everything," he added frankly. As he said
+that, Abel looked at her, and I saw that a dream may persist through
+personality itself. As I have said, if a god were human, Abel would have
+been like a god; and in nothing more so than in this understanding of
+the immortalities.
+
+Calliope stood up and caught, and held, my eyes in passing.
+
+"Let's you and Abel and I take Delia home in the automobile," she said;
+"there ain't anything so good for folks as fresh air."
+
+I brought a warm wrap for Delia, a crimson cloak of mine which, so to
+say, drew a line about her, defining her prettiness; and in the
+starlight we set off along the snowless Plank Road, Delia and Abel and I
+in the tonneau of the machine, and I silent. It had befallen strangely
+that over this road Delia More and I should be faring in the Proudfits'
+car, and beside her Abel Halsey as if, for such as he and she, a dream
+may, just possibly, come back.
+
+"See," she said to Abel, "the sky has gone back up again."
+
+"Yes," Abel assented, "one of the things even the sky can't do is to
+change the way things are."
+
+"Oh, I know, I know ..." said Delia More.
+
+"I want you to feel that," said Abel, gently. "Things are the way things
+are, and no use trying to leave them out of it. Besides, you need them.
+They're foundation. Then you build, and build better. That's all there
+is to it, Delia."
+
+She was silent, and Abel sat looking up at the stars.
+
+"All there is to it except what I said about the other side of the sky,"
+he said. "And then me. I'll help."
+
+From my thought of these two I remember that I drifted on to some
+consideration of myself, for their presence opened old paths where were
+in durance things that did their best to escape, and were disquieting. I
+thought also of Calliope, of whose story I had heard a little from one
+and another. And it seemed to me that possibly Delia More's laughter and
+her wistfulness summed us all up.
+
+When we drew up at the entrance to Proudfit House we all alighted,
+Calliope and Abel and I to walk home. But while we were saying good
+night to Delia, the door opened and Clementina Proudfit stood against
+the light. The car was to wait, she said, to take Mr. Baring, the
+lawyer, to the midnight train. And then, as she saw her:--
+
+"Calliope!" she cried, "I never wanted anybody so much. Come in and make
+Mr. Baring a cup of your good coffee--you will, Calliope? Mother and I
+will be with him for half an hour yet. Come, all of you, and help her."
+
+We went in, lingering for a moment by the drawing-room fire while Miss
+Clementina went below stairs; and I noted how, in that room colourful
+and of fair proportion, Abel Halsey in his shabby clothes moved as
+simply as if the splendour were not there. He stood looking down at
+Delia, in her white dress, the crimson cloak catching the firelight;
+while Calliope and I, before a length of Beauvais tapestry, talked with
+spirit about both tapestry and coffee-making. ("My grandmother use' to
+crochet faces an' figgers in her afaghans, too," Calliope commented,
+"an' when I looked at 'em they use' to make me feel kind o' mad. But
+with these, I don't care at all.") And when Miss Clementina returned,--
+
+"Now," Calliope said to me, "you come with me an' help about the coffee,
+will you? An' Delia, you an' Abel stay here. Nothin' will put me out o'
+my head so quick--_nothin'_--as too many flyin' 'round the kitchen when
+I'm tryin' to do work."
+
+We went downstairs, and Miss Clementina rejoined her mother and the
+lawyer in the library, and Delia and Abel were left alone together in
+the firelight. If I had been a dream, and had been intending to come
+back at all, I think that I must have come then.
+
+"_Pray_, why don't you?" said Calliope to me almost savagely on the
+kitchen stairs.
+
+The coffee-making was a slow process and a silent one. Calliope and I
+were both absorbed in what had so wonderfully come about: That Delia
+More, who was dead, was alive again; or rather, that her spirit, patient
+within her through all the years of its loneliness, was coming forth at
+the sound of Abel's voice. We were alone in the kitchen, and when the
+coffee was over the flame, we stood at the window looking out on the
+black kitchen gardens. There lay the yellow reflection of the room, with
+that unreality of all window-mirrored rooms, so that if one might walk
+within them one would almost certainly wear one's self with a
+difference.
+
+"Ain't it like somethin' bright was in the inside o' the garden,"
+Calliope put it, "just the way I told you Abel feels about everything?
+That they's something inside, hid, kind of secret an' holy--like the
+dreams he said was in the sky. I guess mebbe he's believed that about
+Delia all these years. An' now he's bringin' it out. Oh," she said, "the
+kitchen is where you can tell about things best. Seems to me _you'd_
+ought to know somethin' about Delia an' Abel."
+
+And I wanted to hear.
+
+"Abel see Delia first," Calliope told me then, "to the Rummage Sale that
+the Cemetery Auxiliary, that the Sodality use' to be, give. That is to
+say, they didn't _give_ it, as it turned out--they just _had_ it, you
+might say. Abel was twenty-five or so, an' he'd just come here fresh
+ordained a minister. We found he wa'n't the kind to stop short on, Be
+good yourself an' then a crown. No, but he just went after the folks
+that was livin' along, moral an' step-pickin', an' he says to us, 'What
+you sittin' down here for, enjoyin' yourselves bein' moral? Get out an'
+help the rest o' the world,' he says. But everybody liked him in spite
+o' that, an' he was goin' to be installed minister in our church.
+
+"Then the Rummage Sale come on an' he met Delia. Delia was eighteen an'
+just back from visitin' in the City, with her veil a new way, an' I
+never see prettier. She was goin' to take charge o' the odd waists
+table, an' Abel was runnin' 'round helpin'--Abel wa'n't the white-cuff
+kind, like some, but he always pitched in an' stirred up whatever was
+a-stewin'. He come bringin' in an armful o' old shoes somebody'd fetched
+down, an' just as she was beginnin' on the odd waists, sortin' 'em over,
+he met Delia. I remember she looks up at him from under that veil an'
+from over a red basque she'd picked off the pile, an', 'Mr. Halsey,' she
+says, 'I've a notion to buy this myself an' be savin'.' That took
+Abel--Delia was so pretty an' fluffy that hearin' her talk savin' was
+about like seein' a butterfly washin' out its own wings. 'Do,' says he,
+'the red is beautiful on you,' s'e, shovin' the blame off on to the red.
+An' when he got done with the shoes he come over to help on the waists
+too--I was lookin' over the child sizes, next table, an' I see the whole
+business.
+
+"I will say their talk was wonderful pretty. It run on sort o' easy,
+slippin' along over little laughs an' no hard work to keep it goin'.
+Abel had a nice way o' cuttin' his words out sharp--like they was made
+o' somethin' with sizin' on the back an' stayed where he put 'em. An'
+his laugh would sort o' clamp down soft on a joke an' make it double
+funny. An' Delia, she was right back at him, give for take, an' though
+she was rill genial, she was shy. An' come to think of it, Abel was just
+as full o' his fancyin's then as he is now.
+
+"'Old clothes,' he says to her, 'always seems to me sort o' haunted.'
+
+"'Haunted?' I know she asks him, wonderin'.
+
+"'All steeped in what folks have been when they've wore 'em,' s'e, 'an'
+givin' it out again.'
+
+"'Oh ...' Delia says, 'I never thought o' that before.'
+
+"An' she see what he meant, too. Delia wa'n't one to get up little wavy
+notions like that, but she could see 'em when told. An' neither was she
+one to do one way instead of another by just her own willin' it, but if
+somebody pointed things out to her, then she'd see how, an' do the
+right. An' I think Abel understood that about her--that her soul was
+sort o' packed down in her an' would hev to be loosened gentle, before
+it could speak. Like Peleg Bemus says about his flute," Calliope said,
+smiling, "that they's something packed deep down in it that can't say
+things it knows."
+
+"'Clothes folks wear, rooms they live in, things they use--they all get
+like the folks that use 'em,' Abel says, layin' black with black an'
+white with white, on to the waist table. 'It makes us want to step
+careful, don't it?' s'e. 'I think,' s'e, simple, '_your_ dresses--an'
+ribbins--an' your veil--must go about doin' pleasant things without
+you.'
+
+"'Oh, no,' says Delia, demure, 'I ain't near good enough, Mr. Halsey;
+you mustn't think that,' she says--an' right while he was lookin' gentle
+an' clerical an' ready to help her, she dimples out all over her face.
+'Besides,' she says, 'I ain't enough dresses to spare away from me for
+that. I ain't but about two!' s'she. An' when a girl is all rose pink
+and sky blue and dainty neat, a man loves to hear her brag how few
+dresses she's got, an' Abel wa'n't the exception.
+
+"'Same as a lily,' says he; 'they only have _one_ dress. Now, what else
+shall I do?'
+
+"Well, at sharp nine the Cemetery Auxiliary come to order, Mis' Sykes
+presidin', like she always does when it's time for a hush. The doors was
+to open to the general public at ten o'clock, an' the _i_-dee was to hev
+the Auxiliary get the pick o' the goods first, payin' the reg'lar, set,
+marked price. An' just as they was ready to begin pickin', up arrove the
+Proudfit pony cart with a great big box o' stuff, sent to the sale.
+Land, land, Mis' Sykes from the chair an' the others the same, they just
+makes one swoop--an' begun selectin'; an' in less than a jiffy if they
+hadn't selected up every one o' the Proudfit articles themselves. It was
+natural enough. The things was worth havin'--pretty curtains, an'
+trimmin's not much wore, an' some millinery an' dresses with the new
+hardly off. An' the Auxiliary paid the price they would 'a' asked
+anybody else. They was anxious, but they was square.
+
+"That just seemed to get their hand in. Next, they fell to on the other
+tables an' begun buyin' from them. They was lots o' things that most
+anybody would 'a' been glad to hev that the owners had sent down sheer
+through bein' sick o' seein' 'em around--like you will--an' couldn't be
+thrown away 'count o' conscience, but could be give to a cause an'
+conscience not notice. We had quite fun buyin', too--knowin' they was
+each other's, an' no hard feelin'--only good spirits an' pleased with
+each other's taste. Everybody knew who'd sent what, an' everybody hed
+bought it for some not so high-minded use as it hed hed before, an' kep'
+their dignity that way. Front-stair carpet was bought to go down on back
+stairs, sittin' room lamp for chamber lamp, kitchen stove-pipe for wash
+room stove-pipe, an' so on, an' the clothes to make rag rugs--so they
+give out. The things kep' on an' on bein' snapped up hot-cake quick, an'
+the crowd beginnin' to gather outside, waitin' to get in, made 'em sort
+o' lose their heads an' begin buyin' sole because things was
+cheap--bird-cages, a machine cover, odd table-leaves, an' like that. The
+Society was rill large then, an' what happened might 'a' been expected.
+When ten o'clock come an' it was time to open the door, the Rummage Sale
+was over, an' the Auxiliary hed bought the whole thing themselves.
+
+"We never thought folks might be anyways mad about it--but I tell you,
+they was. They hed been seein' us through the glass, like they was caged
+in front o' bargain day. An' when Mis' Toplady, fair beamin', unlocks
+the door an' tells 'em the sale was through with an' a rill success,
+they acted some het up. But Mis' Toplady, she bristles back at 'em. 'I'm
+sure,' s'she, 'nobody wants you to die an' be buried in a nice, neat,
+up-to-date, kep'-up cemet'ry if you don't _want_ to.' An' o' course she
+hed 'em there.
+
+"Well, it was that performance o' the Auxiliary's that rilly brought
+Delia an' Abel together. It seemed to strike Abel awful funny, an'
+Delia, lookin' at it with him, she see the funny too. They laughed a
+good deal, an' they seemed to sort o' understand each other through
+laughin', like you will. Delia bought the red waist, an' Abel walked
+home with her--an' by that time Abel, with his half-scriptural,
+half-boy, half-lover way that he couldn't help, was just on the craggy
+edge o' fallin' in love with her. But I b'lieve it wa'n't love, just
+ordinary. It was more like Abel, in his zeal for reddin' up the world,
+see that he could do for Delia what nobody else could do--an' her for
+him. An' that both of 'em workin' together could do more through knowin'
+each other was near. That's the way,' Calliope said shyly, 'lovin'
+always ought to be, my notion. An' when it ain't, things is likely to
+get all wrong. Sometime--sometime,' she said, 'you'll hear about me--an'
+how things with me went all wrong. An' I want you to remember, no matter
+how much it don't seem my fault--that that's why they did go wrong--an'
+no other. I was too crude selfish to sense what love is. I didn't
+know--I didn't know. An' so with lots o' folks.
+
+"I've often thought that Delia an' Abel meetin' at a Rummage Sale was
+like all the rest of it. There was just a lot o' rubbish lumberin' up
+the whole situation. Things wasn't happy for Delia to home--her mother,
+Mis' Crapwell, had married again to a man that kep' throwin' out about
+hevin' to be support to Delia; an' her stepsister, Jennie Crapwell, was
+sickly an' self-seekin' an' engaged all to once. An' the young carpenter
+that Jennie was goin' to marry, he was the black-eyed, hither-an'-yon
+kind, an' crazier over Delia from the first than he ever was over
+Jennie. Delia, she was shy about not havin' much education--Mis'
+Proudfit hed wanted to send her off to school, an' Mis' Crapwell
+wouldn't hear to it--an' Abel kep' talkin' that he was goin' to hev a
+big church in the City some day, an' I guess that scairt Delia some, an'
+Jennie kep' frettin' an' houndin' her, one way an' another, an'
+a-callin' her 'parson's wife'--ain't it awful the _power_ them
+pin-pricky things has if we let 'em? An' Delia wa'n't the kind to know
+how to do right by her own willin'. An' so all to once we woke up one
+mornin', an' she'd done what she'd done, an' no help for it.
+
+"It was only a month after Delia an' Abel had met that Delia went away,
+an' Abel hadn't been installed yet. An' when Delia done that, Abel just
+settled into bein' somebody else. He seemed to want to go off in the
+hills an' be by himself, an' most o' the time he done so. But there was
+grace for him even in that: Abel see the hill folks, how they didn't hev
+any churches nor not anything else much, an' he just set to work on 'em,
+quiet an' still. He'd wanted to go away an' travel, but the chance never
+come. An' it seemed, then on, he didn't want even to hear o' the City,
+an' when his chances there come, he never took 'em. An' Abel's been
+'round here with the hill folks the fourteen years since, an' never
+pastor of any church--but he got the blessedness, after all, an' I
+guess the chance to do better service than any other way. You can see
+how he's broad an' gentle an' tender an' strong, but you don't know
+what he does for folks--an' that's the best. An' yet--his soul must be
+sort o' packed away too, to what it would 'a' been if things had 'a'
+gone differ'nt ... packed away an' tryin' to say somethin'. An' now
+Delia's come back I b'lieve Abel knows that, an' I b'lieve he sees the
+soul in her needin' him too, just like it did all that time--waitin' to
+be loosened, gentle, before it can speak; an' meanin' things it can't
+say, like Peleg's flute. Oh, don't it seem like the dreams Abel said he
+found up in the sky had _ought_ to be let come true?"
+
+It did seem as if, for the two up there in the drawing-room, this dream
+might, just possibly, come back.
+
+"But then you never can tell for sure about the sky, can you?" said
+Calliope, sighing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Coffee was served in the library where Madame Proudfit and Miss
+Clementina had been in consultation with their lawyer. We were all
+rather silent as Madame Proudfit sat at the urn and the lawyer handed
+our cups down some long avenue of his abstraction. And now everything
+seemed to me a kind of setting for Delia and Abel, and Calliope kept
+looking at them as if, before her eyes, things might come right. So, I
+own, did I, though in the Proudfit library it was usually difficult to
+fix my attention on what passed; for it was in that room that Linda
+Proudfit's portrait hung, and the beautiful eyes seemed always trying to
+tell one what the weary absence meant. But I thought again that this
+daughter of the house had won a kind of presence there, because of
+Madame Proudfit's tender mother-care of Delia More.
+
+Yet it was to this care that Calliope and I owed a present defeat; for
+when we were leave-taking,--
+
+"We shall sail, then, the moment we can get passage," Madame Proudfit
+observed to her lawyer, "providing that Clementina can arrange. Delia,"
+she added, "Clementina and I find to-night that we must sail immediately
+for Europe, for six months or so. And we want to carry you off with us."
+
+Madame Proudfit and Miss Clementina and Delia were standing with us
+outside the threshold, where the outdoors had met us like something that
+had been waiting. There, with the light from the hall falling but dimly,
+I saw in Abel's face only the glow of his simple joy that this good
+thing had come to Delia--though, indeed, that very joy told much
+besides. And it was in his face when he bade Delia good night and, since
+he was expected somewhere among the hills for days to come, gave her
+God-speed. But we four fell momentarily silent, as if we meant things
+which we might not speak. It was almost a relief to hear tapping on the
+sidewalk the wooden leg of Peleg Bemus, while a familiar, thin little
+stream of melody from his flute made its way about.
+
+"Doesn't it seem as if Peleg were trying to tell one something?" said
+Madame Proudfit, lightly, as we went away.
+
+And down on the gravel of the drive Calliope demanded passionately of
+Abel and me:--
+
+"Oh, don't some things make you want to pull the sky down an' _wrap up
+in it_!"
+
+But at this Abel laughed a little.
+
+"It's easier to pull down just the dreams," he said.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+TOP FLOOR BACK
+
+
+One morning a few weeks after the Proudfits had left, I was sitting
+beside Calliope's cooking range, watching her at her baking, when the
+wooden leg of Peleg Bemus thumped across the threshold, and without
+ceremony he came in from the shed and stood by the fire, warming his axe
+handle. But Peleg's intrusions were never imputed to him. As I have
+said, his gifts and experiences had given him a certain authority.
+Perhaps, too, he reflected a kind of institutional dignity from his
+sign, which read:--
+
+     P. Bemus: Retail Saw Miller
+
+At the moment of his entrance Calliope was talking of Emerel Kitton, now
+Mrs. Abe Daniel:
+
+"There's them two," she said, "seems to hev married because they both
+use a good deal o' salt--'t least they ain't much else they're alike in.
+An' Emerel is just one-half workin' her head off for him. Little nervous
+thing she is--when I heard she was down with nervous prostration two
+years ago, I says, 'Land, land,' I says, 'but ain't she _always_ had
+it?' They's a strain o' good blood in that girl,--Al Kitton was New
+England,--but they don't none of it flow up through her head. She's
+great on sacrificin', but she don't sacrifice judicious. If folks is
+goin' to sacrifice, I think they'd ought to do it conscientious, the
+kind in the Bible, same as Abraham an' like that."
+
+Peleg Bemus rubbed one hand up and down his axe handle.
+
+"I reckon you can't always tell, Miss Marsh," he said meditatively. "I
+once knowed a man that done some sacrificin' that ain't called by that
+name when it gets into the newspapers." He turned to me, with a manner
+of pointing at me with his head, "You been in New York," he said; "ain't
+you ever heard o' Mr. Loneway--Mr. John Loneway?"
+
+I was sorry that I could not answer "yes." He was so expectant that I
+had the sensation of having failed him.
+
+"Him an' I lived in the same building in East Fourteenth Street there,"
+he said. "That is to say, he lived top floor back and I was janitor.
+That was a good many years ago, but whenever I get an introduction to
+anybody that's been in New York, I allus take an interest. I'd like to
+know whatever become of him."
+
+He scrupulously waited for our question, and then sat down beside the
+oven door and laid his axe across his knees.
+
+"It was that hard winter," he told us, "about a dozen years ago. I'd hev
+to figger out just what year, but most anybody on the East Side can tell
+you. Coal was clear up an' soarin', an' vittles was too--everybody
+howlin' hard times, an' the Winter just commenced. Make things worse,
+some philanthropist had put up two model tenements in the block we was
+in, an' property alongside had shot up in value accordin' an' lugged
+rents with it. Everybody in my buildin' 'most was rowin' about it.
+
+"But John Loneway, he wasn't rowin'. I met him on the stairs one mornin'
+early an' I says, 'Beg pardon, sir,' I says, 'but you ain't meanin' to
+make no change?' I ask him. He looks at me kind o' dazed--he was a
+wonderful clean-muscled little chap, with a crisscross o' veins on each
+temple an' big brown eyes back in his head. 'No,' he says. 'Change? I
+can't move. My wife's sick,' he says. That was news to me. I'd met her a
+couple o' times in the hall--pale little mite, hardly big as a baby, but
+pleasant-spoken, an' with a way o' dressin' herself in shabby clo'es
+that made the other women in the house look like bundles tied up
+careless. But she didn't go out much--they had only been in the house a
+couple o' weeks or so. 'Sick, is she?' I says. 'Too bad,' I says.
+'Anything I can do?' I ask him. He stopped on the nex' step an' looked
+back at me. 'Got a wife?' he says. 'No,' says I, 'I ain't, sir. But they
+ain't never challenged my vote on 'count o' that, sir--no offence,' I
+says to him respectful. 'All right,' he says, noddin' at me. 'I just
+thought mebbe she'd look in now and then. I'm gone all day,' he added,
+an' went off like he'd forgot me.
+
+"I thought about the little thing all that mornin'--layin' all alone up
+there in that room that wa'n't no bigger'n a coal-bin. It's bad enough
+to be sick anywheres, but it's like havin' both legs in a trap to be
+sick in New York. Towards noon I went into one o' the flats--first floor
+front it was--with the kindlin' barrel, an' I give the woman to
+understand they was somebody sick in the house. She was a great big
+creatur' that I'd never see excep' in red calico, an' I always thought
+she looked some like a tomato ketchup bottle, with her apron for the
+label. She says, when I told her, 'You see if she wants anything,' she
+says. 'I can't climb all them stairs,' she answers me.
+
+"Well, that afternoon I went down an' hunted up a rusty sleigh-bell I'd
+seen in the basement, an' I rubbed it up an' tied a string to it, an'
+'long in the evenin' I went upstairs an' rapped at Mr. Loneway's door.
+
+"'I called,' I says, 'to ask after your wife, if I might.'
+
+"'If you might,' he says after me. 'I thank the Lord you're somebody
+that will. Come in,' he told me.
+
+"They had two rooms. In one he was cookin' somethin' on a smelly
+oil-stove. In the other was his wife; but that room was all neat an'
+nice--curtains looped back, carpet an' all that. She was half up on
+pillows, an' she had a black waist on, an' her hair pushed straight
+back, an' she was burnin' up with the fever.
+
+"'Set down an' talk to her,' he says to me, 'while I get the dinner,
+will you? I've got to go out for the milk.'
+
+"I did set down, feelin' some like a sawhorse in church. If she hadn't
+been so durn little, seems though I could 'a' talked with her, but I
+ketched sight of her hand on the quilt, an'--law! it wa'n't no bigger'n
+a butternut. She done the best thing she could do an' set me to work.
+
+"'Mr. Bemus,' she says, first off--everybody else called me Peleg--'Mr.
+Bemus,' she says, 'I wonder if you'd mind takin' an old
+newspaper--there's one somewheres around--an' stuffin' in the cracks of
+this window an' stop its rattlin'?'
+
+"I laid my sleigh-bell down an' done as she says; an' while I fussed
+with the window, that seems though all Printin' House Square couldn't
+stuff up, she talked on, chipper as a squirrel, all about the buildin',
+an' who lived where, an' how many kids they was, an' wouldn't it be nice
+if they had an elevator like the model tenement we was payin' rent for,
+an' so on. I'd never 'a' dreamt she was sick if I hadn't looked 'round a
+time or two at her poor, burnin'-up face. Then bime-by he brought the
+supper in, an' when he went to lift her up, she just naturally laid back
+an' fainted. But she was all right again in a minute, brave as two, an'
+she was like a child when she see what he'd brought her--a big platter
+for a tray, with milk-toast an' an apple an' five cents' worth o' dates.
+She done her best to eat, too, and praised him up, an' the poor soul
+hung over her, watchin' every mouthful, feedin' her, coaxin' her,
+lookin' like nothin' more'n a boy himself. When I couldn't stand it no
+longer, I took an' jingled the sleigh-bell.
+
+"'I'm a-goin',' I says, 'to hang this outside the door here, an' run
+this nice long string through the transom. An' to-morrow,' I says, 'when
+you want anything, just you pull the string a time or two, an' I'll be
+somewheres around.'
+
+"She clapped her hands, her eyes shinin'.
+
+"'Oh, _goodey_!' she says. 'Now I won't be alone. Ain't it nice,' she
+says, 'that there ain't no glass in the transom? If we lived in the
+model tenement, we couldn't do that,' she says, laughin' some.
+
+"An' that young fellow, he followed me to the door an' just naturally
+shook hands with me, same's though I'd been his kind. Then he followed
+me on out into the hall.
+
+"'We had a little boy,' he says to me low, 'an' it died four months ago
+yesterday, when it was six days old. She ain't ever been well since,' he
+says, kind of as if he wanted to tell somebody. But I didn't know what
+to say, an' so I found fault with the kerosene lamp in the hall, an'
+went on down.
+
+"Nex' day I knew the doctor come again. An' 'way 'long in the afternoon
+I was a-tinkerin' with the stair rail when I heard the sleigh-bell ring.
+I run up, an' she was settin' up, in the black waist--but I thought her
+eyes was shiney with somethin' that wasn't the fever--sort of a scared
+excitement.
+
+"'Mr. Bemus,' she says, 'I want you to do somethin' for me,' she says,
+'an' not tell anybody. Will you?'
+
+"'Why, yes,' I says, 'I will, Mis' Loneway,' I says. 'What is it?' I
+ask' her.
+
+"'There's a baby somewheres downstairs,' she says. 'I hear it cryin'
+sometimes. An' I want you to get it an' bring it up here.'
+
+"That was a queer thing to ask, because kids isn't soothin' to the sick.
+But I went off downstairs to the first floor front. The kid she meant
+belonged to the Tomato Ketchup woman. I knew they had one because it
+howled different times an', I judge, pounded its head on the floor some
+when it was maddest. It was the only real little one in the
+buildin'--the others was all the tonguey age. I told what I wanted.
+
+"'For the land!' says Tomato Ketchup, 'I never see such nerve. Take my
+baby into a sick room? Not if I know it. I s'pose you just come out o'
+there? Well, don't you stay here, bringin' diseases. A hospital's the
+true place fer the sick,' she says.
+
+"I went back to Mis' Loneway, an' I guess I lied some. I said the kid
+was sick--had the croup, I thought, an' she'd hev to wait. Her face
+fell, but she said 'all right an' please not to say nothin',' an' then I
+went out an' done my best to borrow a kid for her. I ask' all over the
+neighbourhood, an' not a woman but looked on me for a cradle
+snatcher--thought I wanted to abduct her child away from her. Bime-by I
+even told one woman what I wanted it for.
+
+"'My!' she says, 'if she ain't got one, she's got one less mouth to
+feed. Tell her to thank her stars.'
+
+"After that I used to look into Mis' Loneway's frequent. The women on
+the same floor was quite decent to her, but they worked all day, an'
+mostly didn't get home till after her husband did. I found out somethin'
+about him, too. He was clerk in a big commission house 'way down-town,
+an' his salary, as near as I could make out, was about what mine was,
+an' they wa'n't no estimatin' that by the cord at all. But I never heard
+a word out'n him about their not havin' much. He kep' on makin' milk
+toast an' bringin' in one piece o' fruit at a time an' once in a while a
+little meat. An' all the time anybody could see she wa'n't gettin' no
+better. I knew she wa'n't gettin' enough to eat, an' I knew he knew it,
+too. An' one night the doctor he outs with the truth.
+
+"Mr. Loneway an' I was sittin' in the kitchen while the doctor was in
+the other room with her. I went there evenin's all the time by then--the
+young fellow seemed to like to hev me. We was keepin' warm over the
+oil-stove because the real stove was in her room, an' the doctor come in
+an' stood over him.
+
+"'My lad,' he says gentle, 'there ain't half as much use o' my comin'
+here as there is o' her gettin' strengthenin' food. She's got to hev
+beef broth--cer'als--fresh this an' fresh that'--he went on to tell him,
+'an' plenty of it,' he says. 'An' if we can make her strength hold out,
+I think,' he wound up, 'that we can save her. But she's gettin' weaker
+every day for lack o' food. Can you do anything more?' he ask' him.
+
+"I expected to see young Mr. Loneway go all to pieces at this, because I
+knew as it was he didn't ride in the street-car, he was pinchin' so to
+pay the doctor. But he sorter set up sudden an' squared his shoulders,
+an' he looked up an' says:--
+
+"'Yes!' he says. 'I've been thinkin' that to-night,' he says. 'An' I've
+hed a way to some good luck, you might call it--an' now I guess she can
+hev everything she wants,' he told him; an' he laughed some when he said
+it.
+
+"That sort o' amazed me. I hadn't heard him sayin' anything about any
+excruciatin' luck, an' his face hadn't been the face of a man on the
+brink of a bonanza. I wondered why he hadn't told her about this luck o'
+his, but I kep' quiet an' watched to see if he was bluffin'.
+
+"I was cleanin' the walk off when he come home nex' night. Sure enough,
+there was his arms laid full o' bundles. An' his face--it done me good
+to see it.
+
+"'Come on up an' help get dinner,' he yelled out, like a kid, an' I
+thought I actually seen him smilin'.
+
+"Soon's I could I went upstairs, an' they wa'n't nothin' that man hadn't
+brought. They was everything the doctor had said, an' green things, an'
+a whol' basket o' fruit an' two bottles o' port, an' more things
+besides. They was lots o' fixin's, too, that there wa'n't a mite o'
+nourishment in--for he wa'n't no more practical _nor_ medicinal'n a
+wood-tick. But I knew how he felt.
+
+"'Don't tell her,' he says. 'Don't tell her,' he says to me, hoppin'
+'round the kitchen like a buzz-saw. 'I want to surprise her.'
+
+"You can bet he did, too--if you'll overlook the liberty. When he was
+all ready, he made me go in ahead.
+
+"'_To-ot!_' says I, genial-like--they treated me jus' like one of 'em.
+'_To-ot!_ Lookey-_at_!'
+
+"He set the big white platter down on the bed, an' when she see all the
+stuff,--white grapes, mind you, an' fresh tomatoes, an' a glass for the
+wine,--she just grabs his hand an' holds it up to her throat, an'
+says:--
+
+"'Jack! Oh, Jack!' she says,--she called him that when she was
+pleased,--'how did you? _How did you?_'
+
+"'Never you mind,' he says, kissin' her an' lookin' as though he was
+goin' to bu'st out himself, 'never you ask. It's time I had some luck,
+ain't it? Like other men?'
+
+"She was touchin' things here an' there, liftin' up the grapes an'
+lookin' at 'em--poor little soul had lived on milk toast an' dates an' a
+apple now an' then for two weeks to my knowledge. But when he said that,
+she stopped an' looked at him, scared.
+
+"'John!' she says, 'you ain't--'
+
+"He laughed at that.
+
+"'Gamblin'?' he says. 'No--never you fear.' I had thought o' that
+myself, only I didn't quite see when he'd had the chance since night
+before when the doctor told him. 'It's all owin' to the office,' he says
+to her, 'an' now you eat--lemme see you eat, Linda,' he says, an' that
+seemed to be food enough for him. He didn't half touch a thing. 'Eat all
+you want,' he says, 'an', Peleg, poke up the fire. There's half a ton o'
+coal comin' to-morrow. An' we're goin' to have this _every day_,' he
+told her.
+
+"Land o' love! how happy she was! She made me eat some grapes, an' she
+sent a bunch to the woman on the same floor, because she'd brought her
+an orange six weeks before; an' then she begs Mr. Loneway to get an
+extry candle out of the top dresser draw'. An' when that was lit up she
+whispers to him, and he goes out an' fetches from somewheres a guitar
+with more'n half the strings left on; an' she set up an' picked away on
+'em, an' we all three sung, though I can't carry a tune no more'n what I
+can carry a white oak tree trunk.
+
+"'Oh,' she says, 'I'm a-goin' to get well now. Oh,' she says, 'ain't it
+heaven to be rich again?'
+
+"No--you can say she'd ought to 'a' made him tell her where he got the
+money. But she trusted him, an' she'd been a-livin' on milk toast an'
+dates for so long that I can pretty well see how she took it all as
+what's-his-name took the wild honey, without askin' the Lord whose make
+it was. Besides, she was sick. An' milk toast an' dates'd reconcile me
+to 'most any change for the better.
+
+"It got so then that I went upstairs every noon an' fixed up her lunch
+for her, an' one day she done what I'd been dreadin'. 'Mr. Bemus,' she
+says, 'that baby must be over the croup now. Won't you--won't you take
+it down this orange an' see if you can't bring it up here awhile?'
+
+"I went down, but, law!--where was the use? The Ketchup woman grabs up
+her kid an' fair threw the orange at me. 'You don't know what disease
+you're bringin' in here,' she says--she had a voice like them gasoline
+wood-cutters. I see she'd took to heart some o' the model-tenement
+social-evenin' lectures on bugs an' worms in diseases. I carried the
+orange out and give it to a kid in the ar'y, so's Mis' Loneway'd be
+makin' somebody some pleasure, anyhow. An' then I went back upstairs an'
+told her the kid was worse. Seems the croup had turned into cholery
+infantum.
+
+"'Why,' she says, 'I mus' send it down somethin' nice an' hot to-night,'
+an' so she did, and I slips it back in the Loneway kitchen unbeknownst.
+She wa'n't so very medicinal, either, bless her heart!
+
+"'Tell me about that baby,' she says to me one noon. 'What's its name?
+Does it like to hev its mother love it?' she ask me.
+
+"I knew the truth to be that it didn't let anybody do anything day or
+night within sight or sound of it, an' it looked to me like an imp o'
+the dark. But I fixed up a tol'able description, an' left out the
+freckles an' the temper, an' told her it was fat an' well an' a boy.
+That seemed to satisfy her. Its name, though, sort o' stumped me. The
+Tomato Ketchup called it mostly 'you-come-back-here-you-little-ape.' I
+heard that every day. So I said, just to piece out my information, that
+I thought its name might be April. That seemed to take her fancy, an'
+after that she was always askin' me how little April was--but not when
+Mr. Loneway was in hearin'. I see well enough she didn't want he should
+know that she was grievin' none.
+
+"All the time kep' comin', every night, another armful o' good things.
+Land! that man he bought everything. Seems though he couldn't buy
+enough. Every night the big platter was heaped up an' runnin' over with
+everything under the sun, an' she was like another girl. I s'pose the
+things give her strength, but I reck'n the cheer helped most. She had
+the surprise to look forward to all day, an' there was plenty o' light,
+evenin's; an' the stove, that was drove red-hot. The doctor kep' sayin'
+she was better, too, an' everything seemed lookin' right up.
+
+"Seems queer I didn't suspect from the first something was wrong. Seems
+though I ought to 'a' known money didn't grow out o' green wood the way
+he was pretendin'. It wasn't two weeks before he takes me down to the
+basement one night when he comes home, an' he owns up.
+
+"'Peleg,' he says, 'I've got to tell somebody, an' God knows maybe it'll
+be you that'll hev to tell her. I've stole fifty-four dollars out o' the
+tray in the retail department,' says he, 'an' to-day they found me out.
+They wasn't no fuss made. Lovett, the assistant cashier, is the only one
+that knows. He took me aside quiet,' Mr. Loneway says, 'an' I made a
+clean breast. I said what I took it for. He's a married man himself, an'
+he told me if I'd make it up in three days, he'd fix it so's nobody
+should know. The cashier's off for a week. In three days he's comin'
+back. But they might as well ask me to make up fifty-four hundred. I've
+got enough to keep on these three days so's she won't know,' he says,
+'an' after that--'
+
+"He hunched out his arms, an' I'll never forget his face.
+
+"I says, 'Mr. Loneway, sir,' I says, 'chuck it. Tell her the whole thing
+an' give 'em back what you got left, an' do your best.'
+
+"He turned on me like a crazy man.
+
+"'Don't talk to me like that,' he says fierce. 'You don't know what
+you're sayin',' he says. 'No man does till he has this happen to him.
+The judge on the bench that'll send me to jail for it, he won't know
+what he's judgin'. My God--_my God!_' he says, leanin' up against the
+door o' the furnace room, 'to see her sick like this--an' _needin'
+things_--when she give herself to me to take care of!'
+
+"Course there wa'n't no talkin' to him. An' the nex' night an' the nex'
+he come home bringin' her truck just the same. Once he even hed her a
+bunch o' pinks. Seems though he was doin' the worst he could.
+
+"The pinks come at the end of the second day of the three days the
+assistant cashier had give him to pay the money back in. An' two things
+happened that night. I was in the kitchen helpin' him wash up the dishes
+while the doctor was in the room with Mis' Loneway. An' when the doctor
+come out o' there into the kitchen, he shuts the door. I see right off
+somethin' was the matter. He took Mr. Loneway off to the back window,
+an' I rattled 'round with the dishes an' took on not to notice. Up until
+when the doctor goes out--an' then I felt Mr. Loneway's grip on my arm.
+I looked at him, an' I knew. She wasn't goin' to get well. He just
+lopped down on the chair like so much sawdust, an' put his face down in
+his arm, the way a schoolboy does--an' I swan he wa'n't much more'n a
+schoolboy, either. I s'pose if ever hell is in a man's heart,--an' we
+mostly all see it there sometime, even if we don't feel it,--why, there
+was hell in his then.
+
+"All of a sudden there was a rap on the hall door. He never moved, an'
+so I went. I whistled, I rec'lect, so's she shouldn't suspect nothin'
+from our not goin' in where she was right off. An' a messenger-boy was
+out there in the passage with a letter for Mr. Loneway.
+
+"I took it in to him. He turned himself around an' opened it, though I
+don't believe he knew half what he was doin'. An' what do you guess come
+tumblin' out o' that envelope? Fifty-four dollars in bills. Not a word
+with 'em.
+
+"Then he broke down. 'It's Lovett,' he says, 'it's Lovett's done
+this--the assistant cashier. Maybe he's told some o' the other fellows
+at the desks next, an' they helped. They knew about her bein' sick. An'
+they can't none of 'em afford it,' he says, an' that seemed to cut him
+up worst of all. 'I'll give it back to him,' he says resolute. 'I can't
+take it from 'em, Peleg.'
+
+"I says, 'Hush up, Mr. Loneway, sir,' I says. 'You got to think o' her.
+Take it,' I told him, 'an' thank God it ain't as bad as it was. Who
+knows,' I ask' him, 'but what the doctor might turn out wrong?'
+
+"Pretty soon I got him to pull himself together some, an' I shoved him
+into the other room, an' I went with him, an' talked on like an idiot so
+nobody'd suspect--I didn't hev no idea what.
+
+"She was settin' up in the same black waist, with a newspaper hung
+acrost the head o' the iron bed to keep the draught out. All of a
+sudden,--
+
+"'John!' says she.
+
+"He went close by the bed.
+
+"'Is everything goin' on good?' she ask' him.
+
+"'Everything,' he told her right off.
+
+"'Splendid, John?' she ask' him, pullin' his hand up by her cheek.
+
+"'Splendid, Linda,' he says after her.
+
+"'We got a little money ahead?' she goes on.
+
+"'Bless me, if he didn't do just what I had time to be afraid of. He
+hauls out them fifty-four dollars an' showed her.
+
+"She claps her hands like a child.
+
+"'Oh, _goodey_!' she says; 'I'm so glad. I'm so glad. Now I can tell
+you,' she says to him.
+
+"He took her in his arms an' kneeled down by the bed, an' I tried to
+slip out, but she called me back. So I stayed, like an' axe in the
+parlour.
+
+"'John,' she says to him, 'do you know what Aunt Nita told me before I
+was married? "You must always look the prettiest you know how," Aunt
+Nita says,' she tells him, '"for your husband. Because you must always
+be prettier for him than anybody else is." An', oh, dearest,' she says,
+'you know I'd 'a' looked my best for you if I could--but I never
+had--an' it wasn't your fault!' she cries out, 'but things didn't go
+right. It wasn't anybody's fault. Only--I _wanted_ to look nice for you.
+An' since I've been sick,' she says, 'it's made me wretched, wretched to
+think I didn't hev nothin' to put on but this black waist--this homely
+old black waist. You never liked me to wear black,' I rec'lect she says
+to him, 'an' it killed me to think--if anything should happen--you'd be
+rememberin' me like this. You think you'd remember me the way I was when
+I was well--but you wouldn't,' she says earnest; 'people never, never
+do. You'd remember me here like I look now. Oh--an' so I thought--if
+there was ever so little money we could spare--won't you get me
+somethin'--somethin' so's you could remember me better? Somethin' to
+wear these few days,' she says.
+
+"He breaks down then an' cries, with his face in her pillow.
+
+"'Don't--why, don't!' she says to him; 'if there wasn't any money, you
+might cry--only then I wouldn't never hev told you. But
+now--to-morrow--you can go an' buy me a little dressing-sacque--the kind
+they have in the windows on Broadway. Oh, _Jack_!' she says, 'is it
+wicked an' foolish for me to want you to remember me as nice as you can?
+It ain't--it _ain't_!' she says.
+
+"Then I give out. I felt like a handful o' wet sawdust that's been
+squeezed. I slid out an' downstairs, an' I guess I chopped wood near all
+night. The Tomato Ketchup's husband he pounded the floor for me to shut
+up, an' I told him--though I never was what you might call a impudent
+janitor--that if he thought he could chop it up any more soft, he'd
+better engage in it. But then the kid woke up, too, an' yelled some, an'
+I's afraid she'd hear it an' remember, an' so I quit.
+
+"Nex' mornin' I laid for Mr. Loneway in the hall.
+
+"'Sir,' I says to him when he come down to go out, 'you won't do nothin'
+foolish?' I ask' him.
+
+"'Mind your business,' he says, his face like a patch o' poplar ashes.
+
+"I was in an' out o' their flat all day, an' I could see't Mis' Loneway
+she's happy as a lark. But I knew pretty well what was comin'. Mind you,
+this was the third day.
+
+"That night I hed things goin' in the kitchen an' the kettle on, an' I's
+hesitatin' whether to put two eggs in the omelet or three, when he comes
+home. He laid a eternal lot o' stuff on the kitchen table, without one
+word, an' went in where she was. I heard paper rustlin', an' then I
+heard her voice--an' it wasn't no cryin', lemme say. An' so I says to
+myself, 'Well,' I says, 'she might as well hev a four-egg omelet,
+because it'll be the last.' I knew if they's to arrest him she wouldn't
+never live the day out. So I goes on with the omelet, an' when he come
+out where I was, I just told him if he'd cut open the grapefruit I hed
+ever'thing else ready. An' then he quit lookin' defiant, an' he calmed
+down some; an' pretty soon we took in the dinner.
+
+"She was sittin' up in front of her two pillows, pretty as a picture.
+An' she was in one o' the things I ain't ever see outside a store
+window. Lord! it was all the colour o' roses, with craped-up stuff like
+the bark on a tree, an' rows an' rows o' lace, an' long, flappy ribbon.
+She was allus pretty, but she looked like an angel in that. An' I says
+to myself then, I says: 'If a woman _knows_ she looks like that in them
+things, an' if she loves somebody an', livin' or dead, wants to look
+like that for him, I want to know who's to blame her? I ain't--Peleg
+Bemus, he ain't.' Mis' Loneway was as pretty as I ever see, not barrin'
+the stage. An' she was laughin', an' her cheeks was pink-like, an' she
+says,--
+
+"'Oh, Mr. Bemus,' she says, 'I feel like a queen,' she says, 'an' you
+must stay for dinner.'
+
+"I never seen Mr. Loneway gayer. He was full o' fun an' funny sayin's,
+an' his face had even lost its chalky look an' he'd got some colour, an'
+he laughed with her an' he made love to her--durned if it wasn't enough
+to keep a woman out o' the grave to be worshipped the way that man
+worshipped her. An' when she ask' for the guitar, I carried out the
+platter, an' I stayed an' straightened things some in the kitchen.
+An' all the while I could hear 'em singin' soft an' laughin'
+together ... an' all the while I knew what was double sure to come.
+
+"Well, in about an hour it did come. I was waitin' for it. Fact, I had
+filled up the coffee-pot expectin' it. An' when I heard the men comin'
+up the stairs I takes the coffee an' what rolls there was left an' I
+meets 'em in the hall, on the landing. They was two of 'em--constables,
+or somethin'--with a warrant for his arrest.
+
+"'Gentlemen,' says I, openin' the coffee-pot careless so's the smell
+could get out an' circ'late--'gentlemen, he's up there in that room.
+There's only these one stairs, an' the only manhole's right here over
+your heads, so's you can watch that. You rec'lect that there ain't a
+roof on that side o' the house. Now, I'm a lonely beggar, an' I wish't
+you'd let me invite you to a cup o' hot coffee an' a hot buttered roll
+or two, right over there in that hall window. You can keep your eye
+peeled towards that door all the while,' I reminds 'em.
+
+"Well, it was a bitter night, an' them two was flesh an' blood. They
+'lowed that if he hadn't been there they'd 'a' had to wait for him,
+anyway, so they finally set down. An' I doled 'em out the coffee. I
+'lowed I could keep 'em an hour if I knew myself. Nobody could 'a' done
+any different, with her an' him settin' up there singin' an' no manner
+o' doubt but what it was for the last time.
+
+"I'd be'n 'round consid'able in my time an' I knew quite a batch o'
+stories. I let 'em have 'em all, an' poured the coffee down 'em. They
+was willin' enough--it wa'n't cold in the halls to what it was outside,
+an' the coffee was boilin' hot. An' if anybody wants to blame me, they'd
+hev to see her first, all fluffed up same as a kitten in that pink
+jacket-thing, afore I'd give 'em a word o' hearin'.
+
+"In the midst of it all I heard the Tomato Ketchup's kid yell. I
+remembered that this'd be my last chanst fer _her_ to see the kid when
+she could get any happiness out of it. I didn't think twice--I just
+filled up the cups o' them two, an' then I sails downstairs, two at a
+time, an' opened the door o' first floor front without rappin'. The kid
+was there in its little nightgown, howlin' fer fair because it had be'n
+left alone with its boy brother. The Tomato Ketchup an' her husband was
+to a wake. I picked up the kid, rolled it in a blanket, grabbed brother
+by the arm, an' started up the stairs.
+
+"'Is the house on f-f-fire?' says the boy brother.
+
+"'Yes,' says I, 'it is. An' we're goin' upstairs to hunt up a
+fire-escape,' I told him.
+
+"At the top o' the stairs I sets him down on the floor an' promises him
+an orange, an' then I opens the door, with the kid on my arm. It had
+stopped yellin' by then, an' it was settin' up straight, with its eyes
+all round an' its cheeks all pinked-up with havin' just woke up, an' it
+looked awful cute, in spite of its mother. Mis' Loneway was leanin'
+back, laughin', an' tellin' him what they was goin' to do the minute she
+got well; but when she see the baby she drops her husband's hand and
+sorter screams out, weak, an' holds out her arms. Mr. Loneway, he hardly
+heard me go in, I reckon--leastwise, he looks at me clean through me
+without seein' I was there. An' she hugs the kiddie up in her arms an'
+looks at me over the top of its head as much as to say she understood
+an' thanked me.
+
+"'Its ma is went off,' I told 'em apologetic, 'an' I thought maybe you'd
+look after it awhile,' I told 'em.
+
+"Then I went out an' put oranges all around the boy brother on the hall
+floor, an' I hustled back downstairs.
+
+"'Gentlemen,' says I, brisk, 'I've got two dollars too much,' says
+I--an' I reck'n the cracks in them walls must 'a' winked at the notion.
+'What do you say to a game o' dice on the bread-plate?' I ask' 'em.
+
+"Well, one way an' another I kep' them two there for two hours. An'
+then, when the game was out, I knew I couldn't do nothin' else. So I
+stood up an' told 'em I'd go up an' let Mr. Loneway know they was
+there--along o' his wife bein' sick an' hadn't ought to be scared.
+
+"I started up the stairs, feelin' like lead. Little more'n halfway up I
+heard a little noise. I looked up, an' I see the boy brother a-comin',
+leakin' orange-peel, with the kid slung over his shoulder, sleepin'. I
+looked on past him, an' the door o' Mr. Loneway's sittin' room was open,
+an' I see Mr. Loneway standin' in the middle o' the floor. I must 'a'
+stopped still, because something stumbled up against me from the back,
+an' the two constables was there, comin' close behind me. I could hear
+one of 'em breathin'.
+
+"Then I went on up, an' somehow I knew there wasn't nothin' more to wait
+for. When we got to the top I see inside the room, an' she was layin'
+back on her pillow, all still an' quiet. An' the little new pink jacket
+never moved nor stirred, for there wa'n't no breath.
+
+"Mr. Loneway, he come acrost the floor towards us.
+
+"'Come in,' he says. 'Come right in,' he told us--an' I see him smilin'
+some."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+AN EPILOGUE
+
+
+When Peleg had gone back to the woodshed, Calliope slipped away too. I
+sat beside the fire, listening to the fine, measured fall of Peleg's
+axe--so much more vital with the spirit of music than his flute; looking
+at Calliope's brown earthen baking dishes--so much purer in line than
+the village bric-a-brac; thinking of Peleg's story and of the life that
+beat within it as life does not beat in the unaided letter of the law.
+But chiefly I thought of Linda Loneway. Linda Loneway. I made a picture
+of her name.
+
+So, Calliope having come from above stairs where I had heard her moving
+about as if in some search, I think that I recognized, even before I
+lifted my eyes to it, the photograph which she gave me. It was as if the
+name had heard me, and had come.
+
+"It's Linda," Calliope said. "It's Linda Proudfit. An' I'm certain,
+certain sure it's the Linda that Peleg knew."
+
+"Surely not, Calliope," I said--obedient to some law.
+
+Calliope nodded, with closed eyes, in simple certainty.
+
+"I _know_ it was her that Peleg meant about," she said. "I thought of it
+first when he said about her looks--an' her husband a clerk--an' he said
+he called her Linda. An' then when he got to where she mentioned Aunt
+Nita--that's what her an' Clementina always calls Mis' Ordway, though
+she ain't by rights--oh, it is--it is...."
+
+Calliope sat down on the floor before me, cherishing the picture. And
+all natural doubts of the possibility, all apparent denial in the real
+name of Linda Proudfit's poor young husband were for us both presently
+overborne by something which seemed viewlessly witnessing to the truth.
+
+"But little Linda," Calliope said, "to think o' her. To think o'
+_her_--like Peleg said. Why, I hardly ever see her excep' in all silk,
+or imported kinds. None of us did. I hardly ever 'see her walk--it was
+horses and carriages and dance in a ballroom till I wonder she
+remembered how to walk at all. Everything with her was cut good, an'
+kid, an' handwork, an' like that--the same way the Proudfits is now. But
+yet she wasn't a bit like Mis' Proudfit an' Clementina. They're both
+sweet an' rule-lovin' an' ladies born, but--" Calliope hesitated,
+"they's somethin' they _ain't_. An' Linda was."
+
+Calliope looked about the room, seeking a way to tell me. And her eyes
+fell on the flame on her cooking-stove hearth.
+
+"Linda had a little somethin' in her that lit her up," she said. "She
+didn't say much of anything that other folks don't say, but somehow she
+meant the words farther in. In where the light was, an' words mean
+differ'nt an' better. I use' to think I didn't believe that what she saw
+or heard or read was exactly like what her mother an' Clementina an'
+most folks see an' hear an' read. Somehow, she got the inside out o'
+things, an' drew it in like breathin', an' lit it up, an' lived it more.
+I donno's you know what I'm talkin' about. But Mis' Proudfit an'
+Clementina don't do that way. They're dear an' good an' generous, an'
+lots gentler than they was before Linda left 'em--an' yet they just wear
+things' an' invite folks in an' see Europe an' keep up their French an'
+serve God, an' never get any of it rill lit up. But Linda, she _knew_.
+An' she use' to be lonesome. I know she did--I know she did.
+
+"I use' to look at her an' wish an' wish I wa'n't who I am, so's I could
+a' let her know I knew too. I use' to go to mend her lace an' sell orris
+root to her--an' Madame Proudfit an' Clementina would be there, buyin'
+an' livin' on the outside, judicious an' refined an' rill right about
+everything; but when Linda come in, she sort o' reached somewheres,
+deep, or up, or out, or like that, an' got somethin' that meant it all
+instead o' gnawin' its way through words. It was like other folks was
+the recipe an' Linda was the rill dish. They was the way to be, but she
+was the one that was.
+
+"Well, then one year, when she come home from off to school, this young
+clerk followed her. I only see 'em together once--he only stayed a day
+an' had his terrible time with Jason Proudfit an' everybody knew it--but
+even with seein' 'em that once, I knew about him. I don't care who he
+was or what he was worth--he was lit up, too. I donno why he was a clerk
+nor anything of him--excep' that the lit kind ain't always the
+money-makers--but he could talk to her her way. An' when I see the four
+of 'em drive up in front of the post-office the day he come, Mis'
+Proudfit an' Clementina talkin' all soft an' interested an' regular
+about the foreign postage stamps they was buyin', an' Linda an' him
+sittin' there with foreign lands fair livin' in their eyes--I knew how
+it would be. An' so it was. They went off, Linda with only the clothes
+she was wearin' an' none of her stone rings or like that with her. An'
+see what it all done--see what it done. Jason Proudfit, he wouldn't
+forgive 'em nor wouldn't hear a word from 'em, though they say Mis'
+Linda wrote, at first, an' more than once. An' then when he died two
+years or so afterwards, an' Mis' Proudfit tried everywhere--they wa'n't
+no trace. An' no wonder, with a differ'nt name so's nobody should find
+out how poor they was--an' death--an' like enough prison...."
+
+Calliope stood up, and in the pause Peleg's axe went rhythmically on.
+
+"I'm goin' to be sure," she said. "I hate to--but o' course I've got to
+be rill certain, in words."
+
+She went out to the shed, taking with her the photograph, and closed the
+door. Peleg's axe ceased. And when she came back, she said nothing at
+all for a little, and the axe did not go on.
+
+"We mustn't tell Mis' Proudfit--yet," she put it, presently, "not till
+we can think. I donno's we ever can tell her. The dyin'--an' the
+disgrace--an' the other name--an' the hurt about Linda's _needin'
+things_ ... Peleg thinks not tell her, too."
+
+"At least," I said, "we can wait, for a little. Until they come home."
+
+I listened while, her task long disregarded, Calliope fitted together
+the dates and the meagre facts she knew, and made the sad tally
+complete. Then she laid the picture by and stood staring at the
+cooking-range flame.
+
+"It ain't enough," she said, "bein'--lit up--ain't enough for folks, is
+it? Not without they're some made out o' iron, too, to hold it--like
+stoves. An' yet--"
+
+She looked at me with one of her infrequent, passionate doubtings in her
+eyes.
+
+"--if Mis' Proudfit an' Clementina had just of been lit too," she said,
+"mebbe--"
+
+She got no farther, though I think it was not the opening of the door by
+Peleg Bemus that interrupted her. Peleg did not come in. He said
+something of the snow on his shoes, and spoke through the door's
+opening.
+
+"I'm a-goin to quit work for to-day, Mis' Marsh," he told her. "Seems
+like I'm too dead tired to chop."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+THE TEA PARTY
+
+
+As spring came on, and I found myself fairly identified with the life of
+Friendship,--or, at any rate, "more one of us," as they said,--I
+suggested to Calliope something which had been for some time pleasantly
+in my mind: might I, I asked one day, give a tea for her?
+
+"A tea!" she repeated. "For _me_? You know they give me a benefit once
+in the basement of the Court House. But a private tea, for me?"
+
+And when she understood that this was what I meant,
+
+"Oh," she said earnestly, "I'd be so glad to come. An' you an' I can
+know the tea is for me--if you rilly mean it--but it won't do to say it
+so'd it'd get out around. Oh, no, it won't. Not one o' the rest'll come
+near if you give it _for_ me--nor if you give it _for_ anybody. Mis'
+Proudfit, now, she tried to give a noon lunch on St. Patrick's day for
+Mis' Postmaster Sykes, an' the folks she ask' to it got together an'
+sent in their regrets. 'We're just as good as Mis' Postmaster Sykes,'
+they give out to everybody, 'an' we don't bow down to her like that.' So
+Mis' Proudfit she calls it a Shamrock Party an' give it a day later. An'
+every one of 'em went. It won't do to say it's _for_ me."
+
+So I contented myself with planning to seat Calliope at the foot of my
+table, and I found a kind of happiness in her child-like content, though
+only we two knew that the occasion would do her honour. If Delia had
+been available we would have told her, but Delia was still in Europe,
+and would not return until June.
+
+Calliope was quite radiant when, on the afternoon of the tea, she
+arrived in advance of the others. She was wearing her best gray
+henrietta, and I noted that she had changed her cameo ring from her
+first to her third finger. ("First-finger rings seem to me more
+everyday," she had once said to me, "but third-finger I always think
+looks real dressy.") She was carrying a small parcel.
+
+"You didn't ask to borrow anything," she said shyly; "I didn't know how
+you'd feel about that, a stranger so. An' we all got together--your
+company, you know--an' found out you hadn't borrowed anything from any
+of us, an' we thought maybe you hesitated. So we made up I should bring
+my spoons. They was mother's, an' they're thin as weddin' rings--an'
+solid. Any time you want to give a company you're welcome to 'em."
+
+When I had laid the delicate old silver in its place, I found Calliope
+standing in the middle of my living-room, looking frankly about on my
+simple furnishings, her eyes lingering here and there almost lovingly.
+
+"Bein' in your house," she said, "is like bein' somewheres else. I don't
+know if you know what I mean? Most o' the time I'm where I belong--just
+common. But now an' then--like a holiday when we're dressed up an'
+sittin' 'round--I feel differ'nt an' _special_. It was the way I felt
+when they give the William Shakespeare supper in the library an' had it
+lit up in the evenin' so differ'nt--like bein' somewheres else. It'll be
+that way on Market Square next month when the Carnival comes. I guess
+that's why I'm a extract agent," she added, laughing a little. "When I
+set an' smell the spices I could think it wasn't me I feel so _special_.
+An' I feel that way now--I do' know if you know what I mean--"
+
+She looked at me, measuring my ability to comprehend, and brightening at
+my nod.
+
+"Well, most o' Friendship wouldn't understand," she said. "To them
+vanilla smells like corn-starch pudding an' no more. An' that reminds
+me," she added slowly, "you know Friendship well enough by this time,
+don't you, to find we're apt to say things here this afternoon?"
+
+"Say things?" I repeated, puzzling.
+
+"We won't mean to," she hastened loyally to add; "I ain't talkin' about
+us, you know," she explained anxiously, "I just want to warn you so's
+you won't be hurt. I guess I notice such things more'n most. We won't
+mean to offend you--but I thought you'd ought to know ahead. An' bein'
+as it's part my tea, I thought it was kind o' my place to tell you."
+
+She was touching the matter delicately, almost tenderly, and not more,
+as I saw, with a wish to spare me than with a wish to apologize in
+advance for the others, to explain away some real or fancied weakness.
+
+"You know," she said, "we ain't never had anybody to, what you might
+say, tell us what we can an' what we can't say. So we just naturally say
+whatever comes into our heads. An' then when we get it said, we see
+often that it ain't what we meant--an' that it's apt to hurt folks or
+put us in a bad light, or somethin'. But some don't even see that--some
+go right ahead sayin' the hurt things an' never know it _is_ a hurt. I
+don't know if you've noticed what I mean," Calliope said, "but you will
+to-night. An' I didn't want you should be hurt or should think hard of
+them that says 'em."
+
+But how, I wondered, as my guests assembled, could one "think hard" of
+any one in Friendship, and especially of the little circle to which I
+belonged: My dear Mis' Amanda Toplady, Mis' Photographer Sturgis, Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, who, since our Thanksgiving, seemed, as
+Calliope put it, to have "got good with the universe again"; the Liberty
+sisters, for that day once more persuaded from their seclusion, and Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes, with, we sometimes said, "some right to hev her
+peculiarities if ever anybody hed it." Of them all the Friendship phrase
+of approval had frequently been spoken: That this one, or that, was "_at
+heart_, one o' the most all-round capable women we've got."
+
+I had hoped to have one more guest--Mrs. Merriman, wife of the late
+chief of the Friendship fire department. But I had promptly received her
+regrets, "owing to affliction in the family," though the fire chief had
+died two years and more before.
+
+"But it's her black," Calliope had explained to me sympathetically; "she
+can't afford to throw away her best dress, made mournin' style, with
+crape ornaments. As long as that lasts good, she'll hev to stay home
+from places. I see she's just had new crape cuffs put on, an' that means
+another six months at the least. An' she won't go to parties wearin'
+widow weeds. Mis' Fire Chief Merriman is very delicate."
+
+My guests, save Calliope, all arrived together and greeted me, I
+observed, with a manner of marked surprise. Afterward, when I wondered,
+Calliope explained simply that it was not usual for a hostess to meet
+her guests at the door. "Of course, they're usually right in the midst
+o' gettin' the supper when the company comes," she said.
+
+My prettiest dishes and silver were to do honour to those whom I had
+bidden; and boughs of my Flowering-currant filled my little hall and
+curved above the line of sight at table, where the candle shades lent
+deeper yellows. I delighted in the manner of formality with which they
+took their places, as if some forgotten ceremonial of ancient courts
+were still in their veins, when a banquet was not a thing to be entered
+upon lightly.
+
+Quite in ignorance of the Japanese custom of sipping tea while the first
+course is arriving, it is our habit in Friendship to inaugurate "supper"
+by seeing the tea poured. In deference to this ceremony a hush fell
+immediately we were seated, and this was in courtesy to me, who must
+inquire how each would take her tea. I think that this conversation
+never greatly varied, as:--
+
+"Mrs. Toplady?" I said at once, the rest being understood.
+
+"Cream and sugar, _if_ you please," said that great Amanda heartily, "or
+milk if it's milk. I take the tea for the trimmin's."
+
+Then a little stir of laughter and a straying comment or two about, say,
+the length of days at that time of year, and:--
+
+"Mrs. Sykes?"
+
+"Just milk, please. I always say I don't think tea would hurt _anybody_
+if they'd leave the sugar alone. But then, I've got a very peculiar
+stomach."
+
+"Mrs. Holcomb?"
+
+"I want mine plain tea, thank you. My husband takes milk and the boys
+like sugar, but I like the taste of the tea."
+
+At which, from Libbie Liberty: "Oh, Mis' Holcomb just says that to make
+out she's strong-minded. Plain tea an' plain coffee's regular woman's
+rights fare, Mis' Holcomb!" And then, after more laughter and Mis'
+Holcomb's blushes, they awaited:--
+
+"Mrs. Sturgis?"
+
+"Not any at all, thank you. No, I like the tea, but the tea don't like
+me. My mother was the same way. She never could drink it. No, not any
+for me, though I must say I should dearly love a cup."
+
+"Miss 'Viny?"
+
+"Just a little tea and the rest hot water. Dear me, I shouldn't go to
+sleep till _to-morrow_ night if I was to drink a cup as strong as that.
+No--a little more water, please. I s'pose I can send it back for more if
+it's still too strong?"
+
+"Miss Libbie?"
+
+"Laviny just wants the canister pointed in her direction, an' she thinks
+she's had her tea. Lucy don't dare take any. Three lumps for me, please.
+I like mine surup."
+
+"Calliope?"
+
+"Oh," said Calliope, "milk if there's any left in the pitcher. An' if
+there ain't, send it down clear. I like it most any way. Ain't it queer
+about the differ'nce in folks' tastes in their tea and coffee?"
+
+That was the signal for the talk to begin with anecdotes of how various
+relatives, quick and passed, had loved to take their tea. No one ever
+broached a real topic until this introduction had had its way. To do so
+would have been an indelicacy, like familiar speech among those in the
+ceremony of a first meeting.
+
+Thus I began to see that in spite of Calliope's distress at the ways of
+us in Friendship, a matchless delicacy was among its people a dominant
+note. Not the delicacy born of convention, not that sometimes bred in
+the crudest by urban standards, but a finer courtesy that will spare the
+conscious stab which convention allows. It was, if I may say so, a
+_savoir faire_ of the heart instead of the head. But we had hardly
+entered upon the hour before the ground for Calliope's warning was
+demonstrated.
+
+"There!" she herself bridged a pause with her ready little laugh, "I
+knew somebody'd pass me somethin' while I was saltin' my potato. My
+brother, older, always said that at home. 'I never salt my potato,' he
+use' to say, 'without somebody passes me somethin'."
+
+Next instant her eyes flew to my face in a kind of horror, for:--
+
+"We've noticed that at our house, too," Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss
+observed, vigorously using a salt-shaker, "but then I always believe,
+myself, in havin' everything properly seasoned in the kitchen before it
+comes on to the table."
+
+"See!" Calliope signalled me fleetly.
+
+But no one else, and certainly not Mis' Holcomb herself, perceived the
+surface of things vexed by a ripple.
+
+"Well, now," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady heartily, "that _is_ so
+about saltin' your potato. I know it now, but I never thought of it
+right out before. Lots o' things are true that you don't think of right
+out. Now I come to put my mind on it, I know at our house if I cut up a
+big plate o' bread we don't eat up half of it; but just as sure as I
+don't, I hev to get up from the table an' go get more bread."
+
+"I know--we often speak of that!" and "So my husband says," chimed Mis'
+Holcomb and Mis' Sturgis.
+
+"Seems as if I'd noticed that, too," Calliope said brightly.
+
+Whereupon: "My part," Miss Lucy Liberty contributed shyly, "I always
+like to see a great big plate of good, big slices o' bread come on to
+the table. Looks like the crock was full," she added, laughing heartily
+to cover her really pretty shyness, "an' like you wouldn't run out."
+
+Calliope's glance at me was still more distressed, for my table showed
+no bread at all, and my maid was at that moment handing rolls the size
+of a walnut. But for the others the moment passed undisturbed.
+
+"I've never noticed in particular about the bread," observed Mis'
+Sykes,--she had great magnetism, for when she spoke an instant hush
+fell,--"but what _I_ have noticed"--Mis' Sykes was very original and
+usually disregarded the experiences of others,--"is that if I don't make
+a list of my washing when it goes, something is pretty sure to get lost.
+But let me make a list, an' even the dust-cloths'll come back home."
+
+Everybody had noticed that. Even Libbie Liberty assented, and exchanged
+with her sister a smile of domestic memories.
+
+"An' every single piece has got my initial in the corner, too," Mis'
+Sykes added; "I wouldn't hev a piece o' linen in the house without my
+initial on. It don't seem to me rill refined not to."
+
+Calliope's look was almost one of anguish. My hemstitched damask napkins
+bear no saving initial in a corner. But no one else would, I was
+certain, connect that circumstance, even if it was observed, with what
+Mis' Sykes had said.
+
+"It's too bad Mis' Fire Chief Merriman wouldn't come to-day," Calliope
+hastily turned the topic. "She can't seem to get used to things again,
+since Sum died."
+
+"She didn't do this way for her first husband that died in the city, I
+heard," volunteered Mis' Sturgis. "Why, I heard she went out _there_,
+right after the first year."
+
+"That's easy explained," said Mis' Sykes, positively.
+
+"Wasn't she fond of him?" asked Mis' Holcomb. "She seems real clingin',
+like she would be fond o' most any one."
+
+"Oh, yes, she was fond of him," declared Mis' Sykes. "Why, he was a
+professional man, you know. But then he died ten years ago, durin' tight
+skirts. Naturally, being a widow then wasn't what it is now. She
+couldn't cut her skirt over to any advantage--a bell skirt is a bell
+skirt. An' they went out the very next year. When she got new cloth for
+the flare skirts, she got colours. But the Fire Chief died right at the
+height o' the full skirts. She's kep' cuttin' over an' cuttin' over, an'
+by the looks o' the Spring plates she can keep right on at it. She
+really can't afford to go _out_ o' mournin'. I don't blame her a bit."
+
+"She told me the other day," remarked Libbie Liberty, "that she was real
+homesick for some company food. She said she'd been ask' in to eat with
+this family an' that, most hospitable but very plain. An' seems though
+she couldn't wait for a company lay-out."
+
+"She won't go anywheres in her crape," Mis' Sykes turned to me,
+supplementing Calliope's former information. "She's a very superior
+woman,--she graduated in Oils in the city,--an' she's fitted for any
+society, say where who _will_. We always say about her that nobody's so
+delicate as Mis' Fire Chief Merriman."
+
+"She don't take strangers in very ready, anyway," Mis' Holcomb explained
+to me. "She belongs to what you might call the old school. She's very
+sensitive to _every_thing."
+
+The moment came when I had unintentionally produced a hush by serving a
+salad unknown in Friendship. When almost at once I perceived what I had
+done, I confess that I looked at Calliope in a kind of dread lest this
+too were a _faux pas_, and I took refuge in some question about the
+coming Carnival. But my attention was challenged by my maid, who was in
+the doorway announcing a visitor.
+
+"Company, ma'am," she said.
+
+And when I had bidden her to ask that I be excused for a little:--
+
+"Please, ma'am," she said, "she says she has to see you _now_."
+
+And when I suggested the lady's card:--
+
+"Oh, it's Mis' Fire Chief Merriman," the maid imparted easily.
+
+"Mis' Fire Chief Merriman!" exclaimed every one at table. "Well
+forevermore! Speakin' of angels! She must 'a' forgot the tea was bein'."
+
+In my living-room, in her smartly freshened spring toilet of mourning,
+Mis' Fire Chief Merriman rose to greet me. She was very tall and slight,
+and her face was curiously like an oblong yellow brooch which fastened
+her gown at the throat.
+
+"My dear friend," she said, "I felt, after your kind invitation, that I
+must pay my respects _during_ your tea. Afterwards wouldn't be the same.
+It's a tea, and there couldn't be lanterns an' bunting or anything o'
+the sort. So I felt I could come in."
+
+"You are very good," I murmured, and in some perplexity, as she resumed
+her seat, I sat down also. Mis' Merriman sought in the pocket of her
+petticoat for a black-bordered handkerchief.
+
+"When you're in mourning so," she observed, "folks forget you. They
+don't really forget you, either. But they get used to missing you
+places, an' they don't always remember to miss you. I did appreciate
+your inviting me to-day so. Because I'm just as fond of meeting my
+friends as I was before the chief died."
+
+And when I had made an end of murmuring something:--
+
+"Really," she went on placidly, "it ought to be the custom to go out in
+society when you're in mourning if you never did any other time. You
+need distraction then if you ever needed it in your life. An' the chief
+would 'a' been the first to feel that too. He was very partial to going
+out in company."
+
+And when I had made an end of murmuring something else:--
+
+"You were very thoughtful to give me an invitation for this afternoon,"
+she said. "An' I felt that I must stop in an' tell you so, even if I
+couldn't attend."
+
+Serenely she spread her black crape fan and swayed it. In the
+dining-room my guests proceeded with their lonely salad toward a
+probable lonely dessert. At thought of that dessert and of that salad, a
+suggestion, partly impulsive and partly flavoured with some faint
+reminiscence, at once besieged me, and in it I divined a solution of the
+moment.
+
+"Mrs. Merriman," I said eagerly, "may I send you in a cup of strawberry
+ice? I've some early strawberries from the city."
+
+She turned on me her great dark eyes, with their flat curve of shadow
+accenting her sadness.
+
+"I'm sure you are very kind," she said simply. "An' I should be pleased,
+I'm sure."
+
+I rose, hesitating, longing to say what I had in mind.
+
+"I'd really like your opinion," I said, "on rather a new salad I'm
+trying. Now would you not--"
+
+"A salad?" Mis' Merriman repeated. "The chief," she said reflectively,
+"was very partial to all green salads. I don't think men usually care
+for them the way he did."
+
+"Dear Mrs. Merriman," said I at this, "a cup of bouillon and a bit of
+chicken breast and a drop of creamed cauliflower--"
+
+"Oh," she murmured, "really, I couldn't think--"
+
+And when I had made my cordial insistence she looked up at me for a
+moment solemnly, over her crape fan. I thought that her eyes with that
+flat, underlying curve of shadow were as if tears were native to them.
+Her grief and the usages of grief had made of her some one other than
+her first self, some one circumscribed, wary of living.
+
+"Oh," she said wistfully, "I ain't had anything like that since I went
+into mourning. If you don't think it would be disrespectful to him--?"
+
+"I am certain that it would not be so," I assured her, and construed her
+doubting silence as capitulation.
+
+So I filled a tray with all the dainties of our little feast, and my
+maid carried it to her where she sat, and then to us at table served
+dessert. And my strange party went forward with seven guests in my
+dining-room and one mourner at supper in my living-room.
+
+"How very, _very_ delicate!" said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, in an emphatic
+whisper. "Mis' Fire Chief Merriman is a very superior woman, an' she
+always does the delicate thing."
+
+And now as I met Calliope's eyes I saw that the dear little woman was
+looking at me with a manner of unmistakable pride. In spite of her
+warning to me and what she thought had been its justification during the
+supper, here was an occasion to reveal to me a delicacy unequalled.
+
+Thereafter, in deference to my mourning guest in the next room, we all
+dropped our voices and talked virtually in whispers. And when at last we
+rose from the table, complete silence had come upon us.
+
+Then, the tray not having yet been brought from that other room, I
+confess to having found myself somewhat uncertain how to treat a
+situation so out of my experience. But the kind heart of my dear Mis'
+Amanda Toplady was the dictator.
+
+"Now," she whispered, tip-toeing, "we must all go in an' speak to her.
+Poor woman--she don't call anywheres, an' she stays in mournin' so long
+folks have kind o' dropped off goin' to see her. Let's walk in an' be
+rill nice to her."
+
+Mis' Fire Chief Merriman sat as I had left her, and the tray was before
+her on my writing-table. She looked up gravely and greeted them all, one
+by one, without rising. We sat about her in a circle and spoke to her
+gently on subjects decently allied to her grief: on the coming meeting
+of the Cemetery Improvement Sodality; on the new styles in mourning; on
+the deaths in Friendship during the winter; and on two cases of typhoid
+fever recently developed in the town. (The Fire Chief had died of
+"walking typo.") And Mis' Merriman, gravely partaking of strawberry ice
+and cake and bonbons, listened and replied and, with the last morsel,
+rose to take her leave.
+
+It was then that my unlucky star shone effulgent. For, as she was
+shaking hands all round:--
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Merriman," I said, with the gentlest intent, "would you care
+to come out to see my dining-room? My Flowering-currant was very early
+this year--"
+
+To my horrified amazement Mis' Fire Chief Merriman lifted her
+black-bordered handkerchief to her face and broke into subdued sobbing.
+Suddenly I understood that all the others were looking at me in a kind
+of reproachful astonishment. My bewilderment, mounting for an instant,
+was precipitately overthrown by the sobbing woman's words.
+
+"Oh," Mis' Merriman said indistinctly, "I'm much obliged to you, I'm
+sure. But how can you think I would? I haven't looked at lanterns an'
+bunting an' such things since the Fire Chief died. I don't know how I'm
+ever going to stand the Carnival!"
+
+In deep distress I apologized, and found myself adrift upon a sea of
+uncharted classifications. Here were niceties of distinction which
+escaped my ruder vision, trained to the mere interchange of signals in
+smooth sailing or straight tempest, on open water. But I knew with grief
+that I had given her pain--that was clear enough; and in my confusion
+and wish to make amends, I caught up from their jar on the hall table my
+Flowering-currant boughs and thrust them in her hands.
+
+"Ah," I begged breathlessly, "at all events, take these!"
+
+On which she drew away from me and shook her head and fairly fled down
+the path, her floating crape brushing the mother bushes of my offending
+offering. And I was helplessly aware that sympathetic silence had fallen
+on the others and that the sympathy was not for me.
+
+"But what on earth was the matter?" I entreated my guests.
+
+It was that great Mis' Amanda Toplady who slipped her arm about me and
+explained.
+
+"When we've got any dead belongin' to us," she said, "we always carry
+all the flowers we get to the grave--an', of course, we don't feel we
+_can_ carry them that's been used for a company. It's the same with Mis'
+Fire Chief. An' she can't bear even to see flowers an' things that's
+fixed for a company, either. Of course, that's her privilege."
+
+Mis' Sykes took my hands.
+
+"You come here so lately," she said, "you naturally wouldn't know what's
+what in these things, here in Friendship. An' then, of course, Mis' Fire
+Chief Merriman is very, _very_ delicate."
+
+Calliope linked her arm in mine.
+
+"Don't you mind," she whispered; "we're all liable to our mistakes."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Half an hour after tea my guests took leave.
+
+"I enjoyed myself so much," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss; "you
+look tired out. I hope it ain't been too much for you."
+
+"Entertainin' is a real job," said Mis' Sturgis, "but you do it almost
+as if you liked it. I enjoyed myself _so_ much."
+
+"I'll give bail you're glad it's over," said Libbie Liberty,
+sympathetically, "even if it did go off nice. I enjoyed myself ever so
+much."
+
+"_Ever_ so much," murmured Miss Lucy, laughing heartily.
+
+"Good night. Everything was lovely. I enjoyed myself very much," Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes told me. "And," she said, "you'll hear from me very,
+_very_ soon in return for this."
+
+"Now don't you overdo, reddin' up to-night," advised my dear Mis' Amanda
+Toplady. "Just pick up the silver an' rense it off, an' let the dishes
+set till mornin', _I_ say. I _did_ enjoy myself so much."
+
+"Good-by," Calliope whispered in the hall. "Oh, it was beautiful. I
+_never_ felt so special. Thank you--thank you. An'--you won't mind those
+things we said at the supper table?"
+
+"Oh, Calliope," I murmured miserably, "I've forgotten all about them."
+
+I went out to the veranda with her. At the foot of the steps the others
+had paused in consultation. Hesitating, they looked up at me, and Mis'
+Sykes became their spokesman.
+
+"If I was you," she said gently, "I wouldn't feel too cut up over that
+slip o' yours to Mis' Merriman. She'd ought not to see blunders where
+they wasn't any meant. It'd ought to be the heart that counts, _I_ say.
+Good-by. We enjoyed ourselves very, _very_ much!"
+
+They went down the path between blossoming bushes, in the late afternoon
+sun. And as Calliope followed,--
+
+"That's so about the heart, ain't it?" she said brightly.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+WHAT IS THAT IN THINE HAND?
+
+
+"Busy, busy, busy, busy all the day. Busy, busy, busy. And busy ..."
+
+"There goes Ellen Ember, crazy again," we said, when we heard that cry
+of hers, not unmelodious nor loud, echoing along Friendship streets.
+
+Then we usually ran to the windows and peered at her. Sometimes her long
+hair would be unbound on her shoulders, sometimes her little figure
+would be leaping lightly up as she caught at the lowest boughs of the
+curb elms, and sometimes her hand would be moving swiftly back and forth
+above her heart.
+
+"If your heart is broken," she had explained to many, "you can lace it
+together with 'Busy, busy, busy ...' Sing it and see! Or mebbe your
+heart is all of a piece?"
+
+Once, when I had gone to Miss Liddy's house, I had found Ellen in a
+skirt fashioned of an old plaid shawl of her father's, her bare
+shoulders wound in the rosy "nubia" that had been her mother's, and she
+was dancing in the dining-room, with surprising grace, as Pierrette
+might have danced in Carnival, and singing, in a sweet, piping voice, an
+incongruous little song:--
+
+    O Day of wind and laughter,
+      A goddess born are you,
+    Whose eyes are in the morning
+      Blue--blue!
+
+"I made that up," she had explained, "or I guess mebbe I remembered it
+from deep in my skull. I like the feel of it in my mouth when I speak
+the words."
+
+I used to think that Miss Liddy was really a less useful citizen than
+Ellen. For though Miss Liddy worked painstakingly at her dressmaking,
+and even dreamed over it little partial dreams, Ellen, mad or sane, made
+a garden, and threw little nosegays over our fences, and exercised a
+certain presence, latent in the rest of us, which made us momentarily
+gentle and in awe of our own sanity.
+
+When, one spring morning, a week before the Friendship Carnival, she
+passed down Daphne Street with her plaintive, musical "Busy, busy,
+busy ..." Doctor June and the young Reverend Arthur Bliss sat on Doctor
+June's screened-in porch discussing a deficit in the Good Shepherd's
+Orphans' Home fund for the fiscal year. Ever since the wreck of the
+Through, Friendship had contributed to the support of the Home,--having
+first understood then that the Home was its patient pensioner,--and now
+it was almost like a compliment that we had been appealed to for help.
+
+Doctor June listened with serene patience to what his visitor would say.
+
+"Tension," said the Reverend Arthur Bliss, squaring his splendid young
+shoulders, "tension. Warfare. We, as a church, are enormously equipped.
+We have--shall we say?--the helmets of our intelligence and the swords
+of our wills. Why, the joy of the fight ought to be to us like that of a
+strong man ready to do battle, oughtn't it--oughtn't it?"
+
+Doctor June, his straight white hair outlining his plump pink face,
+nodded; but one would have said that it was rather less at the Reverend
+Arthur than at his Van Houtii spiræa, which nodded back at him.
+
+"My young friend," said Doctor June, "will you forgive me for saying
+that it is fairly amazing to me how the church of God continues to use
+the terms of barbarism? We talk of the peace that passeth understanding,
+and yet we keep on employing metaphors of blood-red war. What does the
+modern church want of a helmet and a sword, if I may ask? Even
+rhetorically?"
+
+"The Christian life is an eternal warfare against the forces of sin, is
+it not?" asked the Reverend Arthur Bliss in surprise.
+
+"Let me suggest," said Doctor June, "that all good life is an eternal
+surrender to the forces of good. There's a difference."
+
+The visitor from the city smiled very reverently.
+
+"I see, sir," he said, "that you are one of those wonderful
+non-combatants. You are by nature sanctified--and that I can well
+believe."
+
+"I am by nature a miserable old sinner," rejoined the doctor, warmly.
+"Often--often I would enjoy a fine round Elizabethan oath--note how that
+single adjective condones my poor taste. But I hold that good is
+inflowing and that it possesses whom it may possess. If a man is too
+busy fighting, it may pass him by."
+
+"But surely, sir," said the young clergyman, "you agree with me that a
+man wins his way into the kingdom of light by both a staff and a sword?"
+
+"You will perhaps forgive me for agreeing with nothing of the sort,"
+said the doctor, mildly; "I hold that a man takes his way to the light
+by grasping whatever the Lord puts in his hand--a hammer, a rope, a
+pen--and grasping it hard."
+
+"But the ungifted--what of the ungifted?" cried the Reverend Arthur
+Bliss.
+
+"In this sense, there are none," said Doctor June, briefly.
+
+"Busy, busy, busy all the day. Busy, busy, busy ..." sounded suddenly
+from the street in Ellen's thin soprano. Doctor June looked down at her,
+his expression scarcely changing, because it was always serenely soft.
+But the young clergyman saw with amazement the strange little figure
+with her unbound hair and her arms high and swaying, and as she took
+some steps of her dance before the gate, he questioned his host with
+uplifted brows.
+
+"A little mad," the doctor said, nodding, "like us all. She sings in the
+streets of a glad morning, and dances now and then. We take ours out in
+tangential opinions. It is nearly the same thing."
+
+The young clergyman's face lighted responsively at this, and then he
+deferentially clinched his argument.
+
+"There is a case in point," said he. "That poor creature there--what has
+the Lord put in her hand?"
+
+Doctor June looked thoughtful.
+
+"Nothing," he declared, "for any fight. But I'm not sure that she isn't
+made to be a leaven. The kingdom of God works like a leaven, you know,
+my dear young friend. Not like a dum-dum bullet."
+
+"But--that poor creature. A leaven?" doubted the Reverend Arthur Bliss.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder," said Doctor June, "I shouldn't wonder. I'm not so
+sure as I used to be that I can recognize leaven at first sight."
+
+"Ah, that's it!" cried his guest. "But a soldier, now, is a soldier!"
+
+Then they smiled their lack of acquiescence, and went back to the
+figures for the fiscal year.
+
+An hour later Doctor June stood alone on his garden walk, aimlessly
+poking about among his slips. He had done what he always did, following
+close on the heels of his well-established resolution never to do it
+again. He had pledged himself to try to raise one hundred dollars in
+Friendship for a pet philanthropy.
+
+"It's a kind of dissipation with me," he said, helplessly, and wandered
+down to his gate. "If I read an article about the Congo Free State or
+Women in India, it acts on me like brandy. I go off my head and give
+away my substance, and involve innocent people. But then, of course,
+this is different. It is always different."
+
+Then he heard Ellen's little song again. "Busy, busy, busy ..." she
+sang, and came round the corner from the town, catching at the lowest
+branches of the curb elms and laughing a little. At Doctor June's gate
+she halted and shook some lilacs at him.
+
+"Here," she said, "put some on your coat for a patch on your heart so's
+the break won't show. Ain't the Lord made the sun shine down this
+morning? Did you know there's a Carnival comin' to town?"
+
+"Like enough, Ellen," said Doctor June. "Like enough."
+
+"_Is_ one," she persisted. "They said about it in the Post-Office--I
+heard 'em. Dancin', an' parrots, an' jumpin' dogs."
+
+He stood looking at her thoughtfully as she arranged her flowers,
+singing under breath.
+
+"Ellen," he said, "will you tell Miss Liddy a few of us are going to
+meet here in my yard to-morrow afternoon, to talk over some
+money-raising? And ask her to come?"
+
+"I will," Ellen sang it, "I will an' I will. Did you mean me to come,
+too?" she broke off wistfully.
+
+"My stars, yes!" said Doctor June. "You're going to come early and help
+me, aren't you? I took that for granted."
+
+"Here's your lilacs," said Ellen, tossing him a nosegay. "I'll tell
+Liddy while she's eatin'. Liddy don't like me to talk much when she's
+workin'. But when she eats I can talk, an' I'll tell her then."
+
+She went on, singing, and Doctor June shook his head.
+
+"I don't know but Mr. Bliss is right," he said, "though I hope I can
+keep my doubts to myself and not brag about 'em, just to be the style.
+But it does look as if poor Ellen Ember came into the world
+empty-handed. As if the Lord didn't give her much of anything to work
+_with_."
+
+Summons to a meeting to talk over money-raising is, in Friendship, like
+the call to festivity in a different life. The cause never greatly
+matters. Interests appear eclectically to range from ice to coral. For
+let the news get about that there is to be a bazaar for China, a home
+bakery sale for the missionary station at Trebizond, or a Japanese tea
+for the Friendship cemetery fund, and we all sew or bake or lend dishes
+or sell tickets with the same infinity of zeal. The enterprise in hand
+absorbs our sense of the ultimate object; as when, after three days of
+hand-to-hand battle to wrest money for the freedmen from the patrons of
+a Kirmess at the old roller-skating rink, dear Mis' Amanda, secretary
+and door-tender, handed over our $64.85 with the wondering question:--
+
+"What do they mean by Freegman, anyway? What country is it they live
+in?"
+
+It was no marvel that Doctor June's garden was filled, that yellow
+afternoon, with many eager for action. Some of us knew that there was an
+Orphans' Home fund deficit; but more of us knew only that we were to
+"talk over some money-raising." I remember how, from the garden seat
+against the spiræa, the doctor faced us, all scattered about the
+antlered walk and its triangle of green, erect on golden oak and bright
+velvet chairs from within doors. And when he had told us of the shortage
+to which we were party, instantly the talk emptied into channels of
+possible pop-corn social, chicken-pie supper, rummage sale, art and loan
+exhibit, Old Settlers' Entertainment, and so on. After which Doctor June
+rose, and stood touching thoughtfully at the leaves which grew nearest,
+while he essayed to turn our minds from chicken-pot-pie-part-veal, and
+bib-aprons, to the eternal verities.
+
+"My friends," he said, "isn't there a better way? Let us, this time,
+give of our hearts' love to the little children of God, instead of
+buying pies and freezing ice cream in His name."
+
+There was, of course, an instant's hush in the garden. We were not used
+to paradoxes, and we felt as concave images must feel when they first
+look upon the world. It was as amazing as if we had been told that God
+grieves with us instead of afflicting us, as we held.
+
+"None of us has much money to give," Doctor June went on; "let us take
+the way that lies nearest our hand, and make a little money. God never
+permitted any normal human creature to come into His world unprovided
+with some means of making it better. Only, let us get outside our bazaar
+and chicken-pie faculties. Now what can we each do?"
+
+We sat still for a little, tentatively murmuring; and then Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss stood up by the sweet-alyssum urn.
+
+"Speakin' of what we can do," she said, "doin' ain't easy. Not when
+you're well along in years. Your ways seem to stiffen up some. When I
+was a girl, I could 'a' been quite an elocutionist if I could 'a' had
+lessons. I had a reg'lar born sense o' givin' gestures. But I never
+took. An' now I declare I don't know of anything I could do. It's the
+same way, I guess, with quite a number of us."
+
+Mis' Postmaster Sykes was in the arm-chair, and she sat still, queenly.
+
+"I could do some o' my embroidery," she observed, "but it's quite
+expensive stuff, an' I don't know whether it would sell rill well here
+in Friendship. I'd be 'most afraid to risk. An' I don't do enough
+cookin', myself, to what-you-might-say know how, any more."
+
+"Same with my sewing," observed Mis' Doctor Helman; "I put it all out
+now. I don't know as I could sew up a seam. That's the trouble, hiring
+everything done so."
+
+Those who did not hire everything done preserved a respectful silence.
+And Doctor June looked up in the elm trees.
+
+"The Lord," he said, "spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. The Lord
+said unto Moses, 'What is that in thine hand?' Moses had, you remember,
+nothing but a rod in his hand. But it was enough to let the people know
+that God had been with him--that the Lord had appeared unto him. Suppose
+the glory of the Lord, here in the garden, should ask us now, as it does
+ask, 'What is that in thine hand?' What have we got?"
+
+There was silence again, and we looked at one another doubtfully.
+
+"Land, Doctor!" said Libbie Liberty then, "I been tryin' for two years
+to earn a new parlour carpet, an' I ain't had nothin' in my hand to earn
+with. So I keep on sayin' I _like_ an old Brussels carpet--they're so
+easy to sweep."
+
+"My!" said Abigail Arnold, "I declare, I'd be real put to it to try to
+make extry money. 'Bout the only thing the Lord seems to 'a' put in my
+hand is time. I've got oodles o' that, layin' 'round loose."
+
+Mis' Photographer Sturgis was in the big garden chair, wrapped in a
+shawl, her feet on an inverted flower-pot.
+
+"I'm tryin' to think," she said, looking sidewise at the ground. "I
+donno's I know how I could earn a cent, convenient. It ain't real easy
+for women to earn. I think mebbe the Lord meant the men to be the
+Moseses."
+
+Mis' Amanda Toplady's voice rolled out, deep and comfortable, like a
+complaisant giant's.
+
+"Well said!" she remarked. "I'm drove to death all day. If anybody's to
+ask me what I got in my hand, I declare I guess I'd say, rill reverent:
+Dear Lord, I've got my hands full, an' that's about all I have got."
+
+So we went on, saying much or little as was our nature, but we were all
+agreed that we were virtually helpless--for Calliope was out of town
+that week, and not present to shame us.
+
+"What's in my hands?" said grim Miss Liddy Ember, finally, in her thin
+falsetto. "Well, I ain't got any rill, what-you-might-call hands. I just
+got kind o' cat's paws for my three meals a day an' my rent."
+
+Then, by her sister's side, Ellen Ember stood up. We had hardly noticed
+her, sitting there quietly playing with some of the doctor's flowers.
+But now we saw that she had hurriedly twisted her splendid hair about
+her head, and by this we understood that she was herself again. We had
+seen her come to herself like this on the street, and then she would go
+hurrying home, the tears running down her face in shame for her unbound
+hair and her singing and dancing. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes
+were shining as she rose now, and she looked appealingly pretty, one
+hand, palm outward, half hiding her trembling mouth. By her soft eyes,
+too, we knew that she was herself again.
+
+"You all know," she began, and dare not trust herself. "You all
+know ..." she said once more, and we understood what she would say.
+"What can I do?" she cried to us. "What is there I can do? I ain't got
+anything but my craziness! Oh, it seems like I _ain't_ much, an' so
+I'd ought to _do_ all the more."
+
+To soothe her, we took our woman's way of all talking at once. And then
+Doctor June called out cheerily that he felt the way Ellen did, that he
+wasn't a real Moses, for what had he--Doctor June--in his hand, and
+didn't we all know there was no money in pills? And then he told us how
+the Reverend Arthur Bliss was to be in town again on Wednesday of the
+next week, and would we not all think the matter over quietly, and meet
+with them on that evening, for cakes and tea?
+
+"As many of you as can," he said, "come with a plan to earn a dollar,
+and tell how you mean to do it. Ellen, you and I'll preside at the
+meeting, and hear what the rest say, and keep real still ourselves, like
+proper officers."
+
+But Ellen Ember would not be comforted. She stood with that one hand,
+palm outward, pressed against her lips, looking at us with big, brimming
+eyes.
+
+"I ain't got nothin' but my craziness, you know," she said over. And
+then, as she was going through the gateway, she turned to Doctor June.
+
+"Why, Wednesday's the first night o' the Carnival!" she cried. "You set
+the dollar meetin' on the first night o' the Carnival!"
+
+"My stars!" cried Doctor June, gravely. "And I might have been selling
+pills on the grounds!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All Friendship Village loves a Carnival. Once the word meant to me a
+Florentine _fiesta_ day, with a feast of colour, and of many little fine
+things, "real, like laughter." Now when I say "carnival" I mean the
+painted eruption by night from the market square of some town like
+Friendship, when lines broaden and waver grotesquely, when the mirth is
+in great silhouettes and Colour goes unmasked.
+
+I always make my way to such a place, for it holds for me the wonder of
+the untoward; as will a strolling Italian plodding past my house at
+night with his big, silent bear; or the spectacle of the huge, faded red
+ice-wagon, with powerful horses and rattling chains and tongs, and
+giants in blue denim atop the crystal; or the strange, copper world that
+dissolves in the fluid of certain sunsets. And that Wednesday night, a
+week later, on my way to the "dollar meeting" at Doctor June's, I turned
+toward the Friendship Carnival with some vestige of my youth clinging to
+the hem of things.
+
+I gave my attention to them all: The pop-corn wagon, an aristocratic
+affair that looked like a hearse; the little painted canaries and
+love-birds, so out of place and patient that I thought they must have
+souls to form as well as we; the sad little live monkey, incessantly
+dodging white balls thrown at him by certain immortals (who, when they
+hit him, got pipes); and the giant who flung "Look! Look! Look! Look!"
+through a megaphone, while a good little dog toiled up a ladder and then
+stood at the ladder's top in a silence that was all nice reticence and
+dignity. Also, the huge Saxon fellow who, at the portal of the Arabian
+Court of Art and Regular Café Restaurant, sang a love-song through a
+megaphone--"Tenderly, dearest, I breathe thy sweet name," he hallooed,
+with his free hand beckoning the crowd to the Court of Art.
+
+And then I saw the Lyric Dance Arcade and Indian Palace of Asiatic
+Mystery. And I found myself close to the platform, listening to the cry
+of a man in gilt knickerbockers.
+
+"Ladies! Gentlemen! All!" he summoned. "Never in the history of
+the show business has there been anything resemblin' this. Come
+here--here--here--here! See Zorah, queen of the West and princess of the
+East, who is about to begin one of her most sublimely sensational
+dances. See her, see her, you may never again see her! Graceful,
+glittering, genteel. Graceful, glittering, gen-te-e-e-l. I am telling
+you about Zorah, queen of the West and princess of the East, in her
+ancient Asiatic dance, the most up-to-date little act in the entire show
+business to-day. Here she is, waiting for you--you--you. Everybody
+that's got the dime!"
+
+Until he ceased, I had hardly noticed Zorah herself, standing in the
+canvas portico. The woman had, I then observed, a kind of appealing
+prettiness and a genuineness of pose. She was looking out on the crowd
+with the usual manner of simulated shyness, but to the shyness was given
+conviction by an uplifted hand, palm outward, hiding her mouth. I noted
+her small, stained face, her splendid unbound hair--and then a certain
+resemblance caught at my heart. And I saw that she was wearing a skirt
+made of a man's plaid shawl, and about her shoulders was a rosy,
+old-fashioned nubia. Her face and throat were stained, and so were her
+thin little arms--but I knew her.
+
+The performance, as the man had said, was about to begin, and already he
+was giving Zorah her signal to go within. Somehow I bought a ticket and
+hurried into the tent. The seats were sparingly occupied, and I saw, as
+I would have guessed, no one whom I knew in the eager, stamping little
+audience. In their midst I lost the slim figure that had preceded me,
+until she mounted the platform and swept before the footlights a stately
+courtesy.
+
+And there, in the smoky little tent, Ellen Ember began to dance, with
+her quite surprising grace--as Pierrette might have danced in Carnival.
+It was the charming, faery measure which she had danced for me in Miss
+Liddy's dining-room; and as she had sung to me then, so now, in a sweet
+piping voice, she sang her incongruous little song:--
+
+    O Day of wind and laughter,
+    A goddess born are you,
+    Whose eyes are in the morning
+    Blue--blue!
+    The slumbrous noon your body is,
+    Your feet are the shadow's flight,
+    But the immortal soul of you
+    Is Night.
+
+It seemed to me that I sat for hours in that hot little place, cut off
+from the world, watching. Again and again, to the brass blare of some
+hoiden tune, she set the words of the lyric that "she liked the feel
+of," and she danced on and on. And when at last the music shattered off,
+and she ceased, and ran behind a screening canvas, somehow I made my way
+forward through the crowd that was clapping hands and calling her back,
+and I gained the place where she stood.
+
+When I asked her to come with me, she nodded and smiled, with unseeing
+eyes, and assented quite simply, and then suddenly sat down before the
+lifted tent flap.
+
+"But I must wait for my money," she said. "That's what I came for--my
+money. They thought I'd never earn my dollar, but I have."
+
+At this I understood. And now I marvel how I talked at all to the man in
+gilt knickerbockers who arrived and haggled over the whole matter.
+
+Zorah, he explained, the sure-enough Zorah, had took down sick in the
+last place they made, an' they'd had to leave her behind. An' when he
+told about it down town that morning, this little piece here had up an'
+offered. Somethin' had to be done--he left it to me if they didn't. He
+felt his duty to the amusement park public, him. So he had closed with
+her for a dollar for three fifteen-minute turns--he give two shillings a
+turn, on the usual, but she'd hung out stout for the even money. An'
+she'd danced her three, odd but satisfactory. You could hand 'em queer
+things in the show business, if you only dressed the part. Yes, sure,
+here was the dollar. Be on hand to-morrow night? No? Sufferin' snakes,
+but was we goin' to leave him shipwrecked?
+
+Finally I got her away, and skirted the market-place with her dancing at
+my side, shaking her silver dollar in her shut palms and singing:--
+
+"Busy, busy, busy all the day. An' then I earned my dollar, my
+dollar--they never thought I'd earn my dollar ..."
+
+I remember, as we struck into the unlighted block where Miss Liddy's
+house stood, that I was struggling hard for my own serenity, so that for
+a moment I did not observe that Ellen stopped beside me. But I knew that
+she fell silent, and when I turned I saw her there on the dark walk
+hurriedly twisting her splendid hair about her head. And by that and by
+her silence I understood that she was suddenly herself, and of her own
+mind, as we say.
+
+On this, "Ellen!" said I quickly, "how fine of you to have earned your
+Orphans' Home dollar so soon. But you have beaten us all!"
+
+She had contrived to fasten her hair, and I saw her touching tentatively
+the folds of her strange dress. And so I made her know what she had
+done, as gently as I might, and with all praise I stilled her dismay and
+shame. And last I led her, as I was determined that I would do, past
+Miss Liddy's dark little house and on to the home of Doctor June.
+
+I think that I would not have dared take Ellen, just as she was, in her
+plaid skirt and her rosy nubia, into that black and brown
+henrietta-cloth assembly, if I had remembered that there was to be a
+stranger present. But this, in the events of the hour, I had quite
+forgotten. I remembered as I entered the room and came face to face with
+the Reverend Arthur Bliss, talking of the figures for the fiscal year.
+
+"--and the deficit," he was saying, "ought to be made up by us who are
+so well equipped to do it. With Paul, let us fight the good fight--of
+every day. This is to-day's fight. Now let us talk over our various
+weapons."
+
+Doctor June looked thoughtfully at his young guest, and in the older
+face was a brooding tenderness, like the tenderness of the father who
+longs to hold the child in quiet, in his arms.
+
+"Yes," said Doctor June, "'fighting' is one name for it. I am tempted to
+say that 'drudgery' is another name. Errantry, ministry, service, or
+whatever. It all comes to the same thing: 'What is that in thine hand?'
+Well, now, who of us is first?"
+
+"I think," said I then, "that Ellen Ember is first."
+
+She would have shrunk back from the doorway to the passage, but I put my
+arm about her, and then I told them. And when I had done, I remember how
+she threw up that pathetic hand of hers, palm outward, and this time it
+was over her eyes.
+
+"I'm a disgrace to all of you!" she said, sobbing, "an' to the whole
+Good Shepherd's Home. But I guess anyhow it's all the way I had. Seems
+like I ain't got nothin' in the world but my craziness!"
+
+There was silence for a moment, that rich silence which flowers in the
+heart. And then great Mis' Amanda Toplady spoke out, in her deep voice
+which now she some way contrived to keep firm.
+
+"Well said!" she cried. "I come here to say I'd give a dollar outright
+to get red o' the whole thing, rather'n to fuss. But now I ain't goin'
+to stop at a dollar. Seems like a dollar for me wouldn't be _moral_. I'm
+goin' to sell some strawberry plants--why, we got hundreds of 'em to
+spare. I can do it by turnin' my hand over. An' I expec' the Lord meant
+you should turn your hand over to find out what's in it, anyway."
+
+I think that then we tried our woman's way of all talking at once, but I
+remember how the shrill voice of Abigail Arnold, of the home bakery,
+rose above the others:--
+
+"Cream puffs!" she cried. "I got a rush demand for my cream puffs every
+Sat'day, an' I ain't been makin' 'em sole-because I hate to run after
+the milk an' set it. An' I was goin' to get out o' this by givin' fifty
+cents out o' the bakery till. An' me with my hands full o' cream
+puffs...."
+
+"Hens--hens is what mine is," Libbie Liberty was saying. "My grief, I
+got both hands full o' hens. I wouldn't sell 'em because I can't bear to
+hev any of 'em killed--they're tame as a bag o' feathers, all of 'em. I
+guess I ben settin' the hens o' my hand over against the heathen an' the
+orphans. An' now I'm goin' to sell spring chickens...."
+
+Mis' Sturgis in the rocking-chair was waving a corner of her shawl.
+
+"C-canaries!" she cried. "I can rise canary-birds an' sell 'em a dollar
+apiece in the city. I m-meant to slide out account o' my health, but it
+was just because I hate to muss 'round b-boilin' eggs for the little
+ones. I'll raise a couple or two--mebbe more."
+
+"My good land!" came Miss Liddy Ember's piping falsetto; "to think o' my
+sittin' up, hesitatin', when new dresses just falls off the ends o' my
+fingers. An' me in my right mind, too."
+
+Dear Doctor June stood up among us, his face shining.
+
+"Bless us," he said. "Didn't I have some spiræa in my hand right while I
+stood talking to you the other afternoon in my garden? And haven't I got
+some tricolored Barbary varieties of chrysanthemums, and some hardy
+roses and one thing and another to make men marvel? And can't I sell 'em
+in the city at a pretty profit? What I've got in my hand is seeds and
+slips--I see that plain enough. And my stars, out they go!"
+
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, Mis' Mayor Uppers, even Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes--ah, they all knew what to do, knew it as if somebody
+had been saying it over and over, and as if they now first listened.
+
+But Ellen Ember sat crying, her face buried in her hands. And I think
+that she cannot have understood, even when Doctor June touched her hair
+and said something of the little leaven which leaveneth the whole lump.
+
+Last, the Reverend Arthur Bliss arose, and there was a sudden hush among
+us, for it was as if a new spirit shone in his strong young face.
+
+"Dear friends," he said, "dear friends ..." And then, "Lord God," he
+prayed abruptly, "show me what is that in my hand--thy tool where I had
+looked for my sword!"
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+PUT ON THY BEAUTIFUL GARMENTS
+
+
+"I donno," Calliope said, as, on her return, we talked about Ellen
+Ember, "I guess I kind o' believe in craziness."
+
+Calliope's laugh often made me think of a bluebird's note, which is to
+say, of the laughter of a child. Bluebirds are the little children among
+birds, as robins are the men, house-wrens the women, scarlet tanagers
+the unrealities and humming-birds the fairies.
+
+"Only," Calliope added, "I do say you'd ought to hev some sort o'
+leadin' strap even to craziness, an' that I ain't got an' never had. I
+guess folks thinks I'm rill lunar when I take the notion. Only thing
+comforts me, they don't know how lunar I rilly can be."
+
+Then she told me about 'Leven.
+
+"A shroud, to look rill nice," Calliope said, "ought to be made as much
+as you can like a dress--barrin' t' you can't fit it. Mis' Toplady an'
+Mis' Holcomb an' I made Jennie Crapwell's shroud--it was white mull and
+a little narrow lace edge on a rill life-like collar. We finished it the
+noon o' the day after Jennie died,--you know Jennie was Delia's
+stepsister that they'd run away from--an' I brought it over to my house
+an' pressed it an' laid it on the back bedroom bed--the room I don't use
+excep' for company an' hang my clean dresses in the closet of.
+
+"In the afternoon I went up to the City on a few little funeral
+urrants,--a crape veil for Jennie's mother an' like that,--you know
+Jennie died first. We wasn't goin' to dress her till the next
+mornin'--her mother wanted we should leave her till then in her little
+pink sacque she'd wore, an' the soft lavender cloth they use now spread
+over her careless. An' we wanted to, too, because sence Mis' Jeweler
+Sprague died nobody could do up the Dead's hair, an' Jennie wa'n't the
+exception.
+
+"Mis' Sprague, she'd hed a rill gift that way. She always done folks'
+hair when they died an' she always got it like life--she owned up how,
+after she begun doin' it so much, she used to set in church an' in
+gatherin's and find herself lookin' at the backs of heads to see if they
+was two puffs or three, an' whether the twist was under to left or over
+to right--so's she'd know, if the time come. But none of us could get
+Jennie's to look right. We studied her pictures an' all too, but best we
+could do we got it all drawed back, abnormal.
+
+"I was 'most all the afternoon in the City, an' it was pretty warm--a
+hot April followin' on a raw March. I stood waitin' for the six o'clock
+car an', my grief, I was tired. My feet ached like night in preservin'
+time. An' I was thinkin' how like a dunce we are to live a life made up
+mostly of urrants an' feetache followin'. _Yet_, after all, the right
+sort o' urrants an' like that _is_ life--an', if they do ache, 'tain't
+like your feet was your soul. Well, an' just before the car come, up
+arrove the girl.
+
+"I guess she was towards thirty, but she seemed even older, 'count o'
+bein' large an' middlin' knowin'. First I see her was a check gingham
+sleeve reachin' out an' she was elbowed up clost by me. 'Say,' she says,
+'couldn't you gimme a nickel? I'm starved hollow.' She didn't look it
+special--excep' as thin, homely folks always looks sort o' hungry. An'
+she was homely--kind o' coarse made, more like a shed than a dwellin'
+house. Her dress an' little flappy cape hed the looks o' bein' held on
+by her shoulders alone, an' her hands was midnight dirty.
+
+"I was feelin' just tired enough to snap her up.
+
+"'A nickel!' s'I, crisp, 'give you a nickel! An' what you willin' to
+give me?'
+
+"She looked sort o' surprised an' foolish an' her mouth open.
+
+"'Huh?' s'she, intelligent as the back o' somethin'.
+
+"'You,' I says, 'are some bigger an' some stronger'n me. What you goin'
+to give me?'
+
+"Well, sir, the way she dropped her arms down sort o' hit at me, it was
+so kitten helpless. I took that in rather than her silly, sort o'
+insultin' laugh.
+
+"'I can't do nothin',' she told me--an' all to once I saw how it was,
+an' that that was what ailed her. I didn't stop to think no more'n as if
+I didn't hev a brain to my name. 'Well,' I says, 'I'll give you a
+nickel. Leastways, I'll spend one on you. You take this car,' I says,
+'an' come on over to Friendship with me. An' we'll see.'
+
+"She come without a word, like goin' or stayin' was all of a piece to
+her, an' her relations all dead. When I got her on the car I begun to
+see what a fool thing I'd done, seemin'ly. An' yet, I donno. I wouldn't
+'a' left a month-old baby there on the corner. I'd 'a' _bed_ to 'a' done
+for that, like you do--I s'pose to keep the world goin'. An' that woman
+was just as helpless as a month-old. Some are. I s'pose likely,"
+Calliope said thoughtfully, "we got more door-steps than we think, if we
+get 'em all located.
+
+"When we got to my house I pumped her a pitcher o' water an' pointed to
+the back bedroom door. 'First thing,' s'I, blunt, 'clean up'--bein' as I
+was too tired to be very delicate. 'An',' s'I, 'you'll see a clean
+wrapper in the closet. Put it on.' Then I went to spread
+supper--warmed-up potatoes an' bread an' butter an' pickles an' sauce
+an' some cocoanut layer cake. It looked rill good, with the linen clean,
+though common.
+
+"I donno how I done it, excep' I was so ramfeezled. But I clear forgot
+Jennie Crapwell's shroud, layin' ready on the back bedroom bed. An'
+land, land, when the woman come out, if she didn't hev it on.
+
+"I tell you, when I see her come walkin' out towards the supper table
+with them fresh-ironed ruffles framin' in her face, I felt sort o'
+kitterin'-headed--like my i-dees had fell over each other to get away
+from me. The shroud fit her pretty good, too, barrin' it was a mite
+long-skirted. An' somehow, it give her a look almost like dignity. Come
+to think of it, I donno but a shroud does become most folks--like they
+was rilly well-dressed at last.
+
+"She come an' set down to table, quiet as you please--an' differ'nt.
+Your clothes don't make you, by any means, but they just do sort o' hem
+your edges, or rhyme the ends of you, or give a nice, even bake to your
+crust--I donno. They do somethin'. An' the shroud hed done it to that
+girl. She looked rill leaved out.
+
+"How she did eat. It give me some excuse not to say anything to her till
+she was through with the first violence. I did try to say grace, but she
+says: 'Who you speakin' to? Me?' An' I didn't let on. I thought I
+wouldn't start in on her moral manners. I just set still an' kep'
+thinkin': You poor thing. Why, you poor thing. You're nothin' but a
+piece o' God's work that wants doin' over--like a back yard or a poor
+piece o' road or a rubbish place, or sim'lar. An' this tidyin' up is
+what we're for, as I see it--only some of us lays a-holt of our own
+settin' rooms an' butt'ry cupboards an' sullars an' cleans away on
+_them_ for dear life, over an' over, an' forgets the rest. I ain't
+objectin' to good housekeepin' at all, but what I say is: Get your
+dust-rag big enough to wipe up somethin' besides your own dust. The
+Lord, He's a-housekeepin' too.
+
+"So, with that i-dee, I got above the shroud an' I begun on the woman
+some like she was my kitchen closet in the spring o' the year.
+
+"'What's your name?' s'I.
+
+"''Leven,' s'she.
+
+"'Leaven,' s'I, 'like the Bible?'
+
+"'Huh?' s'she.
+
+"'Why--oh, _'leven'_,' s'I, 'that ain't a name at all. That's a number.'
+
+"'I know it,' s'she, indiffer'nt, 'that was me. I was the 'leventh, an'
+they'd run out a'ready.'
+
+"'For the land,' s'I, simple.
+
+"An' that just about summed her up. They seemed to 'a' run out o'
+everything, time she come.
+
+"She hadn't been taught a thing but eat an' drink. Them was her only
+arts. Excep' for one thing: When I ask' her what she could do, if any,
+she says like she had on the street corner:--
+
+"'I can't do nothin'. I donno no work.'
+
+"'You think it over,' s'I. She had rill capable hands--them odd,
+undressed-lookin' hands--I donno if you know what I mean?
+
+"'Well,' s'she, sort o' sheepish, 'I can comb hair. Ma was allus sick
+an' me an' Big Lil--she's the same floor--combed her hair for her. But I
+could do it nicest.'
+
+"Wan't that a curious happenin'--an' Jennie Crapwell layin' dead with
+her hair drawn tight back because none of us could do it up human?
+
+"'Could you when dead?' s'I. 'I mean when them that has the hair is?'
+
+"An' with that the girl turns pallor white.
+
+"'Oh ...' s'she, 'I ain't never touched the dead. But,' s'she, sort o'
+defiant at somethin', 'I could do it, I guess, if you want I should.'
+
+"Kind o' like a handle stickin' out from what would 'a' been her
+character, if she'd hed one, that was, I thought. An', too, I see what
+it'd mean to her if she knew she was wearin' a shroud, casual as calico.
+
+"But when I told her about Jennie Crapwell, an' how they had a good
+picture, City-made, of her side head, she took it quite calm.
+
+"'I'll try it,' she says, bein' as she'd done her ma's hair layin' down,
+though livin'. 'Big Lil always helps dress 'Em,' she says, 'an' guess I
+could do Their hair.'
+
+"I got right up from the supper table an' took 'Leven over to Crapwell's
+without waitin' for the dishes. But early as I was, the rest was there
+before me. I guess they was full ten to Crapwell's when we got there,
+an' 'Leven an' I, we walked into the sittin'-room right in the midst of
+'em--that is, of what wasn't clearin' table or doin' dishes or sweepin'
+upstairs. Mis' Timothy Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss was
+the group nearest the door--an' the both of 'em reco'nized that shroud
+the minute they clamped their eyes on it. But me, bein' back o' 'Leven,
+I laid my front finger on to my shut lips with a motion that must 'a'
+been armies with banners. An' they see me an' kep' still, sudden an' all
+pent up.
+
+"'This,' s'I, 'is a friend o' mine. She's goin' to do up Jennie's hair
+from her City photograph.'
+
+"Then I hustled 'Leven into the parlour where Jennie was layin' under
+the soft lavender cloth. Nobody was in there but a few flowers, sent
+early. An' it was a west window an' open, an' the sky all sunset--like
+the End. 'Leven hung back, but I took her by the hand an' we went an'
+looked down at Jennie in that nice, gentlin', after-supper light--'Leven
+in Jennie's shroud an' neither of 'em knew it.
+
+"An' all out o' the air somethin' says to me, Now--_now_--like it will
+when you get so's you listen. I always think it's like the Lord had
+pressed His bell somewheres for help in His housekeepin'--oh, because
+_how_ He needs it!
+
+"So I says, ''Leven, you never see anybody dead before. What's the
+differ'nce between her an' you?'
+
+"'She can't move,' 'Leven says, starin' down.
+
+"'Yes, sir,' s'I, 'that's it. She's through doin' the things she was
+born to do, an' you ain't.'
+
+"With that 'Leven looks at me.
+
+"'I _can't_ do nothin',' she says again.
+
+"'Why, then,' says I, brisk, 'you're as good as dead, an' we'd best bury
+you, too. What do you think the Lord wants you 'round for?'
+
+"An' she didn't say nothin', only stood fingerin' the shroud she wore.
+
+"'Here,' s'I, then, 'is the comb. Here is Jennie's picture. The pins is
+in her hair. Take it down an' do it over. _There's_ somethin' to do an'
+ease her mother about Jennie not lookin' natural.'
+
+"An' with that I marched myself out an' shut the door.
+
+"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb was high-eyebrows on the other side of
+it, an' they come at me like _tick_ lookin' for _tock_.
+
+"'Well,' s'I, 'it _is_ Jennie's shroud she's wearin'. But I guess we'll
+hev to bury 'Leven in it to get it underground. _I_ won't tell her.'
+
+"I give 'em to understand as much as I wanted they should know,--not
+includin' exactly how I met 'Leven. An' we consulted, vague an'
+emphatic, like women will. There wasn't time to make another one an' do
+it up an' all. An' anyway, I was bound not to let the poor thing know
+what she'd done. The others hated to, too--I donno if you'll know how we
+felt? I donno but mebbe you sense things like that better when you live
+in a little town.
+
+"'Well said!' Mis' Amanda bursts out after a while, 'I'm reg'lar put to
+it. I can scare up an excuse, or a meal, or a church entertainment on as
+short notice as any, but I declare if I ever trumped up a shroud. An'
+you know an' I know,' she says, 'poor Jennie'd be the livin' last to
+want to take it off'n the poor girl.'
+
+"'An',' s'I, 'even if I should give her somethin' else to put on in the
+mornin', an' sly this into the coffin on Jennie, I donno's I'd want to.
+The shroud,' s'I, ''s been wore.'
+
+"Mis' Holcomb sort o' kippered--some like a shiver.
+
+"'I donno what it is about its bein' wore first,' s'she, 'but I guess it
+ain't so much what it is as what it ain't. Or sim'lar.'
+
+"An' I knew what she meant. I've noticed that, often.
+
+"In the end we done what I'd favoured from the beginnin': We ask' Mis'
+Crapwell if we couldn't bury Jennie in her white mull.
+
+"'A _shroud_,' says Mis' Crapwell, grievin', 'made by a dressmaker with
+buttons?'
+
+"'It's the part o' Jennie that wore it before that'll wear it now,' I
+says, reasonable, 'an' her soul never was buttoned into it anyways. An'
+it won't be now.'
+
+"An' after a while we made her see it, an' that was the first regular
+dress ever wore to a buryin' in Friendship, by the one that was the one.
+
+"I'll never forget when 'Leven come out o' that room, after she'd got
+through. We all went in--Mis' Crapwell an' Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb
+an' I, an' some more. An' I took 'Leven back in with me. An' as soon as
+I see Jennie I see it was Jennie come back--hair just as natural as if
+it was church Sunday mornin' an' her in her pew. We all knew it was so,
+an' we all said so, an' Mis' Crapwell, she just out cryin' like she'd
+broke her heart. An' when the first of it was over, she went acrost to
+'Leven, an' 'Oh,' s'she, 'you've give her back to me. You give her back.
+God bless you!' she says to her. An' when I looked at 'Leven, I see the
+'Huh?' look wasn't there at all. But they was a little somethin' on her
+face like she was proud, an' didn't quite want to show it--along of her
+features or complexion or somethin' never havin' had it spread on 'em
+before.
+
+"Nex' mornin' o' course 'Leven put on the shroud again. I must say it
+give me the creeps to see her wearin' it, even if it did look like
+everybody's dresses. I donno what it is about such things, but they make
+somethin' scrunch inside o' you. Like when they got a new babtismal dish
+for the church, an' the minister's sister took the old one for a cake
+dish.
+
+"S'I, to 'Leven, after breakfast:--
+
+"We're goin' to line Jennie's grave this mornin'. I guess you'd like to
+go with us, wouldn't you?'
+
+But I see her face with the old look, like the back o' somethin', or
+like you'd rubbed down the page when the ink was wet, an' had blurred
+the whole thing unreadable. An' I judged that, like enough, she knew
+nothin' whatever about grave-linin', done civilized.
+
+"'I mean, I thought mebbe you'd like to help us some,' I says.
+
+"'I would!' s'she, at that, rill ready an' quick. An' it come to me 't
+she knew now what _help_ meant. She'd learnt it the night before from
+Jennie's mother--like she'd learnt to answer a bell when Somebody
+pressed it. Only, o' course she never guessed Who it was ringin'
+it--like you don't at first.
+
+"So I made up my mind I'd take her to the cemet'ry. We done the work up
+first, an' 'Leven spried 'round for me, wipin' the dishes with the
+wipin' cloth in a bunch, an' settin' 'em up wrong places. An' I did hev
+to go in the butt'ry an' laugh to see her sweep up. She swep' up some
+like her broom was a branch an' the wind a-switchin' it.
+
+"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb stopped by for us, with the white cotton
+cloth an' the tacks, an' by nine o'clock we was over to the cemet'ry.
+The grave was all dug an' lined with nice pine boards, an' the dirt
+piled 'longside, an' the boards for coverin' an' the spades layin' near.
+Zittelhof was just leavin', havin' got in his pulley things to lower
+'em. Zittelhof's rill up to date. Him an' Mink, the barber, keep runnin'
+each other to see who can get the most citified things. No sooner'd
+Zittelhof get his pulleys than Mink, he put in shower-baths. An' when
+Mink bought a buzz fan, Zittelhof sent for the lavender cloth to spread
+over 'em before the coffin comes. It makes it rill nice for Friendship.
+
+"'Who's goin to get down in?' says Mis' Toplady, shakin' out the cloth.
+
+Mis' Toplady always use' to be the one, but she can't do that any more
+since she got so heavy. An' Mis' Holcomb's rheumatism was bad that day
+an' the grave middlin' damp, so it was for me to do. An' all of a sudden
+I says:--
+
+"''Leven, you just get down in there, will you? An' we'll tell you how.'
+
+"'_In the grave?_' says 'Leven.
+
+"I guess I'm some firm-mannered, just by takin' things for granted, an'
+I says, noddin':--
+
+"'Yes. You're the lightest on your feet,' I says--an' I sort o' shoved
+at her, bird to young, an' she jumped down in, not bein' able to help
+it.
+
+"'Here,' s'I, flingin' her an end o' cloth, 'tack it 'round smooth to
+them boards.'
+
+"'Mother o' God,' says she, swallowin' in her breath.
+
+"But she done it. She knelt down there in the grave, her poor, frowzy
+head showin,' an' she tacked away like we told her to, an' she never
+said another word. Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb didn't say nothin',
+either, only looked at me mother-knowin'. Them two--Mis' Toplady more'n
+anybody in Friendship, acts like bein' useful is bein' alive an' nothin'
+else is. They see what I was doin', well enough--only I donno's they'd
+'a' called it what I did, 'bout the Lord's housekeepin' an all. An' I
+knew I couldn't gentle 'Leven into the _i_-dee, but I judged I could
+shock it into her--same as her an' the Big Lil kind have to hev. Some
+folks you hev to shoot _i_-dees at, muzzle to brain.
+
+"I donno if you've took it in that when you're in a grave, or 'round
+one, your talk sort o' veers that way? Ours did. Mis' Banker Mason's
+baby had just died in March, an' the choir'd made an awful scandal,
+breakin' down in the fifth verse of 'One poor flower has drooped and
+faded.' They'd stood 'em in a half circle where they could look right
+down on the little thing. An' when the choir got to
+
+    "But we feel no thought of sadness
+    For our friend is happy now,
+    She has knelt in heartfelt gladness
+    Where the holy angels bow,
+
+they just naturally broke down an' cried, every one of 'em. An' then the
+little coffin was some to blame, too--it was sort of a little Lord
+Fauntleroy coffin, with a broad white puff around, an' most anybody
+would a' cried when they looked in it, even empty. But Doctor June, he
+just stood up calm, like his soul was his body, an' he begun to pray
+like God was there in the parlour, Him feelin' as bad as we, an' not
+doin' the child's death Himself at all, like we'd been taught--but
+sorrowin' with us, for some o' His housekeepin' gone wrong. An' by the
+time Banker an' Mis' Mason got in the close' carriage an' took the
+little thing's casket on their knees--you know we do that here, not
+havin' any white hearse--why, we was all feelin' like God Almighty was
+hand in hand in sorrow with us. An' it's never left me since. I know He
+is.
+
+"We talked that over while 'Leven tacked the evergreen on the white
+cloth. An' I know Mis' Toplady says she'd stayed with Mis' Banker Mason
+so much since then that she felt God had sort o' singled her--Mis'
+Toplady--out, to give her a chanst to do His work o' comfortin'. 'I've
+just let my house go,' s'she, 'an' I've got the grace to see it don't
+matter if I have.' Mis' Toplady ain't one o' them turtle women that
+their houses is shells on 'em, burden to back. She's more the bird
+kind--neat little nest under, an' wings to be used every day, somewheres
+in the blue.
+
+"So 'Leven done all Jennie Crapwell's grave. She must 'a been down in it
+an hour. An' when she got through, an' looked up at us from down in the
+green, an' wearin' Jennie's shroud an' all, I just put out my hands, to
+help her up, an' I thought, almost like prayin': 'Oh, raise up, you
+Dead, an' come forth--come forth.' Sort o' like Lazarus. An' I know I
+wasn't sacrilegious from what happened; for when Mis' Toplady an' Miss
+Holcomb come up to 'Leven an' says, rill warm, how well she'd done it
+an' how much obliged they was, I see that little look on the girl's face
+again like--oh, like she'd wrote somethin' on the blurry page, somethin'
+you could read.
+
+"Jennie was buried that afternoon at sharp three. It was a sad funeral,
+'count o' Jennie's trouble, an' all. But it was a rill big funeral an'
+nicely conducted, if I do say that done the managin'. Mis' Postmaster
+Sykes seated the guests--ain't she the kind that always seems to be one
+to stand in the hall at funerals with her hat off, to consult about
+chairs an' where shall the minister lay his Bible, an' who'd ought to be
+invited to set next the bier? An' she always takes charge o' the
+flowers. Mis' Sykes can tell you who sent what flowers to who for years
+back, an the wordin' on the pillows. She's got a rill gift that way. But
+I done the managin' behind the scenes, an' it went off rill well, an' I
+got the minister to drop a flower on Jennie's coffin instead of a pinch
+o' dirt. An' one chair I did see to: right in the bay, near Jennie, I
+set 'Leven--I guess with just a kind of a blind feelin' that I wanted to
+get her _near_. Near the flowers or the singin' or what the minister
+said or,--oh, near the mystery an' God speakin' from the dead, like He
+does. Anyway, I shoved her into the bay window back o' the casket, an'
+there I left her in behind a looped-back Nottingham--settin' in Jennie's
+shroud an' didn't either of 'em know it.
+
+"It was a queer chapter for Doctor June to read, some said--but I guess
+holy things often is queer, only we're better cut out to see queer than
+holy. Anyway, his voice went all mellow and gentle, boomin' out soft an'
+in his throat, all over the house. It was that about ..." Calliope
+quoted piecemeal:--
+
+"'Awake, awake, put on thy strength ... put on thy beautiful garments, O
+Jerusalem, the holy city ... shake thyself from the dust, arise and sit
+down ... loose thyself from the bonds of thy neck, O captive daughter of
+Zion ... how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that
+bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace, that bringeth good tidings
+of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion: Thy God
+reigneth! Break forth into joy, sing together ... depart ye, depart ye,
+go ye out from thence, touch no unclean thing ... be ye clean, that bear
+the vessels of the Lord....'
+
+"Sometimes a thing you've heard always will come at you sudden, like a
+star had fell on your very head. It was that way with me that day. 'Put
+on thy beautiful garments ...' I says over, 'Put 'em on--put 'em on!'
+An' all the while I was seein' to the supper for the crowd that was
+goin' to be there--train relations an' all--I kep' thinkin' that over
+like a song--'Put 'em on--put 'em on--put 'em on!' An' it was in me yet,
+like a song had come to life there, when they'd all gone to the
+cemetery--'Leven with 'em--an' I'd got through straightenin' the
+chairs--or rather crookedin' 'em some into loops from funeral lines--an'
+slipped over to my house, back way. For I ain't sunk so low as to be
+that sympathetic that I'll stay to supper after the funeral just because
+I've helped at it. There's a time to mourn an' there's a time to eat,
+an' you better do one with the bereaved an' slip home to your own
+butt'ry shelf for the other, _I_ say.
+
+"I was just goin' through the side yard to my house when I see 'em
+comin' back from the cemetery, an' I waited a little, lookin' to see
+what was sproutin' in the flower-bed. It was a beautiful, beautiful
+evenin'--when I think of it it seems I can breathe it in yet. It was
+'most sunset, an' it was like the West was a big, blue bowl with eggs
+beat up in it, yolks an' whites, some gold an' some feathery. But the
+bowl wa'n't big enough, an' it had spilled over an' flooded the whole
+world yellowish, or all floatin' shinin' in the air. It was like the
+world had done the way the Bible said--put on its beautiful garments. I
+was thinkin' that when 'Leven come in the front gate. She was walkin'
+fast, an' lookin' up, not down. Her cheeks was some pink, an' the light
+made the shroud all pinkey, an' she looked rill nice. An' I marched
+straight up to her, feelin' like I was swimmin' in that lovely light:--
+
+"''Leven,' I says, ''Leven--it's like the whole world was made over
+to-night, ain't it?'
+
+"'Yes,' says she--an' not 'Huh?' at all.
+
+"'Seems like another world than when we met on the street corner, don't
+it?' I says.
+
+"'Yes,' she says again, noddin'--an' I thought how she'd stood there on
+the sidewalk, hungry an' her hands all black, an' believin' she couldn't
+do anything at all. An' it seemed like I hed sort o' scrabbled her up
+an' held her over a precipice, an' said to her: 'See the dead. Look at
+yourself. Come forth--come forth! Clean up--do somethin' to help,
+anything, if it's only tackin' on evergreens an' doin' the Dead's hair
+up becomin'--' oh, I s'pose, rilly, I was sayin' to her: 'Put on thy
+beautiful garments. Awake. Put on thy strength.' Only it come out some
+differ'nt from me than it come from Isaiah.
+
+"I took a-hold of her hand--quite clean by the second day's washin',
+though I ain't much given to the same (_not_ meanin' second day's
+washin's). I didn't know quite what I was goin' to say, but just then I
+looked up Daphne Street, an' I see 'em all sprinkled along comin' from
+the funeral--neighbours an' friends an' just folks--an' most of 'em
+livin' in Friendship peaceful an'--barrin' slopovers--doin' the level
+best they could. Not all of 'em hearin' the Bell, you understand, nor
+knowin' it by name if they did hear. But in little ways, an' because it
+was secunt nature, just helpin', helpin', helpin' ... Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, Liddy Ember, Abagail Arnold an' her
+husband, that was alive then, hurryin' to open the home bakery to catch
+the funeral trade on the funeral's way back, Amanda an' Timothy Toplady
+rattlin' by in the wagon an' 'most likely scrappin' over the new
+springs ... an' all of 'em salt good at heart.
+
+"''Leven,' I says, out o' the fulness o' the lump in my throat, 'stay
+here with us. Find somethin' honest you can do, an' stay here an' do it.
+Mebbe,' I told her, 'you could start dressin' the Dead's hair. An'
+_help_ us,' I says, 'help us.'
+
+"She looked up in my eyes quick, an' my heart stood still. An' then it
+sunk down an' down.
+
+"'I want to go back ...' she says, 'I want to go back ...' but I'm glad
+to remember that even for a minute I didn't doubt God's position,
+because I remember thinkin' swift that if Him an' I had failed it wasn't
+for no inscrutable reason o' His, but He was feelin' just as bad over it
+as I was, an' worse.... 'I want to go back,' 'Leven finished up, 'an'
+get Big Lil, too.'
+
+"Oh, an' I tell you the song in me just crowded the rest o' me out of
+existence. I felt like a psalm o' David, bein' sung. I hadn't dreamed
+she'd be like that--I hadn't dreamed it. Why, some folks, Christian an'
+in a pew, never come to the part o' their lives where they want to go
+back an' get a Big Lil, too.
+
+"We stood there a little while, an' I talked to her some, though I
+declare I couldn't tell you what I said. You can't--when the psalm
+feelin' comes. But we stood out there sort o' occupyin' April, till
+after the big blue bowl o' feathery eggs had been popped in the big
+black oven, an' it was rill dark.
+
+"I forgot all about the shroud till we stepped in the house an' lit up,
+an' I see it. An' then it was like the song in me gettin' words, an' it
+come to me what it all was: How it rilly hadn't been Jennie's funeral so
+much as it had been 'Leven's--the 'Leven that was. But I didn't tell
+her--I never told her. An' she wore that shroud for most two years,
+mornin's, about her work."
+
+Calliope smiled a little, with her way of coming back to the moment from
+the four great horizons.
+
+"Land," she said, "sometimes I think I'll make some shrouds an' starch
+'em up rill good, an' take 'em to the City an' offer to folks. An' say:
+Here. Die--die. You've got to, some part o' you, before you can awake
+an' put on your beautiful garments an' your strength. I told you, you
+know," she added, "I guess sometimes I kind o' believe in craziness!"
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+IN THE WILDERNESS A CEDAR
+
+
+In answer to my summons Liddy Ember appeared before me one morning and
+outspread a Vienna book of coloured fashion-plates.
+
+"Dressmakin' 'd be a real drudgery for me," she said, "if it wasn't for
+havin' the colour plates an' makin' what I can to look like 'em.
+Sometimes I get a collar or a cuff that seems almost like the picture.
+There's always somethin' in the way of a cedar," she added blithely.
+
+"A cedar?" I repeated.
+
+She nodded, her plain face lighting. "That's what Calliope use' to call
+'em," she explained; "'I will plant in the wilderness the cedar,' you
+know--in the Bible." And I did recall the phrase on Calliope's lips, as
+if it were the theme of her.
+
+From this one and that one, and now and then from her herself, I had
+heard something of Calliope's love story. Indeed, all Friendship knew it
+and spoke of it with no possibility of gossip or speculation, but with a
+kind of genius for consideration. I did not know, however, that it was
+of this that Liddy meant to speak, for she began her story far afield,
+with some talk of Oldmoxon house, in which I lived, and of its former
+tenants.
+
+"Right here in this house is mixed up in it," she said; "I been thinkin'
+about it all the way up. Not very many have lived here in the Oldmoxon
+house, and the folks that lived here the year I mean come so quiet
+nobody knew it until they was here--an' that ain't easy to do in
+Friendship. First we knew they was in an' housekeepin'. Their accounts
+was in the name of a Mis' Morgan. We see her now an' then on the
+street--trim an' elderly an' no airs excep' she wouldn't open up a
+conversation an' she wouldn't return her calls. 'Most everybody called
+on her inside the two weeks, but the woman was never home an' she never
+paid any attention. She didn't seem to have no men folks, an' she
+settled her bills with checks, like she didn't have any ready money.
+Little by little we all dropped her, which she ought to of expected.
+Even when it got around that there was sickness in the house, nobody
+went near, we feelin' as if we knew as good as the best what dignity
+calls for.
+
+"But Calliope didn't feel the same about it. Calliope hardly ever felt
+the same about anything. That is, if it meant feelin' mean. She was a
+woman that worked, like me, but yet she was wonderful differ'nt. That
+was when we had our shop together in the house where we lived with the
+boy--I'll come to him in a minute or two. Besides lace-makin', Calliope
+had a piano an' taught in the fittin'-room--that was the same as the
+dinin'-room. Six scholars took. Sometimes I think it was her knowin'
+music that made her differ'nt.
+
+"We two was sittin' on our porch that night in the first dark. I know a
+full moon was up back o' the hollyhocks an' makin' its odd little
+shadows up an' down the yard, an' we could smell the savoury bed. 'Every
+time I breathe in, somethin' pleasant seems goin' on inside my head,' I
+rec'lect Calliope's sayin'. But most o' the time we was still an' set
+watchin' the house on the corner where the New People lived. They had a
+hard French name an' so we kep' on callin' 'em just the 'New People.' He
+was youngish an' she was younger an'--she wasn't goin' out anywheres
+that summer. She was settin' on the porch that night waitin' for him to
+come home. Before it got dark we'd noticed she had on a pretty white
+dress an' a flower or two. It seemed sort o' nice--_that_ bein' so, an'
+her waitin' there dressed so pretty. An' we sort o' set there waitin'
+for him, too--like you will, you know.
+
+"The boy was in the bed. He wa'n't no relation of Calliope's if you're
+as strict as some, but accordin' to my idea he was closer than
+that--closer than kin. He was the grandchild of the man Calliope had
+been goin' to marry forty-some years before, when she was twenty-odd.
+Calvert Oldmoxon he was--born an' bred up in this very house. He was
+quite well off an'--barrin' he was always heathen selfish--it was a
+splendid match for Calliope, but I never see a girl care so next to
+nothin' about that. She was sheer crazy about him, an' he seemed just as
+much so about her. An' then when everything was ready--Calliope's dress
+done an' layin' on their best-room bed, the minister stayin' home from
+conference to perform the ceremony, even the white cake made--off goes
+Calvert Oldmoxon with Martha Boughton, a little high-fly that had just
+moved to town. A new girl can marry anything she wants in Friendship if
+she does it quick. So Calliope had to put up from Martha Boughton with
+just what Jennie Crapwell had to take from Delia, more'n twenty-five
+years afterwards.
+
+"It was near thirty years before we see either of 'em again. Then, just
+a little before I'm tellin' you about, a strange woman come here to town
+one night with a little boy; an' she goes to the hotel, sick, an' sends
+for Calliope. An' when Calliope gets to the hotel the woman was about
+breathin' her last. An' it was Mis' Oldmoxon--Martha Boughton, if you
+please, an' dyin' on the trip she'd made to ask Calliope to forgive her
+for what she done.
+
+"An' Calliope forgive her, but I don't imagine Calliope was thinkin'
+much about her at the time. Hangin' round the bed was a little boy--the
+livin', breathin' image of Calvert Oldmoxon himself. Calliope was
+mad-daft over children anyway, though she was always kind o' shy o'
+showin' it, like a good many women are that ain't married. I've seen her
+pick one up an' gentle it close to her, but let anybody besides me come
+in the room an' see her an' she'd turn a regular guilt-red. Calliope
+never was one to let on. But I s'pose seein' that little boy there at
+the hotel look so much like _him_ was kind o' unbalancin'. So what does
+she do when Mis' Oldmoxon was cryin' about forgiveness but up an' ask
+her what was goin' to be done with the boy after she was dead. Calliope
+would be one to bring the word 'dead' right out, too, an' let the room
+ring with it--though that ain't the custom in society. Now'days they lie
+everybody 'way into the grave, givin' 'em to understand that their
+recovery is certain, till there must be a lots o' dumfounded dead, shot
+into the next world--you might say unbeknownst. But Calliope wasn't
+mincin' matters. An' when it come out that the dyin' woman hadn't seen
+Calvert Oldmoxon for thirty years an' didn't know where he was, an' that
+the child was an orphan an' would go to collateral kin or some such
+folks, Calliope plumps out to her to give her the child. The forgiveness
+Calliope sort o' took for granted--like you will as you get older. An'
+Mis' Oldmoxon seemed real willin' she should have him. So when Calliope
+come home from the funeral--she'd rode alone with the little boy for
+mourners--she just went to work an' lived for that child.
+
+"'"In the wilderness the cedar," Liddy,' she says to me. 'More than one
+of 'em. I've had 'em right along. My music scholars an' my lace-makin'
+customers an' all. An', Liddy,' she says to me sort o' shy, 'ain't you
+noticed,' she says, 'how many neighbours we've had move in an out that's
+had children? So many o' the little things right around us! Seems like
+they'd almost been born to me when they come acrost the street, so. An'
+I've always thought o' that--"In the wilderness the cedar"' she says,
+'an' they's always somethin' to be a cedar for me, seems though.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, sort o' sceptical, 'mebbe that's because you always
+plant 'em,' I says. 'I think it means that, too,' I told her. An' I knew
+well enough Calliope was one to plant her cedars herself. Cedars o'
+comfort, you know.
+
+"I've seen a good many kinds o' mother-love--you do when you go round to
+houses like I do. But I never see anything like Calliope. Seems though
+she breathed that child for air. She always was one to pretend to
+herself, an' I knew well enough she'd figured it out as if this was
+_their_ child that might 'a' been, long ago. She sort o' played
+mother--like you will; an' she lived her play. He was a real sweet
+little fellow, too. He was one o' them big-eyed kind that don't laugh
+easy, an' he was well-spoken, an' wonderful self-settled for a child o'
+seven. He was always findin' time for you when you thought he was doin'
+somethin' else--slidin' up to you an' puttin' up his hand in yours when
+you thought he was playin' or asleep. An' that was what he done that
+night when we set on the porch--comes slippin' out of his little bed an'
+sets down between us on the top step, in his little night-things.
+
+"'Calvert, honey,' Calliope says, 'you must run back an' play dreams.
+Mother wants you to.'
+
+"She'd taught him to call her mother--she'd had him about six months
+then--an' some thought that was queer to do, seein' Calliope was her age
+an' all. But I thought it was wonderful right.
+
+"'I did play,' he says to her--he had a nice little way o' pressin' down
+hard with his voice on one word an' lettin' the next run off his
+tongue--'I did play dreams,' I rec'lect he says; 'I dreamed 'bout
+robbers. Ain't robbers _distinct_?' he says.
+
+"I didn't know what he meant till Calliope laughs an' says, 'Oh,
+distinctly extinct!' I remembered it by the way the words kind o'
+crackled.
+
+"By then he was lookin' up to the stars--his little mind always lit here
+an' there, like a grasshopper.
+
+"'How can heaven begin,' he says, 'till everybody gets there?'
+
+"Yes, he was a dear little chap. I like to think about him. An' I know
+when he says that, Calliope just put her arms around him, an' her head
+down, an' set sort o' rockin' back an' forth. An' she says:--
+
+"'Oh, but I think it begins when we don't know.'
+
+"After a while she took him back to bed, little round face lookin' over
+her shoulder an' big, wide-apart, lonesome eyes an' little sort o'
+crooked frown, for all the world like the other Calvert Oldmoxon. Just
+as she come out an' set down again, we heard the click o' the gate
+acrost at the corner house where the New People lived, an' it was the
+New Husband got home. We see his wife's white dress get up to meet him,
+an' they went in the house together, an' we see 'em standin' by the
+lamp, lookin' at things. Seems though the whole night was sort
+o'--gentle.
+
+"All of a sudden Calliope unties her apron.
+
+"'Let's dress up,' she says.
+
+"'Dress up!' I says, laughin' some. 'Why, it must be goin' on half-past
+eight,' I told her.
+
+"'I don't care if it is,' she says; 'I'm goin' to dress up. It seems as
+though I must.'
+
+"She went inside, an' I followed her. Calliope an' I hadn't no men folks
+to dress for, but, bein' dressmakers an' lace folks, we had good things
+to wear. She put on the best thin dress she had--a gray book-muslin; an'
+I took down a black lawn o' mine. It was such a beautiful night that I
+'most knew what she meant. Sometimes you can't do much but fit yourself
+in the scenery. But I always thought Calliope fit in no matter what she
+had on. She was so little an' rosy, an' she always kep' her head up like
+she was singin'.
+
+"'Now what?' I says. For when you dress up, you can't set home. An' then
+she says slow--an' you could 'a' knocked me over while I listened:--
+
+"'I've been thinkin',' she says, 'that we ought to go up to Oldmoxon
+house an see that sick person.'
+
+"'Calliope!' I says, 'for the land. You don't want to be refused in!'
+
+"'I don't know as I do an' I don't know but I do,' she answers me. 'I
+feel like I wanted to be doin' somethin'.'
+
+"With that she out in the kitchen an' begins to fill a basket.
+Calliope's music didn't prevent her cookin' good, as it does some. She
+put in I don't know what all good, an' she had me pick some hollyhocks
+to take along. An' before I knew it, I was out on Daphne Street in the
+moonlight headin' for Oldmoxon house here that no foot in Friendship had
+stepped or set inside of in 'most six months.
+
+"'They won't let us in,' I says, pos'tive.
+
+"'Well,' Calliope says, 'seems though I'd like to walk up there a night
+like this, anyway.'
+
+"An' I wasn't the one to stop her, bein' I sort o' guessed that what
+started her off was the New People. Those two livin' so near by--lookin'
+forward to what they was lookin' forward to--so soon after the boy had
+come to Calliope, an' all, had took hold of her terrible. She'd spent
+hours handmakin' the little baby-bonnet she was goin' to give 'em. An'
+then mebbe it was the night some, too, that made her want to come up
+around this house--because you could 'most 'a' cut the moonlight with a
+knife.
+
+"They wa'n't any light in the big hall here when we rung the bell, but
+they lit up an' let us in. Yes, they actually let us in. Mis' Morgan
+come to the door herself.
+
+"'Come right in,' she says, cordial. 'Come right upstairs.'
+
+"Calliope says somethin' about our bein' glad they could see us.
+
+"'Oh,' says Mis' Morgan, 'I had orders quite a while ago to let in
+whoever asked. An' you're the first,' she says. 'You're the first.'
+
+"An' then it come to us that this Mis' Morgan we'd all been tryin' to
+call on was only what you might name the housekeeper. An' so it turned
+out she was.
+
+"The whole upper hall was dark, like puttin' a black skirt on over your
+head. But the room we went in was cheerful, with a fire burnin' up. Only
+it was awful littered up--old newspapers layin' round, used glasses
+settin' here an' there, water-pitcher empty, an' the lamp-chimney was
+smoked up, even. The woman said somethin' about us an' went out an' left
+us with somebody settin' in a big chair by the fire, sick an' wrapped
+up. An' when we looked over there, Calliope an' I stopped still. It was
+a man.
+
+"If it'd been me, I'd 'a' turned round an' got out. But Calliope was as
+brave as two, an' she spoke up.
+
+"'This must be the invalid,' she says, cheerful. 'We hope we see you at
+the best.'
+
+"The man stirs some an' looks over at us kind o' eager--he was oldish,
+an' the firelight bein' in his eyes, he couldn't see us.
+
+"'It isn't anybody to see me, is it?' he asks.
+
+"At that Calliope steps forward--I remember how she looked in her pretty
+gray dress with some light thing over her head, an' her starched white
+skirts was rustlin' along under, soundin' so genteel she seemed to me
+like strangers do. When he see her, the man made to get up, but he was
+too weak for it.
+
+"'Why, yes,' she answers him, 'if you're well enough to see anybody.'
+
+"An' at that the man put his hands on his knees an' leaned sort o'
+hunchin' forward.
+
+"'Calliope!' he says.
+
+"It was him, sure enough--Calvert Oldmoxon. Same big, wide-apart,
+lonesome eyes an' kind o' crooked frown. His hair was gray, an' so was
+his pointed beard, an' he was crool thin. But I'd 'a' known him
+anywheres.
+
+"Calliope, she just stood still. But when he reached out his hand, his
+lips parted some like a child's an' his eyes lookin' up at her, she went
+an' stood near him, by the table, an' she set her basket there an'
+leaned down on the handle, like her strength was gone.
+
+"'I never knew it was you here,' she says. 'Nobody knows,' she told him.
+
+"'No,' he says, 'I've done my best they shouldn't know. Up till I got
+sick. Since then--I--wanted folks,' he says.
+
+"I kep' back by the door, an' I couldn't take my eyes off of him. He was
+older than Calliope, but he had a young air. Like you don't have when
+you stay in Friendship. An' he seemed to know how to be easy, sick as he
+was. An' that ain't like Friendship, either. He an' Calliope had growed
+opposite ways, seems though.
+
+"'I'll go now,' says Calliope, not lookin' at him. 'I brought up some
+things I baked. I didn't know but they'd taste good to whoever was sick
+here.'
+
+"With that he covers one hand over his eyes.
+
+"'No,' he says, 'no, no, Calliope--don't go yet. It's you I come here to
+Friendship to see,' he told her.
+
+"'What could you have to say to me?' asks Calliope--dry as a bone in her
+voice, but I see her eyes wasn't so dry. Leastwise, it may not have been
+her eyes, but it was her look.
+
+"Then he straightens up some. He was still good-lookin'. When you was
+with him it use' to be that you sort o' wanted to stay--an' it seemed
+the same way now. He was that kind.
+
+"'Don't you think,' he says to her--an' it was like he was humble, but
+it was like he was proud, too--'don't you think,' he says, 'that I ever
+dreamed you could forgive me. I knew better than that,' he told her.
+'It's what you must think o' me that's kep' me from sayin' to you what I
+come here to say. But I'll tell you now,' he says, 'I'm sick an' alone
+an' done for. An' what I come to see you about--is the boy.'
+
+"'The boy,' Calliope says over, not understandin'; 'the boy.'
+
+"'My God, yes,' says he. 'He's all I've got left in the world.
+Calliope--I need the boy. I need him!'
+
+"I rec'lect Calliope puttin' back that light thing from her head like it
+smothered her. He laid back in his chair for a minute, white an' still.
+An' then he says--only of course his words didn't sound the way mine
+do:--
+
+"'I robbed your life, Cally, an' I robbed my own. As soon as I knew it
+an' couldn't bear it any longer, I went away alone--an' I've lived alone
+all exceptin' since the little boy come. His mother, my son's wife,
+died; an' I all but brought him up. I loved him as I never loved
+anybody--but you,' he says, simple. 'But when his father died, of course
+I hadn't any claim on the little fellow, I felt, when I'd been away from
+the rest so long. _She_ took him with her. An' when I knew she'd left
+him here I couldn't have kep' away,' he says, 'I couldn't. He's all I've
+got left in the world. I all but brought him up. I must have him,
+Cally--don't you see I must have him?' he says.
+
+"Calliope looks down at him, wonderful calm an' still.
+
+"'You've had your own child,' she told him slow; 'you've had a real
+life. I'm just gettin' to mine--since I had the boy.'
+
+"'But, good God,' he says, starin' up at her, 'you're a woman. An' one
+child is the same as another to you, so be that it ain't your own.'
+
+"Calliope looked almost as if he had struck at her, though he'd only
+spoke a kind o' general male idea, an' he couldn't help _bein'_ a male.
+An' she says back at him:--
+
+"'But you're a man. An' bein' alive is one thing to you an' another
+thing to me. Never let any man forget that,' she says, like I never
+heard her speak before.
+
+"Then I see the tears shinin' on his face. He was terrible weak. He
+slips down in his chair an' sets starin' at the fire, his hands hangin'
+limp over the arms like there wasn't none of him left. His face looked
+tired to death, an' yet there was that somethin' about him like you
+didn't want to leave him. I see Calliope lookin' at him--an' all of a
+sudden it come to me that if I'd 'a' loved him as she use' to, I'd 'a'
+walked over there an' then, an' sort o' gentled his hair, no matter
+what.
+
+"But Calliope, she turned sharp away from him an' begun lookin' around
+the room, like she see it for the first time--smoky lamp-chimney, old
+newspapers layin' 'round, used-up glasses, an' such like. The room was
+one o' the kind when they ain't no women or children. An' then, when she
+see all that, pretty soon she looked back at him, layin' sick in his
+chair, alone an' done for, like he said. An' I see her take her arms in
+her hands an' kind o' rock.
+
+"'Ain't the little fellow a care to you, Cally?' he says then, wistful.
+
+"She went over towards him, an' I see her pick up his pillow an' smooth
+it some an' make to fix it better.
+
+"'Yes,' she says then, 'you're right. He is a care. An' he's your
+grandchild. You must take him with you just as soon as you're well
+enough,' she says.
+
+"He broke clear down then, an' he caught her hands an' laid his face on
+'em. She stood wonderful calm, lookin' down at him--an' lookin'. An' I
+laid the hollyhocks down on the rug or anywheres, an' somehow I got out
+o' the room an' down the stairs. An' I set there in the lower hall an'
+waited.
+
+"She come herself in a minute. The big outside door was standin' open,
+an' when I heard her step on the stairs I went on ahead out to the
+porch, feelin' kind o' strange--like you will. But when Calliope come up
+to me she was just the same as she always was, an' I might 'a' known she
+would be. She isn't easy to understand--she's differ'nt--but when you
+once get to expectin' folks to be differ'nt, you can depend on 'em some
+that way, too.
+
+"The moon was noon-high by then an' filterin' down through the leaves
+wonderful soft, an' things was still--I remember thinkin' it was like
+the hushin'-up before a bride comes in, but there wasn't any bride.
+
+"When we come to our house--just as we begun to smell the savoury bed
+clear out there on the walk--we heard something ... a little bit of a
+noise that I couldn't put a name to, first. But, bless you, Calliope
+could. She stopped short by the gate an' stood lookin' acrost the road
+to the corner house where the New People lived. It was late for
+Friendship, but upstairs in that house a lamp was burnin'. An' that room
+was where the little noise come from--a little new cry.
+
+"'Oh, Liddy,' Calliope says--her head up like she was singin'--'Oh,
+Liddy--the New People have got their little child.'
+
+"An' I see, though of course she didn't anywheres near realize it then,
+that she was plantin' herself another cedar."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+HERSELF
+
+
+After all, it was as if I had first been told about refraction and then
+had been shown a rainbow. For presently Calliope herself said something
+to me of her having been twenty. One would as lief have broken the
+reticence of a rainbow as that of Calliope, but rainbows are not always
+reticent. I have known them suggest infinite things.
+
+In June she spent a fortnight with me at Oldmoxon house, and I wanted
+never to let her go. Often our talk was as irrelevant to patency as are
+wings. That day I had been telling her some splendid inconsequent dream
+of mine. It had to do with an affair of a wheelbarrow of roses, which I
+was tying on my trees in the garden directly the original blossoms fell
+off.
+
+Calliope nodded in entire acceptance.
+
+"But that wasn't so queer as my dream," she said. "My dream about
+myself--I mean my rill, true regular self," she added, with a manner of
+testing me.
+
+I think that we all dream our real, true, regular selves, only we do not
+dream us until we come true. I said something of this to Calliope; and
+then she told me.
+
+"It was when I was twenty," she said, "an' it was a little while
+after--well, things wasn't so very happy for me. But first thing I must
+tell you about the picture. We didn't have so very many pictures. But in
+my room used to be an old steel engraving of a poet, a man walkin'
+'round under some kind o' trees in blossom. He had a beautiful face an'
+a look on it like he see heaven. I use' to look at the picture an' look
+at it, an' when I did, it seemed almost like I was off somewheres else.
+
+"Then one night I had my dream. I thought I was walkin' down a long
+road, green an' shady an' quite wide, an' fields around an' no folks. I
+know I was hurryin'--oh, I was in such a hurry to see somebody, seems
+though, somebody I was goin' to see when I got to the end o' the road.
+An' I was so happy--did you ever dream o' being happy, I mean if you
+wasn't so very happy in rill life? It puts you in mind o' havin' a pain
+in your side an' then gettin' in one big, deep breath when the pain
+don't hurt. In rill life I was lonesome, an' I hated Friendship an' I
+wanted to get away--to go to the City to take music, or go anywheres
+else. I never had any what you might call rill pleasure excep' walkin'
+in the Depot Woods. That was a gully grove beyond the railroad track,
+an' I use' to like to sit in there some, by myself. I wasn't ever rill
+happy, though, them days, but in the dream--oh, I was happy, like on a
+nice mornin', only more so."
+
+Calliope looked at me fleetingly, as if she were measuring my ability to
+understand.
+
+"The funny part of it was," she said, "that in the dream I wasn't _me_
+at all. Not me, as you know me. I thought somehow _I_ was that poet in
+my picture, the man in the steel engravin' with a look like he see
+heaven. An' it didn't seem strange to me, but just like it had always
+been so. I thought I rilly was that poet that I'd looked at in the
+picture all my life. But then I guess after all that part wasn't so
+funny as the rest of it. For down at the end o' the road somebody was
+waitin' for me under trees all in blossom, like the picture, too. It was
+a girl, standin' there. An' I thought I looked at her--I, the poet, you
+know--an' I see that the girl was me, Calliope Marsh, lookin' just like
+I looked every day, natural as anything. Like you see yourself in the
+glass.
+
+"I know I wasn't su'prised at all. We met like we was friends, both
+livin' here in the village, an' we walked down the road together like it
+had always been that way. An' we talked--like you do when you're with
+them you'd rather be with than anybody else. I thought we was goin'
+somewhere to see somebody, an' we talked about that:--
+
+"'Will They be home, do you think?' I says.
+
+"An' the girl that was me says: 'Oh, yes. They'll be home. They're
+always home,' she told me. An' we both felt pleased, like when you're
+sure.
+
+"An' then--oh," Calliope cried, "I wish I could remember what we said. I
+wish I could remember. I know it was something that seemed beautiful,
+an' the words come all soft. It was like bein' born again, somewheres
+else. An' we knew just exactly what each other meant, an' that was best
+of all."
+
+She hesitated, seeking to explain that to me.
+
+"When I was twenty," she said, "I use' to want to talk about things that
+wasn't commonly mentioned here in Friendship--I mean, well, like little
+things I'd read about noted people an' what they said an' done--an' like
+that. But when you brought 'em up in the conversation, folks always
+thought you was tryin' to show off. An' if you quoted a verse o' poetry
+in company, my land, there was a hush like you'd swore. So gradually I'd
+got to keepin' still about such things. But in that dream we talked an'
+talked--said things about old noted folks right out an' told about 'em
+without beginnin' it 'I happened to read the other day.' An' I know I
+mentioned the sun on the leaves an' the way the clouds looked, right
+out, too, without bein' afraid the girl that was me would think I was
+affected. An' I said little things about--oh, like about goblins in the
+wood an' figgers in the smoke, without bein' scared that mothers would
+hear of it an' not let their children come to see me. An' then I made up
+things an' said--things I was always wantin' to say--like about
+expectin' to meet Summer walkin' down the road, an' so on: things that
+if I'd said so's they'd got out around Friendship, folks would 'a'
+thought I was queer an' not to be trusted to bring up their mail from
+town. I said all those kind o' things, like I was really born to talk
+what I thought about. An' the girl that was me understood what I meant.
+An' we laughed a good deal--oh, how we laughed together. That was 'most
+the best of all.
+
+"Well, the dream dwindled off, like they will. An' when I woke up, I was
+nothin' but Calliope Marsh, livin' in Friendship where folks cut a loaf
+o' bread on a baker's headstone just because he _was_ a baker. Rill life
+didn't get any better, an' I was more an' more lonesome in Friendship.
+Somehow, nobody here in town rilly matched me. They all knew what I said
+well enough, but when I spoke to 'em about what was rill interestin' to
+me, seemed like their minds didn't _click_, with that good little
+feelin' o' rilly takin' it in. My _i_-dees didn't seem to fit, quite
+ball an' socket, into nobody's mind, but just to slide along over. And
+as to _their_ i-dees--I rec'lect thinkin' that the three R's meant to
+'em Relations, Recipes, an' the Remains. Yes, all I did have, you might
+say, was my walks out in the Depot Woods. An' times like when Elder
+Jacob Sykes--that was Silas's father--said in church that God come down
+to be Moses's undertaker, I run off there to the woods feelin' all sick
+an' skinned in soul, an' it sort o' seemed like the gully understood.
+An' still, you can't be friends when they's only one of you. It's like
+tryin' to hold a dust-pan an' sweep the dirt in at the same time. It
+can't be done--not thorough. An' so settin' out there I used to take a
+book an' hunt up nice little things an' learn different verses, in the
+hopes that if that dream _should_ come back, I could have 'em to
+tell--tell 'em, you know, to the girl that was me. Because it hed got so
+by then that it seemed to me I was actually more that poet than I was
+Calliope Marsh. An' so it went along till the day I met him--the man,
+the poet."
+
+"The man!" I said. "But do you mean _the_ man--the poet--the one that
+was you?"
+
+Calliope nodded confidently.
+
+"Yes," she said, in her delicate excitement, "I do. Oh, I'll tell you
+an' you'll see for yourself it must 'a' been him. It was one early
+afternoon towards the end o' summer, an' I knew him in a minute. I'd
+gone up to the depot to mail a postal on the Through, an' he got off the
+train an' went into the Telegraph Office. An' the train pulled out an'
+left him--it was down to the end o' the platform before he come out. He
+didn't act, though, as if the train's leavin' him was much of anything
+to notice. He just went up an' commenced talkin' to the baggageman,
+Bill. But Bill couldn't understand him--Bill was sort o' crusted over
+the mind--you had to say things over an' over again to him, an' even
+then he 'most always took it different from what you meant. So I suppose
+that was why the man left him an' come towards me.
+
+"When I looked up in his face I stood still on the platform. He was
+young. An' he had soft hair, an' his face was beautiful, like he see
+heaven. It wasn't to say he was _exactly_ like my picture," Calliope
+said slowly. "For instance, I think the man at the depot had a beard,
+an' the poet in my picture didn't. But it was more his look, you might
+say. It wasn't like any look I'd ever seen on anybody in Friendship. His
+hands were kind o' slim an' wanderin', an' he carried a book like it was
+his only baggage. An' he had a way--well, like what he happened to be
+doin' wasn't all day to him. Like he was partly there, but mostly
+somewheres else, where everything was better.
+
+"'Perhaps this lady will know,' he says--an' it wasn't the way most of
+'em talks here in Friendship, you understand--'I've been askin' the
+luggageman there,' he says, an' he was smilin' almost like a laugh at
+what he thought I was goin' to answer, 'I've been askin' the luggageman
+there, if he knows of a wood near the station that I shall be likely to
+find haunted at this hour. I've to wait for the 4.20, an' it's a bad
+time of day for a haunted wood, I'm afraid. The luggageman didn't seem
+to know.'
+
+"An' then all at once I knew--I knew. Why, don't you see," Calliope
+cried, "I had to know! That was just the way we'd talked in my
+dream--kind of jokin' an' yet meanin' somethin', too--so's you felt all
+lifted up an' out o' the ordinary. An' then I knew who he was an' I see
+how everything was. Why, the girl that was me an' that was lonesome
+there in Friendship _wasn't_ me, very much. Me bein' Calliope Marsh was
+the chance part, an' didn't count. But things was rilly the way I'd
+dreamed o' their bein.' Somehow, I had another self. An' I had dreamed
+o' bein' that self. An' there he stood, on the Friendship depot
+platform."
+
+Calliope looked at me wistfully.
+
+"You don't think I sound crazy, do you?" she asked.
+
+And at my answer:--
+
+"Well," she said, brightening, "that was how it was. An' it was like
+there hadn't been any first time an' like there wouldn't be any end.
+Like they was things bigger than time--an' lots nicer than life. An' I
+spoke up like I'd always known him.
+
+"'Why, yes,' I says to him simple, 'you must mean the Depot Woods,' I
+said. 'They're always kind o' haunted to me. I guess the little folks
+that come in the en-gine smoke live in there,' I told him, smilin'
+because I was so glad.
+
+"I remember how su'prised he looked an' how his face lit up, like he was
+hearin' English in a heathen land.
+
+"'Upon my word,' he says, still only half believin' in me. 'An' do you
+go there often?' he ask' me. 'An' I daresay the little smoke folk talk
+to you, now?' he says.
+
+"'I go 'most every day,' I told him, 'but we don't say very much. I
+guess they talk an' I listen,' I says.
+
+"An' then the funny part about his askin' Bill for a haunted wood come
+over me.
+
+"'_Bill!_' I says. 'Did you actually ask Bill that?'
+
+"Oh, an' how we laughed--how we laughed. Just the way the dream had
+been. It seemed--it seemed such a sort o' _special_ comical," Calliope
+said, "an' not like a Sodality laugh. 'Seems though I'd always laughed
+at one set o' things all my life--my everyday life. An' this was a new
+recipe for Laugh, flavoured different, an' baked in a quick oven, an' et
+hot.
+
+"Well, we walked down the road together, like it had always been that
+way. An' we talked--like you do when you're with them you'd rather be
+with than anybody else. An' he ask' me, grave as grave, about the little
+smoke folks.
+
+"'Will They be home, do you think?' he says.
+
+"An' I says: 'Oh, yes. I know They will. They're always home.'
+
+"An' we both felt pleased, like when you're sure.
+
+"We went to walk in the Depot Woods. I remember how much he made me
+talk--more than I'd ever talked before, excep' in the dream. I know I
+told him the little stories I'd read about noted people, an' I said over
+some o' the verses I'd learned an' liked the sound of--I remembered 'em
+all for him, an' he listened an' heard 'em all just the way I'd said
+'em. That was it--he heard it all just the way I said it. An' I
+mentioned the sun on the leaves an' the way the clouds looked, right
+out--an' I knew he didn't think I was affected. An' I made up things an'
+said, too--things that was always comin' in my head an' that I was
+always wantin' to say. An' he'd laugh almost before I was through--oh,
+it was like heaven to have him laugh an' not just say, 'What on earth
+_are_ you talkin', Calliope Marsh?' like I'd heard. An' he kep' sayin',
+'I know, I know,' like he knew what I meant better than anything else in
+the world. Then he read to me out o' the book he had an' he told
+me--beautiful things. Some of 'em I remember--I've remembered always.
+Some of 'em I forgot till I come on 'em, now an' then, in books--long
+afterwards; an' then it was like somebody dead spoke up. I'm always
+thankful to get hold o' other people's books an' see if mebbe I won't
+find somethin' else he said. But a good many o' the things I s'pose I
+clear forgot, an' I won't know 'em again till in the next life. Like I
+forgot what we said in the dream, till they're both all mixed up an'
+shinin'.
+
+"We talked till 'most time for the 4.20 train. An' when it got towards
+four o'clock, I told him about my dream. It seemed like he ought to
+know, somehow. An' I told him how I dreamed I was him.
+
+"'You don't look like the one I dreamed I was,' I told him, 'but, oh,
+you talk the same--an' you pretend, an' you laugh, an' you seem the
+same. An' your face looks different from folks here in Friendship, just
+like his, an' it seems somehow like you saw things besides with your
+eyes,' I told him, 'like the poet in my picture. So I know it's you--it
+must be you,' I says.
+
+"He looked at me so queer an' sudden an' long.
+
+"'I'm a poet, too,' he said, 'if it comes to that. A very bad one, you
+know--but a kind of poet.'
+
+"An' then of course I was certain sure.
+
+"When he understood all about it, I remember how he looked at me. An' he
+says:--
+
+"'Well, an' who knows? Who knows?'
+
+"He sat a long time without sayin' anything. But I wasn't unhappy, even
+when he seemed so sad. I couldn't be, because it was so much to know
+what I knew.
+
+"'If I can,' he says to me on the depot platform, 'dead or alive, I'll
+come back some day to see you. But meanwhile you must forget me. Only
+the dream--keep the dream,' he says.
+
+"I tried to dream it again," Calliope told me, "but I never could. An'
+dead or alive, he's never been back, all these years. I don't even know
+his name--an' I remembered afterwards he hadn't asked me mine. But I
+guess all that is the chance part, an' it don't really count. Out o' the
+dream I've been, you might say, caught, tied up an' couldn't get
+out,--just me, like you know me,--with a big unhappiness, an' like that.
+But in the dream I dreamed myself true. An' then God let me meet myself,
+just that once, there in the Depot Woods, to show me it's all right, an'
+that they's things that's bigger than time an' lots nicer than life."
+
+Calliope sat silent, with her way of sighing and looking by; and it was
+as if she had suggested to me delicate things, as a rainbow will suggest
+them.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+THE HIDINGS OF POWER
+
+
+I divined the birches, blurred gray and white against the fog-bound
+cedars. In the haze the airy trunks, because of their imminence, bore
+the reality of thought, but the sterner green sank in the distance to
+the faint avail of speech. It was well to be walking on the Plank Road
+toward seven o'clock of a June morning, in a mist which might yield
+fellowship in the same ease with which it breathed on distinctions.
+
+Abel had told how, on that winter way of his among the hills, the sky
+has fallen in the fog and had surrendered to him a fellowship of dreams.
+But in Friendship Village, as I had often thought, there are dreams for
+every one; how should it be otherwise to us faring up and down Daphne
+Street (where Daphne's feet have been)? And yet that morning on the
+Plank Road where, if the fancy seized her to walk in beauty, our lady of
+the laurels might be met at any moment, her power seemed to me to be as
+frail as wings, and I thought that it would not greatly matter if I were
+to meet her.
+
+As if my thought of Abel Halsey had brought him, the beat of hoofs won
+toward me from the village; and presently Major Mary overtook me, and
+there was Abel, driving with his eyes shut. I hailed him, laughed at
+him, let him pick me up, and we went on through door after door of the
+fog, with now a lintel of boughs and now a wall of wild roses.
+
+"Abel," I remember saying abruptly, "dreams are not enough."
+
+"No," he replied, as simply as if we had been talking of it, "dreams are
+just one of the sources of power ... but doing is enough."
+
+I said weakly--perhaps because it was a morning of chill and fog, when a
+woman may feel her forlornest, look her plainest, know herself for dust:
+"But then--what about everybody's heart?"
+
+"Don't you know?" Abel asked, and even after those months in Friendship
+Village I did not know.
+
+"... use it up making some little corner better--better--better by the
+width of a hand..." said Abel. "As I could do," he added after a moment,
+"if I could get my chapel in the hills. Do you know, I've written to
+Mrs. Proudfit about it at last. I couldn't help it--I couldn't help it!"
+
+We came to the rise of the hill, where, but for the fog, we might have
+looked back on the village, already long astir. To the left, within its
+line of field stone and whitewashed rails and wild roses, the cemetery
+lay, like another way of speech. A little before us the mist hid the
+tracks, but we heard the whistle of the Fast Mail, coming in from the
+end of the earth.
+
+"Ah, well, I want some wild roses," said I--since a woman may always
+take certain refuges from life.
+
+"I'm coming back about noon," Abel told me; "I'll bring you a thousand."
+
+He drew up Major Mary, and we sat silent, watching for the train. And
+the Something which found in Abel its unfailing channel came
+companioning us, and caught me up so that I longed unspeakably to be
+about the Business which Abel and Calliope followed, and followed before
+all else.
+
+But when I would have said more, I noted on Abel's face some surprise,
+and then I myself felt it. For the Fast Mail from the East, having as
+usual come roaring through Friendship station with but an instant's
+stop, was now slowing at the draw. Through the thick white we perceived
+it motionless for a breath, and then we heard it beat away again.
+
+I wonder now, remembering, how I can have known with such singing
+confidence what was in store for me. It is certain that I did know, even
+though in the mist I saw no one alight. But as if at a summons I bade
+Abel let me descend, and somehow I gave him good-by; and I recall that I
+cried back to him:--
+
+"Abel! You _said_ the sky can fall and give one dreams."
+
+"Yes," he answered. "Dreams to use in one's corner."
+
+But I knew then and I know now that Abel's dreams flowed in his blood,
+and that when he gave them to his corner of the world he gave from his
+own veins; and I think that the world is the richer for that.
+
+When he had gone I stood still in the road, waiting. I distinguished a
+lintel of elms, a wall of wild roses; I heard a brave little bird
+twittering impatient matins, and the sound of nearing footsteps in the
+road. And then a voice in the mist said my name.
+
+There in the fog on the Plank Road we met as if there had come a
+clearness everywhere--we two, between whom lay that year since my coming
+to Friendship. Only, now that he was with me, I observed that the
+traitor year had slipped away as if it had never been, and had left us
+two alone in a place so sightly that at last I recognized my own
+happiness. And I understood--and this way of understanding leaves one a
+breathless being--that his happiness was there too.
+
+And yet it was only: "You.... But what an adventure to meet you here!"
+And from him: "Me. Here. Please, may we go to your house? I haven't had
+an _indication_ of breakfast." At which we laughed somewhat, with my,
+"How absurdly like you not to have had breakfast," and his, "How very
+shabby of you to feel superior because you happen to have had your
+coffee." So we moved back down the road with the clear little space in
+the fog following, following....
+
+A kind of passion for detail seized on us both.
+
+He said: "You're wearing brown. I've never seen you wear brown--I'm sure
+I haven't. Have I?"
+
+"My fur coat was brown," I escaped into the subject, "but then that
+hardly counts."
+
+"No," he agreed, "fur isn't a colour. Fur is just fur. No, I've never
+seen you in brown."
+
+"How did they let you off at the draw? How did you know about getting
+off at the draw?" I demanded.
+
+"You said something of your getting off there--in that one letter, you
+know...."
+
+"Yes, yes...."
+
+"You said something about getting off there on a night when you left the
+train with a girl who was coming home to the village--you know the
+letter?" he broke off, "I think it was that letter that finally gave me
+courage to come. Because in that I saw in you something new
+and--understanding. Well, and I remembered about the draw. I always
+meant to get off there, when I came."
+
+"You always meant ... but then how did you make them stop?"
+
+"I told the man I had to, and then he had to, too. There were four
+others who got off and went across the tracks, but we are not obliged to
+consider them."
+
+"From that," I said, "I would think it _is_ you, if I didn't know it
+couldn't possibly be!"
+
+Then I hurried into some recital about the Topladys, whose big barn and
+little house were lined faintly out as if something were making them
+feel hushed; and about Friendship, hidden in the valley as if it were
+suddenly of lesser import--how strange that these things should be there
+as they were an hour ago. And so we came to Oldmoxon House and went up
+the walk in silence save that, at the steps, "How long shall I tell them
+to boil your eggs?" I asked desperately, to still the quite ridiculous
+singing of the known world. But then the singing took one voice, a voice
+whose firmness made it almost hard, save that deep within it something
+was beating....
+
+"You know," said the voice simply, "if I come in now, I come to stay.
+You _do_ know?"
+
+"You come to breakfast...." I tried it.
+
+"I come to stay."
+
+"You mean--"
+
+"I come to stay."
+
+I rather hoped to affirm something gracious, and masterful of
+myself--not to say of him; but suddenly that whole lonely year was back
+again, most of it in my throat. And though I gave up saying anything at
+all, I cannot have been unintelligible. Indeed, I know that I was not
+unintelligible, for when, in a little while, Calliope, who was still
+with me, opened my front door and emerged briskly to the veranda, she
+seems to have understood in a minute.
+
+"Well said!" Calliope cried, and made a little swoop down from the
+threshold and stood before us, one hand in mine and one outstretched for
+his; "I knew, as soon as I woke up this morning, I felt special. I
+thought it was my soul, sittin' up in my chest, an' wantin' me to spry
+round with it some, like it does. But I guess now it was this. Oh,
+this!" she said. "Oh, I sp'ose I'd rilly ought to hev an introduction
+before I jump up an' down, hadn't I?"
+
+"No need in the world, Calliope," he told her; "come on. I'll jump,
+too."
+
+And that was an added joy--that he had read and re-read that one
+Friendship letter of mine, written on the night of Delia More's return,
+until it was as if he, too, knew Calliope. But before all things was the
+wonder of the justice and the grace which had made the letter of that
+night, when I, too, "took stock," yield such return.
+
+It was Calliope who led the way indoors at last, and he and I who
+followed like her guests. From the edges of consciousness I finally drew
+some discernment of the place of coffee and rolls in a beneficent
+universe, and presently we three sat at his breakfast table. And not
+until then did Calliope remember her other news.
+
+"Land, land," she said, "I like to forgot. Who do you s'pose I had a
+telephone from just before you come? Delia. She'd just got home this
+morning on the Fast Mail. An' the Proudfits'll be here, noon train."
+
+Delia indeed had come on the same glorified train that Abel and I had
+seen stop at the draw, only she had alighted at Friendship station and
+had hurried up to the Proudfits' to make ready for their home-coming.
+And since those whom we know best never come to Friendship without a
+welcome, it was instantly incumbent on us all to be what Calliope called
+"up in arms an' flyin' round."
+
+As soon as we were alone:--
+
+"I've planned noon lunch for 'em," Calliope told me; "I'm goin' to see
+to the meat--leg o' lamb, sissin' hot, an' a big bowl o' mint. Mis'
+Holcomb's got to freeze a freezer o' her lemon ice--she gets it smooth
+as a mud pie. Mis' Toplady, she'll come in on the baked stuff--raised
+rolls an' a big devil's food. An'--I'd kind o' meant to look to you for
+the salad, but I s'pose you won't want to bother now...." And when I had
+hastened to assume the salad, "Well, I _am_ glad," she owned, with a
+relieved sigh. "The Proudfit salads they can't a soul tell what
+ingredients is in 'em, chew high though we may. I know you know about
+them queer organs an' canned sea reptiles they use now in cookin'. I've
+come to the solemn conclusion I ain't studied physiology an' the animal
+sciences close enough myself to make a rill up-to-date salad."
+
+Before noon we were all at Proudfit House--to which I had taken care to
+leave word for Abel to follow me--and we were letting in the sun, making
+ready the table, filling the vases with garden roses; and in the library
+Calliope laid a fire "in case they get chilly, travellin' so," she said,
+but I think rather it was in longing somehow to summon a secret agency
+to that place where Linda Proudfit's portrait hung. For we had long been
+agreed that, as soon as she was at home again, Linda's mother must be
+told all that we knew of Linda. Thus, to Calliope and me, the time held
+a tragic meaning beneath the exterior of our simple cheer. But the time
+held many meanings, as a time will hold them; and the Voice of its new
+meaning said to me, as we all waited on the Proudfit veranda with its
+vines and its climbing rose and its canaries:--
+
+"I marvel, I _marvel_ at your bad taste. How can you leave the dear
+place and the dear people for me?"
+
+I love to recall the bustle of that arriving and how, as the motor came
+up the drive, Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss and Mis' Amanda ran down
+on the gravel and waved their aprons; and how Mis' Postmaster Sykes and
+Mis' Mayor Uppers and Mis' Photographer Sturgis, having heard the
+machine pass their doors, had issued forth and followed it and arrived
+at the Proudfits' with:
+
+"I was right in the midst of a basque, cuttin' over an old lining, but I
+told Liddy Ember: 'You rip on. I've _got_ to run over.' Excuse my looks.
+Well said! Back!"
+
+And, "Got here, did you? My, my, all tired out, I expect. Well, mebbe
+you think we won't feel relieved to see the house open again an' folks
+in it flyin' round. An' you look as natural as the first thunder-storm
+in the spring o' the year!"
+
+And, "Every day for two weeks," Mis' Sturgis said, "I've said to Jimmy:
+'Proudfits back?' 'No, sir,' s'he, 'not back yet.' An' so it went. Could
+you sleep any on the sleeper?"
+
+Then Calliope and Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb and the three newcomers
+hurried all but abreast to the kitchen to "see what they could find";
+and when Mis' Proudfit and Miss Clementina and Delia More had taken
+their places at the burdened table, we all sat about the edge of the
+room--no one would share in the feast, every one having to "get right
+back"--and asked of the journey, and gave news of Friendship Village in
+the long absence. I love to remember it all, but I think that I love
+best to remember their delicate acceptance of what that day had brought
+to me. Of this no one said a word, nor did they ask me anything, or seem
+to observe, far less to wonder. But when they passed me, one and another
+and another squeezed my hand or patted my arm or gave me their unwonted
+"dear."
+
+"What gentlefolk they are," my stranger said.
+
+"Noon lunch" was finished, and I had seen Calliope go with Madame
+Proudfit to the library and close the door, and we were all gathered in
+the hall, where Miss Clementina had opened a trunk and was showing us
+some pretty things, when some one else crossed the veranda and appeared
+in the doorway. And there was Abel, come with my wild roses.
+
+I do not think, however, that it can have occurred to Abel that I was in
+the room. Nor that any of the others were there, intent on the pretty
+things of Miss Clementina's trunk. But, his face shining, he went
+straight to Delia More; and he laid my roses in her arms, looking at her
+the while with a look which was like a passionate recognition of one not
+met for many years.
+
+I have said nothing of Delia More as she seemed to me that day of her
+return, for indeed I do not well know how to tell of her. But as he
+looked at her, it was all in Abel's eyes. I do not know whether it was
+that her spirit having been long "packed down in her," as Calliope had
+said, was at last loosed by the mysterious ministry of distance and the
+touch of far places, or whether, over there nearer Tempe, she had held
+converse with Daphne herself, who, for the sake of the Friendship bond
+between them, had taken for her own all that was wild and strange in the
+girl's nature. But this I know: that Delia More had come back among us a
+new creature, simple, gentle, humble as before, and yet somehow
+quickened, invested with the dignity of personality which, long ago, she
+had lost. And now she stood looking at Abel as he was looking at her.
+
+"Delia!" he said, and took her hand, and, "I brought you some wild roses
+to tell you we're glad you're back," said he, disposing of my hedge
+spoils as coolly as if I were not.
+
+"That's nice of you, Abel," she replied simply, "but it's nicer to think
+you came."
+
+"Why," Abel said, "you couldn't have kept me away. You couldn't have
+kept me away, Delia."
+
+He could not have done looking at her. And even after we had closed in
+before them and had gone on with our talk about the tray of the trunk, I
+think that we were all conscious, as one is conscious of a light in the
+room, that to Delia and Abel had come again the immemorial wonder.
+
+When the library door opened and Madame Proudfit and Calliope came out,
+a little hush fell upon us, even though none but I knew what that
+interval held for Linda's mother. Her face was tranquil--indeed, I think
+it was almost as if its ancient fear had forever left it and had given
+place to the blessed relief of mere sorrow. She stood for a
+moment--looking at them all, and looking, as if she were thankful for
+their presence. Then she saw Abel and held out both hands.
+
+"Abel!" she said, "Abel! I had your letter in Lucerne. I meant to talk
+it over with you--but now I know, I know. You shall have your little
+chapel in the hills. We will build it together--you and I--for Linda."
+
+But then, because Abel turned joyously and naturally to Delia to share
+with her the tidings, Madame Proudfit looked at Delia too, and saw her
+eyes. And,
+
+"You and Delia and I," she added gently.
+
+On which, with the kindliest intent, the happiness of us all overflowed
+in speech about the common-place, the trivial, the irrelevant, and we
+all fell talking at once there in the hall, and told one another things
+which we knew perfectly already, and we listened, nodding, and laughed a
+great deal at nothing in the world--save that life is good.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We three walked home together in the afternoon sunshine--the man who,
+through all this time in Friendship, had been dear, and Calliope and I.
+I thought that Daphne Street had never looked so beautiful. The tulip
+beds on the lawns had been re-filled for summer, a touch of bonfire
+smoke hung in the air, Eppleby Holcomb was mending his picket gate, and
+over many magic thresholds of the cool walks were lintels of the boughs.
+Down town Abigail Arnold was laying cream puffs in the home bakery
+window; at the Helmans' Mis' Doctor Helman, wound in a shawl and a
+fascinator, was training her matrimony vine; the Liberty sisters had let
+out their chickens and, posted in a great triangle, were keeping them
+well within Liberty lawn confines; Doctor June was working in his garden
+and he waved his hat at us like a boy. ("It's a year ago now they give
+him his benefit," Calliope remembered; "ice-cream an' strawberries an'
+cake. An' every soul that come in he treated, one after another. An'
+when they got hold of him an' told him what that was doin' to the
+benefit box, he wanted to know whose benefit it was, anyway. An' he kep'
+on treatin' folks up to the last spoonful o' cream. He said he never had
+such a good time since he was born. I donno but he showed us _how_ to
+give a benefit, too.")
+
+We were crossing the lawn to Oldmoxon House when I said to Calliope what
+it had been decided that day that I should say:--
+
+"Calliope," I asked, "could you be ready in a month or two to leave
+Friendship for good, and come to us in town, and live with us for
+always?"
+
+She looked up at one and the other of us, with her little embarrassed
+laugh.
+
+"You're makin' fun o' me," she said.
+
+But when we had explained that we were wholly serious, she stopped and
+leaned against one of the great trees before the house; and it was at
+Oldmoxon House rather than at us that she looked as she answered:--
+
+"I couldn't," she said quickly, and with a manner of breathlessness, "I
+couldn't. You know how I've wanted to leave Friendship, too, you know
+that. An' I want to yet, as far as wantin' goes. But wantin' to mustn't
+be enough to make you do things."
+
+She stood, her head held up as if she were singing, as Liddy Ember had
+said of her, her arms tightly folded, her cheeks flushing with her fear
+that we would not understand.
+
+"Oh," she said, "you know--you _know_ how I've always wanted nice
+things. Wanted 'em so it hurt. Not just from likin' 'em, either, but
+because some way I thought I could _be_ more, _do_ more, live up to my
+biggest best if I could only get where things was kind of educated
+an'--gentle. But every time I tried to go, somethin' come up--like it
+will, to shove you hard down into the place you was. Then I thought--you
+know 'bout that, I guess--I thought I was goin' to live here in Oldmoxon
+House, an' hev a life like other women hev. An' when that wasn't to be,
+I thought mebbe it was because God see I wasn't fit for it, an' I set to
+work on myself to make me as good as I knew--an' I worked an' worked,
+like life was nothin' but me, an' I was nothin' but a cake, to get a
+good bake on an' die without bein' too much dough to me. An' then all to
+once I see that couldn't be the only thing He meant. It didn't seem like
+He could 'a' made me sole in order to save me from hell. An' I begun to
+see He must 'a' made me to help in some great, big hid plan or other of
+His. An' quick as I knew that an' begun wantin' to help, He begun
+showin' me when to. That's how I mean what I said about the Bell. Times
+like Elspie, or 'Leven, or like that, I can hear it just as plain as
+plain--the Bell, callin' me to help Him."
+
+She looked hard at us, and, "I donno if you know what I'm talkin'
+about----" she doubted; but, at our answer,
+
+"Well," she added, "they's somethin' else. It's somethin' almost like
+what you've got--you two--an' like what Delia an' Abel have got. Lately,
+I don't _need_ to hear the Bell any more. I know 'bout it without. It's
+almost like I _am_ the Bell. Don't you see, it's come to be my power,
+just like love will be your power, if you rilly understand. An'
+here--here I know how. I've grown to Friendship, an' here I know what's
+what. An' if I went away now, where things is gentle an' like in books,
+I wouldn't know how to be any rill use. I can _be_ the Bell here--here I
+can have my power. In town I expect I couldn't be anything but just cake
+again--bakin' myself rill good, or even gettin' frosted; but mebbe not
+helpin'. An' I couldn't risk that--I couldn't risk it. It looks to me
+like helpin' is what I'm for."
+
+I think, as she said, Calliope was become the Bell; and at that moment
+she rang to us the call of sovereign clearness. This was the life that
+she and Abel followed, and followed before all else, and there lay the
+hiding of their power. "Just like love will be your power," she had
+said.
+
+When she had gone before us into the house--that was to have been her
+house--we two stood looking along the sunny Plank Road toward Daphne
+Street. And in the light lifting of the bonfire smoke it seemed to me
+that there moved a spirit--not Daphne, but another; one who walks less
+in beauty than in service; not our lady of the laurels, but our lady of
+the thorns.
+
+
+
+
+GROSSET & DUNLAP'S
+
+DRAMATIZED NOVELS
+
+A Few that are Making Theatrical History
+
+
+MARY JANE'S PA. By Norman Way. Illustrated with scenes from the play.
+
+Delightful, irresponsible "Mary Jane's Pa" awakes one morning to find
+himself famous, and, genius being ill adapted to domestic joys, he
+wanders from home to work out his own unique destiny. One of the most
+humorous bits of recent fiction.
+
+
+CHERUB DEVINE. By Sewell Ford.
+
+"Cherub," a good hearted but not over refined young man is brought in
+touch with the aristocracy. Of sprightly wit, he is sometimes a
+merciless analyst, but he proves in the end that manhood counts for more
+than ancient lineage by winning the love of the fairest girl in the
+flock.
+
+
+A WOMAN'S WAY. By Charles Somerville. Illustrated with scenes from the
+play.
+
+A story in which a woman's wit and self-sacrificing love save her
+husband from the toils of an adventuress, and change an apparently
+tragic situation into one of delicious comedy.
+
+
+THE CLIMAX. By George C. Jenks.
+
+With ambition luring her on, a young choir soprano leaves the little
+village where she was born and the limited audience of St. Judo's to
+train for the opera in New York. She leaves love behind her and meets
+love more ardent but not more sincere in her new environment. How she
+works, how she studies, how she suffers, are vividly portrayed.
+
+
+A FOOL THERE WAS. By Porter Emerson Browne. Illustrated by Edmund
+Magrath and W. W. Fawcett.
+
+A relentless portrayal of the career of a man who comes under the
+influence of a beautiful but evil woman; how she lures him on and on,
+how he struggles, falls and rises, only to fall again into her net, make
+a story of unflinching realism.
+
+
+THE SQUAW MAN. By Julie Opp Faversham and Edwin Milton Royle.
+Illustrated with scenes from the play.
+
+A glowing story, rapid in action, bright in dialogue with a fine
+courageous hero and a beautiful English heroine.
+
+
+THE GIRL IN WAITING. By Archibald Eyre. Illustrated with scenes from the
+play.
+
+A droll little comedy of misunderstandings, told with a light touch, a
+venturesome spirit and an eye for human oddities.
+
+
+THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. By Baroness Orczy. Illustrated with scenes from
+the play.
+
+A realistic story of the days of the French Revolution, abounding in
+dramatic incident, with a young English soldier of fortune, daring,
+mysterious as the hero.
+
+
+Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Friendship Village, by Zona Gale
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Friendship Village, by Zona Gale
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Friendship Village
+
+Author: Zona Gale
+
+Release Date: September 17, 2008 [EBook #26644]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Garcia, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figright">
+<a href="images/cover.jpg"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt=""/></a>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="figleft">
+<a href="images/spine.jpg"><img src="images/spine.jpg" alt=""/></a>
+</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+<h1>FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE</h1>
+
+<h2>BY ZONA GALE</h2>
+
+<h3>AUTHOR OF "THE LOVES OF PELLEAS AND ETTARRE"</h3>
+
+
+
+<h4>NEW YORK<br />
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />
+1908</h4>
+
+<h4><i>All rights reserved</i></h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1908,<br />
+<span class="smcap">By</span> THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.</h4>
+
+
+<h4>Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1908.</h4>
+
+<h4><i>Norwood Press</i><br />
+<i>J. S. Cushing Co.&mdash;Berwick &amp; Smith Co.</i><br />
+<i>Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.</i></h4>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+<h4>To<br />
+EDITH, HARRIET, AND MUSA<br />
+AND THE TWO FOR WHOM IT COMES TOO LATE<br />
+GEORGIA AND HELEN<br />
+THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY INSCRIBED</h4>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>AUTHOR'S NOTE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Friendship Village is not known to me, nor are any of its people, save
+in the comradeship which I offer here. But I commend for occupancy a
+sweeter place. For us here the long Caledonia hills, the four rhythmic
+spans of the bridge, the nearer river, the island where the first birds
+build&mdash;these teach our windows the quiet and the opportunity of the
+"home town," among the "home people." To those who have such a bond to
+cherish I commend the little real home towns, their kindly, brooding
+companionship, their doors to an efficiency as intimate as that of fairy
+fingers. If there were shrines to these things, we would seek them. The
+urgency is to recognize shrines.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Portage, Wisconsin,</span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">September, 1908.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Certain of the following chapters have appeared in <i>The Outlook, The
+Broadway Magazine, The Delineator, Everybody's, and Harper's Monthly
+Magazine</i>. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous permission
+to reprint these chapters.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p>
+<a href="#I">I. <span class="smcap">The Side Door</span></a><br />
+<a href="#II">II. <span class="smcap">The D&eacute;but</span></a><br />
+<a href="#III">III. <span class="smcap">Nobody Sick, Nobody Poor</span></a><br />
+<a href="#IV">IV. <span class="smcap">Covers for Seven</span></a><br />
+<a href="#V">V. <span class="smcap">The Shadow of Good Things to Come</span></a><br />
+<a href="#VI">VI. <span class="smcap">Stock</span></a><br />
+<a href="#VII">VII. <span class="smcap">The Big Wind</span></a><br />
+<a href="#VIII">VIII. <span class="smcap">The Grandma Ladies</span></a><br />
+<a href="#IX">IX. <span class="smcap">Not as the World Giveth</span></a><br />
+<a href="#X">X. <span class="smcap">Lonesome&mdash;I</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XI">XI. <span class="smcap">Lonesome&mdash;II</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XII">XII. <span class="smcap">Of the Sky and Some Rosemary</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XIII">XIII. <span class="smcap">Top Floor Back</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XIV">XIV. <span class="smcap">An Epilogue</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XV">XV. <span class="smcap">The Tea Party</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XVI">XVI. <span class="smcap">What is That in thine Hand?</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XVII">XVII. <span class="smcap">Put on thy Beautiful Garments</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XVIII">XVIII. <span class="smcap">In the Wilderness a Cedar</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XIX">XIX. <span class="smcap">Herself</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XX">XX. <span class="smcap">The Hidings of Power</span></a><br /><br />
+<a href="#GROSSET_DUNLAPS">Other Books from GROSSET &amp; DUNLAP'S</a><br />
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>Friendship Village</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SIDE DOOR</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is as if Friendship Village were to say:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"There is no help for it. A telephone line, antique oak chairs, kitchen
+cabinets, a new doctor, and the like are upon us. But we shall be
+medi&aelig;val directly&mdash;we and our improvements. Really, we are so now, if
+you know how to look."</p>
+
+<p>And are we not so? We are one long street, rambling from sun to sun,
+inheriting traits of the parent country roads which we unite. And we are
+cross streets, members of the same family, properly imitative, proving
+our ancestorship in a primeval genius for trees, or bursting out in
+inexplicable weaknesses of Court-House, Engine-House, Town Hall, and
+Telephone Office. Ultimately our stock dwindles out in a slaughter-yard
+and a few detached houses of milkmen. The cemetery is delicately put
+behind us, under a hill. There is nothing medi&aelig;val in all this, one
+would say. But then see how we wear our rue:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>When one of us telephones, she will scrupulously ask for the number, not
+the name, for it says so at the top of every page. "Give me one-one,"
+she will put it, with an impersonality as fine as if she were calling
+for four figures. And Central will answer:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I just saw Mis' Holcomb go 'crost the street. I'll call you, if
+you want, when she comes back."</p>
+
+<p>Or, "I don't think you better ring the Helmans' just now. They were
+awake 'most all night with one o' Mis' Helman's attacks."</p>
+
+<p>Or, "Doctor June's invited to Mis' Sykes's for tea. Shall I give him to
+you there?"</p>
+
+<p>The telephone is modern enough. But in our use of it is there not a
+flavour as of an Elder Time, to be caught by Them of Many Years from
+Now? And already we may catch this flavour, as our Britain
+great-great-lady grandmothers, and more, may have been conscious of the
+old fashion of sitting in bowers. If only they were conscious like that!
+To be sure of it would be to touch their hands in the margins of the
+ballad books.</p>
+
+<p>Or we telephone to the Livery Barn and Boarding Stable for the little
+blacks, celebrated for their self-control in encounters with the
+Proudfits' motor-car. The stable-boy answers that the little blacks are
+at "the funeral." And after he has gone off to ask his employer what is
+in then, the employer, who in his unofficial moments is our neighbour,
+our church choir bass, our landlord even, comes and tells us that, after
+all, we may have the little blacks, and he himself brings them round at
+once,&mdash;the same little blacks that we meant all along. And when, quite
+naturally, we wonder at the boy's version, we learn: "Oh, why, the
+blacks was standin' just acrost the street, waitin' at the church door,
+hitched to the hearse. I took 'em out an' put in the bays. I says to
+myself: 'The corp won't care.'" Someway the Proudfits' car and the
+stable telephone must themselves have slipped from modernity to old
+fashion before that incident shall quite come into its own.</p>
+
+<p>So it is with certain of our domestic ways. For example, Mis' Postmaster
+Sykes&mdash;in Friendship Village every woman assumes for given name the
+employment of her husband&mdash;has some fine modern china and much solid
+silver in extremely good taste, so much, indeed, that she is wont to
+confess to having cleaned forty, or sixty, or seventy-five
+pieces&mdash;"seventy-five pieces of solid silver have I cleaned this
+morning. You can say what you want to, nice things are a <i>rill</i> care."
+Yet&mdash;surely this is the proper conjunction&mdash;Mis' Sykes is currently
+reported to rise in the night preceding the days of her house cleaning,
+and to take her carpets out in the back yard, and there softly to sweep
+and sweep them so that, at their official cleaning next day, the
+neighbours may witness how little dirt is whipped out on the line. Ought
+she not to have old-fashioned silver and egg-shell china and drop-leaf
+mahogany to fit the practice? Instead of daisy and wild-rose patterns in
+"solid," and art curtains, and mission chairs, and a white-enamelled
+refrigerator, and a gas range.</p>
+
+<p>We have the latest funeral equipment,&mdash;black broadcloth-covered
+supports, a coffin carriage for up-and-down the aisles, natural palms to
+order, and the pulleys to "let them down slow"; and yet our individual
+funeral capacity has been such that we can tell what every woman who has
+died in Friendship for years has "done without": Mis' Grocer Stew, her
+of all folks, had done without new-style flat-irons; Mis' Worth had used
+the bread pan to wash dishes in; Mis' Jeweller Sprague&mdash;the <i>first</i> Mis'
+Sprague&mdash;had had only six bread and butter knives, her that could get
+wholesale too.... And we have little maid-servants who answer our bells
+in caps and trays, so to say; but this savour of jestership is
+authentic, for any one of them is likely to do as of late did Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss's maid,&mdash;answer, at dinner-with-guests, that
+there were no more mashed potatoes, "<i>or else</i>, there won't be any left
+to warm up for your breakfasts." ... And though we have our daily
+newspaper, receiving Associated Press service, yet, as Mis' Amanda
+Toplady observed, it is "only <i>very</i> lately that they have mentioned in
+the <i>Daily</i> the birth of a child, or anything that had anything of a
+<i>tang</i> to it."</p>
+
+<p>We put new wine in old bottles, but also we use new bottles to hold our
+old wine. For, consider the name of our main street: is this Main or
+Clark or Cook or Grand Street, according to the register of the main
+streets of towns? Instead, for its half-mile of village life, the Plank
+Road, macadamized and arc-lighted, is called Daphne Street. Daphne
+Street! I love to wonder why. Did our dear Doctor June's father name it
+when he set the five hundred elms and oaks which glorify us? Or did
+Daphne herself take this way on the day of her flight, so that when they
+came to draught the town, they recognized that it <i>was</i> Daphne Street,
+and so were spared the trouble of naming it? Or did the Future
+anonymously toss us back the suggestion, thrifty of some day of her own
+when she might remember us and say, "<i>Daphne Street!</i>" Already some of
+us smile with a secret nod at something when we direct a stranger, "You
+will find the Telegraph and Cable Office two blocks down, on Daphne
+Street." "The Commercial Travellers' House, the Abigail Arnold Home
+Bakery, the Post-office and Armoury are in the same block on Daphne
+Street." Or, "The Electric Light Office is at the corner of Dunn and
+Daphne." It is not wonderful that Daphne herself, foreseeing these
+things, did not stay, but lifted her laurels somewhat nearer
+Tempe,&mdash;although there are those of us who like to fancy that she is
+here all the time in our Daphne-street magic: the fire bell, the tulip
+beds, and the twilight bonfires. For how else, in all reason, has the
+name persisted?</p>
+
+<p>Of late a new doctor has appeared&mdash;one may say, has abounded: a surgeon
+who, such is his zeal, will almost perform an operation over the
+telephone and, we have come somewhat cynically to believe, would prefer
+doing so to not operating at all. As Calliope Marsh puts it:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"He is great on operations, that little doctor. Let him go into any
+house, an' some o' the family, seems though, has to be operated on,
+usually inside o' twelve hours. It'll get so that as soon as he strikes
+the front porch, they'll commence sterilizin' water. I donno but some'll
+go an' put on the tea-kettle if they even see him drive past."</p>
+
+<p><i>Why</i> within twelve hours, we wonder when we hear the edict? Why never
+fourteen hours, or six? How does it happen that no matter at what stage
+of the malady the new doctor is called, the patient always has to be
+operated on within twelve hours? Is it that everybody has a bunch and
+goes about not knowing it until he appears? Or is he a kind of basanite
+for bunches, and do they come out on us at the sight of him? There are
+those of us who almost hesitate to take his hand, fearing that he will
+fix us with his eye, point somewhere about, and tell us, "Within twelve
+hours, <i>if</i> you want your life your own." But in spite of his skill and
+his modernity, in our midst there persist those who, in a scientific
+night, would die rather than risk our advantages.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the New shoulders the Old, and our transition is still swift enough
+to be a spectacle, as was its earlier phase which gave over our Middle
+West to cabins and plough horses, with a tendency away from wigwams and
+bob-whites. And in this local warfare between Old and New a chief figure
+is Calliope Marsh&mdash;who just said that about the new doctor. She is a
+little rosy wrinkled creature officially&mdash;though no other than
+officially&mdash;pertaining to sixty years; mender of lace, seller of
+extracts, and music teacher, but of the three she thinks of the last as
+her true vocation. ("I come honestly by that," she says. "You know my
+father before me was rill musical. I was babtized Calliope because a
+circus with one come through the town the day't I was born.") And with
+her, too, the grafting of to-morrow upon yesterday is unconscious; or
+only momentarily conscious, as when she phrased it:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Land, land, I like New as well as anybody. But I want it should be put
+in the Old kind o' gentle, like an <i>i</i>-dee in your mind, an' not sudden,
+like a bullet in your brain."</p>
+
+<p>In her acceptance of innovations Calliope symbolizes the fine Friendship
+tendency to scientific procedure, to the penetration of the unknown
+through the known, the explication of mystery by natural law. And when
+to the bright-figured paper and pictures of her little sitting room she
+had added a print of the Mona Lisa, she observed:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"She sort o' lifts me up, like somethin' I've thought of, myself. But I
+don't see any sense in raisin' a question about what her smile means. I
+told the agent so. 'Whenever I set for my photograph,' I says to him, 'I
+always have that same silly smile on my face.'"</p>
+
+<p>With us all the Friendship idea prevails: we accept what Progress sends,
+but we regard it in our own fashion. Our improvements, like our
+entertainments, our funerals, our holidays, and our very loves, are but
+Friendship Village exponents of the modern spirit. Perhaps, in a
+tenderer significance than she meant, Calliope characterized us when she
+said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"This town is more like a back door than a front&mdash;or, givin' it full
+credit, <i>anyhow</i>, it's no more'n a side door, with no vines."</p>
+
+<p>For indeed, we are a kind of middle door to experience, minus the fuss
+of official arriving and, too, without the old odours of the kitchen
+savoury beds; but having, instead, a serene side-door existence,
+partaking of both electric bells and of neighbours with shawls pinned
+over their heads.</p>
+
+<p>Only at one point Calliope was wrong. There are vines, with tendrils and
+flowers and many birds.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>THE D&Eacute;BUT</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mrs. Ricker, "washens, scrubben, work by the day or Our," as the sign of
+her own lettering announced, had come into a little fortune by the death
+of her first husband, Al Kitton, early divorced and late repentant. Just
+before my arrival in Friendship she had bought a respectable frame house
+in the heart of the village,&mdash;for a village will have a heart instead of
+having a boulevard,&mdash;and with her daughter Emerel she had set up a
+modest establishment with Ingrain carpets and parlour pieces, and a bit
+of grass in front. Thus Emerel Kitton&mdash;we, in our simple, penultimate
+way, called it Kitten&mdash;became a kind of heiress. She had been christened
+Emma Ella, but her mother, of her love of order, had tidied the name to
+Emerel, and Friendship had adopted the form, perhaps as having about it
+something pleasing and jewel-like. Though Emerel was in the thirties at
+the time of her inheritance, she was still pretty, shy, conformable; and
+yet there was no disguising that she was nearly a spinster when, as soon
+as the white house was settled, Mrs. Ricker issued invitations to her
+daughter's coming-out party.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">You aRe Invite<br /></span>
+<span class="i7">to A<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Comen Out Recep<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Next wenesday Night at eigt<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">At Her Home<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><span class="smcap">Emma Ella Kitton</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Mrs. Ricker and Kitton</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Pa<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>the invitations said, and the "Pa" was divined to imply "Please answer."</p>
+
+<p>"It's Kitton's money an' it's his daughter. I hed to hev him in it
+somehow," Mrs. Ricker explained her double signature. "You see," she
+added, "up till now I ain't never been situate' so's Emerel <i>could</i> come
+out. I've always wanted to give her things, too, but 't seems like when
+I've tried, everything's shook its fist at me. It ain't too late. Emerel
+looks just like she did fifteen years ago, don't she?"</p>
+
+<p>It was at once observed that if Emerel shared her mother's enthusiasm
+for the project, she did not betray it. But then no one knew much about
+Emerel save that she was engaged, and had been so for some years, to big
+Abe Daniel, the Methodist tenor, a circumstance wholly unconsidered in
+the scheme of her d&eacute;but.</p>
+
+<p>Quite simply and with happy pride, Mrs. Ricker and Kitton issued her
+invitations to every one in the village who had ever employed her. And
+the village was divided against itself.</p>
+
+<p>"How can we?" Mis' Postmaster Sykes demanded, "I ask you. There's things
+to omit an' there's things to observe. We should be The Laughing Stock."</p>
+
+<p>"The Laughing Stock," variously echoed her followers.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Land, o' course we'll all go," Mis' Amanda Toplady comfortably settled
+it, "an' take Emerel a deboo present, civilized. The dear child."</p>
+
+<p>And to that many of us gladly assented, Timothy, big Amanda's little
+husband, going so far as to add:</p>
+
+<p>"I do vum, the Sykeses feels the post-office like it was that much
+oats."</p>
+
+<p>A day later Timothy's opinion seemed, he thought, to be verified. Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes issued "written invites to an evening party, hot supper
+and like that," as Friendship communicated it, to be given on the very
+night of Emerel's d&eacute;but.</p>
+
+<p>Friendship was shaken. Never in the history of the village had two
+social affairs been set for the same hour. Indeed, more than one hostess
+had postponed an impending tea-party or thimble party or "afternoon
+coffee" or "five o'clock supper" on hearing that another was planned for
+the same day. And now, when there were those of us anxious to "do
+something nice" for hard-working little Mrs. Ricker, the Sykeses had
+deliberately sought the forbidden ground. And Society dare not deny Mis'
+Sykes, for besides "being who she was" ("She's the leader in Friendship
+if they <i>is</i> a leader," we said, emphatically implying that there was
+none), she kept two maids,&mdash;little young thing and a <i>rill</i> hired
+girl,&mdash;entertained "above the most," put out her sewing and wore, we
+kept in the back of our minds, a bar pin, solid, with "four solitaires"
+in it. And, "Oh, you know," Calliope Marsh admitted to me later, "Mis'
+Sykes is rilly a great society woman. They isn't anybody's funeral that
+she don't get to ride to the cemet'ry."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ricker and Kitton accepted the situation with fine philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," she said, "the whole town can dance to the Sykeses'
+fiddlin' if they want. But it's a pretty pass if they do let anybody
+step in before me that's washed for 'em an' cleaned their houses years
+on end."</p>
+
+<p>My own course was pleasantly simple. Mrs. Ricker and Kitton had included
+me on her list, accredited, no doubt, because a few weeks earlier she
+had helped me to settle my belongings in Oldmoxon house, and since then
+had twice swept for me, and was to come in a day or two to do so again.
+As I had instantly accepted her invitation, I had no choice when Mis'
+Sykes's "written invite" came, even though when it arrived Mis' Sykes
+herself was calling on me.</p>
+
+<p>"Well said," she observed, when she saw a neighbour's little girl, her
+temporary servitor, coming up my walk with the invitations in a paper
+bag to be kept clean, "I meant to get my call made on you before your
+invite got here. I hope you'll overlook taking us both together. I've
+meant to call on you before, but I declare it looked like a mountain to
+me to get started out. Don't you find your calls a rill chore?"</p>
+
+<p>But Mis' Sykes's visit was, she confessed, "Errand as well as Call."</p>
+
+<p>"The Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality," she told
+me, as she rose to go, "is to our wits' end to get up a new
+entertainment. We want to give something, and we want it should be rill
+new and spicey, but of course it has to be pretty quiet, owing to the
+Cause&mdash;the Dead, so. It bars us from home-talent evenings or festivals
+or like that. And the minute I saw the inside o' your house it come to
+me: of course you know your house is differ'nt from Friendship. If I'd
+been shot out of a gun into it, I wouldn't 'a' sensed I was in
+Friendship at all. You've got nice things, all carved an' hard to dust.
+The Oldmoxons use' to do a lot o' entertainin', an' everybody remembers
+it, an' the house has been shut quite some time. Well, now, you've been
+ask' to join the Sodality. An' if you was to announce an Evening Benefit
+for it, here in your home, the whole town'd come out to it hot-foot.
+We're owin' Zittelhof on Eph Cadoza's coffin yet, an' I shouldn't wonder
+an' that one evening would pay him all off <i>and</i>, same time, get you
+rill well acquainted. Don't you think it's a nice <i>i</i>-dea?"</p>
+
+<p>As I had come to Friendship chiefly to get away from everywhere, I
+thought that I had never heard such a bad plan. But inasmuch as I was
+obliged to refuse outright one invitation of my visitor's, about the
+other I weakly temporized and promised to let her know. And she went
+away, deploring my hasty acceptance of Mrs. Ricker and Kitton, although,
+"How could you tell?" she strove to excuse me. "A person coming to a
+strange town so, <i>of course</i> they accept all their invitations good
+faith. And then her signing her name that way might mislead you. It
+gives a rill sensation of a hyphen. But still, the spelling&mdash;after all
+you'd ought&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at me with tardy suspicion.</p>
+
+<p>"Some geniuses can't spell very well, you know," I defended my
+discrimination.</p>
+
+<p>"That's so," she admitted brightly; "I see you're literary."</p>
+
+<p>The next morning the other principal, Mrs. Ricker and Kitton, arrived to
+keep her engagement with me. She was a little woman, suggesting wire,
+which gave and sprang when she moved, and paper, which crackled when she
+laughed. Her speech was all independence, confidence, self-possession;
+but in her silences I have seldom seen so wistful a face as hers.</p>
+
+<p>In response to my question:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," Mrs. Ricker and Kitton said brightly, "everything's goin' fine. I
+s'pose the town's still decidin' between us, but up to now I ain't had
+but one regrets that can't come&mdash;that's Mis' Stew. She wrote it was on
+account o' domestic affliction, an' I hadn't heard what, so I went right
+down. 'Seems nobody had died&mdash;she ain't much of any family, anyway. But
+she'd wrote her letter out of a letter book, an' the only one she could
+find regrettin' an invite give domestic affliction for the reason. She
+said she didn't know a letter like that hed to be true, an' I don't know
+as it does, either."</p>
+
+<p>She stood silent for a moment, searching my face.</p>
+
+<p>"Look-a-here," she said; "they's somethin' I thought of. Mebbe you've
+heard of it bein' done in the City somewheres. Do you s'pose folks'd be
+willin' to send Emerel's an' my funeral flowers to the comin' out party
+<i>instead</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Funeral...?" I doubted.</p>
+
+<p>"Grave flowers," she explained. "You know, they're a perfect waste so
+far's the General Dead is concerned. An' land knows, the fam'ly don't
+sense 'em much more. Anyway, Emerel an' I ain't got any fam'ly. An' if
+folks'd be willin' to send us what flowers they would send us if we died
+<i>now</i>, then they'd do us some good. We'll never want 'em more'n we do
+now, dead or alive. 'Least, I won't. Emerel, she don't seem to care. But
+do you think it'd be all right if I was to mention it out around?"</p>
+
+<p>My desire to have this happen I did my best not to confuse with a
+disinterested opinion. But indeed Mrs. Ricker and Kitton was seldom in
+need of an opinion, as was proved that night by the appearance of this
+notice in the Friendship <i>Daily</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>All that would give flowers when dead please send same anyhow and
+not expected to send same if we do die afterwards.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Ricker and Kitton.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>All of Friendship society which intended to accept Mis' Sykes's
+invitation hastened with relieved eagerness to follow with flowers its
+regrets to the "comen out recep." For every one was genuinely attached
+to the little laundress and interested in her welfare&mdash;up to the point
+of sacrificing social interests in the eyes of the Sykeses. Friendship
+gardens were rich with Autumn, cosmos and salvia and opulent asters, and
+on the morning of the two parties this store of sweetness was rifled for
+the d&eacute;butante. By noon Mrs. Ricker and Kitton was saying in awe, "Nobody
+in Friendship ever had this many flowers, dead, or alive, or rich." And
+although some of us grieved that Mis' Postmaster Sykes had shown what
+she named her good-will by ordering from the town a pillow of white
+carnations (but with no "wording"), Mrs. Ricker and Kitton received even
+this suggestive token with simple-hearted delight.</p>
+
+<p>"It'll look lovely on the lamp shelf," she observed. "I've often planned
+how nice my parlour'd trim up for a funeral."</p>
+
+<p>In the preparation for the two events, the one unconcerned and
+unconsulted appeared to be the d&eacute;butante herself. We never said
+"Emerel's party"; we all said "Mis' Ricker's party." We knew that Mrs.
+Ricker and Kitton was putting painstaking care on Emerel's coming-out
+dress, which was to be a surprise, but otherwise Emerel was seldom even
+mentioned in connection with her d&eacute;but. And whenever we saw her, it was
+as Friendship had seen her for two years,&mdash;walking quietly with Abe
+Daniel, her betrothed.</p>
+
+<p>"It's doin' things kind o' backwards," Calliope Marsh said, "engaged
+first an' comin' out in society afterwards. But I donno as it's any more
+backwards than ridin' to the cemet'ry feet first. What's what all
+depends on what you agree on for What. If it ain't your soul you mean
+about," she added cryptically.</p>
+
+<p>The Topladys and others of us who united to uphold Emerel, and
+especially to uphold Emerel's mother, could not but realize that the
+majority of Friendship society had regretted to decline the d&eacute;but party,
+and had been pleased to accept the hospitality of the Postmaster
+Sykeses. I dare say that this may have been partly why, in the usual
+self-indulgence of challenge, I put on my prettiest frock for the party
+and prepared to set out somewhat early, hoping for the amusement of
+sharing in the finishing touches. But as I was leaving my house Calliope
+Marsh arrived, buttoned tightly in her best gray henrietta, her cheeks
+hot with some intense excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she said without preface, "they've done it. Emerel Kitton's
+married. She's just married Abe at the parsonage to get out o' bein'
+debooed. They've gone to take the train now."</p>
+
+<p>No one could fail to see what this would mean to Mrs. Ricker and Kitton,
+and, rather than the newly married Emerel, it was she who absorbed our
+speculation.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Ricker just slimpsed," Calliope told me. "I says to her: 'Look
+here, Mis' Ricker, don't you go givin' in. Your kitchen's a sight with
+the good things o' your hand&mdash;think o' that,' I told her; 'think how you
+mortgaged your very funeral for to-night, an' brace yourself up,' An'
+she says, awful pitiful: 'I <i>can't</i>, Calliope,' she says. ''T seems like
+this slips the pins right out. They ain't nothin' to deboo with now,
+anyway,' she told me. 'How can I?'"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, poor Mrs. Ricker!" I exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope looked at me intently.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she said, "that's what I run in about. You're a stranger just
+fresh come here. You ain't met folks much yet. An' Mis' Sykes, she's
+just crazy to get a-hold o' you an' your house for the Sodality. An' the
+only thing I could think of for Mis' Ricker&mdash;well, would you stand up
+with Mis' Ricker to-night an' shake all their hands? An' sort o' leave
+her deboo for <i>you</i>, you might say?"</p>
+
+<p>I think that I loved Calliope for this even before she understood my
+assent. But she added something which puzzled me.</p>
+
+<p>"If I was you," she observed, "I'd do somethin' else to-night, too. You
+could do it&mdash;or I could do it for you. You don't expect to let Mis'
+Sykes hev the Sodality here, do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I might have had it here," I said impulsively, "if she had not done
+this to poor little Mrs. Ricker."</p>
+
+<p>"Would&mdash;would you give me the lief to say that?" Calliope asked
+demurely.</p>
+
+<p>I had no objection in the world to any one knowing my opinion of Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes's proceeding,&mdash;"one of her preposterousnesses,"
+Calliope called it,&mdash;and I said so, and set off for Mrs. Ricker's, while
+Calliope herself flew somewhere else on some last mission. And, "Mis'
+Sykes'd ought to be showed," she called to me over-shoulder. "That
+woman's got a sinful pride. She'd wear fur in August to prove she could
+afford to hev moths!"</p>
+
+<p>The Ricker parlour was a garden which sloped gently, as a garden should,
+for the house was old and the parlour floor sagged toward the entrance
+so that the front of the organ was propped on wooden blocks. The room
+was bedizened with flowers, in dishes, tins, and gallon jars, so that it
+seemed some way an alien thing, like a prune horse. On the lamp shelf
+was the huge white carnation pillow, across which the hostess had
+inscribed "welcom," in stems.</p>
+
+<p>Within ten minutes of the appointed hour all those who had been pleased
+to accept were in the rooms, and Mrs. Ricker and Kitton and I, standing
+among the funeral flowers, received the guests while Calliope, hovering
+at the door, gave the key with: "Ain't you heard? Emerel's a bride
+instead of a debbytant. Ain't it a rill joke? Married to-night an' we're
+here to celebrate. Throw off your things." Then she hopelessly involved
+them in a presentation to me, and between us we contrived to elide Mrs.
+Ricker and Kitton from all save her perfunctory office, until her voice
+and lips ceased their trembling. Poor little hostess, in her starched
+lawn which had seemed to her adequate for her unpretentious r&ocirc;le of
+mother! All her humour and independence and self-possession had left
+her, and in their stead, on what was to have been her great night, had
+settled only the immemorial wistfulness.</p>
+
+<p>Although I did not then foresee it, the guests that evening were
+destined to point me to many meanings, like sketches in the note-book of
+a patient Pen. I am fond of remembering them as I saw them first: the
+Topladys, that great Mis' Amanda, ponderous, majestic, and suggesting
+black grosgrain, her beaming way of whole-hearted approval not quite
+masking the critical, house-wife glances which she continually cast; and
+little Timothy, her husband, who, in company, went quite out of his head
+and could think of nothing to say save "Blisterin' Benson, what I think
+is this: ain't everything movin' off nice?" Dear Doctor June, pastor
+emeritus of Friendship, since he was so identified with all the village
+interests that not many could tell from what church he had retired. (At
+each of the three Friendship churches he rented a pew, and contributed
+impartially to their beneficences; and, "seems to me the Lord would of,"
+he sometimes apologized for this.) Photographer Jimmy Sturgis, who stood
+about with one eye shut, and who drove the 'bus, took charge of the
+mail-bags, conducted a photograph gallery, and painted portraits. ("The
+Dead From Photos a specialty," was tacked on the risers of the stairs
+leading to his studio.) And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, who was an
+invalid and "very, very seldom got out." (Not, I was to learn, an
+invalid because of ill health, but by nature. She was an invalid as
+other people are blond or brunette, and no more to be said about it.)
+Miss Liddy Ember, the village seamstress, and her beautiful sister
+Ellen, who was "not quite right," and whom Miss Liddy took about and
+treated like a child until the times when Ellen "come herself again,"
+and then she quite overshadowed in personality little busy Miss Liddy.
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and Eppleby Holcomb, and the "Other"
+Holcombs; Mis' Doctor Helman, the Gekerjecks, who "kept the drug store,"
+and scented the world with musk and essences. ("Musk on one handkerchief
+and some kind o' flower scent on your other one," Mis' Gekerjeck was
+wont to say, "then you can suit everybody, say who who will.")&mdash;These
+and the others Mrs. Ricker and Kitton and I received, standing before
+the white carnation pillow. And I, who had come to Friendship to get
+away from everywhere, found myself the one to whom they did honour, as
+they were to have honoured Emerel.</p>
+
+<p>When the hour for supper came, Mrs. Ricker and Kitton excused herself
+because she must "see to gettin' it on to the plates," and Mis' Toplady,
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, Calliope, and I "handed." We had all
+lent silver and dishes&mdash;indeed, save at Mis' Sykes's (and of course at
+the Proudfits' of Proudfit estate), there is rarely a Friendship party
+at which the pantries of the guests are not represented, an arrangement
+seeming almost to hold in anticipation certain social and political
+ideals. (If the telephone yields us an invitation from those whom we
+know best, we always answer: "Thank you. I will. What do you want me to
+send over?" Is there such a matter-of-course federation on any
+boulevard?) And after the guests had been served and the talk had been
+resumed, we four who had "handed" sat down, with Mrs. Ricker and Kitton,
+at meat, at a corner of the kitchen table.</p>
+
+<p>"Everything tastes like so much chips to me when I hev company, anyhow,"
+the hostess said sadly, "but to-night it's got the regular salt-pork
+taste. When I'm nervous or got delegates or comin' down with anything, I
+always taste salt pork."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, everything's all of a whirl to me," Calliope confessed, "an' I
+should think your brains, Mis' Ricker, 'd be fair rarin' 'round in your
+head."</p>
+
+<p>"Who didn't eat what?" Mrs. Ricker and Kitton asked listlessly. "I meant
+to keep track when the plates come out, but I didn't. Did they all take
+a-hold rill good?"</p>
+
+<p>"They wa'n't any mincin' 't <i>I</i> see," Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss
+assured her. "Everything you had was lovely, an' everybody made 'way
+with all they got."</p>
+
+<p>We might have kept indefinitely on at these fascinating comparisons, but
+some unaccountable stir and bustle and rise of talk in the other rooms
+persuaded our attention. ("Can they be goin' <i>home</i>?" cried that great
+Mis' Amanda Toplady. "If they are, I'll go bail Timothy Toplady started
+it." And, "I bet they've broke the finger bowl," Mrs. Ricker and Kitton
+prophesied darkly.) And then we all went in to see what had happened,
+but it was what none of us could possibly have forecast: Crowding in the
+parlour, overflowing into the sitting room, still entering from the
+porch, were Postmaster and Mis' Postmaster Sykes and <i>all</i> their guests.</p>
+
+<p>It was quite as if Wishes had gathered head and spirited them there. I
+remember the white little face of Mrs. Ricker and Kitton, luminously
+gratified to the point of triumph; and Mis' Sykes's brisk and cordial
+"No reason why we shouldn't go to two receptions in an evening, like
+they do in the City, Mis' Ricker, is they?" And the aplomb of the
+hostess's self-respecting, corrective "<i>An'</i> Kitton. 'Count of Al bein'
+so thoughtful in death." And then to my amazement Mis' Postmaster Sykes
+turned to me and held out both hands.</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>am</i> so <i>glad</i>," she said, almost in the rhythm of certain exhausts,
+"that you've decided to hev Sodality at your house. You must just let me
+take a-hold of it for you and <i>run</i> it. And I'm going to propose your
+name the very next meeting we hev, can't I?"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I walked home with Calliope when we had left Mrs. Ricker and Kitton,
+tired but triumphant. ("Land," the hostess said, "now it's turned out so
+nice, I donno but I'm rill pleased Emerel's married. I'd hate to think
+o' borrowin' all them things over again for a weddin'.") And in the dark
+street Calliope said to me:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You see what I done, I guess. I told you Mis' Sykes was reg'lar
+up-in-arms about usin' your house&mdash;though I think the rill reason is she
+wants to get upstairs in it. You know how some are. So I marched myself
+up there before the party, an' I told her you wasn't goin' to hev
+Sodality sole because you thought she'd been so mean to Mis' Ricker. An'
+I give her to understand sharp off 't she'd better do what she did do if
+she wanted you in the Sodality at all. 'An',' s'I, 'I donno what she'll
+think o' you anyway, not knowin' enough to go to two companies in one
+evenin', like the City, even if one is your own.' She see reason. You
+know, Mis' Sykes an' I are kind o' connections, but you can make even
+your relations see sense if you go at 'em right. I donno," Calliope
+ended doubtfully, "but I done wrong. An' yet I feel good friends with my
+backbone too, like I'd done right!"</p>
+
+<p>And it was so that having come to Friendship Village to get away from
+everywhere, I yet found myself abruptly launched in its society,
+committed to its Sodality, and, best of all, friends with Calliope
+Marsh.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>NOBODY SICK, NOBODY POOR</h3>
+
+
+<p>Two days before Thanksgiving the air was already filled with white
+turkey feathers, and I stood at a window and watched until the
+loneliness of my still house seemed like something pointing a mocking
+finger at me. When I could bear it no longer I went out in the snow, and
+through the soft drifts I fought my way up the Plank Road toward the
+village.</p>
+
+<p>I had almost passed the little bundled figure before I recognized
+Calliope. She was walking in the middle of the road, as in Friendship we
+all walk in winter; and neither of us had umbrellas. I think that I
+distrust people who put up umbrellas on a country road in a fall of
+friendly flakes.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of inquiring perfunctorily how I did, she greeted me with a
+fragment of what she had been thinking&mdash;which is always as if one were
+to open a door of his mind to you instead of signing you greeting from a
+closed window.</p>
+
+<p>"I just been tellin' myself," she looked up to say without preface,
+"that if I could see one more good old-fashion' Thanksgivin', life'd
+sort o' smooth out. An' land knows, it needs some smoothin' out for me."</p>
+
+<p>With this I remember that it was as if my own loneliness spoke for me.
+At my reply Calliope looked at me quickly&mdash;as if I, too, had opened a
+door.</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes Thanksgivin' <i>is</i> some like seein' the sun shine when you're
+feelin' rill rainy yourself," she said thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>She held out her blue-mittened hand and let the flakes fall on it in
+stars and coronets.</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder," she asked evenly, "if you'd help me get up a Thanksgivin'
+dinner for a few poor sick folks here in Friendship?"</p>
+
+<p>In order to keep my self-respect, I recall that I was as ungracious as
+possible. I think I said that the day meant so little to me that I was
+willing to do anything to avoid spending it alone. A statement which
+seems to me now not to bristle with logic.</p>
+
+<p>"That's nice of you," Calliope replied genially. Then she hesitated,
+looking down Daphne Street, which the Plank Road had become, toward
+certain white houses. There were the homes of Mis' Mayor Uppers, Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and the Liberty sisters,&mdash;all substantial
+dignified houses, typical of the simple prosperity of the countryside.</p>
+
+<p>"The only trouble," she added simply, "is that in Friendship I don't
+know of a soul rill sick, nor a soul what you might call poor."</p>
+
+<p>At this I laughed, unwillingly enough. Dear Calliope! Here indeed was a
+drawback to her project.</p>
+
+<p>"Honestly," she said reflectively, "Friendship can't seem to do anything
+like any other town. When the new minister come here, he give out he was
+goin' to do settlement work. An' his second week in the place he come to
+me with a reg'lar hang-dog look. 'What kind of a town is this?' he says
+to me, disgusted. 'They ain't nobody sick in it an' they ain't nobody
+poor!' I guess he could 'a' got along without the poor&mdash;most of us can.
+But we mostly like to hev a few sick to carry the flowers off our house
+plants to, an' now an' then a tumbler o' jell. An' yet I've known weeks
+at a time when they wasn't a soul rill flat down sick in Friendship.
+It's so now. An' that's hard, when you're young an' enthusiastic, like
+the minister."</p>
+
+<p>"But where are you going to find your guests then, Calliope?" I asked
+curiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she said brightly, "I was just plannin' as you come up with me.
+An' I says to myself: 'God give me to live in a little bit of a place
+where we've all got enough to get along on, an' Thanksgivin' finds us
+all in health. It looks like He'd afflicted us by lettin' us hev nobody
+to do for.' An' then it come to me that if we was to get up the
+dinner,&mdash;with all the misery an' hunger they is in the world,&mdash;God in
+His goodness would let some of it come our way to be fed. 'In the
+wilderness a cedar,' you know&mdash;as Liddy Ember an' I was always tellin'
+each other when we kep' shop together. An' so to-day I said to myself
+I'd go to work an' get up the dinner an' trust there'd be eaters for
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Calliope," I said, "Calliope!"</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't got much to do with, myself," she added apologetically;
+"the most I've got in my sullar, I guess, is a gallon jar o'
+watermelon pickles. I could give that. You don't think it sounds
+irreverent&mdash;connectin' God with a big dinner, so?" she asked anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>And, at my reply:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then," she said briskly, "let's step in an' see a few folks that
+might be able to tell us of somebody to do for. Let's ask Mis' Mayor
+Uppers an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, an' the Liberty girls."</p>
+
+<p>Because I was lonely and idle, and because I dreaded inexpressibly going
+back to my still house, I went with her. Her ways were a kind of
+entertainment, and I remember that I believed my leisure to be infinite.</p>
+
+<p>We turned first toward the big shuttered house of Mis' Mayor Uppers, to
+whom, although her husband had been a year ago removed from office,
+discredited, and had not since been seen in Friendship, we yet gave her
+old proud title, as if she had been Former Lady Mayoress. For the
+present mayor, Authority Hubblethwaite, was, as Calliope said,
+"unconnect'."</p>
+
+<p>I watched Mis' Uppers in some curiosity while Calliope explained that
+she was planning a dinner for the poor and sick,&mdash;"the lame and the sick
+that's comfortable enough off to eat,"&mdash;and could she suggest some poor
+and sick to ask? Mis' Uppers was like a vinegar cruet of mine, slim and
+tall, with a little grotesquely puckered face for a stopper, as if the
+whole known world were sour.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure," she said humbly, "it's a nice i-dea. But I declare, I'm put
+to it to suggest. We ain't got nobody sick nor nobody poor in
+Friendship, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you know of anybody kind o' hard up? Or somebody that, if they
+ain't down sick, feels sort o' spindlin'?" Calliope asked anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Uppers thought, rocking a little and running a pin in and out of a
+fold of her skirt.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said at length, "I don't know a soul. I think the church'd
+give a good deal if a real poor family'd come here to do for. Since the
+Cadozas went, we ain't known which way to look for poor. Mis' Ricker
+gettin' her fortune so puts her beyond the wolf. An' Peleg Bemus, you
+can't <i>get</i> him to take anything. No, I don't know of anybody real
+decently poor."</p>
+
+<p>"An' nobody sick?" Calliope pressed her wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, there's Mis' Crawford," admitted Mis' Uppers; "she had a spell o'
+lumbago two weeks ago, but I see her pass the house to-day. Mis' Brady
+was laid up with toothache, too, but the <i>Daily</i> last night said she'd
+had it out. An' Mis' Doctor Helman did have one o' her stomach attacks
+this week, an' Elzabella got out her dyin' dishes an' her dyin' linen
+from the still-room&mdash;you know how Mis' Doctor always brings out her nice
+things when she's sick, so't if she should die an' the neighbours come
+in, it'd all be shipshape. But she got better this time an' helped put
+'em back. I declare it's hard to get up anything in the charity line
+here."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope sat smiling a little, and I knew that it was because of her
+secret certainty that "some o' the hunger" would come her way, to be
+fed.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't help thinkin'," she said quietly, "that we'll find somebody.
+An' I tell you what: if we do, can I count on you to help some?"</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Mayor Uppers flushed with quick pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>"Me, Calliope?" she said. And I remembered that they had told me how the
+Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality had been unable
+to tempt Mis' Uppers to a single meeting since the mayor ran away. "Oh,
+but I couldn't though," she said wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>"No need to go to the table if you don't want," Calliope told her. "Just
+bake up somethin' for us an' bring it over. Make a couple o' your cherry
+pies&mdash;did you get hold of any cherries to put up this year? Well, a
+couple o' your cherry pies an' a batch o' your nice drop sponge cakes,"
+she directed. "Could you?"</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Mayor Uppers looked up with a kind of light in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes," she said, "I could, I guess. I'll bake 'em Thanksgivin'
+mornin'. I&mdash;I was wonderin' how I'd put in the day."</p>
+
+<p>When we stepped out in the snow again, Calliope's face was shining.
+Sometimes now, when my faith is weak in any good thing, I remember her
+look that November morning. But all that I thought then was how I was
+being entertained that lonely day.</p>
+
+<p>The dear Liberty sisters were next, Lucy and Viny and Libbie Liberty. We
+went to the side door,&mdash;there were houses in Friendship whose front
+doors we tacitly understood that we were never expected to use,&mdash;and we
+found the sisters down cellar, with shawls over their heads, feeding
+their hens through the cellar window, opening on the glassed-in coop
+under the porch.</p>
+
+<p>In Friendship it is a point of etiquette for a morning caller never to
+interrupt the employment of a hostess. So we obeyed the summons of the
+Liberty sisters to "come right down"; and we sat on a firkin and an
+inverted tub while Calliope told her plan and the hens fought for
+delectable morsels.</p>
+
+<p>"My grief!" said Libbie Liberty, tartly, "where you goin' to <i>get</i> your
+sick an' poor?"</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Viny, balancing on the window ledge to reach for eggs, looked back
+at us.</p>
+
+<p>"Friendship's so comfortable that way," she said, "I don't see how you
+can get up much of anything."</p>
+
+<p>And little Miss Lucy, kneeling on the floor of the cellar to measure
+more feed, said without looking up:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You know, since mother died we ain't never done anything for holidays.
+No&mdash;we can't seem to want to think about Thanksgiving or Christmas or
+like that."</p>
+
+<p>They all turned their grave lined faces toward us.</p>
+
+<p>"We want to let the holidays just slip by without noticin'," Miss Viny
+told us. "Seems like it hurts less that way."</p>
+
+<p>Libbie Liberty smiled wanly.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you know," she said, "when you hold your hand still in hot water,
+you don't feel how hot the water really is? But when you move around in
+it some, it begins to burn you. Well, when we let Thanksgiving an'
+Christmas alone, it ain't so bad. But when we start to move around in
+'em&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Her voice faltered and stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"We miss mother terrible," Miss Lucy said simply.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope put her blue mitten to her mouth, but her eyes she might not
+hide, and they were soft with sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>"I know&mdash;I know," she said. "I remember the first Christmas after my
+mother died&mdash;I ached like the toothache all over me, an' I couldn't bear
+to open my presents. Nor the next year I couldn't either&mdash;I couldn't
+open my presents with any heart. But&mdash;" Calliope hesitated, "that second
+year," she said, "I found somethin' I could do. I saw I could fix up
+little things for other folks an' take some comfort in it. Like mother
+would of."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent for a moment, looking thoughtfully at the three lonely
+figures in the dark cellar of their house.</p>
+
+<p>"Your mother," she said abruptly, "stuffed the turkey for a year ago the
+last harvest home."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," they said.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here," said Calliope; "if I can get some poor folks together,&mdash;or
+even <i>one</i> poor folk, or hungry,&mdash;will you three come over to my house
+an' stuff the turkey? The way&mdash;I can't help thinkin' the way your mother
+would of, if she'd been here. An' then," Calliope went on briskly,
+"could you bring some fresh eggs an' make a pan o' custard over to my
+house? An' mebbe one o' you'd stir up a sunshine cake. You must know how
+to make your mother's sunshine cake?"</p>
+
+<p>There was another silence in the cellar when Calliope had done, and for
+a minute I wondered if, after all, she had not failed, and if the
+bleeding of the three hearts might be so stanched. It was not
+self-reliant Libbie Liberty who spoke first; it was gentle Miss Lucy.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess," she said, "I could, if we all do it. I know mother would of."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Miss Viny nodded, "mother would of."</p>
+
+<p>Libbie Liberty stood for a moment with compressed lips.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems like not payin' respect to mother," she began; and then shook
+her head. "It ain't that," she said; "it's only missin' her when we
+begin to step around the kitchen, bakin' up for a holiday."</p>
+
+<p>"I know&mdash;I know," Calliope said again. "That's why I said for you to
+come over in my kitchen. You come over there an' stir up the sunshine
+cake, too, an' bake it in my oven, so's we can hev it et hot. Will you
+do that?"</p>
+
+<p>And after a little time they consented. If Calliope found any sick or
+poor, they would do that.</p>
+
+<p>"We ain't gettin' many i-dees for guests," Calliope said, as we reached
+the street, "but we're gettin' helpers, anyway. An' some dinner, too."</p>
+
+<p>Then we went to the house of Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss&mdash;called
+so, of course, to distinguish her from the "Other" Holcombs.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you be shocked at her," Calliope warned me, as we closed Mis'
+Holcomb's gate behind us; "she's dreadful diff'r'nt an' bitter since
+Abigail was married last month. She's got hold o' some kind of a Persian
+book, in a decorated cover, from the City; an' now she says your soul is
+like when you look in a lookin'-glass&mdash;that there ain't really nothin'
+there. An' that the world's some wind an' the rest water, an' they ain't
+no God only your own breath&mdash;oh, poor Mis' Holcomb!" said Calliope. "I
+guess she ain't rill balanced. But we ought to go to see her. We always
+consult Mis' Holcomb about everything."</p>
+
+<p>Poor Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss! I can see her now in her
+comfortable dining room, where she sat cleaning her old silver, her
+thin, veined hands as fragile as her grandmother's spoons.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, you don't know," she said, when Calliope had unfolded her
+plans, "how useless it all seems to me. What's the use&mdash;I keep sayin' to
+myself now'-days; what's the use? You put so much pains on somethin',
+an' then it goes off an' leaves you. Mebbe it dies, an' everything's all
+wasted. There ain't anything to tie to. It's like lookin' in a glass all
+the while. It's seemin', it ain't bein'. We ain't certain o' nothin' but
+our breath, an' when that goes, what hev you got? What's the use o'
+plannin' Thanksgivin' for anybody?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if you're hungry, it's kind o' nice to get fed up," said
+Calliope, crisply. "Don't you know a soul that's hungry, Mame Bliss?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said, "I don't. Nor nobody sick in body."</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody sick in body," Calliope repeated absently.</p>
+
+<p>"Soul-sick an' soul-hungry you can't feed up," Mis' Holcomb added.</p>
+
+<p>"I donno," said Calliope, thoughtfully, "I donno but you can."</p>
+
+<p>"No," Mis' Holcomb went on; "your soul's like yourself in the glass:
+they ain't anything there."</p>
+
+<p>"I donno," Calliope said again; "some mornin's when I wake up with the
+sun shinin' in, I can feel my soul in me just as plain as plain."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Holcomb sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"Life looks dreadful footless to me," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Calliope, "sometimes life <i>is</i> some like hearin'
+firecrackers go off when you don't feel up to shootin' 'em yourself.
+When I'm like that, I always think if I'd go out an' buy a bunch or two,
+an' get somebody to give me a match, I could see more sense to things.
+Look here, Mame Bliss; if I get hold o' any folks to give the dinner
+for, will you help me some?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Mis' Holcomb assented half-heartedly, "I'll help you. I ain't
+nobody much in family, now Abigail's done what she has. They's only
+Eppleby, an' he won't be home Thanksg'vin this year. So I ain't nothin'
+else to do."</p>
+
+<p>"That's the <i>i</i>-dee," said Calliope, heartily; "if everything's foolish,
+it's just as foolish doin' nothin' as doin' somethin'. Will you bring
+over a kettleful o' boiled potatoes to my house Thanksgivin' noon? An'
+mash 'em an' whip 'em in my kitchen? I'll hev the milk to put in.
+You&mdash;you don't cook as much as some, do you, Mame?"</p>
+
+<p>Did Calliope ask her that purposely? I am almost sure that she did. Mis'
+Holcomb's neck stiffened a little.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I can cook a thing or two beside mash' potatoes," she said, and
+thought for a minute. "How'd you like a pan o' 'scalloped oysters an'
+some baked macaroni with plenty o' cheese?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Sounds like it'd go down awful easy," admitted Calliope, smiling. "It's
+just what we need to carry the dinner off full sail," she added
+earnestly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I ain't nothin' else to do an' I'll make 'em," Mis' Holcomb
+promised. "Only it beats me who you can find to do for. If you don't get
+anybody, let me know before I order the oysters."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope stood up, her little wrinkled face aglow; and I wondered at her
+confidence.</p>
+
+<p>"You just go ahead an' order your oysters," she said. "That dinner's
+goin' to come off Thanksgivin' noon at twelve o'clock. An' you be there
+to help feed the hungry, Mame."</p>
+
+<p>When we were on the street again, Calliope looked at me with her way of
+shy eagerness.</p>
+
+<p>"Could you hev the dinner up to your house," she asked me, "if I do
+every bit o' the work?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Calliope," I said, amazed at her persistence, "have it there, of
+course. But you haven't any guests yet."</p>
+
+<p>She nodded at me through the falling flakes.</p>
+
+<p>"You say you ain't got much to be thankful for," she said, "so I thought
+mebbe you'd put in the time that way. Don't you worry about folks to eat
+the dinner. I'll tell Mis' Holcomb an' the others to come to your
+house&mdash;an I'll get the food an' the folks. Don't you worry! An' I'll
+bring my watermelon pickles an' a bowl o' cream for Mis' Holcomb's
+potatoes, an' I'll furnish the turkey&mdash;a big one. The rest of us'll get
+the dinner in your kitchen Thanksgivin' mornin'. My!" she said, "seems
+though life's smoothin' out fer me a'ready. Good-by&mdash;it's 'most noon."</p>
+
+<p>She hurried up Daphne Street in the snow, and I turned toward my lonely
+house. But I remember that I was planning how I would make my table
+pretty, and how I would add a delicacy or two from the City for this
+strange holiday feast. And I found myself hurrying to look over certain
+long-disused linen and silver, and to see whether my Cloth-o'-Gold rose
+might be counted on to bloom by Thursday noon.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>COVERS FOR SEVEN</h3>
+
+
+<p>"We'll set the table for seven folks," said Calliope, at my house on
+Thanksgiving morning.</p>
+
+<p>"Seven!" I echoed. "But where in the world did you ever find seven,
+Calliope?"</p>
+
+<p>"I found 'em," she answered. "I knew I could find hungry folks to do for
+if I tried, an' I found 'em. You'll see. I sha'n't say another word.
+They'll be here by twelve, sharp. Did the turkey come?"</p>
+
+<p>Yes, the turkey had come, and almost as she spoke the dear Liberty
+sisters arrived to dress and stuff it, and to make ready the pan of
+custard, and to "stir up" the sunshine cake. I could guess how the
+pleasant bustle in my kitchen would hurt them by its holiday air, and I
+carried them off to see my Cloth-o'-Gold rose which had opened in the
+night, to the very crimson heart of it. And I told them of the seven
+guests whom, after all, Calliope had actually contrived to marshal to
+her dinner. And in the midst of our almost gay speculation on this, they
+went at their share of the task.</p>
+
+<p>The three moved about their offices gravely at first, Libbie Liberty
+keeping her back to us as she worked, Miss Viny scrupulously intent on
+the delicate clatter of the egg-beater, Miss Lucy with eyes downcast on
+the sage she rolled. I noted how Calliope made little excuses to pass
+near each of them, with now a touch of the hand and now a pat on a
+shoulder, and all the while she talked briskly of ways and means and
+recipes, and should there be onions in the dressing or should there not
+be? We took a vote on this and were about to chop the onions in when
+Mis' Holcomb's little maid arrived at my kitchen door with a bowl of
+oysters which Mis' Holcomb had had left from the 'scallop, an' wouldn't
+we like 'em in the stuffin'? Roast turkey stuffed with oysters! I saw
+Libbie Liberty's eyes brighten so delightedly that I brought out a jar
+of seedless raisins and another of preserved cherries to add to the
+custard, and then a bag of sweet almonds to be blanched and split for
+the cake o' sunshine. Surely, one of us said, the seven guests could be
+preparing for their Thanksgiving dinner with no more zest than we were
+putting into that dinner for their sakes.</p>
+
+<p>"Seven guests!" we said over and again. "Calliope, how did you do it?
+When everybody says there's nobody in Friendship that's either sick or
+poor?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody sick, nobody poor!" Calliope exclaimed, piling a dish with
+watermelon pickles. "Land, you might think that was the town motto.
+Well, the town don't know everything. Don't you ask me so many
+questions."</p>
+
+<p>Before eleven o'clock Mis' Mayor Uppers tapped at my back door, with two
+deep-dish cherry pies in a basket, and a row of her delicate, feathery
+sponge cakes and a jar of pineapple and pie-plant preserves "to chink
+in." She drew a deep breath and stood looking about the kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>"Throw off your things an' help, Mis' Uppers," Calliope admonished her,
+one hand on the cellar door. "I'm just goin' down for some sweet
+potatoes Mis' Holcomb sent over this morning, an' you might get 'em
+ready, if you will. We ain't goin' to let you off now, spite of what
+you've done for us."</p>
+
+<p>So Mis' Mayor Uppers hung up her shawl and washed the sweet potatoes.
+And my kitchen was fragrant with spices and flavourings and an odorous
+oven, and there was no end of savoury business to be at. I found myself
+glad of the interest of these others in the day and glad of the stirring
+in my lonely house. Even if their bustle could not lessen my own
+loneliness, it was pleasant, I said to myself, to see them quicken with
+interest; and the whole affair entertained my infinite leisure. After
+all, I was not required to be thankful. I merely loaned my house, cosey
+in its glittering drifts of turkey feathers, and the day was no more and
+no less to me than before, though I own that I did feel more than an
+amused interest in Calliope's guests. Whom, in Friendship, had she found
+"to do for," I detected myself speculating with real interest as in the
+dining room, with one and another to help me, I made ready my table. My
+prettiest dishes and silver, the Cloth-o'-Gold rose, and my
+yellow-shaded candles made little auxiliary welcomes. Whoever Calliope's
+guests were, we would do them honour and give them the best we had. And
+in the midst of all came from the City the box with my gift of hothouse
+fruit and a rosebud for every plate.</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope!" I cried, as I went back to the kitchen, "Calliope, it's
+nearly twelve now. Tell us who the guests are, or we won't finish
+dinner!"</p>
+
+<p>Calliope laughed and shook her head and opened the door for Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, who entered, followed by her little maid,
+both laden with good things.</p>
+
+<p>"I prepared for seven," Mis' Holcomb said. "That was the word you sent
+me&mdash;but where you got your seven sick an' poor in Friendship beats me.
+I'll stay an' help for a while&mdash;but to me it all seems like so much
+monkey work."</p>
+
+<p>We worked with a will that last half-hour, and the spirit of the kitchen
+came upon them all. I watched them, amused and pleased at Mis' Mayor
+Uppers's flushed anxiety over the sweet potatoes, at Libbie Liberty
+furiously basting the turkey, and at Miss Lucy exclaiming with delight
+as she unwrapped the rosebuds from their moss. But I think that Mis'
+Holcomb pleased me most, for with the utensils of housewifery in her
+hands she seemed utterly to have forgotten that there is no use in
+anything at all. This was not wonderful in the presence of such a
+feathery cream of mashed potatoes and such aromatic coffee as she made.
+<i>There</i> was something to tie to. Those were real, at any rate, and
+beyond all seeming.</p>
+
+<p>Just before twelve Calliope caught off her apron and pulled down her
+sleeves.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," she said, "I'm going to welcome the guests. I can&mdash;can't I?" she
+begged me. "Everything's all ready but putting on. I won't need to come
+out here again; when I ring the bell on the sideboard, dish it up an'
+bring it in, all together&mdash;turkey ahead an' vegetables followin'. Mis'
+Holcomb, you help 'em, won't you? An' then you can leave if you want.
+Talk about an old-fashion' Thanksgivin'. My!"</p>
+
+<p>"Who <i>has</i> she got?" Libbie Liberty burst out, basting the turkey. "I
+declare, I'm nervous as a witch, I'm so curious!"</p>
+
+<p>And then the clock struck twelve, and a minute after we heard Calliope
+tinkle a silvery summons on the call-bell.</p>
+
+<p>I remember that it was Mis' Holcomb herself&mdash;to whom nothing
+mattered&mdash;who rather lost her head as we served our feast, and who was
+about putting in dishes both her oysters and her macaroni instead of
+carrying in the fair, brown, smoking bake pans. But at last we were
+ready&mdash;Mis' Holcomb at our head with the turkey, the others following
+with both hands filled, and I with the coffee-pot. As they gave the
+signal to start, something&mdash;it may have been the mystery before us, or
+the good things about us, or the mere look of the Thanksgiving snow on
+the window-sills&mdash;seemed to catch at the hearts of them all, and they
+laughed a little, almost joyously, those five for whom joy had seemed
+done, and I found myself laughing too.</p>
+
+<p>So we six filed into the dining room to serve whomever Calliope had
+found "to do for." I wonder that I had not guessed before. There stood
+Calliope at the foot of the table, with its lighted candles and its
+Cloth-o'-Gold rose, and the other six chairs were quite vacant.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down!" Calliope cried to us, with tears and laughter in her voice.
+"Sit down, all six of you. Don't you see? Didn't you know? Ain't we
+soul-sick an' soul-hungry, all of us? An' I tell you, this is goin' to
+do our souls good&mdash;an' our stomachs too!"</p>
+
+<p>Nobody dropped anything, even in the flood of our amazement. We managed
+to get our savoury burden on the table, and some way we found ourselves
+in the chairs&mdash;I at the head of my table where Calliope led me. And we
+all talked at once, exclaiming and questioning, with sudden thanksgiving
+in our hearts that in the world such things may be.</p>
+
+<p>"I was hungry an' sick," Calliope was telling, "for an old-fashion'
+Thanksgivin'&mdash;or anything that'd smooth life out some. But I says to
+myself, 'It looks like God had afflicted us by not givin' us anybody to
+do for.' An' then I started out to find some poor an' some sick&mdash;an'
+each one o' you knows what I found. An' I ask' myself before I got home
+that day, 'Why not them an' me?' There's lots o' kinds o' things to do
+on Thanksgivin' Day. Are you ever goin' to forgive me?"</p>
+
+<p>I think that we all answered at once. But what we all meant was what
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said, as she sat flushed and smiling
+behind the coffee-cups:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I declare, I feel something like I ain't felt since I don't know when!"</p>
+
+<p>And Calliope nodded at her.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess that's your soul, Mame Bliss," she said. "You can always feel
+it if you go to work an' act as if you got one. I'll take my coffee
+clear."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SHADOW OF GOOD THINGS TO COME</h3>
+
+
+<p>The Friendship accommodation reaches the village from the City at six
+o'clock at night, and we call the train the Dick Dasher, because Dick
+Dasher is its engineer. We "come out on the Dick Dasher" and we "go in
+on the Through"; but the Through is a kind of institution, like
+marriage, while the Dick Dasher is a thing more intimate, like one's
+wedding. It was one winter night on the latter that I hardly heeded what
+I overheard.</p>
+
+<p>"The Lord will provide, Delia," Doctor June was saying.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't sure," came a piping answer, "as they is any Lord. An' don't
+you tell anybody 'bout seein' me on this train. I'm goin' on
+through&mdash;west."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Thy footfall is a silver thing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">West&mdash;&mdash;west!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I said over to the beat of the wheels, but the words that I said over
+were more insistent than the words that I heard. I was watching the eyes
+of a motor-car carrying threads of streaming light, moving near the
+track, swifter than the train. It belonged, as I divined, to the
+Proudfits of Friendship, and it was carrying Madame Proudfit and her
+daughter Clementina, after a day of shopping and visiting in the town.
+And when I saw them returning home in this airy fashion,&mdash;as if they
+were the soul and I in the stuffy Dick Dasher were the body,&mdash;I renewed
+a certain distaste for them, since in their lives these Proudfits seemed
+goblin-like, with no interest in any save their own picturesque
+flittings. But while I shrugged at myself for judging them and held
+firmly to my own opinion, as one will do, I was conscious all the time
+of the gray minister in the aisle of the rocking coach, holding clasped
+in both hands his big carpet-bag without handles. Over it I saw him
+looking down in grieved consternation at the little woman huddled in the
+rush seat.</p>
+
+<p>"No Lord!" he said, "no Lord! Why, Delia More! You might as well say
+there ain't no life in your own bones."</p>
+
+<p>"So they isn't," she answered him grimly. "They keep on a-goin' just to
+spite me."</p>
+
+<p>"Delia More&mdash;<i>De</i>-lia More," the wheels beat out, and it was as if I had
+heard the name often. Already I had noticed the woman. She had a kind of
+youth, like that of Calliope, who had journeyed in town on the Through
+that morning and who had somewhat mysteriously asked me not to say that
+she had gone away. But Calliope's persistent youthfulness gives her a
+claim upon one, while on this woman whom Doctor June perplexedly
+regarded, her stifled youth imposed a forlorn aloofness, made the more
+pathetic by her prettiness.</p>
+
+<p>No one but the doctor himself was preparing to leave the train at
+Friendship. He balanced in the aisle alone, while the few occupants of
+the car sat without speaking&mdash;men dozing, children padding on the panes,
+a woman twisting her thin hair tight and high. Doctor June looked at
+those nearest to be sure of their tired self-absorption, but as for me,
+who sat very near, I think he had long ago decided that I kept my own
+thoughts and no others, since sometimes I had forgotten to give him back
+a greeting. So it was in a fancied security which I was loath to be
+violating, that he opened his great carpet-bag and took out a book to
+lay on the girl's knee.</p>
+
+<p>"Open it," he commanded her.</p>
+
+<p>I saw the contour of her face tightened by her swiftly set lips as she
+complied.</p>
+
+<p>"Point your finger," he went on peremptorily. She must have obeyed, for
+in a kind of unwilling eagerness she bent over the page, and the doctor
+stooped, and together in the blurring light of the kerosene lamp in the
+roof of the coach they made out something.</p>
+
+<p>"... the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very
+image of the things ..." I unwillingly caught, and yet not wholly
+unwillingly either. And though I watched, as if much depended upon it,
+the great motor-car of the Proudfits vanishing before us into the dark,
+I could not forbear to glance at the doctor, who was nodding, his kind
+face quickening. But the girl lifted her eyes and laughed with
+deliberate scepticism.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't take any stock," she said, and within me it was as if something
+answered to her bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no. Mebbe not," Doctor June commented with perfect cheerfulness.
+"Some folks take fresh air, and some folks like to stay shut up tight.
+But&mdash;'the shadow of good things to come.' I'd take that much stock if I
+was you, Delia."</p>
+
+<p>As he laid the book back in his bag, the train was jolting across the
+switches beside the gas house, and the lights of Friendship were all
+about the track.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you get off?" he reiterated, in his tone a descending scale
+of simple hospitality. "Come to our house and stop a spell. Come for
+tea," he added; "I happen to know we're goin' to hev hot griddle-cakes
+an' sausage gravy."</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head sharply and in silence.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor June stood for a moment meditatively looking down at her.</p>
+
+<p>"There's a friend of yours at our house to-day, for all day," he
+observed.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't any friends," replied the girl, obstinately, "without you mean
+<i>use'</i> to be. An' I don't know if I had then, either."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Yes, you have, Delia," said Doctor June, kindly. "He was asking
+about you last time he was here&mdash;kind of indirect."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Who?</i>" she demanded, but it was as if something within her wrung the
+question from her against her will.</p>
+
+<p>"Abel Halsey," Doctor June told her, "Abel Halsey. Remember him?"</p>
+
+<p>Instead of answering she looked out the window at the Friendship Depot
+platform, and:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't he a big minister in the City?" I barely heard her ask.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Doctor June; "dear me, no. Abel's still gypsyin' it off in
+the hills. I expect he's out there by the depot with the busses now,
+come to meet me in his buggy. Better let him take us all home to
+griddle-cakes, Delia?" he pressed her wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't," she said briefly. And, as he put out his hand silently,
+"Don't you let <i>any</i>body know't you saw me!" she charged him again.</p>
+
+<p>When he was gone, and the train was slackening in the station, she moved
+close to the window. If I had been lonely.... I must have caught a
+certain cheer in the look of the station and in the magnificent, cosmic
+leisure of the idlers: in Photographer Jimmy Sturgis, in his leather
+coat, with one eye shut, stamping a foot and waiting for the mail-bag;
+in old Tillie, known up and down the world for her waffles, and
+perpetually peering out between shelves of plants and wax fruit set
+across the window of the "eating-house"; in Peleg Bemus, wood-cutter,
+stumping about the platform on his wooden leg, wearing modestly the
+prestige he had won by his flute-playing and by his advantage of
+New York experience&mdash;"a janitor in the far east, he was," Timothy
+Toplady had once told me; in Timothy Toplady himself, who always
+meets the trains, but for no reason unless to say an amazed and
+reproachful&mdash;"Blisterin' Benson! not a soul wants off here"; and in Abel
+Halsey, that itinerant preacher, of whom Doctor June had spoken. Abel
+was a man of grace, Bible-taught, passioning for service, but within him
+his gentle soul burned to travel, and his white horse, Major Mary, and
+his road wagon and his route to the door of many a country church were
+the sole satisfactions of his wanderlust; and next to these was his
+delight to be at a railway station when any train arrived, savouring the
+moment of some silent familiarity with distance. I delighted in them
+all, and that night, as I looked, I wondered how it would seem to me if
+I were returning to it after many years; and I could imagine how my
+heart would ache.</p>
+
+<p>As the train moved on, the girl whom Doctor June had called Delia More
+turned her head, manifestly to follow for a little way each vanishing
+light and figure; and as the conductor came through the car and she
+spoke to him, I saw that she was in a tingle of excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"You sure," she asked, "that you stop to the canal draw?"</p>
+
+<p>"Uh?" said the conductor, and when he comprehended, "Every time," he
+said, "every time. You be ready when she whistles." He hesitated,
+manifestly in some curiosity. "They ain't a house in a mile f'om there,
+though," he told her.</p>
+
+<p>"I know that," she gave back crisply.</p>
+
+<p>When I heard her speaking of the canal draw, I found myself wondering;
+for a woman is not above wonder. There, where the trains stopped just
+perceptibly I myself was wont to leave them for the sake of the mile
+walk on the quiet highroad to my house. That, too, though it chanced to
+be night, for I am not afraid. But I wondered the more because other
+women do fear, and also because mine was the only house between the
+canal draw and Friendship Village; and manifestly the shortest way to
+reach the village would have been to alight at the station. But I held
+my peace, for the affairs of others should be to those others an
+efficient disguise; and moreover, the greater part of one's wonder is
+wont to come to naught.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, as I seemed to follow this woman out upon the snow and the train
+kept impersonally on across the meadows, I could not but see that her
+bags were many and looked heavy, and twice she set them down to
+rearrange. I think a ghost of the road could have done no less than ask
+to help her. And I did this with an abruptness of which I am unwilling
+master, though indeed I had no need to assume impatience, for I saw that
+my quiet walk was spoiled.</p>
+
+<p>When I spoke to her, she started and shrank away; but there was an
+austerity in the lonely white road and in the country silence which must
+have chilled a woman like her; and her bags were many and seemed heavy.</p>
+
+<p>"Much obliged to you," she said indistinctly. "I'd just as li've you
+should take the basket, if you want."</p>
+
+<p>So I lifted the basket and trudged beside her, hoping very much that she
+would not talk. For though for my own comfort I would walk far to avoid
+treading on a nest, or a worm, or a magenta flower (and I loathe
+magenta), yet I am often blameful enough to wound through the sheerest
+bungling those who talk to me when I would rather be silent.</p>
+
+<p>The night was one clinging to the way of Autumn, and as yet with no
+Winter hinting. The air was mild and dry, and the sky was starry. I am
+not ashamed that on a quiet highroad on a starry night I love to be
+silent, and even to forget concerns of my own which seem pressing in the
+publicity of the sun; but I am ashamed, I own, to have been called to
+myself that night by a little choking breath of haste.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't go&mdash;so fast," my companion said humbly; "you might jest&mdash;set
+the basket down anywheres. I can&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But I think that she can hardly have heard my apology, for she stood
+where she had halted, staring away from me. We were opposite the
+cemetery lying in its fence of field stone and whitewashed rails.</p>
+
+<p>"O my soul, my soul!" I heard her say. "I'd forgot the graveyard, or I
+couldn't never 'a' come this way."</p>
+
+<p>At that she went on, her feet quickening, as I thought, without her
+will; and she kept her face turned to me, so that it should be away from
+that whitewashed fence. And now because of the wound she had shown me, I
+walked a little apart in the middle of the road for my attempt at
+sympathy. So we came to the summit of the hill, and there the dark
+suddenly yielded up the distance. The lamps of the village began to
+signal, lights dotted the fields and gathered in a cosey blur in the
+valley, and half a mile to westward the headlight that marked the big
+Toplady barn and the little Toplady house shone out as if some one over
+there were saying something.</p>
+
+<p>"You live here in Friendship?" the girl demanded abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>I could show her my house a little way before us.</p>
+
+<p>"Ever go inside the graveyard?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes I do go there, and at that answer she walked nearer to me and
+spoke eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>"Air all the tombstones standin' up straight, do you know?" she said.
+"Hev any o' their headstones fell down on 'em?"</p>
+
+<p>This I could answer too, definitely enough; for Friendship Cemetery, by
+the vigilance of the Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality, is
+kept in no less scrupulous order than the Friendship parlours.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's a relief," she said; "I couldn't get it out o' my head."
+Then, because she seemed of those on whom silence lays a certain
+imaginary demand, "My mother an' father an' sister's buried there," she
+explained. "They're in there. They all died when I was gone. An' I got
+the notion that their headstones had tipped over on to 'em. Or Aunt
+Cornie More's, maybe."</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Cornie More. I knew that name, for they had told me about her in
+Friendship, so that her name, and that of the Oldmoxons, in whose former
+house I lived, and many others were like folk whom one passes often and
+remembers. I had been told how Aunt Cornie More had made her own shroud
+from her crocheted parlour curtains, lest these fall to a later wife of
+her octogenarian husband; and how as she lay in her coffin the curtain's
+shell-stitch parrot "come right acrost her chest." This woman beside me
+had called her "Aunt" Cornie More. And then I remembered the name which
+Doctor June had spoken on the train and the wheels had measured.</p>
+
+<p>"Delia More!" I said, involuntarily, and regretted it as soon as I had
+spoken. But, indeed, it was as if some legend woman of the place walked
+suddenly beside me, like the quick.</p>
+
+<p>Who in Friendship had not heard the name, and who, save one who keeps
+her own thoughts and forgets to give back greeting, would not on the
+instant have remembered it? Delia More's stepsister, Jennie Crapwell,
+had been betrothed to a carpenter of Friendship, and he was at work on
+their house when, a month before the wedding-day, Delia and that young
+carpenter had "run away." Who in Friendship could not tell that story?
+But before I had made an end of murmuring something&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I might 'a' known they hadn't done talkin' yet," Delia More said
+bitterly. "They say it was like that when Calliope Marsh's beau run off
+with somebody else,&mdash;for ten years the town et it for cake. Well, they
+ain't any of 'em goin' to get a look at me. I don't give anybody the
+chance to show me the cold shoulder. You can tell 'em I was here if you
+want. They can scare the children with it."</p>
+
+<p>"I won't tell," I said.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at me.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I can't help it if you do," she returned. "I'm glad enough to
+speak to somebody, gettin' back so. It's fourteen year. An' I was fair
+body-sick to see the place again."</p>
+
+<p>At this she asked about Friendship folk, and I answered as best I might,
+though of what she inquired I knew little, and what I did know was
+footless enough for human comfort. As to the Topladys, for example, I
+had no knowledge of that one who had earned his money in bricks and had
+later married a "foreigner"; but I knew Mis' Amanda, that she had hands
+dimpled like a baby giant's, and that she carried a blue parasol all
+winter to keep the sun from her eyes. I could not tell whether Liddy
+Ember had been able to afford skilled treatment for her poor, queer,
+pretty little sister, but I knew that Ellen Ember, with her crown of
+bright hair, went about Friendship streets singing aloud, and leaping up
+to catch at the low branches of the curb elms, and that she was as
+picturesque as a beautiful grotesque on a page of sober text. I had not
+learned where the Oldmoxons had moved, but I knew of them that they had
+left me a huge fireplace in every room of my house. I could have
+repeated little about Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, save that her
+black week-day cloak was lined with wine broadcloth, and that she wore
+it wrong side outward for "best." And of whether Abigail Arnold's
+children had turned out well or ill, I was profoundly ignorant; but I
+remembered that she had caused a loaf of bread to be carved on the
+monument of her husband, the home baker. And so on. But these were not
+matters of which I could talk to the hungry woman beside me.</p>
+
+<p>Then, to my amazement, when I mentioned the Proudfits,&mdash;those great and
+rich Proudfits whose motor had raced by our train,&mdash;Delia More would
+have none of them.</p>
+
+<p>"I do' want to hear about 'em," she said. "I know about 'em. I use' to
+play with Miss Clementina an' Miss Linda when we were little things. I
+use' to live with the Proudfits then, an' go to school. They were good
+to me&mdash;time an' time again they've told me their home was mine, too. But
+<i>now</i>&mdash;it wouldn't be the same. I know 'em. They always were cruel proud
+an' cruel pious. Mis' Proudfit, she use' to set up goodness an' worship
+it like a little god."</p>
+
+<p>This judgment startled me, and yet to its import I secretly assented.
+For though I barely had their acquaintance, Madame Proudfit and her
+daughter Clementina were thorns to me too, so that I had had no pleasure
+in giving them back their greetings. Perhaps it was that they alone in
+Friendship sounded for me a note of other days&mdash;but whatever it was,
+they were thorns to me; and I remember how, once more, something within
+me seemed to answer to this woman's bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>None the less, since of the Proudfits I could give her some fragment of
+account, I did so, to forge for Delia More what link I might between her
+present and her past. And it was knowledge which all Friendship shared.</p>
+
+<p>"You knew," I said, "that Miss Linda does not come here now, because she
+married against the wish of her family."</p>
+
+<p>Delia More looked up at me. But though I saw that now she softened
+somewhat, I had no relish for giving to her anything of the sad romance
+of beautiful Linda Proudfit (as they said) and the poor young clerk of
+nobody knew where, who, a dozen years before, had fled away together
+"into the storm."</p>
+
+<p>"Then there is Calliope Marsh," I ventured, to turn my thought not less
+than hers. But Delia More did not answer, and at this I was puzzled, for
+I think that Calliope has lived in Friendship since the beginning, when
+she and Liddy Ember were partners in their little "modiste" shop. "You
+will recall Calliope?" I pressed the matter.</p>
+
+<p>And at that, "Yes. Oh, yes," she said, and would say no more. And
+because Calliope had forbidden me, I did not mention that I had seen her
+on the train that morning, and that she was absent from Friendship, but
+it grieved me that this stranger should be indifferent to anything about
+her.</p>
+
+<p>I would have passed my own gate, because the basket was heavy and
+because I knew that the girl was crying. But she remembered how I had
+shown her my house, and there she detained me and caught at her basket,
+in haste to be gone. So I, who feel upon me a weak necessity to do a
+bidding, watched her go down the still road; yet I could not let her go
+away quite like that, and before I had meant to do so I called to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Delia More!" I said&mdash;as familiarly as if she had been some other
+expression of myself.</p>
+
+<p>I saw her stop, but I did not go forward. I lifted my voice a little,
+for by the distance between us I was less ill at ease than I am in the
+usual personalities of comfort.</p>
+
+<p>"I heard that on the train," I said then awkwardly,&mdash;and I was the more
+awkward that I was not persuaded of any reason in my words,&mdash;"that about
+'the shadow of good things to come.' Maybe it meant something."</p>
+
+<p>Delia More's thin, high-pitched voice came back to me, expressing all my
+unvoiced doubt.</p>
+
+<p>"Tisn't like," she said. "I never take any stock."</p>
+
+<p>Then I looked at my dark house in a kind of consternation lest it had
+heard me trying to give comfort, for within those walls I had sometimes
+spoken almost as this woman spoke. But it occurred to me that even the
+drowned should throw immaterial ropes to any who struggle in dark
+waters.</p>
+
+<p>It will not be necessary, I hope, to say that I followed Delia More that
+night from no faintest wish to know what might happen to her. For I have
+a weak desire for peace of mind, and I would rather have forgotten her
+story. I followed because the quiet highroad was so profoundly lonely,
+and the country silence is ambiguous, and I cannot bear to think of a
+woman abroad alone in the dark. I cannot bear to think of myself abroad
+alone in the dark, though I go quite without fear; but certain other
+women have fear, and this one was crying. I kept well behind her, and as
+soon as she reached the village, I meant to lose sight of her and
+return, for a village is guardian enough. But when we had passed the
+bleak meadow of the slaughter-house and the wide, wet-smelling wood yard
+and had reached the first cottage on Daphne Street, I was startled to
+see her unlatch that cottage gate and enter the yard. And I was suddenly
+sadly apprehensive, for the cottage was the home of Calliope, who that
+morning had left the village and had asked me to say nothing about it.
+What if this poor creature had fled to Calliope for sanctuary, only to
+find locked doors? So I waited in the shadow of a warehouse like a
+bandit; and I raged at the thought of having possibly to harbour this
+stranger among the books of my quiet home.</p>
+
+<p>Then suddenly I saw a light shining brightly in Calliope Marsh's
+cottage, and some one wearing a hat came swiftly and drew down a shade.
+On the instant the matter was clear to me, who have a genius for certain
+ways of a busybody. Calliope must have known that this poor girl was
+coming; Calliope's warning to me to keep silence must have been a way of
+protection to her. And here to Calliope's cottage Delia More had come
+creeping, whom all Friendship would hold in righteous distaste. But I
+alone of all Friendship knew that she was here, "fair body-sick to see
+the place again."</p>
+
+<p>I turned back to the highroad, pretending great wrath that I should be
+so keen over the doings of any, and that my walk should have been
+spoiled because of her. But there are times when wrath is difficult. And
+do what I would, there came some singing in my blood, and like a
+busybody, I found myself standing still in the road fashioning a plan.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>STOCK</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was as if Time and the Hour were my allies, for at once I was aware
+of a cutter driven smartly from the village, and I recognized the
+Topladys' sorrel. At my signal the cutter drew up beside me, and it held
+Timothy Toplady on his way home from the station. I asked him what
+o'clock it was, and when he had found a match to light his huge silver
+watch&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Blisterin' Benson!" he said ruefully, "it's ha'-past six, an' me late
+with the chores again. I'm hauled an' sawed if it hain't <i>always</i> ha'
+past six. They don't seem to be no times in between."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Toplady," I said boldly, "let us get up a surprise party on
+Calliope Marsh&mdash;you and Mrs. Toplady and me."</p>
+
+<p>I had learned that he was loath to oppose a suggestion and that he
+always preferred to agree, but I had not hoped for enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>"That's the <i>i</i>-dea," said Timothy, heartily. "I do admire a surprise.
+But what I think is this," he added, "when'll we hev it?"</p>
+
+<p>"To-night," I proposed boldly.</p>
+
+<p>"Whew!" Timothy whistled. "Sudden for General&mdash;eh? Suits me&mdash;suits me.
+Better drive out home with me an' break it to Amanda," he cried.</p>
+
+<p>I smiled as I sat beside him, noting that his enthusiasm was very like
+relief. For if any one was present, he well knew that his masterful
+Amanda would say nothing of his tardiness. And so it was, for as we
+entered the kitchen she entirely overlooked her husband in her amazement
+at seeing me.</p>
+
+<p>"Forevermore!" that great Amanda said, turning from her stove of savoury
+skillets; "ain't you the stranger? Timothy says only to-day, speakin' o'
+you, 'She ain't ben here for a week,' s'e. 'Week!' s'I; 'it's goin' on
+<i>two</i>.' I'm a great hand to keep track. Throw off your things."</p>
+
+<p>At that I began to feel her influence. Mis' Toplady is so huge and
+capable that her mere presence will modify my judgments; and instantly I
+fell wondering if I was not, after all, come on a fool's errand. She is
+like Athena. For I can think about Athena well enough, but if I were
+really to stand before her, I am certain that the project in which I
+implored her help would be sunk in my sudden sense of Olympus.</p>
+
+<p>Not the less, I made my somewhat remarkable proposal with some show of
+assurance, and I should have counted on Mis' Toplady's sympathy, which
+ripens at less than a sigh. In Friendship you but mention a possible
+charity, visit, or new church carpet, and the enthusiasm will react on
+the possibility, and the thing be done. It is the spirit of the West,
+the pioneer blood in the veins of her children, expressing itself (since
+there are of late no forests to conquer) in terms of love of any
+initiative. We love a project as an older world would approve the
+civilizing reasons for that project. Mis' Amanda plunged into the
+processes of the party much as she would have felled a tree. It warmed
+my heart to hear her.</p>
+
+<p>"We'd ought to hev a hot supper&mdash;what victuals'll we take?" she said.
+"Land, yes, oysters, o' course, an' we'll all chip in an' take
+plenty-enough crackers. We might as well carry dishes from here, so's to
+be sure an' hev what we want to use. At Mis' Doctor Helman's su'prise we
+run 'way short o' spoons, an' Elder Woodruff finally went out in the
+hall an' drank his broth, an' hid his bowl in the entry. Mis' Helman
+found it, an' knew it by the nick. That reminds me&mdash;who'll we ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss," said I, promptly, "and Abigail
+Arnold, and Doctor June, and Abel Halsey."</p>
+
+<p>"An' the Proudfits," Mis' Amanda went on.</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose," said I, with high courage, "that we do not ask the Proudfits
+at all?"</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Amanda threw up her giant hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Not ask the Proudfits?" she said. "Why, my land a' livin', the minister
+hardly has church in the church without the Proudfits get an invite."</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope mends their fine lace for them," I reminded her, feeling
+guilty. "They wouldn't care to come, Mrs. Amanda, would they?"</p>
+
+<p>But of course I was remembering Delia More's "But <i>now</i>&mdash;I know 'em.
+They worship goodness like a little god." And that night I was not
+minded to have them about, for it might befall that it would be
+necessary to understand other things as well.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Linda would 'a' cared to," said Mis' Amanda, thoughtfully, "but I
+donno, myself, about Mis' Proudfit an' Miss Clementina&mdash;for sure."</p>
+
+<p>So bold an innovation as the Proudfits' omission, however, moved Timothy
+Toplady to doubt.</p>
+
+<p>"They might not come," he said, frowning and looking sidewise, "but what
+I think is this, will they like bein' left out?"</p>
+
+<p>His masterful Amanda instantly took the other side.</p>
+
+<p>"Land, Timothy!" she said, "you <i>be</i> one!"</p>
+
+<p>I have heard her say that to him again and again, and always in a tone
+so skilfully admiring that he looked almost gratified. And we mentioned
+the Proudfits no more.</p>
+
+<p>So Calliope Marsh's surprise party came about. When supper was over, the
+table was "left setting," while pickles and cookies and "conserve" were
+packed in baskets; and presently the Topladys and I were stealing about
+the village inviting to festivity. I love to remember how swiftly Daphne
+Street took on an air of the untoward. Kitchens were left dark,
+unaccustomed lights flashed in upper chambers, some went scurrying for
+oysters before the post-office store should be closed, and some spread
+the news, eager to share in the holiday importance. I love to remember
+our certainty, so reasonably established, that they would all join us as
+infallibly as children will join in jollity. No one refused, no one
+hesitated; and when, at eight o'clock, the Topladys and I reached the
+rendezvous in the Engine-House entry, every one was there before
+us&mdash;save only, of course, the Proudfits.</p>
+
+<p>"Where's the Proudfits? Ain't we goin' to wait for the Proudfits?" asked
+more than one; and some one had seen the Proudfit motor come flashing
+through the town from the Plank Road, empty. At all of which I kept a
+guilty silence; and I had by then not a little guilt to bear, since I
+was becoming every moment more doubtful of my undertaking. For at heart
+these people are the kindly of earth, and yet they are prone, as Delia
+More had said of the Proudfits, "to worship goodness like a little god,"
+nor do they commonly broaden their allegiance without distinguished
+precedent. And how were we to secure this?</p>
+
+<p>Every one was there&mdash;the little gray Doctor June, flitting about as
+quietly as a moth, and all those of whom Delia More had asked me: Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, wearing her cloak wine broadcloth side out
+to honour the occasion; Abigail Arnold, with a huge basket of
+gingerbread and jumbles from her home bakery; Photographer Jimmy
+Sturgis, and even Mis' Sturgis, in a faint aroma of caraway which she
+nibbled incessantly; Liddy Ember, and poor Ellen, wearing her
+magnificent hair like a coronet, and standing wistfully about, with her
+hand, palm outward, persistently covering her mouth; and Abel Halsey,
+who was to leave at midnight for a lonely cross-country ride into the
+hills. And as they stood, gossiping and eager, the women bird-observant
+of one another's toilettes, I own myself to have felt like an alien
+among them, remembering how I alone knew that Calliope Marsh was not
+even in the village.</p>
+
+<p>Very softly we lifted the latch of Calliope's gate and trooped in her
+little dark yard.</p>
+
+<p>"Blisterin' Benson!" Timothy Toplady whispered, "ef the house hain't
+pocket-dark, front <i>and</i> back. What ef she's went in the country?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sh&mdash;h!" whispered his great Amanda, masterfully. "It's the shades down.
+I'm nervous as a witch. My land! if the front door ain't open a foot!"</p>
+
+<p>Though there are no locked doors in Friendship, I had feared that
+Calliope's cottage door would now be barred, and that Delia More would
+answer no formal summons. At sight of the unguarded entrance I had a
+sick fear that she had in some way heard of our coming and fled away,
+leaving the door ajar in her haste. But when we had footed softly across
+the porch and peered in the dark passage, we saw at its farther end a
+crack of light.</p>
+
+<p>"Might as well step ri' down to the dinin' room&mdash;that's where she sets,"
+Mis' Amanda said in her whisper, which is gigantic too.</p>
+
+<p>The passage smelled of the oilcloth on the floor and of a rubber
+waterproof which I brushed. And I shrank back beside the waterproof and
+let the others go on. For, after all, to that woman within I was a
+stranger, and these were her friends of old time. So it was Mis' Amanda
+who opened the dining-room door.</p>
+
+<p>I could see that the room was cheery with a red-shaded hanging-lamp, and
+shelves of plants, and a glowing fire in the great range. A table was
+covered with red cotton and laid with dishes. Also, there was the
+fragrance of toast, so that one wished to enter. And in a rocking-chair
+sat Delia More. She stared up in a kind of terror at the open door, and
+then turned shrinkingly to some one who sat beside her. But at that one
+beside her I looked and looked again, for her rich fur cloak had fallen
+where she had let it fall; and there, sitting with Delia More's hand in
+hers, was that great Madame Proudfit of the Proudfit estate.</p>
+
+<p>"For the land!" Mis' Amanda said. "For the land...."</p>
+
+<p>But she was not looking at Madame Proudfit. And hardly seeing her, as I
+could guess, that great Mis' Amanda went forward, holding out her arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Delia More!" she cried, "Delia More!"</p>
+
+<p>I saw Abel Halsey's pale, luminous face as he pushed past Timothy and
+strode within and crossed to her; and I remember Abigail Arnold and Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and how they followed Abel with little
+sharp cries which must have been a kind of music. And with them went
+Ellen Ember, as if, secretly, she were wiser than we knew. And while the
+others blocked the passage or crowded into the room, according to the
+nature which was theirs, some one came from the cellarway and paused,
+smiling, on the threshold. And it was Miss Clementina Proudfit, with
+eggs in her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait!" I heard Delia's sharp, piping voice then; "wait!"</p>
+
+<p>She rose, one thin little hand pressed tensely along her cheek. But the
+other hand Madame Proudfit held in both her own as she, too, rose beside
+her. And with them Abel stood, facing the rest.</p>
+
+<p>"O, Abel Halsey&mdash;Abel Halsey ..." Delia said, "an' Mame Bliss&mdash;nor you,
+Abigail, don't you, any of you, come in yet. I got somethin' to tell
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"But shake hands first, Delia," cried Abel Halsey, and Delia looked up
+at him, in her face a sudden, incredulous thankfulness which flushed it,
+brow and cheek, and won it to a way of beauty. But she did not give him
+her hand. And before she could speak again Miss Clementina put down the
+eggs, and, with some little stir of silk, she took a step or two steps
+toward us.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," she said, "let us not wait for anything&mdash;it has been so long since
+we have met! Delia has just told mother and me all about these
+years&mdash;and you don't know how splendid we think she has been and how
+brave in great trouble. Come in, everybody, and let's make her welcome
+home!"</p>
+
+<p>Madame Proudfit said nothing, but she nodded and smiled at Delia More,
+and it seemed to me that in the Proudfits' way with Delia, their
+beautiful Linda had won a kind of presence with them after all. And in
+the moment's hush the toast, propped on a fork before the coals in the
+range, suddenly blazed up in blue flame at the crust.</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody save the toast!" cried Clementina and smiled very brightly.</p>
+
+<p>They needed no more. Timothy Toplady sprang at the toast, and already
+Abel Halsey and Doctor June were shaking Delia's hand; and Mis' Amanda,
+throwing her shawl back over her shoulders from its pin at her throat,
+enveloped Delia in her giant arms. And the others came pushing forward,
+on their faces the smiles which, however they had faltered in the
+passage seeking a precedent, I make bold to guess bodied forth the
+gentle, hesitant spirit which informed them.</p>
+
+<p>As for me, I waited without, even after the others had entered. And as I
+lingered, the outer door was pushed open to admit some late comer who
+whisked down the passage and stood in the dining-room doorway. It was
+Calliope.</p>
+
+<p>"Delia More!" she cried; "didn't I tell you how it'd be if you'd only
+let 'em know? An' Mis' Proudfit, you here? I been worried to death on
+account o' forgettin' to take home your cream lace waist I mended."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Proudfit's voice lowered the high key of the others talking in
+chorus.</p>
+
+<p>"We drove over to get it, Calliope," she said. "And here we found our
+Delia More."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At eleven o'clock that night, as I sat writing a letter in which the
+spirit of what had come to pass must have breathed&mdash;as a spirit will
+breathe&mdash;Calliope Marsh tapped at my door; and she had a little basket.</p>
+
+<p>"Here," she said, "I brought you this. It's some o' everything we hed.
+An'&mdash;I'm obliged for my s'prise," she added, squeezing my hand in the
+darkness. "I surmised first thing, most, when Delia described you. No;
+land, no!&mdash;Delia don't suspicion you got it up. She don't think of it
+bein' anybody but just God&mdash;an' I donno's 'twas. An' that's what Abel
+thinks&mdash;wa'n't Abel splendid? You know 'bout Abel&mdash;an' Delia? You know
+he use' to&mdash;he wanted to&mdash;that is, he was in&mdash;oh, well, no. Of course
+you wouldn't know. Well, Delia don't suspicion you&mdash;but she said I
+should tell you something. 'You tell her,' she says to me, 'you tell her
+I say I guess I take stock now,' she says; 'tell her that: I guess I
+take stock now.'"</p>
+
+<p>At this my heart leaped up so that I hardly know what I said in answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Delia's out here now," Calliope called from the dark steps. "The
+Proudfits brought us. Delia's goin' home with 'em&mdash;to stay."</p>
+
+<p>Thus I saw the eyes of the Proudfits' motor, with the threads of
+streaming light, about to go skimming from my gate. And in that kindly
+security was Delia More.</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope," I cried after her because I could not help it, "tell Delia
+More I take stock, too!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE BIG WIND</h3>
+
+
+<p>Of Abel Halsey, that young itinerant preacher, I learned more on a
+December day when Autumn seemed to have come back to find whether she
+had left anything. Calliope and I were resting from a racing walk up the
+hillside, where the squat brick Leading Church of Friendship overlooks
+the valley pastures and the village. Calliope walks like a girl, and
+with our haste and the keen air, her wrinkled cheeks were as rosy as
+youth.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't it seem like some days don't belong to any month, but just whim
+along, doin' as they please?" Calliope said. "Months that might be
+snowin' an' blowin' the expression off our face hev days when they sort
+o' show summer hid inside, secret an' holy. That's the way with lots o'
+things, ain't it? That's the way," she added thoughtfully, "Abel feels
+about the Lord, I guess. Abel Halsey,&mdash;you know."</p>
+
+<p>They had told me how Abel, long ordained a minister of God, had
+steadfastly refused to be installed a pastor of any church. He was a
+devout man, but the love of far places was upon him, and he lived what
+Friendship called "a-gypsyin'" off in the hills, now to visit a sick
+man, now to preach in a country schoolhouse, now to marry, or bury, or
+help with the threshing. These lonely rides among the hills and his
+custom of watching a train come in or rush by out of the distance were
+his ways of voyaging. Perhaps, too, his little skill at the organ gave
+him, now and then, an hour resembling a journey. But in his first youth
+he had meant to go away in earnest&mdash;far away, to the City or some other
+city. Also, though Calliope did not speak of it again, and I think that
+the others kept a loyal silence because of my strangerhood, I had known,
+since the home coming of Delia More, that Abel Halsey had once had
+another dream.</p>
+
+<p>"You wasn't here when the new church was built," Calliope said, looking
+up at the building proudly. "That was the time I mean about Abel. You
+know, before it was built we'd hed church in the hall over the
+Gekerjeck's drug store; an' because it was his hall, Hiram Gekerjeck, he
+just about run the church,&mdash;picked out the wall paper, left the stair
+door open Sundays so's he could get the church heat, till the whole
+service smelt o' ether, an' finally hed church announcements printed as
+a gift, <i>but</i> with a line about a patent medicine o' his set fine along
+at the bottom. He said that was no differ'nt than advertisin' the
+printin'-offices that way, like they do. But it was that move made Abel
+Halsey&mdash;him an' Timothy Toplady and Eppleby Holcomb an' Postmaster
+Sykes, the three elders, set to to build a church. An' they done it too.
+An' to them four I declare it seemed like the buildin' was a body
+waitin' for its soul to be born. From the minute the sod was scraped off
+they watched every stick that went into it. An' by November it was all
+done an' plastered an' waitin' its pews&mdash;an' it was a-goin' to be
+dedicated with special doin's&mdash;music from off, an' strange ministers,
+an' Reverend Arthur Bliss from the City. I guess Abel an' the elders hed
+tacked printed invites to half the barns in the county.</p>
+
+<p>"I rec'lect it was o' Wednesday, the one next before the dedication, an'
+windy-cold an' wintry. I'd been havin' a walk that day, an' 'long about
+five o'clock, right about where we are, I'd stood watchin' the sunset
+over the Pump pasture there, till I was chilled through. The smoke was
+rollin' out o' the church chimney because they was dryin' the plaster,
+an' I run in there to get my hands warm an' see how the plaster was
+doin'. An' inside was the three elders, walkin' 'round, layin' a finger
+on a sash or a post&mdash;the kind o' odd, knowledgeable way men has with new
+buildin's. The Ladies' Aid had got the floor broom-clean, an' the
+lamp-chandelier filled an' ready; an' the foreign pipe-organ that the
+Proudfits had sent from Europe was in an' in workin' order, little
+lookin'-glass over the keyboard an' all. It seemed rill home-like, with
+the two big stoves a-goin', an' the floor back of 'em piled up with the
+chunks Peleg Bemus had sawed for nothin'. Everything was all redded up,
+waitin' for the pews.</p>
+
+<p>"Timothy Toplady was puttin' out his middle finger stiff here an' there
+on the plaster.</p>
+
+<p>"'It's dry as a bone,' he says, 'but what I say is this, le's us leave a
+fire burn here all night, so's to be sure. I'd hate like death to hev
+the whole congregation catchin' cold an' takin' Hiram Gekerjeck's
+medicine.'</p>
+
+<p>"I rec'lect Eppleby Holcomb looked up sort o' dreamy&mdash;Eppleby always
+goes round like he'd swallowed his last night's sleep.</p>
+
+<p>"'The house o' God,' he says over; 'ain't that curious? Nothin' about it
+to indicate it's the house o' God but the shape&mdash;no more'n's if 'twas a
+buildin' where the Holy Spirit never come near. An' yet right here in
+this place we'll mebbe feel the big wind an' speak with Pentecostal
+tongues.'</p>
+
+<p>"''T seems like,' says Postmaster Sykes, thoughtful, ''t seems like we'd
+ought to hev a little meetin' o' thanks here o' Sat'day night&mdash;little
+informal praise meetin' or somethin.'</p>
+
+<p>"Timothy shakes his head decided.</p>
+
+<p>"'Silas Sykes, what you talkin'?' he says. 'Why, the church ain't
+dedicated yet. A house o' God,' s'e, 'can't be used for no purpose
+whatsoever without it's been dedicated.'</p>
+
+<p>"'So it can't&mdash;so it can't,' says the postmaster, apologetic, knowin' he
+was in politics an' that the brethren was watchin' him, cat to mouse,
+for slips.</p>
+
+<p>"'I s'pose that's so,' says Eppleby, doubtful. But he's one o' them that
+sort o' ducks under situations to see if they're alike on both sides,
+an' if they ain't, he up an' questions 'em. Timothy, though, he was
+differ'nt. Timothy was always goin' on about constituted authority, an'
+to him the thing was the thing, even if it was another thing.</p>
+
+<p>"'That's right,' he insists, his lips disappearin' with certainty. 'I
+s'pose we hadn't reely ought even to come in here an' stan' 'round, like
+we are.'</p>
+
+<p>"He looks sidlin' over towards me, warmin' my hands rill secular by the
+church stove. An' I felt like I'd been spoke up for when somebody says
+from the door:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'You better just bar out the carpenters o' this world, friends, an'
+done with it!'</p>
+
+<p>"It was Abel Halsey, standin' in the entry, lookin' as handsome as the
+law allows. An' I see he happened to be there because the Through was
+about due,&mdash;that's the one that don't stop here,&mdash;an' you can always get
+a good view of it from this slope. You know Abel never misses watchin' a
+fast train go 'long, if he can help himself.</p>
+
+<p>"'What's the i-dea?' Abel says. 'How can you pray at all in closets an'
+places that ain't been dedicated? I shouldn't think they'd be holy
+enough, 's'e.'</p>
+
+<p>"'That,' says the postmaster, sure o' support, 'ain't the question.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I thought it couldn't be,' says Abel, amiable. 'Well, what is the
+question? Whether prayer is prayer, no matter where you're prayin'?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, no,' says Eppleby Holcomb, soothin', 'it ain't that.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I thought it couldn't be that,' says Abel. 'Is it whether the Lord is
+in dedicated spots an' nowheres else?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Abel Halsey,' Timothy tarts up, 'you needn't to be sacrilegious.'</p>
+
+<p>"'But,' says Abel, 'the question is, whether <i>you</i>'re sacrilegious to
+deny a prayer-meetin' or any other good use to the church or to any
+other place, dedicated or not. Well, Timothy, I think you are.'</p>
+
+<p>"Timothy clears his throat an' dabs at the palm of his hand with his
+other front finger. But before he could lay down eternal law, we sort o'
+heard, almost before we knew we heard, folks hurryin' past out here on
+the frozen ground. An' they was shoutin', like questions, an' a-shoutin'
+further off. We looked out, an' I can remember how the whole slope up
+from the village there was black with folks.</p>
+
+<p>"We run outside, an' I know I kep' close by Abel Halsey. An' I got hold
+o' what had happened when somebody yelled an answer to his askin'. You
+probably heard all about that part. It was the day the Through Express
+went off the track down there in the cut beyond the Pump pasture.</p>
+
+<p>"We run with the rest of 'em, me keepin' close to Abel, I guess because
+he's got a way with him that makes you think he'd know what to do no
+matter what. But when he was two-thirds o' the way acrost the pasture,
+he stops short an' grabs at my sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>"'Look here,' he says, 'you can't go down there. You mustn't do it. We
+donno what'll be. You stay here,' he says; 'you set there under the
+cottonwood.'</p>
+
+<p>"You kind o' <i>haf</i> to mind Abel. It's sort o' grained in that man to hev
+folks disciple after him. I made him promise he'd motion from the fence
+if he see I could help any, an' then I se' down under that big tree down
+there. I was tremblin' some, I know. It always seems like wrecks are
+somethin' that happen in other states an' in the dark. But when one's on
+ground that you know like a book an' was brought up on,&mdash;when it's in
+the daylight, right by a pasture you've been acrost always an' where
+you've walked the ties,&mdash;well, I s'pose it's the same feelin' as when a
+man you know cuts up a state's prison caper; seem's like he <i>can't</i> of,
+because you knew him.</p>
+
+<p>"Half the men o' Friendship run by me, seems though. The whole town'd
+been rousted up while we was in the church talkin' heresy. An' up on the
+high place on the road there I see Zittelhof's undertaking wagon, with
+the sunset showin' on its nickel rails. But not a woman run past me.
+Ain't it funny how it's men that go to danger of rail an' fire an'
+water&mdash;but when it's nothin' but birth an' dyin' natural, then it's for
+women to be there.</p>
+
+<p>"When I'd got about ready to fly away, waitin' so, I see Abel at the
+fence. An' he didn't motion to me, but he swung over the top an' come
+acrost the stubble, an' I see he hed somethin' in his arms. I run to
+meet him, an' he run too, crooked, his feet turnin' over with him some
+in the hard ground. The sky made his face sort o' bright; an' I see he'd
+got a child in his arms.</p>
+
+<p>"He didn't give her to me. He stood her down side o' me&mdash;a little thing
+of five years old, or six, with thick, straight hair an' big scairt
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"'Is she hurt, Abel?' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'No, she ain't hurt none,' he answers me, 'an' they's about seventeen
+more of 'em, her age, an' they ain't hurt, either. Their coach was
+standin' up on its legs all right. But the man they was with, he's stone
+dead. Hit on the head, somehow. An',' Abel says, 'I'm goin' to throw 'em
+all over the fence to you.'</p>
+
+<p>"The little girl jus' kep' still. An' when we took her by each hand, an'
+run back toward the fence with her, her feet hardly touchin' the ground,
+she kep' up without a word, like all to once she'd found out this is a
+world where the upside-down is consider'ble in use. An' I waited with
+her, over there this side the cut, hearin' 'em farther down rippin' off
+fence rails so's to let through what they hed to carry.</p>
+
+<p>"Time after time Abel come scramblin' up the sand-bank, bringin' 'em two
+'t once&mdash;little girls they was, all about the age o' the first one, none
+of 'em with hats or cloaks on; an' I took 'em in my arms an' set 'em
+down, an' took 'em in my arms an' set 'em down, till I was fair movin'
+in a dream. They belonged, I see by their dress, to some kind of a home
+for the homeless, an' I judged the man was takin' 'em somewheres, him
+that Abel said'd been killed. Some'd reach out their arms to me over the
+fence&mdash;an' some was afraid an' hung back, but some'd just cling to me
+an' not want to be set down. I can remember them the best.</p>
+
+<p>"Abel, when he come with the last ones, he off with his coat like I with
+my ulster, an' as well as we could we wrapped four or five of 'em
+up&mdash;one that was sickly, an' one little delicate blonde, an' a little
+lame girl, an' the one&mdash;the others called her Mitsy&mdash;that'd come over
+the fence first. An' by then half of 'em was beginnin' to cry some. An'
+the wind was like so many knives.</p>
+
+<p>"'Where shall we take 'em to, Abel?' I says, beside myself.</p>
+
+<p>"'Take 'em?' he says. 'Take 'em into the church! Quick as you can. This
+wind is like death. Stay with 'em till I come.'</p>
+
+<p>"Somehow or other I got 'em acrost that pasture. When I look at the Pump
+pasture now, in afternoon like this, or in Spring with vi'lets, or when
+a circus show's there, it don't seem to me it could 'a' been the same
+place. I kep' 'em together the best I could&mdash;some of 'em beggin' for
+'Mr. Middie&mdash;Mr. Middie,' the man, I judged, that was dead. An' finally
+we got up here in the road, an' it was like the end o' pain to be able
+to fling open the church door an' marshal 'em through the entry into
+that great, big, warm room, with the two fires roarin'.</p>
+
+<p>"I got 'em 'round the nearest stove an' rubbed their little hands an'
+tried not to scare 'em to death with wantin' to love 'em; an' all the
+while, bad as I felt for 'em, I was glad an' glad that it was me that
+could be there with 'em. They was twenty,&mdash;when I come to count 'em so's
+to keep track,&mdash;twenty little girls with short, thick hair, or soft,
+short curls, an' every one with something baby-like left to 'em. An'
+when we set on the floor round the stove, the coals shone through the
+big open draft into their faces, an' they looked over their shoulders to
+the dark creepin' up the room, an' they come closer 'round me&mdash;an' the
+closest-up ones <i>snuggled</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, o' course that was at first, when they was some dazed. But as
+fast as their blue little hands was warm an' pink again, one or two of
+'em begun to whimper, natural an' human, an' up with their arm to their
+face, an' then begun to cry right out, an' some more joined in, an' the
+rest pipes up, askin' for Mr. Middie. An' I thought, 'Sp'osin' they
+<i>all</i> cried an' what if Abel Halsey stayed away hours.' I donno. I done
+my best too. Mebbe it's because I'm use' to children with my heart an'
+not with my ways. Anyhow, most of 'em was cryin' prime when Abel finally
+got there.</p>
+
+<p>"When he come in, I see Abel's face was white an' dusty, an' he had his
+other coat off an' gone too, an' his shirt-sleeves was some tore. But he
+comes runnin' up to them cryin' children an' I wish't you could 'a' seen
+his smile&mdash;Abel's smile was always kind o' like his soul growin' out of
+his face, rill thrifty.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, you little kiddies!' s'e, 'cryin' when you're all nice an' warm!
+Le's see now,' he says grave. 'Anybody here know how to play
+Drop-the-handkerchief? If you do,' he tells 'em, 'stand up <i>quick</i>!'</p>
+
+<p>"They scrambled 'round like they was beetles an' you'd took up the
+stone. They was all up in a minute, an' stopped cryin', too. With that
+he catches my handkerchief out o' my hand an' flutters it over his head
+an' runs to the middle o' the room.</p>
+
+<p>"'Come on!' he says. 'Hold o' hands&mdash;every one o' you hold o' hands. I'm
+goin' to drop the handkerchief, an' you'd better hurry up.'</p>
+
+<p>"That was talk they knew. They was after him in a secunt an' tears
+forgot,&mdash;them poor little things,&mdash;laughin' an' hold o' hands, an'
+dancin' in a chain, an' standin' in a ring. An' when he hed 'em like
+that, an' still, Abel begun runnin' 'round to drop the handkerchief; an'
+then he turns to me.</p>
+
+<p>"'Only two killed, thank God,' he says as he run; 'the conductor an'
+M-i-d-d-l-e-t-o-n,' he spells it, an' motions to the children with the
+handkerchief so's I'd know who Middleton was. 'An' not a scrap o' paper
+on him,' he goes on, 'to tell what home he brought the children from or
+where he's goin' with 'em. Their mileage was punched to the City&mdash;but we
+don't know where they belong there, an' the conductor bein' gone too.
+The poor fellow that had 'em in charge never knew what hurt him. Hit
+from overhead, he was, an' his skull crushed....'</p>
+
+<p>"It was so dark in the church by then we could hardly see, but the
+children could keep track o' the white handkerchief. He let it fall
+behind the little girl he'd brought me first,&mdash;Mitsy,&mdash;an' she catches
+it up an' sort o' squeaks with the fun an' runs after him. An' while he
+doubles an' turns,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'They've telegraphed ahead,' he says, 'to two or three places in the
+City. But even if we hear right off, we can't get 'em out o' Friendship
+to-night. They'll hev to stay here. The Commercial Travellers' Hotel an'
+the Depot House has both got all they can do for&mdash;some of 'em hurt
+pretty bad. They couldn't either hotel take 'em in....'</p>
+
+<p>"Then he lets Mitsy catch him an' he ups with her on his shoulder an'
+run with her on his back, his face lookin' out o' her blue, striped
+skirts.</p>
+
+<p>"'We'll hev to house 'em right here in the church,' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Here?' says I; 'here in the church?'</p>
+
+<p>"'You know Friendship,' he says, hoppin' along. 'Not half a dozen houses
+could take in more'n two extry, even if we hed the time to canvass. An'
+we <i>ain't</i> the time. They want their s-u-p-p-e-r right now,' he spells
+it out, an' lit out nimble when Mitsy dropped the handkerchief back o'
+the little blond girl. Then he let the little blond girl catch them, and
+he took her on his shoulders too, an' they was both shoutin' so 't he
+hed to make little circles out to get where I could hear him.</p>
+
+<p>"'I've seen Zittelhof,' he told me. 'He was down there with his wagon.
+He'll bring up enough little canvas cots from the store. An' I thought
+mebbe you'd go down to the village an' pick up some stuff they'll
+need&mdash;bedding an' things. An' get the women here with some supper. Come
+on now,' he calls out to 'em; 'everybody in a procession an' <i>sing</i>!'</p>
+
+<p>"He led 'em off with</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'King William was King James's son,'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>an' he sings back to me, for the secunt line,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Go <i>now</i>, go <i>quick</i>, I bet they're starved!'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"So I got into my coat, tryin' to think where I should go to be sure o'
+not wastin' time talkin'. Lots o' folks in this world is willin', but
+mighty few can be quick.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew right off, though, where I'd find somebody to help. The
+Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality was meetin'
+that afternoon with Mis' Toplady, an' I could cut acrost their
+pasture&mdash;" Calliope nodded toward the little Toplady house and the big
+Toplady barn&mdash;"an' that's what I done. An' when I got near enough to the
+house to tell, I see by the light in the parlour that they was still
+there. An' I know when I got into the room, full as I was o' news o'
+them little children an' the wreck an' the two killed an' all them that
+was hurt&mdash;there was the Sodality settlin' whether the lamb's wool
+comforter for the bazaar should be tied with pink for daintiness or
+brown for durability.</p>
+
+<p>"'<i>Dainty!</i>' says I, when I got my breath. 'They's sides to life makes
+me want to pinch that word right out o' the dictionary same as I would a
+bug,' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"That was funny, too,"&mdash;Calliope added thoughtfully, "because I like
+that word, speakin' o' food an' ways to do things. But some folks get to
+livin' the word same's if it was the law.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess they thought I was crazy," she went on, "but I wasn't long
+makin' 'em understand. An' I tell you, the way they took it made me love
+'em all. If you want to love folks, just you get in some kind o'
+respectable trouble in Friendship, an' you'll see so much lovableness
+that the trouble'll kind o' spindle out an' leave nothin' but the love
+doin' business. My land, the Sodality went at the situation head first,
+like it was somethin' to get acrost before dark. An' so it was.</p>
+
+<p>"I remember Mis' Photographer Sturgis: 'There!' she says, 'most cryin'.
+'If ever I take only a pint o' milk, I'm sure as sure to want more
+before the day's out. None of us is on good terms with each other's
+milkman. <i>Where</i> we goin' to get the milk,' she says, 'for them poor
+little things?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Where?' says Mis' Toplady&mdash;you know how big an' comfortable an'
+settled she is&mdash;'<i>Where?</i> Well, you needn't to think o' where. I expect
+the Jersey won't be milked till I go an' milk her,' she says, 'but she
+gives six quarts, nights, right along now, an' sometimes seven. Now
+about the bread.'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Postmaster Sykes use' to set sponge twice a week, an' she offered
+five loaves out o' her six baked that day. Mis' Holcomb had two loaves
+o' brown bread an' a crock o' sour cream cookies. An' Libbie Liberty
+bursts out that they'd got up their courage an' killed an' boiled two o'
+their chickens the day before an' none o' the girls'd been able to touch
+a mouthful, bein' they'd raised the hens from egg to axe. Libbie said
+she'd bring the whole kettle along, an' it could be het on the church
+stove an' made soup of. So it went on, down to even Liddy Ember, that
+was my partner an' silly poor, an' in about four minutes everything was
+provided for, beddin' an' all.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady had flew upstairs, gettin' out the linen, an' she was
+comin' down the front stairs with her arms full o' sheets an' pillow
+slips when through the front door walks Timothy Toplady, come in all
+excited an' lookin' every which way. Seems he'd barked his elbow in the
+rescue work an' laid off for liniment.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, Timothy,' says his wife, 'them poor little children. We've been
+plannin' it all out.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Who's goin' to take 'em in?' says Timothy, tryin' to roll up his
+overcoat sleeve for fear the Sodality'd be put to the blush if he got to
+his elbow any other way.</p>
+
+<p>"'They're all warm in the church,' Mis' Toplady says; 'we're goin' to
+leave 'em there. Zittelhof's goin' to take up canvas cots. We're gettin'
+the bedding together,' she told him.</p>
+
+<p>"Timothy looked up, sort o' wild an' glazed.</p>
+
+<p>"'Canvas cots,' s'e, 'in the house o' the Lord?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, Timothy,' says his wife, helpless, 'it's all warm there now, an'
+we don't know what else. We thought we'd carry up their supper to 'em&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"'Supper,' says Timothy, 'in the house o' the Lord?'</p>
+
+<p>"Then Mis' Toplady spunks up some.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, yes,' she says; 'I'm goin' to milk the Jersey an' take up the two
+pails.'</p>
+
+<p>"Timothy waves his barked arm in the air.</p>
+
+<p>"'Never!' s'e. 'Never. We elders'll never consent to that, not in this
+world!'</p>
+
+<p>"At that we all stood around sort o' pinned to the air. This hadn't
+occurred to nobody. But his wife was back at him, rill crispy.</p>
+
+<p>"'Timothy Toplady,' s'she, 'they use churches for horspitals an'
+refuges,' she says.</p>
+
+<p>"'They do,' says Timothy, solemn, 'they do, in necessity, an' war, an'
+siege. But here's the whole o' Friendship Village to take these children
+in, an' it's sacrilege to use the house o' God for any purpose whatever
+while it's waitin' its dedication. It's stealin', he says, 'from the
+Lord Most High.'</p>
+
+<p>"I never see anybody more het up. We all tried to tell him. Nobody in
+Friendship has a warm spare room in winter, without it's the Proudfits,
+an' they was in Europe an' their house locked. Mebbe six of us, we
+counted up afterwards, could 'a' took in two children to sleep in a cold
+room, or one child to sleep with some one o' the family. But as Abel
+said, where was the time to canvass round? An' what could we do with the
+other little things? But Timothy wouldn't listen to nothin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'Amanda,' s'e in a married voice, 'what I say is this, I forbid you to
+carry a drop o' Jersey milk or any other kind o' milk up to that
+church.'</p>
+
+<p>"With that he was out the front door an' liniment forgot.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes spatted her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"'He'll find Silas Sykes an' Eppleby,' she says to Mis' Holcomb. 'Quick.
+Le's us get our hands on my bread an' your cookies. Them poor little
+things&mdash;'way past their supper hour.'</p>
+
+<p>"'An' none of 'em got mothers,' says Mis' Sturgis, 'just left 'round
+with lockets on, I sp'ose, an' wrecked an' hungry....'</p>
+
+<p>"'An' one o' 'em lame,' Mame Holcomb puts in, down on her knees tryin'
+to sort out her overshoes. The Sodality never could tell its own
+overshoes.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, they scattered so quick it made you think o' mulberry leaves,
+some years, in the first frost&mdash;an' I was left alone with Mis' Toplady.</p>
+
+<p>"'Here,' she says to me then, all squintin' with firmness, 'you take
+along all the linen an' comfortables you can lug. Timothy didn't mention
+them. An' <i>leave the rest to me</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>"I went over that in my mind while I stumbled along back to the church,
+loaded down. But I couldn't make much out of it. I knew Timothy Toplady:
+that he was meek till he turned an' then it was look out. An' I knew,
+too, that Timothy could run Silas Sykes, the postmaster's political
+strength, like you've noticed, makin' him kind o' wobbled in his own
+judgment of other things. I didn't know how Eppleby Holcomb'd be&mdash;it
+might turn out to be one o' the things he'd up an' question, civilized,
+but I wa'n't sure. Anyhow, the cream cookies an' the two loaves wasn't
+so vital as them five loaves o' bread.</p>
+
+<p>"When I got back to the church, here it was all lit up. Abel had lit the
+chandelier on a secular scene! Bless 'em, it surely was secular, though,
+accordin' to my lights, it was some sacred too. Six or seven of the
+little things was buildin' a palace out o' the split wood, with the
+little lame girl for queen. The little blonde an' the one that was rill
+delicate lookin' had gone to sleep by the stove on Abel's overcoat.
+Mitsy, she run from somewheres an' grabbed my hand. An' Abel had the
+rest over by the other stove tellin' 'em stories. I heard him say
+dragon, an' blue velvet, an' golden hair.</p>
+
+<p>"I hadn't more'n got inside the door before Zittelhof's wagon come with
+the cots. An' Mis' Zittelhof was with him, her arms full o' bedclothes
+she'd gathered up around from folks. I never said a word to Abel about
+the trouble with Timothy. I donno if Abel rilly heard us come in, he was
+so excited about his dragon. An' Mis' Zittelhof an' I began makin' up
+the cots. On the first one I laid the two babies that was asleep on the
+floor. They never woke up. Their little cheeks was warm an' pink, an'
+one of 'em had some tears on it. When I see that, I clear forgot the
+church wasn't dedicated, an' I thanked God they was there, safe an' by a
+good fire, with somebody 'tendin' to 'em.</p>
+
+<p>"The bed-makin' an' the story-tellin' an' the palace-buildin' went on,
+an' I kep' gettin' exciteder every minute. When the door opened, I
+couldn't tell which was in my mouth, my heart or my tongue. But it was
+only Libbie Liberty with the big iron kettle o' chicken broth an' a
+basket o' cups an' spoons. She se' down the kettle on the stove an'
+stirred up the fire under it, an' it was no time before the whole church
+begun to smell savoury as a kitchen. An' then in walks Mis' Holcomb with
+her brown bread an' cream cookies. An' we fair jumped up an' down when
+Mis' Sykes come breathin' in the door with them five loaves o' wheat
+bread safe, an' butter to match.</p>
+
+<p>"Still, we <i>was</i> without milk. There wasn't a sign o' Mis' Toplady. An'
+any minute Timothy might get there with Silas in tow. Mis' Sykes was
+nervous as a witch over it, an' it was her proposed we set the children
+up on the cots an' begin' feedin' 'em right away. I run down the room to
+tell Abel, an' then I hed to tell him <i>why</i> we'd best hurry.</p>
+
+<p>"Abel laughs a little when he heard about it.</p>
+
+<p>"'Dear old Timothy,' he says, 'servin' his God accordin' to the dictates
+of his own notions. Wait a minute till I release the princess.'</p>
+
+<p>"When he said that, I was afraid he must be telling a worldly story with
+royalty in. An' I begun to get troubled myself. But I heard him end it:
+'So the Princess found her kingdom because she learnt to love every
+living thing. She saved the lives of the hare an' the goldfinch. An'
+don't you ever let any living thing suffer one minute and maybe you'll
+find out some of the things the Princess knew.' An', royalty or not, I
+felt all right about Abel's story-telling after that.</p>
+
+<p>"Then we all brisked round an' begun settin' the children up on the
+cots&mdash;two or three to a cot, with one of us to wait on 'em. An' both the
+little sleepy ones woke up, too. An' when we sliced an' spread the bread
+an' dished the hot chicken broth an' see how hungry they all seemed, I
+declare if one of us could feel wicked. The little things'd begun to
+talk some by then, an' they chatted soft an' looked up at us, an' that
+little Mitsy&mdash;she'd got so she'd kiss me every time I'd ask her. An' I
+was perfectly shameless. I donno's the poor little thing got enough to
+eat. But sometimes when things go blue&mdash;I like to think about that. I
+guess we was all the same. Our principal feelin' was how dear they was,
+an' to hurry up before Timothy Toplady got there, an' how we wish't we
+hed more milk.</p>
+
+<p>"Then all of a sudden while we was flyin' round, I happened to go past
+the front door, an' I heard a noise in the entry. I thought o' Timothy
+an' Silas, comin' with sheriffs an' firearms an' I didn't know
+what&mdash;Silas havin' politics back of him, so; an' I rec'lect I planned,
+wild an' contradictory, first about callin' an instantaneous
+congregational meetin' to decide which was right, an' then about
+telegraphin' to the City for constituted authority to do as we was
+doin', an' then about Abel fightin' Timothy an' Silas both, if it come
+rilly necessary.</p>
+
+<p>"I got hold o' Mis' Sykes an' Mame Holcomb, an' told 'em quiet.
+'Somethin's the matter outside there,' I says to 'em, kind o' warnin',
+'an' I thought you two'd ought to know it.' An' we all three come 'round
+by the entry door, careless, an listened. An' the noise kep' up, kind o'
+soft an' obstinate, an' we couldn't make it out.</p>
+
+<p>"'We'd best go out there an' see,' says Mis' Sykes, low; 'the dear land
+knows what men <i>will</i> do.'</p>
+
+<p>"So we watched our chance an' slipped out&mdash;an' I guess, for all our high
+ways, we was all three wonderin' inside, was we rilly doin' right. You
+know your doubts come thick when there's a noise in the entry. But Mis'
+Sykes acted as brave as two, an' it was her shut the door to behind us.</p>
+
+<p>"An' there, right by that stone just outside the entry o' the church,
+set Mis' Timothy Toplady, <i>milkin' her Jersey cow</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"We could just see her, dim, by the light o' the transom. She was on the
+secunt pail, an' that was two-thirds full. She hed her back toward us,
+an' she didn't hear us. She set all wrapped up in a shawl, a basket o'
+cups side of her, an' the Jersey standin' there, quiet an' demure. An'
+beyond, in the cut an' movin' acrost the Pump pasture, it was thick with
+lanterns.</p>
+
+<p>"But before we three'd hed time to burst out like we wanted to, we sort
+o' scrooched back again. Because on the other side o' the cow we heard
+Timothy Toplady's voice. He'd just got there, some breathless, an' with
+him, we see, was Eppleby.</p>
+
+<p>"'Amanda,' says Timothy, 'what in the Dominion o' Canady air you doin'?'</p>
+
+<p>"'I shouldn't think you would know,' says Mis' Toplady, short. 'You
+don't do enough of it.'</p>
+
+<p>"She hed him there. Timothy always <i>will</i> go down to the Dick Dasher an'
+shirk the chores.</p>
+
+<p>"'Amanda,' says Timothy, 'you've disobeyed me flat-footed.'</p>
+
+<p>"'No such thing,' s'she, milkin' away like mad for fear he'd use force;
+'I ain't carried a drop o' milk here. I've drove it,' she says.</p>
+
+<p>"Timothy groaned.</p>
+
+<p>"'Milkin' in the church,' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"'No, sir,' says Amanda, back at him; 'I'm outside on the sod, an' you
+know it.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' then my hopes sort o' riz, because I thought I heard Eppleby
+Holcomb laugh soft&mdash;sort of a half-an'-half chuckle. Like he'd looked
+under the situation an' see it wasn't alike on both sides. An' 't the
+same time Mis' Toplady, she changed her way, an',&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Timothy,' s'she, 'you hungry?'</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm nigh starved,' says Timothy. 'It must be eight o'clock,' s'e, 'but
+I ain't the heart to think o' that.'</p>
+
+<p>"'No,' s'she, 'so you ain't. Not with them poor babies in there
+hungrier'n you be an' nowheres to go.'</p>
+
+<p>"With that she got done milkin' an' stood up an' picked up her two
+pails&mdash;we could smell the sweet, warm milk from where we was.</p>
+
+<p>"'Timothy,' s'she, 'the worst sacrilege that's done in <i>this</i> world is
+when folks turns their backs on any little bit of a chance that the Lord
+gives 'em to do good in, like He told 'em. Who was it, I'd like to know,
+said, "Suffer little children"? Who was it said, "Feed my lambs"? No
+"when" or "where" about that. Just <i>do it</i>. An' no occasion to hem an'
+haw about it, either. The least you can do for your share in this, as I
+see it, is to keep your silence and drive the cow back home. The oven's
+full o' bake' sweet potatoes an' they must be just nearin' done.'</p>
+
+<p>"I see Timothy start to wave his arms an' I donno what he would 'a' said
+if it hadn't been settled for 'im. For then, like it was right out o'
+the sky, the church organ begun to play soft. For a minute we all looked
+up, like the Shepherds must of when the voices of the night told 'em the
+spirit o' God was in the world, born in a little child. It was Abel,&mdash;I
+knew right away it was Abel,&mdash;an' he was just gentlin' round soft on the
+keys, kind o' like he was askin' a blessin' an' rockin' a cradle an'
+doin' all the little nice things music can. An' with that Mis' Sykes,
+she throws open the church door.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll never forget how it looked inside&mdash;all warm an' lamp-lit an' with
+them little things bein' fed an' chatterin' soft. An' up in the loft set
+Abel, playin' away on the foreign organ before it'd been dedicated. An'
+then he begun singin' low&mdash;an' there's somethin' about Abel 't you just
+<i>haf</i> to listen, whatever he says or does. Even Timothy hed to
+listen&mdash;though I think he was some struck dumb, too, an' that kep' him
+controlled for a minute&mdash;like it will. An' Abel sung:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'The Lord is my Shepherd&mdash;I shall not want.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He leadeth me&mdash;He leadeth me beside the still waters.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He restoreth my soul....'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"An' at the first line, before we'd rilly sensed what it was he said,
+every one o' them little children in the midst o' their supper slips off
+the edge o' the cots an' kneeled down there on the bare floor, just like
+they'd been told to. Oh, wasn't it wonderful? An' yet it wasn't&mdash;it
+wasn't. We found out, when folks come for 'em the next mornin', it was
+the children's prayer that they sung every day o' their lives at their
+Good Shepherd's Orphans' Home&mdash;soft an' out o' tune an' with all their
+little hearts, just as they went ahead an' sung it with Abel, clear to
+the end. I guess they didn't know everybody don't kneel down all over
+the world when they hear the Twenty-third Psalm.</p>
+
+<p>"Abel seen 'em in the little lookin'-glass over the keyboard. An' when
+he'd got done he set there perfectly still with his head down. An' Mis'
+Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb an' Eppleby an' I bowed our heads too, out there
+in the entry. An' so, after a minute, did Timothy. I couldn't help
+peekin' to see.</p>
+
+<p>"An' then, when the children was all a-rustlin' up, Mis' Toplady she
+jus' hands her two pails o' milk over to Timothy.</p>
+
+<p>"'You take 'em in,' she says to him, her eyes swimmin'. 'I've come off
+without my handkerchief.'</p>
+
+<p>"Timothy looks round him, kind o' helpless, but Eppleby stood there an'
+pats him on the arm.</p>
+
+<p>"'Go in&mdash;go in, brother,' Eppleby says gentle. 'I guess the church's
+been dedicated. I feel like we'd heard the big wind&mdash;an' I guess, mebbe,
+the Pentecostal tongues.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' Timothy&mdash;he's an awful tender-hearted man in spite o' bein' so
+notional&mdash;Timothy just went on in with the milk, without sayin'
+anything. An' Eppleby side of him. An' we 'most shut the door on Silas
+Sykes, comin' tearin' up on account o' Timothy leavin' him urgent word
+to come, without explainin' why. An' when Silas see the inside o' the
+church, all lit up an' chicken supper for the children an' the other two
+elders there with the milk, he just rubs his hands an' beams like he see
+his secunt term. I donno's it'd ever enter Silas Sykes's head't there
+was anything wrong with anything, providin' somebody wasn't snappin' him
+up for it. I guess it's like that in politics.</p>
+
+<p>"We took the milk around an', bake' sweet potatoes forgot, Timothy stood
+up by the stove, between Eppleby an' Silas, an' watched us&mdash;an' the
+Jersey must 'a' picked her way home alone. An' Abel, he just set there
+to the organ, gentlin' 'round soft on the keys so it made me think o'
+God movin' on the face o' the waters. An' movin' on the face of
+everything else too, dedicated or not. It was like we'd felt the big
+wind, same as Eppleby said. An' somethin' in it kind o' hid, secret an'
+holy."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GRANDMA LADIES</h3>
+
+
+<p>Two weeks before Christmas Friendship was thrown into a state of holiday
+delight. Mrs. Proudfit and her daughter, Miss Clementina, issued
+invitations to a reception to be given on Christmas Eve at Proudfit
+House, on Friendship Hill. The Proudfits, who had rarely entertained
+since Miss Linda went away, lived in Europe and New York and spent
+little time in the village, but, for all that, they remained citizens in
+absence, and Friendship always wrote out invitations for them whenever
+it gave "companies." The invitations the postmaster duly forwarded to
+some Manhattan bank, though I think the village had a secret conviction
+that these were never received&mdash;"sent out wild to a bank in the City,
+so." However, now that old courtesies were to be so magnificently
+returned, every one believed and felt a greater respect for the whole
+financial world.</p>
+
+<p>The invitations enclosed the card of Mrs. Nita Ordway, and the name
+sounded for me a note of other days when, before my coming to Friendship
+Village, we two had, in the town, belonged to one happy circle of
+friends.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought at first mebbe the card'd got shoved in the envelope by
+mistake," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. "I know once I got a
+Christmas book from a cousin o' mine in the City, an' a strange man's
+card fell out o' the leaves. I sent the card right straight back to her,
+an' Cousin Jane seemed rill cut up, so I made up my mind I'd lay low
+about this card. But I hear everybody's got 'em. I s'pose it's a sign
+that it's some Mis' Ordway's party too&mdash;only not enough hers to get her
+name on the invite. Mebbe she chipped in on the expenses. Give a third,
+like enough."</p>
+
+<p>However that was, Friendship looked on the Christmas party as on some
+unexpected door about to open in its path, and it woke in the morning
+conscious of expectation before it could remember what to expect.
+Proudfit House! A Christmas party! It touched every one as might some
+giant Santa Claus, for grown-ups, with a pack of heart's-ease on his
+back.</p>
+
+<p>When Mrs. Ordway arrived in the village, the excitement mounted. Mrs.
+Nita Ordway was the first exquisitely beautiful woman of the great world
+whom Friendship had ever seen&mdash;"beautiful like in the pictures of when
+noted folks was young," the village breathlessly summed her up. To be
+sure, when she and her little daughter, Viola, rode out in the
+Proudfits' motor, nobody in the street appeared to look at them. But
+Friendship knew when they rode, and when they walked, and what they
+wore, and when they returned.</p>
+
+<p>It was a happiness to me to see Mrs. Ordway again, and I sat often with
+her in the music room at Proudfit House and listened to her glorious
+voice in just the songs that I love. Sometimes she would send for her
+little Viola, so that I might sit with the child in my arms, for she was
+one of those rare children who will let you love them.</p>
+
+<p>"I like be made some 'tention to," Viola sometimes said shyly. She was
+not afraid, and she would stay with me hour-long, as if she loved to be
+loved. She was like a little come-a-purpose spirit, to let one pretend.</p>
+
+<p>A day or two after the invitations had been received, I was in my guest
+room going over my Christmas list. Just before Christmas I delight in
+the look of a guest room, for then the bed is spread with a brave array
+of pretty things, and when one arranges and wraps them, the stitches of
+rose and blue on flowered fabrics, the flutter of crisp ribbons, and the
+breath of sachets make one glad. I was lingering at my task when I heard
+some one below, and I recognized her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope!" I called gladly from the stairs, and bade her come up to me.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope is one of the women in whose presence one can wrap one's
+Christmas gifts. She came into the room, bringing a breath of Winter,
+and she laid aside her tan ulster and her round straw hat, and
+straightway sat down on the rug by the open fire.</p>
+
+<p>"Well said!" she cried contentedly, "a grate fire upstairs! It's one of
+the things that never seems real to me, like a tower on a house. I'd as
+soon think o' havin' a grate fire up a tree an' settin' there, as in my
+chamber. Anyway, when it comes Winter, upstairs in Friendship is just a
+place where you go after something in the bureau draw' an' come down
+again as quick as you can. I s'pose you got an invite to the party?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I said, "and you will go, Calliope?"</p>
+
+<p>But instead of answering me:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"My land!" she said, "think of it! A party like that, an' not a
+low-necked waist in town, nor a swallow-tail! An' only two weeks to do
+anything in, an' only Liddy Ember for dressmaker, an' it takes her two
+weeks to make a dress. I guess Mis' Postmaster Sykes has got her. They
+say she read her invite in the post-office with one hand an' snapped up
+that tobacco-brown net in the post-office store window with the other,
+an' out an' up to Liddy's an' hired her before she was up from the
+breakfast table. So she gets the town new dress. Mis' Sykes is terrible
+quick-moved."</p>
+
+<p>"What will you wear, Calliope?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Me&mdash;I never wear anything but henriettas," she said. "I think the
+plainer-faced you are, the simpler you'd ought to be dressed. I use' to
+fix up terrible ruffled, but when I see I was reg'lar plain-faced I
+stuck to henriettas, mostly gray&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope," I said resolutely, "you don't mean you're not going to the
+Proudfit party?"</p>
+
+<p>She clasped her hands and held them, palms outward, over her mouth, and
+her eyes twinkled above them.</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir," she said, "I can't go. You'll laugh at me!" she defended.
+"Don't you tell!" she warned. And finally she told me.</p>
+
+<p>"Day before yesterday," she said, "I went into the City. An' I come out
+on the trolley. An' I donno what possessed me,&mdash;I ain't done it for
+months,&mdash;but when we crossed the start of the Plank Road, I got off an'
+went up an' visited the Old Ladies' Home. You know I've always thought,"
+she broke off, "&mdash;well, you know I ain't a rill lot to do with, an' I
+always had an i-dee that mebbe sometime, when I got older, I might&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I nodded, and she went on.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I walked around among 'em up there&mdash;canary birds an' plants an'
+footstools&mdash;an' the whole thing fixed up so cheerful that it's pitiful.
+Red wall-paper an' flowered curtains an' such, all fair yellin' at you,
+'We're cheerful&mdash;cheerful&mdash;cheerful!' till I like to run. An' it come
+over me, bein' so near Christmas an' all, what would they do on
+Christmas? So I asked a woman in a navy-blue dress, seein' she flipped
+around like she was the flag o' the place.</p>
+
+<p>"'The south corridor,' she answers,&mdash;them's the highest payin"&mdash;Calliope
+threw in, "'chipped in an' got up a tree, an' there's gifts for all,'
+s'she. 'The west corridor'&mdash;them's the local city ones&mdash;'all has friends
+to take 'em away for the day. The east corridor'&mdash;they're from farther
+away an' middlin' well-to-do&mdash;'all has boxes comin' to 'em from off. But
+the north corridor,' s'she, scowlin' some, 'is rather a trial to us.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' I was waitin' for that. The north corridor is all charity old
+ladies, paid for out o' the fund; an' the president o' the home has just
+died, an' the secretary's in the old country on a pleasure trip, an' the
+board's in a row over the policy o' the home, an' the navy-blue matron
+dassent act, an' altogether it looked like the north corridor was goin'
+to get a regular mid-week Wednesday instead of a Christmas. An' I up an'
+ast' her to take me down to see 'em."</p>
+
+<p>It was easy to see what Calliope had done, I thought: she had promised
+to spend Christmas Eve over there in the north corridor, reading aloud.</p>
+
+<p>"They was nine of 'em," she went on, "nice old grandma ladies, with
+hands that looked like they'd ought to 'a' been tyin' little aprons an'
+cuttin' out cookies an' squeezin' somebody else's hand. There they set,
+with the wall-paper doin' its cheerfulest, loud as an insult,&mdash;one of
+'em with lots o' white hair, one of 'em singin' a little, some of 'em
+tryin' to sew or knit some. My land!" said Calliope, "when we think of
+'em sittin' up an' down the world&mdash;with their arms all empty&mdash;an'
+Christmas comin' on&mdash;ain't it a wonder&mdash;Well, I stayed 'round an' talked
+to 'em," she went on, "while the navy-blue lady whisked her starched
+skirts some. She seemed too busy 'tendin' to 'em to give 'em much
+attention. An' they looked rill pleased when I talked to 'em about their
+patchwork an' knittin', an' did they get the sun all day, an' didn't the
+canary sort o' shave somethin' off'n the human ear-drum, on his tiptop
+notes? An' when I said that, Grandma Holly&mdash;her with lots o' white
+hair&mdash;says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'I donno but it does,' she says, 'but I don't mind; I'm so thankful to
+see somethin' around that's <i>little an' young</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>"That sort o' landed in my heart. It's just what I'd been thinkin' about
+'em.</p>
+
+<p>"'Little, young things,' s'I, sort o' careless, 'make a lot o' racket,
+you know.'</p>
+
+<p>"At that old Mis' Burney pipes up&mdash;her that brought up her daughter's
+children an' her son-in-law married again an' turned her out:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'I use' to think so,' she says quiet; 'the noise o' the children use'
+to bother me terrible. When they reely got to goin' I use' to think I
+couldn't stand it, my head hurt me so. But now,' s'she, 'I get to
+thinkin' sometimes I wouldn't mind a horse-fiddle if some of 'em played
+it.'</p>
+
+<p>"'They're lots o' company, the little things,' says old Mis'
+Norris&mdash;she'd kep' mislayin' her teeth an' the navy-blue lady had took
+'em away from her that day for to teach her, so I couldn't hardly
+understand what she said. 'Mine was named Ellen an' Nancy,' I made out.</p>
+
+<p>"'Some o' you remember my Sam,'&mdash;Mis' Ailing speaks up then, an' she
+begun windin' up her yarn an' never noticed she was ravellin' out her
+mitten,&mdash;'he was an alderman,' she was goin' on, but old Mis' Winslow
+cuts in on her:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'It don't matter what he was when he was man-grown,' s'she. 'Man-grown
+can get along themselves. It's when they're little bits o' ones,' she
+says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Little!' says Grandma Holly. 'Is it little you mean? Well, my Amy's
+two little feet use' to be swallowed up in my hand&mdash;so,' she says,
+shuttin' her hand over to show us.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, so they went on. I give you my word I stood there sort o'
+grippin' up on my elbows. I'd always known it was so&mdash;like you do know
+things are so. But somehow when you come to <i>feel</i> they're so, that's
+another thing. And I was feelin' this in my throat 'bout as big as an
+orange. I'd thought their hands looked like they'd ought to be tyin' up
+little aprons, but I never thought o' the hands bein' rill lonesome to
+do the tyin', an' thinkin' about it, too. An' now I understood 'em like
+I see 'em for the first time, rill face to face. Somehow, we ain't any
+too apt to look at people that way," said Calliope. "You see how I mean
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"Then comes the navy-blue woman an' says it's time for their hot milk,
+an' they all looked up, kind o' hopeful. An' I see that the navy-blue
+one had got 'em trained into the i-dee that hot milk was an event. She
+didn't like to hev 'em talk much about the past, she told me, when she
+see what we was speakin' of, because it gener'lly made some of 'em cry,
+an' the i-dee was to keep the spirit of the home bright an' cheerful.
+'So I see,' s'I, dry. An' there was Christmas comin' on, an' nothin' to
+break the general cheerfulness but hot milk. "Well," Calliope said, "I
+s'pose you'll think I'm terrible foolish, but I couldn't help what I
+done&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't wonder at it," said I, warmly; "you promised to spend Christmas
+Eve with them and read aloud to them, didn't you, Calliope?"</p>
+
+<p>"No!" Calliope cried; "I didn't do that. I should think they'd be sick
+to death o' bein' read aloud to. I should think they'd be sick to death
+bein' cheered up by their surroundin's. No&mdash;I invited the whole nine of
+'em to come over an' spend Christmas Eve with me."</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope!" I cried, "but how&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know it," she exclaimed, "I know it. But they're all well an' hardy.
+The charity corridor ain't expected in the infirmary much. An' Jimmy
+Sturgis is goin' to bring 'em over free in the closed 'bus&mdash;I'll fill it
+with hot bricks an' hot flat-irons an' bed-quilts. An' my land! you'd
+ought to see 'em when I ask' 'em. I don't s'pose they'd had an invite
+out in years. The navy-blue lady looked like I'd nipped a mountain off'n
+her shoulders, too. An' now," said Calliope, "what on top o' this earth
+will I do with 'em when I get 'em here?"</p>
+
+<p>What indeed? I left my task and sat by her on the rug before the fire,
+and we talked it over. But all the while we talked, I could see that she
+was keeping something back&mdash;some plan of which she was doubtful.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't no money to spend, you know," she said, "an' I won't let
+anybody else spend any for me, for this. Folks has plans enough o' their
+own without mine. But I kep' sayin' to myself, all the way home when my
+knees give down at the i-dee of what I was goin' to do: 'Calliope, the
+Lord says, "<i>Give.</i>" An' He meant you to give, same's those that hev
+got. He didn't say, "Everybody give but Calliope, an' she ain't got
+much, so she'd ought to be let off." He said, "<i>Give.</i>"' An' He didn't
+mention all nice things, same's I'd like to give, an' most everybody
+does give&mdash;" she nodded toward my bed, brave with its Christmas array.
+"He didn't mention givin' <i>things</i> at all. An' so," said Calliope, "I
+thought o' somethin' else."</p>
+
+<p>She sat with brooding eyes on the fire, her hands clasped about her
+knees.</p>
+
+<p>"The Lord Christ," said Calliope, "didn't hev nothin' of His own. An'
+yet He just give an' give an' give. An' somehow I got the <i>i</i>-dee," she
+finished, glancing up at me shyly, "that mebbe Christmas ain't really
+all in your stocking foot, after all. I ain't much to spend, and mebbe
+that sounds some like sour grapes. But it seems like a good many
+beautiful things is free to all, an' that they's ways to do. Well, I've
+thought of a way&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope," I said, "tell me what you have really planned for the
+old-lady party. You <i>have</i> planned?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes," she said, "I hev. But mebbe you'll think it ain't anything.
+First I thought o' tea, an' thin bread-an'-butter sandwiches&mdash;it seems
+some like a party when you get your bread thin. An' I've got apples in
+the house we could roast, an' corn to pop over the kitchen fire. But
+then I come to a stop. For I ain't nothin' else, an' I've spent every
+cent I <i>can</i> spend a'ready. But yet I did want to show 'em somethin'
+lovely&mdash;an' differ'nt from what they see, so's it'd seem as if somebody
+cared, an' as if they'd been <i>in Christmas</i>, too. An' all of a sudden it
+come to me, why not invite in a few little children o' somebody's here
+in Friendship? So's them old grandma ladies&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head and turned away.</p>
+
+<p>"I expec'," she said, "you think I'm terrible foolish. But wouldn't that
+be givin', don't you think? <i>Would</i> that be anything?"</p>
+
+<p>I have planned, as will fall to us all, many happy ways of keeping
+festival; but I think that never, even in days when I myself was
+happiest, have I so delighted in any event as in this of Calliope's
+proposing. And when at last she had gone, and the dusk had fallen and I
+lighted candles and went back to my pleasant task, some way the stitches
+of pink and blue on flowered fabrics, the flutter of crisp ribbons, and
+the breath of the sachets were not greatly in my thoughts; and that
+which made me glad was a certain shining in the room, but this was not
+of candle-light, or firelight, or winter starlight.</p>
+
+<p>With the days the plans for the Proudfit party&mdash;or rather the plans of
+the Proudfit guests&mdash;went merrily forward. It was, they said, like "in
+the Oldmoxon days," when the house in which I was now living had been
+the Friendship fairyland. Some take their parties solemnly, some
+joyously, some feverishly; but Friendship takes them vitally, as it
+takes a project or the breath of being. Like the rest of the world, the
+village sank Christmas in festivity. It could not see Christmas for the
+Christmas plans.</p>
+
+<p>Speculation was the delight of meetings, and every one conspired in
+terms of toilettes.</p>
+
+<p>"Likely," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "Mis' Banker Mason'll
+wear her black-an'-white foulard. Them foulards are wonderful
+durable&mdash;you can't muss 'em. She got hers when Gramma Mason first hurt
+her back, so's if anything happened she'd be part mournin', an' if
+anything didn't, she'd have a nice dress to wear out places. Ain't it
+real convenient,&mdash;white standin' for both companies an' the tomb, so?"</p>
+
+<p>And "Mis' Photographer Sturgis has the best of it, bein' an invalid,
+till a party comes up," said Libbie Liberty. "She gets plenty enough
+food sent in, an' flowers, an' such things, an' she's got nails hung
+full o' what I call sympathy clo'es, to wear durin' sympathy calls. But
+when it comes to a real what you might say dress-up dress, I guess
+she'll hev to be took worse with her side an' stay in the house."</p>
+
+<p>Abigail Arnold contributed:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Seems Mis' Doctor Helman had a whole wine silk dress put away with her
+dyin' things. She always thought it sounded terrible fine to hear about
+the dead havin' dress-pattern after dress-pattern laid away that hadn't
+never been made up. So she'd got together the one, but now she an'
+Elzabella are goin' to work an' make it up. I guess Mis' Helman thinks
+her stomach is so much better 't mebbe she'll be spared till after the
+holidays when the sales begin."</p>
+
+<p>Even Liddy Ember had promised to go and to take Ellen, and Ellen went up
+and down the winter streets singing sane little songs about the party,
+save on days when she "come herself again," and then she planned, as
+wildly as anybody, what she meant to wear. And Liddy, whose dream had
+always been to do "reg'lar city dress-makin', with helpers an' plates
+an' furnish the findin's at the shop," and whose lot instead had been to
+cut and fit "just the durable kind," was blithely at work night and day
+on Mis' Postmaster Sykes's tobacco-brown net. We understood that there
+were to be brown velvet butterflies stitched down the skirt, and if her
+Lady Washington geranium flowered in time,&mdash;Mis' Sykes was said to lay
+bread and milk nightly about the roots to encourage it,&mdash;she was to wear
+the blossom in her hair. ("She'll be gettin' herself talked about,
+wearin' a wreath o' flowers on her head, so," said some.) But then, Mis'
+Sykes was recognized to be "one that picks her own steps."</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes always dresses for company accordin' to the way she gets her
+invite," Calliope observed. "A telephone invite, she goes in somethin'
+she'd wear home afternoons. Word o' mouth at the front door, she wears
+what she wears on Sundays. Written invites, she rags out in her rill
+<i>best</i> dress, for parties. But <i>engraved</i>," Calliope mounted to her
+climax, "a bran' new dress an' a wreath in her hair is the least she'll
+stop at."</p>
+
+<p>But I think that, in the wish to do honour to so distinguished an
+occasion, the temper of Mis' Sykes, and perhaps of Ellen Ember too, was
+the secret temper of all the village.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>"NOT AS THE WORLD GIVETH"</h3>
+
+
+<p>I daresay that excitement followed excitement when news of Calliope's
+party got abroad. But of this I knew little, for I spent those next days
+at the Proudfits' with Nita Ordway and little Viola, and though I
+thought often of Calliope, I chanced not to see her again until the
+holidays were almost upon us. In the late afternoon, two days before
+Christmas, I dropped in at her cottage to learn how pleasantly the plans
+for her party matured.</p>
+
+<p>To my amazement I found her all dejection.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Calliope," I said, "can't the grandma ladies come, after all?"</p>
+
+<p>Yes, they could come; they were coming.</p>
+
+<p>"You are never sorry you asked them?" I pressed her.</p>
+
+<p>No. Oh, no; she was glad she had asked them.</p>
+
+<p>"Something is wrong, though," I said sadly&mdash;thinking what a blessed
+thing it is to be so joyous a spirit that one's dejections are bound to
+be taken seriously.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Calliope, then, "it's the children. No it ain't, it's
+Friendship. The town's about as broad as a broom straw an' most as deep.
+Anything differ'nt scares 'em like something wore out'd ought to.
+Friendship's got an i-dee that Christmas begins in a stocking an' ends
+off in a candle. It thinks the rest o' the days are reg'lar,
+self-respecting days, but it looks on Christmas like an extry thing,
+thrown in to please 'em. It acts as if the rest o' the year was plain
+cake an' the holidays was the frostin' to be et, an' everybody grab the
+best themselves, give or take."</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope!" I cried&mdash;for this was as if the moon had objected to the
+heavens.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know I'd ought not to," she said sadly; "but don't folks act as
+if time was give to 'em to run around wild with, as best suits 'em?
+Three hundred an' 'leven days a year to use for themselves, an' Sundays
+an' Christmas an' Thanksgivin' to give away looks to me a rill fair
+division. But, no. Some folks act like Sundays an' holidays was not only
+the frostin', but the nuts an' candy an' ice-cream o' things&mdash;<i>their</i>
+ice-cream, to eat an' pass to their own, an' scrape the freezer."</p>
+
+<p>And then came the heart of the matter.</p>
+
+<p>"'T seems," said Calliope, "there's that children's Christmas tree at
+the new minister's on Christmas Eve. But that ain't till ha'-past seven,
+an' I done my best to hev some o' the children stop in here on their
+way, for <i>my</i> little party. An' with one set o' lungs their mas says no,
+they'd get mussed for the tree if they do. I offered to hev 'em bring
+their white dresses pinned in papers, an' we'd dress 'em here&mdash;I think
+the grandma ladies'd like that. But their mas says no, pinned in
+papers'd take the starch out an' their hair'd get all over their heads.
+An' some o' the mothers says indignant: 'Old ladies from the poorhouse
+end o' the home&mdash;well, I should think not! Children is very easy to take
+things. If you'd hed young o' your own, you'd think more, Calliope,'
+they says witherin'."</p>
+
+<p>Her little wrinkled hands were trembling at the enormity.</p>
+
+<p>"I donno," she added, "but I was foolish to try it. But I did want to
+get a-hold o' somethin' beautiful for them old ladies to see. An', my
+mind, they ain't much so rilly lovely as little young children, together
+in a room."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Calliope," I said in distress, "isn't there even one child you can
+get?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir," she said. "Not a one. I been everywhere. You know they ain't
+any poor in Friendship. We're all comfortable enough off to be
+overparticular."</p>
+
+<p>"But wouldn't you think," I said, "at Christmas time&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you would," Calliope said, "you would. You'd think Christmas'd
+make everything kind o' softened up an' differ'nt. Every time I look at
+the holly myself, I feel like I'd just shook hands with somebody
+cordial."</p>
+
+<p>None the less&mdash;for Calliope had drunk deep of the wine of doing and she
+never gave up any project&mdash;at four o'clock on the day before Christmas I
+saw the closed 'bus driven by Jimmy Sturgis fare briskly past my house
+on its way to the "start of the Plank Road," to the Old Ladies' Home.
+Within, I knew, were quilts and hot stones of Calliope's providing; and
+Jimmy had hung the 'bus windows with cedar, and two little flags
+fluttered from the door. It all had a merry, holiday air as Jimmy shook
+the lines and drew on swiftly through the snow to those wistful nine
+guests, who at last were to be "in Christmas," too.</p>
+
+<p>"If they can't do nothin' else," Calliope had said, "they can talk over
+old times, without hot milk interferin'. But I wish, an' I wish&mdash;seem's
+though there'd ought always to be a child around on Star o' Bethlehem
+night, don't it?"</p>
+
+<p>I dined alone that Star of Bethlehem night, and to dine alone under
+Christmas candles is never a cheerful business. The Proudfit car was to
+come for me soon after eight, and at eight I stood waiting at the window
+of my little living room, saying to myself that if I were to drop from
+the air to a deserted country road, I should be certain that it was
+Christmas Eve. You can tell Christmas Eve anywhere, like a sugar-plum,
+with your eyes shut. It is not the lighted houses, or the
+close-curtained windows behind which Christmas trees are fruiting; nor
+yet, in Friendship, will it be the post-office store or the home bakery
+windows, gay with Christmas trappings. But there is in the world a
+subdued note of joyful preparation, as if some spirit whom one never may
+see face to face had on this night a gift of perceptible life. And in
+spite of my loneliness, my heart upleaped to the note of a distant
+sleigh-bell jingling an air of "Home, going Home, Christmas Eve and
+going Home."</p>
+
+<p>Then, when the big Proudfit car came flashing to my door, I had a sweet
+surprise. For from it, through the snowy dark, came running a little
+fairy thing, and Viola Ordway danced to my door with her mother, muffled
+in furs.</p>
+
+<p>"We've been close in the house all day," Mrs. Ordway cried, "and now
+we've run away to get you. Come!"</p>
+
+<p>As for me, I took Viola in my arms and lifted her to my hall table and
+caught off her cloak and hood. I can never resist doing this to a child.
+I love to see the little warm, plump body in its fine white linen emerge
+rose-wise, from the calyx cloak; and I love that shy first gesture,
+whatever it may be, of a child so emerging. The turning about, the
+freeing of soft hair from the neck, the smoothing down of the frock, the
+half-abashed upward look. Viola did more. She laid one hand on my cheek
+and held it so, looking at me quite gravely, as if that were some secret
+sign of brotherhood in the unknown, which she remembered and I, alas!
+had forgotten. But I perfectly remembered how to kiss her. If only, I
+thought, all the empty arms could know a Viola. If only all the empty
+arms, up and down the world, could know a Viola even just at Christmas
+time. If only&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Over the top of Viola's head I looked across at Nita Ordway, and a
+sudden joyous purpose lighted all the air about me&mdash;as a joyous purpose
+will. Oh, if only&mdash;And then I heard myself pouring out a marvellous
+jumble of sound and senselessness.</p>
+
+<p>"Nita!" I cried, "you are not a Friendship Village mother! You are not
+afraid. Viola is not going to the new minister's Christmas tree. Oh,
+don't you see? It's still early&mdash;surely we have time! The grandma ladies
+<i>must</i> see Viola!"</p>
+
+<p>I remember how Nita Ordway laughed, and her answer made me love her the
+more&mdash;as is the way of some answers.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't catch it&mdash;I don't," she said, "but it sounds delicious. All
+courage, and old ladies, and ample time for everything! If I said, 'Of
+course,' would that do?"</p>
+
+<p>Already I was tying Viola's hood, and next to taking off a child's hood
+I love putting one on&mdash;surely every one will have noticed how their
+mouths bud up for kissing. While we sped along the Plank Road toward
+Calliope's cottage, I poured out the story of who were at her house that
+night, and why, and all that had befallen. In a moment the great car,
+devouring its own path of light, set us down at Calliope's gate, and
+Calliope herself, trim in her gray henrietta, her wrinkled face flushed
+and shining, came at our summons. And I pushed Viola in before
+us&mdash;little fairy thing in a fluff of white wraps and white furs.</p>
+
+<p>"Look, Calliope!" I cried.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope looked down at her, and I think she can hardly have seen Mrs.
+Ordway and me at all. She smote her hands softly together.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "if it isn't! Oh&mdash;a child for Star o' Bethlehem night,
+after all!"</p>
+
+<p>She dropped to her knees before Viola, touching the little girl's hand
+almost shyly. There was in Calliope's face when she looked at any child
+a kind of nakedness of the woman's soul; and she, who was so deft, was
+curiously awkward in such a presence.</p>
+
+<p>"They're out there in the dinin' room," she whispered, "settin' round
+the cook stove. I saw they felt some better out there. Le's us leave her
+go out alone by herself, just the way she is."</p>
+
+<p>And that was what we did. We said something to Viola softly about "the
+poor grandma ladies, with no little girl to love," and then Calliope
+opened the door and let her through.</p>
+
+<p>We peeped for a moment at the lamp-lit crack. The dining room was warm
+and bright, its table covered with red cotton and set with tea-cups,
+shelves of plants blooming across the windows, cedar green on the walls.
+The odour of pop-corn was in the air, and above an open griddle hole
+apples bobbed on strings tied to the stove-pipe wing. And there about
+the cooking range, with its cheery opened hearth, Calliope's Christmas
+guests were gathered.</p>
+
+<p>They were exquisitely neat and trim, in black and brown cloth dresses,
+with a brooch, or a white apron, or a geranium from a window plant worn
+for festival. I recognized Grandma Holly, with her soft white hair, and
+I thought I could tell which were Mis' Ailing and Mis' Burney and Mis'
+Norris. And the faces of them all, the gentle, the grief-marked, even
+the querulous, were grown kindly with the knowledge that somebody had
+cared about their Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>The child went toward them as simply as if they had been friends. They
+looked at her with some murmuring of surprise, and at one another
+questioningly. Viola went straight to the knee of Grandma Holly, who was
+nearest.</p>
+
+<p>"'At lady tied my hood too tight," she referred unflatteringly to me,
+"p'eas do it off."</p>
+
+<p>Grandma Holly looked down over her spectacles, and up at the other
+grandma ladies, and back to Viola. The others gathered nearer, hitching
+forward rocking-chairs, rising to peer over shoulders&mdash;breathlessly,
+with a manner of fearing to touch her. But because of the little
+uplifted face, waiting, Grandma Holly must needs untie the white hood
+and reveal all the shining of the child's hair.</p>
+
+<p>"Nen do my toat off," Viola gravely directed.</p>
+
+<p>At that Grandma Holly crooned some single indistinguishable syllable in
+her throat, and then off came the cloak. The little warm, plump body in
+its fine linen emerged, rose-wise, and Viola smoothed down her frock,
+and freed her hair from her neck, and glanced up shyly. By the stir and
+flutter among them I understood that they were feeling just as I feel
+when a little hood and cloak come off.</p>
+
+<p>Viola stood still for a minute.</p>
+
+<p>"I like be made some 'tention to," she suggested gently.</p>
+
+<p>Ah&mdash;and they understood. How they understood! Grandma Holly swept the
+little girl in her arms, and I know how the others closed about them
+with smiles and vague unimportant words. Viola sat quietly and happily,
+like a little come-a-purpose spirit to let them pretend. And it was with
+them all as if something long pent up went free.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope left the door and turned toward us.</p>
+
+<p>"Seems like my throat couldn't stand it," she said, ... and it seemed to
+me, as we three sat together in the dim little parlor, that Nita Ordway
+must cherish Viola for us all&mdash;for the grandma ladies and Calliope and
+me.</p>
+
+<p>Half an hour later we three went out to the dining room. Viola ran to
+her mother when she entered. Nita took her in her arms and sat beside
+the stove, her cloak slipping from her shoulders, the soft peach tints
+of her gown shot through with shining lines and the light caught in her
+collar of gems. "I did want to get a-hold o' somethin' beautiful for
+them old ladies to see," Calliope had said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Grandma Holly, and she laid her brown hand on Viola's hand,
+"ain't she <i>dear an' little an' young</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"I wish't she'd talk some," begged old Mis' Norris.</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't she good, though, the little thing?" Mis' Ailing said. "Look at
+how still she sets. Not wigglin' 'round same as some. It was just that
+way with Sam when he was small&mdash;he'd set by the hour an' leave me hold
+him&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A little bent creature, whose name I never learned, sat patting Viola's
+skirt.</p>
+
+<p>"Seems like I'd gone back years," we heard her say.</p>
+
+<p>Grandma Holly held up one half-closed hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Like that," she told them, "my Amy's feet was so little I could hold
+'em like that, an' I see hers is the same way. She's wonderful like Amy
+was, her age."</p>
+
+<p>I cannot recall half the sweet, trivial things that they said. But I
+remember how they told us stories of their own babies, and we laughed
+with them over treasured sayings of long-ago lips, or grieved with them
+over silences, or rejoiced at glad things that had been. Regardless of
+the Proudfit party, we let them talk as they would, and remember. Then
+of her own accord Nita Ordway hummed some haunting air, and sang one of
+the songs that we all loved&mdash;the grandma ladies and Calliope and I. It
+was a sleepy song, whose words I have forgotten, but it was in a kind of
+universal tongue which I think that no one can possibly mistake. And out
+of the lullaby came all the little spirits, freed in babyhood or
+"man-grown," and stood at the knees of the grandma ladies, so that I was
+afraid that they could not bear it.</p>
+
+<p>When the song was done, Viola suddenly sat up very straight.</p>
+
+<p>"I got a litty box," she announced, "an' I had a parasol. An' once a boy
+div me a new nail. An' once I didn' feel berry well, but now I am. An'
+once&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Their laughter was like a caress. Before it was done, we heard a
+stamping without, and there was Jimmy Sturgis, with a spray of holly in
+his old felt hat and the closed 'bus at the door.</p>
+
+<p>We helped Calliope to get their wraps and to fill the 'bus with hot
+stones from the oven and with many quilts, and we made ready a basket of
+pop-corn and apples and of the cedar hung around the little room. They
+stood about us to say good-by, or to tell us some last bit of the news
+of their long-past youth&mdash;dear, wrinkled faces framed in broad lines of
+bonnet or hood, and smiling, every one.</p>
+
+<p>"This gray shawl I got on me is the very one I used to wrap Amy in to
+carry her through the cold hall," said Grandma Holly. "My land-a-livin'!
+seems's if I'd been with her to-night, over again!"</p>
+
+<p>Their way of thanks lay among stumbling words and vague repetitions, but
+there was a kind of glory in their grateful faces, and one always
+remembers that.</p>
+
+<p>"Merry Prismas, gramma ladies!" Viola cried shrilly at the 'bus door,
+and within they laughed like mothers as they answered. And Jimmy Sturgis
+cracked his whip, and the sleigh-bells jingled.</p>
+
+<p>Nita Ordway and Viola and I stood for a moment with Calliope at her
+gate.</p>
+
+<p>"Come!" we begged her, "now go with us. We are all late together. There
+is no reason why you should not go with us to the Christmas party."</p>
+
+<p>But Calliope shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm ever so much obliged to you," she said, "but oh, I couldn't. I've
+hed too rilly a Christmas to come down to a party anywheres."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When Nita and Viola and I reached Proudfit House, the guests were all
+assembled, but we knew that Mrs. Proudfit and Miss Clementina would be
+the first to forgive us when they understood.</p>
+
+<p>The big colonial home was bright with scarlet-shaded candles and
+holly-hung walls; there was mistletoe on the sconces, and in the great
+hall there were tuneful strings. On the landing of the stairs stood Mrs.
+Proudfit and Miss Clementina, charmingly pretty in their delicate
+frocks, and wholly gay and gracious. ("They seem lively like in pictures
+where folks don't make a loud sound a-talkin'," said Friendship. "I
+s'pose it's somethin' you learn in the City.") And Friendship wore its
+loyalty like a mantle. Twelve years had passed, and yet one and another
+said under breath and sighed, "If only Miss Linda could 'a' been here,
+too."</p>
+
+<p>All Friendship Village was there, save Abel Halsey, who was at the Good
+Shepherd's Home Christmas tree in the City, and, perhaps one would say,
+Delia More, who had begged to be allowed to help in the kitchen "an' be
+there that way." Even Peleg Bemus was in his place in the orchestra,
+sitting with closed eyes, playing his flute, and keeping audible time
+with his wooden leg,&mdash;quite as he did when he played his flute at night,
+on Friendship streets. And there was Mis' Postmaster Sykes, in the
+tobacco-brown net, with butterflies stitched down the skirt and the Lady
+Washington geranium in her hair&mdash;and forever near her went little Miss
+Liddy Ember with an almost passionate creative pride in the gown of her
+hand, so that she would murmur her patron an occasional warning: "Mis'
+Sykes, throw back your shoulders, you hev to, to bring out the real set
+o' the basque;" or, "Don't forget you want to give a little hitch to the
+back when you stand up, Mis' Sykes." And to one and another Liddy said
+proudly, "I declare if I didn't get that skirt with the butterflies just
+like a magazine cover." And there, too, was Ellen Ember, wearing a white
+book muslin and a rosy "nubia" that had been her mother's; and Ellen's
+face was uplifted, and of pale distinction under the bronze glory of her
+hair, but all that evening she smiled and sang and wondered, in utter
+absence of the spirit. ("Oh," poor Miss Liddy said, "I do so want Ellen
+to come herself before supper. She won't remember a thing she eats, an'
+she don't have much that's tasty an' good. It'll be just like she missed
+the whole thing, in spite of all the chore o' comin'.") And there were
+Mis' Doctor Helman in her new wine silk; Mis' Banker Mason in the
+black-and-white foulard designed to grace a festival or to respect a
+tomb; Mis' Sturgis, in a put-away dress that was a surprise to every
+one; Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and Eppleby, and the "Other"
+Holcombs; Abigail Arnold, the Gekerjecks, Mis' Toplady and Timothy, even
+Mis' Mayor Uppers&mdash;no one was forgotten. And&mdash;save poor Ellen&mdash;every one
+was aglow with the sweet satisfaction of having sent abroad a brave
+array of pretty things, with stitches of rose and blue on flowered
+fabrics, with the flutter of ribbons, and the breath of sachets, and
+with many a gift of substance to those less generously endowed. To them
+all the delight of the season was in the gifts of their hands and in the
+night's merry-making, and in the joy of keeping holiday. Here, as
+Calliope had said, Christmas, begun in a stocking, was ending in a
+candle.</p>
+
+<p>And yet it was Star of Bethlehem night, the night of Him who "didn't
+mention givin' <i>things</i> at all."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+
+<h3>LONESOME.&mdash;I</h3>
+
+
+<p>Calliope and I were talking over the Proudfit party, as I had grown to
+like to talk over most things with her, when I said something of two of
+the guests whom I did not remember before to have seen: a little man of
+shy gravity and an extremely pretty girl who, if she looked at any one
+but him, did so quite undetected.</p>
+
+<p>"That's Eb Goodnight," Calliope replied, "him of the new-born spine.
+Wasn't it like the Proudfits to ask them?"</p>
+
+<p>And, at my question:</p>
+
+<p>"Some folks," Calliope said, "has got spines and some folks hasn't. But
+what I say is, nobody can tell which is which. Because now and then the
+soft-spine' kind just hardens up all in a minute same as steel. So when
+I meet a stranger that sort o' sops along through life, limp and floppy,
+I never judge him. I just say, 'You look some like a loose shutter, but
+mebbe you can fair bang the house down, if you rilly get to blowin'.' It
+was that way with Eb Goodnight.</p>
+
+<p>"I donno how it is other places. But I've noticed with us here in
+Friendship&mdash;an' I've grown to the town from short dresses to
+bein'-careful-what-I-eat&mdash;I've often noticed't when folks seems not to
+have any backbone to speak of, or even when they go 'round sort o'
+crazy&mdash;they's usually some other reason, like enough. Sensitive or sick
+or lonesome, or like that. It was so with Eb&mdash;an' it was so with Elspie.
+Elspie, though, was interestin' on account o' bein' not only a little
+crazy, but rill pretty besides. But Eb, he was the kind that a
+sign-board is more interestin' than. An' yet&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>With that she paused, looking down some way of her own thought. I knew
+Calliope's "an' yet." It splendidly conceded the entire converse of her
+argument.</p>
+
+<p>"Eb come here to Friendship," she went on, "less public than Elspie did.
+Elspie come official, as an inmate o' the county house. Eb, he sort o'
+crep' in town, like he crep' everywhere else. He introduced himself to
+me through sellin' needles. He walked in on me an' a two-weeks ironin'
+one mornin' with, 'Lemme present myself as Ebenezer Goodnight, sewin'
+needles, knittin' needles, crochet hooks an' shuttles an' anything o'
+that,' an' down he set an' never opened his mouth about his needles
+again. Eb was real delicate, for an agent. He just talked all the time
+about Friendship an' himself. 'The whol' blame' town's kin,' s'e; 'I
+never see such a place. <i>Every</i>body's kin, only just me. Air you,' he
+ask' me wistful, 'cousin' of 'em all, too?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Mis' Sprague that's dead was connected up with me by marriage an' Mis'
+Sykes is my mother's secunt cousin,' I owned up.'</p>
+
+<p>"'That's it again,' s'e, sighin'. 'I'm the odd number, dum it,' he says
+sorrowful.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, an' he hed sort of an odd-number way about him, too. He went
+along the street like he didn't belong. I donno if you know what I mean,
+but he was always takin' in the tops o' buildin's an' lookin' at the
+roads an' behavin' like he noticed&mdash;the way you don't when you live in a
+town. Yes, Ebenezer Goodnight went around like he see things for the
+first time. An' somehow he never could join in. When he walked up to a
+flock o' men, he stood <i>side</i> of 'em, an' not with 'em. An' he shook
+hands sort o' loose an' temporary like he meant somethin' else. An' he
+just couldn't bear not to agree with you. If he let out't the sky was
+blue an' you said, No, pink, he'd work around till he'd dyed <i>his</i> sky
+pink, too. That man would agree to things he never heard of. Let Peleg
+Bemus be tellin' one o' his eastern janitor adventures, an' Eb'd set an'
+agree with him, past noddin' an' up to words, all about elevators an'
+Ferris boats an' Eyetalians an' things he'd never laid look to. He
+seemed to hev a spine made mostly o' molasses. An' sometimes I think
+your spine's your soul.</p>
+
+<p>"Eb hed been lonelyin' 'round the village a month or so when Sum
+Merriman, that run the big rival business to the post-office store, an'
+was fire chief besides, took him an' his peddler's pack into the dry
+goods end&mdash;an' Eb was tickled. He went down first mornin' in his best
+clo'es, a-wearin' both collar an' cuffs. But when somebody remarked on
+the clo'es, he didn't hev backbone enough to keep on wearin' 'em&mdash;he
+slimpsed right back to his peddler duds an' done his best to please. An'
+he did please&mdash;he made a rill first-rate merchant clear up till June o'
+the year. An' then Sum Merriman, his employer, he went to work an' died.</p>
+
+<p>"Sum died a Tuesday, an', bein' it never rains but it pours, an' piles
+peelin's on ashes, or whatever it is they say, it was the Tuesday that
+the poorhouse burnt down&mdash;just like it knew the fire chief was gone. The
+poorhouse use' to be across the track, beyond the cemetery an' quite
+near my house. An' the night it burnt I was settin' on the side stoop
+without anything over my head, just smellin' in the air, when I see a
+little pinky look on the sky beyond the track. It wasn't moon-time, an'
+they wa'n't nothin' to bonfire that time o' year, an' I set still,
+pretendin' it was rose-bushes makin' a ladder an' buildin' a way of
+escape by night. It was such a nice evenin' you couldn't imagine
+anything rilly happenin' bad. But all at once I heard the fire-engine
+bell poundin' away like all possessed&mdash;an' then runnin' feet, like when
+they's an accident. I got to the gate just as somebody come rushin'
+past, an' I piped up what was the matter. 'Poorhouse's afire,' s'e.
+'Poorhouse,' s'I. 'My land!' An' I out the gate an' run alongside of
+him, an' he sort o' slowed down for me, courteous.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I noticed it was Eb Goodnight&mdash;lonelier'n ever now that his
+employer hed died that day. I'd never see Eb hustle that much before,
+an' the thought went through my head, kind o' wonderin', that he was
+runnin' as if the fire was a real relation o' his an' he was sent for.
+'Know anything else about it?' I ask' him, keepin' up. 'Not much,' s'e,
+'but I guess it's got such a head-start the whol' thing'll go like a
+shell.' An' when we got to the top o' the bank on the other side o' the
+track, we see it was that way&mdash;the poorhouse'd got such a head-start
+burnin' that nothin' could save it, though Timothy Toplady, that was
+town marshal an' chairman o' the county board, an' Silas Sykes an'
+Eppleby Holcomb, that was managers o' the poorhouse, an' some more, went
+puffin' past us, yellin', 'Put it out&mdash;run fer water&mdash;why don't you do
+suthin'?'&mdash;an' like that, most beside theirselves.</p>
+
+<p>"'Them poor critturs,' says I, 'oh, my, them poor critturs in the
+home'&mdash;for there must 'a' ben twenty o' the county charges all quartered
+in the buildin'. An' when we come to the foot o' the poorhouse hill,
+land, land, I never see such Bedlam.</p>
+
+<p>"The fire had started so soon after dusk that the inmates was all up
+yet. An' they was half of 'em huddled in a bunch by the side-yard stile
+an' half of 'em runnin' 'round wild as anything. The whol' place looked
+like when you hev a bad dream. It made me weak in my knees, an' I was
+winded anyway with runnin', an' I stopped an' leant up against a tree,
+an' Eb, he stopped too, takin' bearin's. An' there I was, plump against
+Elspie, standin' holdin' her arms 'round the tree trunk an' shiverin'
+some.</p>
+
+<p>"'Elspie,' s'I, 'why, you poor child.'</p>
+
+<p>"'No need to rub <i>that</i> in,' s'she, tart. It's the one word the county
+charges gets sensitive about&mdash;an' Eb, he seemed to sense that, an' he
+ask' her, hasty, how the fire started. He called her 'Miss,' too, an' I
+judged that 'Miss' was one o' them poultice words to her.</p>
+
+<p>"'I donno,' s'she, 'but don't it look <i>cheerful</i>? The yard's all lit up
+nice, like fer comp'ny,' she says, rill pleased.</p>
+
+<p>"It sort o' uncovered my nerves to hear her so unconcerned. I never hed
+understood her&mdash;none of us hed. She was from outside the state, but her
+uncle, Job Ore, was on our county board an' he got her into our
+poorhouse&mdash;like you can when you're in politics. Then he up an' died an'
+went home to be buried, an' there she was on our hands. She wa'n't rill
+crazy&mdash;we understood't she hadn't ben crazy at all up to the time her
+mother died. Then she hadn't no one to go to an' she got queer, an' the
+poorhouse uncle stepped in; an' when he died, he died in debt, so his
+death wa'n't no use to her. She was thirty odd, but awful little an'
+slim an' scairt-lookin', an' quite pretty, I allus thought; an' I never
+see a thing wrong with her till she was so unconcerned about the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"'Elspie,' s'I, stern, 'ain't you no feelin',' s'I, 'for the loss o' the
+only home you've got to your back?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, I donno,' s'she, an' I could see her smilin' in that bright light,
+'oh, I donno. It'll be some place to come to, afterwards. When I go out
+walkin',' s'she, 'I ain't no place to head for. I sort o' circle 'round
+an' come back. I ain't even a grave to visit,' s'she, 'an' it'll be kind
+o' cosey to come up here on the hill an' set down by the ashes&mdash;like
+they <i>belonged</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>"I know I heard Eb Goodnight laugh, kind o' cracked an' enjoyable, an' I
+took some shame to him for makin' fun o' the poor girl.</p>
+
+<p>"'She's goin' clear out o' her head,' thinks I, 'an' you'd better get
+her home with you, short off.' So I put my arm around her, persuadish,
+an' I says: 'Elspie,' I says, 'you come on to my house now for a spell,'
+I says. But Eb, he steps in, prompter'n I ever knew him&mdash;I'd never heard
+him do a thing decisive an' sudden excep' sneeze, an' them he always
+done his best to swallow. 'I'll take her to your house,' he says to me;
+'you go on up there to them women. I won't be no use up there,' he says.
+An' that was reasonable enough, on account o' Eb not bein' the decisive
+kind, for fires an' such.</p>
+
+<p>"So Eb he went off, takin' Elspie to my house, an' I went on up the
+hill, where Timothy Toplady and Silas Sykes an' Eppleby was rushin'
+round, wild an' sudden, herdin' the inmates here an' there, vague an'
+energetic. I didn't do much better, an' I done worse too, because I
+burned my left wrist, long an' deep. When I got home with it, Eb was
+settin' on the front stoop with Elspie, an' when he heard about the
+wrist, he come in an' done the lightin' up. An' Elspie, she fair
+su'prised me.</p>
+
+<p>"'Where do you keep your rags?' s'she, brisk.</p>
+
+<p>"'In that flour chest I don't use,' I says, 'in the shed.'</p>
+
+<p>"My land! she was back in a minute with a soft piece o' linen an' the
+black oil off the clock shelf that I hadn't told her where it was, an'
+she bound up my wrist like she'd created that burn an' understood it up
+an' down.</p>
+
+<p>"'Now you get into the bed,' she says, 'without workin' the rag off. I'm
+all right,' s'she. 'I can lock up. I like hevin' it to do,' she told me.</p>
+
+<p>"But Eb puts in, kind o' eager:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Lemme lock up the shed&mdash;it's dark as a hat out there an' you might
+sprain over your ankle,' he says awkward. An' so he done the lockin' up,
+an' it come over me he liked hevin' that little householdy thing to do.
+An' then he went off home&mdash;that is, to where he stopped an' hated it so.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the poorhouse burnt clear to the ground, an' the inmates hed to
+be quartered 'round in Friendship anyhow that night, an' nex' day I
+never see Friendship so upset. I never see the village roust itself so
+sudden, either. Timothy an' the managers was up an' doin' before
+breakfast next mornin', an' no wonder. Timothy Toplady, he had three old
+women to his farm. Silas Sykes, he'd took in Foolish Henzie an' another
+old man for his. An' Eppleby Holcomb, in his frenzy he'd took in <i>five</i>,
+an' Mame was near a lunatic with havin' 'em to do for. An' all three men
+bein' at the head o' the burned buildin', they danced 'round lively
+makin' provision, an' they sent telegrams, wild an' reckless, without
+countin' the words. An' before noon it was settled't the poorhouse in
+Alice County, nearest us, should take in the inmates temporary. We was
+eatin' dinner when Timothy an' Silas come in to tell Elspie. I wished
+Eppleby had come to tell her. Eppleby does everything like he was
+company, an' not like he owned it.</p>
+
+<p>"Eb was hevin' dinner with us too. He'd been scallopin' in an' out o'
+the house all the forenoon, an' I'd ask' him to set down an' hev a bite.
+But when he done even that, he done it kind of alien. Peleg Bemus,
+playin' his flute walkin' along the streets nights, like he does, seems
+more a rill citizen than Eb use' to, eatin' his dinner. Elspie, she'd
+got the whol' dinner&mdash;she was a rill good cook, an' that su'prised me as
+much as her dressin' my wrist the night before. She'd pampered me
+shameful all that mornin' too, an' I'd let her&mdash;when you've lived alone
+so long, it's kind o' nice to hev a person fussin' here an' there, an'
+Elspie seemed to love takin' care o' somebody. I declare, it seemed as
+if she done some things for me just for the sake o' doin' 'em&mdash;she was
+that kind. Timothy an' Silas wouldn't hev any dinner,&mdash;it was a boiled
+piece, too,&mdash;bein' as dinners o' their own was gettin' cold. But they
+set up against the edge o' the room so's we could be eatin' on.</p>
+
+<p>"'Elspie,' says Timothy, 'you must be ready to go sharp seven o'clock
+Friday mornin'.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Go where?' says Elspie. She hed on a black-an'-white stripe o' mine,
+an' her cheeks were some pink from standin' over the cook stove, an' she
+looked rill pretty.</p>
+
+<p>"Timothy, he hesitated. But,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'To the Alice County poorhouse,' says Silas, blunt. Silas Sykes is a
+man that always says 'bloody' an' 'devil' an' 'coffin' right out instead
+o' 'bandaged' an' 'the Evil One,' an' 'casket.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh!' says Elspie. 'Oh, ...' an' sort o' sunk down an' covered her
+mouth with her wrist an' looked at us over it.</p>
+
+<p>"'The twenty o' you'll take the Dick Dasher,' says Timothy, then, 'an'
+it'll be a nice train ride for ye,' he says, some like an undertaker
+makin' small talk. But he see how Elspie took it, an' so he slid off the
+subjec' an' turned to Eb.</p>
+
+<p>"'Little too early to know who's goin' to take the Merriman store, ain't
+it?' s'he, cheerful. Timothy ain't so everlastin' cheerful, either, but
+he always hearties himself all over when he talks, like he was a bell or
+a whistle an' he hed it to do.</p>
+
+<p>"Eb, he dropped his knife on the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes, yes,' he says flurried, 'yes, it is&mdash;' like he was rushin' to
+cover an' a 'yes' to agree was his best protection.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, well, it ain't so early either,' Silas cuts in, noddin' crafty.</p>
+
+<p>"'No, no,' Eb agrees immediate, 'I donno's <i>'tis</i> so very early, after
+all.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm thinkin' o' takin' the store over myself,' says Silas Sykes,
+tippin' his head back an' rubbin' thoughtful under his whiskers. 'It'd
+be a good idee to buy it in, an' no mistake,'</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes,' says Eb, noddin', 'yes. Yes, so't would be.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I donno's I'd do it, Silas, if I was you,' says Timothy, frownin'
+judicial. 'Ain't you gettin' some stiff to take up with a new business?'
+But Timothy is one o' them little pink men, an' you can't take his
+frowns much to heart.</p>
+
+<p>"'No,' says Eb, shakin' his head. 'No. No, I donno's I would take it
+either, Mr. Sykes.'</p>
+
+<p>"I was goin' to say somethin' about the wind blowin' now east, now west,
+an' the human spine makin' a bad weathercock, but I held on, an' pretty
+soon Timothy an' Silas went out.</p>
+
+<p>"'Seven o'clock Friday A.M., now!' says Silas, playful, over his
+shoulder to Elspie. But Elspie didn't answer. She was just sittin'
+there, still an' quiet, an' she didn't eat another thing.</p>
+
+<p>"That afternoon she slipped out o' the house somewheres. She didn't hev
+a hat&mdash;what few things she did hev hed been burnt. She went off without
+any hat an' stayed most all the afternoon. I didn't worry, though,
+because I thought I knew where she'd gone. But I wouldn't 'a' asked
+her,&mdash;I'd as soon slap anybody as quiz 'em,&mdash;an' besides I knew't
+somebody'd tell me if I kep' still. Friendship'll tell you everything
+you want to know, if you lay low long enough. An' sure as the world,
+'bout five o'clock in come Mis' Postmaster Sykes, lookin' troubled.
+Folks always looks that way when they come to interfere. Seems't she'd
+just walked past the poorhouse ruins, an' she'd see Elspie settin' there
+side of 'em, all alone&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'&mdash;<i>singin'</i>,' says Mis' Sykes, impressive,&mdash;like the evil was in the
+music,&mdash;'sittin' there singin', like she was all possessed. An' I come
+up behind her an' plumped out at her to know <i>what</i> she was a-doin'. An'
+she says: "I'm makin' a call,"&mdash;just like that; "I'm makin' a call,"
+s'she, smilin', an' not another word to be got out of her. '<i>An'</i>,' says
+Mis' Sykes, 'let me tell you, I scud down that hill, <i>one goose
+pimple</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Let her alone,' says I, philosophic. 'Leave her be.'</p>
+
+<p>"But inside I ached like the toothache for the poor thing&mdash;for Elspie.
+An' I says to her, when she come home:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Elspie,' I says, 'why don't you go out 'round some an' see folks here
+in the village? The minister's wife'd be rill glad to hev you come,' I
+says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, I hate to hev 'em sit thinkin' about me in behind their eyes,'
+s'she, ready.</p>
+
+<p>"'What?' says I, blank.</p>
+
+<p>"'It comes out through their eyes,' she says. 'They keep thinkin': Poor,
+poor, poor Elspie. If they was somebody dead't I could go to see,' she
+told me, smilin', 'I'd do that. A grave can't <i>poor</i> you,' she told me,
+'an' everybody that's company to you does.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well!' says I, an' couldn't, in logic, say no more.</p>
+
+<p>"That evenin' Eb come in an' set down on the edge of a chair,
+experimental, like he was testin' the cane.</p>
+
+<p>"'Miss Cally,' s'e, when Elspie was out o' the room, 'you goin' t' let
+<i>her</i> go with them folks to the Alice County poorhouse?'</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I dissembulated some under my eyelids&mdash;bein' I see t' Eb's mind
+was givin' itself little lurches.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' s'I, 'I don't see what that's wise I can do besides.'</p>
+
+<p>"He mulled that rill thorough, seein' to the back o' one hand with the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>"'Would you take her to board an' me pay for her board?' s'e, like he'd
+sneezed the <i>i</i>-dea an' couldn't help it comin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'Goodness!' s'I, neutral.</p>
+
+<p>"Eb sighed, like he'd got my refusal&mdash;Eb was one o' the kind that always
+thinks, if it clouds up, 't the sun is down on 'em personally.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh,' s'I, bold an' swift, 'you great big ridiculous <i>man</i>!'</p>
+
+<p>"An' I'm blest if he didn't agree to that.</p>
+
+<p>"'I know I'm ridiculous,' s'he, noddin', sad. 'I know I'm that, Miss
+Cally.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, I didn't mean it that way,' s'I, reticent&mdash;an' said no more,
+with the exception of what I'd rilly meant.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why under the canopy,' I ask' him, for a hint, 'don't you take the Sum
+Merriman store, an' run it, an' live on your feet? I ain't any patience
+with a man,' s'I, 'that lives on his toes. Stomp some, why don't you,
+an' buy that store?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' his answer su'prised me.</p>
+
+<p>"'I did ask Mis' Fire Chief fer the refusal of it,' he said. 'I ask' her
+when I took my flowers to Sum, to-day&mdash;they was wild flowers I'd picked
+myself,' he threw in, so's I wouldn't think spendthrift of him. 'An' I'm
+to let her know this week, for sure.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Glory, glory, glory,' s'I, under my breath&mdash;like I'd seen a rill live
+soul, standin' far off on a hill somewheres, drawin' cuts to see whether
+it should come an' belong to Eb, or whether it shouldn't.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+<h3>LONESOME.&mdash;II</h3>
+
+
+<p>"All that evenin' Eb an' Elspie an' I set by the cook stove, talkin',
+an' they seemed to be plenty to talk about, an' the air in the room was
+easy to get through with what you hed to say&mdash;it was that kind of an
+evenin'. Eb was pretty quiet, though, excep' when he piped up to agree.
+'Gettin' little too hot here, ain't it?' I know I said once; an' Eb see
+right off he was roasted an' he spried 'round the draughts like mad. An'
+a little bit afterwards I says, with malice the fourth thought: 'I can
+feel my shoulders some chilly,' I says&mdash;an' he acted fair
+chatterin'-toothed himself, an' went off headfirst for the woodpile. I
+noticed that, an' laughed to myself, kind o' pityin'. But Elspie, she
+never noticed. An' when it come time to lock up, I 'tended to my wrist
+an' let them two do the lockin'. They seemed to like to&mdash;I could tell
+that. An' Elspie, she let Eb out the front door herself, like they was
+rill folks.</p>
+
+<p>"Nex' day I was gettin' ready for Sum Merriman's funeral,&mdash;it was to be
+at one o'clock,&mdash;when Elspie come in my room, sort o' shyin' up to me
+gentle.</p>
+
+<p>"'Miss Cally,' 's'she, 'do you think the mourners'd take it wrong if I's
+to go to the funeral?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, no, Elspie,' I says, su'prised; 'only what do you want to go
+for?' I ask' her.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, I donno,' s'she. 'I'd like to go an' I'd like to ride to the
+graveyard. I've watched the funerals through the poorhouse fence. An'
+I'd kind o' like to be one o' the followers, for once&mdash;all lookin'
+friendly an' together so, in a line.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Go with me then, child,' I says. An' she done so.</p>
+
+<p>"Bein' summer, the funeral flowers was perfectly beautiful. They was a
+rill hothouse box from the Proudfits; an' a anchor an' two crosses an' a
+red geranium lantern; an' a fruit piece made o' straw flowers from the
+other merchants; an' seven pillows, good-sized, an' with all different
+wordin', an' so on. The mound at the side o' the grave was piled
+knee-high, an' Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, I heard, said it seemed like
+Sum was less dead than almost anybody 't'd died in Friendship, bein' the
+grave kind o' spoke up, friendly, when you see the flowers. She went
+home rill cheerful from the funeral an' was able to help get the supper
+for the out-o'-town relations, a thing no widow ever thinks of, anyway
+till the next day&mdash;though Sum was her second husband, so it was a little
+different than most.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, a few of us waited 'round the cemetery afterwards to fix the
+flowers on the top o' the sod, an' Elspie, she waited with me&mdash;fussin'
+quiet with one thing an' another. Eb, he waited too, standin' 'round.
+An' when it come time for us women to lay the set pieces on, I see
+Elspie an' Eb walkin' off toward the top o' the cemetery hill. It's a
+pretty view from there, lookin' down the slope toward the Old Part,
+where nobody remembered much who was buried, an' it's a rill popular
+walk. I liked seein' 'em go 'long together&mdash;some way, lookin' at 'em,
+Elspie so pretty an' Eb so kind o' gentle, you could 'a' thought they
+<i>was</i> rill folks, her sane an' him with a spine. I slipped off an' left
+'em, the cemetery bein' so near my house, an' Eb walked home with her.
+'Poor things,' I thought, 'if he <i>does</i> go back to peddlin' an' she
+<i>has</i> to go to the Alice County poorhouse, I'll give 'em this funeral
+afternoon for a bright spot, anyhow.'</p>
+
+<p>"But I'd just about decided that Elspie wa'n't to go to Alice County. I
+hadn't looked the <i>i</i>-dee in the face an' thought about it, very
+financial. But I ain't sure you get your best lights when you do that.
+I'd just sort o' decided on it out o' pure shame for the shabby trick o'
+<i>not</i> doin' so. I hadn't said anything about it to Timothy or Silas or
+any o' the rest, because I didn't hev the strength to go through the
+arguin' agony. When the Dick Dasher had pulled out without her, final, I
+judged they'd be easier to manage. An' that evenin' I told Elspie&mdash;just
+to sort o' clamp myself <i>to</i> myself; an' I fair never see anybody so
+happy as she was. It made me ashamed o' myself for not doin' different
+everything I done.</p>
+
+<p>"I was up early that Friday mornin', because I judged't when Elspie
+wasn't to the train some o' them in charge'd come tearin' to my house to
+find out why. I hadn't called Elspie, an' I s'posed she was asleep in
+the other bedroom. I was washin' up my breakfast dishes quiet, so's not
+to disturb her, when I heard somebody come on to the front stoop like
+they'd been sent for.</p>
+
+<p>"'There,' thinks I, 'just as I expected. It's one o' the managers.'</p>
+
+<p>"But it wa'n't a manager. When I'd got to the front door, lo an' the
+hold! there standin' on the steps, wild an' white, was the widow o' the
+day before's funeral&mdash;Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, lookin' like the grave
+<i>hed</i> spoke up. She'd got up early to go alone to the cemetery, an', my
+house bein' the nearest, she'd come rushin' back to me with her news.</p>
+
+<p>"'Cally!' s'she, from almost before she laid eyes on me, 'Cally!
+Somebody's stole every last one o' the flowers off'n Sum's grave. <i>An'</i>
+the ribbins.'</p>
+
+<p>"She was fair beside herself, bein' as the loss hed piled up on a long
+sickness o' Sum's, an' a big doctor's bill consequent, an' she nervous
+anyhow, an' a good deal o' the ribbin tyin' the stems was silk, both
+sides.</p>
+
+<p>"'I'll hev out the marshal,' s'she, wild. 'I'll send for Timothy. They
+can't hev got far with 'em. I'll know,' s'she, defiant, 'whether they's
+anything to the law or whether they ain't.'</p>
+
+<p>"I hed her take some strong coffee from breakfast, an' I got her, after
+some more fumin's an' fustin's, to walk back to the cemetery with me,
+till we give a look around. I do as many quick-moved things as some, but
+I allus try, <i>first</i>, to give a look around.</p>
+
+<p>"'An' another thing,' s'I to her, as we set out, 'are you sure, Mis'
+Fire Chief, that you got to the right grave? The first visit, so,' I
+says, 'an' not bein' accustomed to bein' a widow, lately, an' all, you
+might 'a' got mixed in the lots.'</p>
+
+<p>"While she was disclaimin' this I looked up an' see, hangin' round the
+road, was Eb. He seemed some sheepish when he see me, an' he said,
+hasty, that he'd just got there, an' it come over me like a flash't he'd
+come to see Elspie off. An' I marched a-past him without hardly a word.</p>
+
+<p>"We wasn't mor'n out o' the house when we heard a shout, an' there come
+Silas an' Timothy, tearin' along full tilt in the store delivery wagon,
+wavin' their arms.</p>
+
+<p>"'It's Elspie&mdash;Elspie!' they yelled, when they was in hearin'. 'She
+ain't to the depot. She'll be left. Where is she?'</p>
+
+<p>"I hadn't counted on their comin' before the train left, but I thought I
+see my way clear. An' when they come up to us, I spoke to 'em, quiet.</p>
+
+<p>"'She's in the house, asleep,' s'I, 'an' what's more, in that house
+she's goin' to stay as long as she wants. But,' s'I, without waitin' for
+'em to bu'st out, 'there's more important business than that afoot for
+the marshal;' an' then I told 'em about Sum Merriman's flowers. 'An','
+s'I, 'you'd better come an' see about that now&mdash;an' let Eppleby an' the
+others take down the inmates, an' you go after 'em on the 8.05. It ain't
+often,' s'I, crafty, 'that we get a thief in Friendship.'</p>
+
+<p>"I hed Timothy Toplady there, an' he knew it. He's rill sensitive about
+the small number o' arrests he's made in the village in his term. He
+excited up about it in a minute.</p>
+
+<p>"'Blisterin' Benson!' he says, 'ain't this what they call vandalism?
+Look at it right here in our midst like a city!' says he, fierce&mdash;an'
+showin' through some gleeful.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, sir,' says Silas Sykes, 'mebbe it's them human <i>goals</i>. Mebbe
+they've dug Sum up,' he says, 'an mebbe&mdash;' But I hushed him up. Silas
+Sykes always grabs on to his thoughts an' throws 'em out, dressed or
+undressed. He ain't a bit o' reserve. Not a thought of his head that he
+don't part with. If he had hands on his forehead, you could tell what
+time he is&mdash;I think you could, anyway.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it was rill easy to manage 'em, they bein' men an' susceptible to
+fascinations o' lawin' it over somethin'. An' we all got into the
+delivery wagon, an' Eb, he come too, sittin' in back, listenin' an'
+noddin', his feet hangin' over the box informal.</p>
+
+<p>"I allus remember how the cemetery looked that mornin'. It was the tag
+end o' June&mdash;an' in June cemeteries seems like somewheres else. The
+Sodality hed been tryin' to get a new iron fence, but they hadn't made
+out then, an' they ain't made out now&mdash;an' the old whitewashed fence an'
+the field stone wall was fair pink with wild roses, an' the mulberry
+tree was alive with birds, an' the grass layin' down with dew, an' the
+white gravestones set around, placid an' quiet, like other kind o' folks
+that we don't know about. Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, she went right
+through the wet grass, cross lots an' round graves, holdin' up her
+mournin' an' showin' blue beneath&mdash;kind o' secular, like her thinkin'
+about the all-silk ribbin at such a time. Sure enough, she knew her way
+to the lot all right. An' there was the new grave, all sodered green,
+an' not a sprig nor a stitch to honour it.</p>
+
+<p>"'<i>Now!</i>' says Mis' Merriman, rill triumphant.</p>
+
+<p>"'Land, land!' s'I, seein' how it rilly was.</p>
+
+<p>"Timothy an' Silas, they both pitched in an' talked at once an' bent
+down, technical, lookin' for tracks. But Eb, he just begun seemin'
+peculiar&mdash;an' then he slipped off somewheres, though we never missed
+him, till, in a minute, he come runnin' back.</p>
+
+<p>"'Come here!' he says. 'Come on over here a little ways,' he told us,
+an' not knowin' anything better to do we turned an' went after him,
+wonderin' what on the earth was the matter with him an' ready to believe
+'most anything.</p>
+
+<p>"Eb led us past the vault where Obe Toplady, Timothy's father, lays in a
+stone box you can see through the grating tiptoe; an' round by the
+sample cement coffin that sets where the drives meet for advertisin'
+purposes, an' you go by wonderin' whose it'll be, an' so on over toward
+the Old Part o' the cemetery, down the slope of the hill where
+everybody's forgot who's who or where they rest, an' no names, so. But
+it's always blue with violets in May&mdash;like Somebody remembered, anyhow.</p>
+
+<p>"When we got to the top o' the hill, we all looked down the slope,
+shinin' with dew an' sunniness, an' little flowers runnin' in the grass,
+thick as thick, till at the foot o' the hill they fair made a garden,&mdash;a
+garden about the size of a grave, knee-deep with flowers. From where we
+stood we could see 'em&mdash;hothouse roses an' straw flowers, an' set
+pieces, an' a lot o' pillows, an' ribbins layin' out on the grass. An'
+there, side of 'em, broodin' over 'em lovin', set Elspie, that I'd
+thought was in my house asleep.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Fire Chief, she wasn't one to hesitate. She was over the hill in a
+minute, the blue edge o' petticoat bannerin' behind.</p>
+
+<p>"'Up-<i>un</i> my word,' s'she, like a cut, 'if this ain't a pretty note.
+What under the sun are you doin' sittin' there, Elspie, with <i>my</i>
+flowers?'</p>
+
+<p>"Elspie looked up an' see her, an' see us streamin' toward her over the
+hill.</p>
+
+<p>"'They ain't your flowers, are they?' s'she, quiet. 'They're the dead's.
+I was a-goin' to take 'em back in a minute or two, anyway, an' I'll take
+'em back now.'</p>
+
+<p>"She got up, simple an' natural, an' picked up the fruit piece an' one
+o' the pillows, an' started up the hill.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, I nev-er,' says Mis' Merriman; 'the very bare brazenness. Ain't
+you goin' to tell me <i>what</i> you're doin' here with the flowers you say
+is the dead's, an' I'm sure what was Sum's is mine an' the dead's the
+same&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"She begun to cry a little, an' with that Elspie looks up at her,
+troubled.</p>
+
+<p>"'I didn't mean to make you cry,' she says. 'I didn't mean you should
+know anything about it. I come early to do it&mdash;I thought you wouldn't
+know.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Do <i>what</i>?' says Mis' Merriman, rill snappish.</p>
+
+<p>"Elspie looks around at us then as if she first rilly took us in. An'
+when she sees Eb an' me standin' together, she give us a little
+smile&mdash;an' she sort o' answered to us two.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why,' she says, 'I ain't got anybody, anywheres here, dead or alive,
+that <i>belongs</i>. The dead is all other folks's dead, an' the livin' is
+all other folks's folks. An' when I see all the graves down here that
+they don't nobody know who's they are, I thought mebbe one of 'em
+wouldn't care&mdash;if I kind of&mdash;adopted it.'</p>
+
+<p>"At that she sort o' searched into Mis' Merriman's face, an' then
+Elspie's head went down, like she hed to excuse herself.</p>
+
+<p>"'I thought,' she said, 'they must be so dead&mdash;an' no names on 'em an'
+all&mdash;an' their live folks all dead too by now&mdash;nobody'd care much. I
+thought of it yesterday when we was walkin' down here,' she said, 'an' I
+picked out the grave&mdash;it's the <i>littlest</i> one here. An' then when we
+come back past where the funeral was, an' I see them flowers&mdash;seemed
+like I hed to see how 'twould be to put 'em on <i>my</i> grave, that I'd took
+over. So I come early an' done it. But I was goin' to lay 'em right back
+where they belong&mdash;I truly was.'</p>
+
+<p>"I guess none of us hed the least <i>i</i>-dea what to say. We just stood
+there plain tuckered in the part of us that senses things. All, that is,
+but one of us. An' that one was Eb Goodnight.</p>
+
+<p>"I can see Eb now, how he just walked out o' the line of us standin'
+there, starin', an' he goes right up to Elspie an' he looks her in the
+face.</p>
+
+<p>"'You're lonesome,' s'he, kind o' wonderin'. 'You're <i>lonesome</i>.
+Like&mdash;other folks.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' all to once Eb took a-hold o' her elbow&mdash;not loose an' temporary
+like he shook hands, but firm an' four-cornered; an' when he spoke it
+was like his voice hed been starched an' ironed.</p>
+
+<p>"'Mis' Fire Chief,' s'he, lookin' round at her, 'I's to let you know
+this week whether I'd take over the store. Well, yes,' he says, 'if
+you'll give me the time on it we mentioned, I'll take it over. An' if
+Elspie'll marry me an' let me belong to her, an' her to me.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Marry you?' says Elspie, understandin' how he'd rilly spoke to her.
+'<i>Me?</i>'</p>
+
+<p>"Eb straightened himself up, an' his eyes was bright an' keen as the
+edge o' somethin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes, you,' he says gentle. 'An' me.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' then she looked at him like he was lookin' at her. An' it come to
+me how it'd been with them two since the night they'd locked up my house
+together. An' I felt all hushed up, like the weddin' was beginnin'.</p>
+
+<p>"But Timothy an' Silas, they wa'n't feelin' so hushed.</p>
+
+<p>'Look a-here!' says Timothy Toplady, all pent up. 'She ain't discharged
+from the county house yet.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I don't care a <i>dum</i>,' says Eb, an' I must say I respected him for the
+'dum'&mdash;that once.</p>
+
+<p>"'Look a-here,' says Silas, without a bit o' delicacy. 'She ain't
+responsible. She ain't&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"'She is too,' Eb cut him short. 'She's just as responsible as anybody
+can be when they're lonesome enough to die. <i>I</i> ought 'a' know that.
+Shut up, Silas Sykes,' says Eb, all het up. 'You've just et a hot
+breakfast your wife hed ready for you. You don't know what you're
+talkin' about.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' then Eb sort o' swep' us all up in the dust-pan.</p>
+
+<p>"'No more words about it,' s'he, 'an' I don't care what any one o' you
+says&mdash;Mis' Cally nor <i>none</i> o' you. So you might just as well say less.
+Tell 'em, Elspie!'</p>
+
+<p>"She looked up at him, smilin' a little, an' he turned toward her, like
+we wasn't there. An' I nudged Mis' Merriman an' made a move, an' she
+turns right away, like she'd fair forgot the funeral flowers. An'
+Timothy an' Silas actually followed us, but talkin' away a good
+deal&mdash;like men will.</p>
+
+<p>"None of us looked back from the top o' the hill, though I will own I
+would 'a' loved to. An' about up there I heard Silas say:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, well. I <i>am</i> gettin' kind o' old an' some stiff to take a new
+business on myself.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' Timothy, he adds absent: 'I don't s'pose, when you come right down
+to it, as Alice County'll rilly care a whoop.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, she wipes up her eyes, an', 'It does seem
+like courtin' with Sum's flowers,' she says, sighin', 'but I'm rill glad
+for Eb.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' Eb not bein' there to agree with her, I says to myself, lookin' at
+the mornin' sun on the cemetery an' thinkin' o' them two back there
+among the baskets an' set pieces&mdash;I says, low to myself:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, glory, glory, glory.'</p>
+
+<p>"For I tell you, when you see a livin' soul born in somebody's eyes, it
+makes you feel pretty sure you can hev one o' your own, if you try."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+
+<h3>OF THE SKY AND SOME ROSEMARY</h3>
+
+
+<p>When the Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality had
+its Evening Benefit at my house, Delia More came to help in the kitchen.
+She steadfastly refused to be a guest. "I'd love bein' 'round there,"
+she said, "over the stove, or that way. But I can't&mdash;<i>can't</i> be
+company&mdash;yet. When I think of it, it's like a high swing."</p>
+
+<p>So she stayed in the kitchen, and it was characteristic of Friendship
+that when its women learned that she was there, they all went&mdash;either
+deliberately or for a drink of water&mdash;to speak with her. And they all
+did learn that she was there. "Who you got in the kitchen?" was a part
+of the small talk from guest to hostess. The men stayed "in the other
+part of the house," Doctor June and Eppleby Holcomb sending by me some
+cordial word to Delia. I think that they cannot do these things anywhere
+else with such beautiful delicacy.</p>
+
+<p>When my other guests had taken leave, Calliope stayed to help in the
+search for Mis' Postmaster Sykes's pickle fork and two of Mis' Helman's
+napkins (the latter marked with L because the store had been out of
+<i>papier-mach&eacute;</i> H's, and it didn't matter what letter so long as you knew
+it meant you) and all the other borrowed articles whose mislaying made
+any Sodality gathering a kind of panic. Moreover, Calliope had been
+helping and we, and Delia, had been far too busy to taste supper.</p>
+
+<p>We would have said that the true life of the evening was done instead of
+just beginning. But when we entered the kitchen, we found Delia More
+serving the supper on an end of the baking table, while warming his
+hands at the range stood Abel Halsey.</p>
+
+<p>"I came in across the track, from the hills," Abel explained to me. "I
+didn't know you had doings till I tied and blanketed&mdash;an' I came on in
+anyhow, back way. I'm in luck too. I haven't had supper."</p>
+
+<p>We four sat down in that homely cheer, and before us was the Sodality's
+exquisite cookery. It was good to have Abel there. Since my coming to
+Friendship I had seen him often, and my wonder at him had deepened. He
+was alive to the finger-tips and by nature equipped to conquer through
+sheer mentality, but he seemed deliberately to have fore-gone the prizes
+for the tasks of the lower places. Not only so, but he who understood
+all fine things seemed to regard his tastes as na&iuml;vet&eacute;, and to have won
+away from them, as if he had set "above all wisdom and subtlety" the
+unquenchable spirit which he knew. And withal he was so merry, so human,
+so big, and so good-looking. "Handsome as Calvert Oldmoxon," the older
+ones in Friendship were accustomed to say,&mdash;save Calliope, whom I had
+never heard say that,&mdash;but I myself, if I had not had my simile already
+selected, would have said "as Abel Halsey." If a god were human, I think
+that Abel would have been very like a god. And to this opinion his
+experiences were continually bearing witness.</p>
+
+<p>That night, for example, he was in the merriest humour, and told us a
+tale of how, that day, the sky had fallen. There had been down on the
+Pump pasture, deep fog, white and thick and folded in, and above him
+blue sky, when he had emerged on the Hill Road and driven on with his
+eyes shut. ("When I need an adventure," he said, "I just trot old Major
+Mary with my eyes shut. Courting death isn't half as costly as they
+think it is.") And when he had opened his eyes, the sky was gone, and
+everything was white and thick and folded in and fabulous. Obviously, as
+he convinced us, the sky had fallen. But he had driven on through it and
+in it, and had found it, as I recall his account, to be made of
+inextinguishable dreams. These, Abel ran on, are on the other side of
+the sky for anybody who claims them, and our sandwiches were, above all
+sandwiches, delicious. He was so merry that Calliope and I, by a nod or
+a smile of understanding, played our r&ocirc;le of merely, so to say, proving
+that the films were right&mdash;for you may have an inspired conversational
+photographer, but unless you are properly prepared chemically he can get
+no pictures. As Calliope had said of her evening with Eb and Elspie,
+"the air in the room was easy to get through with what you had to
+say&mdash;it was that kind of evening." Sometimes I wonder if an hour like
+that is real time; or is it, instead, a kind of chronometrical fairy,
+having no real existence on the dial, but only in essence.</p>
+
+<p>As I think of it now the hour, if it was an hour, was simply a
+background for Delia More. For it was not only Calliope and I who
+responded to Abel's light-hearted talk, but, little by little, it was
+Delia too. Perhaps it was that faint spark in her&mdash;fanned to life on the
+night of her coming home, so that she "took stock"&mdash;which we now divined
+faintly quickening to Abel's humour, his wisdom, even his fancies. Save
+in her bitterness, on that first night, I had not heard her laugh; and
+it was as if something were set free. I could not help looking at her,
+but that did not matter, for she did not see me. She was listening to
+Abel with an almost childish delight in her face; and in her eyes was
+the look of one in a place before unvisited.</p>
+
+<p>Some while after we had moved away from the table and sat together about
+the cooking range, we heard the questioning horn of a motor. We knew
+that it would belong to the Proudfits, since for us in Friendship there
+exists no other motor, and moreover this one was standing at my gate.
+Abel went out there and came back to tell us that the car had been in
+town to fetch the Proudfits' lawyer, and that Madame Proudfit had kindly
+sent it for Delia "and spoilt everything," he added frankly. As he said
+that, Abel looked at her, and I saw that a dream may persist through
+personality itself. As I have said, if a god were human, Abel would have
+been like a god; and in nothing more so than in this understanding of
+the immortalities.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope stood up and caught, and held, my eyes in passing.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's you and Abel and I take Delia home in the automobile," she said;
+"there ain't anything so good for folks as fresh air."</p>
+
+<p>I brought a warm wrap for Delia, a crimson cloak of mine which, so to
+say, drew a line about her, defining her prettiness; and in the
+starlight we set off along the snowless Plank Road, Delia and Abel and I
+in the tonneau of the machine, and I silent. It had befallen strangely
+that over this road Delia More and I should be faring in the Proudfits'
+car, and beside her Abel Halsey as if, for such as he and she, a dream
+may, just possibly, come back.</p>
+
+<p>"See," she said to Abel, "the sky has gone back up again."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Abel assented, "one of the things even the sky can't do is to
+change the way things are."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know, I know ..." said Delia More.</p>
+
+<p>"I want you to feel that," said Abel, gently. "Things are the way things
+are, and no use trying to leave them out of it. Besides, you need them.
+They're foundation. Then you build, and build better. That's all there
+is to it, Delia."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent, and Abel sat looking up at the stars.</p>
+
+<p>"All there is to it except what I said about the other side of the sky,"
+he said. "And then me. I'll help."</p>
+
+<p>From my thought of these two I remember that I drifted on to some
+consideration of myself, for their presence opened old paths where were
+in durance things that did their best to escape, and were disquieting. I
+thought also of Calliope, of whose story I had heard a little from one
+and another. And it seemed to me that possibly Delia More's laughter and
+her wistfulness summed us all up.</p>
+
+<p>When we drew up at the entrance to Proudfit House we all alighted,
+Calliope and Abel and I to walk home. But while we were saying good
+night to Delia, the door opened and Clementina Proudfit stood against
+the light. The car was to wait, she said, to take Mr. Baring, the
+lawyer, to the midnight train. And then, as she saw her:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope!" she cried, "I never wanted anybody so much. Come in and make
+Mr. Baring a cup of your good coffee&mdash;you will, Calliope? Mother and I
+will be with him for half an hour yet. Come, all of you, and help her."</p>
+
+<p>We went in, lingering for a moment by the drawing-room fire while Miss
+Clementina went below stairs; and I noted how, in that room colourful
+and of fair proportion, Abel Halsey in his shabby clothes moved as
+simply as if the splendour were not there. He stood looking down at
+Delia, in her white dress, the crimson cloak catching the firelight;
+while Calliope and I, before a length of Beauvais tapestry, talked with
+spirit about both tapestry and coffee-making. ("My grandmother use' to
+crochet faces an' figgers in her afaghans, too," Calliope commented,
+"an' when I looked at 'em they use' to make me feel kind o' mad. But
+with these, I don't care at all.") And when Miss Clementina returned,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Now," Calliope said to me, "you come with me an' help about the coffee,
+will you? An' Delia, you an' Abel stay here. Nothin' will put me out o'
+my head so quick&mdash;<i>nothin'</i>&mdash;as too many flyin' 'round the kitchen when
+I'm tryin' to do work."</p>
+
+<p>We went downstairs, and Miss Clementina rejoined her mother and the
+lawyer in the library, and Delia and Abel were left alone together in
+the firelight. If I had been a dream, and had been intending to come
+back at all, I think that I must have come then.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Pray</i>, why don't you?" said Calliope to me almost savagely on the
+kitchen stairs.</p>
+
+<p>The coffee-making was a slow process and a silent one. Calliope and I
+were both absorbed in what had so wonderfully come about: That Delia
+More, who was dead, was alive again; or rather, that her spirit, patient
+within her through all the years of its loneliness, was coming forth at
+the sound of Abel's voice. We were alone in the kitchen, and when the
+coffee was over the flame, we stood at the window looking out on the
+black kitchen gardens. There lay the yellow reflection of the room, with
+that unreality of all window-mirrored rooms, so that if one might walk
+within them one would almost certainly wear one's self with a
+difference.</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't it like somethin' bright was in the inside o' the garden,"
+Calliope put it, "just the way I told you Abel feels about everything?
+That they's something inside, hid, kind of secret an' holy&mdash;like the
+dreams he said was in the sky. I guess mebbe he's believed that about
+Delia all these years. An' now he's bringin' it out. Oh," she said, "the
+kitchen is where you can tell about things best. Seems to me <i>you'd</i>
+ought to know somethin' about Delia an' Abel."</p>
+
+<p>And I wanted to hear.</p>
+
+<p>"Abel see Delia first," Calliope told me then, "to the Rummage Sale that
+the Cemetery Auxiliary, that the Sodality use' to be, give. That is to
+say, they didn't <i>give</i> it, as it turned out&mdash;they just <i>had</i> it, you
+might say. Abel was twenty-five or so, an' he'd just come here fresh
+ordained a minister. We found he wa'n't the kind to stop short on, Be
+good yourself an' then a crown. No, but he just went after the folks
+that was livin' along, moral an' step-pickin', an' he says to us, 'What
+you sittin' down here for, enjoyin' yourselves bein' moral? Get out an'
+help the rest o' the world,' he says. But everybody liked him in spite
+o' that, an' he was goin' to be installed minister in our church.</p>
+
+<p>"Then the Rummage Sale come on an' he met Delia. Delia was eighteen an'
+just back from visitin' in the City, with her veil a new way, an' I
+never see prettier. She was goin' to take charge o' the odd waists
+table, an' Abel was runnin' 'round helpin'&mdash;Abel wa'n't the white-cuff
+kind, like some, but he always pitched in an' stirred up whatever was
+a-stewin'. He come bringin' in an armful o' old shoes somebody'd fetched
+down, an' just as she was beginnin' on the odd waists, sortin' 'em over,
+he met Delia. I remember she looks up at him from under that veil an'
+from over a red basque she'd picked off the pile, an', 'Mr. Halsey,' she
+says, 'I've a notion to buy this myself an' be savin'.' That took
+Abel&mdash;Delia was so pretty an' fluffy that hearin' her talk savin' was
+about like seein' a butterfly washin' out its own wings. 'Do,' says he,
+'the red is beautiful on you,' s'e, shovin' the blame off on to the red.
+An' when he got done with the shoes he come over to help on the waists
+too&mdash;I was lookin' over the child sizes, next table, an' I see the whole
+business.</p>
+
+<p>"I will say their talk was wonderful pretty. It run on sort o' easy,
+slippin' along over little laughs an' no hard work to keep it goin'.
+Abel had a nice way o' cuttin' his words out sharp&mdash;like they was made
+o' somethin' with sizin' on the back an' stayed where he put 'em. An'
+his laugh would sort o' clamp down soft on a joke an' make it double
+funny. An' Delia, she was right back at him, give for take, an' though
+she was rill genial, she was shy. An' come to think of it, Abel was just
+as full o' his fancyin's then as he is now.</p>
+
+<p>"'Old clothes,' he says to her, 'always seems to me sort o' haunted.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Haunted?' I know she asks him, wonderin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'All steeped in what folks have been when they've wore 'em,' s'e, 'an'
+givin' it out again.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh ...' Delia says, 'I never thought o' that before.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' she see what he meant, too. Delia wa'n't one to get up little wavy
+notions like that, but she could see 'em when told. An' neither was she
+one to do one way instead of another by just her own willin' it, but if
+somebody pointed things out to her, then she'd see how, an' do the
+right. An' I think Abel understood that about her&mdash;that her soul was
+sort o' packed down in her an' would hev to be loosened gentle, before
+it could speak. Like Peleg Bemus says about his flute," Calliope said,
+smiling, "that they's something packed deep down in it that can't say
+things it knows."</p>
+
+<p>"'Clothes folks wear, rooms they live in, things they use&mdash;they all get
+like the folks that use 'em,' Abel says, layin' black with black an'
+white with white, on to the waist table. 'It makes us want to step
+careful, don't it?' s'e. 'I think,' s'e, simple, '<i>your</i> dresses&mdash;an'
+ribbins&mdash;an' your veil&mdash;must go about doin' pleasant things without
+you.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, no,' says Delia, demure, 'I ain't near good enough, Mr. Halsey;
+you mustn't think that,' she says&mdash;an' right while he was lookin' gentle
+an' clerical an' ready to help her, she dimples out all over her face.
+'Besides,' she says, 'I ain't enough dresses to spare away from me for
+that. I ain't but about two!' s'she. An' when a girl is all rose pink
+and sky blue and dainty neat, a man loves to hear her brag how few
+dresses she's got, an' Abel wa'n't the exception.</p>
+
+<p>"'Same as a lily,' says he; 'they only have <i>one</i> dress. Now, what else
+shall I do?'</p>
+
+<p>"Well, at sharp nine the Cemetery Auxiliary come to order, Mis' Sykes
+presidin', like she always does when it's time for a hush. The doors was
+to open to the general public at ten o'clock, an' the <i>i</i>-dee was to hev
+the Auxiliary get the pick o' the goods first, payin' the reg'lar, set,
+marked price. An' just as they was ready to begin pickin', up arrove the
+Proudfit pony cart with a great big box o' stuff, sent to the sale.
+Land, land, Mis' Sykes from the chair an' the others the same, they just
+makes one swoop&mdash;an' begun selectin'; an' in less than a jiffy if they
+hadn't selected up every one o' the Proudfit articles themselves. It was
+natural enough. The things was worth havin'&mdash;pretty curtains, an'
+trimmin's not much wore, an' some millinery an' dresses with the new
+hardly off. An' the Auxiliary paid the price they would 'a' asked
+anybody else. They was anxious, but they was square.</p>
+
+<p>"That just seemed to get their hand in. Next, they fell to on the other
+tables an' begun buyin' from them. They was lots o' things that most
+anybody would 'a' been glad to hev that the owners had sent down sheer
+through bein' sick o' seein' 'em around&mdash;like you will&mdash;an' couldn't be
+thrown away 'count o' conscience, but could be give to a cause an'
+conscience not notice. We had quite fun buyin', too&mdash;knowin' they was
+each other's, an' no hard feelin'&mdash;only good spirits an' pleased with
+each other's taste. Everybody knew who'd sent what, an' everybody hed
+bought it for some not so high-minded use as it hed hed before, an' kep'
+their dignity that way. Front-stair carpet was bought to go down on back
+stairs, sittin' room lamp for chamber lamp, kitchen stove-pipe for wash
+room stove-pipe, an' so on, an' the clothes to make rag rugs&mdash;so they
+give out. The things kep' on an' on bein' snapped up hot-cake quick, an'
+the crowd beginnin' to gather outside, waitin' to get in, made 'em sort
+o' lose their heads an' begin buyin' sole because things was
+cheap&mdash;bird-cages, a machine cover, odd table-leaves, an' like that. The
+Society was rill large then, an' what happened might 'a' been expected.
+When ten o'clock come an' it was time to open the door, the Rummage Sale
+was over, an' the Auxiliary hed bought the whole thing themselves.</p>
+
+<p>"We never thought folks might be anyways mad about it&mdash;but I tell you,
+they was. They hed been seein' us through the glass, like they was caged
+in front o' bargain day. An' when Mis' Toplady, fair beamin', unlocks
+the door an' tells 'em the sale was through with an' a rill success,
+they acted some het up. But Mis' Toplady, she bristles back at 'em. 'I'm
+sure,' s'she, 'nobody wants you to die an' be buried in a nice, neat,
+up-to-date, kep'-up cemet'ry if you don't <i>want</i> to.' An' o' course she
+hed 'em there.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it was that performance o' the Auxiliary's that rilly brought
+Delia an' Abel together. It seemed to strike Abel awful funny, an'
+Delia, lookin' at it with him, she see the funny too. They laughed a
+good deal, an' they seemed to sort o' understand each other through
+laughin', like you will. Delia bought the red waist, an' Abel walked
+home with her&mdash;an' by that time Abel, with his half-scriptural,
+half-boy, half-lover way that he couldn't help, was just on the craggy
+edge o' fallin' in love with her. But I b'lieve it wa'n't love, just
+ordinary. It was more like Abel, in his zeal for reddin' up the world,
+see that he could do for Delia what nobody else could do&mdash;an' her for
+him. An' that both of 'em workin' together could do more through knowin'
+each other was near. That's the way,' Calliope said shyly, 'lovin'
+always ought to be, my notion. An' when it ain't, things is likely to
+get all wrong. Sometime&mdash;sometime,' she said, 'you'll hear about me&mdash;an'
+how things with me went all wrong. An' I want you to remember, no matter
+how much it don't seem my fault&mdash;that that's why they did go wrong&mdash;an'
+no other. I was too crude selfish to sense what love is. I didn't
+know&mdash;I didn't know. An' so with lots o' folks.</p>
+
+<p>"I've often thought that Delia an' Abel meetin' at a Rummage Sale was
+like all the rest of it. There was just a lot o' rubbish lumberin' up
+the whole situation. Things wasn't happy for Delia to home&mdash;her mother,
+Mis' Crapwell, had married again to a man that kep' throwin' out about
+hevin' to be support to Delia; an' her stepsister, Jennie Crapwell, was
+sickly an' self-seekin' an' engaged all to once. An' the young carpenter
+that Jennie was goin' to marry, he was the black-eyed, hither-an'-yon
+kind, an' crazier over Delia from the first than he ever was over
+Jennie. Delia, she was shy about not havin' much education&mdash;Mis'
+Proudfit hed wanted to send her off to school, an' Mis' Crapwell
+wouldn't hear to it&mdash;an' Abel kep' talkin' that he was goin' to hev a
+big church in the City some day, an' I guess that scairt Delia some, an'
+Jennie kep' frettin' an' houndin' her, one way an' another, an'
+a-callin' her 'parson's wife'&mdash;ain't it awful the <i>power</i> them
+pin-pricky things has if we let 'em? An' Delia wa'n't the kind to know
+how to do right by her own willin'. An' so all to once we woke up one
+mornin', an' she'd done what she'd done, an' no help for it.</p>
+
+<p>"It was only a month after Delia an' Abel had met that Delia went away,
+an' Abel hadn't been installed yet. An' when Delia done that, Abel just
+settled into bein' somebody else. He seemed to want to go off in the
+hills an' be by himself, an' most o' the time he done so. But there was
+grace for him even in that: Abel see the hill folks, how they didn't hev
+any churches nor not anything else much, an' he just set to work on 'em,
+quiet an' still. He'd wanted to go away an' travel, but the chance never
+come. An' it seemed, then on, he didn't want even to hear o' the City,
+an' when his chances there come, he never took 'em. An' Abel's been
+'round here with the hill folks the fourteen years since, an' never
+pastor of any church&mdash;but he got the blessedness, after all, an' I
+guess the chance to do better service than any other way. You can see
+how he's broad an' gentle an' tender an' strong, but you don't know
+what he does for folks&mdash;an' that's the best. An' yet&mdash;his soul must be
+sort o' packed away too, to what it would 'a' been if things had 'a'
+gone differ'nt ... packed away an' tryin' to say somethin'. An' now
+Delia's come back I b'lieve Abel knows that, an' I b'lieve he sees the
+soul in her needin' him too, just like it did all that time&mdash;waitin' to
+be loosened, gentle, before it can speak; an' meanin' things it can't
+say, like Peleg's flute. Oh, don't it seem like the dreams Abel said he
+found up in the sky had <i>ought</i> to be let come true?"</p>
+
+<p>It did seem as if, for the two up there in the drawing-room, this dream
+might, just possibly, come back.</p>
+
+<p>"But then you never can tell for sure about the sky, can you?" said
+Calliope, sighing.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Coffee was served in the library where Madame Proudfit and Miss
+Clementina had been in consultation with their lawyer. We were all
+rather silent as Madame Proudfit sat at the urn and the lawyer handed
+our cups down some long avenue of his abstraction. And now everything
+seemed to me a kind of setting for Delia and Abel, and Calliope kept
+looking at them as if, before her eyes, things might come right. So, I
+own, did I, though in the Proudfit library it was usually difficult to
+fix my attention on what passed; for it was in that room that Linda
+Proudfit's portrait hung, and the beautiful eyes seemed always trying to
+tell one what the weary absence meant. But I thought again that this
+daughter of the house had won a kind of presence there, because of
+Madame Proudfit's tender mother-care of Delia More.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it was to this care that Calliope and I owed a present defeat; for
+when we were leave-taking,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"We shall sail, then, the moment we can get passage," Madame Proudfit
+observed to her lawyer, "providing that Clementina can arrange. Delia,"
+she added, "Clementina and I find to-night that we must sail immediately
+for Europe, for six months or so. And we want to carry you off with us."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Proudfit and Miss Clementina and Delia were standing with us
+outside the threshold, where the outdoors had met us like something that
+had been waiting. There, with the light from the hall falling but dimly,
+I saw in Abel's face only the glow of his simple joy that this good
+thing had come to Delia&mdash;though, indeed, that very joy told much
+besides. And it was in his face when he bade Delia good night and, since
+he was expected somewhere among the hills for days to come, gave her
+God-speed. But we four fell momentarily silent, as if we meant things
+which we might not speak. It was almost a relief to hear tapping on the
+sidewalk the wooden leg of Peleg Bemus, while a familiar, thin little
+stream of melody from his flute made its way about.</p>
+
+<p>"Doesn't it seem as if Peleg were trying to tell one something?" said
+Madame Proudfit, lightly, as we went away.</p>
+
+<p>And down on the gravel of the drive Calliope demanded passionately of
+Abel and me:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, don't some things make you want to pull the sky down an' <i>wrap up
+in it</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>But at this Abel laughed a little.</p>
+
+<p>"It's easier to pull down just the dreams," he said.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>TOP FLOOR BACK</h3>
+
+
+<p>One morning a few weeks after the Proudfits had left, I was sitting
+beside Calliope's cooking range, watching her at her baking, when the
+wooden leg of Peleg Bemus thumped across the threshold, and without
+ceremony he came in from the shed and stood by the fire, warming his axe
+handle. But Peleg's intrusions were never imputed to him. As I have
+said, his gifts and experiences had given him a certain authority.
+Perhaps, too, he reflected a kind of institutional dignity from his
+sign, which read:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">P. Bemus: Retail Saw Miller</span></p></div>
+
+<p>At the moment of his entrance Calliope was talking of Emerel Kitton, now
+Mrs. Abe Daniel:</p>
+
+<p>"There's them two," she said, "seems to hev married because they both
+use a good deal o' salt&mdash;'t least they ain't much else they're alike in.
+An' Emerel is just one-half workin' her head off for him. Little nervous
+thing she is&mdash;when I heard she was down with nervous prostration two
+years ago, I says, 'Land, land,' I says, 'but ain't she <i>always</i> had
+it?' They's a strain o' good blood in that girl,&mdash;Al Kitton was New
+England,&mdash;but they don't none of it flow up through her head. She's
+great on sacrificin', but she don't sacrifice judicious. If folks is
+goin' to sacrifice, I think they'd ought to do it conscientious, the
+kind in the Bible, same as Abraham an' like that."</p>
+
+<p>Peleg Bemus rubbed one hand up and down his axe handle.</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon you can't always tell, Miss Marsh," he said meditatively. "I
+once knowed a man that done some sacrificin' that ain't called by that
+name when it gets into the newspapers." He turned to me, with a manner
+of pointing at me with his head, "You been in New York," he said; "ain't
+you ever heard o' Mr. Loneway&mdash;Mr. John Loneway?"</p>
+
+<p>I was sorry that I could not answer "yes." He was so expectant that I
+had the sensation of having failed him.</p>
+
+<p>"Him an' I lived in the same building in East Fourteenth Street there,"
+he said. "That is to say, he lived top floor back and I was janitor.
+That was a good many years ago, but whenever I get an introduction to
+anybody that's been in New York, I allus take an interest. I'd like to
+know whatever become of him."</p>
+
+<p>He scrupulously waited for our question, and then sat down beside the
+oven door and laid his axe across his knees.</p>
+
+<p>"It was that hard winter," he told us, "about a dozen years ago. I'd hev
+to figger out just what year, but most anybody on the East Side can tell
+you. Coal was clear up an' soarin', an' vittles was too&mdash;everybody
+howlin' hard times, an' the Winter just commenced. Make things worse,
+some philanthropist had put up two model tenements in the block we was
+in, an' property alongside had shot up in value accordin' an' lugged
+rents with it. Everybody in my buildin' 'most was rowin' about it.</p>
+
+<p>"But John Loneway, he wasn't rowin'. I met him on the stairs one mornin'
+early an' I says, 'Beg pardon, sir,' I says, 'but you ain't meanin' to
+make no change?' I ask him. He looks at me kind o' dazed&mdash;he was a
+wonderful clean-muscled little chap, with a crisscross o' veins on each
+temple an' big brown eyes back in his head. 'No,' he says. 'Change? I
+can't move. My wife's sick,' he says. That was news to me. I'd met her a
+couple o' times in the hall&mdash;pale little mite, hardly big as a baby, but
+pleasant-spoken, an' with a way o' dressin' herself in shabby clo'es
+that made the other women in the house look like bundles tied up
+careless. But she didn't go out much&mdash;they had only been in the house a
+couple o' weeks or so. 'Sick, is she?' I says. 'Too bad,' I says.
+'Anything I can do?' I ask him. He stopped on the nex' step an' looked
+back at me. 'Got a wife?' he says. 'No,' says I, 'I ain't, sir. But they
+ain't never challenged my vote on 'count o' that, sir&mdash;no offence,' I
+says to him respectful. 'All right,' he says, noddin' at me. 'I just
+thought mebbe she'd look in now and then. I'm gone all day,' he added,
+an' went off like he'd forgot me.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought about the little thing all that mornin'&mdash;layin' all alone up
+there in that room that wa'n't no bigger'n a coal-bin. It's bad enough
+to be sick anywheres, but it's like havin' both legs in a trap to be
+sick in New York. Towards noon I went into one o' the flats&mdash;first floor
+front it was&mdash;with the kindlin' barrel, an' I give the woman to
+understand they was somebody sick in the house. She was a great big
+creatur' that I'd never see excep' in red calico, an' I always thought
+she looked some like a tomato ketchup bottle, with her apron for the
+label. She says, when I told her, 'You see if she wants anything,' she
+says. 'I can't climb all them stairs,' she answers me.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that afternoon I went down an' hunted up a rusty sleigh-bell I'd
+seen in the basement, an' I rubbed it up an' tied a string to it, an'
+'long in the evenin' I went upstairs an' rapped at Mr. Loneway's door.</p>
+
+<p>"'I called,' I says, 'to ask after your wife, if I might.'</p>
+
+<p>"'If you might,' he says after me. 'I thank the Lord you're somebody
+that will. Come in,' he told me.</p>
+
+<p>"They had two rooms. In one he was cookin' somethin' on a smelly
+oil-stove. In the other was his wife; but that room was all neat an'
+nice&mdash;curtains looped back, carpet an' all that. She was half up on
+pillows, an' she had a black waist on, an' her hair pushed straight
+back, an' she was burnin' up with the fever.</p>
+
+<p>"'Set down an' talk to her,' he says to me, 'while I get the dinner,
+will you? I've got to go out for the milk.'</p>
+
+<p>"I did set down, feelin' some like a sawhorse in church. If she hadn't
+been so durn little, seems though I could 'a' talked with her, but I
+ketched sight of her hand on the quilt, an'&mdash;law! it wa'n't no bigger'n
+a butternut. She done the best thing she could do an' set me to work.</p>
+
+<p>"'Mr. Bemus,' she says, first off&mdash;everybody else called me Peleg&mdash;'Mr.
+Bemus,' she says, 'I wonder if you'd mind takin' an old
+newspaper&mdash;there's one somewheres around&mdash;an' stuffin' in the cracks of
+this window an' stop its rattlin'?'</p>
+
+<p>"I laid my sleigh-bell down an' done as she says; an' while I fussed
+with the window, that seems though all Printin' House Square couldn't
+stuff up, she talked on, chipper as a squirrel, all about the buildin',
+an' who lived where, an' how many kids they was, an' wouldn't it be nice
+if they had an elevator like the model tenement we was payin' rent for,
+an' so on. I'd never 'a' dreamt she was sick if I hadn't looked 'round a
+time or two at her poor, burnin'-up face. Then bime-by he brought the
+supper in, an' when he went to lift her up, she just naturally laid back
+an' fainted. But she was all right again in a minute, brave as two, an'
+she was like a child when she see what he'd brought her&mdash;a big platter
+for a tray, with milk-toast an' an apple an' five cents' worth o' dates.
+She done her best to eat, too, and praised him up, an' the poor soul
+hung over her, watchin' every mouthful, feedin' her, coaxin' her,
+lookin' like nothin' more'n a boy himself. When I couldn't stand it no
+longer, I took an' jingled the sleigh-bell.</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm a-goin',' I says, 'to hang this outside the door here, an' run
+this nice long string through the transom. An' to-morrow,' I says, 'when
+you want anything, just you pull the string a time or two, an' I'll be
+somewheres around.'</p>
+
+<p>"She clapped her hands, her eyes shinin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, <i>goodey</i>!' she says. 'Now I won't be alone. Ain't it nice,' she
+says, 'that there ain't no glass in the transom? If we lived in the
+model tenement, we couldn't do that,' she says, laughin' some.</p>
+
+<p>"An' that young fellow, he followed me to the door an' just naturally
+shook hands with me, same's though I'd been his kind. Then he followed
+me on out into the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"'We had a little boy,' he says to me low, 'an' it died four months ago
+yesterday, when it was six days old. She ain't ever been well since,' he
+says, kind of as if he wanted to tell somebody. But I didn't know what
+to say, an' so I found fault with the kerosene lamp in the hall, an'
+went on down.</p>
+
+<p>"Nex' day I knew the doctor come again. An' 'way 'long in the afternoon
+I was a-tinkerin' with the stair rail when I heard the sleigh-bell ring.
+I run up, an' she was settin' up, in the black waist&mdash;but I thought her
+eyes was shiney with somethin' that wasn't the fever&mdash;sort of a scared
+excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"'Mr. Bemus,' she says, 'I want you to do somethin' for me,' she says,
+'an' not tell anybody. Will you?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, yes,' I says, 'I will, Mis' Loneway,' I says. 'What is it?' I
+ask' her.</p>
+
+<p>"'There's a baby somewheres downstairs,' she says. 'I hear it cryin'
+sometimes. An' I want you to get it an' bring it up here.'</p>
+
+<p>"That was a queer thing to ask, because kids isn't soothin' to the sick.
+But I went off downstairs to the first floor front. The kid she meant
+belonged to the Tomato Ketchup woman. I knew they had one because it
+howled different times an', I judge, pounded its head on the floor some
+when it was maddest. It was the only real little one in the
+buildin'&mdash;the others was all the tonguey age. I told what I wanted.</p>
+
+<p>"'For the land!' says Tomato Ketchup, 'I never see such nerve. Take my
+baby into a sick room? Not if I know it. I s'pose you just come out o'
+there? Well, don't you stay here, bringin' diseases. A hospital's the
+true place fer the sick,' she says.</p>
+
+<p>"I went back to Mis' Loneway, an' I guess I lied some. I said the kid
+was sick&mdash;had the croup, I thought, an' she'd hev to wait. Her face
+fell, but she said 'all right an' please not to say nothin',' an' then I
+went out an' done my best to borrow a kid for her. I ask' all over the
+neighbourhood, an' not a woman but looked on me for a cradle
+snatcher&mdash;thought I wanted to abduct her child away from her. Bime-by I
+even told one woman what I wanted it for.</p>
+
+<p>"'My!' she says, 'if she ain't got one, she's got one less mouth to
+feed. Tell her to thank her stars.'</p>
+
+<p>"After that I used to look into Mis' Loneway's frequent. The women on
+the same floor was quite decent to her, but they worked all day, an'
+mostly didn't get home till after her husband did. I found out somethin'
+about him, too. He was clerk in a big commission house 'way down-town,
+an' his salary, as near as I could make out, was about what mine was,
+an' they wa'n't no estimatin' that by the cord at all. But I never heard
+a word out'n him about their not havin' much. He kep' on makin' milk
+toast an' bringin' in one piece o' fruit at a time an' once in a while a
+little meat. An' all the time anybody could see she wa'n't gettin' no
+better. I knew she wa'n't gettin' enough to eat, an' I knew he knew it,
+too. An' one night the doctor he outs with the truth.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Loneway an' I was sittin' in the kitchen while the doctor was in
+the other room with her. I went there evenin's all the time by then&mdash;the
+young fellow seemed to like to hev me. We was keepin' warm over the
+oil-stove because the real stove was in her room, an' the doctor come in
+an' stood over him.</p>
+
+<p>"'My lad,' he says gentle, 'there ain't half as much use o' my comin'
+here as there is o' her gettin' strengthenin' food. She's got to hev
+beef broth&mdash;cer'als&mdash;fresh this an' fresh that'&mdash;he went on to tell him,
+'an' plenty of it,' he says. 'An' if we can make her strength hold out,
+I think,' he wound up, 'that we can save her. But she's gettin' weaker
+every day for lack o' food. Can you do anything more?' he ask' him.</p>
+
+<p>"I expected to see young Mr. Loneway go all to pieces at this, because I
+knew as it was he didn't ride in the street-car, he was pinchin' so to
+pay the doctor. But he sorter set up sudden an' squared his shoulders,
+an' he looked up an' says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes!' he says. 'I've been thinkin' that to-night,' he says. 'An' I've
+hed a way to some good luck, you might call it&mdash;an' now I guess she can
+hev everything she wants,' he told him; an' he laughed some when he said
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"That sort o' amazed me. I hadn't heard him sayin' anything about any
+excruciatin' luck, an' his face hadn't been the face of a man on the
+brink of a bonanza. I wondered why he hadn't told her about this luck o'
+his, but I kep' quiet an' watched to see if he was bluffin'.</p>
+
+<p>"I was cleanin' the walk off when he come home nex' night. Sure enough,
+there was his arms laid full o' bundles. An' his face&mdash;it done me good
+to see it.</p>
+
+<p>"'Come on up an' help get dinner,' he yelled out, like a kid, an' I
+thought I actually seen him smilin'.</p>
+
+<p>"Soon's I could I went upstairs, an' they wa'n't nothin' that man hadn't
+brought. They was everything the doctor had said, an' green things, an'
+a whol' basket o' fruit an' two bottles o' port, an' more things
+besides. They was lots o' fixin's, too, that there wa'n't a mite o'
+nourishment in&mdash;for he wa'n't no more practical <i>nor</i> medicinal'n a
+wood-tick. But I knew how he felt.</p>
+
+<p>"'Don't tell her,' he says. 'Don't tell her,' he says to me, hoppin'
+'round the kitchen like a buzz-saw. 'I want to surprise her.'</p>
+
+<p>"You can bet he did, too&mdash;if you'll overlook the liberty. When he was
+all ready, he made me go in ahead.</p>
+
+<p>"'<i>To-ot!</i>' says I, genial-like&mdash;they treated me jus' like one of 'em.
+'<i>To-ot!</i> Lookey-<i>at</i>!'</p>
+
+<p>"He set the big white platter down on the bed, an' when she see all the
+stuff,&mdash;white grapes, mind you, an' fresh tomatoes, an' a glass for the
+wine,&mdash;she just grabs his hand an' holds it up to her throat, an'
+says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Jack! Oh, Jack!' she says,&mdash;she called him that when she was
+pleased,&mdash;'how did you? <i>How did you?</i>'</p>
+
+<p>"'Never you mind,' he says, kissin' her an' lookin' as though he was
+goin' to bu'st out himself, 'never you ask. It's time I had some luck,
+ain't it? Like other men?'</p>
+
+<p>"She was touchin' things here an' there, liftin' up the grapes an'
+lookin' at 'em&mdash;poor little soul had lived on milk toast an' dates an' a
+apple now an' then for two weeks to my knowledge. But when he said that,
+she stopped an' looked at him, scared.</p>
+
+<p>"'John!' she says, 'you ain't&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"He laughed at that.</p>
+
+<p>"'Gamblin'?' he says. 'No&mdash;never you fear.' I had thought o' that
+myself, only I didn't quite see when he'd had the chance since night
+before when the doctor told him. 'It's all owin' to the office,' he says
+to her, 'an' now you eat&mdash;lemme see you eat, Linda,' he says, an' that
+seemed to be food enough for him. He didn't half touch a thing. 'Eat all
+you want,' he says, 'an', Peleg, poke up the fire. There's half a ton o'
+coal comin' to-morrow. An' we're goin' to have this <i>every day</i>,' he
+told her.</p>
+
+<p>"Land o' love! how happy she was! She made me eat some grapes, an' she
+sent a bunch to the woman on the same floor, because she'd brought her
+an orange six weeks before; an' then she begs Mr. Loneway to get an
+extry candle out of the top dresser draw'. An' when that was lit up she
+whispers to him, and he goes out an' fetches from somewheres a guitar
+with more'n half the strings left on; an' she set up an' picked away on
+'em, an' we all three sung, though I can't carry a tune no more'n what I
+can carry a white oak tree trunk.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh,' she says, 'I'm a-goin' to get well now. Oh,' she says, 'ain't it
+heaven to be rich again?'</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;you can say she'd ought to 'a' made him tell her where he got the
+money. But she trusted him, an' she'd been a-livin' on milk toast an'
+dates for so long that I can pretty well see how she took it all as
+what's-his-name took the wild honey, without askin' the Lord whose make
+it was. Besides, she was sick. An' milk toast an' dates'd reconcile me
+to 'most any change for the better.</p>
+
+<p>"It got so then that I went upstairs every noon an' fixed up her lunch
+for her, an' one day she done what I'd been dreadin'. 'Mr. Bemus,' she
+says, 'that baby must be over the croup now. Won't you&mdash;won't you take
+it down this orange an' see if you can't bring it up here awhile?'</p>
+
+<p>"I went down, but, law!&mdash;where was the use? The Ketchup woman grabs up
+her kid an' fair threw the orange at me. 'You don't know what disease
+you're bringin' in here,' she says&mdash;she had a voice like them gasoline
+wood-cutters. I see she'd took to heart some o' the model-tenement
+social-evenin' lectures on bugs an' worms in diseases. I carried the
+orange out and give it to a kid in the ar'y, so's Mis' Loneway'd be
+makin' somebody some pleasure, anyhow. An' then I went back upstairs an'
+told her the kid was worse. Seems the croup had turned into cholery
+infantum.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why,' she says, 'I mus' send it down somethin' nice an' hot to-night,'
+an' so she did, and I slips it back in the Loneway kitchen unbeknownst.
+She wa'n't so very medicinal, either, bless her heart!</p>
+
+<p>"'Tell me about that baby,' she says to me one noon. 'What's its name?
+Does it like to hev its mother love it?' she ask me.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew the truth to be that it didn't let anybody do anything day or
+night within sight or sound of it, an' it looked to me like an imp o'
+the dark. But I fixed up a tol'able description, an' left out the
+freckles an' the temper, an' told her it was fat an' well an' a boy.
+That seemed to satisfy her. Its name, though, sort o' stumped me. The
+Tomato Ketchup called it mostly 'you-come-back-here-you-little-ape.' I
+heard that every day. So I said, just to piece out my information, that
+I thought its name might be April. That seemed to take her fancy, an'
+after that she was always askin' me how little April was&mdash;but not when
+Mr. Loneway was in hearin'. I see well enough she didn't want he should
+know that she was grievin' none.</p>
+
+<p>"All the time kep' comin', every night, another armful o' good things.
+Land! that man he bought everything. Seems though he couldn't buy
+enough. Every night the big platter was heaped up an' runnin' over with
+everything under the sun, an' she was like another girl. I s'pose the
+things give her strength, but I reck'n the cheer helped most. She had
+the surprise to look forward to all day, an' there was plenty o' light,
+evenin's; an' the stove, that was drove red-hot. The doctor kep' sayin'
+she was better, too, an' everything seemed lookin' right up.</p>
+
+<p>"Seems queer I didn't suspect from the first something was wrong. Seems
+though I ought to 'a' known money didn't grow out o' green wood the way
+he was pretendin'. It wasn't two weeks before he takes me down to the
+basement one night when he comes home, an' he owns up.</p>
+
+<p>"'Peleg,' he says, 'I've got to tell somebody, an' God knows maybe it'll
+be you that'll hev to tell her. I've stole fifty-four dollars out o' the
+tray in the retail department,' says he, 'an' to-day they found me out.
+They wasn't no fuss made. Lovett, the assistant cashier, is the only one
+that knows. He took me aside quiet,' Mr. Loneway says, 'an' I made a
+clean breast. I said what I took it for. He's a married man himself, an'
+he told me if I'd make it up in three days, he'd fix it so's nobody
+should know. The cashier's off for a week. In three days he's comin'
+back. But they might as well ask me to make up fifty-four hundred. I've
+got enough to keep on these three days so's she won't know,' he says,
+'an' after that&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"He hunched out his arms, an' I'll never forget his face.</p>
+
+<p>"I says, 'Mr. Loneway, sir,' I says, 'chuck it. Tell her the whole thing
+an' give 'em back what you got left, an' do your best.'</p>
+
+<p>"He turned on me like a crazy man.</p>
+
+<p>"'Don't talk to me like that,' he says fierce. 'You don't know what
+you're sayin',' he says. 'No man does till he has this happen to him.
+The judge on the bench that'll send me to jail for it, he won't know
+what he's judgin'. My God&mdash;<i>my God!</i>' he says, leanin' up against the
+door o' the furnace room, 'to see her sick like this&mdash;an' <i>needin'
+things</i>&mdash;when she give herself to me to take care of!'</p>
+
+<p>"Course there wa'n't no talkin' to him. An' the nex' night an' the nex'
+he come home bringin' her truck just the same. Once he even hed her a
+bunch o' pinks. Seems though he was doin' the worst he could.</p>
+
+<p>"The pinks come at the end of the second day of the three days the
+assistant cashier had give him to pay the money back in. An' two things
+happened that night. I was in the kitchen helpin' him wash up the dishes
+while the doctor was in the room with Mis' Loneway. An' when the doctor
+come out o' there into the kitchen, he shuts the door. I see right off
+somethin' was the matter. He took Mr. Loneway off to the back window,
+an' I rattled 'round with the dishes an' took on not to notice. Up until
+when the doctor goes out&mdash;an' then I felt Mr. Loneway's grip on my arm.
+I looked at him, an' I knew. She wasn't goin' to get well. He just
+lopped down on the chair like so much sawdust, an' put his face down in
+his arm, the way a schoolboy does&mdash;an' I swan he wa'n't much more'n a
+schoolboy, either. I s'pose if ever hell is in a man's heart,&mdash;an' we
+mostly all see it there sometime, even if we don't feel it,&mdash;why, there
+was hell in his then.</p>
+
+<p>"All of a sudden there was a rap on the hall door. He never moved, an'
+so I went. I whistled, I rec'lect, so's she shouldn't suspect nothin'
+from our not goin' in where she was right off. An' a messenger-boy was
+out there in the passage with a letter for Mr. Loneway.</p>
+
+<p>"I took it in to him. He turned himself around an' opened it, though I
+don't believe he knew half what he was doin'. An' what do you guess come
+tumblin' out o' that envelope? Fifty-four dollars in bills. Not a word
+with 'em.</p>
+
+<p>"Then he broke down. 'It's Lovett,' he says, 'it's Lovett's done
+this&mdash;the assistant cashier. Maybe he's told some o' the other fellows
+at the desks next, an' they helped. They knew about her bein' sick. An'
+they can't none of 'em afford it,' he says, an' that seemed to cut him
+up worst of all. 'I'll give it back to him,' he says resolute. 'I can't
+take it from 'em, Peleg.'</p>
+
+<p>"I says, 'Hush up, Mr. Loneway, sir,' I says. 'You got to think o' her.
+Take it,' I told him, 'an' thank God it ain't as bad as it was. Who
+knows,' I ask' him, 'but what the doctor might turn out wrong?'</p>
+
+<p>"Pretty soon I got him to pull himself together some, an' I shoved him
+into the other room, an' I went with him, an' talked on like an idiot so
+nobody'd suspect&mdash;I didn't hev no idea what.</p>
+
+<p>"She was settin' up in the same black waist, with a newspaper hung
+acrost the head o' the iron bed to keep the draught out. All of a
+sudden,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'John!' says she.</p>
+
+<p>"He went close by the bed.</p>
+
+<p>"'Is everything goin' on good?' she ask' him.</p>
+
+<p>"'Everything,' he told her right off.</p>
+
+<p>"'Splendid, John?' she ask' him, pullin' his hand up by her cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"'Splendid, Linda,' he says after her.</p>
+
+<p>"'We got a little money ahead?' she goes on.</p>
+
+<p>"'Bless me, if he didn't do just what I had time to be afraid of. He
+hauls out them fifty-four dollars an' showed her.</p>
+
+<p>"She claps her hands like a child.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, <i>goodey</i>!' she says; 'I'm so glad. I'm so glad. Now I can tell
+you,' she says to him.</p>
+
+<p>"He took her in his arms an' kneeled down by the bed, an' I tried to
+slip out, but she called me back. So I stayed, like an' axe in the
+parlour.</p>
+
+<p>"'John,' she says to him, 'do you know what Aunt Nita told me before I
+was married? "You must always look the prettiest you know how," Aunt
+Nita says,' she tells him, '"for your husband. Because you must always
+be prettier for him than anybody else is." An', oh, dearest,' she says,
+'you know I'd 'a' looked my best for you if I could&mdash;but I never
+had&mdash;an' it wasn't your fault!' she cries out, 'but things didn't go
+right. It wasn't anybody's fault. Only&mdash;I <i>wanted</i> to look nice for you.
+An' since I've been sick,' she says, 'it's made me wretched, wretched to
+think I didn't hev nothin' to put on but this black waist&mdash;this homely
+old black waist. You never liked me to wear black,' I rec'lect she says
+to him, 'an' it killed me to think&mdash;if anything should happen&mdash;you'd be
+rememberin' me like this. You think you'd remember me the way I was when
+I was well&mdash;but you wouldn't,' she says earnest; 'people never, never
+do. You'd remember me here like I look now. Oh&mdash;an' so I thought&mdash;if
+there was ever so little money we could spare&mdash;won't you get me
+somethin'&mdash;somethin' so's you could remember me better? Somethin' to
+wear these few days,' she says.</p>
+
+<p>"He breaks down then an' cries, with his face in her pillow.</p>
+
+<p>"'Don't&mdash;why, don't!' she says to him; 'if there wasn't any money, you
+might cry&mdash;only then I wouldn't never hev told you. But
+now&mdash;to-morrow&mdash;you can go an' buy me a little dressing-sacque&mdash;the kind
+they have in the windows on Broadway. Oh, <i>Jack</i>!' she says, 'is it
+wicked an' foolish for me to want you to remember me as nice as you can?
+It ain't&mdash;it <i>ain't</i>!' she says.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I give out. I felt like a handful o' wet sawdust that's been
+squeezed. I slid out an' downstairs, an' I guess I chopped wood near all
+night. The Tomato Ketchup's husband he pounded the floor for me to shut
+up, an' I told him&mdash;though I never was what you might call a impudent
+janitor&mdash;that if he thought he could chop it up any more soft, he'd
+better engage in it. But then the kid woke up, too, an' yelled some, an'
+I's afraid she'd hear it an' remember, an' so I quit.</p>
+
+<p>"Nex' mornin' I laid for Mr. Loneway in the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"'Sir,' I says to him when he come down to go out, 'you won't do nothin'
+foolish?' I ask' him.</p>
+
+<p>"'Mind your business,' he says, his face like a patch o' poplar ashes.</p>
+
+<p>"I was in an' out o' their flat all day, an' I could see't Mis' Loneway
+she's happy as a lark. But I knew pretty well what was comin'. Mind you,
+this was the third day.</p>
+
+<p>"That night I hed things goin' in the kitchen an' the kettle on, an' I's
+hesitatin' whether to put two eggs in the omelet or three, when he comes
+home. He laid a eternal lot o' stuff on the kitchen table, without one
+word, an' went in where she was. I heard paper rustlin', an' then I
+heard her voice&mdash;an' it wasn't no cryin', lemme say. An' so I says to
+myself, 'Well,' I says, 'she might as well hev a four-egg omelet,
+because it'll be the last.' I knew if they's to arrest him she wouldn't
+never live the day out. So I goes on with the omelet, an' when he come
+out where I was, I just told him if he'd cut open the grapefruit I hed
+ever'thing else ready. An' then he quit lookin' defiant, an' he calmed
+down some; an' pretty soon we took in the dinner.</p>
+
+<p>"She was sittin' up in front of her two pillows, pretty as a picture.
+An' she was in one o' the things I ain't ever see outside a store
+window. Lord! it was all the colour o' roses, with craped-up stuff like
+the bark on a tree, an' rows an' rows o' lace, an' long, flappy ribbon.
+She was allus pretty, but she looked like an angel in that. An' I says
+to myself then, I says: 'If a woman <i>knows</i> she looks like that in them
+things, an' if she loves somebody an', livin' or dead, wants to look
+like that for him, I want to know who's to blame her? I ain't&mdash;Peleg
+Bemus, he ain't.' Mis' Loneway was as pretty as I ever see, not barrin'
+the stage. An' she was laughin', an' her cheeks was pink-like, an' she
+says,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, Mr. Bemus,' she says, 'I feel like a queen,' she says, 'an' you
+must stay for dinner.'</p>
+
+<p>"I never seen Mr. Loneway gayer. He was full o' fun an' funny sayin's,
+an' his face had even lost its chalky look an' he'd got some colour, an'
+he laughed with her an' he made love to her&mdash;durned if it wasn't enough
+to keep a woman out o' the grave to be worshipped the way that man
+worshipped her. An' when she ask' for the guitar, I carried out the
+platter, an' I stayed an' straightened things some in the kitchen.
+An' all the while I could hear 'em singin' soft an' laughin'
+together ... an' all the while I knew what was double sure to come.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, in about an hour it did come. I was waitin' for it. Fact, I had
+filled up the coffee-pot expectin' it. An' when I heard the men comin'
+up the stairs I takes the coffee an' what rolls there was left an' I
+meets 'em in the hall, on the landing. They was two of 'em&mdash;constables,
+or somethin'&mdash;with a warrant for his arrest.</p>
+
+<p>"'Gentlemen,' says I, openin' the coffee-pot careless so's the smell
+could get out an' circ'late&mdash;'gentlemen, he's up there in that room.
+There's only these one stairs, an' the only manhole's right here over
+your heads, so's you can watch that. You rec'lect that there ain't a
+roof on that side o' the house. Now, I'm a lonely beggar, an' I wish't
+you'd let me invite you to a cup o' hot coffee an' a hot buttered roll
+or two, right over there in that hall window. You can keep your eye
+peeled towards that door all the while,' I reminds 'em.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it was a bitter night, an' them two was flesh an' blood. They
+'lowed that if he hadn't been there they'd 'a' had to wait for him,
+anyway, so they finally set down. An' I doled 'em out the coffee. I
+'lowed I could keep 'em an hour if I knew myself. Nobody could 'a' done
+any different, with her an' him settin' up there singin' an' no manner
+o' doubt but what it was for the last time.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd be'n 'round consid'able in my time an' I knew quite a batch o'
+stories. I let 'em have 'em all, an' poured the coffee down 'em. They
+was willin' enough&mdash;it wa'n't cold in the halls to what it was outside,
+an' the coffee was boilin' hot. An' if anybody wants to blame me, they'd
+hev to see her first, all fluffed up same as a kitten in that pink
+jacket-thing, afore I'd give 'em a word o' hearin'.</p>
+
+<p>"In the midst of it all I heard the Tomato Ketchup's kid yell. I
+remembered that this'd be my last chanst fer <i>her</i> to see the kid when
+she could get any happiness out of it. I didn't think twice&mdash;I just
+filled up the cups o' them two, an' then I sails downstairs, two at a
+time, an' opened the door o' first floor front without rappin'. The kid
+was there in its little nightgown, howlin' fer fair because it had be'n
+left alone with its boy brother. The Tomato Ketchup an' her husband was
+to a wake. I picked up the kid, rolled it in a blanket, grabbed brother
+by the arm, an' started up the stairs.</p>
+
+<p>"'Is the house on f-f-fire?' says the boy brother.</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes,' says I, 'it is. An' we're goin' upstairs to hunt up a
+fire-escape,' I told him.</p>
+
+<p>"At the top o' the stairs I sets him down on the floor an' promises him
+an orange, an' then I opens the door, with the kid on my arm. It had
+stopped yellin' by then, an' it was settin' up straight, with its eyes
+all round an' its cheeks all pinked-up with havin' just woke up, an' it
+looked awful cute, in spite of its mother. Mis' Loneway was leanin'
+back, laughin', an' tellin' him what they was goin' to do the minute she
+got well; but when she see the baby she drops her husband's hand and
+sorter screams out, weak, an' holds out her arms. Mr. Loneway, he hardly
+heard me go in, I reckon&mdash;leastwise, he looks at me clean through me
+without seein' I was there. An' she hugs the kiddie up in her arms an'
+looks at me over the top of its head as much as to say she understood
+an' thanked me.</p>
+
+<p>"'Its ma is went off,' I told 'em apologetic, 'an' I thought maybe you'd
+look after it awhile,' I told 'em.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I went out an' put oranges all around the boy brother on the hall
+floor, an' I hustled back downstairs.</p>
+
+<p>"'Gentlemen,' says I, brisk, 'I've got two dollars too much,' says
+I&mdash;an' I reck'n the cracks in them walls must 'a' winked at the notion.
+'What do you say to a game o' dice on the bread-plate?' I ask' 'em.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, one way an' another I kep' them two there for two hours. An'
+then, when the game was out, I knew I couldn't do nothin' else. So I
+stood up an' told 'em I'd go up an' let Mr. Loneway know they was
+there&mdash;along o' his wife bein' sick an' hadn't ought to be scared.</p>
+
+<p>"I started up the stairs, feelin' like lead. Little more'n halfway up I
+heard a little noise. I looked up, an' I see the boy brother a-comin',
+leakin' orange-peel, with the kid slung over his shoulder, sleepin'. I
+looked on past him, an' the door o' Mr. Loneway's sittin' room was open,
+an' I see Mr. Loneway standin' in the middle o' the floor. I must 'a'
+stopped still, because something stumbled up against me from the back,
+an' the two constables was there, comin' close behind me. I could hear
+one of 'em breathin'.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I went on up, an' somehow I knew there wasn't nothin' more to wait
+for. When we got to the top I see inside the room, an' she was layin'
+back on her pillow, all still an' quiet. An' the little new pink jacket
+never moved nor stirred, for there wa'n't no breath.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Loneway, he come acrost the floor towards us.</p>
+
+<p>"'Come in,' he says. 'Come right in,' he told us&mdash;an' I see him smilin'
+some."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>AN EPILOGUE</h3>
+
+
+<p>When Peleg had gone back to the woodshed, Calliope slipped away too. I
+sat beside the fire, listening to the fine, measured fall of Peleg's
+axe&mdash;so much more vital with the spirit of music than his flute; looking
+at Calliope's brown earthen baking dishes&mdash;so much purer in line than
+the village bric-a-brac; thinking of Peleg's story and of the life that
+beat within it as life does not beat in the unaided letter of the law.
+But chiefly I thought of Linda Loneway. Linda Loneway. I made a picture
+of her name.</p>
+
+<p>So, Calliope having come from above stairs where I had heard her moving
+about as if in some search, I think that I recognized, even before I
+lifted my eyes to it, the photograph which she gave me. It was as if the
+name had heard me, and had come.</p>
+
+<p>"It's Linda," Calliope said. "It's Linda Proudfit. An' I'm certain,
+certain sure it's the Linda that Peleg knew."</p>
+
+<p>"Surely not, Calliope," I said&mdash;obedient to some law.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope nodded, with closed eyes, in simple certainty.</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>know</i> it was her that Peleg meant about," she said. "I thought of it
+first when he said about her looks&mdash;an' her husband a clerk&mdash;an' he said
+he called her Linda. An' then when he got to where she mentioned Aunt
+Nita&mdash;that's what her an' Clementina always calls Mis' Ordway, though
+she ain't by rights&mdash;oh, it is&mdash;it is...."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope sat down on the floor before me, cherishing the picture. And
+all natural doubts of the possibility, all apparent denial in the real
+name of Linda Proudfit's poor young husband were for us both presently
+overborne by something which seemed viewlessly witnessing to the truth.</p>
+
+<p>"But little Linda," Calliope said, "to think o' her. To think o'
+<i>her</i>&mdash;like Peleg said. Why, I hardly ever see her excep' in all silk,
+or imported kinds. None of us did. I hardly ever 'see her walk&mdash;it was
+horses and carriages and dance in a ballroom till I wonder she
+remembered how to walk at all. Everything with her was cut good, an'
+kid, an' handwork, an' like that&mdash;the same way the Proudfits is now. But
+yet she wasn't a bit like Mis' Proudfit an' Clementina. They're both
+sweet an' rule-lovin' an' ladies born, but&mdash;" Calliope hesitated,
+"they's somethin' they <i>ain't</i>. An' Linda was."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope looked about the room, seeking a way to tell me. And her eyes
+fell on the flame on her cooking-stove hearth.</p>
+
+<p>"Linda had a little somethin' in her that lit her up," she said. "She
+didn't say much of anything that other folks don't say, but somehow she
+meant the words farther in. In where the light was, an' words mean
+differ'nt an' better. I use' to think I didn't believe that what she saw
+or heard or read was exactly like what her mother an' Clementina an'
+most folks see an' hear an' read. Somehow, she got the inside out o'
+things, an' drew it in like breathin', an' lit it up, an' lived it more.
+I donno's you know what I'm talkin' about. But Mis' Proudfit an'
+Clementina don't do that way. They're dear an' good an' generous, an'
+lots gentler than they was before Linda left 'em&mdash;an' yet they just wear
+things' an' invite folks in an' see Europe an' keep up their French an'
+serve God, an' never get any of it rill lit up. But Linda, she <i>knew</i>.
+An' she use' to be lonesome. I know she did&mdash;I know she did.</p>
+
+<p>"I use' to look at her an' wish an' wish I wa'n't who I am, so's I could
+a' let her know I knew too. I use' to go to mend her lace an' sell orris
+root to her&mdash;an' Madame Proudfit an' Clementina would be there, buyin'
+an' livin' on the outside, judicious an' refined an' rill right about
+everything; but when Linda come in, she sort o' reached somewheres,
+deep, or up, or out, or like that, an' got somethin' that meant it all
+instead o' gnawin' its way through words. It was like other folks was
+the recipe an' Linda was the rill dish. They was the way to be, but she
+was the one that was.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then one year, when she come home from off to school, this young
+clerk followed her. I only see 'em together once&mdash;he only stayed a day
+an' had his terrible time with Jason Proudfit an' everybody knew it&mdash;but
+even with seein' 'em that once, I knew about him. I don't care who he
+was or what he was worth&mdash;he was lit up, too. I donno why he was a clerk
+nor anything of him&mdash;excep' that the lit kind ain't always the
+money-makers&mdash;but he could talk to her her way. An' when I see the four
+of 'em drive up in front of the post-office the day he come, Mis'
+Proudfit an' Clementina talkin' all soft an' interested an' regular
+about the foreign postage stamps they was buyin', an' Linda an' him
+sittin' there with foreign lands fair livin' in their eyes&mdash;I knew how
+it would be. An' so it was. They went off, Linda with only the clothes
+she was wearin' an' none of her stone rings or like that with her. An'
+see what it all done&mdash;see what it done. Jason Proudfit, he wouldn't
+forgive 'em nor wouldn't hear a word from 'em, though they say Mis'
+Linda wrote, at first, an' more than once. An' then when he died two
+years or so afterwards, an' Mis' Proudfit tried everywhere&mdash;they wa'n't
+no trace. An' no wonder, with a differ'nt name so's nobody should find
+out how poor they was&mdash;an' death&mdash;an' like enough prison...."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope stood up, and in the pause Peleg's axe went rhythmically on.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm goin' to be sure," she said. "I hate to&mdash;but o' course I've got to
+be rill certain, in words."</p>
+
+<p>She went out to the shed, taking with her the photograph, and closed the
+door. Peleg's axe ceased. And when she came back, she said nothing at
+all for a little, and the axe did not go on.</p>
+
+<p>"We mustn't tell Mis' Proudfit&mdash;yet," she put it, presently, "not till
+we can think. I donno's we ever can tell her. The dyin'&mdash;an' the
+disgrace&mdash;an' the other name&mdash;an' the hurt about Linda's <i>needin'
+things</i> ... Peleg thinks not tell her, too."</p>
+
+<p>"At least," I said, "we can wait, for a little. Until they come home."</p>
+
+<p>I listened while, her task long disregarded, Calliope fitted together
+the dates and the meagre facts she knew, and made the sad tally
+complete. Then she laid the picture by and stood staring at the
+cooking-range flame.</p>
+
+<p>"It ain't enough," she said, "bein'&mdash;lit up&mdash;ain't enough for folks, is
+it? Not without they're some made out o' iron, too, to hold it&mdash;like
+stoves. An' yet&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at me with one of her infrequent, passionate doubtings in her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;if Mis' Proudfit an' Clementina had just of been lit too," she said,
+"mebbe&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She got no farther, though I think it was not the opening of the door by
+Peleg Bemus that interrupted her. Peleg did not come in. He said
+something of the snow on his shoes, and spoke through the door's
+opening.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm a-goin to quit work for to-day, Mis' Marsh," he told her. "Seems
+like I'm too dead tired to chop."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE TEA PARTY</h3>
+
+
+<p>As spring came on, and I found myself fairly identified with the life of
+Friendship,&mdash;or, at any rate, "more one of us," as they said,&mdash;I
+suggested to Calliope something which had been for some time pleasantly
+in my mind: might I, I asked one day, give a tea for her?</p>
+
+<p>"A tea!" she repeated. "For <i>me</i>? You know they give me a benefit once
+in the basement of the Court House. But a private tea, for me?"</p>
+
+<p>And when she understood that this was what I meant,</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said earnestly, "I'd be so glad to come. An' you an' I can
+know the tea is for me&mdash;if you rilly mean it&mdash;but it won't do to say it
+so'd it'd get out around. Oh, no, it won't. Not one o' the rest'll come
+near if you give it <i>for</i> me&mdash;nor if you give it <i>for</i> anybody. Mis'
+Proudfit, now, she tried to give a noon lunch on St. Patrick's day for
+Mis' Postmaster Sykes, an' the folks she ask' to it got together an'
+sent in their regrets. 'We're just as good as Mis' Postmaster Sykes,'
+they give out to everybody, 'an' we don't bow down to her like that.' So
+Mis' Proudfit she calls it a Shamrock Party an' give it a day later. An'
+every one of 'em went. It won't do to say it's <i>for</i> me."</p>
+
+<p>So I contented myself with planning to seat Calliope at the foot of my
+table, and I found a kind of happiness in her child-like content, though
+only we two knew that the occasion would do her honour. If Delia had
+been available we would have told her, but Delia was still in Europe,
+and would not return until June.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope was quite radiant when, on the afternoon of the tea, she
+arrived in advance of the others. She was wearing her best gray
+henrietta, and I noted that she had changed her cameo ring from her
+first to her third finger. ("First-finger rings seem to me more
+everyday," she had once said to me, "but third-finger I always think
+looks real dressy.") She was carrying a small parcel.</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't ask to borrow anything," she said shyly; "I didn't know how
+you'd feel about that, a stranger so. An' we all got together&mdash;your
+company, you know&mdash;an' found out you hadn't borrowed anything from any
+of us, an' we thought maybe you hesitated. So we made up I should bring
+my spoons. They was mother's, an' they're thin as weddin' rings&mdash;an'
+solid. Any time you want to give a company you're welcome to 'em."</p>
+
+<p>When I had laid the delicate old silver in its place, I found Calliope
+standing in the middle of my living-room, looking frankly about on my
+simple furnishings, her eyes lingering here and there almost lovingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Bein' in your house," she said, "is like bein' somewheres else. I don't
+know if you know what I mean? Most o' the time I'm where I belong&mdash;just
+common. But now an' then&mdash;like a holiday when we're dressed up an'
+sittin' 'round&mdash;I feel differ'nt an' <i>special</i>. It was the way I felt
+when they give the William Shakespeare supper in the library an' had it
+lit up in the evenin' so differ'nt&mdash;like bein' somewheres else. It'll be
+that way on Market Square next month when the Carnival comes. I guess
+that's why I'm a extract agent," she added, laughing a little. "When I
+set an' smell the spices I could think it wasn't me I feel so <i>special</i>.
+An' I feel that way now&mdash;I do' know if you know what I mean&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at me, measuring my ability to comprehend, and brightening at
+my nod.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, most o' Friendship wouldn't understand," she said. "To them
+vanilla smells like corn-starch pudding an' no more. An' that reminds
+me," she added slowly, "you know Friendship well enough by this time,
+don't you, to find we're apt to say things here this afternoon?"</p>
+
+<p>"Say things?" I repeated, puzzling.</p>
+
+<p>"We won't mean to," she hastened loyally to add; "I ain't talkin' about
+us, you know," she explained anxiously, "I just want to warn you so's
+you won't be hurt. I guess I notice such things more'n most. We won't
+mean to offend you&mdash;but I thought you'd ought to know ahead. An' bein'
+as it's part my tea, I thought it was kind o' my place to tell you."</p>
+
+<p>She was touching the matter delicately, almost tenderly, and not more,
+as I saw, with a wish to spare me than with a wish to apologize in
+advance for the others, to explain away some real or fancied weakness.</p>
+
+<p>"You know," she said, "we ain't never had anybody to, what you might
+say, tell us what we can an' what we can't say. So we just naturally say
+whatever comes into our heads. An' then when we get it said, we see
+often that it ain't what we meant&mdash;an' that it's apt to hurt folks or
+put us in a bad light, or somethin'. But some don't even see that&mdash;some
+go right ahead sayin' the hurt things an' never know it <i>is</i> a hurt. I
+don't know if you've noticed what I mean," Calliope said, "but you will
+to-night. An' I didn't want you should be hurt or should think hard of
+them that says 'em."</p>
+
+<p>But how, I wondered, as my guests assembled, could one "think hard" of
+any one in Friendship, and especially of the little circle to which I
+belonged: My dear Mis' Amanda Toplady, Mis' Photographer Sturgis, Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, who, since our Thanksgiving, seemed, as
+Calliope put it, to have "got good with the universe again"; the Liberty
+sisters, for that day once more persuaded from their seclusion, and Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes, with, we sometimes said, "some right to hev her
+peculiarities if ever anybody hed it." Of them all the Friendship phrase
+of approval had frequently been spoken: That this one, or that, was "<i>at
+heart</i>, one o' the most all-round capable women we've got."</p>
+
+<p>I had hoped to have one more guest&mdash;Mrs. Merriman, wife of the late
+chief of the Friendship fire department. But I had promptly received her
+regrets, "owing to affliction in the family," though the fire chief had
+died two years and more before.</p>
+
+<p>"But it's her black," Calliope had explained to me sympathetically; "she
+can't afford to throw away her best dress, made mournin' style, with
+crape ornaments. As long as that lasts good, she'll hev to stay home
+from places. I see she's just had new crape cuffs put on, an' that means
+another six months at the least. An' she won't go to parties wearin'
+widow weeds. Mis' Fire Chief Merriman is very delicate."</p>
+
+<p>My guests, save Calliope, all arrived together and greeted me, I
+observed, with a manner of marked surprise. Afterward, when I wondered,
+Calliope explained simply that it was not usual for a hostess to meet
+her guests at the door. "Of course, they're usually right in the midst
+o' gettin' the supper when the company comes," she said.</p>
+
+<p>My prettiest dishes and silver were to do honour to those whom I had
+bidden; and boughs of my Flowering-currant filled my little hall and
+curved above the line of sight at table, where the candle shades lent
+deeper yellows. I delighted in the manner of formality with which they
+took their places, as if some forgotten ceremonial of ancient courts
+were still in their veins, when a banquet was not a thing to be entered
+upon lightly.</p>
+
+<p>Quite in ignorance of the Japanese custom of sipping tea while the first
+course is arriving, it is our habit in Friendship to inaugurate "supper"
+by seeing the tea poured. In deference to this ceremony a hush fell
+immediately we were seated, and this was in courtesy to me, who must
+inquire how each would take her tea. I think that this conversation
+never greatly varied, as:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Toplady?" I said at once, the rest being understood.</p>
+
+<p>"Cream and sugar, <i>if</i> you please," said that great Amanda heartily, "or
+milk if it's milk. I take the tea for the trimmin's."</p>
+
+<p>Then a little stir of laughter and a straying comment or two about, say,
+the length of days at that time of year, and:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Sykes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just milk, please. I always say I don't think tea would hurt <i>anybody</i>
+if they'd leave the sugar alone. But then, I've got a very peculiar
+stomach."</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Holcomb?"</p>
+
+<p>"I want mine plain tea, thank you. My husband takes milk and the boys
+like sugar, but I like the taste of the tea."</p>
+
+<p>At which, from Libbie Liberty: "Oh, Mis' Holcomb just says that to make
+out she's strong-minded. Plain tea an' plain coffee's regular woman's
+rights fare, Mis' Holcomb!" And then, after more laughter and Mis'
+Holcomb's blushes, they awaited:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Sturgis?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not any at all, thank you. No, I like the tea, but the tea don't like
+me. My mother was the same way. She never could drink it. No, not any
+for me, though I must say I should dearly love a cup."</p>
+
+<p>"Miss 'Viny?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just a little tea and the rest hot water. Dear me, I shouldn't go to
+sleep till <i>to-morrow</i> night if I was to drink a cup as strong as that.
+No&mdash;a little more water, please. I s'pose I can send it back for more if
+it's still too strong?"</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Libbie?"</p>
+
+<p>"Laviny just wants the canister pointed in her direction, an' she thinks
+she's had her tea. Lucy don't dare take any. Three lumps for me, please.
+I like mine surup."</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Calliope, "milk if there's any left in the pitcher. An' if
+there ain't, send it down clear. I like it most any way. Ain't it queer
+about the differ'nce in folks' tastes in their tea and coffee?"</p>
+
+<p>That was the signal for the talk to begin with anecdotes of how various
+relatives, quick and passed, had loved to take their tea. No one ever
+broached a real topic until this introduction had had its way. To do so
+would have been an indelicacy, like familiar speech among those in the
+ceremony of a first meeting.</p>
+
+<p>Thus I began to see that in spite of Calliope's distress at the ways of
+us in Friendship, a matchless delicacy was among its people a dominant
+note. Not the delicacy born of convention, not that sometimes bred in
+the crudest by urban standards, but a finer courtesy that will spare the
+conscious stab which convention allows. It was, if I may say so, a
+<i>savoir faire</i> of the heart instead of the head. But we had hardly
+entered upon the hour before the ground for Calliope's warning was
+demonstrated.</p>
+
+<p>"There!" she herself bridged a pause with her ready little laugh, "I
+knew somebody'd pass me somethin' while I was saltin' my potato. My
+brother, older, always said that at home. 'I never salt my potato,' he
+use' to say, 'without somebody passes me somethin'."</p>
+
+<p>Next instant her eyes flew to my face in a kind of horror, for:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"We've noticed that at our house, too," Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss
+observed, vigorously using a salt-shaker, "but then I always believe,
+myself, in havin' everything properly seasoned in the kitchen before it
+comes on to the table."</p>
+
+<p>"See!" Calliope signalled me fleetly.</p>
+
+<p>But no one else, and certainly not Mis' Holcomb herself, perceived the
+surface of things vexed by a ripple.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady heartily, "that <i>is</i> so
+about saltin' your potato. I know it now, but I never thought of it
+right out before. Lots o' things are true that you don't think of right
+out. Now I come to put my mind on it, I know at our house if I cut up a
+big plate o' bread we don't eat up half of it; but just as sure as I
+don't, I hev to get up from the table an' go get more bread."</p>
+
+<p>"I know&mdash;we often speak of that!" and "So my husband says," chimed Mis'
+Holcomb and Mis' Sturgis.</p>
+
+<p>"Seems as if I'd noticed that, too," Calliope said brightly.</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon: "My part," Miss Lucy Liberty contributed shyly, "I always
+like to see a great big plate of good, big slices o' bread come on to
+the table. Looks like the crock was full," she added, laughing heartily
+to cover her really pretty shyness, "an' like you wouldn't run out."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope's glance at me was still more distressed, for my table showed
+no bread at all, and my maid was at that moment handing rolls the size
+of a walnut. But for the others the moment passed undisturbed.</p>
+
+<p>"I've never noticed in particular about the bread," observed Mis'
+Sykes,&mdash;she had great magnetism, for when she spoke an instant hush
+fell,&mdash;"but what <i>I</i> have noticed"&mdash;Mis' Sykes was very original and
+usually disregarded the experiences of others,&mdash;"is that if I don't make
+a list of my washing when it goes, something is pretty sure to get lost.
+But let me make a list, an' even the dust-cloths'll come back home."</p>
+
+<p>Everybody had noticed that. Even Libbie Liberty assented, and exchanged
+with her sister a smile of domestic memories.</p>
+
+<p>"An' every single piece has got my initial in the corner, too," Mis'
+Sykes added; "I wouldn't hev a piece o' linen in the house without my
+initial on. It don't seem to me rill refined not to."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope's look was almost one of anguish. My hemstitched damask napkins
+bear no saving initial in a corner. But no one else would, I was
+certain, connect that circumstance, even if it was observed, with what
+Mis' Sykes had said.</p>
+
+<p>"It's too bad Mis' Fire Chief Merriman wouldn't come to-day," Calliope
+hastily turned the topic. "She can't seem to get used to things again,
+since Sum died."</p>
+
+<p>"She didn't do this way for her first husband that died in the city, I
+heard," volunteered Mis' Sturgis. "Why, I heard she went out <i>there</i>,
+right after the first year."</p>
+
+<p>"That's easy explained," said Mis' Sykes, positively.</p>
+
+<p>"Wasn't she fond of him?" asked Mis' Holcomb. "She seems real clingin',
+like she would be fond o' most any one."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, she was fond of him," declared Mis' Sykes. "Why, he was a
+professional man, you know. But then he died ten years ago, durin' tight
+skirts. Naturally, being a widow then wasn't what it is now. She
+couldn't cut her skirt over to any advantage&mdash;a bell skirt is a bell
+skirt. An' they went out the very next year. When she got new cloth for
+the flare skirts, she got colours. But the Fire Chief died right at the
+height o' the full skirts. She's kep' cuttin' over an' cuttin' over, an'
+by the looks o' the Spring plates she can keep right on at it. She
+really can't afford to go <i>out</i> o' mournin'. I don't blame her a bit."</p>
+
+<p>"She told me the other day," remarked Libbie Liberty, "that she was real
+homesick for some company food. She said she'd been ask' in to eat with
+this family an' that, most hospitable but very plain. An' seems though
+she couldn't wait for a company lay-out."</p>
+
+<p>"She won't go anywheres in her crape," Mis' Sykes turned to me,
+supplementing Calliope's former information. "She's a very superior
+woman,&mdash;she graduated in Oils in the city,&mdash;an' she's fitted for any
+society, say where who <i>will</i>. We always say about her that nobody's so
+delicate as Mis' Fire Chief Merriman."</p>
+
+<p>"She don't take strangers in very ready, anyway," Mis' Holcomb explained
+to me. "She belongs to what you might call the old school. She's very
+sensitive to <i>every</i>thing."</p>
+
+<p>The moment came when I had unintentionally produced a hush by serving a
+salad unknown in Friendship. When almost at once I perceived what I had
+done, I confess that I looked at Calliope in a kind of dread lest this
+too were a <i>faux pas</i>, and I took refuge in some question about the
+coming Carnival. But my attention was challenged by my maid, who was in
+the doorway announcing a visitor.</p>
+
+<p>"Company, ma'am," she said.</p>
+
+<p>And when I had bidden her to ask that I be excused for a little:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Please, ma'am," she said, "she says she has to see you <i>now</i>."</p>
+
+<p>And when I suggested the lady's card:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it's Mis' Fire Chief Merriman," the maid imparted easily.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Fire Chief Merriman!" exclaimed every one at table. "Well
+forevermore! Speakin' of angels! She must 'a' forgot the tea was bein'."</p>
+
+<p>In my living-room, in her smartly freshened spring toilet of mourning,
+Mis' Fire Chief Merriman rose to greet me. She was very tall and slight,
+and her face was curiously like an oblong yellow brooch which fastened
+her gown at the throat.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear friend," she said, "I felt, after your kind invitation, that I
+must pay my respects <i>during</i> your tea. Afterwards wouldn't be the same.
+It's a tea, and there couldn't be lanterns an' bunting or anything o'
+the sort. So I felt I could come in."</p>
+
+<p>"You are very good," I murmured, and in some perplexity, as she resumed
+her seat, I sat down also. Mis' Merriman sought in the pocket of her
+petticoat for a black-bordered handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>"When you're in mourning so," she observed, "folks forget you. They
+don't really forget you, either. But they get used to missing you
+places, an' they don't always remember to miss you. I did appreciate
+your inviting me to-day so. Because I'm just as fond of meeting my
+friends as I was before the chief died."</p>
+
+<p>And when I had made an end of murmuring something:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Really," she went on placidly, "it ought to be the custom to go out in
+society when you're in mourning if you never did any other time. You
+need distraction then if you ever needed it in your life. An' the chief
+would 'a' been the first to feel that too. He was very partial to going
+out in company."</p>
+
+<p>And when I had made an end of murmuring something else:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You were very thoughtful to give me an invitation for this afternoon,"
+she said. "An' I felt that I must stop in an' tell you so, even if I
+couldn't attend."</p>
+
+<p>Serenely she spread her black crape fan and swayed it. In the
+dining-room my guests proceeded with their lonely salad toward a
+probable lonely dessert. At thought of that dessert and of that salad, a
+suggestion, partly impulsive and partly flavoured with some faint
+reminiscence, at once besieged me, and in it I divined a solution of the
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Merriman," I said eagerly, "may I send you in a cup of strawberry
+ice? I've some early strawberries from the city."</p>
+
+<p>She turned on me her great dark eyes, with their flat curve of shadow
+accenting her sadness.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure you are very kind," she said simply. "An' I should be pleased,
+I'm sure."</p>
+
+<p>I rose, hesitating, longing to say what I had in mind.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd really like your opinion," I said, "on rather a new salad I'm
+trying. Now would you not&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"A salad?" Mis' Merriman repeated. "The chief," she said reflectively,
+"was very partial to all green salads. I don't think men usually care
+for them the way he did."</p>
+
+<p>"Dear Mrs. Merriman," said I at this, "a cup of bouillon and a bit of
+chicken breast and a drop of creamed cauliflower&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she murmured, "really, I couldn't think&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>And when I had made my cordial insistence she looked up at me for a
+moment solemnly, over her crape fan. I thought that her eyes with that
+flat, underlying curve of shadow were as if tears were native to them.
+Her grief and the usages of grief had made of her some one other than
+her first self, some one circumscribed, wary of living.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said wistfully, "I ain't had anything like that since I went
+into mourning. If you don't think it would be disrespectful to him&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am certain that it would not be so," I assured her, and construed her
+doubting silence as capitulation.</p>
+
+<p>So I filled a tray with all the dainties of our little feast, and my
+maid carried it to her where she sat, and then to us at table served
+dessert. And my strange party went forward with seven guests in my
+dining-room and one mourner at supper in my living-room.</p>
+
+<p>"How very, <i>very</i> delicate!" said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, in an emphatic
+whisper. "Mis' Fire Chief Merriman is a very superior woman, an' she
+always does the delicate thing."</p>
+
+<p>And now as I met Calliope's eyes I saw that the dear little woman was
+looking at me with a manner of unmistakable pride. In spite of her
+warning to me and what she thought had been its justification during the
+supper, here was an occasion to reveal to me a delicacy unequalled.</p>
+
+<p>Thereafter, in deference to my mourning guest in the next room, we all
+dropped our voices and talked virtually in whispers. And when at last we
+rose from the table, complete silence had come upon us.</p>
+
+<p>Then, the tray not having yet been brought from that other room, I
+confess to having found myself somewhat uncertain how to treat a
+situation so out of my experience. But the kind heart of my dear Mis'
+Amanda Toplady was the dictator.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," she whispered, tip-toeing, "we must all go in an' speak to her.
+Poor woman&mdash;she don't call anywheres, an' she stays in mournin' so long
+folks have kind o' dropped off goin' to see her. Let's walk in an' be
+rill nice to her."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Fire Chief Merriman sat as I had left her, and the tray was before
+her on my writing-table. She looked up gravely and greeted them all, one
+by one, without rising. We sat about her in a circle and spoke to her
+gently on subjects decently allied to her grief: on the coming meeting
+of the Cemetery Improvement Sodality; on the new styles in mourning; on
+the deaths in Friendship during the winter; and on two cases of typhoid
+fever recently developed in the town. (The Fire Chief had died of
+"walking typo.") And Mis' Merriman, gravely partaking of strawberry ice
+and cake and bonbons, listened and replied and, with the last morsel,
+rose to take her leave.</p>
+
+<p>It was then that my unlucky star shone effulgent. For, as she was
+shaking hands all round:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mrs. Merriman," I said, with the gentlest intent, "would you care
+to come out to see my dining-room? My Flowering-currant was very early
+this year&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>To my horrified amazement Mis' Fire Chief Merriman lifted her
+black-bordered handkerchief to her face and broke into subdued sobbing.
+Suddenly I understood that all the others were looking at me in a kind
+of reproachful astonishment. My bewilderment, mounting for an instant,
+was precipitately overthrown by the sobbing woman's words.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," Mis' Merriman said indistinctly, "I'm much obliged to you, I'm
+sure. But how can you think I would? I haven't looked at lanterns an'
+bunting an' such things since the Fire Chief died. I don't know how I'm
+ever going to stand the Carnival!"</p>
+
+<p>In deep distress I apologized, and found myself adrift upon a sea of
+uncharted classifications. Here were niceties of distinction which
+escaped my ruder vision, trained to the mere interchange of signals in
+smooth sailing or straight tempest, on open water. But I knew with grief
+that I had given her pain&mdash;that was clear enough; and in my confusion
+and wish to make amends, I caught up from their jar on the hall table my
+Flowering-currant boughs and thrust them in her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," I begged breathlessly, "at all events, take these!"</p>
+
+<p>On which she drew away from me and shook her head and fairly fled down
+the path, her floating crape brushing the mother bushes of my offending
+offering. And I was helplessly aware that sympathetic silence had fallen
+on the others and that the sympathy was not for me.</p>
+
+<p>"But what on earth was the matter?" I entreated my guests.</p>
+
+<p>It was that great Mis' Amanda Toplady who slipped her arm about me and
+explained.</p>
+
+<p>"When we've got any dead belongin' to us," she said, "we always carry
+all the flowers we get to the grave&mdash;an', of course, we don't feel we
+<i>can</i> carry them that's been used for a company. It's the same with Mis'
+Fire Chief. An' she can't bear even to see flowers an' things that's
+fixed for a company, either. Of course, that's her privilege."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Sykes took my hands.</p>
+
+<p>"You come here so lately," she said, "you naturally wouldn't know what's
+what in these things, here in Friendship. An' then, of course, Mis' Fire
+Chief Merriman is very, <i>very</i> delicate."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope linked her arm in mine.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you mind," she whispered; "we're all liable to our mistakes."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Half an hour after tea my guests took leave.</p>
+
+<p>"I enjoyed myself so much," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss; "you
+look tired out. I hope it ain't been too much for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Entertainin' is a real job," said Mis' Sturgis, "but you do it almost
+as if you liked it. I enjoyed myself <i>so</i> much."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll give bail you're glad it's over," said Libbie Liberty,
+sympathetically, "even if it did go off nice. I enjoyed myself ever so
+much."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Ever</i> so much," murmured Miss Lucy, laughing heartily.</p>
+
+<p>"Good night. Everything was lovely. I enjoyed myself very much," Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes told me. "And," she said, "you'll hear from me very,
+<i>very</i> soon in return for this."</p>
+
+<p>"Now don't you overdo, reddin' up to-night," advised my dear Mis' Amanda
+Toplady. "Just pick up the silver an' rense it off, an' let the dishes
+set till mornin', <i>I</i> say. I <i>did</i> enjoy myself so much."</p>
+
+<p>"Good-by," Calliope whispered in the hall. "Oh, it was beautiful. I
+<i>never</i> felt so special. Thank you&mdash;thank you. An'&mdash;you won't mind those
+things we said at the supper table?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Calliope," I murmured miserably, "I've forgotten all about them."</p>
+
+<p>I went out to the veranda with her. At the foot of the steps the others
+had paused in consultation. Hesitating, they looked up at me, and Mis'
+Sykes became their spokesman.</p>
+
+<p>"If I was you," she said gently, "I wouldn't feel too cut up over that
+slip o' yours to Mis' Merriman. She'd ought not to see blunders where
+they wasn't any meant. It'd ought to be the heart that counts, <i>I</i> say.
+Good-by. We enjoyed ourselves very, <i>very</i> much!"</p>
+
+<p>They went down the path between blossoming bushes, in the late afternoon
+sun. And as Calliope followed,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"That's so about the heart, ain't it?" she said brightly.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+
+<h3>WHAT IS THAT IN THINE HAND?</h3>
+
+
+<p>"Busy, busy, busy, busy all the day. Busy, busy, busy. And busy ..."</p>
+
+<p>"There goes Ellen Ember, crazy again," we said, when we heard that cry
+of hers, not unmelodious nor loud, echoing along Friendship streets.</p>
+
+<p>Then we usually ran to the windows and peered at her. Sometimes her long
+hair would be unbound on her shoulders, sometimes her little figure
+would be leaping lightly up as she caught at the lowest boughs of the
+curb elms, and sometimes her hand would be moving swiftly back and forth
+above her heart.</p>
+
+<p>"If your heart is broken," she had explained to many, "you can lace it
+together with 'Busy, busy, busy ...' Sing it and see! Or mebbe your
+heart is all of a piece?"</p>
+
+<p>Once, when I had gone to Miss Liddy's house, I had found Ellen in a
+skirt fashioned of an old plaid shawl of her father's, her bare
+shoulders wound in the rosy "nubia" that had been her mother's, and she
+was dancing in the dining-room, with surprising grace, as Pierrette
+might have danced in Carnival, and singing, in a sweet, piping voice, an
+incongruous little song:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O Day of wind and laughter,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A goddess born are you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose eyes are in the morning<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Blue&mdash;blue!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"I made that up," she had explained, "or I guess mebbe I remembered it
+from deep in my skull. I like the feel of it in my mouth when I speak
+the words."</p>
+
+<p>I used to think that Miss Liddy was really a less useful citizen than
+Ellen. For though Miss Liddy worked painstakingly at her dressmaking,
+and even dreamed over it little partial dreams, Ellen, mad or sane, made
+a garden, and threw little nosegays over our fences, and exercised a
+certain presence, latent in the rest of us, which made us momentarily
+gentle and in awe of our own sanity.</p>
+
+<p>When, one spring morning, a week before the Friendship Carnival, she
+passed down Daphne Street with her plaintive, musical "Busy, busy,
+busy ..." Doctor June and the young Reverend Arthur Bliss sat on Doctor
+June's screened-in porch discussing a deficit in the Good Shepherd's
+Orphans' Home fund for the fiscal year. Ever since the wreck of the
+Through, Friendship had contributed to the support of the Home,&mdash;having
+first understood then that the Home was its patient pensioner,&mdash;and now
+it was almost like a compliment that we had been appealed to for help.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor June listened with serene patience to what his visitor would say.</p>
+
+<p>"Tension," said the Reverend Arthur Bliss, squaring his splendid young
+shoulders, "tension. Warfare. We, as a church, are enormously equipped.
+We have&mdash;shall we say?&mdash;the helmets of our intelligence and the swords
+of our wills. Why, the joy of the fight ought to be to us like that of a
+strong man ready to do battle, oughtn't it&mdash;oughtn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>Doctor June, his straight white hair outlining his plump pink face,
+nodded; but one would have said that it was rather less at the Reverend
+Arthur than at his Van Houtii spir&aelig;a, which nodded back at him.</p>
+
+<p>"My young friend," said Doctor June, "will you forgive me for saying
+that it is fairly amazing to me how the church of God continues to use
+the terms of barbarism? We talk of the peace that passeth understanding,
+and yet we keep on employing metaphors of blood-red war. What does the
+modern church want of a helmet and a sword, if I may ask? Even
+rhetorically?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Christian life is an eternal warfare against the forces of sin, is
+it not?" asked the Reverend Arthur Bliss in surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me suggest," said Doctor June, "that all good life is an eternal
+surrender to the forces of good. There's a difference."</p>
+
+<p>The visitor from the city smiled very reverently.</p>
+
+<p>"I see, sir," he said, "that you are one of those wonderful
+non-combatants. You are by nature sanctified&mdash;and that I can well
+believe."</p>
+
+<p>"I am by nature a miserable old sinner," rejoined the doctor, warmly.
+"Often&mdash;often I would enjoy a fine round Elizabethan oath&mdash;note how that
+single adjective condones my poor taste. But I hold that good is
+inflowing and that it possesses whom it may possess. If a man is too
+busy fighting, it may pass him by."</p>
+
+<p>"But surely, sir," said the young clergyman, "you agree with me that a
+man wins his way into the kingdom of light by both a staff and a sword?"</p>
+
+<p>"You will perhaps forgive me for agreeing with nothing of the sort,"
+said the doctor, mildly; "I hold that a man takes his way to the light
+by grasping whatever the Lord puts in his hand&mdash;a hammer, a rope, a
+pen&mdash;and grasping it hard."</p>
+
+<p>"But the ungifted&mdash;what of the ungifted?" cried the Reverend Arthur
+Bliss.</p>
+
+<p>"In this sense, there are none," said Doctor June, briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"Busy, busy, busy all the day. Busy, busy, busy ..." sounded suddenly
+from the street in Ellen's thin soprano. Doctor June looked down at her,
+his expression scarcely changing, because it was always serenely soft.
+But the young clergyman saw with amazement the strange little figure
+with her unbound hair and her arms high and swaying, and as she took
+some steps of her dance before the gate, he questioned his host with
+uplifted brows.</p>
+
+<p>"A little mad," the doctor said, nodding, "like us all. She sings in the
+streets of a glad morning, and dances now and then. We take ours out in
+tangential opinions. It is nearly the same thing."</p>
+
+<p>The young clergyman's face lighted responsively at this, and then he
+deferentially clinched his argument.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a case in point," said he. "That poor creature there&mdash;what has
+the Lord put in her hand?"</p>
+
+<p>Doctor June looked thoughtful.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing," he declared, "for any fight. But I'm not sure that she isn't
+made to be a leaven. The kingdom of God works like a leaven, you know,
+my dear young friend. Not like a dum-dum bullet."</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;that poor creature. A leaven?" doubted the Reverend Arthur Bliss.</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't wonder," said Doctor June, "I shouldn't wonder. I'm not so
+sure as I used to be that I can recognize leaven at first sight."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, that's it!" cried his guest. "But a soldier, now, is a soldier!"</p>
+
+<p>Then they smiled their lack of acquiescence, and went back to the
+figures for the fiscal year.</p>
+
+<p>An hour later Doctor June stood alone on his garden walk, aimlessly
+poking about among his slips. He had done what he always did, following
+close on the heels of his well-established resolution never to do it
+again. He had pledged himself to try to raise one hundred dollars in
+Friendship for a pet philanthropy.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a kind of dissipation with me," he said, helplessly, and wandered
+down to his gate. "If I read an article about the Congo Free State or
+Women in India, it acts on me like brandy. I go off my head and give
+away my substance, and involve innocent people. But then, of course,
+this is different. It is always different."</p>
+
+<p>Then he heard Ellen's little song again. "Busy, busy, busy ..." she
+sang, and came round the corner from the town, catching at the lowest
+branches of the curb elms and laughing a little. At Doctor June's gate
+she halted and shook some lilacs at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Here," she said, "put some on your coat for a patch on your heart so's
+the break won't show. Ain't the Lord made the sun shine down this
+morning? Did you know there's a Carnival comin' to town?"</p>
+
+<p>"Like enough, Ellen," said Doctor June. "Like enough."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Is</i> one," she persisted. "They said about it in the Post-Office&mdash;I
+heard 'em. Dancin', an' parrots, an' jumpin' dogs."</p>
+
+<p>He stood looking at her thoughtfully as she arranged her flowers,
+singing under breath.</p>
+
+<p>"Ellen," he said, "will you tell Miss Liddy a few of us are going to
+meet here in my yard to-morrow afternoon, to talk over some
+money-raising? And ask her to come?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will," Ellen sang it, "I will an' I will. Did you mean me to come,
+too?" she broke off wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>"My stars, yes!" said Doctor June. "You're going to come early and help
+me, aren't you? I took that for granted."</p>
+
+<p>"Here's your lilacs," said Ellen, tossing him a nosegay. "I'll tell
+Liddy while she's eatin'. Liddy don't like me to talk much when she's
+workin'. But when she eats I can talk, an' I'll tell her then."</p>
+
+<p>She went on, singing, and Doctor June shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know but Mr. Bliss is right," he said, "though I hope I can
+keep my doubts to myself and not brag about 'em, just to be the style.
+But it does look as if poor Ellen Ember came into the world
+empty-handed. As if the Lord didn't give her much of anything to work
+<i>with</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Summons to a meeting to talk over money-raising is, in Friendship, like
+the call to festivity in a different life. The cause never greatly
+matters. Interests appear eclectically to range from ice to coral. For
+let the news get about that there is to be a bazaar for China, a home
+bakery sale for the missionary station at Trebizond, or a Japanese tea
+for the Friendship cemetery fund, and we all sew or bake or lend dishes
+or sell tickets with the same infinity of zeal. The enterprise in hand
+absorbs our sense of the ultimate object; as when, after three days of
+hand-to-hand battle to wrest money for the freedmen from the patrons of
+a Kirmess at the old roller-skating rink, dear Mis' Amanda, secretary
+and door-tender, handed over our $64.85 with the wondering question:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"What do they mean by Freegman, anyway? What country is it they live
+in?"</p>
+
+<p>It was no marvel that Doctor June's garden was filled, that yellow
+afternoon, with many eager for action. Some of us knew that there was an
+Orphans' Home fund deficit; but more of us knew only that we were to
+"talk over some money-raising." I remember how, from the garden seat
+against the spir&aelig;a, the doctor faced us, all scattered about the
+antlered walk and its triangle of green, erect on golden oak and bright
+velvet chairs from within doors. And when he had told us of the shortage
+to which we were party, instantly the talk emptied into channels of
+possible pop-corn social, chicken-pie supper, rummage sale, art and loan
+exhibit, Old Settlers' Entertainment, and so on. After which Doctor June
+rose, and stood touching thoughtfully at the leaves which grew nearest,
+while he essayed to turn our minds from chicken-pot-pie-part-veal, and
+bib-aprons, to the eternal verities.</p>
+
+<p>"My friends," he said, "isn't there a better way? Let us, this time,
+give of our hearts' love to the little children of God, instead of
+buying pies and freezing ice cream in His name."</p>
+
+<p>There was, of course, an instant's hush in the garden. We were not used
+to paradoxes, and we felt as concave images must feel when they first
+look upon the world. It was as amazing as if we had been told that God
+grieves with us instead of afflicting us, as we held.</p>
+
+<p>"None of us has much money to give," Doctor June went on; "let us take
+the way that lies nearest our hand, and make a little money. God never
+permitted any normal human creature to come into His world unprovided
+with some means of making it better. Only, let us get outside our bazaar
+and chicken-pie faculties. Now what can we each do?"</p>
+
+<p>We sat still for a little, tentatively murmuring; and then Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss stood up by the sweet-alyssum urn.</p>
+
+<p>"Speakin' of what we can do," she said, "doin' ain't easy. Not when
+you're well along in years. Your ways seem to stiffen up some. When I
+was a girl, I could 'a' been quite an elocutionist if I could 'a' had
+lessons. I had a reg'lar born sense o' givin' gestures. But I never
+took. An' now I declare I don't know of anything I could do. It's the
+same way, I guess, with quite a number of us."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Postmaster Sykes was in the arm-chair, and she sat still, queenly.</p>
+
+<p>"I could do some o' my embroidery," she observed, "but it's quite
+expensive stuff, an' I don't know whether it would sell rill well here
+in Friendship. I'd be 'most afraid to risk. An' I don't do enough
+cookin', myself, to what-you-might-say know how, any more."</p>
+
+<p>"Same with my sewing," observed Mis' Doctor Helman; "I put it all out
+now. I don't know as I could sew up a seam. That's the trouble, hiring
+everything done so."</p>
+
+<p>Those who did not hire everything done preserved a respectful silence.
+And Doctor June looked up in the elm trees.</p>
+
+<p>"The Lord," he said, "spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. The Lord
+said unto Moses, 'What is that in thine hand?' Moses had, you remember,
+nothing but a rod in his hand. But it was enough to let the people know
+that God had been with him&mdash;that the Lord had appeared unto him. Suppose
+the glory of the Lord, here in the garden, should ask us now, as it does
+ask, 'What is that in thine hand?' What have we got?"</p>
+
+<p>There was silence again, and we looked at one another doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Land, Doctor!" said Libbie Liberty then, "I been tryin' for two years
+to earn a new parlour carpet, an' I ain't had nothin' in my hand to earn
+with. So I keep on sayin' I <i>like</i> an old Brussels carpet&mdash;they're so
+easy to sweep."</p>
+
+<p>"My!" said Abigail Arnold, "I declare, I'd be real put to it to try to
+make extry money. 'Bout the only thing the Lord seems to 'a' put in my
+hand is time. I've got oodles o' that, layin' 'round loose."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Photographer Sturgis was in the big garden chair, wrapped in a
+shawl, her feet on an inverted flower-pot.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm tryin' to think," she said, looking sidewise at the ground. "I
+donno's I know how I could earn a cent, convenient. It ain't real easy
+for women to earn. I think mebbe the Lord meant the men to be the
+Moseses."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Amanda Toplady's voice rolled out, deep and comfortable, like a
+complaisant giant's.</p>
+
+<p>"Well said!" she remarked. "I'm drove to death all day. If anybody's to
+ask me what I got in my hand, I declare I guess I'd say, rill reverent:
+Dear Lord, I've got my hands full, an' that's about all I have got."</p>
+
+<p>So we went on, saying much or little as was our nature, but we were all
+agreed that we were virtually helpless&mdash;for Calliope was out of town
+that week, and not present to shame us.</p>
+
+<p>"What's in my hands?" said grim Miss Liddy Ember, finally, in her thin
+falsetto. "Well, I ain't got any rill, what-you-might-call hands. I just
+got kind o' cat's paws for my three meals a day an' my rent."</p>
+
+<p>Then, by her sister's side, Ellen Ember stood up. We had hardly noticed
+her, sitting there quietly playing with some of the doctor's flowers.
+But now we saw that she had hurriedly twisted her splendid hair about
+her head, and by this we understood that she was herself again. We had
+seen her come to herself like this on the street, and then she would go
+hurrying home, the tears running down her face in shame for her unbound
+hair and her singing and dancing. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes
+were shining as she rose now, and she looked appealingly pretty, one
+hand, palm outward, half hiding her trembling mouth. By her soft eyes,
+too, we knew that she was herself again.</p>
+
+<p>"You all know," she began, and dare not trust herself. "You all
+know ..." she said once more, and we understood what she would say.
+"What can I do?" she cried to us. "What is there I can do? I ain't got
+anything but my craziness! Oh, it seems like I <i>ain't</i> much, an' so
+I'd ought to <i>do</i> all the more."</p>
+
+<p>To soothe her, we took our woman's way of all talking at once. And then
+Doctor June called out cheerily that he felt the way Ellen did, that he
+wasn't a real Moses, for what had he&mdash;Doctor June&mdash;in his hand, and
+didn't we all know there was no money in pills? And then he told us how
+the Reverend Arthur Bliss was to be in town again on Wednesday of the
+next week, and would we not all think the matter over quietly, and meet
+with them on that evening, for cakes and tea?</p>
+
+<p>"As many of you as can," he said, "come with a plan to earn a dollar,
+and tell how you mean to do it. Ellen, you and I'll preside at the
+meeting, and hear what the rest say, and keep real still ourselves, like
+proper officers."</p>
+
+<p>But Ellen Ember would not be comforted. She stood with that one hand,
+palm outward, pressed against her lips, looking at us with big, brimming
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't got nothin' but my craziness, you know," she said over. And
+then, as she was going through the gateway, she turned to Doctor June.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Wednesday's the first night o' the Carnival!" she cried. "You set
+the dollar meetin' on the first night o' the Carnival!"</p>
+
+<p>"My stars!" cried Doctor June, gravely. "And I might have been selling
+pills on the grounds!"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>All Friendship Village loves a Carnival. Once the word meant to me a
+Florentine <i>fiesta</i> day, with a feast of colour, and of many little fine
+things, "real, like laughter." Now when I say "carnival" I mean the
+painted eruption by night from the market square of some town like
+Friendship, when lines broaden and waver grotesquely, when the mirth is
+in great silhouettes and Colour goes unmasked.</p>
+
+<p>I always make my way to such a place, for it holds for me the wonder of
+the untoward; as will a strolling Italian plodding past my house at
+night with his big, silent bear; or the spectacle of the huge, faded red
+ice-wagon, with powerful horses and rattling chains and tongs, and
+giants in blue denim atop the crystal; or the strange, copper world that
+dissolves in the fluid of certain sunsets. And that Wednesday night, a
+week later, on my way to the "dollar meeting" at Doctor June's, I turned
+toward the Friendship Carnival with some vestige of my youth clinging to
+the hem of things.</p>
+
+<p>I gave my attention to them all: The pop-corn wagon, an aristocratic
+affair that looked like a hearse; the little painted canaries and
+love-birds, so out of place and patient that I thought they must have
+souls to form as well as we; the sad little live monkey, incessantly
+dodging white balls thrown at him by certain immortals (who, when they
+hit him, got pipes); and the giant who flung "Look! Look! Look! Look!"
+through a megaphone, while a good little dog toiled up a ladder and then
+stood at the ladder's top in a silence that was all nice reticence and
+dignity. Also, the huge Saxon fellow who, at the portal of the Arabian
+Court of Art and Regular Caf&eacute; Restaurant, sang a love-song through a
+megaphone&mdash;"Tenderly, dearest, I breathe thy sweet name," he hallooed,
+with his free hand beckoning the crowd to the Court of Art.</p>
+
+<p>And then I saw the Lyric Dance Arcade and Indian Palace of Asiatic
+Mystery. And I found myself close to the platform, listening to the cry
+of a man in gilt knickerbockers.</p>
+
+<p>"Ladies! Gentlemen! All!" he summoned. "Never in the history of
+the show business has there been anything resemblin' this. Come
+here&mdash;here&mdash;here&mdash;here! See Zorah, queen of the West and princess of the
+East, who is about to begin one of her most sublimely sensational
+dances. See her, see her, you may never again see her! Graceful,
+glittering, genteel. Graceful, glittering, gen-te-e-e-l. I am telling
+you about Zorah, queen of the West and princess of the East, in her
+ancient Asiatic dance, the most up-to-date little act in the entire show
+business to-day. Here she is, waiting for you&mdash;you&mdash;you. Everybody
+that's got the dime!"</p>
+
+<p>Until he ceased, I had hardly noticed Zorah herself, standing in the
+canvas portico. The woman had, I then observed, a kind of appealing
+prettiness and a genuineness of pose. She was looking out on the crowd
+with the usual manner of simulated shyness, but to the shyness was given
+conviction by an uplifted hand, palm outward, hiding her mouth. I noted
+her small, stained face, her splendid unbound hair&mdash;and then a certain
+resemblance caught at my heart. And I saw that she was wearing a skirt
+made of a man's plaid shawl, and about her shoulders was a rosy,
+old-fashioned nubia. Her face and throat were stained, and so were her
+thin little arms&mdash;but I knew her.</p>
+
+<p>The performance, as the man had said, was about to begin, and already he
+was giving Zorah her signal to go within. Somehow I bought a ticket and
+hurried into the tent. The seats were sparingly occupied, and I saw, as
+I would have guessed, no one whom I knew in the eager, stamping little
+audience. In their midst I lost the slim figure that had preceded me,
+until she mounted the platform and swept before the footlights a stately
+courtesy.</p>
+
+<p>And there, in the smoky little tent, Ellen Ember began to dance, with
+her quite surprising grace&mdash;as Pierrette might have danced in Carnival.
+It was the charming, faery measure which she had danced for me in Miss
+Liddy's dining-room; and as she had sung to me then, so now, in a sweet
+piping voice, she sang her incongruous little song:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O Day of wind and laughter,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A goddess born are you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose eyes are in the morning<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Blue&mdash;blue!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The slumbrous noon your body is,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your feet are the shadow's flight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the immortal soul of you<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is Night.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It seemed to me that I sat for hours in that hot little place, cut off
+from the world, watching. Again and again, to the brass blare of some
+hoiden tune, she set the words of the lyric that "she liked the feel
+of," and she danced on and on. And when at last the music shattered off,
+and she ceased, and ran behind a screening canvas, somehow I made my way
+forward through the crowd that was clapping hands and calling her back,
+and I gained the place where she stood.</p>
+
+<p>When I asked her to come with me, she nodded and smiled, with unseeing
+eyes, and assented quite simply, and then suddenly sat down before the
+lifted tent flap.</p>
+
+<p>"But I must wait for my money," she said. "That's what I came for&mdash;my
+money. They thought I'd never earn my dollar, but I have."</p>
+
+<p>At this I understood. And now I marvel how I talked at all to the man in
+gilt knickerbockers who arrived and haggled over the whole matter.</p>
+
+<p>Zorah, he explained, the sure-enough Zorah, had took down sick in the
+last place they made, an' they'd had to leave her behind. An' when he
+told about it down town that morning, this little piece here had up an'
+offered. Somethin' had to be done&mdash;he left it to me if they didn't. He
+felt his duty to the amusement park public, him. So he had closed with
+her for a dollar for three fifteen-minute turns&mdash;he give two shillings a
+turn, on the usual, but she'd hung out stout for the even money. An'
+she'd danced her three, odd but satisfactory. You could hand 'em queer
+things in the show business, if you only dressed the part. Yes, sure,
+here was the dollar. Be on hand to-morrow night? No? Sufferin' snakes,
+but was we goin' to leave him shipwrecked?</p>
+
+<p>Finally I got her away, and skirted the market-place with her dancing at
+my side, shaking her silver dollar in her shut palms and singing:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Busy, busy, busy all the day. An' then I earned my dollar, my
+dollar&mdash;they never thought I'd earn my dollar ..."</p>
+
+<p>I remember, as we struck into the unlighted block where Miss Liddy's
+house stood, that I was struggling hard for my own serenity, so that for
+a moment I did not observe that Ellen stopped beside me. But I knew that
+she fell silent, and when I turned I saw her there on the dark walk
+hurriedly twisting her splendid hair about her head. And by that and by
+her silence I understood that she was suddenly herself, and of her own
+mind, as we say.</p>
+
+<p>On this, "Ellen!" said I quickly, "how fine of you to have earned your
+Orphans' Home dollar so soon. But you have beaten us all!"</p>
+
+<p>She had contrived to fasten her hair, and I saw her touching tentatively
+the folds of her strange dress. And so I made her know what she had
+done, as gently as I might, and with all praise I stilled her dismay and
+shame. And last I led her, as I was determined that I would do, past
+Miss Liddy's dark little house and on to the home of Doctor June.</p>
+
+<p>I think that I would not have dared take Ellen, just as she was, in her
+plaid skirt and her rosy nubia, into that black and brown
+henrietta-cloth assembly, if I had remembered that there was to be a
+stranger present. But this, in the events of the hour, I had quite
+forgotten. I remembered as I entered the room and came face to face with
+the Reverend Arthur Bliss, talking of the figures for the fiscal year.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;and the deficit," he was saying, "ought to be made up by us who are
+so well equipped to do it. With Paul, let us fight the good fight&mdash;of
+every day. This is to-day's fight. Now let us talk over our various
+weapons."</p>
+
+<p>Doctor June looked thoughtfully at his young guest, and in the older
+face was a brooding tenderness, like the tenderness of the father who
+longs to hold the child in quiet, in his arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Doctor June, "'fighting' is one name for it. I am tempted to
+say that 'drudgery' is another name. Errantry, ministry, service, or
+whatever. It all comes to the same thing: 'What is that in thine hand?'
+Well, now, who of us is first?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think," said I then, "that Ellen Ember is first."</p>
+
+<p>She would have shrunk back from the doorway to the passage, but I put my
+arm about her, and then I told them. And when I had done, I remember how
+she threw up that pathetic hand of hers, palm outward, and this time it
+was over her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm a disgrace to all of you!" she said, sobbing, "an' to the whole
+Good Shepherd's Home. But I guess anyhow it's all the way I had. Seems
+like I ain't got nothin' in the world but my craziness!"</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a moment, that rich silence which flowers in the
+heart. And then great Mis' Amanda Toplady spoke out, in her deep voice
+which now she some way contrived to keep firm.</p>
+
+<p>"Well said!" she cried. "I come here to say I'd give a dollar outright
+to get red o' the whole thing, rather'n to fuss. But now I ain't goin'
+to stop at a dollar. Seems like a dollar for me wouldn't be <i>moral</i>. I'm
+goin' to sell some strawberry plants&mdash;why, we got hundreds of 'em to
+spare. I can do it by turnin' my hand over. An' I expec' the Lord meant
+you should turn your hand over to find out what's in it, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>I think that then we tried our woman's way of all talking at once, but I
+remember how the shrill voice of Abigail Arnold, of the home bakery,
+rose above the others:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Cream puffs!" she cried. "I got a rush demand for my cream puffs every
+Sat'day, an' I ain't been makin' 'em sole-because I hate to run after
+the milk an' set it. An' I was goin' to get out o' this by givin' fifty
+cents out o' the bakery till. An' me with my hands full o' cream
+puffs...."</p>
+
+<p>"Hens&mdash;hens is what mine is," Libbie Liberty was saying. "My grief, I
+got both hands full o' hens. I wouldn't sell 'em because I can't bear to
+hev any of 'em killed&mdash;they're tame as a bag o' feathers, all of 'em. I
+guess I ben settin' the hens o' my hand over against the heathen an' the
+orphans. An' now I'm goin' to sell spring chickens...."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Sturgis in the rocking-chair was waving a corner of her shawl.</p>
+
+<p>"C-canaries!" she cried. "I can rise canary-birds an' sell 'em a dollar
+apiece in the city. I m-meant to slide out account o' my health, but it
+was just because I hate to muss 'round b-boilin' eggs for the little
+ones. I'll raise a couple or two&mdash;mebbe more."</p>
+
+<p>"My good land!" came Miss Liddy Ember's piping falsetto; "to think o' my
+sittin' up, hesitatin', when new dresses just falls off the ends o' my
+fingers. An' me in my right mind, too."</p>
+
+<p>Dear Doctor June stood up among us, his face shining.</p>
+
+<p>"Bless us," he said. "Didn't I have some spir&aelig;a in my hand right while I
+stood talking to you the other afternoon in my garden? And haven't I got
+some tricolored Barbary varieties of chrysanthemums, and some hardy
+roses and one thing and another to make men marvel? And can't I sell 'em
+in the city at a pretty profit? What I've got in my hand is seeds and
+slips&mdash;I see that plain enough. And my stars, out they go!"</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, Mis' Mayor Uppers, even Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes&mdash;ah, they all knew what to do, knew it as if somebody
+had been saying it over and over, and as if they now first listened.</p>
+
+<p>But Ellen Ember sat crying, her face buried in her hands. And I think
+that she cannot have understood, even when Doctor June touched her hair
+and said something of the little leaven which leaveneth the whole lump.</p>
+
+<p>Last, the Reverend Arthur Bliss arose, and there was a sudden hush among
+us, for it was as if a new spirit shone in his strong young face.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear friends," he said, "dear friends ..." And then, "Lord God," he
+prayed abruptly, "show me what is that in my hand&mdash;thy tool where I had
+looked for my sword!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+
+<h3>PUT ON THY BEAUTIFUL GARMENTS</h3>
+
+
+<p>"I donno," Calliope said, as, on her return, we talked about Ellen
+Ember, "I guess I kind o' believe in craziness."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope's laugh often made me think of a bluebird's note, which is to
+say, of the laughter of a child. Bluebirds are the little children among
+birds, as robins are the men, house-wrens the women, scarlet tanagers
+the unrealities and humming-birds the fairies.</p>
+
+<p>"Only," Calliope added, "I do say you'd ought to hev some sort o'
+leadin' strap even to craziness, an' that I ain't got an' never had. I
+guess folks thinks I'm rill lunar when I take the notion. Only thing
+comforts me, they don't know how lunar I rilly can be."</p>
+
+<p>Then she told me about 'Leven.</p>
+
+<p>"A shroud, to look rill nice," Calliope said, "ought to be made as much
+as you can like a dress&mdash;barrin' t' you can't fit it. Mis' Toplady an'
+Mis' Holcomb an' I made Jennie Crapwell's shroud&mdash;it was white mull and
+a little narrow lace edge on a rill life-like collar. We finished it the
+noon o' the day after Jennie died,&mdash;you know Jennie was Delia's
+stepsister that they'd run away from&mdash;an' I brought it over to my house
+an' pressed it an' laid it on the back bedroom bed&mdash;the room I don't use
+excep' for company an' hang my clean dresses in the closet of.</p>
+
+<p>"In the afternoon I went up to the City on a few little funeral
+urrants,&mdash;a crape veil for Jennie's mother an' like that,&mdash;you know
+Jennie died first. We wasn't goin' to dress her till the next
+mornin'&mdash;her mother wanted we should leave her till then in her little
+pink sacque she'd wore, an' the soft lavender cloth they use now spread
+over her careless. An' we wanted to, too, because sence Mis' Jeweler
+Sprague died nobody could do up the Dead's hair, an' Jennie wa'n't the
+exception.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sprague, she'd hed a rill gift that way. She always done folks'
+hair when they died an' she always got it like life&mdash;she owned up how,
+after she begun doin' it so much, she used to set in church an' in
+gatherin's and find herself lookin' at the backs of heads to see if they
+was two puffs or three, an' whether the twist was under to left or over
+to right&mdash;so's she'd know, if the time come. But none of us could get
+Jennie's to look right. We studied her pictures an' all too, but best we
+could do we got it all drawed back, abnormal.</p>
+
+<p>"I was 'most all the afternoon in the City, an' it was pretty warm&mdash;a
+hot April followin' on a raw March. I stood waitin' for the six o'clock
+car an', my grief, I was tired. My feet ached like night in preservin'
+time. An' I was thinkin' how like a dunce we are to live a life made up
+mostly of urrants an' feetache followin'. <i>Yet</i>, after all, the right
+sort o' urrants an' like that <i>is</i> life&mdash;an', if they do ache, 'tain't
+like your feet was your soul. Well, an' just before the car come, up
+arrove the girl.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess she was towards thirty, but she seemed even older, 'count o'
+bein' large an' middlin' knowin'. First I see her was a check gingham
+sleeve reachin' out an' she was elbowed up clost by me. 'Say,' she says,
+'couldn't you gimme a nickel? I'm starved hollow.' She didn't look it
+special&mdash;excep' as thin, homely folks always looks sort o' hungry. An'
+she was homely&mdash;kind o' coarse made, more like a shed than a dwellin'
+house. Her dress an' little flappy cape hed the looks o' bein' held on
+by her shoulders alone, an' her hands was midnight dirty.</p>
+
+<p>"I was feelin' just tired enough to snap her up.</p>
+
+<p>"'A nickel!' s'I, crisp, 'give you a nickel! An' what you willin' to
+give me?'</p>
+
+<p>"She looked sort o' surprised an' foolish an' her mouth open.</p>
+
+<p>"'Huh?' s'she, intelligent as the back o' somethin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'You,' I says, 'are some bigger an' some stronger'n me. What you goin'
+to give me?'</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir, the way she dropped her arms down sort o' hit at me, it was
+so kitten helpless. I took that in rather than her silly, sort o'
+insultin' laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"'I can't do nothin',' she told me&mdash;an' all to once I saw how it was,
+an' that that was what ailed her. I didn't stop to think no more'n as if
+I didn't hev a brain to my name. 'Well,' I says, 'I'll give you a
+nickel. Leastways, I'll spend one on you. You take this car,' I says,
+'an' come on over to Friendship with me. An' we'll see.'</p>
+
+<p>"She come without a word, like goin' or stayin' was all of a piece to
+her, an' her relations all dead. When I got her on the car I begun to
+see what a fool thing I'd done, seemin'ly. An' yet, I donno. I wouldn't
+'a' left a month-old baby there on the corner. I'd 'a' <i>bed</i> to 'a' done
+for that, like you do&mdash;I s'pose to keep the world goin'. An' that woman
+was just as helpless as a month-old. Some are. I s'pose likely,"
+Calliope said thoughtfully, "we got more door-steps than we think, if we
+get 'em all located.</p>
+
+<p>"When we got to my house I pumped her a pitcher o' water an' pointed to
+the back bedroom door. 'First thing,' s'I, blunt, 'clean up'&mdash;bein' as I
+was too tired to be very delicate. 'An',' s'I, 'you'll see a clean
+wrapper in the closet. Put it on.' Then I went to spread
+supper&mdash;warmed-up potatoes an' bread an' butter an' pickles an' sauce
+an' some cocoanut layer cake. It looked rill good, with the linen clean,
+though common.</p>
+
+<p>"I donno how I done it, excep' I was so ramfeezled. But I clear forgot
+Jennie Crapwell's shroud, layin' ready on the back bedroom bed. An'
+land, land, when the woman come out, if she didn't hev it on.</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you, when I see her come walkin' out towards the supper table
+with them fresh-ironed ruffles framin' in her face, I felt sort o'
+kitterin'-headed&mdash;like my i-dees had fell over each other to get away
+from me. The shroud fit her pretty good, too, barrin' it was a mite
+long-skirted. An' somehow, it give her a look almost like dignity. Come
+to think of it, I donno but a shroud does become most folks&mdash;like they
+was rilly well-dressed at last.</p>
+
+<p>"She come an' set down to table, quiet as you please&mdash;an' differ'nt.
+Your clothes don't make you, by any means, but they just do sort o' hem
+your edges, or rhyme the ends of you, or give a nice, even bake to your
+crust&mdash;I donno. They do somethin'. An' the shroud hed done it to that
+girl. She looked rill leaved out.</p>
+
+<p>"How she did eat. It give me some excuse not to say anything to her till
+she was through with the first violence. I did try to say grace, but she
+says: 'Who you speakin' to? Me?' An' I didn't let on. I thought I
+wouldn't start in on her moral manners. I just set still an' kep'
+thinkin': You poor thing. Why, you poor thing. You're nothin' but a
+piece o' God's work that wants doin' over&mdash;like a back yard or a poor
+piece o' road or a rubbish place, or sim'lar. An' this tidyin' up is
+what we're for, as I see it&mdash;only some of us lays a-holt of our own
+settin' rooms an' butt'ry cupboards an' sullars an' cleans away on
+<i>them</i> for dear life, over an' over, an' forgets the rest. I ain't
+objectin' to good housekeepin' at all, but what I say is: Get your
+dust-rag big enough to wipe up somethin' besides your own dust. The
+Lord, He's a-housekeepin' too.</p>
+
+<p>"So, with that i-dee, I got above the shroud an' I begun on the woman
+some like she was my kitchen closet in the spring o' the year.</p>
+
+<p>"'What's your name?' s'I.</p>
+
+<p>"''Leven,' s'she.</p>
+
+<p>"'Leaven,' s'I, 'like the Bible?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Huh?' s'she.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why&mdash;oh, <i>'leven'</i>,' s'I, 'that ain't a name at all. That's a number.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I know it,' s'she, indiffer'nt, 'that was me. I was the 'leventh, an'
+they'd run out a'ready.'</p>
+
+<p>"'For the land,' s'I, simple.</p>
+
+<p>"An' that just about summed her up. They seemed to 'a' run out o'
+everything, time she come.</p>
+
+<p>"She hadn't been taught a thing but eat an' drink. Them was her only
+arts. Excep' for one thing: When I ask' her what she could do, if any,
+she says like she had on the street corner:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'I can't do nothin'. I donno no work.'</p>
+
+<p>"'You think it over,' s'I. She had rill capable hands&mdash;them odd,
+undressed-lookin' hands&mdash;I donno if you know what I mean?</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' s'she, sort o' sheepish, 'I can comb hair. Ma was allus sick
+an' me an' Big Lil&mdash;she's the same floor&mdash;combed her hair for her. But I
+could do it nicest.'</p>
+
+<p>"Wan't that a curious happenin'&mdash;an' Jennie Crapwell layin' dead with
+her hair drawn tight back because none of us could do it up human?</p>
+
+<p>"'Could you when dead?' s'I. 'I mean when them that has the hair is?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' with that the girl turns pallor white.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh ...' s'she, 'I ain't never touched the dead. But,' s'she, sort o'
+defiant at somethin', 'I could do it, I guess, if you want I should.'</p>
+
+<p>"Kind o' like a handle stickin' out from what would 'a' been her
+character, if she'd hed one, that was, I thought. An', too, I see what
+it'd mean to her if she knew she was wearin' a shroud, casual as calico.</p>
+
+<p>"But when I told her about Jennie Crapwell, an' how they had a good
+picture, City-made, of her side head, she took it quite calm.</p>
+
+<p>"'I'll try it,' she says, bein' as she'd done her ma's hair layin' down,
+though livin'. 'Big Lil always helps dress 'Em,' she says, 'an' guess I
+could do Their hair.'</p>
+
+<p>"I got right up from the supper table an' took 'Leven over to Crapwell's
+without waitin' for the dishes. But early as I was, the rest was there
+before me. I guess they was full ten to Crapwell's when we got there,
+an' 'Leven an' I, we walked into the sittin'-room right in the midst of
+'em&mdash;that is, of what wasn't clearin' table or doin' dishes or sweepin'
+upstairs. Mis' Timothy Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss was
+the group nearest the door&mdash;an' the both of 'em reco'nized that shroud
+the minute they clamped their eyes on it. But me, bein' back o' 'Leven,
+I laid my front finger on to my shut lips with a motion that must 'a'
+been armies with banners. An' they see me an' kep' still, sudden an' all
+pent up.</p>
+
+<p>"'This,' s'I, 'is a friend o' mine. She's goin' to do up Jennie's hair
+from her City photograph.'</p>
+
+<p>"Then I hustled 'Leven into the parlour where Jennie was layin' under
+the soft lavender cloth. Nobody was in there but a few flowers, sent
+early. An' it was a west window an' open, an' the sky all sunset&mdash;like
+the End. 'Leven hung back, but I took her by the hand an' we went an'
+looked down at Jennie in that nice, gentlin', after-supper light&mdash;'Leven
+in Jennie's shroud an' neither of 'em knew it.</p>
+
+<p>"An' all out o' the air somethin' says to me, Now&mdash;<i>now</i>&mdash;like it will
+when you get so's you listen. I always think it's like the Lord had
+pressed His bell somewheres for help in His housekeepin'&mdash;oh, because
+<i>how</i> He needs it!</p>
+
+<p>"So I says, ''Leven, you never see anybody dead before. What's the
+differ'nce between her an' you?'</p>
+
+<p>"'She can't move,' 'Leven says, starin' down.</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes, sir,' s'I, 'that's it. She's through doin' the things she was
+born to do, an' you ain't.'</p>
+
+<p>"With that 'Leven looks at me.</p>
+
+<p>"'I <i>can't</i> do nothin',' she says again.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, then,' says I, brisk, 'you're as good as dead, an' we'd best bury
+you, too. What do you think the Lord wants you 'round for?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' she didn't say nothin', only stood fingerin' the shroud she wore.</p>
+
+<p>"'Here,' s'I, then, 'is the comb. Here is Jennie's picture. The pins is
+in her hair. Take it down an' do it over. <i>There's</i> somethin' to do an'
+ease her mother about Jennie not lookin' natural.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' with that I marched myself out an' shut the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb was high-eyebrows on the other side of
+it, an' they come at me like <i>tick</i> lookin' for <i>tock</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' s'I, 'it <i>is</i> Jennie's shroud she's wearin'. But I guess we'll
+hev to bury 'Leven in it to get it underground. <i>I</i> won't tell her.'</p>
+
+<p>"I give 'em to understand as much as I wanted they should know,&mdash;not
+includin' exactly how I met 'Leven. An' we consulted, vague an'
+emphatic, like women will. There wasn't time to make another one an' do
+it up an' all. An' anyway, I was bound not to let the poor thing know
+what she'd done. The others hated to, too&mdash;I donno if you'll know how we
+felt? I donno but mebbe you sense things like that better when you live
+in a little town.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well said!' Mis' Amanda bursts out after a while, 'I'm reg'lar put to
+it. I can scare up an excuse, or a meal, or a church entertainment on as
+short notice as any, but I declare if I ever trumped up a shroud. An'
+you know an' I know,' she says, 'poor Jennie'd be the livin' last to
+want to take it off'n the poor girl.'</p>
+
+<p>"'An',' s'I, 'even if I should give her somethin' else to put on in the
+mornin', an' sly this into the coffin on Jennie, I donno's I'd want to.
+The shroud,' s'I, ''s been wore.'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Holcomb sort o' kippered&mdash;some like a shiver.</p>
+
+<p>"'I donno what it is about its bein' wore first,' s'she, 'but I guess it
+ain't so much what it is as what it ain't. Or sim'lar.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' I knew what she meant. I've noticed that, often.</p>
+
+<p>"In the end we done what I'd favoured from the beginnin': We ask' Mis'
+Crapwell if we couldn't bury Jennie in her white mull.</p>
+
+<p>"'A <i>shroud</i>,' says Mis' Crapwell, grievin', 'made by a dressmaker with
+buttons?'</p>
+
+<p>"'It's the part o' Jennie that wore it before that'll wear it now,' I
+says, reasonable, 'an' her soul never was buttoned into it anyways. An'
+it won't be now.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' after a while we made her see it, an' that was the first regular
+dress ever wore to a buryin' in Friendship, by the one that was the one.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll never forget when 'Leven come out o' that room, after she'd got
+through. We all went in&mdash;Mis' Crapwell an' Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb
+an' I, an' some more. An' I took 'Leven back in with me. An' as soon as
+I see Jennie I see it was Jennie come back&mdash;hair just as natural as if
+it was church Sunday mornin' an' her in her pew. We all knew it was so,
+an' we all said so, an' Mis' Crapwell, she just out cryin' like she'd
+broke her heart. An' when the first of it was over, she went acrost to
+'Leven, an' 'Oh,' s'she, 'you've give her back to me. You give her back.
+God bless you!' she says to her. An' when I looked at 'Leven, I see the
+'Huh?' look wasn't there at all. But they was a little somethin' on her
+face like she was proud, an' didn't quite want to show it&mdash;along of her
+features or complexion or somethin' never havin' had it spread on 'em
+before.</p>
+
+<p>"Nex' mornin' o' course 'Leven put on the shroud again. I must say it
+give me the creeps to see her wearin' it, even if it did look like
+everybody's dresses. I donno what it is about such things, but they make
+somethin' scrunch inside o' you. Like when they got a new babtismal dish
+for the church, an' the minister's sister took the old one for a cake
+dish.</p>
+
+<p>"S'I, to 'Leven, after breakfast:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"We're goin' to line Jennie's grave this mornin'. I guess you'd like to
+go with us, wouldn't you?'</p>
+
+<p>But I see her face with the old look, like the back o' somethin', or
+like you'd rubbed down the page when the ink was wet, an' had blurred
+the whole thing unreadable. An' I judged that, like enough, she knew
+nothin' whatever about grave-linin', done civilized.</p>
+
+<p>"'I mean, I thought mebbe you'd like to help us some,' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'I would!' s'she, at that, rill ready an' quick. An' it come to me 't
+she knew now what <i>help</i> meant. She'd learnt it the night before from
+Jennie's mother&mdash;like she'd learnt to answer a bell when Somebody
+pressed it. Only, o' course she never guessed Who it was ringin'
+it&mdash;like you don't at first.</p>
+
+<p>"So I made up my mind I'd take her to the cemet'ry. We done the work up
+first, an' 'Leven spried 'round for me, wipin' the dishes with the
+wipin' cloth in a bunch, an' settin' 'em up wrong places. An' I did hev
+to go in the butt'ry an' laugh to see her sweep up. She swep' up some
+like her broom was a branch an' the wind a-switchin' it.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb stopped by for us, with the white cotton
+cloth an' the tacks, an' by nine o'clock we was over to the cemet'ry.
+The grave was all dug an' lined with nice pine boards, an' the dirt
+piled 'longside, an' the boards for coverin' an' the spades layin' near.
+Zittelhof was just leavin', havin' got in his pulley things to lower
+'em. Zittelhof's rill up to date. Him an' Mink, the barber, keep runnin'
+each other to see who can get the most citified things. No sooner'd
+Zittelhof get his pulleys than Mink, he put in shower-baths. An' when
+Mink bought a buzz fan, Zittelhof sent for the lavender cloth to spread
+over 'em before the coffin comes. It makes it rill nice for Friendship.</p>
+
+<p>"'Who's goin to get down in?' says Mis' Toplady, shakin' out the cloth.</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Toplady always use' to be the one, but she can't do that any more
+since she got so heavy. An' Mis' Holcomb's rheumatism was bad that day
+an' the grave middlin' damp, so it was for me to do. An' all of a sudden
+I says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"''Leven, you just get down in there, will you? An' we'll tell you how.'</p>
+
+<p>"'<i>In the grave?</i>' says 'Leven.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I'm some firm-mannered, just by takin' things for granted, an'
+I says, noddin':&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes. You're the lightest on your feet,' I says&mdash;an' I sort o' shoved
+at her, bird to young, an' she jumped down in, not bein' able to help
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"'Here,' s'I, flingin' her an end o' cloth, 'tack it 'round smooth to
+them boards.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Mother o' God,' says she, swallowin' in her breath.</p>
+
+<p>"But she done it. She knelt down there in the grave, her poor, frowzy
+head showin,' an' she tacked away like we told her to, an' she never
+said another word. Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb didn't say nothin',
+either, only looked at me mother-knowin'. Them two&mdash;Mis' Toplady more'n
+anybody in Friendship, acts like bein' useful is bein' alive an' nothin'
+else is. They see what I was doin', well enough&mdash;only I donno's they'd
+'a' called it what I did, 'bout the Lord's housekeepin' an all. An' I
+knew I couldn't gentle 'Leven into the <i>i</i>-dee, but I judged I could
+shock it into her&mdash;same as her an' the Big Lil kind have to hev. Some
+folks you hev to shoot <i>i</i>-dees at, muzzle to brain.</p>
+
+<p>"I donno if you've took it in that when you're in a grave, or 'round
+one, your talk sort o' veers that way? Ours did. Mis' Banker Mason's
+baby had just died in March, an' the choir'd made an awful scandal,
+breakin' down in the fifth verse of 'One poor flower has drooped and
+faded.' They'd stood 'em in a half circle where they could look right
+down on the little thing. An' when the choir got to</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But we feel no thought of sadness<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For our friend is happy now,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She has knelt in heartfelt gladness<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the holy angels bow,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>they just naturally broke down an' cried, every one of 'em. An' then the
+little coffin was some to blame, too&mdash;it was sort of a little Lord
+Fauntleroy coffin, with a broad white puff around, an' most anybody
+would a' cried when they looked in it, even empty. But Doctor June, he
+just stood up calm, like his soul was his body, an' he begun to pray
+like God was there in the parlour, Him feelin' as bad as we, an' not
+doin' the child's death Himself at all, like we'd been taught&mdash;but
+sorrowin' with us, for some o' His housekeepin' gone wrong. An' by the
+time Banker an' Mis' Mason got in the close' carriage an' took the
+little thing's casket on their knees&mdash;you know we do that here, not
+havin' any white hearse&mdash;why, we was all feelin' like God Almighty was
+hand in hand in sorrow with us. An' it's never left me since. I know He
+is.</p>
+
+<p>"We talked that over while 'Leven tacked the evergreen on the white
+cloth. An' I know Mis' Toplady says she'd stayed with Mis' Banker Mason
+so much since then that she felt God had sort o' singled her&mdash;Mis'
+Toplady&mdash;out, to give her a chanst to do His work o' comfortin'. 'I've
+just let my house go,' s'she, 'an' I've got the grace to see it don't
+matter if I have.' Mis' Toplady ain't one o' them turtle women that
+their houses is shells on 'em, burden to back. She's more the bird
+kind&mdash;neat little nest under, an' wings to be used every day, somewheres
+in the blue.</p>
+
+<p>"So 'Leven done all Jennie Crapwell's grave. She must 'a been down in it
+an hour. An' when she got through, an' looked up at us from down in the
+green, an' wearin' Jennie's shroud an' all, I just put out my hands, to
+help her up, an' I thought, almost like prayin': 'Oh, raise up, you
+Dead, an' come forth&mdash;come forth.' Sort o' like Lazarus. An' I know I
+wasn't sacrilegious from what happened; for when Mis' Toplady an' Miss
+Holcomb come up to 'Leven an' says, rill warm, how well she'd done it
+an' how much obliged they was, I see that little look on the girl's face
+again like&mdash;oh, like she'd wrote somethin' on the blurry page, somethin'
+you could read.</p>
+
+<p>"Jennie was buried that afternoon at sharp three. It was a sad funeral,
+'count o' Jennie's trouble, an' all. But it was a rill big funeral an'
+nicely conducted, if I do say that done the managin'. Mis' Postmaster
+Sykes seated the guests&mdash;ain't she the kind that always seems to be one
+to stand in the hall at funerals with her hat off, to consult about
+chairs an' where shall the minister lay his Bible, an' who'd ought to be
+invited to set next the bier? An' she always takes charge o' the
+flowers. Mis' Sykes can tell you who sent what flowers to who for years
+back, an the wordin' on the pillows. She's got a rill gift that way. But
+I done the managin' behind the scenes, an' it went off rill well, an' I
+got the minister to drop a flower on Jennie's coffin instead of a pinch
+o' dirt. An' one chair I did see to: right in the bay, near Jennie, I
+set 'Leven&mdash;I guess with just a kind of a blind feelin' that I wanted to
+get her <i>near</i>. Near the flowers or the singin' or what the minister
+said or,&mdash;oh, near the mystery an' God speakin' from the dead, like He
+does. Anyway, I shoved her into the bay window back o' the casket, an'
+there I left her in behind a looped-back Nottingham&mdash;settin' in Jennie's
+shroud an' didn't either of 'em know it.</p>
+
+<p>"It was a queer chapter for Doctor June to read, some said&mdash;but I guess
+holy things often is queer, only we're better cut out to see queer than
+holy. Anyway, his voice went all mellow and gentle, boomin' out soft an'
+in his throat, all over the house. It was that about ..." Calliope
+quoted piecemeal:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Awake, awake, put on thy strength ... put on thy beautiful garments, O
+Jerusalem, the holy city ... shake thyself from the dust, arise and sit
+down ... loose thyself from the bonds of thy neck, O captive daughter of
+Zion ... how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that
+bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace, that bringeth good tidings
+of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion: Thy God
+reigneth! Break forth into joy, sing together ... depart ye, depart ye,
+go ye out from thence, touch no unclean thing ... be ye clean, that bear
+the vessels of the Lord....'</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes a thing you've heard always will come at you sudden, like a
+star had fell on your very head. It was that way with me that day. 'Put
+on thy beautiful garments ...' I says over, 'Put 'em on&mdash;put 'em on!'
+An' all the while I was seein' to the supper for the crowd that was
+goin' to be there&mdash;train relations an' all&mdash;I kep' thinkin' that over
+like a song&mdash;'Put 'em on&mdash;put 'em on&mdash;put 'em on!' An' it was in me yet,
+like a song had come to life there, when they'd all gone to the
+cemetery&mdash;'Leven with 'em&mdash;an' I'd got through straightenin' the
+chairs&mdash;or rather crookedin' 'em some into loops from funeral lines&mdash;an'
+slipped over to my house, back way. For I ain't sunk so low as to be
+that sympathetic that I'll stay to supper after the funeral just because
+I've helped at it. There's a time to mourn an' there's a time to eat,
+an' you better do one with the bereaved an' slip home to your own
+butt'ry shelf for the other, <i>I</i> say.</p>
+
+<p>"I was just goin' through the side yard to my house when I see 'em
+comin' back from the cemetery, an' I waited a little, lookin' to see
+what was sproutin' in the flower-bed. It was a beautiful, beautiful
+evenin'&mdash;when I think of it it seems I can breathe it in yet. It was
+'most sunset, an' it was like the West was a big, blue bowl with eggs
+beat up in it, yolks an' whites, some gold an' some feathery. But the
+bowl wa'n't big enough, an' it had spilled over an' flooded the whole
+world yellowish, or all floatin' shinin' in the air. It was like the
+world had done the way the Bible said&mdash;put on its beautiful garments. I
+was thinkin' that when 'Leven come in the front gate. She was walkin'
+fast, an' lookin' up, not down. Her cheeks was some pink, an' the light
+made the shroud all pinkey, an' she looked rill nice. An' I marched
+straight up to her, feelin' like I was swimmin' in that lovely light:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"''Leven,' I says, ''Leven&mdash;it's like the whole world was made over
+to-night, ain't it?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes,' says she&mdash;an' not 'Huh?' at all.</p>
+
+<p>"'Seems like another world than when we met on the street corner, don't
+it?' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes,' she says again, noddin'&mdash;an' I thought how she'd stood there on
+the sidewalk, hungry an' her hands all black, an' believin' she couldn't
+do anything at all. An' it seemed like I hed sort o' scrabbled her up
+an' held her over a precipice, an' said to her: 'See the dead. Look at
+yourself. Come forth&mdash;come forth! Clean up&mdash;do somethin' to help,
+anything, if it's only tackin' on evergreens an' doin' the Dead's hair
+up becomin'&mdash;' oh, I s'pose, rilly, I was sayin' to her: 'Put on thy
+beautiful garments. Awake. Put on thy strength.' Only it come out some
+differ'nt from me than it come from Isaiah.</p>
+
+<p>"I took a-hold of her hand&mdash;quite clean by the second day's washin',
+though I ain't much given to the same (<i>not</i> meanin' second day's
+washin's). I didn't know quite what I was goin' to say, but just then I
+looked up Daphne Street, an' I see 'em all sprinkled along comin' from
+the funeral&mdash;neighbours an' friends an' just folks&mdash;an' most of 'em
+livin' in Friendship peaceful an'&mdash;barrin' slopovers&mdash;doin' the level
+best they could. Not all of 'em hearin' the Bell, you understand, nor
+knowin' it by name if they did hear. But in little ways, an' because it
+was secunt nature, just helpin', helpin', helpin' ... Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, Liddy Ember, Abagail Arnold an' her
+husband, that was alive then, hurryin' to open the home bakery to catch
+the funeral trade on the funeral's way back, Amanda an' Timothy Toplady
+rattlin' by in the wagon an' 'most likely scrappin' over the new
+springs ... an' all of 'em salt good at heart.</p>
+
+<p>"''Leven,' I says, out o' the fulness o' the lump in my throat, 'stay
+here with us. Find somethin' honest you can do, an' stay here an' do it.
+Mebbe,' I told her, 'you could start dressin' the Dead's hair. An'
+<i>help</i> us,' I says, 'help us.'</p>
+
+<p>"She looked up in my eyes quick, an' my heart stood still. An' then it
+sunk down an' down.</p>
+
+<p>"'I want to go back ...' she says, 'I want to go back ...' but I'm glad
+to remember that even for a minute I didn't doubt God's position,
+because I remember thinkin' swift that if Him an' I had failed it wasn't
+for no inscrutable reason o' His, but He was feelin' just as bad over it
+as I was, an' worse.... 'I want to go back,' 'Leven finished up, 'an'
+get Big Lil, too.'</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, an' I tell you the song in me just crowded the rest o' me out of
+existence. I felt like a psalm o' David, bein' sung. I hadn't dreamed
+she'd be like that&mdash;I hadn't dreamed it. Why, some folks, Christian an'
+in a pew, never come to the part o' their lives where they want to go
+back an' get a Big Lil, too.</p>
+
+<p>"We stood there a little while, an' I talked to her some, though I
+declare I couldn't tell you what I said. You can't&mdash;when the psalm
+feelin' comes. But we stood out there sort o' occupyin' April, till
+after the big blue bowl o' feathery eggs had been popped in the big
+black oven, an' it was rill dark.</p>
+
+<p>"I forgot all about the shroud till we stepped in the house an' lit up,
+an' I see it. An' then it was like the song in me gettin' words, an' it
+come to me what it all was: How it rilly hadn't been Jennie's funeral so
+much as it had been 'Leven's&mdash;the 'Leven that was. But I didn't tell
+her&mdash;I never told her. An' she wore that shroud for most two years,
+mornin's, about her work."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope smiled a little, with her way of coming back to the moment from
+the four great horizons.</p>
+
+<p>"Land," she said, "sometimes I think I'll make some shrouds an' starch
+'em up rill good, an' take 'em to the City an' offer to folks. An' say:
+Here. Die&mdash;die. You've got to, some part o' you, before you can awake
+an' put on your beautiful garments an' your strength. I told you, you
+know," she added, "I guess sometimes I kind o' believe in craziness!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>IN THE WILDERNESS A CEDAR</h3>
+
+
+<p>In answer to my summons Liddy Ember appeared before me one morning and
+outspread a Vienna book of coloured fashion-plates.</p>
+
+<p>"Dressmakin' 'd be a real drudgery for me," she said, "if it wasn't for
+havin' the colour plates an' makin' what I can to look like 'em.
+Sometimes I get a collar or a cuff that seems almost like the picture.
+There's always somethin' in the way of a cedar," she added blithely.</p>
+
+<p>"A cedar?" I repeated.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, her plain face lighting. "That's what Calliope use' to call
+'em," she explained; "'I will plant in the wilderness the cedar,' you
+know&mdash;in the Bible." And I did recall the phrase on Calliope's lips, as
+if it were the theme of her.</p>
+
+<p>From this one and that one, and now and then from her herself, I had
+heard something of Calliope's love story. Indeed, all Friendship knew it
+and spoke of it with no possibility of gossip or speculation, but with a
+kind of genius for consideration. I did not know, however, that it was
+of this that Liddy meant to speak, for she began her story far afield,
+with some talk of Oldmoxon house, in which I lived, and of its former
+tenants.</p>
+
+<p>"Right here in this house is mixed up in it," she said; "I been thinkin'
+about it all the way up. Not very many have lived here in the Oldmoxon
+house, and the folks that lived here the year I mean come so quiet
+nobody knew it until they was here&mdash;an' that ain't easy to do in
+Friendship. First we knew they was in an' housekeepin'. Their accounts
+was in the name of a Mis' Morgan. We see her now an' then on the
+street&mdash;trim an' elderly an' no airs excep' she wouldn't open up a
+conversation an' she wouldn't return her calls. 'Most everybody called
+on her inside the two weeks, but the woman was never home an' she never
+paid any attention. She didn't seem to have no men folks, an' she
+settled her bills with checks, like she didn't have any ready money.
+Little by little we all dropped her, which she ought to of expected.
+Even when it got around that there was sickness in the house, nobody
+went near, we feelin' as if we knew as good as the best what dignity
+calls for.</p>
+
+<p>"But Calliope didn't feel the same about it. Calliope hardly ever felt
+the same about anything. That is, if it meant feelin' mean. She was a
+woman that worked, like me, but yet she was wonderful differ'nt. That
+was when we had our shop together in the house where we lived with the
+boy&mdash;I'll come to him in a minute or two. Besides lace-makin', Calliope
+had a piano an' taught in the fittin'-room&mdash;that was the same as the
+dinin'-room. Six scholars took. Sometimes I think it was her knowin'
+music that made her differ'nt.</p>
+
+<p>"We two was sittin' on our porch that night in the first dark. I know a
+full moon was up back o' the hollyhocks an' makin' its odd little
+shadows up an' down the yard, an' we could smell the savoury bed. 'Every
+time I breathe in, somethin' pleasant seems goin' on inside my head,' I
+rec'lect Calliope's sayin'. But most o' the time we was still an' set
+watchin' the house on the corner where the New People lived. They had a
+hard French name an' so we kep' on callin' 'em just the 'New People.' He
+was youngish an' she was younger an'&mdash;she wasn't goin' out anywheres
+that summer. She was settin' on the porch that night waitin' for him to
+come home. Before it got dark we'd noticed she had on a pretty white
+dress an' a flower or two. It seemed sort o' nice&mdash;<i>that</i> bein' so, an'
+her waitin' there dressed so pretty. An' we sort o' set there waitin'
+for him, too&mdash;like you will, you know.</p>
+
+<p>"The boy was in the bed. He wa'n't no relation of Calliope's if you're
+as strict as some, but accordin' to my idea he was closer than
+that&mdash;closer than kin. He was the grandchild of the man Calliope had
+been goin' to marry forty-some years before, when she was twenty-odd.
+Calvert Oldmoxon he was&mdash;born an' bred up in this very house. He was
+quite well off an'&mdash;barrin' he was always heathen selfish&mdash;it was a
+splendid match for Calliope, but I never see a girl care so next to
+nothin' about that. She was sheer crazy about him, an' he seemed just as
+much so about her. An' then when everything was ready&mdash;Calliope's dress
+done an' layin' on their best-room bed, the minister stayin' home from
+conference to perform the ceremony, even the white cake made&mdash;off goes
+Calvert Oldmoxon with Martha Boughton, a little high-fly that had just
+moved to town. A new girl can marry anything she wants in Friendship if
+she does it quick. So Calliope had to put up from Martha Boughton with
+just what Jennie Crapwell had to take from Delia, more'n twenty-five
+years afterwards.</p>
+
+<p>"It was near thirty years before we see either of 'em again. Then, just
+a little before I'm tellin' you about, a strange woman come here to town
+one night with a little boy; an' she goes to the hotel, sick, an' sends
+for Calliope. An' when Calliope gets to the hotel the woman was about
+breathin' her last. An' it was Mis' Oldmoxon&mdash;Martha Boughton, if you
+please, an' dyin' on the trip she'd made to ask Calliope to forgive her
+for what she done.</p>
+
+<p>"An' Calliope forgive her, but I don't imagine Calliope was thinkin'
+much about her at the time. Hangin' round the bed was a little boy&mdash;the
+livin', breathin' image of Calvert Oldmoxon himself. Calliope was
+mad-daft over children anyway, though she was always kind o' shy o'
+showin' it, like a good many women are that ain't married. I've seen her
+pick one up an' gentle it close to her, but let anybody besides me come
+in the room an' see her an' she'd turn a regular guilt-red. Calliope
+never was one to let on. But I s'pose seein' that little boy there at
+the hotel look so much like <i>him</i> was kind o' unbalancin'. So what does
+she do when Mis' Oldmoxon was cryin' about forgiveness but up an' ask
+her what was goin' to be done with the boy after she was dead. Calliope
+would be one to bring the word 'dead' right out, too, an' let the room
+ring with it&mdash;though that ain't the custom in society. Now'days they lie
+everybody 'way into the grave, givin' 'em to understand that their
+recovery is certain, till there must be a lots o' dumfounded dead, shot
+into the next world&mdash;you might say unbeknownst. But Calliope wasn't
+mincin' matters. An' when it come out that the dyin' woman hadn't seen
+Calvert Oldmoxon for thirty years an' didn't know where he was, an' that
+the child was an orphan an' would go to collateral kin or some such
+folks, Calliope plumps out to her to give her the child. The forgiveness
+Calliope sort o' took for granted&mdash;like you will as you get older. An'
+Mis' Oldmoxon seemed real willin' she should have him. So when Calliope
+come home from the funeral&mdash;she'd rode alone with the little boy for
+mourners&mdash;she just went to work an' lived for that child.</p>
+
+<p>"'"In the wilderness the cedar," Liddy,' she says to me. 'More than one
+of 'em. I've had 'em right along. My music scholars an' my lace-makin'
+customers an' all. An', Liddy,' she says to me sort o' shy, 'ain't you
+noticed,' she says, 'how many neighbours we've had move in an out that's
+had children? So many o' the little things right around us! Seems like
+they'd almost been born to me when they come acrost the street, so. An'
+I've always thought o' that&mdash;"In the wilderness the cedar"' she says,
+'an' they's always somethin' to be a cedar for me, seems though.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says I, sort o' sceptical, 'mebbe that's because you always
+plant 'em,' I says. 'I think it means that, too,' I told her. An' I knew
+well enough Calliope was one to plant her cedars herself. Cedars o'
+comfort, you know.</p>
+
+<p>"I've seen a good many kinds o' mother-love&mdash;you do when you go round to
+houses like I do. But I never see anything like Calliope. Seems though
+she breathed that child for air. She always was one to pretend to
+herself, an' I knew well enough she'd figured it out as if this was
+<i>their</i> child that might 'a' been, long ago. She sort o' played
+mother&mdash;like you will; an' she lived her play. He was a real sweet
+little fellow, too. He was one o' them big-eyed kind that don't laugh
+easy, an' he was well-spoken, an' wonderful self-settled for a child o'
+seven. He was always findin' time for you when you thought he was doin'
+somethin' else&mdash;slidin' up to you an' puttin' up his hand in yours when
+you thought he was playin' or asleep. An' that was what he done that
+night when we set on the porch&mdash;comes slippin' out of his little bed an'
+sets down between us on the top step, in his little night-things.</p>
+
+<p>"'Calvert, honey,' Calliope says, 'you must run back an' play dreams.
+Mother wants you to.'</p>
+
+<p>"She'd taught him to call her mother&mdash;she'd had him about six months
+then&mdash;an' some thought that was queer to do, seein' Calliope was her age
+an' all. But I thought it was wonderful right.</p>
+
+<p>"'I did play,' he says to her&mdash;he had a nice little way o' pressin' down
+hard with his voice on one word an' lettin' the next run off his
+tongue&mdash;'I did play dreams,' I rec'lect he says; 'I dreamed 'bout
+robbers. Ain't robbers <i>distinct</i>?' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know what he meant till Calliope laughs an' says, 'Oh,
+distinctly extinct!' I remembered it by the way the words kind o'
+crackled.</p>
+
+<p>"By then he was lookin' up to the stars&mdash;his little mind always lit here
+an' there, like a grasshopper.</p>
+
+<p>"'How can heaven begin,' he says, 'till everybody gets there?'</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he was a dear little chap. I like to think about him. An' I know
+when he says that, Calliope just put her arms around him, an' her head
+down, an' set sort o' rockin' back an' forth. An' she says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, but I think it begins when we don't know.'</p>
+
+<p>"After a while she took him back to bed, little round face lookin' over
+her shoulder an' big, wide-apart, lonesome eyes an' little sort o'
+crooked frown, for all the world like the other Calvert Oldmoxon. Just
+as she come out an' set down again, we heard the click o' the gate
+acrost at the corner house where the New People lived, an' it was the
+New Husband got home. We see his wife's white dress get up to meet him,
+an' they went in the house together, an' we see 'em standin' by the
+lamp, lookin' at things. Seems though the whole night was sort
+o'&mdash;gentle.</p>
+
+<p>"All of a sudden Calliope unties her apron.</p>
+
+<p>"'Let's dress up,' she says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Dress up!' I says, laughin' some. 'Why, it must be goin' on half-past
+eight,' I told her.</p>
+
+<p>"'I don't care if it is,' she says; 'I'm goin' to dress up. It seems as
+though I must.'</p>
+
+<p>"She went inside, an' I followed her. Calliope an' I hadn't no men folks
+to dress for, but, bein' dressmakers an' lace folks, we had good things
+to wear. She put on the best thin dress she had&mdash;a gray book-muslin; an'
+I took down a black lawn o' mine. It was such a beautiful night that I
+'most knew what she meant. Sometimes you can't do much but fit yourself
+in the scenery. But I always thought Calliope fit in no matter what she
+had on. She was so little an' rosy, an' she always kep' her head up like
+she was singin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'Now what?' I says. For when you dress up, you can't set home. An' then
+she says slow&mdash;an' you could 'a' knocked me over while I listened:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'I've been thinkin',' she says, 'that we ought to go up to Oldmoxon
+house an see that sick person.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Calliope!' I says, 'for the land. You don't want to be refused in!'</p>
+
+<p>"'I don't know as I do an' I don't know but I do,' she answers me. 'I
+feel like I wanted to be doin' somethin'.'</p>
+
+<p>"With that she out in the kitchen an' begins to fill a basket.
+Calliope's music didn't prevent her cookin' good, as it does some. She
+put in I don't know what all good, an' she had me pick some hollyhocks
+to take along. An' before I knew it, I was out on Daphne Street in the
+moonlight headin' for Oldmoxon house here that no foot in Friendship had
+stepped or set inside of in 'most six months.</p>
+
+<p>"'They won't let us in,' I says, pos'tive.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' Calliope says, 'seems though I'd like to walk up there a night
+like this, anyway.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' I wasn't the one to stop her, bein' I sort o' guessed that what
+started her off was the New People. Those two livin' so near by&mdash;lookin'
+forward to what they was lookin' forward to&mdash;so soon after the boy had
+come to Calliope, an' all, had took hold of her terrible. She'd spent
+hours handmakin' the little baby-bonnet she was goin' to give 'em. An'
+then mebbe it was the night some, too, that made her want to come up
+around this house&mdash;because you could 'most 'a' cut the moonlight with a
+knife.</p>
+
+<p>"They wa'n't any light in the big hall here when we rung the bell, but
+they lit up an' let us in. Yes, they actually let us in. Mis' Morgan
+come to the door herself.</p>
+
+<p>"'Come right in,' she says, cordial. 'Come right upstairs.'</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope says somethin' about our bein' glad they could see us.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh,' says Mis' Morgan, 'I had orders quite a while ago to let in
+whoever asked. An' you're the first,' she says. 'You're the first.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' then it come to us that this Mis' Morgan we'd all been tryin' to
+call on was only what you might name the housekeeper. An' so it turned
+out she was.</p>
+
+<p>"The whole upper hall was dark, like puttin' a black skirt on over your
+head. But the room we went in was cheerful, with a fire burnin' up. Only
+it was awful littered up&mdash;old newspapers layin' round, used glasses
+settin' here an' there, water-pitcher empty, an' the lamp-chimney was
+smoked up, even. The woman said somethin' about us an' went out an' left
+us with somebody settin' in a big chair by the fire, sick an' wrapped
+up. An' when we looked over there, Calliope an' I stopped still. It was
+a man.</p>
+
+<p>"If it'd been me, I'd 'a' turned round an' got out. But Calliope was as
+brave as two, an' she spoke up.</p>
+
+<p>"'This must be the invalid,' she says, cheerful. 'We hope we see you at
+the best.'</p>
+
+<p>"The man stirs some an' looks over at us kind o' eager&mdash;he was oldish,
+an' the firelight bein' in his eyes, he couldn't see us.</p>
+
+<p>"'It isn't anybody to see me, is it?' he asks.</p>
+
+<p>"At that Calliope steps forward&mdash;I remember how she looked in her pretty
+gray dress with some light thing over her head, an' her starched white
+skirts was rustlin' along under, soundin' so genteel she seemed to me
+like strangers do. When he see her, the man made to get up, but he was
+too weak for it.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, yes,' she answers him, 'if you're well enough to see anybody.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' at that the man put his hands on his knees an' leaned sort o'
+hunchin' forward.</p>
+
+<p>"'Calliope!' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"It was him, sure enough&mdash;Calvert Oldmoxon. Same big, wide-apart,
+lonesome eyes an' kind o' crooked frown. His hair was gray, an' so was
+his pointed beard, an' he was crool thin. But I'd 'a' known him
+anywheres.</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope, she just stood still. But when he reached out his hand, his
+lips parted some like a child's an' his eyes lookin' up at her, she went
+an' stood near him, by the table, an' she set her basket there an'
+leaned down on the handle, like her strength was gone.</p>
+
+<p>"'I never knew it was you here,' she says. 'Nobody knows,' she told him.</p>
+
+<p>"'No,' he says, 'I've done my best they shouldn't know. Up till I got
+sick. Since then&mdash;I&mdash;wanted folks,' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"I kep' back by the door, an' I couldn't take my eyes off of him. He was
+older than Calliope, but he had a young air. Like you don't have when
+you stay in Friendship. An' he seemed to know how to be easy, sick as he
+was. An' that ain't like Friendship, either. He an' Calliope had growed
+opposite ways, seems though.</p>
+
+<p>"'I'll go now,' says Calliope, not lookin' at him. 'I brought up some
+things I baked. I didn't know but they'd taste good to whoever was sick
+here.'</p>
+
+<p>"With that he covers one hand over his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"'No,' he says, 'no, no, Calliope&mdash;don't go yet. It's you I come here to
+Friendship to see,' he told her.</p>
+
+<p>"'What could you have to say to me?' asks Calliope&mdash;dry as a bone in her
+voice, but I see her eyes wasn't so dry. Leastwise, it may not have been
+her eyes, but it was her look.</p>
+
+<p>"Then he straightens up some. He was still good-lookin'. When you was
+with him it use' to be that you sort o' wanted to stay&mdash;an' it seemed
+the same way now. He was that kind.</p>
+
+<p>"'Don't you think,' he says to her&mdash;an' it was like he was humble, but
+it was like he was proud, too&mdash;'don't you think,' he says, 'that I ever
+dreamed you could forgive me. I knew better than that,' he told her.
+'It's what you must think o' me that's kep' me from sayin' to you what I
+come here to say. But I'll tell you now,' he says, 'I'm sick an' alone
+an' done for. An' what I come to see you about&mdash;is the boy.'</p>
+
+<p>"'The boy,' Calliope says over, not understandin'; 'the boy.'</p>
+
+<p>"'My God, yes,' says he. 'He's all I've got left in the world.
+Calliope&mdash;I need the boy. I need him!'</p>
+
+<p>"I rec'lect Calliope puttin' back that light thing from her head like it
+smothered her. He laid back in his chair for a minute, white an' still.
+An' then he says&mdash;only of course his words didn't sound the way mine
+do:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'I robbed your life, Cally, an' I robbed my own. As soon as I knew it
+an' couldn't bear it any longer, I went away alone&mdash;an' I've lived alone
+all exceptin' since the little boy come. His mother, my son's wife,
+died; an' I all but brought him up. I loved him as I never loved
+anybody&mdash;but you,' he says, simple. 'But when his father died, of course
+I hadn't any claim on the little fellow, I felt, when I'd been away from
+the rest so long. <i>She</i> took him with her. An' when I knew she'd left
+him here I couldn't have kep' away,' he says, 'I couldn't. He's all I've
+got left in the world. I all but brought him up. I must have him,
+Cally&mdash;don't you see I must have him?' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope looks down at him, wonderful calm an' still.</p>
+
+<p>"'You've had your own child,' she told him slow; 'you've had a real
+life. I'm just gettin' to mine&mdash;since I had the boy.'</p>
+
+<p>"'But, good God,' he says, starin' up at her, 'you're a woman. An' one
+child is the same as another to you, so be that it ain't your own.'</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope looked almost as if he had struck at her, though he'd only
+spoke a kind o' general male idea, an' he couldn't help <i>bein'</i> a male.
+An' she says back at him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'But you're a man. An' bein' alive is one thing to you an' another
+thing to me. Never let any man forget that,' she says, like I never
+heard her speak before.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I see the tears shinin' on his face. He was terrible weak. He
+slips down in his chair an' sets starin' at the fire, his hands hangin'
+limp over the arms like there wasn't none of him left. His face looked
+tired to death, an' yet there was that somethin' about him like you
+didn't want to leave him. I see Calliope lookin' at him&mdash;an' all of a
+sudden it come to me that if I'd 'a' loved him as she use' to, I'd 'a'
+walked over there an' then, an' sort o' gentled his hair, no matter
+what.</p>
+
+<p>"But Calliope, she turned sharp away from him an' begun lookin' around
+the room, like she see it for the first time&mdash;smoky lamp-chimney, old
+newspapers layin' 'round, used-up glasses, an' such like. The room was
+one o' the kind when they ain't no women or children. An' then, when she
+see all that, pretty soon she looked back at him, layin' sick in his
+chair, alone an' done for, like he said. An' I see her take her arms in
+her hands an' kind o' rock.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ain't the little fellow a care to you, Cally?' he says then, wistful.</p>
+
+<p>"She went over towards him, an' I see her pick up his pillow an' smooth
+it some an' make to fix it better.</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes,' she says then, 'you're right. He is a care. An' he's your
+grandchild. You must take him with you just as soon as you're well
+enough,' she says.</p>
+
+<p>"He broke clear down then, an' he caught her hands an' laid his face on
+'em. She stood wonderful calm, lookin' down at him&mdash;an' lookin'. An' I
+laid the hollyhocks down on the rug or anywheres, an' somehow I got out
+o' the room an' down the stairs. An' I set there in the lower hall an'
+waited.</p>
+
+<p>"She come herself in a minute. The big outside door was standin' open,
+an' when I heard her step on the stairs I went on ahead out to the
+porch, feelin' kind o' strange&mdash;like you will. But when Calliope come up
+to me she was just the same as she always was, an' I might 'a' known she
+would be. She isn't easy to understand&mdash;she's differ'nt&mdash;but when you
+once get to expectin' folks to be differ'nt, you can depend on 'em some
+that way, too.</p>
+
+<p>"The moon was noon-high by then an' filterin' down through the leaves
+wonderful soft, an' things was still&mdash;I remember thinkin' it was like
+the hushin'-up before a bride comes in, but there wasn't any bride.</p>
+
+<p>"When we come to our house&mdash;just as we begun to smell the savoury bed
+clear out there on the walk&mdash;we heard something ... a little bit of a
+noise that I couldn't put a name to, first. But, bless you, Calliope
+could. She stopped short by the gate an' stood lookin' acrost the road
+to the corner house where the New People lived. It was late for
+Friendship, but upstairs in that house a lamp was burnin'. An' that room
+was where the little noise come from&mdash;a little new cry.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, Liddy,' Calliope says&mdash;her head up like she was singin'&mdash;'Oh,
+Liddy&mdash;the New People have got their little child.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' I see, though of course she didn't anywheres near realize it then,
+that she was plantin' herself another cedar."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+
+<h3>HERSELF</h3>
+
+
+<p>After all, it was as if I had first been told about refraction and then
+had been shown a rainbow. For presently Calliope herself said something
+to me of her having been twenty. One would as lief have broken the
+reticence of a rainbow as that of Calliope, but rainbows are not always
+reticent. I have known them suggest infinite things.</p>
+
+<p>In June she spent a fortnight with me at Oldmoxon house, and I wanted
+never to let her go. Often our talk was as irrelevant to patency as are
+wings. That day I had been telling her some splendid inconsequent dream
+of mine. It had to do with an affair of a wheelbarrow of roses, which I
+was tying on my trees in the garden directly the original blossoms fell
+off.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope nodded in entire acceptance.</p>
+
+<p>"But that wasn't so queer as my dream," she said. "My dream about
+myself&mdash;I mean my rill, true regular self," she added, with a manner of
+testing me.</p>
+
+<p>I think that we all dream our real, true, regular selves, only we do not
+dream us until we come true. I said something of this to Calliope; and
+then she told me.</p>
+
+<p>"It was when I was twenty," she said, "an' it was a little while
+after&mdash;well, things wasn't so very happy for me. But first thing I must
+tell you about the picture. We didn't have so very many pictures. But in
+my room used to be an old steel engraving of a poet, a man walkin'
+'round under some kind o' trees in blossom. He had a beautiful face an'
+a look on it like he see heaven. I use' to look at the picture an' look
+at it, an' when I did, it seemed almost like I was off somewheres else.</p>
+
+<p>"Then one night I had my dream. I thought I was walkin' down a long
+road, green an' shady an' quite wide, an' fields around an' no folks. I
+know I was hurryin'&mdash;oh, I was in such a hurry to see somebody, seems
+though, somebody I was goin' to see when I got to the end o' the road.
+An' I was so happy&mdash;did you ever dream o' being happy, I mean if you
+wasn't so very happy in rill life? It puts you in mind o' havin' a pain
+in your side an' then gettin' in one big, deep breath when the pain
+don't hurt. In rill life I was lonesome, an' I hated Friendship an' I
+wanted to get away&mdash;to go to the City to take music, or go anywheres
+else. I never had any what you might call rill pleasure excep' walkin'
+in the Depot Woods. That was a gully grove beyond the railroad track,
+an' I use' to like to sit in there some, by myself. I wasn't ever rill
+happy, though, them days, but in the dream&mdash;oh, I was happy, like on a
+nice mornin', only more so."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope looked at me fleetingly, as if she were measuring my ability to
+understand.</p>
+
+<p>"The funny part of it was," she said, "that in the dream I wasn't <i>me</i>
+at all. Not me, as you know me. I thought somehow <i>I</i> was that poet in
+my picture, the man in the steel engravin' with a look like he see
+heaven. An' it didn't seem strange to me, but just like it had always
+been so. I thought I rilly was that poet that I'd looked at in the
+picture all my life. But then I guess after all that part wasn't so
+funny as the rest of it. For down at the end o' the road somebody was
+waitin' for me under trees all in blossom, like the picture, too. It was
+a girl, standin' there. An' I thought I looked at her&mdash;I, the poet, you
+know&mdash;an' I see that the girl was me, Calliope Marsh, lookin' just like
+I looked every day, natural as anything. Like you see yourself in the
+glass.</p>
+
+<p>"I know I wasn't su'prised at all. We met like we was friends, both
+livin' here in the village, an' we walked down the road together like it
+had always been that way. An' we talked&mdash;like you do when you're with
+them you'd rather be with than anybody else. I thought we was goin'
+somewhere to see somebody, an' we talked about that:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Will They be home, do you think?' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"An' the girl that was me says: 'Oh, yes. They'll be home. They're
+always home,' she told me. An' we both felt pleased, like when you're
+sure.</p>
+
+<p>"An' then&mdash;oh," Calliope cried, "I wish I could remember what we said. I
+wish I could remember. I know it was something that seemed beautiful,
+an' the words come all soft. It was like bein' born again, somewheres
+else. An' we knew just exactly what each other meant, an' that was best
+of all."</p>
+
+<p>She hesitated, seeking to explain that to me.</p>
+
+<p>"When I was twenty," she said, "I use' to want to talk about things that
+wasn't commonly mentioned here in Friendship&mdash;I mean, well, like little
+things I'd read about noted people an' what they said an' done&mdash;an' like
+that. But when you brought 'em up in the conversation, folks always
+thought you was tryin' to show off. An' if you quoted a verse o' poetry
+in company, my land, there was a hush like you'd swore. So gradually I'd
+got to keepin' still about such things. But in that dream we talked an'
+talked&mdash;said things about old noted folks right out an' told about 'em
+without beginnin' it 'I happened to read the other day.' An' I know I
+mentioned the sun on the leaves an' the way the clouds looked, right
+out, too, without bein' afraid the girl that was me would think I was
+affected. An' I said little things about&mdash;oh, like about goblins in the
+wood an' figgers in the smoke, without bein' scared that mothers would
+hear of it an' not let their children come to see me. An' then I made up
+things an' said&mdash;things I was always wantin' to say&mdash;like about
+expectin' to meet Summer walkin' down the road, an' so on: things that
+if I'd said so's they'd got out around Friendship, folks would 'a'
+thought I was queer an' not to be trusted to bring up their mail from
+town. I said all those kind o' things, like I was really born to talk
+what I thought about. An' the girl that was me understood what I meant.
+An' we laughed a good deal&mdash;oh, how we laughed together. That was 'most
+the best of all.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the dream dwindled off, like they will. An' when I woke up, I was
+nothin' but Calliope Marsh, livin' in Friendship where folks cut a loaf
+o' bread on a baker's headstone just because he <i>was</i> a baker. Rill life
+didn't get any better, an' I was more an' more lonesome in Friendship.
+Somehow, nobody here in town rilly matched me. They all knew what I said
+well enough, but when I spoke to 'em about what was rill interestin' to
+me, seemed like their minds didn't <i>click</i>, with that good little
+feelin' o' rilly takin' it in. My <i>i</i>-dees didn't seem to fit, quite
+ball an' socket, into nobody's mind, but just to slide along over. And
+as to <i>their</i> i-dees&mdash;I rec'lect thinkin' that the three R's meant to
+'em Relations, Recipes, an' the Remains. Yes, all I did have, you might
+say, was my walks out in the Depot Woods. An' times like when Elder
+Jacob Sykes&mdash;that was Silas's father&mdash;said in church that God come down
+to be Moses's undertaker, I run off there to the woods feelin' all sick
+an' skinned in soul, an' it sort o' seemed like the gully understood.
+An' still, you can't be friends when they's only one of you. It's like
+tryin' to hold a dust-pan an' sweep the dirt in at the same time. It
+can't be done&mdash;not thorough. An' so settin' out there I used to take a
+book an' hunt up nice little things an' learn different verses, in the
+hopes that if that dream <i>should</i> come back, I could have 'em to
+tell&mdash;tell 'em, you know, to the girl that was me. Because it hed got so
+by then that it seemed to me I was actually more that poet than I was
+Calliope Marsh. An' so it went along till the day I met him&mdash;the man,
+the poet."</p>
+
+<p>"The man!" I said. "But do you mean <i>the</i> man&mdash;the poet&mdash;the one that
+was you?"</p>
+
+<p>Calliope nodded confidently.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, in her delicate excitement, "I do. Oh, I'll tell you
+an' you'll see for yourself it must 'a' been him. It was one early
+afternoon towards the end o' summer, an' I knew him in a minute. I'd
+gone up to the depot to mail a postal on the Through, an' he got off the
+train an' went into the Telegraph Office. An' the train pulled out an'
+left him&mdash;it was down to the end o' the platform before he come out. He
+didn't act, though, as if the train's leavin' him was much of anything
+to notice. He just went up an' commenced talkin' to the baggageman,
+Bill. But Bill couldn't understand him&mdash;Bill was sort o' crusted over
+the mind&mdash;you had to say things over an' over again to him, an' even
+then he 'most always took it different from what you meant. So I suppose
+that was why the man left him an' come towards me.</p>
+
+<p>"When I looked up in his face I stood still on the platform. He was
+young. An' he had soft hair, an' his face was beautiful, like he see
+heaven. It wasn't to say he was <i>exactly</i> like my picture," Calliope
+said slowly. "For instance, I think the man at the depot had a beard,
+an' the poet in my picture didn't. But it was more his look, you might
+say. It wasn't like any look I'd ever seen on anybody in Friendship. His
+hands were kind o' slim an' wanderin', an' he carried a book like it was
+his only baggage. An' he had a way&mdash;well, like what he happened to be
+doin' wasn't all day to him. Like he was partly there, but mostly
+somewheres else, where everything was better.</p>
+
+<p>"'Perhaps this lady will know,' he says&mdash;an' it wasn't the way most of
+'em talks here in Friendship, you understand&mdash;'I've been askin' the
+luggageman there,' he says, an' he was smilin' almost like a laugh at
+what he thought I was goin' to answer, 'I've been askin' the luggageman
+there, if he knows of a wood near the station that I shall be likely to
+find haunted at this hour. I've to wait for the 4.20, an' it's a bad
+time of day for a haunted wood, I'm afraid. The luggageman didn't seem
+to know.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' then all at once I knew&mdash;I knew. Why, don't you see," Calliope
+cried, "I had to know! That was just the way we'd talked in my
+dream&mdash;kind of jokin' an' yet meanin' somethin', too&mdash;so's you felt all
+lifted up an' out o' the ordinary. An' then I knew who he was an' I see
+how everything was. Why, the girl that was me an' that was lonesome
+there in Friendship <i>wasn't</i> me, very much. Me bein' Calliope Marsh was
+the chance part, an' didn't count. But things was rilly the way I'd
+dreamed o' their bein.' Somehow, I had another self. An' I had dreamed
+o' bein' that self. An' there he stood, on the Friendship depot
+platform."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope looked at me wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't think I sound crazy, do you?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>And at my answer:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she said, brightening, "that was how it was. An' it was like
+there hadn't been any first time an' like there wouldn't be any end.
+Like they was things bigger than time&mdash;an' lots nicer than life. An' I
+spoke up like I'd always known him.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, yes,' I says to him simple, 'you must mean the Depot Woods,' I
+said. 'They're always kind o' haunted to me. I guess the little folks
+that come in the en-gine smoke live in there,' I told him, smilin'
+because I was so glad.</p>
+
+<p>"I remember how su'prised he looked an' how his face lit up, like he was
+hearin' English in a heathen land.</p>
+
+<p>"'Upon my word,' he says, still only half believin' in me. 'An' do you
+go there often?' he ask' me. 'An' I daresay the little smoke folk talk
+to you, now?' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"'I go 'most every day,' I told him, 'but we don't say very much. I
+guess they talk an' I listen,' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"An' then the funny part about his askin' Bill for a haunted wood come
+over me.</p>
+
+<p>"'<i>Bill!</i>' I says. 'Did you actually ask Bill that?'</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, an' how we laughed&mdash;how we laughed. Just the way the dream had
+been. It seemed&mdash;it seemed such a sort o' <i>special</i> comical," Calliope
+said, "an' not like a Sodality laugh. 'Seems though I'd always laughed
+at one set o' things all my life&mdash;my everyday life. An' this was a new
+recipe for Laugh, flavoured different, an' baked in a quick oven, an' et
+hot.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we walked down the road together, like it had always been that
+way. An' we talked&mdash;like you do when you're with them you'd rather be
+with than anybody else. An' he ask' me, grave as grave, about the little
+smoke folks.</p>
+
+<p>"'Will They be home, do you think?' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"An' I says: 'Oh, yes. I know They will. They're always home.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' we both felt pleased, like when you're sure.</p>
+
+<p>"We went to walk in the Depot Woods. I remember how much he made me
+talk&mdash;more than I'd ever talked before, excep' in the dream. I know I
+told him the little stories I'd read about noted people, an' I said over
+some o' the verses I'd learned an' liked the sound of&mdash;I remembered 'em
+all for him, an' he listened an' heard 'em all just the way I'd said
+'em. That was it&mdash;he heard it all just the way I said it. An' I
+mentioned the sun on the leaves an' the way the clouds looked, right
+out&mdash;an' I knew he didn't think I was affected. An' I made up things an'
+said, too&mdash;things that was always comin' in my head an' that I was
+always wantin' to say. An' he'd laugh almost before I was through&mdash;oh,
+it was like heaven to have him laugh an' not just say, 'What on earth
+<i>are</i> you talkin', Calliope Marsh?' like I'd heard. An' he kep' sayin',
+'I know, I know,' like he knew what I meant better than anything else in
+the world. Then he read to me out o' the book he had an' he told
+me&mdash;beautiful things. Some of 'em I remember&mdash;I've remembered always.
+Some of 'em I forgot till I come on 'em, now an' then, in books&mdash;long
+afterwards; an' then it was like somebody dead spoke up. I'm always
+thankful to get hold o' other people's books an' see if mebbe I won't
+find somethin' else he said. But a good many o' the things I s'pose I
+clear forgot, an' I won't know 'em again till in the next life. Like I
+forgot what we said in the dream, till they're both all mixed up an'
+shinin'.</p>
+
+<p>"We talked till 'most time for the 4.20 train. An' when it got towards
+four o'clock, I told him about my dream. It seemed like he ought to
+know, somehow. An' I told him how I dreamed I was him.</p>
+
+<p>"'You don't look like the one I dreamed I was,' I told him, 'but, oh,
+you talk the same&mdash;an' you pretend, an' you laugh, an' you seem the
+same. An' your face looks different from folks here in Friendship, just
+like his, an' it seems somehow like you saw things besides with your
+eyes,' I told him, 'like the poet in my picture. So I know it's you&mdash;it
+must be you,' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"He looked at me so queer an' sudden an' long.</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm a poet, too,' he said, 'if it comes to that. A very bad one, you
+know&mdash;but a kind of poet.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' then of course I was certain sure.</p>
+
+<p>"When he understood all about it, I remember how he looked at me. An' he
+says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, an' who knows? Who knows?'</p>
+
+<p>"He sat a long time without sayin' anything. But I wasn't unhappy, even
+when he seemed so sad. I couldn't be, because it was so much to know
+what I knew.</p>
+
+<p>"'If I can,' he says to me on the depot platform, 'dead or alive, I'll
+come back some day to see you. But meanwhile you must forget me. Only
+the dream&mdash;keep the dream,' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"I tried to dream it again," Calliope told me, "but I never could. An'
+dead or alive, he's never been back, all these years. I don't even know
+his name&mdash;an' I remembered afterwards he hadn't asked me mine. But I
+guess all that is the chance part, an' it don't really count. Out o' the
+dream I've been, you might say, caught, tied up an' couldn't get
+out,&mdash;just me, like you know me,&mdash;with a big unhappiness, an' like that.
+But in the dream I dreamed myself true. An' then God let me meet myself,
+just that once, there in the Depot Woods, to show me it's all right, an'
+that they's things that's bigger than time an' lots nicer than life."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope sat silent, with her way of sighing and looking by; and it was
+as if she had suggested to me delicate things, as a rainbow will suggest
+them.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XX" id="XX"></a>XX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HIDINGS OF POWER</h3>
+
+
+<p>I divined the birches, blurred gray and white against the fog-bound
+cedars. In the haze the airy trunks, because of their imminence, bore
+the reality of thought, but the sterner green sank in the distance to
+the faint avail of speech. It was well to be walking on the Plank Road
+toward seven o'clock of a June morning, in a mist which might yield
+fellowship in the same ease with which it breathed on distinctions.</p>
+
+<p>Abel had told how, on that winter way of his among the hills, the sky
+has fallen in the fog and had surrendered to him a fellowship of dreams.
+But in Friendship Village, as I had often thought, there are dreams for
+every one; how should it be otherwise to us faring up and down Daphne
+Street (where Daphne's feet have been)? And yet that morning on the
+Plank Road where, if the fancy seized her to walk in beauty, our lady of
+the laurels might be met at any moment, her power seemed to me to be as
+frail as wings, and I thought that it would not greatly matter if I were
+to meet her.</p>
+
+<p>As if my thought of Abel Halsey had brought him, the beat of hoofs won
+toward me from the village; and presently Major Mary overtook me, and
+there was Abel, driving with his eyes shut. I hailed him, laughed at
+him, let him pick me up, and we went on through door after door of the
+fog, with now a lintel of boughs and now a wall of wild roses.</p>
+
+<p>"Abel," I remember saying abruptly, "dreams are not enough."</p>
+
+<p>"No," he replied, as simply as if we had been talking of it, "dreams are
+just one of the sources of power ... but doing is enough."</p>
+
+<p>I said weakly&mdash;perhaps because it was a morning of chill and fog, when a
+woman may feel her forlornest, look her plainest, know herself for dust:
+"But then&mdash;what about everybody's heart?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you know?" Abel asked, and even after those months in Friendship
+Village I did not know.</p>
+
+<p>"... use it up making some little corner better&mdash;better&mdash;better by the
+width of a hand..." said Abel. "As I could do," he added after a moment,
+"if I could get my chapel in the hills. Do you know, I've written to
+Mrs. Proudfit about it at last. I couldn't help it&mdash;I couldn't help it!"</p>
+
+<p>We came to the rise of the hill, where, but for the fog, we might have
+looked back on the village, already long astir. To the left, within its
+line of field stone and whitewashed rails and wild roses, the cemetery
+lay, like another way of speech. A little before us the mist hid the
+tracks, but we heard the whistle of the Fast Mail, coming in from the
+end of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, well, I want some wild roses," said I&mdash;since a woman may always
+take certain refuges from life.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm coming back about noon," Abel told me; "I'll bring you a thousand."</p>
+
+<p>He drew up Major Mary, and we sat silent, watching for the train. And
+the Something which found in Abel its unfailing channel came
+companioning us, and caught me up so that I longed unspeakably to be
+about the Business which Abel and Calliope followed, and followed before
+all else.</p>
+
+<p>But when I would have said more, I noted on Abel's face some surprise,
+and then I myself felt it. For the Fast Mail from the East, having as
+usual come roaring through Friendship station with but an instant's
+stop, was now slowing at the draw. Through the thick white we perceived
+it motionless for a breath, and then we heard it beat away again.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder now, remembering, how I can have known with such singing
+confidence what was in store for me. It is certain that I did know, even
+though in the mist I saw no one alight. But as if at a summons I bade
+Abel let me descend, and somehow I gave him good-by; and I recall that I
+cried back to him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Abel! You <i>said</i> the sky can fall and give one dreams."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he answered. "Dreams to use in one's corner."</p>
+
+<p>But I knew then and I know now that Abel's dreams flowed in his blood,
+and that when he gave them to his corner of the world he gave from his
+own veins; and I think that the world is the richer for that.</p>
+
+<p>When he had gone I stood still in the road, waiting. I distinguished a
+lintel of elms, a wall of wild roses; I heard a brave little bird
+twittering impatient matins, and the sound of nearing footsteps in the
+road. And then a voice in the mist said my name.</p>
+
+<p>There in the fog on the Plank Road we met as if there had come a
+clearness everywhere&mdash;we two, between whom lay that year since my coming
+to Friendship. Only, now that he was with me, I observed that the
+traitor year had slipped away as if it had never been, and had left us
+two alone in a place so sightly that at last I recognized my own
+happiness. And I understood&mdash;and this way of understanding leaves one a
+breathless being&mdash;that his happiness was there too.</p>
+
+<p>And yet it was only: "You.... But what an adventure to meet you here!"
+And from him: "Me. Here. Please, may we go to your house? I haven't had
+an <i>indication</i> of breakfast." At which we laughed somewhat, with my,
+"How absurdly like you not to have had breakfast," and his, "How very
+shabby of you to feel superior because you happen to have had your
+coffee." So we moved back down the road with the clear little space in
+the fog following, following....</p>
+
+<p>A kind of passion for detail seized on us both.</p>
+
+<p>He said: "You're wearing brown. I've never seen you wear brown&mdash;I'm sure
+I haven't. Have I?"</p>
+
+<p>"My fur coat was brown," I escaped into the subject, "but then that
+hardly counts."</p>
+
+<p>"No," he agreed, "fur isn't a colour. Fur is just fur. No, I've never
+seen you in brown."</p>
+
+<p>"How did they let you off at the draw? How did you know about getting
+off at the draw?" I demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"You said something of your getting off there&mdash;in that one letter, you
+know...."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes...."</p>
+
+<p>"You said something about getting off there on a night when you left the
+train with a girl who was coming home to the village&mdash;you know the
+letter?" he broke off, "I think it was that letter that finally gave me
+courage to come. Because in that I saw in you something new
+and&mdash;understanding. Well, and I remembered about the draw. I always
+meant to get off there, when I came."</p>
+
+<p>"You always meant ... but then how did you make them stop?"</p>
+
+<p>"I told the man I had to, and then he had to, too. There were four
+others who got off and went across the tracks, but we are not obliged to
+consider them."</p>
+
+<p>"From that," I said, "I would think it <i>is</i> you, if I didn't know it
+couldn't possibly be!"</p>
+
+<p>Then I hurried into some recital about the Topladys, whose big barn and
+little house were lined faintly out as if something were making them
+feel hushed; and about Friendship, hidden in the valley as if it were
+suddenly of lesser import&mdash;how strange that these things should be there
+as they were an hour ago. And so we came to Oldmoxon House and went up
+the walk in silence save that, at the steps, "How long shall I tell them
+to boil your eggs?" I asked desperately, to still the quite ridiculous
+singing of the known world. But then the singing took one voice, a voice
+whose firmness made it almost hard, save that deep within it something
+was beating....</p>
+
+<p>"You know," said the voice simply, "if I come in now, I come to stay.
+You <i>do</i> know?"</p>
+
+<p>"You come to breakfast...." I tried it.</p>
+
+<p>"I come to stay."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I come to stay."</p>
+
+<p>I rather hoped to affirm something gracious, and masterful of
+myself&mdash;not to say of him; but suddenly that whole lonely year was back
+again, most of it in my throat. And though I gave up saying anything at
+all, I cannot have been unintelligible. Indeed, I know that I was not
+unintelligible, for when, in a little while, Calliope, who was still
+with me, opened my front door and emerged briskly to the veranda, she
+seems to have understood in a minute.</p>
+
+<p>"Well said!" Calliope cried, and made a little swoop down from the
+threshold and stood before us, one hand in mine and one outstretched for
+his; "I knew, as soon as I woke up this morning, I felt special. I
+thought it was my soul, sittin' up in my chest, an' wantin' me to spry
+round with it some, like it does. But I guess now it was this. Oh,
+this!" she said. "Oh, I sp'ose I'd rilly ought to hev an introduction
+before I jump up an' down, hadn't I?"</p>
+
+<p>"No need in the world, Calliope," he told her; "come on. I'll jump,
+too."</p>
+
+<p>And that was an added joy&mdash;that he had read and re-read that one
+Friendship letter of mine, written on the night of Delia More's return,
+until it was as if he, too, knew Calliope. But before all things was the
+wonder of the justice and the grace which had made the letter of that
+night, when I, too, "took stock," yield such return.</p>
+
+<p>It was Calliope who led the way indoors at last, and he and I who
+followed like her guests. From the edges of consciousness I finally drew
+some discernment of the place of coffee and rolls in a beneficent
+universe, and presently we three sat at his breakfast table. And not
+until then did Calliope remember her other news.</p>
+
+<p>"Land, land," she said, "I like to forgot. Who do you s'pose I had a
+telephone from just before you come? Delia. She'd just got home this
+morning on the Fast Mail. An' the Proudfits'll be here, noon train."</p>
+
+<p>Delia indeed had come on the same glorified train that Abel and I had
+seen stop at the draw, only she had alighted at Friendship station and
+had hurried up to the Proudfits' to make ready for their home-coming.
+And since those whom we know best never come to Friendship without a
+welcome, it was instantly incumbent on us all to be what Calliope called
+"up in arms an' flyin' round."</p>
+
+<p>As soon as we were alone:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I've planned noon lunch for 'em," Calliope told me; "I'm goin' to see
+to the meat&mdash;leg o' lamb, sissin' hot, an' a big bowl o' mint. Mis'
+Holcomb's got to freeze a freezer o' her lemon ice&mdash;she gets it smooth
+as a mud pie. Mis' Toplady, she'll come in on the baked stuff&mdash;raised
+rolls an' a big devil's food. An'&mdash;I'd kind o' meant to look to you for
+the salad, but I s'pose you won't want to bother now...." And when I had
+hastened to assume the salad, "Well, I <i>am</i> glad," she owned, with a
+relieved sigh. "The Proudfit salads they can't a soul tell what
+ingredients is in 'em, chew high though we may. I know you know about
+them queer organs an' canned sea reptiles they use now in cookin'. I've
+come to the solemn conclusion I ain't studied physiology an' the animal
+sciences close enough myself to make a rill up-to-date salad."</p>
+
+<p>Before noon we were all at Proudfit House&mdash;to which I had taken care to
+leave word for Abel to follow me&mdash;and we were letting in the sun, making
+ready the table, filling the vases with garden roses; and in the library
+Calliope laid a fire "in case they get chilly, travellin' so," she said,
+but I think rather it was in longing somehow to summon a secret agency
+to that place where Linda Proudfit's portrait hung. For we had long been
+agreed that, as soon as she was at home again, Linda's mother must be
+told all that we knew of Linda. Thus, to Calliope and me, the time held
+a tragic meaning beneath the exterior of our simple cheer. But the time
+held many meanings, as a time will hold them; and the Voice of its new
+meaning said to me, as we all waited on the Proudfit veranda with its
+vines and its climbing rose and its canaries:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I marvel, I <i>marvel</i> at your bad taste. How can you leave the dear
+place and the dear people for me?"</p>
+
+<p>I love to recall the bustle of that arriving and how, as the motor came
+up the drive, Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss and Mis' Amanda ran down
+on the gravel and waved their aprons; and how Mis' Postmaster Sykes and
+Mis' Mayor Uppers and Mis' Photographer Sturgis, having heard the
+machine pass their doors, had issued forth and followed it and arrived
+at the Proudfits' with:</p>
+
+<p>"I was right in the midst of a basque, cuttin' over an old lining, but I
+told Liddy Ember: 'You rip on. I've <i>got</i> to run over.' Excuse my looks.
+Well said! Back!"</p>
+
+<p>And, "Got here, did you? My, my, all tired out, I expect. Well, mebbe
+you think we won't feel relieved to see the house open again an' folks
+in it flyin' round. An' you look as natural as the first thunder-storm
+in the spring o' the year!"</p>
+
+<p>And, "Every day for two weeks," Mis' Sturgis said, "I've said to Jimmy:
+'Proudfits back?' 'No, sir,' s'he, 'not back yet.' An' so it went. Could
+you sleep any on the sleeper?"</p>
+
+<p>Then Calliope and Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb and the three newcomers
+hurried all but abreast to the kitchen to "see what they could find";
+and when Mis' Proudfit and Miss Clementina and Delia More had taken
+their places at the burdened table, we all sat about the edge of the
+room&mdash;no one would share in the feast, every one having to "get right
+back"&mdash;and asked of the journey, and gave news of Friendship Village in
+the long absence. I love to remember it all, but I think that I love
+best to remember their delicate acceptance of what that day had brought
+to me. Of this no one said a word, nor did they ask me anything, or seem
+to observe, far less to wonder. But when they passed me, one and another
+and another squeezed my hand or patted my arm or gave me their unwonted
+"dear."</p>
+
+<p>"What gentlefolk they are," my stranger said.</p>
+
+<p>"Noon lunch" was finished, and I had seen Calliope go with Madame
+Proudfit to the library and close the door, and we were all gathered in
+the hall, where Miss Clementina had opened a trunk and was showing us
+some pretty things, when some one else crossed the veranda and appeared
+in the doorway. And there was Abel, come with my wild roses.</p>
+
+<p>I do not think, however, that it can have occurred to Abel that I was in
+the room. Nor that any of the others were there, intent on the pretty
+things of Miss Clementina's trunk. But, his face shining, he went
+straight to Delia More; and he laid my roses in her arms, looking at her
+the while with a look which was like a passionate recognition of one not
+met for many years.</p>
+
+<p>I have said nothing of Delia More as she seemed to me that day of her
+return, for indeed I do not well know how to tell of her. But as he
+looked at her, it was all in Abel's eyes. I do not know whether it was
+that her spirit having been long "packed down in her," as Calliope had
+said, was at last loosed by the mysterious ministry of distance and the
+touch of far places, or whether, over there nearer Tempe, she had held
+converse with Daphne herself, who, for the sake of the Friendship bond
+between them, had taken for her own all that was wild and strange in the
+girl's nature. But this I know: that Delia More had come back among us a
+new creature, simple, gentle, humble as before, and yet somehow
+quickened, invested with the dignity of personality which, long ago, she
+had lost. And now she stood looking at Abel as he was looking at her.</p>
+
+<p>"Delia!" he said, and took her hand, and, "I brought you some wild roses
+to tell you we're glad you're back," said he, disposing of my hedge
+spoils as coolly as if I were not.</p>
+
+<p>"That's nice of you, Abel," she replied simply, "but it's nicer to think
+you came."</p>
+
+<p>"Why," Abel said, "you couldn't have kept me away. You couldn't have
+kept me away, Delia."</p>
+
+<p>He could not have done looking at her. And even after we had closed in
+before them and had gone on with our talk about the tray of the trunk, I
+think that we were all conscious, as one is conscious of a light in the
+room, that to Delia and Abel had come again the immemorial wonder.</p>
+
+<p>When the library door opened and Madame Proudfit and Calliope came out,
+a little hush fell upon us, even though none but I knew what that
+interval held for Linda's mother. Her face was tranquil&mdash;indeed, I think
+it was almost as if its ancient fear had forever left it and had given
+place to the blessed relief of mere sorrow. She stood for a
+moment&mdash;looking at them all, and looking, as if she were thankful for
+their presence. Then she saw Abel and held out both hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Abel!" she said, "Abel! I had your letter in Lucerne. I meant to talk
+it over with you&mdash;but now I know, I know. You shall have your little
+chapel in the hills. We will build it together&mdash;you and I&mdash;for Linda."</p>
+
+<p>But then, because Abel turned joyously and naturally to Delia to share
+with her the tidings, Madame Proudfit looked at Delia too, and saw her
+eyes. And,</p>
+
+<p>"You and Delia and I," she added gently.</p>
+
+<p>On which, with the kindliest intent, the happiness of us all overflowed
+in speech about the common-place, the trivial, the irrelevant, and we
+all fell talking at once there in the hall, and told one another things
+which we knew perfectly already, and we listened, nodding, and laughed a
+great deal at nothing in the world&mdash;save that life is good.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We three walked home together in the afternoon sunshine&mdash;the man who,
+through all this time in Friendship, had been dear, and Calliope and I.
+I thought that Daphne Street had never looked so beautiful. The tulip
+beds on the lawns had been re-filled for summer, a touch of bonfire
+smoke hung in the air, Eppleby Holcomb was mending his picket gate, and
+over many magic thresholds of the cool walks were lintels of the boughs.
+Down town Abigail Arnold was laying cream puffs in the home bakery
+window; at the Helmans' Mis' Doctor Helman, wound in a shawl and a
+fascinator, was training her matrimony vine; the Liberty sisters had let
+out their chickens and, posted in a great triangle, were keeping them
+well within Liberty lawn confines; Doctor June was working in his garden
+and he waved his hat at us like a boy. ("It's a year ago now they give
+him his benefit," Calliope remembered; "ice-cream an' strawberries an'
+cake. An' every soul that come in he treated, one after another. An'
+when they got hold of him an' told him what that was doin' to the
+benefit box, he wanted to know whose benefit it was, anyway. An' he kep'
+on treatin' folks up to the last spoonful o' cream. He said he never had
+such a good time since he was born. I donno but he showed us <i>how</i> to
+give a benefit, too.")</p>
+
+<p>We were crossing the lawn to Oldmoxon House when I said to Calliope what
+it had been decided that day that I should say:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope," I asked, "could you be ready in a month or two to leave
+Friendship for good, and come to us in town, and live with us for
+always?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked up at one and the other of us, with her little embarrassed
+laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"You're makin' fun o' me," she said.</p>
+
+<p>But when we had explained that we were wholly serious, she stopped and
+leaned against one of the great trees before the house; and it was at
+Oldmoxon House rather than at us that she looked as she answered:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't," she said quickly, and with a manner of breathlessness, "I
+couldn't. You know how I've wanted to leave Friendship, too, you know
+that. An' I want to yet, as far as wantin' goes. But wantin' to mustn't
+be enough to make you do things."</p>
+
+<p>She stood, her head held up as if she were singing, as Liddy Ember had
+said of her, her arms tightly folded, her cheeks flushing with her fear
+that we would not understand.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "you know&mdash;you <i>know</i> how I've always wanted nice
+things. Wanted 'em so it hurt. Not just from likin' 'em, either, but
+because some way I thought I could <i>be</i> more, <i>do</i> more, live up to my
+biggest best if I could only get where things was kind of educated
+an'&mdash;gentle. But every time I tried to go, somethin' come up&mdash;like it
+will, to shove you hard down into the place you was. Then I thought&mdash;you
+know 'bout that, I guess&mdash;I thought I was goin' to live here in Oldmoxon
+House, an' hev a life like other women hev. An' when that wasn't to be,
+I thought mebbe it was because God see I wasn't fit for it, an' I set to
+work on myself to make me as good as I knew&mdash;an' I worked an' worked,
+like life was nothin' but me, an' I was nothin' but a cake, to get a
+good bake on an' die without bein' too much dough to me. An' then all to
+once I see that couldn't be the only thing He meant. It didn't seem like
+He could 'a' made me sole in order to save me from hell. An' I begun to
+see He must 'a' made me to help in some great, big hid plan or other of
+His. An' quick as I knew that an' begun wantin' to help, He begun
+showin' me when to. That's how I mean what I said about the Bell. Times
+like Elspie, or 'Leven, or like that, I can hear it just as plain as
+plain&mdash;the Bell, callin' me to help Him."</p>
+
+<p>She looked hard at us, and, "I donno if you know what I'm talkin'
+about&mdash;&mdash;" she doubted; but, at our answer,</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she added, "they's somethin' else. It's somethin' almost like
+what you've got&mdash;you two&mdash;an' like what Delia an' Abel have got. Lately,
+I don't <i>need</i> to hear the Bell any more. I know 'bout it without. It's
+almost like I <i>am</i> the Bell. Don't you see, it's come to be my power,
+just like love will be your power, if you rilly understand. An'
+here&mdash;here I know how. I've grown to Friendship, an' here I know what's
+what. An' if I went away now, where things is gentle an' like in books,
+I wouldn't know how to be any rill use. I can <i>be</i> the Bell here&mdash;here I
+can have my power. In town I expect I couldn't be anything but just cake
+again&mdash;bakin' myself rill good, or even gettin' frosted; but mebbe not
+helpin'. An' I couldn't risk that&mdash;I couldn't risk it. It looks to me
+like helpin' is what I'm for."</p>
+
+<p>I think, as she said, Calliope was become the Bell; and at that moment
+she rang to us the call of sovereign clearness. This was the life that
+she and Abel followed, and followed before all else, and there lay the
+hiding of their power. "Just like love will be your power," she had
+said.</p>
+
+<p>When she had gone before us into the house&mdash;that was to have been her
+house&mdash;we two stood looking along the sunny Plank Road toward Daphne
+Street. And in the light lifting of the bonfire smoke it seemed to me
+that there moved a spirit&mdash;not Daphne, but another; one who walks less
+in beauty than in service; not our lady of the laurels, but our lady of
+the thorns.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="GROSSET_DUNLAPS" id="GROSSET_DUNLAPS"></a>GROSSET &amp; DUNLAP'S</h2>
+
+<h3>DRAMATIZED NOVELS</h3>
+
+<h4>A Few that are Making Theatrical History</h4>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<h3>MARY JANE'S PA.<br /> By Norman Way.<br /> Illustrated with scenes from the play.</h3>
+
+<p>Delightful, irresponsible "Mary Jane's Pa" awakes one morning to find
+himself famous, and, genius being ill adapted to domestic joys, he
+wanders from home to work out his own unique destiny. One of the most
+humorous bits of recent fiction.</p>
+
+
+<h3>CHERUB DEVINE.<br /> By Sewell Ford.</h3>
+
+<p>"Cherub," a good hearted but not over refined young man is brought in
+touch with the aristocracy. Of sprightly wit, he is sometimes a
+merciless analyst, but he proves in the end that manhood counts for more
+than ancient lineage by winning the love of the fairest girl in the
+flock.</p>
+
+
+<h3>A WOMAN'S WAY.<br /> By Charles Somerville.<br /> Illustrated with scenes from the
+play.</h3>
+
+<p>A story in which a woman's wit and self-sacrificing love save her
+husband from the toils of an adventuress, and change an apparently
+tragic situation into one of delicious comedy.</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE CLIMAX.<br /> By George C. Jenks.</h3>
+
+<p>With ambition luring her on, a young choir soprano leaves the little
+village where she was born and the limited audience of St. Judo's to
+train for the opera in New York. She leaves love behind her and meets
+love more ardent but not more sincere in her new environment. How she
+works, how she studies, how she suffers, are vividly portrayed.</p>
+
+
+<h3>A FOOL THERE WAS.<br /> By Porter Emerson Browne.<br /> Illustrated by Edmund
+Magrath and W. W. Fawcett.</h3>
+
+<p>A relentless portrayal of the career of a man who comes under the
+influence of a beautiful but evil woman; how she lures him on and on,
+how he struggles, falls and rises, only to fall again into her net, make
+a story of unflinching realism.</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE SQUAW MAN.<br /> By Julie Opp Faversham and Edwin Milton Royle.
+<br />Illustrated with scenes from the play.</h3>
+
+<p>A glowing story, rapid in action, bright in dialogue with a fine
+courageous hero and a beautiful English heroine.</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE GIRL IN WAITING.<br /> By Archibald Eyre.<br /> Illustrated with scenes from the
+play.</h3>
+
+<p>A droll little comedy of misunderstandings, told with a light touch, a
+venturesome spirit and an eye for human oddities.</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL.<br /> By Baroness Orczy.<br /> Illustrated with scenes from
+the play.</h3>
+
+<p>A realistic story of the days of the French Revolution, abounding in
+dramatic incident, with a young English soldier of fortune, daring,
+mysterious as the hero.</p>
+
+
+<h5><span class="smcap">Grosset &amp; Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York</span></h5>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Friendship Village, by Zona Gale
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Friendship Village, by Zona Gale
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Friendship Village
+
+Author: Zona Gale
+
+Release Date: September 17, 2008 [EBook #26644]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Garcia, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
+
+                             BY ZONA GALE
+
+             AUTHOR OF "THE LOVES OF PELLEAS AND ETTARRE"
+
+
+NEW YORK
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1908
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+Copyright, 1908,
+By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+
+Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1908.
+
+_Norwood Press
+J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
+Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._
+
+
+
+
+To
+EDITH, HARRIET, AND MUSA
+AND THE TWO FOR WHOM IT COMES TOO LATE
+GEORGIA AND HELEN
+THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY INSCRIBED
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+
+Friendship Village is not known to me, nor are any of its people, save
+in the comradeship which I offer here. But I commend for occupancy a
+sweeter place. For us here the long Caledonia hills, the four rhythmic
+spans of the bridge, the nearer river, the island where the first birds
+build--these teach our windows the quiet and the opportunity of the
+"home town," among the "home people." To those who have such a bond to
+cherish I commend the little real home towns, their kindly, brooding
+companionship, their doors to an efficiency as intimate as that of fairy
+fingers. If there were shrines to these things, we would seek them. The
+urgency is to recognize shrines.
+
+Portage, Wisconsin,
+September, 1908.
+
+Certain of the following chapters have appeared in _The Outlook, The
+Broadway Magazine, The Delineator, Everybody's, and Harper's Monthly
+Magazine_. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous permission
+to reprint these chapters.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+       I. The Side Door
+
+      II. The Debut
+
+     III. Nobody Sick, Nobody Poor
+
+      IV. Covers for Seven
+
+       V. The Shadow of Good Things to Come
+
+      VI. Stock
+
+     VII. The Big Wind
+
+    VIII. The Grandma Ladies
+
+      IX. Not as the World Giveth
+
+       X. Lonesome--I
+
+      XI. Lonesome--II
+
+     XII. Of the Sky and Some Rosemary
+
+    XIII. Top Floor Back
+
+     XIV. An Epilogue
+
+      XV. The Tea Party
+
+     XVI. What is That in thine Hand?
+
+    XVII. Put on thy Beautiful Garments
+
+   XVIII. In the Wilderness a Cedar
+
+     XIX. Herself
+
+      XX. The Hidings of Power
+
+
+
+
+Friendship Village
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE SIDE DOOR
+
+
+It is as if Friendship Village were to say:--
+
+"There is no help for it. A telephone line, antique oak chairs, kitchen
+cabinets, a new doctor, and the like are upon us. But we shall be
+mediaeval directly--we and our improvements. Really, we are so now, if
+you know how to look."
+
+And are we not so? We are one long street, rambling from sun to sun,
+inheriting traits of the parent country roads which we unite. And we are
+cross streets, members of the same family, properly imitative, proving
+our ancestorship in a primeval genius for trees, or bursting out in
+inexplicable weaknesses of Court-House, Engine-House, Town Hall, and
+Telephone Office. Ultimately our stock dwindles out in a slaughter-yard
+and a few detached houses of milkmen. The cemetery is delicately put
+behind us, under a hill. There is nothing mediaeval in all this, one
+would say. But then see how we wear our rue:--
+
+When one of us telephones, she will scrupulously ask for the number, not
+the name, for it says so at the top of every page. "Give me one-one,"
+she will put it, with an impersonality as fine as if she were calling
+for four figures. And Central will answer:--
+
+"Well, I just saw Mis' Holcomb go 'crost the street. I'll call you, if
+you want, when she comes back."
+
+Or, "I don't think you better ring the Helmans' just now. They were
+awake 'most all night with one o' Mis' Helman's attacks."
+
+Or, "Doctor June's invited to Mis' Sykes's for tea. Shall I give him to
+you there?"
+
+The telephone is modern enough. But in our use of it is there not a
+flavour as of an Elder Time, to be caught by Them of Many Years from
+Now? And already we may catch this flavour, as our Britain
+great-great-lady grandmothers, and more, may have been conscious of the
+old fashion of sitting in bowers. If only they were conscious like that!
+To be sure of it would be to touch their hands in the margins of the
+ballad books.
+
+Or we telephone to the Livery Barn and Boarding Stable for the little
+blacks, celebrated for their self-control in encounters with the
+Proudfits' motor-car. The stable-boy answers that the little blacks are
+at "the funeral." And after he has gone off to ask his employer what is
+in then, the employer, who in his unofficial moments is our neighbour,
+our church choir bass, our landlord even, comes and tells us that, after
+all, we may have the little blacks, and he himself brings them round at
+once,--the same little blacks that we meant all along. And when, quite
+naturally, we wonder at the boy's version, we learn: "Oh, why, the
+blacks was standin' just acrost the street, waitin' at the church door,
+hitched to the hearse. I took 'em out an' put in the bays. I says to
+myself: 'The corp won't care.'" Someway the Proudfits' car and the
+stable telephone must themselves have slipped from modernity to old
+fashion before that incident shall quite come into its own.
+
+So it is with certain of our domestic ways. For example, Mis' Postmaster
+Sykes--in Friendship Village every woman assumes for given name the
+employment of her husband--has some fine modern china and much solid
+silver in extremely good taste, so much, indeed, that she is wont to
+confess to having cleaned forty, or sixty, or seventy-five
+pieces--"seventy-five pieces of solid silver have I cleaned this
+morning. You can say what you want to, nice things are a _rill_ care."
+Yet--surely this is the proper conjunction--Mis' Sykes is currently
+reported to rise in the night preceding the days of her house cleaning,
+and to take her carpets out in the back yard, and there softly to sweep
+and sweep them so that, at their official cleaning next day, the
+neighbours may witness how little dirt is whipped out on the line. Ought
+she not to have old-fashioned silver and egg-shell china and drop-leaf
+mahogany to fit the practice? Instead of daisy and wild-rose patterns in
+"solid," and art curtains, and mission chairs, and a white-enamelled
+refrigerator, and a gas range.
+
+We have the latest funeral equipment,--black broadcloth-covered
+supports, a coffin carriage for up-and-down the aisles, natural palms to
+order, and the pulleys to "let them down slow"; and yet our individual
+funeral capacity has been such that we can tell what every woman who has
+died in Friendship for years has "done without": Mis' Grocer Stew, her
+of all folks, had done without new-style flat-irons; Mis' Worth had used
+the bread pan to wash dishes in; Mis' Jeweller Sprague--the _first_ Mis'
+Sprague--had had only six bread and butter knives, her that could get
+wholesale too.... And we have little maid-servants who answer our bells
+in caps and trays, so to say; but this savour of jestership is
+authentic, for any one of them is likely to do as of late did Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss's maid,--answer, at dinner-with-guests, that
+there were no more mashed potatoes, "_or else_, there won't be any left
+to warm up for your breakfasts." ... And though we have our daily
+newspaper, receiving Associated Press service, yet, as Mis' Amanda
+Toplady observed, it is "only _very_ lately that they have mentioned in
+the _Daily_ the birth of a child, or anything that had anything of a
+_tang_ to it."
+
+We put new wine in old bottles, but also we use new bottles to hold our
+old wine. For, consider the name of our main street: is this Main or
+Clark or Cook or Grand Street, according to the register of the main
+streets of towns? Instead, for its half-mile of village life, the Plank
+Road, macadamized and arc-lighted, is called Daphne Street. Daphne
+Street! I love to wonder why. Did our dear Doctor June's father name it
+when he set the five hundred elms and oaks which glorify us? Or did
+Daphne herself take this way on the day of her flight, so that when they
+came to draught the town, they recognized that it _was_ Daphne Street,
+and so were spared the trouble of naming it? Or did the Future
+anonymously toss us back the suggestion, thrifty of some day of her own
+when she might remember us and say, "_Daphne Street!_" Already some of
+us smile with a secret nod at something when we direct a stranger, "You
+will find the Telegraph and Cable Office two blocks down, on Daphne
+Street." "The Commercial Travellers' House, the Abigail Arnold Home
+Bakery, the Post-office and Armoury are in the same block on Daphne
+Street." Or, "The Electric Light Office is at the corner of Dunn and
+Daphne." It is not wonderful that Daphne herself, foreseeing these
+things, did not stay, but lifted her laurels somewhat nearer
+Tempe,--although there are those of us who like to fancy that she is
+here all the time in our Daphne-street magic: the fire bell, the tulip
+beds, and the twilight bonfires. For how else, in all reason, has the
+name persisted?
+
+Of late a new doctor has appeared--one may say, has abounded: a surgeon
+who, such is his zeal, will almost perform an operation over the
+telephone and, we have come somewhat cynically to believe, would prefer
+doing so to not operating at all. As Calliope Marsh puts it:--
+
+"He is great on operations, that little doctor. Let him go into any
+house, an' some o' the family, seems though, has to be operated on,
+usually inside o' twelve hours. It'll get so that as soon as he strikes
+the front porch, they'll commence sterilizin' water. I donno but some'll
+go an' put on the tea-kettle if they even see him drive past."
+
+_Why_ within twelve hours, we wonder when we hear the edict? Why never
+fourteen hours, or six? How does it happen that no matter at what stage
+of the malady the new doctor is called, the patient always has to be
+operated on within twelve hours? Is it that everybody has a bunch and
+goes about not knowing it until he appears? Or is he a kind of basanite
+for bunches, and do they come out on us at the sight of him? There are
+those of us who almost hesitate to take his hand, fearing that he will
+fix us with his eye, point somewhere about, and tell us, "Within twelve
+hours, _if_ you want your life your own." But in spite of his skill and
+his modernity, in our midst there persist those who, in a scientific
+night, would die rather than risk our advantages.
+
+Thus the New shoulders the Old, and our transition is still swift enough
+to be a spectacle, as was its earlier phase which gave over our Middle
+West to cabins and plough horses, with a tendency away from wigwams and
+bob-whites. And in this local warfare between Old and New a chief figure
+is Calliope Marsh--who just said that about the new doctor. She is a
+little rosy wrinkled creature officially--though no other than
+officially--pertaining to sixty years; mender of lace, seller of
+extracts, and music teacher, but of the three she thinks of the last as
+her true vocation. ("I come honestly by that," she says. "You know my
+father before me was rill musical. I was babtized Calliope because a
+circus with one come through the town the day't I was born.") And with
+her, too, the grafting of to-morrow upon yesterday is unconscious; or
+only momentarily conscious, as when she phrased it:--
+
+"Land, land, I like New as well as anybody. But I want it should be put
+in the Old kind o' gentle, like an _i_-dee in your mind, an' not sudden,
+like a bullet in your brain."
+
+In her acceptance of innovations Calliope symbolizes the fine Friendship
+tendency to scientific procedure, to the penetration of the unknown
+through the known, the explication of mystery by natural law. And when
+to the bright-figured paper and pictures of her little sitting room she
+had added a print of the Mona Lisa, she observed:--
+
+"She sort o' lifts me up, like somethin' I've thought of, myself. But I
+don't see any sense in raisin' a question about what her smile means. I
+told the agent so. 'Whenever I set for my photograph,' I says to him, 'I
+always have that same silly smile on my face.'"
+
+With us all the Friendship idea prevails: we accept what Progress sends,
+but we regard it in our own fashion. Our improvements, like our
+entertainments, our funerals, our holidays, and our very loves, are but
+Friendship Village exponents of the modern spirit. Perhaps, in a
+tenderer significance than she meant, Calliope characterized us when she
+said:--
+
+"This town is more like a back door than a front--or, givin' it full
+credit, _anyhow_, it's no more'n a side door, with no vines."
+
+For indeed, we are a kind of middle door to experience, minus the fuss
+of official arriving and, too, without the old odours of the kitchen
+savoury beds; but having, instead, a serene side-door existence,
+partaking of both electric bells and of neighbours with shawls pinned
+over their heads.
+
+Only at one point Calliope was wrong. There are vines, with tendrils and
+flowers and many birds.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE DEBUT
+
+
+Mrs. Ricker, "washens, scrubben, work by the day or Our," as the sign of
+her own lettering announced, had come into a little fortune by the death
+of her first husband, Al Kitton, early divorced and late repentant. Just
+before my arrival in Friendship she had bought a respectable frame house
+in the heart of the village,--for a village will have a heart instead of
+having a boulevard,--and with her daughter Emerel she had set up a
+modest establishment with Ingrain carpets and parlour pieces, and a bit
+of grass in front. Thus Emerel Kitton--we, in our simple, penultimate
+way, called it Kitten--became a kind of heiress. She had been christened
+Emma Ella, but her mother, of her love of order, had tidied the name to
+Emerel, and Friendship had adopted the form, perhaps as having about it
+something pleasing and jewel-like. Though Emerel was in the thirties at
+the time of her inheritance, she was still pretty, shy, conformable; and
+yet there was no disguising that she was nearly a spinster when, as soon
+as the white house was settled, Mrs. Ricker issued invitations to her
+daughter's coming-out party.
+
+     You aRe Invite
+           to A
+     Comen Out Recep
+    Next wenesday Night at eigt
+     At Her Home
+     Emma Ella Kitton
+   Mrs. Ricker and Kitton
+     Pa
+
+the invitations said, and the "Pa" was divined to imply "Please answer."
+
+"It's Kitton's money an' it's his daughter. I hed to hev him in it
+somehow," Mrs. Ricker explained her double signature. "You see," she
+added, "up till now I ain't never been situate' so's Emerel _could_ come
+out. I've always wanted to give her things, too, but 't seems like when
+I've tried, everything's shook its fist at me. It ain't too late. Emerel
+looks just like she did fifteen years ago, don't she?"
+
+It was at once observed that if Emerel shared her mother's enthusiasm
+for the project, she did not betray it. But then no one knew much about
+Emerel save that she was engaged, and had been so for some years, to big
+Abe Daniel, the Methodist tenor, a circumstance wholly unconsidered in
+the scheme of her debut.
+
+Quite simply and with happy pride, Mrs. Ricker and Kitton issued her
+invitations to every one in the village who had ever employed her. And
+the village was divided against itself.
+
+"How can we?" Mis' Postmaster Sykes demanded, "I ask you. There's things
+to omit an' there's things to observe. We should be The Laughing Stock."
+
+"The Laughing Stock," variously echoed her followers.
+
+On the other hand:--
+
+"Land, o' course we'll all go," Mis' Amanda Toplady comfortably settled
+it, "an' take Emerel a deboo present, civilized. The dear child."
+
+And to that many of us gladly assented, Timothy, big Amanda's little
+husband, going so far as to add:
+
+"I do vum, the Sykeses feels the post-office like it was that much
+oats."
+
+A day later Timothy's opinion seemed, he thought, to be verified. Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes issued "written invites to an evening party, hot supper
+and like that," as Friendship communicated it, to be given on the very
+night of Emerel's debut.
+
+Friendship was shaken. Never in the history of the village had two
+social affairs been set for the same hour. Indeed, more than one hostess
+had postponed an impending tea-party or thimble party or "afternoon
+coffee" or "five o'clock supper" on hearing that another was planned for
+the same day. And now, when there were those of us anxious to "do
+something nice" for hard-working little Mrs. Ricker, the Sykeses had
+deliberately sought the forbidden ground. And Society dare not deny Mis'
+Sykes, for besides "being who she was" ("She's the leader in Friendship
+if they _is_ a leader," we said, emphatically implying that there was
+none), she kept two maids,--little young thing and a _rill_ hired
+girl,--entertained "above the most," put out her sewing and wore, we
+kept in the back of our minds, a bar pin, solid, with "four solitaires"
+in it. And, "Oh, you know," Calliope Marsh admitted to me later, "Mis'
+Sykes is rilly a great society woman. They isn't anybody's funeral that
+she don't get to ride to the cemet'ry."
+
+Mrs. Ricker and Kitton accepted the situation with fine philosophy.
+
+"Of course," she said, "the whole town can dance to the Sykeses'
+fiddlin' if they want. But it's a pretty pass if they do let anybody
+step in before me that's washed for 'em an' cleaned their houses years
+on end."
+
+My own course was pleasantly simple. Mrs. Ricker and Kitton had included
+me on her list, accredited, no doubt, because a few weeks earlier she
+had helped me to settle my belongings in Oldmoxon house, and since then
+had twice swept for me, and was to come in a day or two to do so again.
+As I had instantly accepted her invitation, I had no choice when Mis'
+Sykes's "written invite" came, even though when it arrived Mis' Sykes
+herself was calling on me.
+
+"Well said," she observed, when she saw a neighbour's little girl, her
+temporary servitor, coming up my walk with the invitations in a paper
+bag to be kept clean, "I meant to get my call made on you before your
+invite got here. I hope you'll overlook taking us both together. I've
+meant to call on you before, but I declare it looked like a mountain to
+me to get started out. Don't you find your calls a rill chore?"
+
+But Mis' Sykes's visit was, she confessed, "Errand as well as Call."
+
+"The Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality," she told
+me, as she rose to go, "is to our wits' end to get up a new
+entertainment. We want to give something, and we want it should be rill
+new and spicey, but of course it has to be pretty quiet, owing to the
+Cause--the Dead, so. It bars us from home-talent evenings or festivals
+or like that. And the minute I saw the inside o' your house it come to
+me: of course you know your house is differ'nt from Friendship. If I'd
+been shot out of a gun into it, I wouldn't 'a' sensed I was in
+Friendship at all. You've got nice things, all carved an' hard to dust.
+The Oldmoxons use' to do a lot o' entertainin', an' everybody remembers
+it, an' the house has been shut quite some time. Well, now, you've been
+ask' to join the Sodality. An' if you was to announce an Evening Benefit
+for it, here in your home, the whole town'd come out to it hot-foot.
+We're owin' Zittelhof on Eph Cadoza's coffin yet, an' I shouldn't wonder
+an' that one evening would pay him all off _and_, same time, get you
+rill well acquainted. Don't you think it's a nice _i_-dea?"
+
+As I had come to Friendship chiefly to get away from everywhere, I
+thought that I had never heard such a bad plan. But inasmuch as I was
+obliged to refuse outright one invitation of my visitor's, about the
+other I weakly temporized and promised to let her know. And she went
+away, deploring my hasty acceptance of Mrs. Ricker and Kitton, although,
+"How could you tell?" she strove to excuse me. "A person coming to a
+strange town so, _of course_ they accept all their invitations good
+faith. And then her signing her name that way might mislead you. It
+gives a rill sensation of a hyphen. But still, the spelling--after all
+you'd ought--"
+
+She looked at me with tardy suspicion.
+
+"Some geniuses can't spell very well, you know," I defended my
+discrimination.
+
+"That's so," she admitted brightly; "I see you're literary."
+
+The next morning the other principal, Mrs. Ricker and Kitton, arrived to
+keep her engagement with me. She was a little woman, suggesting wire,
+which gave and sprang when she moved, and paper, which crackled when she
+laughed. Her speech was all independence, confidence, self-possession;
+but in her silences I have seldom seen so wistful a face as hers.
+
+In response to my question:--
+
+"Oh," Mrs. Ricker and Kitton said brightly, "everything's goin' fine. I
+s'pose the town's still decidin' between us, but up to now I ain't had
+but one regrets that can't come--that's Mis' Stew. She wrote it was on
+account o' domestic affliction, an' I hadn't heard what, so I went right
+down. 'Seems nobody had died--she ain't much of any family, anyway. But
+she'd wrote her letter out of a letter book, an' the only one she could
+find regrettin' an invite give domestic affliction for the reason. She
+said she didn't know a letter like that hed to be true, an' I don't know
+as it does, either."
+
+She stood silent for a moment, searching my face.
+
+"Look-a-here," she said; "they's somethin' I thought of. Mebbe you've
+heard of it bein' done in the City somewheres. Do you s'pose folks'd be
+willin' to send Emerel's an' my funeral flowers to the comin' out party
+_instead_?"
+
+"Funeral...?" I doubted.
+
+"Grave flowers," she explained. "You know, they're a perfect waste so
+far's the General Dead is concerned. An' land knows, the fam'ly don't
+sense 'em much more. Anyway, Emerel an' I ain't got any fam'ly. An' if
+folks'd be willin' to send us what flowers they would send us if we died
+_now_, then they'd do us some good. We'll never want 'em more'n we do
+now, dead or alive. 'Least, I won't. Emerel, she don't seem to care. But
+do you think it'd be all right if I was to mention it out around?"
+
+My desire to have this happen I did my best not to confuse with a
+disinterested opinion. But indeed Mrs. Ricker and Kitton was seldom in
+need of an opinion, as was proved that night by the appearance of this
+notice in the Friendship _Daily_:--
+
+     All that would give flowers when dead please send same anyhow and
+     not expected to send same if we do die afterwards.
+
+     MRS. RICKER AND KITTON.
+
+All of Friendship society which intended to accept Mis' Sykes's
+invitation hastened with relieved eagerness to follow with flowers its
+regrets to the "comen out recep." For every one was genuinely attached
+to the little laundress and interested in her welfare--up to the point
+of sacrificing social interests in the eyes of the Sykeses. Friendship
+gardens were rich with Autumn, cosmos and salvia and opulent asters, and
+on the morning of the two parties this store of sweetness was rifled for
+the debutante. By noon Mrs. Ricker and Kitton was saying in awe, "Nobody
+in Friendship ever had this many flowers, dead, or alive, or rich." And
+although some of us grieved that Mis' Postmaster Sykes had shown what
+she named her good-will by ordering from the town a pillow of white
+carnations (but with no "wording"), Mrs. Ricker and Kitton received even
+this suggestive token with simple-hearted delight.
+
+"It'll look lovely on the lamp shelf," she observed. "I've often planned
+how nice my parlour'd trim up for a funeral."
+
+In the preparation for the two events, the one unconcerned and
+unconsulted appeared to be the debutante herself. We never said
+"Emerel's party"; we all said "Mis' Ricker's party." We knew that Mrs.
+Ricker and Kitton was putting painstaking care on Emerel's coming-out
+dress, which was to be a surprise, but otherwise Emerel was seldom even
+mentioned in connection with her debut. And whenever we saw her, it was
+as Friendship had seen her for two years,--walking quietly with Abe
+Daniel, her betrothed.
+
+"It's doin' things kind o' backwards," Calliope Marsh said, "engaged
+first an' comin' out in society afterwards. But I donno as it's any more
+backwards than ridin' to the cemet'ry feet first. What's what all
+depends on what you agree on for What. If it ain't your soul you mean
+about," she added cryptically.
+
+The Topladys and others of us who united to uphold Emerel, and
+especially to uphold Emerel's mother, could not but realize that the
+majority of Friendship society had regretted to decline the debut party,
+and had been pleased to accept the hospitality of the Postmaster
+Sykeses. I dare say that this may have been partly why, in the usual
+self-indulgence of challenge, I put on my prettiest frock for the party
+and prepared to set out somewhat early, hoping for the amusement of
+sharing in the finishing touches. But as I was leaving my house Calliope
+Marsh arrived, buttoned tightly in her best gray henrietta, her cheeks
+hot with some intense excitement.
+
+"Well," she said without preface, "they've done it. Emerel Kitton's
+married. She's just married Abe at the parsonage to get out o' bein'
+debooed. They've gone to take the train now."
+
+No one could fail to see what this would mean to Mrs. Ricker and Kitton,
+and, rather than the newly married Emerel, it was she who absorbed our
+speculation.
+
+"Mis' Ricker just slimpsed," Calliope told me. "I says to her: 'Look
+here, Mis' Ricker, don't you go givin' in. Your kitchen's a sight with
+the good things o' your hand--think o' that,' I told her; 'think how you
+mortgaged your very funeral for to-night, an' brace yourself up,' An'
+she says, awful pitiful: 'I _can't_, Calliope,' she says. ''T seems like
+this slips the pins right out. They ain't nothin' to deboo with now,
+anyway,' she told me. 'How can I?'"
+
+"Oh, poor Mrs. Ricker!" I exclaimed.
+
+Calliope looked at me intently.
+
+"Well," she said, "that's what I run in about. You're a stranger just
+fresh come here. You ain't met folks much yet. An' Mis' Sykes, she's
+just crazy to get a-hold o' you an' your house for the Sodality. An' the
+only thing I could think of for Mis' Ricker--well, would you stand up
+with Mis' Ricker to-night an' shake all their hands? An' sort o' leave
+her deboo for _you_, you might say?"
+
+I think that I loved Calliope for this even before she understood my
+assent. But she added something which puzzled me.
+
+"If I was you," she observed, "I'd do somethin' else to-night, too. You
+could do it--or I could do it for you. You don't expect to let Mis'
+Sykes hev the Sodality here, do you?"
+
+"I might have had it here," I said impulsively, "if she had not done
+this to poor little Mrs. Ricker."
+
+"Would--would you give me the lief to say that?" Calliope asked
+demurely.
+
+I had no objection in the world to any one knowing my opinion of Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes's proceeding,--"one of her preposterousnesses,"
+Calliope called it,--and I said so, and set off for Mrs. Ricker's, while
+Calliope herself flew somewhere else on some last mission. And, "Mis'
+Sykes'd ought to be showed," she called to me over-shoulder. "That
+woman's got a sinful pride. She'd wear fur in August to prove she could
+afford to hev moths!"
+
+The Ricker parlour was a garden which sloped gently, as a garden should,
+for the house was old and the parlour floor sagged toward the entrance
+so that the front of the organ was propped on wooden blocks. The room
+was bedizened with flowers, in dishes, tins, and gallon jars, so that it
+seemed some way an alien thing, like a prune horse. On the lamp shelf
+was the huge white carnation pillow, across which the hostess had
+inscribed "welcom," in stems.
+
+Within ten minutes of the appointed hour all those who had been pleased
+to accept were in the rooms, and Mrs. Ricker and Kitton and I, standing
+among the funeral flowers, received the guests while Calliope, hovering
+at the door, gave the key with: "Ain't you heard? Emerel's a bride
+instead of a debbytant. Ain't it a rill joke? Married to-night an' we're
+here to celebrate. Throw off your things." Then she hopelessly involved
+them in a presentation to me, and between us we contrived to elide Mrs.
+Ricker and Kitton from all save her perfunctory office, until her voice
+and lips ceased their trembling. Poor little hostess, in her starched
+lawn which had seemed to her adequate for her unpretentious role of
+mother! All her humour and independence and self-possession had left
+her, and in their stead, on what was to have been her great night, had
+settled only the immemorial wistfulness.
+
+Although I did not then foresee it, the guests that evening were
+destined to point me to many meanings, like sketches in the note-book of
+a patient Pen. I am fond of remembering them as I saw them first: the
+Topladys, that great Mis' Amanda, ponderous, majestic, and suggesting
+black grosgrain, her beaming way of whole-hearted approval not quite
+masking the critical, house-wife glances which she continually cast; and
+little Timothy, her husband, who, in company, went quite out of his head
+and could think of nothing to say save "Blisterin' Benson, what I think
+is this: ain't everything movin' off nice?" Dear Doctor June, pastor
+emeritus of Friendship, since he was so identified with all the village
+interests that not many could tell from what church he had retired. (At
+each of the three Friendship churches he rented a pew, and contributed
+impartially to their beneficences; and, "seems to me the Lord would of,"
+he sometimes apologized for this.) Photographer Jimmy Sturgis, who stood
+about with one eye shut, and who drove the 'bus, took charge of the
+mail-bags, conducted a photograph gallery, and painted portraits. ("The
+Dead From Photos a specialty," was tacked on the risers of the stairs
+leading to his studio.) And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, who was an
+invalid and "very, very seldom got out." (Not, I was to learn, an
+invalid because of ill health, but by nature. She was an invalid as
+other people are blond or brunette, and no more to be said about it.)
+Miss Liddy Ember, the village seamstress, and her beautiful sister
+Ellen, who was "not quite right," and whom Miss Liddy took about and
+treated like a child until the times when Ellen "come herself again,"
+and then she quite overshadowed in personality little busy Miss Liddy.
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and Eppleby Holcomb, and the "Other"
+Holcombs; Mis' Doctor Helman, the Gekerjecks, who "kept the drug store,"
+and scented the world with musk and essences. ("Musk on one handkerchief
+and some kind o' flower scent on your other one," Mis' Gekerjeck was
+wont to say, "then you can suit everybody, say who who will.")--These
+and the others Mrs. Ricker and Kitton and I received, standing before
+the white carnation pillow. And I, who had come to Friendship to get
+away from everywhere, found myself the one to whom they did honour, as
+they were to have honoured Emerel.
+
+When the hour for supper came, Mrs. Ricker and Kitton excused herself
+because she must "see to gettin' it on to the plates," and Mis' Toplady,
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, Calliope, and I "handed." We had all
+lent silver and dishes--indeed, save at Mis' Sykes's (and of course at
+the Proudfits' of Proudfit estate), there is rarely a Friendship party
+at which the pantries of the guests are not represented, an arrangement
+seeming almost to hold in anticipation certain social and political
+ideals. (If the telephone yields us an invitation from those whom we
+know best, we always answer: "Thank you. I will. What do you want me to
+send over?" Is there such a matter-of-course federation on any
+boulevard?) And after the guests had been served and the talk had been
+resumed, we four who had "handed" sat down, with Mrs. Ricker and Kitton,
+at meat, at a corner of the kitchen table.
+
+"Everything tastes like so much chips to me when I hev company, anyhow,"
+the hostess said sadly, "but to-night it's got the regular salt-pork
+taste. When I'm nervous or got delegates or comin' down with anything, I
+always taste salt pork."
+
+"Well, everything's all of a whirl to me," Calliope confessed, "an' I
+should think your brains, Mis' Ricker, 'd be fair rarin' 'round in your
+head."
+
+"Who didn't eat what?" Mrs. Ricker and Kitton asked listlessly. "I meant
+to keep track when the plates come out, but I didn't. Did they all take
+a-hold rill good?"
+
+"They wa'n't any mincin' 't _I_ see," Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss
+assured her. "Everything you had was lovely, an' everybody made 'way
+with all they got."
+
+We might have kept indefinitely on at these fascinating comparisons, but
+some unaccountable stir and bustle and rise of talk in the other rooms
+persuaded our attention. ("Can they be goin' _home_?" cried that great
+Mis' Amanda Toplady. "If they are, I'll go bail Timothy Toplady started
+it." And, "I bet they've broke the finger bowl," Mrs. Ricker and Kitton
+prophesied darkly.) And then we all went in to see what had happened,
+but it was what none of us could possibly have forecast: Crowding in the
+parlour, overflowing into the sitting room, still entering from the
+porch, were Postmaster and Mis' Postmaster Sykes and _all_ their guests.
+
+It was quite as if Wishes had gathered head and spirited them there. I
+remember the white little face of Mrs. Ricker and Kitton, luminously
+gratified to the point of triumph; and Mis' Sykes's brisk and cordial
+"No reason why we shouldn't go to two receptions in an evening, like
+they do in the City, Mis' Ricker, is they?" And the aplomb of the
+hostess's self-respecting, corrective "_An'_ Kitton. 'Count of Al bein'
+so thoughtful in death." And then to my amazement Mis' Postmaster Sykes
+turned to me and held out both hands.
+
+"I _am_ so _glad_," she said, almost in the rhythm of certain exhausts,
+"that you've decided to hev Sodality at your house. You must just let me
+take a-hold of it for you and _run_ it. And I'm going to propose your
+name the very next meeting we hev, can't I?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I walked home with Calliope when we had left Mrs. Ricker and Kitton,
+tired but triumphant. ("Land," the hostess said, "now it's turned out so
+nice, I donno but I'm rill pleased Emerel's married. I'd hate to think
+o' borrowin' all them things over again for a weddin'.") And in the dark
+street Calliope said to me:--
+
+"You see what I done, I guess. I told you Mis' Sykes was reg'lar
+up-in-arms about usin' your house--though I think the rill reason is she
+wants to get upstairs in it. You know how some are. So I marched myself
+up there before the party, an' I told her you wasn't goin' to hev
+Sodality sole because you thought she'd been so mean to Mis' Ricker. An'
+I give her to understand sharp off 't she'd better do what she did do if
+she wanted you in the Sodality at all. 'An',' s'I, 'I donno what she'll
+think o' you anyway, not knowin' enough to go to two companies in one
+evenin', like the City, even if one is your own.' She see reason. You
+know, Mis' Sykes an' I are kind o' connections, but you can make even
+your relations see sense if you go at 'em right. I donno," Calliope
+ended doubtfully, "but I done wrong. An' yet I feel good friends with my
+backbone too, like I'd done right!"
+
+And it was so that having come to Friendship Village to get away from
+everywhere, I yet found myself abruptly launched in its society,
+committed to its Sodality, and, best of all, friends with Calliope
+Marsh.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+NOBODY SICK, NOBODY POOR
+
+
+Two days before Thanksgiving the air was already filled with white
+turkey feathers, and I stood at a window and watched until the
+loneliness of my still house seemed like something pointing a mocking
+finger at me. When I could bear it no longer I went out in the snow, and
+through the soft drifts I fought my way up the Plank Road toward the
+village.
+
+I had almost passed the little bundled figure before I recognized
+Calliope. She was walking in the middle of the road, as in Friendship we
+all walk in winter; and neither of us had umbrellas. I think that I
+distrust people who put up umbrellas on a country road in a fall of
+friendly flakes.
+
+Instead of inquiring perfunctorily how I did, she greeted me with a
+fragment of what she had been thinking--which is always as if one were
+to open a door of his mind to you instead of signing you greeting from a
+closed window.
+
+"I just been tellin' myself," she looked up to say without preface,
+"that if I could see one more good old-fashion' Thanksgivin', life'd
+sort o' smooth out. An' land knows, it needs some smoothin' out for me."
+
+With this I remember that it was as if my own loneliness spoke for me.
+At my reply Calliope looked at me quickly--as if I, too, had opened a
+door.
+
+"Sometimes Thanksgivin' _is_ some like seein' the sun shine when you're
+feelin' rill rainy yourself," she said thoughtfully.
+
+She held out her blue-mittened hand and let the flakes fall on it in
+stars and coronets.
+
+"I wonder," she asked evenly, "if you'd help me get up a Thanksgivin'
+dinner for a few poor sick folks here in Friendship?"
+
+In order to keep my self-respect, I recall that I was as ungracious as
+possible. I think I said that the day meant so little to me that I was
+willing to do anything to avoid spending it alone. A statement which
+seems to me now not to bristle with logic.
+
+"That's nice of you," Calliope replied genially. Then she hesitated,
+looking down Daphne Street, which the Plank Road had become, toward
+certain white houses. There were the homes of Mis' Mayor Uppers, Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and the Liberty sisters,--all substantial
+dignified houses, typical of the simple prosperity of the countryside.
+
+"The only trouble," she added simply, "is that in Friendship I don't
+know of a soul rill sick, nor a soul what you might call poor."
+
+At this I laughed, unwillingly enough. Dear Calliope! Here indeed was a
+drawback to her project.
+
+"Honestly," she said reflectively, "Friendship can't seem to do anything
+like any other town. When the new minister come here, he give out he was
+goin' to do settlement work. An' his second week in the place he come to
+me with a reg'lar hang-dog look. 'What kind of a town is this?' he says
+to me, disgusted. 'They ain't nobody sick in it an' they ain't nobody
+poor!' I guess he could 'a' got along without the poor--most of us can.
+But we mostly like to hev a few sick to carry the flowers off our house
+plants to, an' now an' then a tumbler o' jell. An' yet I've known weeks
+at a time when they wasn't a soul rill flat down sick in Friendship.
+It's so now. An' that's hard, when you're young an' enthusiastic, like
+the minister."
+
+"But where are you going to find your guests then, Calliope?" I asked
+curiously.
+
+"Well," she said brightly, "I was just plannin' as you come up with me.
+An' I says to myself: 'God give me to live in a little bit of a place
+where we've all got enough to get along on, an' Thanksgivin' finds us
+all in health. It looks like He'd afflicted us by lettin' us hev nobody
+to do for.' An' then it come to me that if we was to get up the
+dinner,--with all the misery an' hunger they is in the world,--God in
+His goodness would let some of it come our way to be fed. 'In the
+wilderness a cedar,' you know--as Liddy Ember an' I was always tellin'
+each other when we kep' shop together. An' so to-day I said to myself
+I'd go to work an' get up the dinner an' trust there'd be eaters for
+it."
+
+"Why, Calliope," I said, "Calliope!"
+
+"I ain't got much to do with, myself," she added apologetically;
+"the most I've got in my sullar, I guess, is a gallon jar o'
+watermelon pickles. I could give that. You don't think it sounds
+irreverent--connectin' God with a big dinner, so?" she asked anxiously.
+
+And, at my reply:--
+
+"Well, then," she said briskly, "let's step in an' see a few folks that
+might be able to tell us of somebody to do for. Let's ask Mis' Mayor
+Uppers an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, an' the Liberty girls."
+
+Because I was lonely and idle, and because I dreaded inexpressibly going
+back to my still house, I went with her. Her ways were a kind of
+entertainment, and I remember that I believed my leisure to be infinite.
+
+We turned first toward the big shuttered house of Mis' Mayor Uppers, to
+whom, although her husband had been a year ago removed from office,
+discredited, and had not since been seen in Friendship, we yet gave her
+old proud title, as if she had been Former Lady Mayoress. For the
+present mayor, Authority Hubblethwaite, was, as Calliope said,
+"unconnect'."
+
+I watched Mis' Uppers in some curiosity while Calliope explained that
+she was planning a dinner for the poor and sick,--"the lame and the sick
+that's comfortable enough off to eat,"--and could she suggest some poor
+and sick to ask? Mis' Uppers was like a vinegar cruet of mine, slim and
+tall, with a little grotesquely puckered face for a stopper, as if the
+whole known world were sour.
+
+"I'm sure," she said humbly, "it's a nice i-dea. But I declare, I'm put
+to it to suggest. We ain't got nobody sick nor nobody poor in
+Friendship, you know."
+
+"Don't you know of anybody kind o' hard up? Or somebody that, if they
+ain't down sick, feels sort o' spindlin'?" Calliope asked anxiously.
+
+Mis' Uppers thought, rocking a little and running a pin in and out of a
+fold of her skirt.
+
+"No," she said at length, "I don't know a soul. I think the church'd
+give a good deal if a real poor family'd come here to do for. Since the
+Cadozas went, we ain't known which way to look for poor. Mis' Ricker
+gettin' her fortune so puts her beyond the wolf. An' Peleg Bemus, you
+can't _get_ him to take anything. No, I don't know of anybody real
+decently poor."
+
+"An' nobody sick?" Calliope pressed her wistfully.
+
+"Well, there's Mis' Crawford," admitted Mis' Uppers; "she had a spell o'
+lumbago two weeks ago, but I see her pass the house to-day. Mis' Brady
+was laid up with toothache, too, but the _Daily_ last night said she'd
+had it out. An' Mis' Doctor Helman did have one o' her stomach attacks
+this week, an' Elzabella got out her dyin' dishes an' her dyin' linen
+from the still-room--you know how Mis' Doctor always brings out her nice
+things when she's sick, so't if she should die an' the neighbours come
+in, it'd all be shipshape. But she got better this time an' helped put
+'em back. I declare it's hard to get up anything in the charity line
+here."
+
+Calliope sat smiling a little, and I knew that it was because of her
+secret certainty that "some o' the hunger" would come her way, to be
+fed.
+
+"I can't help thinkin'," she said quietly, "that we'll find somebody.
+An' I tell you what: if we do, can I count on you to help some?"
+
+Mis' Mayor Uppers flushed with quick pleasure.
+
+"Me, Calliope?" she said. And I remembered that they had told me how the
+Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality had been unable
+to tempt Mis' Uppers to a single meeting since the mayor ran away. "Oh,
+but I couldn't though," she said wistfully.
+
+"No need to go to the table if you don't want," Calliope told her. "Just
+bake up somethin' for us an' bring it over. Make a couple o' your cherry
+pies--did you get hold of any cherries to put up this year? Well, a
+couple o' your cherry pies an' a batch o' your nice drop sponge cakes,"
+she directed. "Could you?"
+
+Mis' Mayor Uppers looked up with a kind of light in her eyes.
+
+"Why, yes," she said, "I could, I guess. I'll bake 'em Thanksgivin'
+mornin'. I--I was wonderin' how I'd put in the day."
+
+When we stepped out in the snow again, Calliope's face was shining.
+Sometimes now, when my faith is weak in any good thing, I remember her
+look that November morning. But all that I thought then was how I was
+being entertained that lonely day.
+
+The dear Liberty sisters were next, Lucy and Viny and Libbie Liberty. We
+went to the side door,--there were houses in Friendship whose front
+doors we tacitly understood that we were never expected to use,--and we
+found the sisters down cellar, with shawls over their heads, feeding
+their hens through the cellar window, opening on the glassed-in coop
+under the porch.
+
+In Friendship it is a point of etiquette for a morning caller never to
+interrupt the employment of a hostess. So we obeyed the summons of the
+Liberty sisters to "come right down"; and we sat on a firkin and an
+inverted tub while Calliope told her plan and the hens fought for
+delectable morsels.
+
+"My grief!" said Libbie Liberty, tartly, "where you goin' to _get_ your
+sick an' poor?"
+
+Mis' Viny, balancing on the window ledge to reach for eggs, looked back
+at us.
+
+"Friendship's so comfortable that way," she said, "I don't see how you
+can get up much of anything."
+
+And little Miss Lucy, kneeling on the floor of the cellar to measure
+more feed, said without looking up:--
+
+"You know, since mother died we ain't never done anything for holidays.
+No--we can't seem to want to think about Thanksgiving or Christmas or
+like that."
+
+They all turned their grave lined faces toward us.
+
+"We want to let the holidays just slip by without noticin'," Miss Viny
+told us. "Seems like it hurts less that way."
+
+Libbie Liberty smiled wanly.
+
+"Don't you know," she said, "when you hold your hand still in hot water,
+you don't feel how hot the water really is? But when you move around in
+it some, it begins to burn you. Well, when we let Thanksgiving an'
+Christmas alone, it ain't so bad. But when we start to move around in
+'em--"
+
+Her voice faltered and stopped.
+
+"We miss mother terrible," Miss Lucy said simply.
+
+Calliope put her blue mitten to her mouth, but her eyes she might not
+hide, and they were soft with sympathy.
+
+"I know--I know," she said. "I remember the first Christmas after my
+mother died--I ached like the toothache all over me, an' I couldn't bear
+to open my presents. Nor the next year I couldn't either--I couldn't
+open my presents with any heart. But--" Calliope hesitated, "that second
+year," she said, "I found somethin' I could do. I saw I could fix up
+little things for other folks an' take some comfort in it. Like mother
+would of."
+
+She was silent for a moment, looking thoughtfully at the three lonely
+figures in the dark cellar of their house.
+
+"Your mother," she said abruptly, "stuffed the turkey for a year ago the
+last harvest home."
+
+"Yes," they said.
+
+"Look here," said Calliope; "if I can get some poor folks together,--or
+even _one_ poor folk, or hungry,--will you three come over to my house
+an' stuff the turkey? The way--I can't help thinkin' the way your mother
+would of, if she'd been here. An' then," Calliope went on briskly,
+"could you bring some fresh eggs an' make a pan o' custard over to my
+house? An' mebbe one o' you'd stir up a sunshine cake. You must know how
+to make your mother's sunshine cake?"
+
+There was another silence in the cellar when Calliope had done, and for
+a minute I wondered if, after all, she had not failed, and if the
+bleeding of the three hearts might be so stanched. It was not
+self-reliant Libbie Liberty who spoke first; it was gentle Miss Lucy.
+
+"I guess," she said, "I could, if we all do it. I know mother would of."
+
+"Yes," Miss Viny nodded, "mother would of."
+
+Libbie Liberty stood for a moment with compressed lips.
+
+"It seems like not payin' respect to mother," she began; and then shook
+her head. "It ain't that," she said; "it's only missin' her when we
+begin to step around the kitchen, bakin' up for a holiday."
+
+"I know--I know," Calliope said again. "That's why I said for you to
+come over in my kitchen. You come over there an' stir up the sunshine
+cake, too, an' bake it in my oven, so's we can hev it et hot. Will you
+do that?"
+
+And after a little time they consented. If Calliope found any sick or
+poor, they would do that.
+
+"We ain't gettin' many i-dees for guests," Calliope said, as we reached
+the street, "but we're gettin' helpers, anyway. An' some dinner, too."
+
+Then we went to the house of Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss--called
+so, of course, to distinguish her from the "Other" Holcombs.
+
+"Don't you be shocked at her," Calliope warned me, as we closed Mis'
+Holcomb's gate behind us; "she's dreadful diff'r'nt an' bitter since
+Abigail was married last month. She's got hold o' some kind of a Persian
+book, in a decorated cover, from the City; an' now she says your soul is
+like when you look in a lookin'-glass--that there ain't really nothin'
+there. An' that the world's some wind an' the rest water, an' they ain't
+no God only your own breath--oh, poor Mis' Holcomb!" said Calliope. "I
+guess she ain't rill balanced. But we ought to go to see her. We always
+consult Mis' Holcomb about everything."
+
+Poor Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss! I can see her now in her
+comfortable dining room, where she sat cleaning her old silver, her
+thin, veined hands as fragile as her grandmother's spoons.
+
+"Of course, you don't know," she said, when Calliope had unfolded her
+plans, "how useless it all seems to me. What's the use--I keep sayin' to
+myself now'-days; what's the use? You put so much pains on somethin',
+an' then it goes off an' leaves you. Mebbe it dies, an' everything's all
+wasted. There ain't anything to tie to. It's like lookin' in a glass all
+the while. It's seemin', it ain't bein'. We ain't certain o' nothin' but
+our breath, an' when that goes, what hev you got? What's the use o'
+plannin' Thanksgivin' for anybody?"
+
+"Well, if you're hungry, it's kind o' nice to get fed up," said
+Calliope, crisply. "Don't you know a soul that's hungry, Mame Bliss?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No," she said, "I don't. Nor nobody sick in body."
+
+"Nobody sick in body," Calliope repeated absently.
+
+"Soul-sick an' soul-hungry you can't feed up," Mis' Holcomb added.
+
+"I donno," said Calliope, thoughtfully, "I donno but you can."
+
+"No," Mis' Holcomb went on; "your soul's like yourself in the glass:
+they ain't anything there."
+
+"I donno," Calliope said again; "some mornin's when I wake up with the
+sun shinin' in, I can feel my soul in me just as plain as plain."
+
+Mis' Holcomb sighed.
+
+"Life looks dreadful footless to me," she said.
+
+"Well," said Calliope, "sometimes life _is_ some like hearin'
+firecrackers go off when you don't feel up to shootin' 'em yourself.
+When I'm like that, I always think if I'd go out an' buy a bunch or two,
+an' get somebody to give me a match, I could see more sense to things.
+Look here, Mame Bliss; if I get hold o' any folks to give the dinner
+for, will you help me some?"
+
+"Yes," Mis' Holcomb assented half-heartedly, "I'll help you. I ain't
+nobody much in family, now Abigail's done what she has. They's only
+Eppleby, an' he won't be home Thanksg'vin this year. So I ain't nothin'
+else to do."
+
+"That's the _i_-dee," said Calliope, heartily; "if everything's foolish,
+it's just as foolish doin' nothin' as doin' somethin'. Will you bring
+over a kettleful o' boiled potatoes to my house Thanksgivin' noon? An'
+mash 'em an' whip 'em in my kitchen? I'll hev the milk to put in.
+You--you don't cook as much as some, do you, Mame?"
+
+Did Calliope ask her that purposely? I am almost sure that she did. Mis'
+Holcomb's neck stiffened a little.
+
+"I guess I can cook a thing or two beside mash' potatoes," she said, and
+thought for a minute. "How'd you like a pan o' 'scalloped oysters an'
+some baked macaroni with plenty o' cheese?" she demanded.
+
+"Sounds like it'd go down awful easy," admitted Calliope, smiling. "It's
+just what we need to carry the dinner off full sail," she added
+earnestly.
+
+"Well, I ain't nothin' else to do an' I'll make 'em," Mis' Holcomb
+promised. "Only it beats me who you can find to do for. If you don't get
+anybody, let me know before I order the oysters."
+
+Calliope stood up, her little wrinkled face aglow; and I wondered at her
+confidence.
+
+"You just go ahead an' order your oysters," she said. "That dinner's
+goin' to come off Thanksgivin' noon at twelve o'clock. An' you be there
+to help feed the hungry, Mame."
+
+When we were on the street again, Calliope looked at me with her way of
+shy eagerness.
+
+"Could you hev the dinner up to your house," she asked me, "if I do
+every bit o' the work?"
+
+"Why, Calliope," I said, amazed at her persistence, "have it there, of
+course. But you haven't any guests yet."
+
+She nodded at me through the falling flakes.
+
+"You say you ain't got much to be thankful for," she said, "so I thought
+mebbe you'd put in the time that way. Don't you worry about folks to eat
+the dinner. I'll tell Mis' Holcomb an' the others to come to your
+house--an I'll get the food an' the folks. Don't you worry! An' I'll
+bring my watermelon pickles an' a bowl o' cream for Mis' Holcomb's
+potatoes, an' I'll furnish the turkey--a big one. The rest of us'll get
+the dinner in your kitchen Thanksgivin' mornin'. My!" she said, "seems
+though life's smoothin' out fer me a'ready. Good-by--it's 'most noon."
+
+She hurried up Daphne Street in the snow, and I turned toward my lonely
+house. But I remember that I was planning how I would make my table
+pretty, and how I would add a delicacy or two from the City for this
+strange holiday feast. And I found myself hurrying to look over certain
+long-disused linen and silver, and to see whether my Cloth-o'-Gold rose
+might be counted on to bloom by Thursday noon.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+COVERS FOR SEVEN
+
+
+"We'll set the table for seven folks," said Calliope, at my house on
+Thanksgiving morning.
+
+"Seven!" I echoed. "But where in the world did you ever find seven,
+Calliope?"
+
+"I found 'em," she answered. "I knew I could find hungry folks to do for
+if I tried, an' I found 'em. You'll see. I sha'n't say another word.
+They'll be here by twelve, sharp. Did the turkey come?"
+
+Yes, the turkey had come, and almost as she spoke the dear Liberty
+sisters arrived to dress and stuff it, and to make ready the pan of
+custard, and to "stir up" the sunshine cake. I could guess how the
+pleasant bustle in my kitchen would hurt them by its holiday air, and I
+carried them off to see my Cloth-o'-Gold rose which had opened in the
+night, to the very crimson heart of it. And I told them of the seven
+guests whom, after all, Calliope had actually contrived to marshal to
+her dinner. And in the midst of our almost gay speculation on this, they
+went at their share of the task.
+
+The three moved about their offices gravely at first, Libbie Liberty
+keeping her back to us as she worked, Miss Viny scrupulously intent on
+the delicate clatter of the egg-beater, Miss Lucy with eyes downcast on
+the sage she rolled. I noted how Calliope made little excuses to pass
+near each of them, with now a touch of the hand and now a pat on a
+shoulder, and all the while she talked briskly of ways and means and
+recipes, and should there be onions in the dressing or should there not
+be? We took a vote on this and were about to chop the onions in when
+Mis' Holcomb's little maid arrived at my kitchen door with a bowl of
+oysters which Mis' Holcomb had had left from the 'scallop, an' wouldn't
+we like 'em in the stuffin'? Roast turkey stuffed with oysters! I saw
+Libbie Liberty's eyes brighten so delightedly that I brought out a jar
+of seedless raisins and another of preserved cherries to add to the
+custard, and then a bag of sweet almonds to be blanched and split for
+the cake o' sunshine. Surely, one of us said, the seven guests could be
+preparing for their Thanksgiving dinner with no more zest than we were
+putting into that dinner for their sakes.
+
+"Seven guests!" we said over and again. "Calliope, how did you do it?
+When everybody says there's nobody in Friendship that's either sick or
+poor?"
+
+"Nobody sick, nobody poor!" Calliope exclaimed, piling a dish with
+watermelon pickles. "Land, you might think that was the town motto.
+Well, the town don't know everything. Don't you ask me so many
+questions."
+
+Before eleven o'clock Mis' Mayor Uppers tapped at my back door, with two
+deep-dish cherry pies in a basket, and a row of her delicate, feathery
+sponge cakes and a jar of pineapple and pie-plant preserves "to chink
+in." She drew a deep breath and stood looking about the kitchen.
+
+"Throw off your things an' help, Mis' Uppers," Calliope admonished her,
+one hand on the cellar door. "I'm just goin' down for some sweet
+potatoes Mis' Holcomb sent over this morning, an' you might get 'em
+ready, if you will. We ain't goin' to let you off now, spite of what
+you've done for us."
+
+So Mis' Mayor Uppers hung up her shawl and washed the sweet potatoes.
+And my kitchen was fragrant with spices and flavourings and an odorous
+oven, and there was no end of savoury business to be at. I found myself
+glad of the interest of these others in the day and glad of the stirring
+in my lonely house. Even if their bustle could not lessen my own
+loneliness, it was pleasant, I said to myself, to see them quicken with
+interest; and the whole affair entertained my infinite leisure. After
+all, I was not required to be thankful. I merely loaned my house, cosey
+in its glittering drifts of turkey feathers, and the day was no more and
+no less to me than before, though I own that I did feel more than an
+amused interest in Calliope's guests. Whom, in Friendship, had she found
+"to do for," I detected myself speculating with real interest as in the
+dining room, with one and another to help me, I made ready my table. My
+prettiest dishes and silver, the Cloth-o'-Gold rose, and my
+yellow-shaded candles made little auxiliary welcomes. Whoever Calliope's
+guests were, we would do them honour and give them the best we had. And
+in the midst of all came from the City the box with my gift of hothouse
+fruit and a rosebud for every plate.
+
+"Calliope!" I cried, as I went back to the kitchen, "Calliope, it's
+nearly twelve now. Tell us who the guests are, or we won't finish
+dinner!"
+
+Calliope laughed and shook her head and opened the door for Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, who entered, followed by her little maid,
+both laden with good things.
+
+"I prepared for seven," Mis' Holcomb said. "That was the word you sent
+me--but where you got your seven sick an' poor in Friendship beats me.
+I'll stay an' help for a while--but to me it all seems like so much
+monkey work."
+
+We worked with a will that last half-hour, and the spirit of the kitchen
+came upon them all. I watched them, amused and pleased at Mis' Mayor
+Uppers's flushed anxiety over the sweet potatoes, at Libbie Liberty
+furiously basting the turkey, and at Miss Lucy exclaiming with delight
+as she unwrapped the rosebuds from their moss. But I think that Mis'
+Holcomb pleased me most, for with the utensils of housewifery in her
+hands she seemed utterly to have forgotten that there is no use in
+anything at all. This was not wonderful in the presence of such a
+feathery cream of mashed potatoes and such aromatic coffee as she made.
+_There_ was something to tie to. Those were real, at any rate, and
+beyond all seeming.
+
+Just before twelve Calliope caught off her apron and pulled down her
+sleeves.
+
+"Now," she said, "I'm going to welcome the guests. I can--can't I?" she
+begged me. "Everything's all ready but putting on. I won't need to come
+out here again; when I ring the bell on the sideboard, dish it up an'
+bring it in, all together--turkey ahead an' vegetables followin'. Mis'
+Holcomb, you help 'em, won't you? An' then you can leave if you want.
+Talk about an old-fashion' Thanksgivin'. My!"
+
+"Who _has_ she got?" Libbie Liberty burst out, basting the turkey. "I
+declare, I'm nervous as a witch, I'm so curious!"
+
+And then the clock struck twelve, and a minute after we heard Calliope
+tinkle a silvery summons on the call-bell.
+
+I remember that it was Mis' Holcomb herself--to whom nothing
+mattered--who rather lost her head as we served our feast, and who was
+about putting in dishes both her oysters and her macaroni instead of
+carrying in the fair, brown, smoking bake pans. But at last we were
+ready--Mis' Holcomb at our head with the turkey, the others following
+with both hands filled, and I with the coffee-pot. As they gave the
+signal to start, something--it may have been the mystery before us, or
+the good things about us, or the mere look of the Thanksgiving snow on
+the window-sills--seemed to catch at the hearts of them all, and they
+laughed a little, almost joyously, those five for whom joy had seemed
+done, and I found myself laughing too.
+
+So we six filed into the dining room to serve whomever Calliope had
+found "to do for." I wonder that I had not guessed before. There stood
+Calliope at the foot of the table, with its lighted candles and its
+Cloth-o'-Gold rose, and the other six chairs were quite vacant.
+
+"Sit down!" Calliope cried to us, with tears and laughter in her voice.
+"Sit down, all six of you. Don't you see? Didn't you know? Ain't we
+soul-sick an' soul-hungry, all of us? An' I tell you, this is goin' to
+do our souls good--an' our stomachs too!"
+
+Nobody dropped anything, even in the flood of our amazement. We managed
+to get our savoury burden on the table, and some way we found ourselves
+in the chairs--I at the head of my table where Calliope led me. And we
+all talked at once, exclaiming and questioning, with sudden thanksgiving
+in our hearts that in the world such things may be.
+
+"I was hungry an' sick," Calliope was telling, "for an old-fashion'
+Thanksgivin'--or anything that'd smooth life out some. But I says to
+myself, 'It looks like God had afflicted us by not givin' us anybody to
+do for.' An' then I started out to find some poor an' some sick--an'
+each one o' you knows what I found. An' I ask' myself before I got home
+that day, 'Why not them an' me?' There's lots o' kinds o' things to do
+on Thanksgivin' Day. Are you ever goin' to forgive me?"
+
+I think that we all answered at once. But what we all meant was what
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said, as she sat flushed and smiling
+behind the coffee-cups:--
+
+"I declare, I feel something like I ain't felt since I don't know when!"
+
+And Calliope nodded at her.
+
+"I guess that's your soul, Mame Bliss," she said. "You can always feel
+it if you go to work an' act as if you got one. I'll take my coffee
+clear."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE SHADOW OF GOOD THINGS TO COME
+
+
+The Friendship accommodation reaches the village from the City at six
+o'clock at night, and we call the train the Dick Dasher, because Dick
+Dasher is its engineer. We "come out on the Dick Dasher" and we "go in
+on the Through"; but the Through is a kind of institution, like
+marriage, while the Dick Dasher is a thing more intimate, like one's
+wedding. It was one winter night on the latter that I hardly heeded what
+I overheard.
+
+"The Lord will provide, Delia," Doctor June was saying.
+
+"I ain't sure," came a piping answer, "as they is any Lord. An' don't
+you tell anybody 'bout seein' me on this train. I'm goin' on
+through--west."
+
+    "Thy footfall is a silver thing,
+    West----west!"
+
+I said over to the beat of the wheels, but the words that I said over
+were more insistent than the words that I heard. I was watching the eyes
+of a motor-car carrying threads of streaming light, moving near the
+track, swifter than the train. It belonged, as I divined, to the
+Proudfits of Friendship, and it was carrying Madame Proudfit and her
+daughter Clementina, after a day of shopping and visiting in the town.
+And when I saw them returning home in this airy fashion,--as if they
+were the soul and I in the stuffy Dick Dasher were the body,--I renewed
+a certain distaste for them, since in their lives these Proudfits seemed
+goblin-like, with no interest in any save their own picturesque
+flittings. But while I shrugged at myself for judging them and held
+firmly to my own opinion, as one will do, I was conscious all the time
+of the gray minister in the aisle of the rocking coach, holding clasped
+in both hands his big carpet-bag without handles. Over it I saw him
+looking down in grieved consternation at the little woman huddled in the
+rush seat.
+
+"No Lord!" he said, "no Lord! Why, Delia More! You might as well say
+there ain't no life in your own bones."
+
+"So they isn't," she answered him grimly. "They keep on a-goin' just to
+spite me."
+
+"Delia More--_De_-lia More," the wheels beat out, and it was as if I had
+heard the name often. Already I had noticed the woman. She had a kind of
+youth, like that of Calliope, who had journeyed in town on the Through
+that morning and who had somewhat mysteriously asked me not to say that
+she had gone away. But Calliope's persistent youthfulness gives her a
+claim upon one, while on this woman whom Doctor June perplexedly
+regarded, her stifled youth imposed a forlorn aloofness, made the more
+pathetic by her prettiness.
+
+No one but the doctor himself was preparing to leave the train at
+Friendship. He balanced in the aisle alone, while the few occupants of
+the car sat without speaking--men dozing, children padding on the panes,
+a woman twisting her thin hair tight and high. Doctor June looked at
+those nearest to be sure of their tired self-absorption, but as for me,
+who sat very near, I think he had long ago decided that I kept my own
+thoughts and no others, since sometimes I had forgotten to give him back
+a greeting. So it was in a fancied security which I was loath to be
+violating, that he opened his great carpet-bag and took out a book to
+lay on the girl's knee.
+
+"Open it," he commanded her.
+
+I saw the contour of her face tightened by her swiftly set lips as she
+complied.
+
+"Point your finger," he went on peremptorily. She must have obeyed, for
+in a kind of unwilling eagerness she bent over the page, and the doctor
+stooped, and together in the blurring light of the kerosene lamp in the
+roof of the coach they made out something.
+
+"... the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very
+image of the things ..." I unwillingly caught, and yet not wholly
+unwillingly either. And though I watched, as if much depended upon it,
+the great motor-car of the Proudfits vanishing before us into the dark,
+I could not forbear to glance at the doctor, who was nodding, his kind
+face quickening. But the girl lifted her eyes and laughed with
+deliberate scepticism.
+
+"I don't take any stock," she said, and within me it was as if something
+answered to her bitterness.
+
+"No--no. Mebbe not," Doctor June commented with perfect cheerfulness.
+"Some folks take fresh air, and some folks like to stay shut up tight.
+But--'the shadow of good things to come.' I'd take that much stock if I
+was you, Delia."
+
+As he laid the book back in his bag, the train was jolting across the
+switches beside the gas house, and the lights of Friendship were all
+about the track.
+
+"Why don't you get off?" he reiterated, in his tone a descending scale
+of simple hospitality. "Come to our house and stop a spell. Come for
+tea," he added; "I happen to know we're goin' to hev hot griddle-cakes
+an' sausage gravy."
+
+She shook her head sharply and in silence.
+
+Doctor June stood for a moment meditatively looking down at her.
+
+"There's a friend of yours at our house to-day, for all day," he
+observed.
+
+"I ain't any friends," replied the girl, obstinately, "without you mean
+_use'_ to be. An' I don't know if I had then, either."
+
+"Yes. Yes, you have, Delia," said Doctor June, kindly. "He was asking
+about you last time he was here--kind of indirect."
+
+"_Who?_" she demanded, but it was as if something within her wrung the
+question from her against her will.
+
+"Abel Halsey," Doctor June told her, "Abel Halsey. Remember him?"
+
+Instead of answering she looked out the window at the Friendship Depot
+platform, and:--
+
+"Ain't he a big minister in the City?" I barely heard her ask.
+
+"No," said Doctor June; "dear me, no. Abel's still gypsyin' it off in
+the hills. I expect he's out there by the depot with the busses now,
+come to meet me in his buggy. Better let him take us all home to
+griddle-cakes, Delia?" he pressed her wistfully.
+
+"I couldn't," she said briefly. And, as he put out his hand silently,
+"Don't you let _any_body know't you saw me!" she charged him again.
+
+When he was gone, and the train was slackening in the station, she moved
+close to the window. If I had been lonely.... I must have caught a
+certain cheer in the look of the station and in the magnificent, cosmic
+leisure of the idlers: in Photographer Jimmy Sturgis, in his leather
+coat, with one eye shut, stamping a foot and waiting for the mail-bag;
+in old Tillie, known up and down the world for her waffles, and
+perpetually peering out between shelves of plants and wax fruit set
+across the window of the "eating-house"; in Peleg Bemus, wood-cutter,
+stumping about the platform on his wooden leg, wearing modestly the
+prestige he had won by his flute-playing and by his advantage of
+New York experience--"a janitor in the far east, he was," Timothy
+Toplady had once told me; in Timothy Toplady himself, who always
+meets the trains, but for no reason unless to say an amazed and
+reproachful--"Blisterin' Benson! not a soul wants off here"; and in Abel
+Halsey, that itinerant preacher, of whom Doctor June had spoken. Abel
+was a man of grace, Bible-taught, passioning for service, but within him
+his gentle soul burned to travel, and his white horse, Major Mary, and
+his road wagon and his route to the door of many a country church were
+the sole satisfactions of his wanderlust; and next to these was his
+delight to be at a railway station when any train arrived, savouring the
+moment of some silent familiarity with distance. I delighted in them
+all, and that night, as I looked, I wondered how it would seem to me if
+I were returning to it after many years; and I could imagine how my
+heart would ache.
+
+As the train moved on, the girl whom Doctor June had called Delia More
+turned her head, manifestly to follow for a little way each vanishing
+light and figure; and as the conductor came through the car and she
+spoke to him, I saw that she was in a tingle of excitement.
+
+"You sure," she asked, "that you stop to the canal draw?"
+
+"Uh?" said the conductor, and when he comprehended, "Every time," he
+said, "every time. You be ready when she whistles." He hesitated,
+manifestly in some curiosity. "They ain't a house in a mile f'om there,
+though," he told her.
+
+"I know that," she gave back crisply.
+
+When I heard her speaking of the canal draw, I found myself wondering;
+for a woman is not above wonder. There, where the trains stopped just
+perceptibly I myself was wont to leave them for the sake of the mile
+walk on the quiet highroad to my house. That, too, though it chanced to
+be night, for I am not afraid. But I wondered the more because other
+women do fear, and also because mine was the only house between the
+canal draw and Friendship Village; and manifestly the shortest way to
+reach the village would have been to alight at the station. But I held
+my peace, for the affairs of others should be to those others an
+efficient disguise; and moreover, the greater part of one's wonder is
+wont to come to naught.
+
+Yet, as I seemed to follow this woman out upon the snow and the train
+kept impersonally on across the meadows, I could not but see that her
+bags were many and looked heavy, and twice she set them down to
+rearrange. I think a ghost of the road could have done no less than ask
+to help her. And I did this with an abruptness of which I am unwilling
+master, though indeed I had no need to assume impatience, for I saw that
+my quiet walk was spoiled.
+
+When I spoke to her, she started and shrank away; but there was an
+austerity in the lonely white road and in the country silence which must
+have chilled a woman like her; and her bags were many and seemed heavy.
+
+"Much obliged to you," she said indistinctly. "I'd just as li've you
+should take the basket, if you want."
+
+So I lifted the basket and trudged beside her, hoping very much that she
+would not talk. For though for my own comfort I would walk far to avoid
+treading on a nest, or a worm, or a magenta flower (and I loathe
+magenta), yet I am often blameful enough to wound through the sheerest
+bungling those who talk to me when I would rather be silent.
+
+The night was one clinging to the way of Autumn, and as yet with no
+Winter hinting. The air was mild and dry, and the sky was starry. I am
+not ashamed that on a quiet highroad on a starry night I love to be
+silent, and even to forget concerns of my own which seem pressing in the
+publicity of the sun; but I am ashamed, I own, to have been called to
+myself that night by a little choking breath of haste.
+
+"I can't go--so fast," my companion said humbly; "you might jest--set
+the basket down anywheres. I can--"
+
+But I think that she can hardly have heard my apology, for she stood
+where she had halted, staring away from me. We were opposite the
+cemetery lying in its fence of field stone and whitewashed rails.
+
+"O my soul, my soul!" I heard her say. "I'd forgot the graveyard, or I
+couldn't never 'a' come this way."
+
+At that she went on, her feet quickening, as I thought, without her
+will; and she kept her face turned to me, so that it should be away from
+that whitewashed fence. And now because of the wound she had shown me, I
+walked a little apart in the middle of the road for my attempt at
+sympathy. So we came to the summit of the hill, and there the dark
+suddenly yielded up the distance. The lamps of the village began to
+signal, lights dotted the fields and gathered in a cosey blur in the
+valley, and half a mile to westward the headlight that marked the big
+Toplady barn and the little Toplady house shone out as if some one over
+there were saying something.
+
+"You live here in Friendship?" the girl demanded abruptly.
+
+I could show her my house a little way before us.
+
+"Ever go inside the graveyard?" she asked.
+
+Sometimes I do go there, and at that answer she walked nearer to me and
+spoke eagerly.
+
+"Air all the tombstones standin' up straight, do you know?" she said.
+"Hev any o' their headstones fell down on 'em?"
+
+This I could answer too, definitely enough; for Friendship Cemetery, by
+the vigilance of the Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality, is
+kept in no less scrupulous order than the Friendship parlours.
+
+"Well, that's a relief," she said; "I couldn't get it out o' my head."
+Then, because she seemed of those on whom silence lays a certain
+imaginary demand, "My mother an' father an' sister's buried there," she
+explained. "They're in there. They all died when I was gone. An' I got
+the notion that their headstones had tipped over on to 'em. Or Aunt
+Cornie More's, maybe."
+
+Aunt Cornie More. I knew that name, for they had told me about her in
+Friendship, so that her name, and that of the Oldmoxons, in whose former
+house I lived, and many others were like folk whom one passes often and
+remembers. I had been told how Aunt Cornie More had made her own shroud
+from her crocheted parlour curtains, lest these fall to a later wife of
+her octogenarian husband; and how as she lay in her coffin the curtain's
+shell-stitch parrot "come right acrost her chest." This woman beside me
+had called her "Aunt" Cornie More. And then I remembered the name which
+Doctor June had spoken on the train and the wheels had measured.
+
+"Delia More!" I said, involuntarily, and regretted it as soon as I had
+spoken. But, indeed, it was as if some legend woman of the place walked
+suddenly beside me, like the quick.
+
+Who in Friendship had not heard the name, and who, save one who keeps
+her own thoughts and forgets to give back greeting, would not on the
+instant have remembered it? Delia More's stepsister, Jennie Crapwell,
+had been betrothed to a carpenter of Friendship, and he was at work on
+their house when, a month before the wedding-day, Delia and that young
+carpenter had "run away." Who in Friendship could not tell that story?
+But before I had made an end of murmuring something--
+
+"I might 'a' known they hadn't done talkin' yet," Delia More said
+bitterly. "They say it was like that when Calliope Marsh's beau run off
+with somebody else,--for ten years the town et it for cake. Well, they
+ain't any of 'em goin' to get a look at me. I don't give anybody the
+chance to show me the cold shoulder. You can tell 'em I was here if you
+want. They can scare the children with it."
+
+"I won't tell," I said.
+
+She looked at me.
+
+"Well, I can't help it if you do," she returned. "I'm glad enough to
+speak to somebody, gettin' back so. It's fourteen year. An' I was fair
+body-sick to see the place again."
+
+At this she asked about Friendship folk, and I answered as best I might,
+though of what she inquired I knew little, and what I did know was
+footless enough for human comfort. As to the Topladys, for example, I
+had no knowledge of that one who had earned his money in bricks and had
+later married a "foreigner"; but I knew Mis' Amanda, that she had hands
+dimpled like a baby giant's, and that she carried a blue parasol all
+winter to keep the sun from her eyes. I could not tell whether Liddy
+Ember had been able to afford skilled treatment for her poor, queer,
+pretty little sister, but I knew that Ellen Ember, with her crown of
+bright hair, went about Friendship streets singing aloud, and leaping up
+to catch at the low branches of the curb elms, and that she was as
+picturesque as a beautiful grotesque on a page of sober text. I had not
+learned where the Oldmoxons had moved, but I knew of them that they had
+left me a huge fireplace in every room of my house. I could have
+repeated little about Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, save that her
+black week-day cloak was lined with wine broadcloth, and that she wore
+it wrong side outward for "best." And of whether Abigail Arnold's
+children had turned out well or ill, I was profoundly ignorant; but I
+remembered that she had caused a loaf of bread to be carved on the
+monument of her husband, the home baker. And so on. But these were not
+matters of which I could talk to the hungry woman beside me.
+
+Then, to my amazement, when I mentioned the Proudfits,--those great and
+rich Proudfits whose motor had raced by our train,--Delia More would
+have none of them.
+
+"I do' want to hear about 'em," she said. "I know about 'em. I use' to
+play with Miss Clementina an' Miss Linda when we were little things. I
+use' to live with the Proudfits then, an' go to school. They were good
+to me--time an' time again they've told me their home was mine, too. But
+_now_--it wouldn't be the same. I know 'em. They always were cruel proud
+an' cruel pious. Mis' Proudfit, she use' to set up goodness an' worship
+it like a little god."
+
+This judgment startled me, and yet to its import I secretly assented.
+For though I barely had their acquaintance, Madame Proudfit and her
+daughter Clementina were thorns to me too, so that I had had no pleasure
+in giving them back their greetings. Perhaps it was that they alone in
+Friendship sounded for me a note of other days--but whatever it was,
+they were thorns to me; and I remember how, once more, something within
+me seemed to answer to this woman's bitterness.
+
+None the less, since of the Proudfits I could give her some fragment of
+account, I did so, to forge for Delia More what link I might between her
+present and her past. And it was knowledge which all Friendship shared.
+
+"You knew," I said, "that Miss Linda does not come here now, because she
+married against the wish of her family."
+
+Delia More looked up at me. But though I saw that now she softened
+somewhat, I had no relish for giving to her anything of the sad romance
+of beautiful Linda Proudfit (as they said) and the poor young clerk of
+nobody knew where, who, a dozen years before, had fled away together
+"into the storm."
+
+"Then there is Calliope Marsh," I ventured, to turn my thought not less
+than hers. But Delia More did not answer, and at this I was puzzled, for
+I think that Calliope has lived in Friendship since the beginning, when
+she and Liddy Ember were partners in their little "modiste" shop. "You
+will recall Calliope?" I pressed the matter.
+
+And at that, "Yes. Oh, yes," she said, and would say no more. And
+because Calliope had forbidden me, I did not mention that I had seen her
+on the train that morning, and that she was absent from Friendship, but
+it grieved me that this stranger should be indifferent to anything about
+her.
+
+I would have passed my own gate, because the basket was heavy and
+because I knew that the girl was crying. But she remembered how I had
+shown her my house, and there she detained me and caught at her basket,
+in haste to be gone. So I, who feel upon me a weak necessity to do a
+bidding, watched her go down the still road; yet I could not let her go
+away quite like that, and before I had meant to do so I called to her.
+
+"Delia More!" I said--as familiarly as if she had been some other
+expression of myself.
+
+I saw her stop, but I did not go forward. I lifted my voice a little,
+for by the distance between us I was less ill at ease than I am in the
+usual personalities of comfort.
+
+"I heard that on the train," I said then awkwardly,--and I was the more
+awkward that I was not persuaded of any reason in my words,--"that about
+'the shadow of good things to come.' Maybe it meant something."
+
+Delia More's thin, high-pitched voice came back to me, expressing all my
+unvoiced doubt.
+
+"Tisn't like," she said. "I never take any stock."
+
+Then I looked at my dark house in a kind of consternation lest it had
+heard me trying to give comfort, for within those walls I had sometimes
+spoken almost as this woman spoke. But it occurred to me that even the
+drowned should throw immaterial ropes to any who struggle in dark
+waters.
+
+It will not be necessary, I hope, to say that I followed Delia More that
+night from no faintest wish to know what might happen to her. For I have
+a weak desire for peace of mind, and I would rather have forgotten her
+story. I followed because the quiet highroad was so profoundly lonely,
+and the country silence is ambiguous, and I cannot bear to think of a
+woman abroad alone in the dark. I cannot bear to think of myself abroad
+alone in the dark, though I go quite without fear; but certain other
+women have fear, and this one was crying. I kept well behind her, and as
+soon as she reached the village, I meant to lose sight of her and
+return, for a village is guardian enough. But when we had passed the
+bleak meadow of the slaughter-house and the wide, wet-smelling wood yard
+and had reached the first cottage on Daphne Street, I was startled to
+see her unlatch that cottage gate and enter the yard. And I was suddenly
+sadly apprehensive, for the cottage was the home of Calliope, who that
+morning had left the village and had asked me to say nothing about it.
+What if this poor creature had fled to Calliope for sanctuary, only to
+find locked doors? So I waited in the shadow of a warehouse like a
+bandit; and I raged at the thought of having possibly to harbour this
+stranger among the books of my quiet home.
+
+Then suddenly I saw a light shining brightly in Calliope Marsh's
+cottage, and some one wearing a hat came swiftly and drew down a shade.
+On the instant the matter was clear to me, who have a genius for certain
+ways of a busybody. Calliope must have known that this poor girl was
+coming; Calliope's warning to me to keep silence must have been a way of
+protection to her. And here to Calliope's cottage Delia More had come
+creeping, whom all Friendship would hold in righteous distaste. But I
+alone of all Friendship knew that she was here, "fair body-sick to see
+the place again."
+
+I turned back to the highroad, pretending great wrath that I should be
+so keen over the doings of any, and that my walk should have been
+spoiled because of her. But there are times when wrath is difficult. And
+do what I would, there came some singing in my blood, and like a
+busybody, I found myself standing still in the road fashioning a plan.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+STOCK
+
+
+It was as if Time and the Hour were my allies, for at once I was aware
+of a cutter driven smartly from the village, and I recognized the
+Topladys' sorrel. At my signal the cutter drew up beside me, and it held
+Timothy Toplady on his way home from the station. I asked him what
+o'clock it was, and when he had found a match to light his huge silver
+watch--
+
+"Blisterin' Benson!" he said ruefully, "it's ha'-past six, an' me late
+with the chores again. I'm hauled an' sawed if it hain't _always_ ha'
+past six. They don't seem to be no times in between."
+
+"Mr. Toplady," I said boldly, "let us get up a surprise party on
+Calliope Marsh--you and Mrs. Toplady and me."
+
+I had learned that he was loath to oppose a suggestion and that he
+always preferred to agree, but I had not hoped for enthusiasm.
+
+"That's the _i_-dea," said Timothy, heartily. "I do admire a surprise.
+But what I think is this," he added, "when'll we hev it?"
+
+"To-night," I proposed boldly.
+
+"Whew!" Timothy whistled. "Sudden for General--eh? Suits me--suits me.
+Better drive out home with me an' break it to Amanda," he cried.
+
+I smiled as I sat beside him, noting that his enthusiasm was very like
+relief. For if any one was present, he well knew that his masterful
+Amanda would say nothing of his tardiness. And so it was, for as we
+entered the kitchen she entirely overlooked her husband in her amazement
+at seeing me.
+
+"Forevermore!" that great Amanda said, turning from her stove of savoury
+skillets; "ain't you the stranger? Timothy says only to-day, speakin' o'
+you, 'She ain't ben here for a week,' s'e. 'Week!' s'I; 'it's goin' on
+_two_.' I'm a great hand to keep track. Throw off your things."
+
+At that I began to feel her influence. Mis' Toplady is so huge and
+capable that her mere presence will modify my judgments; and instantly I
+fell wondering if I was not, after all, come on a fool's errand. She is
+like Athena. For I can think about Athena well enough, but if I were
+really to stand before her, I am certain that the project in which I
+implored her help would be sunk in my sudden sense of Olympus.
+
+Not the less, I made my somewhat remarkable proposal with some show of
+assurance, and I should have counted on Mis' Toplady's sympathy, which
+ripens at less than a sigh. In Friendship you but mention a possible
+charity, visit, or new church carpet, and the enthusiasm will react on
+the possibility, and the thing be done. It is the spirit of the West,
+the pioneer blood in the veins of her children, expressing itself (since
+there are of late no forests to conquer) in terms of love of any
+initiative. We love a project as an older world would approve the
+civilizing reasons for that project. Mis' Amanda plunged into the
+processes of the party much as she would have felled a tree. It warmed
+my heart to hear her.
+
+"We'd ought to hev a hot supper--what victuals'll we take?" she said.
+"Land, yes, oysters, o' course, an' we'll all chip in an' take
+plenty-enough crackers. We might as well carry dishes from here, so's to
+be sure an' hev what we want to use. At Mis' Doctor Helman's su'prise we
+run 'way short o' spoons, an' Elder Woodruff finally went out in the
+hall an' drank his broth, an' hid his bowl in the entry. Mis' Helman
+found it, an' knew it by the nick. That reminds me--who'll we ask?"
+
+"Mrs. Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss," said I, promptly, "and Abigail
+Arnold, and Doctor June, and Abel Halsey."
+
+"An' the Proudfits," Mis' Amanda went on.
+
+"Suppose," said I, with high courage, "that we do not ask the Proudfits
+at all?"
+
+Mis' Amanda threw up her giant hands.
+
+"Not ask the Proudfits?" she said. "Why, my land a' livin', the minister
+hardly has church in the church without the Proudfits get an invite."
+
+"Calliope mends their fine lace for them," I reminded her, feeling
+guilty. "They wouldn't care to come, Mrs. Amanda, would they?"
+
+But of course I was remembering Delia More's "But _now_--I know 'em.
+They worship goodness like a little god." And that night I was not
+minded to have them about, for it might befall that it would be
+necessary to understand other things as well.
+
+"Miss Linda would 'a' cared to," said Mis' Amanda, thoughtfully, "but I
+donno, myself, about Mis' Proudfit an' Miss Clementina--for sure."
+
+So bold an innovation as the Proudfits' omission, however, moved Timothy
+Toplady to doubt.
+
+"They might not come," he said, frowning and looking sidewise, "but what
+I think is this, will they like bein' left out?"
+
+His masterful Amanda instantly took the other side.
+
+"Land, Timothy!" she said, "you _be_ one!"
+
+I have heard her say that to him again and again, and always in a tone
+so skilfully admiring that he looked almost gratified. And we mentioned
+the Proudfits no more.
+
+So Calliope Marsh's surprise party came about. When supper was over, the
+table was "left setting," while pickles and cookies and "conserve" were
+packed in baskets; and presently the Topladys and I were stealing about
+the village inviting to festivity. I love to remember how swiftly Daphne
+Street took on an air of the untoward. Kitchens were left dark,
+unaccustomed lights flashed in upper chambers, some went scurrying for
+oysters before the post-office store should be closed, and some spread
+the news, eager to share in the holiday importance. I love to remember
+our certainty, so reasonably established, that they would all join us as
+infallibly as children will join in jollity. No one refused, no one
+hesitated; and when, at eight o'clock, the Topladys and I reached the
+rendezvous in the Engine-House entry, every one was there before
+us--save only, of course, the Proudfits.
+
+"Where's the Proudfits? Ain't we goin' to wait for the Proudfits?" asked
+more than one; and some one had seen the Proudfit motor come flashing
+through the town from the Plank Road, empty. At all of which I kept a
+guilty silence; and I had by then not a little guilt to bear, since I
+was becoming every moment more doubtful of my undertaking. For at heart
+these people are the kindly of earth, and yet they are prone, as Delia
+More had said of the Proudfits, "to worship goodness like a little god,"
+nor do they commonly broaden their allegiance without distinguished
+precedent. And how were we to secure this?
+
+Every one was there--the little gray Doctor June, flitting about as
+quietly as a moth, and all those of whom Delia More had asked me: Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, wearing her cloak wine broadcloth side out
+to honour the occasion; Abigail Arnold, with a huge basket of
+gingerbread and jumbles from her home bakery; Photographer Jimmy
+Sturgis, and even Mis' Sturgis, in a faint aroma of caraway which she
+nibbled incessantly; Liddy Ember, and poor Ellen, wearing her
+magnificent hair like a coronet, and standing wistfully about, with her
+hand, palm outward, persistently covering her mouth; and Abel Halsey,
+who was to leave at midnight for a lonely cross-country ride into the
+hills. And as they stood, gossiping and eager, the women bird-observant
+of one another's toilettes, I own myself to have felt like an alien
+among them, remembering how I alone knew that Calliope Marsh was not
+even in the village.
+
+Very softly we lifted the latch of Calliope's gate and trooped in her
+little dark yard.
+
+"Blisterin' Benson!" Timothy Toplady whispered, "ef the house hain't
+pocket-dark, front _and_ back. What ef she's went in the country?"
+
+"Sh--h!" whispered his great Amanda, masterfully. "It's the shades down.
+I'm nervous as a witch. My land! if the front door ain't open a foot!"
+
+Though there are no locked doors in Friendship, I had feared that
+Calliope's cottage door would now be barred, and that Delia More would
+answer no formal summons. At sight of the unguarded entrance I had a
+sick fear that she had in some way heard of our coming and fled away,
+leaving the door ajar in her haste. But when we had footed softly across
+the porch and peered in the dark passage, we saw at its farther end a
+crack of light.
+
+"Might as well step ri' down to the dinin' room--that's where she sets,"
+Mis' Amanda said in her whisper, which is gigantic too.
+
+The passage smelled of the oilcloth on the floor and of a rubber
+waterproof which I brushed. And I shrank back beside the waterproof and
+let the others go on. For, after all, to that woman within I was a
+stranger, and these were her friends of old time. So it was Mis' Amanda
+who opened the dining-room door.
+
+I could see that the room was cheery with a red-shaded hanging-lamp, and
+shelves of plants, and a glowing fire in the great range. A table was
+covered with red cotton and laid with dishes. Also, there was the
+fragrance of toast, so that one wished to enter. And in a rocking-chair
+sat Delia More. She stared up in a kind of terror at the open door, and
+then turned shrinkingly to some one who sat beside her. But at that one
+beside her I looked and looked again, for her rich fur cloak had fallen
+where she had let it fall; and there, sitting with Delia More's hand in
+hers, was that great Madame Proudfit of the Proudfit estate.
+
+"For the land!" Mis' Amanda said. "For the land...."
+
+But she was not looking at Madame Proudfit. And hardly seeing her, as I
+could guess, that great Mis' Amanda went forward, holding out her arms.
+
+"Delia More!" she cried, "Delia More!"
+
+I saw Abel Halsey's pale, luminous face as he pushed past Timothy and
+strode within and crossed to her; and I remember Abigail Arnold and Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and how they followed Abel with little
+sharp cries which must have been a kind of music. And with them went
+Ellen Ember, as if, secretly, she were wiser than we knew. And while the
+others blocked the passage or crowded into the room, according to the
+nature which was theirs, some one came from the cellarway and paused,
+smiling, on the threshold. And it was Miss Clementina Proudfit, with
+eggs in her hands.
+
+"Wait!" I heard Delia's sharp, piping voice then; "wait!"
+
+She rose, one thin little hand pressed tensely along her cheek. But the
+other hand Madame Proudfit held in both her own as she, too, rose beside
+her. And with them Abel stood, facing the rest.
+
+"O, Abel Halsey--Abel Halsey ..." Delia said, "an' Mame Bliss--nor you,
+Abigail, don't you, any of you, come in yet. I got somethin' to tell
+you."
+
+"But shake hands first, Delia," cried Abel Halsey, and Delia looked up
+at him, in her face a sudden, incredulous thankfulness which flushed it,
+brow and cheek, and won it to a way of beauty. But she did not give him
+her hand. And before she could speak again Miss Clementina put down the
+eggs, and, with some little stir of silk, she took a step or two steps
+toward us.
+
+"Ah," she said, "let us not wait for anything--it has been so long since
+we have met! Delia has just told mother and me all about these
+years--and you don't know how splendid we think she has been and how
+brave in great trouble. Come in, everybody, and let's make her welcome
+home!"
+
+Madame Proudfit said nothing, but she nodded and smiled at Delia More,
+and it seemed to me that in the Proudfits' way with Delia, their
+beautiful Linda had won a kind of presence with them after all. And in
+the moment's hush the toast, propped on a fork before the coals in the
+range, suddenly blazed up in blue flame at the crust.
+
+"Somebody save the toast!" cried Clementina and smiled very brightly.
+
+They needed no more. Timothy Toplady sprang at the toast, and already
+Abel Halsey and Doctor June were shaking Delia's hand; and Mis' Amanda,
+throwing her shawl back over her shoulders from its pin at her throat,
+enveloped Delia in her giant arms. And the others came pushing forward,
+on their faces the smiles which, however they had faltered in the
+passage seeking a precedent, I make bold to guess bodied forth the
+gentle, hesitant spirit which informed them.
+
+As for me, I waited without, even after the others had entered. And as I
+lingered, the outer door was pushed open to admit some late comer who
+whisked down the passage and stood in the dining-room doorway. It was
+Calliope.
+
+"Delia More!" she cried; "didn't I tell you how it'd be if you'd only
+let 'em know? An' Mis' Proudfit, you here? I been worried to death on
+account o' forgettin' to take home your cream lace waist I mended."
+
+Madame Proudfit's voice lowered the high key of the others talking in
+chorus.
+
+"We drove over to get it, Calliope," she said. "And here we found our
+Delia More."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At eleven o'clock that night, as I sat writing a letter in which the
+spirit of what had come to pass must have breathed--as a spirit will
+breathe--Calliope Marsh tapped at my door; and she had a little basket.
+
+"Here," she said, "I brought you this. It's some o' everything we hed.
+An'--I'm obliged for my s'prise," she added, squeezing my hand in the
+darkness. "I surmised first thing, most, when Delia described you. No;
+land, no!--Delia don't suspicion you got it up. She don't think of it
+bein' anybody but just God--an' I donno's 'twas. An' that's what Abel
+thinks--wa'n't Abel splendid? You know 'bout Abel--an' Delia? You know
+he use' to--he wanted to--that is, he was in--oh, well, no. Of course
+you wouldn't know. Well, Delia don't suspicion you--but she said I
+should tell you something. 'You tell her,' she says to me, 'you tell her
+I say I guess I take stock now,' she says; 'tell her that: I guess I
+take stock now.'"
+
+At this my heart leaped up so that I hardly know what I said in answer.
+
+"Delia's out here now," Calliope called from the dark steps. "The
+Proudfits brought us. Delia's goin' home with 'em--to stay."
+
+Thus I saw the eyes of the Proudfits' motor, with the threads of
+streaming light, about to go skimming from my gate. And in that kindly
+security was Delia More.
+
+"Calliope," I cried after her because I could not help it, "tell Delia
+More I take stock, too!"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE BIG WIND
+
+
+Of Abel Halsey, that young itinerant preacher, I learned more on a
+December day when Autumn seemed to have come back to find whether she
+had left anything. Calliope and I were resting from a racing walk up the
+hillside, where the squat brick Leading Church of Friendship overlooks
+the valley pastures and the village. Calliope walks like a girl, and
+with our haste and the keen air, her wrinkled cheeks were as rosy as
+youth.
+
+"Don't it seem like some days don't belong to any month, but just whim
+along, doin' as they please?" Calliope said. "Months that might be
+snowin' an' blowin' the expression off our face hev days when they sort
+o' show summer hid inside, secret an' holy. That's the way with lots o'
+things, ain't it? That's the way," she added thoughtfully, "Abel feels
+about the Lord, I guess. Abel Halsey,--you know."
+
+They had told me how Abel, long ordained a minister of God, had
+steadfastly refused to be installed a pastor of any church. He was a
+devout man, but the love of far places was upon him, and he lived what
+Friendship called "a-gypsyin'" off in the hills, now to visit a sick
+man, now to preach in a country schoolhouse, now to marry, or bury, or
+help with the threshing. These lonely rides among the hills and his
+custom of watching a train come in or rush by out of the distance were
+his ways of voyaging. Perhaps, too, his little skill at the organ gave
+him, now and then, an hour resembling a journey. But in his first youth
+he had meant to go away in earnest--far away, to the City or some other
+city. Also, though Calliope did not speak of it again, and I think that
+the others kept a loyal silence because of my strangerhood, I had known,
+since the home coming of Delia More, that Abel Halsey had once had
+another dream.
+
+"You wasn't here when the new church was built," Calliope said, looking
+up at the building proudly. "That was the time I mean about Abel. You
+know, before it was built we'd hed church in the hall over the
+Gekerjeck's drug store; an' because it was his hall, Hiram Gekerjeck, he
+just about run the church,--picked out the wall paper, left the stair
+door open Sundays so's he could get the church heat, till the whole
+service smelt o' ether, an' finally hed church announcements printed as
+a gift, _but_ with a line about a patent medicine o' his set fine along
+at the bottom. He said that was no differ'nt than advertisin' the
+printin'-offices that way, like they do. But it was that move made Abel
+Halsey--him an' Timothy Toplady and Eppleby Holcomb an' Postmaster
+Sykes, the three elders, set to to build a church. An' they done it too.
+An' to them four I declare it seemed like the buildin' was a body
+waitin' for its soul to be born. From the minute the sod was scraped off
+they watched every stick that went into it. An' by November it was all
+done an' plastered an' waitin' its pews--an' it was a-goin' to be
+dedicated with special doin's--music from off, an' strange ministers,
+an' Reverend Arthur Bliss from the City. I guess Abel an' the elders hed
+tacked printed invites to half the barns in the county.
+
+"I rec'lect it was o' Wednesday, the one next before the dedication, an'
+windy-cold an' wintry. I'd been havin' a walk that day, an' 'long about
+five o'clock, right about where we are, I'd stood watchin' the sunset
+over the Pump pasture there, till I was chilled through. The smoke was
+rollin' out o' the church chimney because they was dryin' the plaster,
+an' I run in there to get my hands warm an' see how the plaster was
+doin'. An' inside was the three elders, walkin' 'round, layin' a finger
+on a sash or a post--the kind o' odd, knowledgeable way men has with new
+buildin's. The Ladies' Aid had got the floor broom-clean, an' the
+lamp-chandelier filled an' ready; an' the foreign pipe-organ that the
+Proudfits had sent from Europe was in an' in workin' order, little
+lookin'-glass over the keyboard an' all. It seemed rill home-like, with
+the two big stoves a-goin', an' the floor back of 'em piled up with the
+chunks Peleg Bemus had sawed for nothin'. Everything was all redded up,
+waitin' for the pews.
+
+"Timothy Toplady was puttin' out his middle finger stiff here an' there
+on the plaster.
+
+"'It's dry as a bone,' he says, 'but what I say is this, le's us leave a
+fire burn here all night, so's to be sure. I'd hate like death to hev
+the whole congregation catchin' cold an' takin' Hiram Gekerjeck's
+medicine.'
+
+"I rec'lect Eppleby Holcomb looked up sort o' dreamy--Eppleby always
+goes round like he'd swallowed his last night's sleep.
+
+"'The house o' God,' he says over; 'ain't that curious? Nothin' about it
+to indicate it's the house o' God but the shape--no more'n's if 'twas a
+buildin' where the Holy Spirit never come near. An' yet right here in
+this place we'll mebbe feel the big wind an' speak with Pentecostal
+tongues.'
+
+"''T seems like,' says Postmaster Sykes, thoughtful, ''t seems like we'd
+ought to hev a little meetin' o' thanks here o' Sat'day night--little
+informal praise meetin' or somethin.'
+
+"Timothy shakes his head decided.
+
+"'Silas Sykes, what you talkin'?' he says. 'Why, the church ain't
+dedicated yet. A house o' God,' s'e, 'can't be used for no purpose
+whatsoever without it's been dedicated.'
+
+"'So it can't--so it can't,' says the postmaster, apologetic, knowin' he
+was in politics an' that the brethren was watchin' him, cat to mouse,
+for slips.
+
+"'I s'pose that's so,' says Eppleby, doubtful. But he's one o' them that
+sort o' ducks under situations to see if they're alike on both sides,
+an' if they ain't, he up an' questions 'em. Timothy, though, he was
+differ'nt. Timothy was always goin' on about constituted authority, an'
+to him the thing was the thing, even if it was another thing.
+
+"'That's right,' he insists, his lips disappearin' with certainty. 'I
+s'pose we hadn't reely ought even to come in here an' stan' 'round, like
+we are.'
+
+"He looks sidlin' over towards me, warmin' my hands rill secular by the
+church stove. An' I felt like I'd been spoke up for when somebody says
+from the door:--
+
+"'You better just bar out the carpenters o' this world, friends, an'
+done with it!'
+
+"It was Abel Halsey, standin' in the entry, lookin' as handsome as the
+law allows. An' I see he happened to be there because the Through was
+about due,--that's the one that don't stop here,--an' you can always get
+a good view of it from this slope. You know Abel never misses watchin' a
+fast train go 'long, if he can help himself.
+
+"'What's the i-dea?' Abel says. 'How can you pray at all in closets an'
+places that ain't been dedicated? I shouldn't think they'd be holy
+enough, 's'e.'
+
+"'That,' says the postmaster, sure o' support, 'ain't the question.'
+
+"'I thought it couldn't be,' says Abel, amiable. 'Well, what is the
+question? Whether prayer is prayer, no matter where you're prayin'?'
+
+"'Oh, no,' says Eppleby Holcomb, soothin', 'it ain't that.'
+
+"'I thought it couldn't be that,' says Abel. 'Is it whether the Lord is
+in dedicated spots an' nowheres else?'
+
+"'Abel Halsey,' Timothy tarts up, 'you needn't to be sacrilegious.'
+
+"'But,' says Abel, 'the question is, whether _you_'re sacrilegious to
+deny a prayer-meetin' or any other good use to the church or to any
+other place, dedicated or not. Well, Timothy, I think you are.'
+
+"Timothy clears his throat an' dabs at the palm of his hand with his
+other front finger. But before he could lay down eternal law, we sort o'
+heard, almost before we knew we heard, folks hurryin' past out here on
+the frozen ground. An' they was shoutin', like questions, an' a-shoutin'
+further off. We looked out, an' I can remember how the whole slope up
+from the village there was black with folks.
+
+"We run outside, an' I know I kep' close by Abel Halsey. An' I got hold
+o' what had happened when somebody yelled an answer to his askin'. You
+probably heard all about that part. It was the day the Through Express
+went off the track down there in the cut beyond the Pump pasture.
+
+"We run with the rest of 'em, me keepin' close to Abel, I guess because
+he's got a way with him that makes you think he'd know what to do no
+matter what. But when he was two-thirds o' the way acrost the pasture,
+he stops short an' grabs at my sleeve.
+
+"'Look here,' he says, 'you can't go down there. You mustn't do it. We
+donno what'll be. You stay here,' he says; 'you set there under the
+cottonwood.'
+
+"You kind o' _haf_ to mind Abel. It's sort o' grained in that man to hev
+folks disciple after him. I made him promise he'd motion from the fence
+if he see I could help any, an' then I se' down under that big tree down
+there. I was tremblin' some, I know. It always seems like wrecks are
+somethin' that happen in other states an' in the dark. But when one's on
+ground that you know like a book an' was brought up on,--when it's in
+the daylight, right by a pasture you've been acrost always an' where
+you've walked the ties,--well, I s'pose it's the same feelin' as when a
+man you know cuts up a state's prison caper; seem's like he _can't_ of,
+because you knew him.
+
+"Half the men o' Friendship run by me, seems though. The whole town'd
+been rousted up while we was in the church talkin' heresy. An' up on the
+high place on the road there I see Zittelhof's undertaking wagon, with
+the sunset showin' on its nickel rails. But not a woman run past me.
+Ain't it funny how it's men that go to danger of rail an' fire an'
+water--but when it's nothin' but birth an' dyin' natural, then it's for
+women to be there.
+
+"When I'd got about ready to fly away, waitin' so, I see Abel at the
+fence. An' he didn't motion to me, but he swung over the top an' come
+acrost the stubble, an' I see he hed somethin' in his arms. I run to
+meet him, an' he run too, crooked, his feet turnin' over with him some
+in the hard ground. The sky made his face sort o' bright; an' I see he'd
+got a child in his arms.
+
+"He didn't give her to me. He stood her down side o' me--a little thing
+of five years old, or six, with thick, straight hair an' big scairt
+eyes.
+
+"'Is she hurt, Abel?' I says.
+
+"'No, she ain't hurt none,' he answers me, 'an' they's about seventeen
+more of 'em, her age, an' they ain't hurt, either. Their coach was
+standin' up on its legs all right. But the man they was with, he's stone
+dead. Hit on the head, somehow. An',' Abel says, 'I'm goin' to throw 'em
+all over the fence to you.'
+
+"The little girl jus' kep' still. An' when we took her by each hand, an'
+run back toward the fence with her, her feet hardly touchin' the ground,
+she kep' up without a word, like all to once she'd found out this is a
+world where the upside-down is consider'ble in use. An' I waited with
+her, over there this side the cut, hearin' 'em farther down rippin' off
+fence rails so's to let through what they hed to carry.
+
+"Time after time Abel come scramblin' up the sand-bank, bringin' 'em two
+'t once--little girls they was, all about the age o' the first one, none
+of 'em with hats or cloaks on; an' I took 'em in my arms an' set 'em
+down, an' took 'em in my arms an' set 'em down, till I was fair movin'
+in a dream. They belonged, I see by their dress, to some kind of a home
+for the homeless, an' I judged the man was takin' 'em somewheres, him
+that Abel said'd been killed. Some'd reach out their arms to me over the
+fence--an' some was afraid an' hung back, but some'd just cling to me
+an' not want to be set down. I can remember them the best.
+
+"Abel, when he come with the last ones, he off with his coat like I with
+my ulster, an' as well as we could we wrapped four or five of 'em
+up--one that was sickly, an' one little delicate blonde, an' a little
+lame girl, an' the one--the others called her Mitsy--that'd come over
+the fence first. An' by then half of 'em was beginnin' to cry some. An'
+the wind was like so many knives.
+
+"'Where shall we take 'em to, Abel?' I says, beside myself.
+
+"'Take 'em?' he says. 'Take 'em into the church! Quick as you can. This
+wind is like death. Stay with 'em till I come.'
+
+"Somehow or other I got 'em acrost that pasture. When I look at the Pump
+pasture now, in afternoon like this, or in Spring with vi'lets, or when
+a circus show's there, it don't seem to me it could 'a' been the same
+place. I kep' 'em together the best I could--some of 'em beggin' for
+'Mr. Middie--Mr. Middie,' the man, I judged, that was dead. An' finally
+we got up here in the road, an' it was like the end o' pain to be able
+to fling open the church door an' marshal 'em through the entry into
+that great, big, warm room, with the two fires roarin'.
+
+"I got 'em 'round the nearest stove an' rubbed their little hands an'
+tried not to scare 'em to death with wantin' to love 'em; an' all the
+while, bad as I felt for 'em, I was glad an' glad that it was me that
+could be there with 'em. They was twenty,--when I come to count 'em so's
+to keep track,--twenty little girls with short, thick hair, or soft,
+short curls, an' every one with something baby-like left to 'em. An'
+when we set on the floor round the stove, the coals shone through the
+big open draft into their faces, an' they looked over their shoulders to
+the dark creepin' up the room, an' they come closer 'round me--an' the
+closest-up ones _snuggled_.
+
+"Well, o' course that was at first, when they was some dazed. But as
+fast as their blue little hands was warm an' pink again, one or two of
+'em begun to whimper, natural an' human, an' up with their arm to their
+face, an' then begun to cry right out, an' some more joined in, an' the
+rest pipes up, askin' for Mr. Middie. An' I thought, 'Sp'osin' they
+_all_ cried an' what if Abel Halsey stayed away hours.' I donno. I done
+my best too. Mebbe it's because I'm use' to children with my heart an'
+not with my ways. Anyhow, most of 'em was cryin' prime when Abel finally
+got there.
+
+"When he come in, I see Abel's face was white an' dusty, an' he had his
+other coat off an' gone too, an' his shirt-sleeves was some tore. But he
+comes runnin' up to them cryin' children an' I wish't you could 'a' seen
+his smile--Abel's smile was always kind o' like his soul growin' out of
+his face, rill thrifty.
+
+"'Why, you little kiddies!' s'e, 'cryin' when you're all nice an' warm!
+Le's see now,' he says grave. 'Anybody here know how to play
+Drop-the-handkerchief? If you do,' he tells 'em, 'stand up _quick_!'
+
+"They scrambled 'round like they was beetles an' you'd took up the
+stone. They was all up in a minute, an' stopped cryin', too. With that
+he catches my handkerchief out o' my hand an' flutters it over his head
+an' runs to the middle o' the room.
+
+"'Come on!' he says. 'Hold o' hands--every one o' you hold o' hands. I'm
+goin' to drop the handkerchief, an' you'd better hurry up.'
+
+"That was talk they knew. They was after him in a secunt an' tears
+forgot,--them poor little things,--laughin' an' hold o' hands, an'
+dancin' in a chain, an' standin' in a ring. An' when he hed 'em like
+that, an' still, Abel begun runnin' 'round to drop the handkerchief; an'
+then he turns to me.
+
+"'Only two killed, thank God,' he says as he run; 'the conductor an'
+M-i-d-d-l-e-t-o-n,' he spells it, an' motions to the children with the
+handkerchief so's I'd know who Middleton was. 'An' not a scrap o' paper
+on him,' he goes on, 'to tell what home he brought the children from or
+where he's goin' with 'em. Their mileage was punched to the City--but we
+don't know where they belong there, an' the conductor bein' gone too.
+The poor fellow that had 'em in charge never knew what hurt him. Hit
+from overhead, he was, an' his skull crushed....'
+
+"It was so dark in the church by then we could hardly see, but the
+children could keep track o' the white handkerchief. He let it fall
+behind the little girl he'd brought me first,--Mitsy,--an' she catches
+it up an' sort o' squeaks with the fun an' runs after him. An' while he
+doubles an' turns,--
+
+"'They've telegraphed ahead,' he says, 'to two or three places in the
+City. But even if we hear right off, we can't get 'em out o' Friendship
+to-night. They'll hev to stay here. The Commercial Travellers' Hotel an'
+the Depot House has both got all they can do for--some of 'em hurt
+pretty bad. They couldn't either hotel take 'em in....'
+
+"Then he lets Mitsy catch him an' he ups with her on his shoulder an'
+run with her on his back, his face lookin' out o' her blue, striped
+skirts.
+
+"'We'll hev to house 'em right here in the church,' he says.
+
+"'Here?' says I; 'here in the church?'
+
+"'You know Friendship,' he says, hoppin' along. 'Not half a dozen houses
+could take in more'n two extry, even if we hed the time to canvass. An'
+we _ain't_ the time. They want their s-u-p-p-e-r right now,' he spells
+it out, an' lit out nimble when Mitsy dropped the handkerchief back o'
+the little blond girl. Then he let the little blond girl catch them, and
+he took her on his shoulders too, an' they was both shoutin' so 't he
+hed to make little circles out to get where I could hear him.
+
+"'I've seen Zittelhof,' he told me. 'He was down there with his wagon.
+He'll bring up enough little canvas cots from the store. An' I thought
+mebbe you'd go down to the village an' pick up some stuff they'll
+need--bedding an' things. An' get the women here with some supper. Come
+on now,' he calls out to 'em; 'everybody in a procession an' _sing_!'
+
+"He led 'em off with
+
+    "'King William was King James's son,'
+
+an' he sings back to me, for the secunt line,
+
+    "'Go _now_, go _quick_, I bet they're starved!'
+
+"So I got into my coat, tryin' to think where I should go to be sure o'
+not wastin' time talkin'. Lots o' folks in this world is willin', but
+mighty few can be quick.
+
+"I knew right off, though, where I'd find somebody to help. The
+Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality was meetin'
+that afternoon with Mis' Toplady, an' I could cut acrost their
+pasture--" Calliope nodded toward the little Toplady house and the big
+Toplady barn--"an' that's what I done. An' when I got near enough to the
+house to tell, I see by the light in the parlour that they was still
+there. An' I know when I got into the room, full as I was o' news o'
+them little children an' the wreck an' the two killed an' all them that
+was hurt--there was the Sodality settlin' whether the lamb's wool
+comforter for the bazaar should be tied with pink for daintiness or
+brown for durability.
+
+"'_Dainty!_' says I, when I got my breath. 'They's sides to life makes
+me want to pinch that word right out o' the dictionary same as I would a
+bug,' I says.
+
+"That was funny, too,"--Calliope added thoughtfully, "because I like
+that word, speakin' o' food an' ways to do things. But some folks get to
+livin' the word same's if it was the law.
+
+"I guess they thought I was crazy," she went on, "but I wasn't long
+makin' 'em understand. An' I tell you, the way they took it made me love
+'em all. If you want to love folks, just you get in some kind o'
+respectable trouble in Friendship, an' you'll see so much lovableness
+that the trouble'll kind o' spindle out an' leave nothin' but the love
+doin' business. My land, the Sodality went at the situation head first,
+like it was somethin' to get acrost before dark. An' so it was.
+
+"I remember Mis' Photographer Sturgis: 'There!' she says, 'most cryin'.
+'If ever I take only a pint o' milk, I'm sure as sure to want more
+before the day's out. None of us is on good terms with each other's
+milkman. _Where_ we goin' to get the milk,' she says, 'for them poor
+little things?'
+
+"'Where?' says Mis' Toplady--you know how big an' comfortable an'
+settled she is--'_Where?_ Well, you needn't to think o' where. I expect
+the Jersey won't be milked till I go an' milk her,' she says, 'but she
+gives six quarts, nights, right along now, an' sometimes seven. Now
+about the bread.'
+
+"Mis' Postmaster Sykes use' to set sponge twice a week, an' she offered
+five loaves out o' her six baked that day. Mis' Holcomb had two loaves
+o' brown bread an' a crock o' sour cream cookies. An' Libbie Liberty
+bursts out that they'd got up their courage an' killed an' boiled two o'
+their chickens the day before an' none o' the girls'd been able to touch
+a mouthful, bein' they'd raised the hens from egg to axe. Libbie said
+she'd bring the whole kettle along, an' it could be het on the church
+stove an' made soup of. So it went on, down to even Liddy Ember, that
+was my partner an' silly poor, an' in about four minutes everything was
+provided for, beddin' an' all.
+
+"Mis' Toplady had flew upstairs, gettin' out the linen, an' she was
+comin' down the front stairs with her arms full o' sheets an' pillow
+slips when through the front door walks Timothy Toplady, come in all
+excited an' lookin' every which way. Seems he'd barked his elbow in the
+rescue work an' laid off for liniment.
+
+"'Oh, Timothy,' says his wife, 'them poor little children. We've been
+plannin' it all out.'
+
+"'Who's goin' to take 'em in?' says Timothy, tryin' to roll up his
+overcoat sleeve for fear the Sodality'd be put to the blush if he got to
+his elbow any other way.
+
+"'They're all warm in the church,' Mis' Toplady says; 'we're goin' to
+leave 'em there. Zittelhof's goin' to take up canvas cots. We're gettin'
+the bedding together,' she told him.
+
+"Timothy looked up, sort o' wild an' glazed.
+
+"'Canvas cots,' s'e, 'in the house o' the Lord?'
+
+"'Why, Timothy,' says his wife, helpless, 'it's all warm there now, an'
+we don't know what else. We thought we'd carry up their supper to 'em--'
+
+"'Supper,' says Timothy, 'in the house o' the Lord?'
+
+"Then Mis' Toplady spunks up some.
+
+"'Why, yes,' she says; 'I'm goin' to milk the Jersey an' take up the two
+pails.'
+
+"Timothy waves his barked arm in the air.
+
+"'Never!' s'e. 'Never. We elders'll never consent to that, not in this
+world!'
+
+"At that we all stood around sort o' pinned to the air. This hadn't
+occurred to nobody. But his wife was back at him, rill crispy.
+
+"'Timothy Toplady,' s'she, 'they use churches for horspitals an'
+refuges,' she says.
+
+"'They do,' says Timothy, solemn, 'they do, in necessity, an' war, an'
+siege. But here's the whole o' Friendship Village to take these children
+in, an' it's sacrilege to use the house o' God for any purpose whatever
+while it's waitin' its dedication. It's stealin', he says, 'from the
+Lord Most High.'
+
+"I never see anybody more het up. We all tried to tell him. Nobody in
+Friendship has a warm spare room in winter, without it's the Proudfits,
+an' they was in Europe an' their house locked. Mebbe six of us, we
+counted up afterwards, could 'a' took in two children to sleep in a cold
+room, or one child to sleep with some one o' the family. But as Abel
+said, where was the time to canvass round? An' what could we do with the
+other little things? But Timothy wouldn't listen to nothin'.
+
+"'Amanda,' s'e in a married voice, 'what I say is this, I forbid you to
+carry a drop o' Jersey milk or any other kind o' milk up to that
+church.'
+
+"With that he was out the front door an' liniment forgot.
+
+"Mis' Sykes spatted her hands.
+
+"'He'll find Silas Sykes an' Eppleby,' she says to Mis' Holcomb. 'Quick.
+Le's us get our hands on my bread an' your cookies. Them poor little
+things--'way past their supper hour.'
+
+"'An' none of 'em got mothers,' says Mis' Sturgis, 'just left 'round
+with lockets on, I sp'ose, an' wrecked an' hungry....'
+
+"'An' one o' 'em lame,' Mame Holcomb puts in, down on her knees tryin'
+to sort out her overshoes. The Sodality never could tell its own
+overshoes.
+
+"Well, they scattered so quick it made you think o' mulberry leaves,
+some years, in the first frost--an' I was left alone with Mis' Toplady.
+
+"'Here,' she says to me then, all squintin' with firmness, 'you take
+along all the linen an' comfortables you can lug. Timothy didn't mention
+them. An' _leave the rest to me_.'
+
+"I went over that in my mind while I stumbled along back to the church,
+loaded down. But I couldn't make much out of it. I knew Timothy Toplady:
+that he was meek till he turned an' then it was look out. An' I knew,
+too, that Timothy could run Silas Sykes, the postmaster's political
+strength, like you've noticed, makin' him kind o' wobbled in his own
+judgment of other things. I didn't know how Eppleby Holcomb'd be--it
+might turn out to be one o' the things he'd up an' question, civilized,
+but I wa'n't sure. Anyhow, the cream cookies an' the two loaves wasn't
+so vital as them five loaves o' bread.
+
+"When I got back to the church, here it was all lit up. Abel had lit the
+chandelier on a secular scene! Bless 'em, it surely was secular, though,
+accordin' to my lights, it was some sacred too. Six or seven of the
+little things was buildin' a palace out o' the split wood, with the
+little lame girl for queen. The little blonde an' the one that was rill
+delicate lookin' had gone to sleep by the stove on Abel's overcoat.
+Mitsy, she run from somewheres an' grabbed my hand. An' Abel had the
+rest over by the other stove tellin' 'em stories. I heard him say
+dragon, an' blue velvet, an' golden hair.
+
+"I hadn't more'n got inside the door before Zittelhof's wagon come with
+the cots. An' Mis' Zittelhof was with him, her arms full o' bedclothes
+she'd gathered up around from folks. I never said a word to Abel about
+the trouble with Timothy. I donno if Abel rilly heard us come in, he was
+so excited about his dragon. An' Mis' Zittelhof an' I began makin' up
+the cots. On the first one I laid the two babies that was asleep on the
+floor. They never woke up. Their little cheeks was warm an' pink, an'
+one of 'em had some tears on it. When I see that, I clear forgot the
+church wasn't dedicated, an' I thanked God they was there, safe an' by a
+good fire, with somebody 'tendin' to 'em.
+
+"The bed-makin' an' the story-tellin' an' the palace-buildin' went on,
+an' I kep' gettin' exciteder every minute. When the door opened, I
+couldn't tell which was in my mouth, my heart or my tongue. But it was
+only Libbie Liberty with the big iron kettle o' chicken broth an' a
+basket o' cups an' spoons. She se' down the kettle on the stove an'
+stirred up the fire under it, an' it was no time before the whole church
+begun to smell savoury as a kitchen. An' then in walks Mis' Holcomb with
+her brown bread an' cream cookies. An' we fair jumped up an' down when
+Mis' Sykes come breathin' in the door with them five loaves o' wheat
+bread safe, an' butter to match.
+
+"Still, we _was_ without milk. There wasn't a sign o' Mis' Toplady. An'
+any minute Timothy might get there with Silas in tow. Mis' Sykes was
+nervous as a witch over it, an' it was her proposed we set the children
+up on the cots an' begin' feedin' 'em right away. I run down the room to
+tell Abel, an' then I hed to tell him _why_ we'd best hurry.
+
+"Abel laughs a little when he heard about it.
+
+"'Dear old Timothy,' he says, 'servin' his God accordin' to the dictates
+of his own notions. Wait a minute till I release the princess.'
+
+"When he said that, I was afraid he must be telling a worldly story with
+royalty in. An' I begun to get troubled myself. But I heard him end it:
+'So the Princess found her kingdom because she learnt to love every
+living thing. She saved the lives of the hare an' the goldfinch. An'
+don't you ever let any living thing suffer one minute and maybe you'll
+find out some of the things the Princess knew.' An', royalty or not, I
+felt all right about Abel's story-telling after that.
+
+"Then we all brisked round an' begun settin' the children up on the
+cots--two or three to a cot, with one of us to wait on 'em. An' both the
+little sleepy ones woke up, too. An' when we sliced an' spread the bread
+an' dished the hot chicken broth an' see how hungry they all seemed, I
+declare if one of us could feel wicked. The little things'd begun to
+talk some by then, an' they chatted soft an' looked up at us, an' that
+little Mitsy--she'd got so she'd kiss me every time I'd ask her. An' I
+was perfectly shameless. I donno's the poor little thing got enough to
+eat. But sometimes when things go blue--I like to think about that. I
+guess we was all the same. Our principal feelin' was how dear they was,
+an' to hurry up before Timothy Toplady got there, an' how we wish't we
+hed more milk.
+
+"Then all of a sudden while we was flyin' round, I happened to go past
+the front door, an' I heard a noise in the entry. I thought o' Timothy
+an' Silas, comin' with sheriffs an' firearms an' I didn't know
+what--Silas havin' politics back of him, so; an' I rec'lect I planned,
+wild an' contradictory, first about callin' an instantaneous
+congregational meetin' to decide which was right, an' then about
+telegraphin' to the City for constituted authority to do as we was
+doin', an' then about Abel fightin' Timothy an' Silas both, if it come
+rilly necessary.
+
+"I got hold o' Mis' Sykes an' Mame Holcomb, an' told 'em quiet.
+'Somethin's the matter outside there,' I says to 'em, kind o' warnin',
+'an' I thought you two'd ought to know it.' An' we all three come 'round
+by the entry door, careless, an listened. An' the noise kep' up, kind o'
+soft an' obstinate, an' we couldn't make it out.
+
+"'We'd best go out there an' see,' says Mis' Sykes, low; 'the dear land
+knows what men _will_ do.'
+
+"So we watched our chance an' slipped out--an' I guess, for all our high
+ways, we was all three wonderin' inside, was we rilly doin' right. You
+know your doubts come thick when there's a noise in the entry. But Mis'
+Sykes acted as brave as two, an' it was her shut the door to behind us.
+
+"An' there, right by that stone just outside the entry o' the church,
+set Mis' Timothy Toplady, _milkin' her Jersey cow_.
+
+"We could just see her, dim, by the light o' the transom. She was on the
+secunt pail, an' that was two-thirds full. She hed her back toward us,
+an' she didn't hear us. She set all wrapped up in a shawl, a basket o'
+cups side of her, an' the Jersey standin' there, quiet an' demure. An'
+beyond, in the cut an' movin' acrost the Pump pasture, it was thick with
+lanterns.
+
+"But before we three'd hed time to burst out like we wanted to, we sort
+o' scrooched back again. Because on the other side o' the cow we heard
+Timothy Toplady's voice. He'd just got there, some breathless, an' with
+him, we see, was Eppleby.
+
+"'Amanda,' says Timothy, 'what in the Dominion o' Canady air you doin'?'
+
+"'I shouldn't think you would know,' says Mis' Toplady, short. 'You
+don't do enough of it.'
+
+"She hed him there. Timothy always _will_ go down to the Dick Dasher an'
+shirk the chores.
+
+"'Amanda,' says Timothy, 'you've disobeyed me flat-footed.'
+
+"'No such thing,' s'she, milkin' away like mad for fear he'd use force;
+'I ain't carried a drop o' milk here. I've drove it,' she says.
+
+"Timothy groaned.
+
+"'Milkin' in the church,' he says.
+
+"'No, sir,' says Amanda, back at him; 'I'm outside on the sod, an' you
+know it.'
+
+"An' then my hopes sort o' riz, because I thought I heard Eppleby
+Holcomb laugh soft--sort of a half-an'-half chuckle. Like he'd looked
+under the situation an' see it wasn't alike on both sides. An' 't the
+same time Mis' Toplady, she changed her way, an',--
+
+"'Timothy,' s'she, 'you hungry?'
+
+"'I'm nigh starved,' says Timothy. 'It must be eight o'clock,' s'e, 'but
+I ain't the heart to think o' that.'
+
+"'No,' s'she, 'so you ain't. Not with them poor babies in there
+hungrier'n you be an' nowheres to go.'
+
+"With that she got done milkin' an' stood up an' picked up her two
+pails--we could smell the sweet, warm milk from where we was.
+
+"'Timothy,' s'she, 'the worst sacrilege that's done in _this_ world is
+when folks turns their backs on any little bit of a chance that the Lord
+gives 'em to do good in, like He told 'em. Who was it, I'd like to know,
+said, "Suffer little children"? Who was it said, "Feed my lambs"? No
+"when" or "where" about that. Just _do it_. An' no occasion to hem an'
+haw about it, either. The least you can do for your share in this, as I
+see it, is to keep your silence and drive the cow back home. The oven's
+full o' bake' sweet potatoes an' they must be just nearin' done.'
+
+"I see Timothy start to wave his arms an' I donno what he would 'a' said
+if it hadn't been settled for 'im. For then, like it was right out o'
+the sky, the church organ begun to play soft. For a minute we all looked
+up, like the Shepherds must of when the voices of the night told 'em the
+spirit o' God was in the world, born in a little child. It was Abel,--I
+knew right away it was Abel,--an' he was just gentlin' round soft on the
+keys, kind o' like he was askin' a blessin' an' rockin' a cradle an'
+doin' all the little nice things music can. An' with that Mis' Sykes,
+she throws open the church door.
+
+"I'll never forget how it looked inside--all warm an' lamp-lit an' with
+them little things bein' fed an' chatterin' soft. An' up in the loft set
+Abel, playin' away on the foreign organ before it'd been dedicated. An'
+then he begun singin' low--an' there's somethin' about Abel 't you just
+_haf_ to listen, whatever he says or does. Even Timothy hed to
+listen--though I think he was some struck dumb, too, an' that kep' him
+controlled for a minute--like it will. An' Abel sung:--
+
+    "'The Lord is my Shepherd--I shall not want.
+    He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,
+    He leadeth me--He leadeth me beside the still waters.
+    He restoreth my soul....'
+
+"An' at the first line, before we'd rilly sensed what it was he said,
+every one o' them little children in the midst o' their supper slips off
+the edge o' the cots an' kneeled down there on the bare floor, just like
+they'd been told to. Oh, wasn't it wonderful? An' yet it wasn't--it
+wasn't. We found out, when folks come for 'em the next mornin', it was
+the children's prayer that they sung every day o' their lives at their
+Good Shepherd's Orphans' Home--soft an' out o' tune an' with all their
+little hearts, just as they went ahead an' sung it with Abel, clear to
+the end. I guess they didn't know everybody don't kneel down all over
+the world when they hear the Twenty-third Psalm.
+
+"Abel seen 'em in the little lookin'-glass over the keyboard. An' when
+he'd got done he set there perfectly still with his head down. An' Mis'
+Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb an' Eppleby an' I bowed our heads too, out there
+in the entry. An' so, after a minute, did Timothy. I couldn't help
+peekin' to see.
+
+"An' then, when the children was all a-rustlin' up, Mis' Toplady she
+jus' hands her two pails o' milk over to Timothy.
+
+"'You take 'em in,' she says to him, her eyes swimmin'. 'I've come off
+without my handkerchief.'
+
+"Timothy looks round him, kind o' helpless, but Eppleby stood there an'
+pats him on the arm.
+
+"'Go in--go in, brother,' Eppleby says gentle. 'I guess the church's
+been dedicated. I feel like we'd heard the big wind--an' I guess, mebbe,
+the Pentecostal tongues.'
+
+"An' Timothy--he's an awful tender-hearted man in spite o' bein' so
+notional--Timothy just went on in with the milk, without sayin'
+anything. An' Eppleby side of him. An' we 'most shut the door on Silas
+Sykes, comin' tearin' up on account o' Timothy leavin' him urgent word
+to come, without explainin' why. An' when Silas see the inside o' the
+church, all lit up an' chicken supper for the children an' the other two
+elders there with the milk, he just rubs his hands an' beams like he see
+his secunt term. I donno's it'd ever enter Silas Sykes's head't there
+was anything wrong with anything, providin' somebody wasn't snappin' him
+up for it. I guess it's like that in politics.
+
+"We took the milk around an', bake' sweet potatoes forgot, Timothy stood
+up by the stove, between Eppleby an' Silas, an' watched us--an' the
+Jersey must 'a' picked her way home alone. An' Abel, he just set there
+to the organ, gentlin' 'round soft on the keys so it made me think o'
+God movin' on the face o' the waters. An' movin' on the face of
+everything else too, dedicated or not. It was like we'd felt the big
+wind, same as Eppleby said. An' somethin' in it kind o' hid, secret an'
+holy."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE GRANDMA LADIES
+
+
+Two weeks before Christmas Friendship was thrown into a state of holiday
+delight. Mrs. Proudfit and her daughter, Miss Clementina, issued
+invitations to a reception to be given on Christmas Eve at Proudfit
+House, on Friendship Hill. The Proudfits, who had rarely entertained
+since Miss Linda went away, lived in Europe and New York and spent
+little time in the village, but, for all that, they remained citizens in
+absence, and Friendship always wrote out invitations for them whenever
+it gave "companies." The invitations the postmaster duly forwarded to
+some Manhattan bank, though I think the village had a secret conviction
+that these were never received--"sent out wild to a bank in the City,
+so." However, now that old courtesies were to be so magnificently
+returned, every one believed and felt a greater respect for the whole
+financial world.
+
+The invitations enclosed the card of Mrs. Nita Ordway, and the name
+sounded for me a note of other days when, before my coming to Friendship
+Village, we two had, in the town, belonged to one happy circle of
+friends.
+
+"I thought at first mebbe the card'd got shoved in the envelope by
+mistake," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. "I know once I got a
+Christmas book from a cousin o' mine in the City, an' a strange man's
+card fell out o' the leaves. I sent the card right straight back to her,
+an' Cousin Jane seemed rill cut up, so I made up my mind I'd lay low
+about this card. But I hear everybody's got 'em. I s'pose it's a sign
+that it's some Mis' Ordway's party too--only not enough hers to get her
+name on the invite. Mebbe she chipped in on the expenses. Give a third,
+like enough."
+
+However that was, Friendship looked on the Christmas party as on some
+unexpected door about to open in its path, and it woke in the morning
+conscious of expectation before it could remember what to expect.
+Proudfit House! A Christmas party! It touched every one as might some
+giant Santa Claus, for grown-ups, with a pack of heart's-ease on his
+back.
+
+When Mrs. Ordway arrived in the village, the excitement mounted. Mrs.
+Nita Ordway was the first exquisitely beautiful woman of the great world
+whom Friendship had ever seen--"beautiful like in the pictures of when
+noted folks was young," the village breathlessly summed her up. To be
+sure, when she and her little daughter, Viola, rode out in the
+Proudfits' motor, nobody in the street appeared to look at them. But
+Friendship knew when they rode, and when they walked, and what they
+wore, and when they returned.
+
+It was a happiness to me to see Mrs. Ordway again, and I sat often with
+her in the music room at Proudfit House and listened to her glorious
+voice in just the songs that I love. Sometimes she would send for her
+little Viola, so that I might sit with the child in my arms, for she was
+one of those rare children who will let you love them.
+
+"I like be made some 'tention to," Viola sometimes said shyly. She was
+not afraid, and she would stay with me hour-long, as if she loved to be
+loved. She was like a little come-a-purpose spirit, to let one pretend.
+
+A day or two after the invitations had been received, I was in my guest
+room going over my Christmas list. Just before Christmas I delight in
+the look of a guest room, for then the bed is spread with a brave array
+of pretty things, and when one arranges and wraps them, the stitches of
+rose and blue on flowered fabrics, the flutter of crisp ribbons, and the
+breath of sachets make one glad. I was lingering at my task when I heard
+some one below, and I recognized her voice.
+
+"Calliope!" I called gladly from the stairs, and bade her come up to me.
+
+Calliope is one of the women in whose presence one can wrap one's
+Christmas gifts. She came into the room, bringing a breath of Winter,
+and she laid aside her tan ulster and her round straw hat, and
+straightway sat down on the rug by the open fire.
+
+"Well said!" she cried contentedly, "a grate fire upstairs! It's one of
+the things that never seems real to me, like a tower on a house. I'd as
+soon think o' havin' a grate fire up a tree an' settin' there, as in my
+chamber. Anyway, when it comes Winter, upstairs in Friendship is just a
+place where you go after something in the bureau draw' an' come down
+again as quick as you can. I s'pose you got an invite to the party?"
+
+"Yes," I said, "and you will go, Calliope?"
+
+But instead of answering me:--
+
+"My land!" she said, "think of it! A party like that, an' not a
+low-necked waist in town, nor a swallow-tail! An' only two weeks to do
+anything in, an' only Liddy Ember for dressmaker, an' it takes her two
+weeks to make a dress. I guess Mis' Postmaster Sykes has got her. They
+say she read her invite in the post-office with one hand an' snapped up
+that tobacco-brown net in the post-office store window with the other,
+an' out an' up to Liddy's an' hired her before she was up from the
+breakfast table. So she gets the town new dress. Mis' Sykes is terrible
+quick-moved."
+
+"What will you wear, Calliope?" I asked.
+
+"Me--I never wear anything but henriettas," she said. "I think the
+plainer-faced you are, the simpler you'd ought to be dressed. I use' to
+fix up terrible ruffled, but when I see I was reg'lar plain-faced I
+stuck to henriettas, mostly gray--"
+
+"Calliope," I said resolutely, "you don't mean you're not going to the
+Proudfit party?"
+
+She clasped her hands and held them, palms outward, over her mouth, and
+her eyes twinkled above them.
+
+"No, sir," she said, "I can't go. You'll laugh at me!" she defended.
+"Don't you tell!" she warned. And finally she told me.
+
+"Day before yesterday," she said, "I went into the City. An' I come out
+on the trolley. An' I donno what possessed me,--I ain't done it for
+months,--but when we crossed the start of the Plank Road, I got off an'
+went up an' visited the Old Ladies' Home. You know I've always thought,"
+she broke off, "--well, you know I ain't a rill lot to do with, an' I
+always had an i-dee that mebbe sometime, when I got older, I might--"
+
+I nodded, and she went on.
+
+"Well, I walked around among 'em up there--canary birds an' plants an'
+footstools--an' the whole thing fixed up so cheerful that it's pitiful.
+Red wall-paper an' flowered curtains an' such, all fair yellin' at you,
+'We're cheerful--cheerful--cheerful!' till I like to run. An' it come
+over me, bein' so near Christmas an' all, what would they do on
+Christmas? So I asked a woman in a navy-blue dress, seein' she flipped
+around like she was the flag o' the place.
+
+"'The south corridor,' she answers,--them's the highest payin"--Calliope
+threw in, "'chipped in an' got up a tree, an' there's gifts for all,'
+s'she. 'The west corridor'--them's the local city ones--'all has friends
+to take 'em away for the day. The east corridor'--they're from farther
+away an' middlin' well-to-do--'all has boxes comin' to 'em from off. But
+the north corridor,' s'she, scowlin' some, 'is rather a trial to us.'
+
+"An' I was waitin' for that. The north corridor is all charity old
+ladies, paid for out o' the fund; an' the president o' the home has just
+died, an' the secretary's in the old country on a pleasure trip, an' the
+board's in a row over the policy o' the home, an' the navy-blue matron
+dassent act, an' altogether it looked like the north corridor was goin'
+to get a regular mid-week Wednesday instead of a Christmas. An' I up an'
+ast' her to take me down to see 'em."
+
+It was easy to see what Calliope had done, I thought: she had promised
+to spend Christmas Eve over there in the north corridor, reading aloud.
+
+"They was nine of 'em," she went on, "nice old grandma ladies, with
+hands that looked like they'd ought to 'a' been tyin' little aprons an'
+cuttin' out cookies an' squeezin' somebody else's hand. There they set,
+with the wall-paper doin' its cheerfulest, loud as an insult,--one of
+'em with lots o' white hair, one of 'em singin' a little, some of 'em
+tryin' to sew or knit some. My land!" said Calliope, "when we think of
+'em sittin' up an' down the world--with their arms all empty--an'
+Christmas comin' on--ain't it a wonder--Well, I stayed 'round an' talked
+to 'em," she went on, "while the navy-blue lady whisked her starched
+skirts some. She seemed too busy 'tendin' to 'em to give 'em much
+attention. An' they looked rill pleased when I talked to 'em about their
+patchwork an' knittin', an' did they get the sun all day, an' didn't the
+canary sort o' shave somethin' off'n the human ear-drum, on his tiptop
+notes? An' when I said that, Grandma Holly--her with lots o' white
+hair--says:--
+
+"'I donno but it does,' she says, 'but I don't mind; I'm so thankful to
+see somethin' around that's _little an' young_.'
+
+"That sort o' landed in my heart. It's just what I'd been thinkin' about
+'em.
+
+"'Little, young things,' s'I, sort o' careless, 'make a lot o' racket,
+you know.'
+
+"At that old Mis' Burney pipes up--her that brought up her daughter's
+children an' her son-in-law married again an' turned her out:--
+
+"'I use' to think so,' she says quiet; 'the noise o' the children use'
+to bother me terrible. When they reely got to goin' I use' to think I
+couldn't stand it, my head hurt me so. But now,' s'she, 'I get to
+thinkin' sometimes I wouldn't mind a horse-fiddle if some of 'em played
+it.'
+
+"'They're lots o' company, the little things,' says old Mis'
+Norris--she'd kep' mislayin' her teeth an' the navy-blue lady had took
+'em away from her that day for to teach her, so I couldn't hardly
+understand what she said. 'Mine was named Ellen an' Nancy,' I made out.
+
+"'Some o' you remember my Sam,'--Mis' Ailing speaks up then, an' she
+begun windin' up her yarn an' never noticed she was ravellin' out her
+mitten,--'he was an alderman,' she was goin' on, but old Mis' Winslow
+cuts in on her:--
+
+"'It don't matter what he was when he was man-grown,' s'she. 'Man-grown
+can get along themselves. It's when they're little bits o' ones,' she
+says.
+
+"'Little!' says Grandma Holly. 'Is it little you mean? Well, my Amy's
+two little feet use' to be swallowed up in my hand--so,' she says,
+shuttin' her hand over to show us.
+
+"Well, so they went on. I give you my word I stood there sort o'
+grippin' up on my elbows. I'd always known it was so--like you do know
+things are so. But somehow when you come to _feel_ they're so, that's
+another thing. And I was feelin' this in my throat 'bout as big as an
+orange. I'd thought their hands looked like they'd ought to be tyin' up
+little aprons, but I never thought o' the hands bein' rill lonesome to
+do the tyin', an' thinkin' about it, too. An' now I understood 'em like
+I see 'em for the first time, rill face to face. Somehow, we ain't any
+too apt to look at people that way," said Calliope. "You see how I mean
+it.
+
+"Then comes the navy-blue woman an' says it's time for their hot milk,
+an' they all looked up, kind o' hopeful. An' I see that the navy-blue
+one had got 'em trained into the i-dee that hot milk was an event. She
+didn't like to hev 'em talk much about the past, she told me, when she
+see what we was speakin' of, because it gener'lly made some of 'em cry,
+an' the i-dee was to keep the spirit of the home bright an' cheerful.
+'So I see,' s'I, dry. An' there was Christmas comin' on, an' nothin' to
+break the general cheerfulness but hot milk. "Well," Calliope said, "I
+s'pose you'll think I'm terrible foolish, but I couldn't help what I
+done--"
+
+"I don't wonder at it," said I, warmly; "you promised to spend Christmas
+Eve with them and read aloud to them, didn't you, Calliope?"
+
+"No!" Calliope cried; "I didn't do that. I should think they'd be sick
+to death o' bein' read aloud to. I should think they'd be sick to death
+bein' cheered up by their surroundin's. No--I invited the whole nine of
+'em to come over an' spend Christmas Eve with me."
+
+"Calliope!" I cried, "but how--"
+
+"I know it," she exclaimed, "I know it. But they're all well an' hardy.
+The charity corridor ain't expected in the infirmary much. An' Jimmy
+Sturgis is goin' to bring 'em over free in the closed 'bus--I'll fill it
+with hot bricks an' hot flat-irons an' bed-quilts. An' my land! you'd
+ought to see 'em when I ask' 'em. I don't s'pose they'd had an invite
+out in years. The navy-blue lady looked like I'd nipped a mountain off'n
+her shoulders, too. An' now," said Calliope, "what on top o' this earth
+will I do with 'em when I get 'em here?"
+
+What indeed? I left my task and sat by her on the rug before the fire,
+and we talked it over. But all the while we talked, I could see that she
+was keeping something back--some plan of which she was doubtful.
+
+"I ain't no money to spend, you know," she said, "an' I won't let
+anybody else spend any for me, for this. Folks has plans enough o' their
+own without mine. But I kep' sayin' to myself, all the way home when my
+knees give down at the i-dee of what I was goin' to do: 'Calliope, the
+Lord says, "_Give._" An' He meant you to give, same's those that hev
+got. He didn't say, "Everybody give but Calliope, an' she ain't got
+much, so she'd ought to be let off." He said, "_Give._"' An' He didn't
+mention all nice things, same's I'd like to give, an' most everybody
+does give--" she nodded toward my bed, brave with its Christmas array.
+"He didn't mention givin' _things_ at all. An' so," said Calliope, "I
+thought o' somethin' else."
+
+She sat with brooding eyes on the fire, her hands clasped about her
+knees.
+
+"The Lord Christ," said Calliope, "didn't hev nothin' of His own. An'
+yet He just give an' give an' give. An' somehow I got the _i_-dee," she
+finished, glancing up at me shyly, "that mebbe Christmas ain't really
+all in your stocking foot, after all. I ain't much to spend, and mebbe
+that sounds some like sour grapes. But it seems like a good many
+beautiful things is free to all, an' that they's ways to do. Well, I've
+thought of a way--"
+
+"Calliope," I said, "tell me what you have really planned for the
+old-lady party. You _have_ planned?"
+
+"Well, yes," she said, "I hev. But mebbe you'll think it ain't anything.
+First I thought o' tea, an' thin bread-an'-butter sandwiches--it seems
+some like a party when you get your bread thin. An' I've got apples in
+the house we could roast, an' corn to pop over the kitchen fire. But
+then I come to a stop. For I ain't nothin' else, an' I've spent every
+cent I _can_ spend a'ready. But yet I did want to show 'em somethin'
+lovely--an' differ'nt from what they see, so's it'd seem as if somebody
+cared, an' as if they'd been _in Christmas_, too. An' all of a sudden it
+come to me, why not invite in a few little children o' somebody's here
+in Friendship? So's them old grandma ladies--"
+
+She shook her head and turned away.
+
+"I expec'," she said, "you think I'm terrible foolish. But wouldn't that
+be givin', don't you think? _Would_ that be anything?"
+
+I have planned, as will fall to us all, many happy ways of keeping
+festival; but I think that never, even in days when I myself was
+happiest, have I so delighted in any event as in this of Calliope's
+proposing. And when at last she had gone, and the dusk had fallen and I
+lighted candles and went back to my pleasant task, some way the stitches
+of pink and blue on flowered fabrics, the flutter of crisp ribbons, and
+the breath of the sachets were not greatly in my thoughts; and that
+which made me glad was a certain shining in the room, but this was not
+of candle-light, or firelight, or winter starlight.
+
+With the days the plans for the Proudfit party--or rather the plans of
+the Proudfit guests--went merrily forward. It was, they said, like "in
+the Oldmoxon days," when the house in which I was now living had been
+the Friendship fairyland. Some take their parties solemnly, some
+joyously, some feverishly; but Friendship takes them vitally, as it
+takes a project or the breath of being. Like the rest of the world, the
+village sank Christmas in festivity. It could not see Christmas for the
+Christmas plans.
+
+Speculation was the delight of meetings, and every one conspired in
+terms of toilettes.
+
+"Likely," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "Mis' Banker Mason'll
+wear her black-an'-white foulard. Them foulards are wonderful
+durable--you can't muss 'em. She got hers when Gramma Mason first hurt
+her back, so's if anything happened she'd be part mournin', an' if
+anything didn't, she'd have a nice dress to wear out places. Ain't it
+real convenient,--white standin' for both companies an' the tomb, so?"
+
+And "Mis' Photographer Sturgis has the best of it, bein' an invalid,
+till a party comes up," said Libbie Liberty. "She gets plenty enough
+food sent in, an' flowers, an' such things, an' she's got nails hung
+full o' what I call sympathy clo'es, to wear durin' sympathy calls. But
+when it comes to a real what you might say dress-up dress, I guess
+she'll hev to be took worse with her side an' stay in the house."
+
+Abigail Arnold contributed:--
+
+"Seems Mis' Doctor Helman had a whole wine silk dress put away with her
+dyin' things. She always thought it sounded terrible fine to hear about
+the dead havin' dress-pattern after dress-pattern laid away that hadn't
+never been made up. So she'd got together the one, but now she an'
+Elzabella are goin' to work an' make it up. I guess Mis' Helman thinks
+her stomach is so much better 't mebbe she'll be spared till after the
+holidays when the sales begin."
+
+Even Liddy Ember had promised to go and to take Ellen, and Ellen went up
+and down the winter streets singing sane little songs about the party,
+save on days when she "come herself again," and then she planned, as
+wildly as anybody, what she meant to wear. And Liddy, whose dream had
+always been to do "reg'lar city dress-makin', with helpers an' plates
+an' furnish the findin's at the shop," and whose lot instead had been to
+cut and fit "just the durable kind," was blithely at work night and day
+on Mis' Postmaster Sykes's tobacco-brown net. We understood that there
+were to be brown velvet butterflies stitched down the skirt, and if her
+Lady Washington geranium flowered in time,--Mis' Sykes was said to lay
+bread and milk nightly about the roots to encourage it,--she was to wear
+the blossom in her hair. ("She'll be gettin' herself talked about,
+wearin' a wreath o' flowers on her head, so," said some.) But then, Mis'
+Sykes was recognized to be "one that picks her own steps."
+
+"Mis' Sykes always dresses for company accordin' to the way she gets her
+invite," Calliope observed. "A telephone invite, she goes in somethin'
+she'd wear home afternoons. Word o' mouth at the front door, she wears
+what she wears on Sundays. Written invites, she rags out in her rill
+_best_ dress, for parties. But _engraved_," Calliope mounted to her
+climax, "a bran' new dress an' a wreath in her hair is the least she'll
+stop at."
+
+But I think that, in the wish to do honour to so distinguished an
+occasion, the temper of Mis' Sykes, and perhaps of Ellen Ember too, was
+the secret temper of all the village.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+"NOT AS THE WORLD GIVETH"
+
+
+I daresay that excitement followed excitement when news of Calliope's
+party got abroad. But of this I knew little, for I spent those next days
+at the Proudfits' with Nita Ordway and little Viola, and though I
+thought often of Calliope, I chanced not to see her again until the
+holidays were almost upon us. In the late afternoon, two days before
+Christmas, I dropped in at her cottage to learn how pleasantly the plans
+for her party matured.
+
+To my amazement I found her all dejection.
+
+"Why, Calliope," I said, "can't the grandma ladies come, after all?"
+
+Yes, they could come; they were coming.
+
+"You are never sorry you asked them?" I pressed her.
+
+No. Oh, no; she was glad she had asked them.
+
+"Something is wrong, though," I said sadly--thinking what a blessed
+thing it is to be so joyous a spirit that one's dejections are bound to
+be taken seriously.
+
+"Well," said Calliope, then, "it's the children. No it ain't, it's
+Friendship. The town's about as broad as a broom straw an' most as deep.
+Anything differ'nt scares 'em like something wore out'd ought to.
+Friendship's got an i-dee that Christmas begins in a stocking an' ends
+off in a candle. It thinks the rest o' the days are reg'lar,
+self-respecting days, but it looks on Christmas like an extry thing,
+thrown in to please 'em. It acts as if the rest o' the year was plain
+cake an' the holidays was the frostin' to be et, an' everybody grab the
+best themselves, give or take."
+
+"Calliope!" I cried--for this was as if the moon had objected to the
+heavens.
+
+"Oh, I know I'd ought not to," she said sadly; "but don't folks act as
+if time was give to 'em to run around wild with, as best suits 'em?
+Three hundred an' 'leven days a year to use for themselves, an' Sundays
+an' Christmas an' Thanksgivin' to give away looks to me a rill fair
+division. But, no. Some folks act like Sundays an' holidays was not only
+the frostin', but the nuts an' candy an' ice-cream o' things--_their_
+ice-cream, to eat an' pass to their own, an' scrape the freezer."
+
+And then came the heart of the matter.
+
+"'T seems," said Calliope, "there's that children's Christmas tree at
+the new minister's on Christmas Eve. But that ain't till ha'-past seven,
+an' I done my best to hev some o' the children stop in here on their
+way, for _my_ little party. An' with one set o' lungs their mas says no,
+they'd get mussed for the tree if they do. I offered to hev 'em bring
+their white dresses pinned in papers, an' we'd dress 'em here--I think
+the grandma ladies'd like that. But their mas says no, pinned in
+papers'd take the starch out an' their hair'd get all over their heads.
+An' some o' the mothers says indignant: 'Old ladies from the poorhouse
+end o' the home--well, I should think not! Children is very easy to take
+things. If you'd hed young o' your own, you'd think more, Calliope,'
+they says witherin'."
+
+Her little wrinkled hands were trembling at the enormity.
+
+"I donno," she added, "but I was foolish to try it. But I did want to
+get a-hold o' somethin' beautiful for them old ladies to see. An', my
+mind, they ain't much so rilly lovely as little young children, together
+in a room."
+
+"But, Calliope," I said in distress, "isn't there even one child you can
+get?"
+
+"No, sir," she said. "Not a one. I been everywhere. You know they ain't
+any poor in Friendship. We're all comfortable enough off to be
+overparticular."
+
+"But wouldn't you think," I said, "at Christmas time--"
+
+"Yes, you would," Calliope said, "you would. You'd think Christmas'd
+make everything kind o' softened up an' differ'nt. Every time I look at
+the holly myself, I feel like I'd just shook hands with somebody
+cordial."
+
+None the less--for Calliope had drunk deep of the wine of doing and she
+never gave up any project--at four o'clock on the day before Christmas I
+saw the closed 'bus driven by Jimmy Sturgis fare briskly past my house
+on its way to the "start of the Plank Road," to the Old Ladies' Home.
+Within, I knew, were quilts and hot stones of Calliope's providing; and
+Jimmy had hung the 'bus windows with cedar, and two little flags
+fluttered from the door. It all had a merry, holiday air as Jimmy shook
+the lines and drew on swiftly through the snow to those wistful nine
+guests, who at last were to be "in Christmas," too.
+
+"If they can't do nothin' else," Calliope had said, "they can talk over
+old times, without hot milk interferin'. But I wish, an' I wish--seem's
+though there'd ought always to be a child around on Star o' Bethlehem
+night, don't it?"
+
+I dined alone that Star of Bethlehem night, and to dine alone under
+Christmas candles is never a cheerful business. The Proudfit car was to
+come for me soon after eight, and at eight I stood waiting at the window
+of my little living room, saying to myself that if I were to drop from
+the air to a deserted country road, I should be certain that it was
+Christmas Eve. You can tell Christmas Eve anywhere, like a sugar-plum,
+with your eyes shut. It is not the lighted houses, or the
+close-curtained windows behind which Christmas trees are fruiting; nor
+yet, in Friendship, will it be the post-office store or the home bakery
+windows, gay with Christmas trappings. But there is in the world a
+subdued note of joyful preparation, as if some spirit whom one never may
+see face to face had on this night a gift of perceptible life. And in
+spite of my loneliness, my heart upleaped to the note of a distant
+sleigh-bell jingling an air of "Home, going Home, Christmas Eve and
+going Home."
+
+Then, when the big Proudfit car came flashing to my door, I had a sweet
+surprise. For from it, through the snowy dark, came running a little
+fairy thing, and Viola Ordway danced to my door with her mother, muffled
+in furs.
+
+"We've been close in the house all day," Mrs. Ordway cried, "and now
+we've run away to get you. Come!"
+
+As for me, I took Viola in my arms and lifted her to my hall table and
+caught off her cloak and hood. I can never resist doing this to a child.
+I love to see the little warm, plump body in its fine white linen emerge
+rose-wise, from the calyx cloak; and I love that shy first gesture,
+whatever it may be, of a child so emerging. The turning about, the
+freeing of soft hair from the neck, the smoothing down of the frock, the
+half-abashed upward look. Viola did more. She laid one hand on my cheek
+and held it so, looking at me quite gravely, as if that were some secret
+sign of brotherhood in the unknown, which she remembered and I, alas!
+had forgotten. But I perfectly remembered how to kiss her. If only, I
+thought, all the empty arms could know a Viola. If only all the empty
+arms, up and down the world, could know a Viola even just at Christmas
+time. If only--
+
+Over the top of Viola's head I looked across at Nita Ordway, and a
+sudden joyous purpose lighted all the air about me--as a joyous purpose
+will. Oh, if only--And then I heard myself pouring out a marvellous
+jumble of sound and senselessness.
+
+"Nita!" I cried, "you are not a Friendship Village mother! You are not
+afraid. Viola is not going to the new minister's Christmas tree. Oh,
+don't you see? It's still early--surely we have time! The grandma ladies
+_must_ see Viola!"
+
+I remember how Nita Ordway laughed, and her answer made me love her the
+more--as is the way of some answers.
+
+"I don't catch it--I don't," she said, "but it sounds delicious. All
+courage, and old ladies, and ample time for everything! If I said, 'Of
+course,' would that do?"
+
+Already I was tying Viola's hood, and next to taking off a child's hood
+I love putting one on--surely every one will have noticed how their
+mouths bud up for kissing. While we sped along the Plank Road toward
+Calliope's cottage, I poured out the story of who were at her house that
+night, and why, and all that had befallen. In a moment the great car,
+devouring its own path of light, set us down at Calliope's gate, and
+Calliope herself, trim in her gray henrietta, her wrinkled face flushed
+and shining, came at our summons. And I pushed Viola in before
+us--little fairy thing in a fluff of white wraps and white furs.
+
+"Look, Calliope!" I cried.
+
+Calliope looked down at her, and I think she can hardly have seen Mrs.
+Ordway and me at all. She smote her hands softly together.
+
+"Oh," she said, "if it isn't! Oh--a child for Star o' Bethlehem night,
+after all!"
+
+She dropped to her knees before Viola, touching the little girl's hand
+almost shyly. There was in Calliope's face when she looked at any child
+a kind of nakedness of the woman's soul; and she, who was so deft, was
+curiously awkward in such a presence.
+
+"They're out there in the dinin' room," she whispered, "settin' round
+the cook stove. I saw they felt some better out there. Le's us leave her
+go out alone by herself, just the way she is."
+
+And that was what we did. We said something to Viola softly about "the
+poor grandma ladies, with no little girl to love," and then Calliope
+opened the door and let her through.
+
+We peeped for a moment at the lamp-lit crack. The dining room was warm
+and bright, its table covered with red cotton and set with tea-cups,
+shelves of plants blooming across the windows, cedar green on the walls.
+The odour of pop-corn was in the air, and above an open griddle hole
+apples bobbed on strings tied to the stove-pipe wing. And there about
+the cooking range, with its cheery opened hearth, Calliope's Christmas
+guests were gathered.
+
+They were exquisitely neat and trim, in black and brown cloth dresses,
+with a brooch, or a white apron, or a geranium from a window plant worn
+for festival. I recognized Grandma Holly, with her soft white hair, and
+I thought I could tell which were Mis' Ailing and Mis' Burney and Mis'
+Norris. And the faces of them all, the gentle, the grief-marked, even
+the querulous, were grown kindly with the knowledge that somebody had
+cared about their Christmas.
+
+The child went toward them as simply as if they had been friends. They
+looked at her with some murmuring of surprise, and at one another
+questioningly. Viola went straight to the knee of Grandma Holly, who was
+nearest.
+
+"'At lady tied my hood too tight," she referred unflatteringly to me,
+"p'eas do it off."
+
+Grandma Holly looked down over her spectacles, and up at the other
+grandma ladies, and back to Viola. The others gathered nearer, hitching
+forward rocking-chairs, rising to peer over shoulders--breathlessly,
+with a manner of fearing to touch her. But because of the little
+uplifted face, waiting, Grandma Holly must needs untie the white hood
+and reveal all the shining of the child's hair.
+
+"Nen do my toat off," Viola gravely directed.
+
+At that Grandma Holly crooned some single indistinguishable syllable in
+her throat, and then off came the cloak. The little warm, plump body in
+its fine linen emerged, rose-wise, and Viola smoothed down her frock,
+and freed her hair from her neck, and glanced up shyly. By the stir and
+flutter among them I understood that they were feeling just as I feel
+when a little hood and cloak come off.
+
+Viola stood still for a minute.
+
+"I like be made some 'tention to," she suggested gently.
+
+Ah--and they understood. How they understood! Grandma Holly swept the
+little girl in her arms, and I know how the others closed about them
+with smiles and vague unimportant words. Viola sat quietly and happily,
+like a little come-a-purpose spirit to let them pretend. And it was with
+them all as if something long pent up went free.
+
+Calliope left the door and turned toward us.
+
+"Seems like my throat couldn't stand it," she said, ... and it seemed to
+me, as we three sat together in the dim little parlor, that Nita Ordway
+must cherish Viola for us all--for the grandma ladies and Calliope and
+me.
+
+Half an hour later we three went out to the dining room. Viola ran to
+her mother when she entered. Nita took her in her arms and sat beside
+the stove, her cloak slipping from her shoulders, the soft peach tints
+of her gown shot through with shining lines and the light caught in her
+collar of gems. "I did want to get a-hold o' somethin' beautiful for
+them old ladies to see," Calliope had said.
+
+"Oh," said Grandma Holly, and she laid her brown hand on Viola's hand,
+"ain't she _dear an' little an' young_?"
+
+"I wish't she'd talk some," begged old Mis' Norris.
+
+"Ain't she good, though, the little thing?" Mis' Ailing said. "Look at
+how still she sets. Not wigglin' 'round same as some. It was just that
+way with Sam when he was small--he'd set by the hour an' leave me hold
+him--"
+
+A little bent creature, whose name I never learned, sat patting Viola's
+skirt.
+
+"Seems like I'd gone back years," we heard her say.
+
+Grandma Holly held up one half-closed hand.
+
+"Like that," she told them, "my Amy's feet was so little I could hold
+'em like that, an' I see hers is the same way. She's wonderful like Amy
+was, her age."
+
+I cannot recall half the sweet, trivial things that they said. But I
+remember how they told us stories of their own babies, and we laughed
+with them over treasured sayings of long-ago lips, or grieved with them
+over silences, or rejoiced at glad things that had been. Regardless of
+the Proudfit party, we let them talk as they would, and remember. Then
+of her own accord Nita Ordway hummed some haunting air, and sang one of
+the songs that we all loved--the grandma ladies and Calliope and I. It
+was a sleepy song, whose words I have forgotten, but it was in a kind of
+universal tongue which I think that no one can possibly mistake. And out
+of the lullaby came all the little spirits, freed in babyhood or
+"man-grown," and stood at the knees of the grandma ladies, so that I was
+afraid that they could not bear it.
+
+When the song was done, Viola suddenly sat up very straight.
+
+"I got a litty box," she announced, "an' I had a parasol. An' once a boy
+div me a new nail. An' once I didn' feel berry well, but now I am. An'
+once--"
+
+Their laughter was like a caress. Before it was done, we heard a
+stamping without, and there was Jimmy Sturgis, with a spray of holly in
+his old felt hat and the closed 'bus at the door.
+
+We helped Calliope to get their wraps and to fill the 'bus with hot
+stones from the oven and with many quilts, and we made ready a basket of
+pop-corn and apples and of the cedar hung around the little room. They
+stood about us to say good-by, or to tell us some last bit of the news
+of their long-past youth--dear, wrinkled faces framed in broad lines of
+bonnet or hood, and smiling, every one.
+
+"This gray shawl I got on me is the very one I used to wrap Amy in to
+carry her through the cold hall," said Grandma Holly. "My land-a-livin'!
+seems's if I'd been with her to-night, over again!"
+
+Their way of thanks lay among stumbling words and vague repetitions, but
+there was a kind of glory in their grateful faces, and one always
+remembers that.
+
+"Merry Prismas, gramma ladies!" Viola cried shrilly at the 'bus door,
+and within they laughed like mothers as they answered. And Jimmy Sturgis
+cracked his whip, and the sleigh-bells jingled.
+
+Nita Ordway and Viola and I stood for a moment with Calliope at her
+gate.
+
+"Come!" we begged her, "now go with us. We are all late together. There
+is no reason why you should not go with us to the Christmas party."
+
+But Calliope shook her head.
+
+"I'm ever so much obliged to you," she said, "but oh, I couldn't. I've
+hed too rilly a Christmas to come down to a party anywheres."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Nita and Viola and I reached Proudfit House, the guests were all
+assembled, but we knew that Mrs. Proudfit and Miss Clementina would be
+the first to forgive us when they understood.
+
+The big colonial home was bright with scarlet-shaded candles and
+holly-hung walls; there was mistletoe on the sconces, and in the great
+hall there were tuneful strings. On the landing of the stairs stood Mrs.
+Proudfit and Miss Clementina, charmingly pretty in their delicate
+frocks, and wholly gay and gracious. ("They seem lively like in pictures
+where folks don't make a loud sound a-talkin'," said Friendship. "I
+s'pose it's somethin' you learn in the City.") And Friendship wore its
+loyalty like a mantle. Twelve years had passed, and yet one and another
+said under breath and sighed, "If only Miss Linda could 'a' been here,
+too."
+
+All Friendship Village was there, save Abel Halsey, who was at the Good
+Shepherd's Home Christmas tree in the City, and, perhaps one would say,
+Delia More, who had begged to be allowed to help in the kitchen "an' be
+there that way." Even Peleg Bemus was in his place in the orchestra,
+sitting with closed eyes, playing his flute, and keeping audible time
+with his wooden leg,--quite as he did when he played his flute at night,
+on Friendship streets. And there was Mis' Postmaster Sykes, in the
+tobacco-brown net, with butterflies stitched down the skirt and the Lady
+Washington geranium in her hair--and forever near her went little Miss
+Liddy Ember with an almost passionate creative pride in the gown of her
+hand, so that she would murmur her patron an occasional warning: "Mis'
+Sykes, throw back your shoulders, you hev to, to bring out the real set
+o' the basque;" or, "Don't forget you want to give a little hitch to the
+back when you stand up, Mis' Sykes." And to one and another Liddy said
+proudly, "I declare if I didn't get that skirt with the butterflies just
+like a magazine cover." And there, too, was Ellen Ember, wearing a white
+book muslin and a rosy "nubia" that had been her mother's; and Ellen's
+face was uplifted, and of pale distinction under the bronze glory of her
+hair, but all that evening she smiled and sang and wondered, in utter
+absence of the spirit. ("Oh," poor Miss Liddy said, "I do so want Ellen
+to come herself before supper. She won't remember a thing she eats, an'
+she don't have much that's tasty an' good. It'll be just like she missed
+the whole thing, in spite of all the chore o' comin'.") And there were
+Mis' Doctor Helman in her new wine silk; Mis' Banker Mason in the
+black-and-white foulard designed to grace a festival or to respect a
+tomb; Mis' Sturgis, in a put-away dress that was a surprise to every
+one; Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and Eppleby, and the "Other"
+Holcombs; Abigail Arnold, the Gekerjecks, Mis' Toplady and Timothy, even
+Mis' Mayor Uppers--no one was forgotten. And--save poor Ellen--every one
+was aglow with the sweet satisfaction of having sent abroad a brave
+array of pretty things, with stitches of rose and blue on flowered
+fabrics, with the flutter of ribbons, and the breath of sachets, and
+with many a gift of substance to those less generously endowed. To them
+all the delight of the season was in the gifts of their hands and in the
+night's merry-making, and in the joy of keeping holiday. Here, as
+Calliope had said, Christmas, begun in a stocking, was ending in a
+candle.
+
+And yet it was Star of Bethlehem night, the night of Him who "didn't
+mention givin' _things_ at all."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+LONESOME.--I
+
+
+Calliope and I were talking over the Proudfit party, as I had grown to
+like to talk over most things with her, when I said something of two of
+the guests whom I did not remember before to have seen: a little man of
+shy gravity and an extremely pretty girl who, if she looked at any one
+but him, did so quite undetected.
+
+"That's Eb Goodnight," Calliope replied, "him of the new-born spine.
+Wasn't it like the Proudfits to ask them?"
+
+And, at my question:
+
+"Some folks," Calliope said, "has got spines and some folks hasn't. But
+what I say is, nobody can tell which is which. Because now and then the
+soft-spine' kind just hardens up all in a minute same as steel. So when
+I meet a stranger that sort o' sops along through life, limp and floppy,
+I never judge him. I just say, 'You look some like a loose shutter, but
+mebbe you can fair bang the house down, if you rilly get to blowin'.' It
+was that way with Eb Goodnight.
+
+"I donno how it is other places. But I've noticed with us here in
+Friendship--an' I've grown to the town from short dresses to
+bein'-careful-what-I-eat--I've often noticed't when folks seems not to
+have any backbone to speak of, or even when they go 'round sort o'
+crazy--they's usually some other reason, like enough. Sensitive or sick
+or lonesome, or like that. It was so with Eb--an' it was so with Elspie.
+Elspie, though, was interestin' on account o' bein' not only a little
+crazy, but rill pretty besides. But Eb, he was the kind that a
+sign-board is more interestin' than. An' yet--"
+
+With that she paused, looking down some way of her own thought. I knew
+Calliope's "an' yet." It splendidly conceded the entire converse of her
+argument.
+
+"Eb come here to Friendship," she went on, "less public than Elspie did.
+Elspie come official, as an inmate o' the county house. Eb, he sort o'
+crep' in town, like he crep' everywhere else. He introduced himself to
+me through sellin' needles. He walked in on me an' a two-weeks ironin'
+one mornin' with, 'Lemme present myself as Ebenezer Goodnight, sewin'
+needles, knittin' needles, crochet hooks an' shuttles an' anything o'
+that,' an' down he set an' never opened his mouth about his needles
+again. Eb was real delicate, for an agent. He just talked all the time
+about Friendship an' himself. 'The whol' blame' town's kin,' s'e; 'I
+never see such a place. _Every_body's kin, only just me. Air you,' he
+ask' me wistful, 'cousin' of 'em all, too?'
+
+"'Mis' Sprague that's dead was connected up with me by marriage an' Mis'
+Sykes is my mother's secunt cousin,' I owned up.'
+
+"'That's it again,' s'e, sighin'. 'I'm the odd number, dum it,' he says
+sorrowful.
+
+"Well, an' he hed sort of an odd-number way about him, too. He went
+along the street like he didn't belong. I donno if you know what I mean,
+but he was always takin' in the tops o' buildin's an' lookin' at the
+roads an' behavin' like he noticed--the way you don't when you live in a
+town. Yes, Ebenezer Goodnight went around like he see things for the
+first time. An' somehow he never could join in. When he walked up to a
+flock o' men, he stood _side_ of 'em, an' not with 'em. An' he shook
+hands sort o' loose an' temporary like he meant somethin' else. An' he
+just couldn't bear not to agree with you. If he let out't the sky was
+blue an' you said, No, pink, he'd work around till he'd dyed _his_ sky
+pink, too. That man would agree to things he never heard of. Let Peleg
+Bemus be tellin' one o' his eastern janitor adventures, an' Eb'd set an'
+agree with him, past noddin' an' up to words, all about elevators an'
+Ferris boats an' Eyetalians an' things he'd never laid look to. He
+seemed to hev a spine made mostly o' molasses. An' sometimes I think
+your spine's your soul.
+
+"Eb hed been lonelyin' 'round the village a month or so when Sum
+Merriman, that run the big rival business to the post-office store, an'
+was fire chief besides, took him an' his peddler's pack into the dry
+goods end--an' Eb was tickled. He went down first mornin' in his best
+clo'es, a-wearin' both collar an' cuffs. But when somebody remarked on
+the clo'es, he didn't hev backbone enough to keep on wearin' 'em--he
+slimpsed right back to his peddler duds an' done his best to please. An'
+he did please--he made a rill first-rate merchant clear up till June o'
+the year. An' then Sum Merriman, his employer, he went to work an' died.
+
+"Sum died a Tuesday, an', bein' it never rains but it pours, an' piles
+peelin's on ashes, or whatever it is they say, it was the Tuesday that
+the poorhouse burnt down--just like it knew the fire chief was gone. The
+poorhouse use' to be across the track, beyond the cemetery an' quite
+near my house. An' the night it burnt I was settin' on the side stoop
+without anything over my head, just smellin' in the air, when I see a
+little pinky look on the sky beyond the track. It wasn't moon-time, an'
+they wa'n't nothin' to bonfire that time o' year, an' I set still,
+pretendin' it was rose-bushes makin' a ladder an' buildin' a way of
+escape by night. It was such a nice evenin' you couldn't imagine
+anything rilly happenin' bad. But all at once I heard the fire-engine
+bell poundin' away like all possessed--an' then runnin' feet, like when
+they's an accident. I got to the gate just as somebody come rushin'
+past, an' I piped up what was the matter. 'Poorhouse's afire,' s'e.
+'Poorhouse,' s'I. 'My land!' An' I out the gate an' run alongside of
+him, an' he sort o' slowed down for me, courteous.
+
+"Then I noticed it was Eb Goodnight--lonelier'n ever now that his
+employer hed died that day. I'd never see Eb hustle that much before,
+an' the thought went through my head, kind o' wonderin', that he was
+runnin' as if the fire was a real relation o' his an' he was sent for.
+'Know anything else about it?' I ask' him, keepin' up. 'Not much,' s'e,
+'but I guess it's got such a head-start the whol' thing'll go like a
+shell.' An' when we got to the top o' the bank on the other side o' the
+track, we see it was that way--the poorhouse'd got such a head-start
+burnin' that nothin' could save it, though Timothy Toplady, that was
+town marshal an' chairman o' the county board, an' Silas Sykes an'
+Eppleby Holcomb, that was managers o' the poorhouse, an' some more, went
+puffin' past us, yellin', 'Put it out--run fer water--why don't you do
+suthin'?'--an' like that, most beside theirselves.
+
+"'Them poor critturs,' says I, 'oh, my, them poor critturs in the
+home'--for there must 'a' ben twenty o' the county charges all quartered
+in the buildin'. An' when we come to the foot o' the poorhouse hill,
+land, land, I never see such Bedlam.
+
+"The fire had started so soon after dusk that the inmates was all up
+yet. An' they was half of 'em huddled in a bunch by the side-yard stile
+an' half of 'em runnin' 'round wild as anything. The whol' place looked
+like when you hev a bad dream. It made me weak in my knees, an' I was
+winded anyway with runnin', an' I stopped an' leant up against a tree,
+an' Eb, he stopped too, takin' bearin's. An' there I was, plump against
+Elspie, standin' holdin' her arms 'round the tree trunk an' shiverin'
+some.
+
+"'Elspie,' s'I, 'why, you poor child.'
+
+"'No need to rub _that_ in,' s'she, tart. It's the one word the county
+charges gets sensitive about--an' Eb, he seemed to sense that, an' he
+ask' her, hasty, how the fire started. He called her 'Miss,' too, an' I
+judged that 'Miss' was one o' them poultice words to her.
+
+"'I donno,' s'she, 'but don't it look _cheerful_? The yard's all lit up
+nice, like fer comp'ny,' she says, rill pleased.
+
+"It sort o' uncovered my nerves to hear her so unconcerned. I never hed
+understood her--none of us hed. She was from outside the state, but her
+uncle, Job Ore, was on our county board an' he got her into our
+poorhouse--like you can when you're in politics. Then he up an' died an'
+went home to be buried, an' there she was on our hands. She wa'n't rill
+crazy--we understood't she hadn't ben crazy at all up to the time her
+mother died. Then she hadn't no one to go to an' she got queer, an' the
+poorhouse uncle stepped in; an' when he died, he died in debt, so his
+death wa'n't no use to her. She was thirty odd, but awful little an'
+slim an' scairt-lookin', an' quite pretty, I allus thought; an' I never
+see a thing wrong with her till she was so unconcerned about the fire.
+
+"'Elspie,' s'I, stern, 'ain't you no feelin',' s'I, 'for the loss o' the
+only home you've got to your back?'
+
+"'Oh, I donno,' s'she, an' I could see her smilin' in that bright light,
+'oh, I donno. It'll be some place to come to, afterwards. When I go out
+walkin',' s'she, 'I ain't no place to head for. I sort o' circle 'round
+an' come back. I ain't even a grave to visit,' s'she, 'an' it'll be kind
+o' cosey to come up here on the hill an' set down by the ashes--like
+they _belonged_.'
+
+"I know I heard Eb Goodnight laugh, kind o' cracked an' enjoyable, an' I
+took some shame to him for makin' fun o' the poor girl.
+
+"'She's goin' clear out o' her head,' thinks I, 'an' you'd better get
+her home with you, short off.' So I put my arm around her, persuadish,
+an' I says: 'Elspie,' I says, 'you come on to my house now for a spell,'
+I says. But Eb, he steps in, prompter'n I ever knew him--I'd never heard
+him do a thing decisive an' sudden excep' sneeze, an' them he always
+done his best to swallow. 'I'll take her to your house,' he says to me;
+'you go on up there to them women. I won't be no use up there,' he says.
+An' that was reasonable enough, on account o' Eb not bein' the decisive
+kind, for fires an' such.
+
+"So Eb he went off, takin' Elspie to my house, an' I went on up the
+hill, where Timothy Toplady and Silas Sykes an' Eppleby was rushin'
+round, wild an' sudden, herdin' the inmates here an' there, vague an'
+energetic. I didn't do much better, an' I done worse too, because I
+burned my left wrist, long an' deep. When I got home with it, Eb was
+settin' on the front stoop with Elspie, an' when he heard about the
+wrist, he come in an' done the lightin' up. An' Elspie, she fair
+su'prised me.
+
+"'Where do you keep your rags?' s'she, brisk.
+
+"'In that flour chest I don't use,' I says, 'in the shed.'
+
+"My land! she was back in a minute with a soft piece o' linen an' the
+black oil off the clock shelf that I hadn't told her where it was, an'
+she bound up my wrist like she'd created that burn an' understood it up
+an' down.
+
+"'Now you get into the bed,' she says, 'without workin' the rag off. I'm
+all right,' s'she. 'I can lock up. I like hevin' it to do,' she told me.
+
+"But Eb puts in, kind o' eager:--
+
+"'Lemme lock up the shed--it's dark as a hat out there an' you might
+sprain over your ankle,' he says awkward. An' so he done the lockin' up,
+an' it come over me he liked hevin' that little householdy thing to do.
+An' then he went off home--that is, to where he stopped an' hated it so.
+
+"Well, the poorhouse burnt clear to the ground, an' the inmates hed to
+be quartered 'round in Friendship anyhow that night, an' nex' day I
+never see Friendship so upset. I never see the village roust itself so
+sudden, either. Timothy an' the managers was up an' doin' before
+breakfast next mornin', an' no wonder. Timothy Toplady, he had three old
+women to his farm. Silas Sykes, he'd took in Foolish Henzie an' another
+old man for his. An' Eppleby Holcomb, in his frenzy he'd took in _five_,
+an' Mame was near a lunatic with havin' 'em to do for. An' all three men
+bein' at the head o' the burned buildin', they danced 'round lively
+makin' provision, an' they sent telegrams, wild an' reckless, without
+countin' the words. An' before noon it was settled't the poorhouse in
+Alice County, nearest us, should take in the inmates temporary. We was
+eatin' dinner when Timothy an' Silas come in to tell Elspie. I wished
+Eppleby had come to tell her. Eppleby does everything like he was
+company, an' not like he owned it.
+
+"Eb was hevin' dinner with us too. He'd been scallopin' in an' out o'
+the house all the forenoon, an' I'd ask' him to set down an' hev a bite.
+But when he done even that, he done it kind of alien. Peleg Bemus,
+playin' his flute walkin' along the streets nights, like he does, seems
+more a rill citizen than Eb use' to, eatin' his dinner. Elspie, she'd
+got the whol' dinner--she was a rill good cook, an' that su'prised me as
+much as her dressin' my wrist the night before. She'd pampered me
+shameful all that mornin' too, an' I'd let her--when you've lived alone
+so long, it's kind o' nice to hev a person fussin' here an' there, an'
+Elspie seemed to love takin' care o' somebody. I declare, it seemed as
+if she done some things for me just for the sake o' doin' 'em--she was
+that kind. Timothy an' Silas wouldn't hev any dinner,--it was a boiled
+piece, too,--bein' as dinners o' their own was gettin' cold. But they
+set up against the edge o' the room so's we could be eatin' on.
+
+"'Elspie,' says Timothy, 'you must be ready to go sharp seven o'clock
+Friday mornin'.'
+
+"'Go where?' says Elspie. She hed on a black-an'-white stripe o' mine,
+an' her cheeks were some pink from standin' over the cook stove, an' she
+looked rill pretty.
+
+"Timothy, he hesitated. But,--
+
+"'To the Alice County poorhouse,' says Silas, blunt. Silas Sykes is a
+man that always says 'bloody' an' 'devil' an' 'coffin' right out instead
+o' 'bandaged' an' 'the Evil One,' an' 'casket.'
+
+"'Oh!' says Elspie. 'Oh, ...' an' sort o' sunk down an' covered her
+mouth with her wrist an' looked at us over it.
+
+"'The twenty o' you'll take the Dick Dasher,' says Timothy, then, 'an'
+it'll be a nice train ride for ye,' he says, some like an undertaker
+makin' small talk. But he see how Elspie took it, an' so he slid off the
+subjec' an' turned to Eb.
+
+"'Little too early to know who's goin' to take the Merriman store, ain't
+it?' s'he, cheerful. Timothy ain't so everlastin' cheerful, either, but
+he always hearties himself all over when he talks, like he was a bell or
+a whistle an' he hed it to do.
+
+"Eb, he dropped his knife on the floor.
+
+"'Yes, yes,' he says flurried, 'yes, it is--' like he was rushin' to
+cover an' a 'yes' to agree was his best protection.
+
+"'Oh, well, it ain't so early either,' Silas cuts in, noddin' crafty.
+
+"'No, no,' Eb agrees immediate, 'I donno's _'tis_ so very early, after
+all.'
+
+"'I'm thinkin' o' takin' the store over myself,' says Silas Sykes,
+tippin' his head back an' rubbin' thoughtful under his whiskers. 'It'd
+be a good idee to buy it in, an' no mistake,'
+
+"'Yes,' says Eb, noddin', 'yes. Yes, so't would be.'
+
+"'I donno's I'd do it, Silas, if I was you,' says Timothy, frownin'
+judicial. 'Ain't you gettin' some stiff to take up with a new business?'
+But Timothy is one o' them little pink men, an' you can't take his
+frowns much to heart.
+
+"'No,' says Eb, shakin' his head. 'No. No, I donno's I would take it
+either, Mr. Sykes.'
+
+"I was goin' to say somethin' about the wind blowin' now east, now west,
+an' the human spine makin' a bad weathercock, but I held on, an' pretty
+soon Timothy an' Silas went out.
+
+"'Seven o'clock Friday A.M., now!' says Silas, playful, over his
+shoulder to Elspie. But Elspie didn't answer. She was just sittin'
+there, still an' quiet, an' she didn't eat another thing.
+
+"That afternoon she slipped out o' the house somewheres. She didn't hev
+a hat--what few things she did hev hed been burnt. She went off without
+any hat an' stayed most all the afternoon. I didn't worry, though,
+because I thought I knew where she'd gone. But I wouldn't 'a' asked
+her,--I'd as soon slap anybody as quiz 'em,--an' besides I knew't
+somebody'd tell me if I kep' still. Friendship'll tell you everything
+you want to know, if you lay low long enough. An' sure as the world,
+'bout five o'clock in come Mis' Postmaster Sykes, lookin' troubled.
+Folks always looks that way when they come to interfere. Seems't she'd
+just walked past the poorhouse ruins, an' she'd see Elspie settin' there
+side of 'em, all alone--
+
+"'--_singin'_,' says Mis' Sykes, impressive,--like the evil was in the
+music,--'sittin' there singin', like she was all possessed. An' I come
+up behind her an' plumped out at her to know _what_ she was a-doin'. An'
+she says: "I'm makin' a call,"--just like that; "I'm makin' a call,"
+s'she, smilin', an' not another word to be got out of her. '_An'_,' says
+Mis' Sykes, 'let me tell you, I scud down that hill, _one goose
+pimple_.'
+
+"'Let her alone,' says I, philosophic. 'Leave her be.'
+
+"But inside I ached like the toothache for the poor thing--for Elspie.
+An' I says to her, when she come home:--
+
+"'Elspie,' I says, 'why don't you go out 'round some an' see folks here
+in the village? The minister's wife'd be rill glad to hev you come,' I
+says.
+
+"'Oh, I hate to hev 'em sit thinkin' about me in behind their eyes,'
+s'she, ready.
+
+"'What?' says I, blank.
+
+"'It comes out through their eyes,' she says. 'They keep thinkin': Poor,
+poor, poor Elspie. If they was somebody dead't I could go to see,' she
+told me, smilin', 'I'd do that. A grave can't _poor_ you,' she told me,
+'an' everybody that's company to you does.'
+
+"'Well!' says I, an' couldn't, in logic, say no more.
+
+"That evenin' Eb come in an' set down on the edge of a chair,
+experimental, like he was testin' the cane.
+
+"'Miss Cally,' s'e, when Elspie was out o' the room, 'you goin' t' let
+_her_ go with them folks to the Alice County poorhouse?'
+
+"I guess I dissembulated some under my eyelids--bein' I see t' Eb's mind
+was givin' itself little lurches.
+
+"'Well,' s'I, 'I don't see what that's wise I can do besides.'
+
+"He mulled that rill thorough, seein' to the back o' one hand with the
+other.
+
+"'Would you take her to board an' me pay for her board?' s'e, like he'd
+sneezed the _i_-dea an' couldn't help it comin'.
+
+"'Goodness!' s'I, neutral.
+
+"Eb sighed, like he'd got my refusal--Eb was one o' the kind that always
+thinks, if it clouds up, 't the sun is down on 'em personally.
+
+"'Oh,' s'I, bold an' swift, 'you great big ridiculous _man_!'
+
+"An' I'm blest if he didn't agree to that.
+
+"'I know I'm ridiculous,' s'he, noddin', sad. 'I know I'm that, Miss
+Cally.'
+
+"'Well, I didn't mean it that way,' s'I, reticent--an' said no more,
+with the exception of what I'd rilly meant.
+
+"'Why under the canopy,' I ask' him, for a hint, 'don't you take the Sum
+Merriman store, an' run it, an' live on your feet? I ain't any patience
+with a man,' s'I, 'that lives on his toes. Stomp some, why don't you,
+an' buy that store?'
+
+"An' his answer su'prised me.
+
+"'I did ask Mis' Fire Chief fer the refusal of it,' he said. 'I ask' her
+when I took my flowers to Sum, to-day--they was wild flowers I'd picked
+myself,' he threw in, so's I wouldn't think spendthrift of him. 'An' I'm
+to let her know this week, for sure.'
+
+"'Glory, glory, glory,' s'I, under my breath--like I'd seen a rill live
+soul, standin' far off on a hill somewheres, drawin' cuts to see whether
+it should come an' belong to Eb, or whether it shouldn't.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+LONESOME.--II
+
+
+"All that evenin' Eb an' Elspie an' I set by the cook stove, talkin',
+an' they seemed to be plenty to talk about, an' the air in the room was
+easy to get through with what you hed to say--it was that kind of an
+evenin'. Eb was pretty quiet, though, excep' when he piped up to agree.
+'Gettin' little too hot here, ain't it?' I know I said once; an' Eb see
+right off he was roasted an' he spried 'round the draughts like mad. An'
+a little bit afterwards I says, with malice the fourth thought: 'I can
+feel my shoulders some chilly,' I says--an' he acted fair
+chatterin'-toothed himself, an' went off headfirst for the woodpile. I
+noticed that, an' laughed to myself, kind o' pityin'. But Elspie, she
+never noticed. An' when it come time to lock up, I 'tended to my wrist
+an' let them two do the lockin'. They seemed to like to--I could tell
+that. An' Elspie, she let Eb out the front door herself, like they was
+rill folks.
+
+"Nex' day I was gettin' ready for Sum Merriman's funeral,--it was to be
+at one o'clock,--when Elspie come in my room, sort o' shyin' up to me
+gentle.
+
+"'Miss Cally,' 's'she, 'do you think the mourners'd take it wrong if I's
+to go to the funeral?'
+
+"'Why, no, Elspie,' I says, su'prised; 'only what do you want to go
+for?' I ask' her.
+
+"'Oh, I donno,' s'she. 'I'd like to go an' I'd like to ride to the
+graveyard. I've watched the funerals through the poorhouse fence. An'
+I'd kind o' like to be one o' the followers, for once--all lookin'
+friendly an' together so, in a line.'
+
+"'Go with me then, child,' I says. An' she done so.
+
+"Bein' summer, the funeral flowers was perfectly beautiful. They was a
+rill hothouse box from the Proudfits; an' a anchor an' two crosses an' a
+red geranium lantern; an' a fruit piece made o' straw flowers from the
+other merchants; an' seven pillows, good-sized, an' with all different
+wordin', an' so on. The mound at the side o' the grave was piled
+knee-high, an' Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, I heard, said it seemed like
+Sum was less dead than almost anybody 't'd died in Friendship, bein' the
+grave kind o' spoke up, friendly, when you see the flowers. She went
+home rill cheerful from the funeral an' was able to help get the supper
+for the out-o'-town relations, a thing no widow ever thinks of, anyway
+till the next day--though Sum was her second husband, so it was a little
+different than most.
+
+"Well, a few of us waited 'round the cemetery afterwards to fix the
+flowers on the top o' the sod, an' Elspie, she waited with me--fussin'
+quiet with one thing an' another. Eb, he waited too, standin' 'round.
+An' when it come time for us women to lay the set pieces on, I see
+Elspie an' Eb walkin' off toward the top o' the cemetery hill. It's a
+pretty view from there, lookin' down the slope toward the Old Part,
+where nobody remembered much who was buried, an' it's a rill popular
+walk. I liked seein' 'em go 'long together--some way, lookin' at 'em,
+Elspie so pretty an' Eb so kind o' gentle, you could 'a' thought they
+_was_ rill folks, her sane an' him with a spine. I slipped off an' left
+'em, the cemetery bein' so near my house, an' Eb walked home with her.
+'Poor things,' I thought, 'if he _does_ go back to peddlin' an' she
+_has_ to go to the Alice County poorhouse, I'll give 'em this funeral
+afternoon for a bright spot, anyhow.'
+
+"But I'd just about decided that Elspie wa'n't to go to Alice County. I
+hadn't looked the _i_-dee in the face an' thought about it, very
+financial. But I ain't sure you get your best lights when you do that.
+I'd just sort o' decided on it out o' pure shame for the shabby trick o'
+_not_ doin' so. I hadn't said anything about it to Timothy or Silas or
+any o' the rest, because I didn't hev the strength to go through the
+arguin' agony. When the Dick Dasher had pulled out without her, final, I
+judged they'd be easier to manage. An' that evenin' I told Elspie--just
+to sort o' clamp myself _to_ myself; an' I fair never see anybody so
+happy as she was. It made me ashamed o' myself for not doin' different
+everything I done.
+
+"I was up early that Friday mornin', because I judged't when Elspie
+wasn't to the train some o' them in charge'd come tearin' to my house to
+find out why. I hadn't called Elspie, an' I s'posed she was asleep in
+the other bedroom. I was washin' up my breakfast dishes quiet, so's not
+to disturb her, when I heard somebody come on to the front stoop like
+they'd been sent for.
+
+"'There,' thinks I, 'just as I expected. It's one o' the managers.'
+
+"But it wa'n't a manager. When I'd got to the front door, lo an' the
+hold! there standin' on the steps, wild an' white, was the widow o' the
+day before's funeral--Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, lookin' like the grave
+_hed_ spoke up. She'd got up early to go alone to the cemetery, an', my
+house bein' the nearest, she'd come rushin' back to me with her news.
+
+"'Cally!' s'she, from almost before she laid eyes on me, 'Cally!
+Somebody's stole every last one o' the flowers off'n Sum's grave. _An'_
+the ribbins.'
+
+"She was fair beside herself, bein' as the loss hed piled up on a long
+sickness o' Sum's, an' a big doctor's bill consequent, an' she nervous
+anyhow, an' a good deal o' the ribbin tyin' the stems was silk, both
+sides.
+
+"'I'll hev out the marshal,' s'she, wild. 'I'll send for Timothy. They
+can't hev got far with 'em. I'll know,' s'she, defiant, 'whether they's
+anything to the law or whether they ain't.'
+
+"I hed her take some strong coffee from breakfast, an' I got her, after
+some more fumin's an' fustin's, to walk back to the cemetery with me,
+till we give a look around. I do as many quick-moved things as some, but
+I allus try, _first_, to give a look around.
+
+"'An' another thing,' s'I to her, as we set out, 'are you sure, Mis'
+Fire Chief, that you got to the right grave? The first visit, so,' I
+says, 'an' not bein' accustomed to bein' a widow, lately, an' all, you
+might 'a' got mixed in the lots.'
+
+"While she was disclaimin' this I looked up an' see, hangin' round the
+road, was Eb. He seemed some sheepish when he see me, an' he said,
+hasty, that he'd just got there, an' it come over me like a flash't he'd
+come to see Elspie off. An' I marched a-past him without hardly a word.
+
+"We wasn't mor'n out o' the house when we heard a shout, an' there come
+Silas an' Timothy, tearin' along full tilt in the store delivery wagon,
+wavin' their arms.
+
+"'It's Elspie--Elspie!' they yelled, when they was in hearin'. 'She
+ain't to the depot. She'll be left. Where is she?'
+
+"I hadn't counted on their comin' before the train left, but I thought I
+see my way clear. An' when they come up to us, I spoke to 'em, quiet.
+
+"'She's in the house, asleep,' s'I, 'an' what's more, in that house
+she's goin' to stay as long as she wants. But,' s'I, without waitin' for
+'em to bu'st out, 'there's more important business than that afoot for
+the marshal;' an' then I told 'em about Sum Merriman's flowers. 'An','
+s'I, 'you'd better come an' see about that now--an' let Eppleby an' the
+others take down the inmates, an' you go after 'em on the 8.05. It ain't
+often,' s'I, crafty, 'that we get a thief in Friendship.'
+
+"I hed Timothy Toplady there, an' he knew it. He's rill sensitive about
+the small number o' arrests he's made in the village in his term. He
+excited up about it in a minute.
+
+"'Blisterin' Benson!' he says, 'ain't this what they call vandalism?
+Look at it right here in our midst like a city!' says he, fierce--an'
+showin' through some gleeful.
+
+"'Why, sir,' says Silas Sykes, 'mebbe it's them human _goals_. Mebbe
+they've dug Sum up,' he says, 'an mebbe--' But I hushed him up. Silas
+Sykes always grabs on to his thoughts an' throws 'em out, dressed or
+undressed. He ain't a bit o' reserve. Not a thought of his head that he
+don't part with. If he had hands on his forehead, you could tell what
+time he is--I think you could, anyway.
+
+"Well, it was rill easy to manage 'em, they bein' men an' susceptible to
+fascinations o' lawin' it over somethin'. An' we all got into the
+delivery wagon, an' Eb, he come too, sittin' in back, listenin' an'
+noddin', his feet hangin' over the box informal.
+
+"I allus remember how the cemetery looked that mornin'. It was the tag
+end o' June--an' in June cemeteries seems like somewheres else. The
+Sodality hed been tryin' to get a new iron fence, but they hadn't made
+out then, an' they ain't made out now--an' the old whitewashed fence an'
+the field stone wall was fair pink with wild roses, an' the mulberry
+tree was alive with birds, an' the grass layin' down with dew, an' the
+white gravestones set around, placid an' quiet, like other kind o' folks
+that we don't know about. Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, she went right
+through the wet grass, cross lots an' round graves, holdin' up her
+mournin' an' showin' blue beneath--kind o' secular, like her thinkin'
+about the all-silk ribbin at such a time. Sure enough, she knew her way
+to the lot all right. An' there was the new grave, all sodered green,
+an' not a sprig nor a stitch to honour it.
+
+"'_Now!_' says Mis' Merriman, rill triumphant.
+
+"'Land, land!' s'I, seein' how it rilly was.
+
+"Timothy an' Silas, they both pitched in an' talked at once an' bent
+down, technical, lookin' for tracks. But Eb, he just begun seemin'
+peculiar--an' then he slipped off somewheres, though we never missed
+him, till, in a minute, he come runnin' back.
+
+"'Come here!' he says. 'Come on over here a little ways,' he told us,
+an' not knowin' anything better to do we turned an' went after him,
+wonderin' what on the earth was the matter with him an' ready to believe
+'most anything.
+
+"Eb led us past the vault where Obe Toplady, Timothy's father, lays in a
+stone box you can see through the grating tiptoe; an' round by the
+sample cement coffin that sets where the drives meet for advertisin'
+purposes, an' you go by wonderin' whose it'll be, an' so on over toward
+the Old Part o' the cemetery, down the slope of the hill where
+everybody's forgot who's who or where they rest, an' no names, so. But
+it's always blue with violets in May--like Somebody remembered, anyhow.
+
+"When we got to the top o' the hill, we all looked down the slope,
+shinin' with dew an' sunniness, an' little flowers runnin' in the grass,
+thick as thick, till at the foot o' the hill they fair made a garden,--a
+garden about the size of a grave, knee-deep with flowers. From where we
+stood we could see 'em--hothouse roses an' straw flowers, an' set
+pieces, an' a lot o' pillows, an' ribbins layin' out on the grass. An'
+there, side of 'em, broodin' over 'em lovin', set Elspie, that I'd
+thought was in my house asleep.
+
+"Mis' Fire Chief, she wasn't one to hesitate. She was over the hill in a
+minute, the blue edge o' petticoat bannerin' behind.
+
+"'Up-_un_ my word,' s'she, like a cut, 'if this ain't a pretty note.
+What under the sun are you doin' sittin' there, Elspie, with _my_
+flowers?'
+
+"Elspie looked up an' see her, an' see us streamin' toward her over the
+hill.
+
+"'They ain't your flowers, are they?' s'she, quiet. 'They're the dead's.
+I was a-goin' to take 'em back in a minute or two, anyway, an' I'll take
+'em back now.'
+
+"She got up, simple an' natural, an' picked up the fruit piece an' one
+o' the pillows, an' started up the hill.
+
+"'Well, I nev-er,' says Mis' Merriman; 'the very bare brazenness. Ain't
+you goin' to tell me _what_ you're doin' here with the flowers you say
+is the dead's, an' I'm sure what was Sum's is mine an' the dead's the
+same--'
+
+"She begun to cry a little, an' with that Elspie looks up at her,
+troubled.
+
+"'I didn't mean to make you cry,' she says. 'I didn't mean you should
+know anything about it. I come early to do it--I thought you wouldn't
+know.'
+
+"'Do _what_?' says Mis' Merriman, rill snappish.
+
+"Elspie looks around at us then as if she first rilly took us in. An'
+when she sees Eb an' me standin' together, she give us a little
+smile--an' she sort o' answered to us two.
+
+"'Why,' she says, 'I ain't got anybody, anywheres here, dead or alive,
+that _belongs_. The dead is all other folks's dead, an' the livin' is
+all other folks's folks. An' when I see all the graves down here that
+they don't nobody know who's they are, I thought mebbe one of 'em
+wouldn't care--if I kind of--adopted it.'
+
+"At that she sort o' searched into Mis' Merriman's face, an' then
+Elspie's head went down, like she hed to excuse herself.
+
+"'I thought,' she said, 'they must be so dead--an' no names on 'em an'
+all--an' their live folks all dead too by now--nobody'd care much. I
+thought of it yesterday when we was walkin' down here,' she said, 'an' I
+picked out the grave--it's the _littlest_ one here. An' then when we
+come back past where the funeral was, an' I see them flowers--seemed
+like I hed to see how 'twould be to put 'em on _my_ grave, that I'd took
+over. So I come early an' done it. But I was goin' to lay 'em right back
+where they belong--I truly was.'
+
+"I guess none of us hed the least _i_-dea what to say. We just stood
+there plain tuckered in the part of us that senses things. All, that is,
+but one of us. An' that one was Eb Goodnight.
+
+"I can see Eb now, how he just walked out o' the line of us standin'
+there, starin', an' he goes right up to Elspie an' he looks her in the
+face.
+
+"'You're lonesome,' s'he, kind o' wonderin'. 'You're _lonesome_.
+Like--other folks.'
+
+"An' all to once Eb took a-hold o' her elbow--not loose an' temporary
+like he shook hands, but firm an' four-cornered; an' when he spoke it
+was like his voice hed been starched an' ironed.
+
+"'Mis' Fire Chief,' s'he, lookin' round at her, 'I's to let you know
+this week whether I'd take over the store. Well, yes,' he says, 'if
+you'll give me the time on it we mentioned, I'll take it over. An' if
+Elspie'll marry me an' let me belong to her, an' her to me.'
+
+"'Marry you?' says Elspie, understandin' how he'd rilly spoke to her.
+'_Me?_'
+
+"Eb straightened himself up, an' his eyes was bright an' keen as the
+edge o' somethin'.
+
+"'Yes, you,' he says gentle. 'An' me.'
+
+"An' then she looked at him like he was lookin' at her. An' it come to
+me how it'd been with them two since the night they'd locked up my house
+together. An' I felt all hushed up, like the weddin' was beginnin'.
+
+"But Timothy an' Silas, they wa'n't feelin' so hushed.
+
+'Look a-here!' says Timothy Toplady, all pent up. 'She ain't discharged
+from the county house yet.'
+
+"'I don't care a _dum_,' says Eb, an' I must say I respected him for the
+'dum'--that once.
+
+"'Look a-here,' says Silas, without a bit o' delicacy. 'She ain't
+responsible. She ain't--'
+
+"'She is too,' Eb cut him short. 'She's just as responsible as anybody
+can be when they're lonesome enough to die. _I_ ought 'a' know that.
+Shut up, Silas Sykes,' says Eb, all het up. 'You've just et a hot
+breakfast your wife hed ready for you. You don't know what you're
+talkin' about.'
+
+"An' then Eb sort o' swep' us all up in the dust-pan.
+
+"'No more words about it,' s'he, 'an' I don't care what any one o' you
+says--Mis' Cally nor _none_ o' you. So you might just as well say less.
+Tell 'em, Elspie!'
+
+"She looked up at him, smilin' a little, an' he turned toward her, like
+we wasn't there. An' I nudged Mis' Merriman an' made a move, an' she
+turns right away, like she'd fair forgot the funeral flowers. An'
+Timothy an' Silas actually followed us, but talkin' away a good
+deal--like men will.
+
+"None of us looked back from the top o' the hill, though I will own I
+would 'a' loved to. An' about up there I heard Silas say:--
+
+"'Oh, well. I _am_ gettin' kind o' old an' some stiff to take a new
+business on myself.'
+
+"An' Timothy, he adds absent: 'I don't s'pose, when you come right down
+to it, as Alice County'll rilly care a whoop.'
+
+"An' Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, she wipes up her eyes, an', 'It does seem
+like courtin' with Sum's flowers,' she says, sighin', 'but I'm rill glad
+for Eb.'
+
+"An' Eb not bein' there to agree with her, I says to myself, lookin' at
+the mornin' sun on the cemetery an' thinkin' o' them two back there
+among the baskets an' set pieces--I says, low to myself:--
+
+"'Oh, glory, glory, glory.'
+
+"For I tell you, when you see a livin' soul born in somebody's eyes, it
+makes you feel pretty sure you can hev one o' your own, if you try."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+OF THE SKY AND SOME ROSEMARY
+
+
+When the Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality had
+its Evening Benefit at my house, Delia More came to help in the kitchen.
+She steadfastly refused to be a guest. "I'd love bein' 'round there,"
+she said, "over the stove, or that way. But I can't--_can't_ be
+company--yet. When I think of it, it's like a high swing."
+
+So she stayed in the kitchen, and it was characteristic of Friendship
+that when its women learned that she was there, they all went--either
+deliberately or for a drink of water--to speak with her. And they all
+did learn that she was there. "Who you got in the kitchen?" was a part
+of the small talk from guest to hostess. The men stayed "in the other
+part of the house," Doctor June and Eppleby Holcomb sending by me some
+cordial word to Delia. I think that they cannot do these things anywhere
+else with such beautiful delicacy.
+
+When my other guests had taken leave, Calliope stayed to help in the
+search for Mis' Postmaster Sykes's pickle fork and two of Mis' Helman's
+napkins (the latter marked with L because the store had been out of
+_papier-mache_ H's, and it didn't matter what letter so long as you knew
+it meant you) and all the other borrowed articles whose mislaying made
+any Sodality gathering a kind of panic. Moreover, Calliope had been
+helping and we, and Delia, had been far too busy to taste supper.
+
+We would have said that the true life of the evening was done instead of
+just beginning. But when we entered the kitchen, we found Delia More
+serving the supper on an end of the baking table, while warming his
+hands at the range stood Abel Halsey.
+
+"I came in across the track, from the hills," Abel explained to me. "I
+didn't know you had doings till I tied and blanketed--an' I came on in
+anyhow, back way. I'm in luck too. I haven't had supper."
+
+We four sat down in that homely cheer, and before us was the Sodality's
+exquisite cookery. It was good to have Abel there. Since my coming to
+Friendship I had seen him often, and my wonder at him had deepened. He
+was alive to the finger-tips and by nature equipped to conquer through
+sheer mentality, but he seemed deliberately to have fore-gone the prizes
+for the tasks of the lower places. Not only so, but he who understood
+all fine things seemed to regard his tastes as naivete, and to have won
+away from them, as if he had set "above all wisdom and subtlety" the
+unquenchable spirit which he knew. And withal he was so merry, so human,
+so big, and so good-looking. "Handsome as Calvert Oldmoxon," the older
+ones in Friendship were accustomed to say,--save Calliope, whom I had
+never heard say that,--but I myself, if I had not had my simile already
+selected, would have said "as Abel Halsey." If a god were human, I think
+that Abel would have been very like a god. And to this opinion his
+experiences were continually bearing witness.
+
+That night, for example, he was in the merriest humour, and told us a
+tale of how, that day, the sky had fallen. There had been down on the
+Pump pasture, deep fog, white and thick and folded in, and above him
+blue sky, when he had emerged on the Hill Road and driven on with his
+eyes shut. ("When I need an adventure," he said, "I just trot old Major
+Mary with my eyes shut. Courting death isn't half as costly as they
+think it is.") And when he had opened his eyes, the sky was gone, and
+everything was white and thick and folded in and fabulous. Obviously, as
+he convinced us, the sky had fallen. But he had driven on through it and
+in it, and had found it, as I recall his account, to be made of
+inextinguishable dreams. These, Abel ran on, are on the other side of
+the sky for anybody who claims them, and our sandwiches were, above all
+sandwiches, delicious. He was so merry that Calliope and I, by a nod or
+a smile of understanding, played our role of merely, so to say, proving
+that the films were right--for you may have an inspired conversational
+photographer, but unless you are properly prepared chemically he can get
+no pictures. As Calliope had said of her evening with Eb and Elspie,
+"the air in the room was easy to get through with what you had to
+say--it was that kind of evening." Sometimes I wonder if an hour like
+that is real time; or is it, instead, a kind of chronometrical fairy,
+having no real existence on the dial, but only in essence.
+
+As I think of it now the hour, if it was an hour, was simply a
+background for Delia More. For it was not only Calliope and I who
+responded to Abel's light-hearted talk, but, little by little, it was
+Delia too. Perhaps it was that faint spark in her--fanned to life on the
+night of her coming home, so that she "took stock"--which we now divined
+faintly quickening to Abel's humour, his wisdom, even his fancies. Save
+in her bitterness, on that first night, I had not heard her laugh; and
+it was as if something were set free. I could not help looking at her,
+but that did not matter, for she did not see me. She was listening to
+Abel with an almost childish delight in her face; and in her eyes was
+the look of one in a place before unvisited.
+
+Some while after we had moved away from the table and sat together about
+the cooking range, we heard the questioning horn of a motor. We knew
+that it would belong to the Proudfits, since for us in Friendship there
+exists no other motor, and moreover this one was standing at my gate.
+Abel went out there and came back to tell us that the car had been in
+town to fetch the Proudfits' lawyer, and that Madame Proudfit had kindly
+sent it for Delia "and spoilt everything," he added frankly. As he said
+that, Abel looked at her, and I saw that a dream may persist through
+personality itself. As I have said, if a god were human, Abel would have
+been like a god; and in nothing more so than in this understanding of
+the immortalities.
+
+Calliope stood up and caught, and held, my eyes in passing.
+
+"Let's you and Abel and I take Delia home in the automobile," she said;
+"there ain't anything so good for folks as fresh air."
+
+I brought a warm wrap for Delia, a crimson cloak of mine which, so to
+say, drew a line about her, defining her prettiness; and in the
+starlight we set off along the snowless Plank Road, Delia and Abel and I
+in the tonneau of the machine, and I silent. It had befallen strangely
+that over this road Delia More and I should be faring in the Proudfits'
+car, and beside her Abel Halsey as if, for such as he and she, a dream
+may, just possibly, come back.
+
+"See," she said to Abel, "the sky has gone back up again."
+
+"Yes," Abel assented, "one of the things even the sky can't do is to
+change the way things are."
+
+"Oh, I know, I know ..." said Delia More.
+
+"I want you to feel that," said Abel, gently. "Things are the way things
+are, and no use trying to leave them out of it. Besides, you need them.
+They're foundation. Then you build, and build better. That's all there
+is to it, Delia."
+
+She was silent, and Abel sat looking up at the stars.
+
+"All there is to it except what I said about the other side of the sky,"
+he said. "And then me. I'll help."
+
+From my thought of these two I remember that I drifted on to some
+consideration of myself, for their presence opened old paths where were
+in durance things that did their best to escape, and were disquieting. I
+thought also of Calliope, of whose story I had heard a little from one
+and another. And it seemed to me that possibly Delia More's laughter and
+her wistfulness summed us all up.
+
+When we drew up at the entrance to Proudfit House we all alighted,
+Calliope and Abel and I to walk home. But while we were saying good
+night to Delia, the door opened and Clementina Proudfit stood against
+the light. The car was to wait, she said, to take Mr. Baring, the
+lawyer, to the midnight train. And then, as she saw her:--
+
+"Calliope!" she cried, "I never wanted anybody so much. Come in and make
+Mr. Baring a cup of your good coffee--you will, Calliope? Mother and I
+will be with him for half an hour yet. Come, all of you, and help her."
+
+We went in, lingering for a moment by the drawing-room fire while Miss
+Clementina went below stairs; and I noted how, in that room colourful
+and of fair proportion, Abel Halsey in his shabby clothes moved as
+simply as if the splendour were not there. He stood looking down at
+Delia, in her white dress, the crimson cloak catching the firelight;
+while Calliope and I, before a length of Beauvais tapestry, talked with
+spirit about both tapestry and coffee-making. ("My grandmother use' to
+crochet faces an' figgers in her afaghans, too," Calliope commented,
+"an' when I looked at 'em they use' to make me feel kind o' mad. But
+with these, I don't care at all.") And when Miss Clementina returned,--
+
+"Now," Calliope said to me, "you come with me an' help about the coffee,
+will you? An' Delia, you an' Abel stay here. Nothin' will put me out o'
+my head so quick--_nothin'_--as too many flyin' 'round the kitchen when
+I'm tryin' to do work."
+
+We went downstairs, and Miss Clementina rejoined her mother and the
+lawyer in the library, and Delia and Abel were left alone together in
+the firelight. If I had been a dream, and had been intending to come
+back at all, I think that I must have come then.
+
+"_Pray_, why don't you?" said Calliope to me almost savagely on the
+kitchen stairs.
+
+The coffee-making was a slow process and a silent one. Calliope and I
+were both absorbed in what had so wonderfully come about: That Delia
+More, who was dead, was alive again; or rather, that her spirit, patient
+within her through all the years of its loneliness, was coming forth at
+the sound of Abel's voice. We were alone in the kitchen, and when the
+coffee was over the flame, we stood at the window looking out on the
+black kitchen gardens. There lay the yellow reflection of the room, with
+that unreality of all window-mirrored rooms, so that if one might walk
+within them one would almost certainly wear one's self with a
+difference.
+
+"Ain't it like somethin' bright was in the inside o' the garden,"
+Calliope put it, "just the way I told you Abel feels about everything?
+That they's something inside, hid, kind of secret an' holy--like the
+dreams he said was in the sky. I guess mebbe he's believed that about
+Delia all these years. An' now he's bringin' it out. Oh," she said, "the
+kitchen is where you can tell about things best. Seems to me _you'd_
+ought to know somethin' about Delia an' Abel."
+
+And I wanted to hear.
+
+"Abel see Delia first," Calliope told me then, "to the Rummage Sale that
+the Cemetery Auxiliary, that the Sodality use' to be, give. That is to
+say, they didn't _give_ it, as it turned out--they just _had_ it, you
+might say. Abel was twenty-five or so, an' he'd just come here fresh
+ordained a minister. We found he wa'n't the kind to stop short on, Be
+good yourself an' then a crown. No, but he just went after the folks
+that was livin' along, moral an' step-pickin', an' he says to us, 'What
+you sittin' down here for, enjoyin' yourselves bein' moral? Get out an'
+help the rest o' the world,' he says. But everybody liked him in spite
+o' that, an' he was goin' to be installed minister in our church.
+
+"Then the Rummage Sale come on an' he met Delia. Delia was eighteen an'
+just back from visitin' in the City, with her veil a new way, an' I
+never see prettier. She was goin' to take charge o' the odd waists
+table, an' Abel was runnin' 'round helpin'--Abel wa'n't the white-cuff
+kind, like some, but he always pitched in an' stirred up whatever was
+a-stewin'. He come bringin' in an armful o' old shoes somebody'd fetched
+down, an' just as she was beginnin' on the odd waists, sortin' 'em over,
+he met Delia. I remember she looks up at him from under that veil an'
+from over a red basque she'd picked off the pile, an', 'Mr. Halsey,' she
+says, 'I've a notion to buy this myself an' be savin'.' That took
+Abel--Delia was so pretty an' fluffy that hearin' her talk savin' was
+about like seein' a butterfly washin' out its own wings. 'Do,' says he,
+'the red is beautiful on you,' s'e, shovin' the blame off on to the red.
+An' when he got done with the shoes he come over to help on the waists
+too--I was lookin' over the child sizes, next table, an' I see the whole
+business.
+
+"I will say their talk was wonderful pretty. It run on sort o' easy,
+slippin' along over little laughs an' no hard work to keep it goin'.
+Abel had a nice way o' cuttin' his words out sharp--like they was made
+o' somethin' with sizin' on the back an' stayed where he put 'em. An'
+his laugh would sort o' clamp down soft on a joke an' make it double
+funny. An' Delia, she was right back at him, give for take, an' though
+she was rill genial, she was shy. An' come to think of it, Abel was just
+as full o' his fancyin's then as he is now.
+
+"'Old clothes,' he says to her, 'always seems to me sort o' haunted.'
+
+"'Haunted?' I know she asks him, wonderin'.
+
+"'All steeped in what folks have been when they've wore 'em,' s'e, 'an'
+givin' it out again.'
+
+"'Oh ...' Delia says, 'I never thought o' that before.'
+
+"An' she see what he meant, too. Delia wa'n't one to get up little wavy
+notions like that, but she could see 'em when told. An' neither was she
+one to do one way instead of another by just her own willin' it, but if
+somebody pointed things out to her, then she'd see how, an' do the
+right. An' I think Abel understood that about her--that her soul was
+sort o' packed down in her an' would hev to be loosened gentle, before
+it could speak. Like Peleg Bemus says about his flute," Calliope said,
+smiling, "that they's something packed deep down in it that can't say
+things it knows."
+
+"'Clothes folks wear, rooms they live in, things they use--they all get
+like the folks that use 'em,' Abel says, layin' black with black an'
+white with white, on to the waist table. 'It makes us want to step
+careful, don't it?' s'e. 'I think,' s'e, simple, '_your_ dresses--an'
+ribbins--an' your veil--must go about doin' pleasant things without
+you.'
+
+"'Oh, no,' says Delia, demure, 'I ain't near good enough, Mr. Halsey;
+you mustn't think that,' she says--an' right while he was lookin' gentle
+an' clerical an' ready to help her, she dimples out all over her face.
+'Besides,' she says, 'I ain't enough dresses to spare away from me for
+that. I ain't but about two!' s'she. An' when a girl is all rose pink
+and sky blue and dainty neat, a man loves to hear her brag how few
+dresses she's got, an' Abel wa'n't the exception.
+
+"'Same as a lily,' says he; 'they only have _one_ dress. Now, what else
+shall I do?'
+
+"Well, at sharp nine the Cemetery Auxiliary come to order, Mis' Sykes
+presidin', like she always does when it's time for a hush. The doors was
+to open to the general public at ten o'clock, an' the _i_-dee was to hev
+the Auxiliary get the pick o' the goods first, payin' the reg'lar, set,
+marked price. An' just as they was ready to begin pickin', up arrove the
+Proudfit pony cart with a great big box o' stuff, sent to the sale.
+Land, land, Mis' Sykes from the chair an' the others the same, they just
+makes one swoop--an' begun selectin'; an' in less than a jiffy if they
+hadn't selected up every one o' the Proudfit articles themselves. It was
+natural enough. The things was worth havin'--pretty curtains, an'
+trimmin's not much wore, an' some millinery an' dresses with the new
+hardly off. An' the Auxiliary paid the price they would 'a' asked
+anybody else. They was anxious, but they was square.
+
+"That just seemed to get their hand in. Next, they fell to on the other
+tables an' begun buyin' from them. They was lots o' things that most
+anybody would 'a' been glad to hev that the owners had sent down sheer
+through bein' sick o' seein' 'em around--like you will--an' couldn't be
+thrown away 'count o' conscience, but could be give to a cause an'
+conscience not notice. We had quite fun buyin', too--knowin' they was
+each other's, an' no hard feelin'--only good spirits an' pleased with
+each other's taste. Everybody knew who'd sent what, an' everybody hed
+bought it for some not so high-minded use as it hed hed before, an' kep'
+their dignity that way. Front-stair carpet was bought to go down on back
+stairs, sittin' room lamp for chamber lamp, kitchen stove-pipe for wash
+room stove-pipe, an' so on, an' the clothes to make rag rugs--so they
+give out. The things kep' on an' on bein' snapped up hot-cake quick, an'
+the crowd beginnin' to gather outside, waitin' to get in, made 'em sort
+o' lose their heads an' begin buyin' sole because things was
+cheap--bird-cages, a machine cover, odd table-leaves, an' like that. The
+Society was rill large then, an' what happened might 'a' been expected.
+When ten o'clock come an' it was time to open the door, the Rummage Sale
+was over, an' the Auxiliary hed bought the whole thing themselves.
+
+"We never thought folks might be anyways mad about it--but I tell you,
+they was. They hed been seein' us through the glass, like they was caged
+in front o' bargain day. An' when Mis' Toplady, fair beamin', unlocks
+the door an' tells 'em the sale was through with an' a rill success,
+they acted some het up. But Mis' Toplady, she bristles back at 'em. 'I'm
+sure,' s'she, 'nobody wants you to die an' be buried in a nice, neat,
+up-to-date, kep'-up cemet'ry if you don't _want_ to.' An' o' course she
+hed 'em there.
+
+"Well, it was that performance o' the Auxiliary's that rilly brought
+Delia an' Abel together. It seemed to strike Abel awful funny, an'
+Delia, lookin' at it with him, she see the funny too. They laughed a
+good deal, an' they seemed to sort o' understand each other through
+laughin', like you will. Delia bought the red waist, an' Abel walked
+home with her--an' by that time Abel, with his half-scriptural,
+half-boy, half-lover way that he couldn't help, was just on the craggy
+edge o' fallin' in love with her. But I b'lieve it wa'n't love, just
+ordinary. It was more like Abel, in his zeal for reddin' up the world,
+see that he could do for Delia what nobody else could do--an' her for
+him. An' that both of 'em workin' together could do more through knowin'
+each other was near. That's the way,' Calliope said shyly, 'lovin'
+always ought to be, my notion. An' when it ain't, things is likely to
+get all wrong. Sometime--sometime,' she said, 'you'll hear about me--an'
+how things with me went all wrong. An' I want you to remember, no matter
+how much it don't seem my fault--that that's why they did go wrong--an'
+no other. I was too crude selfish to sense what love is. I didn't
+know--I didn't know. An' so with lots o' folks.
+
+"I've often thought that Delia an' Abel meetin' at a Rummage Sale was
+like all the rest of it. There was just a lot o' rubbish lumberin' up
+the whole situation. Things wasn't happy for Delia to home--her mother,
+Mis' Crapwell, had married again to a man that kep' throwin' out about
+hevin' to be support to Delia; an' her stepsister, Jennie Crapwell, was
+sickly an' self-seekin' an' engaged all to once. An' the young carpenter
+that Jennie was goin' to marry, he was the black-eyed, hither-an'-yon
+kind, an' crazier over Delia from the first than he ever was over
+Jennie. Delia, she was shy about not havin' much education--Mis'
+Proudfit hed wanted to send her off to school, an' Mis' Crapwell
+wouldn't hear to it--an' Abel kep' talkin' that he was goin' to hev a
+big church in the City some day, an' I guess that scairt Delia some, an'
+Jennie kep' frettin' an' houndin' her, one way an' another, an'
+a-callin' her 'parson's wife'--ain't it awful the _power_ them
+pin-pricky things has if we let 'em? An' Delia wa'n't the kind to know
+how to do right by her own willin'. An' so all to once we woke up one
+mornin', an' she'd done what she'd done, an' no help for it.
+
+"It was only a month after Delia an' Abel had met that Delia went away,
+an' Abel hadn't been installed yet. An' when Delia done that, Abel just
+settled into bein' somebody else. He seemed to want to go off in the
+hills an' be by himself, an' most o' the time he done so. But there was
+grace for him even in that: Abel see the hill folks, how they didn't hev
+any churches nor not anything else much, an' he just set to work on 'em,
+quiet an' still. He'd wanted to go away an' travel, but the chance never
+come. An' it seemed, then on, he didn't want even to hear o' the City,
+an' when his chances there come, he never took 'em. An' Abel's been
+'round here with the hill folks the fourteen years since, an' never
+pastor of any church--but he got the blessedness, after all, an' I
+guess the chance to do better service than any other way. You can see
+how he's broad an' gentle an' tender an' strong, but you don't know
+what he does for folks--an' that's the best. An' yet--his soul must be
+sort o' packed away too, to what it would 'a' been if things had 'a'
+gone differ'nt ... packed away an' tryin' to say somethin'. An' now
+Delia's come back I b'lieve Abel knows that, an' I b'lieve he sees the
+soul in her needin' him too, just like it did all that time--waitin' to
+be loosened, gentle, before it can speak; an' meanin' things it can't
+say, like Peleg's flute. Oh, don't it seem like the dreams Abel said he
+found up in the sky had _ought_ to be let come true?"
+
+It did seem as if, for the two up there in the drawing-room, this dream
+might, just possibly, come back.
+
+"But then you never can tell for sure about the sky, can you?" said
+Calliope, sighing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Coffee was served in the library where Madame Proudfit and Miss
+Clementina had been in consultation with their lawyer. We were all
+rather silent as Madame Proudfit sat at the urn and the lawyer handed
+our cups down some long avenue of his abstraction. And now everything
+seemed to me a kind of setting for Delia and Abel, and Calliope kept
+looking at them as if, before her eyes, things might come right. So, I
+own, did I, though in the Proudfit library it was usually difficult to
+fix my attention on what passed; for it was in that room that Linda
+Proudfit's portrait hung, and the beautiful eyes seemed always trying to
+tell one what the weary absence meant. But I thought again that this
+daughter of the house had won a kind of presence there, because of
+Madame Proudfit's tender mother-care of Delia More.
+
+Yet it was to this care that Calliope and I owed a present defeat; for
+when we were leave-taking,--
+
+"We shall sail, then, the moment we can get passage," Madame Proudfit
+observed to her lawyer, "providing that Clementina can arrange. Delia,"
+she added, "Clementina and I find to-night that we must sail immediately
+for Europe, for six months or so. And we want to carry you off with us."
+
+Madame Proudfit and Miss Clementina and Delia were standing with us
+outside the threshold, where the outdoors had met us like something that
+had been waiting. There, with the light from the hall falling but dimly,
+I saw in Abel's face only the glow of his simple joy that this good
+thing had come to Delia--though, indeed, that very joy told much
+besides. And it was in his face when he bade Delia good night and, since
+he was expected somewhere among the hills for days to come, gave her
+God-speed. But we four fell momentarily silent, as if we meant things
+which we might not speak. It was almost a relief to hear tapping on the
+sidewalk the wooden leg of Peleg Bemus, while a familiar, thin little
+stream of melody from his flute made its way about.
+
+"Doesn't it seem as if Peleg were trying to tell one something?" said
+Madame Proudfit, lightly, as we went away.
+
+And down on the gravel of the drive Calliope demanded passionately of
+Abel and me:--
+
+"Oh, don't some things make you want to pull the sky down an' _wrap up
+in it_!"
+
+But at this Abel laughed a little.
+
+"It's easier to pull down just the dreams," he said.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+TOP FLOOR BACK
+
+
+One morning a few weeks after the Proudfits had left, I was sitting
+beside Calliope's cooking range, watching her at her baking, when the
+wooden leg of Peleg Bemus thumped across the threshold, and without
+ceremony he came in from the shed and stood by the fire, warming his axe
+handle. But Peleg's intrusions were never imputed to him. As I have
+said, his gifts and experiences had given him a certain authority.
+Perhaps, too, he reflected a kind of institutional dignity from his
+sign, which read:--
+
+     P. Bemus: Retail Saw Miller
+
+At the moment of his entrance Calliope was talking of Emerel Kitton, now
+Mrs. Abe Daniel:
+
+"There's them two," she said, "seems to hev married because they both
+use a good deal o' salt--'t least they ain't much else they're alike in.
+An' Emerel is just one-half workin' her head off for him. Little nervous
+thing she is--when I heard she was down with nervous prostration two
+years ago, I says, 'Land, land,' I says, 'but ain't she _always_ had
+it?' They's a strain o' good blood in that girl,--Al Kitton was New
+England,--but they don't none of it flow up through her head. She's
+great on sacrificin', but she don't sacrifice judicious. If folks is
+goin' to sacrifice, I think they'd ought to do it conscientious, the
+kind in the Bible, same as Abraham an' like that."
+
+Peleg Bemus rubbed one hand up and down his axe handle.
+
+"I reckon you can't always tell, Miss Marsh," he said meditatively. "I
+once knowed a man that done some sacrificin' that ain't called by that
+name when it gets into the newspapers." He turned to me, with a manner
+of pointing at me with his head, "You been in New York," he said; "ain't
+you ever heard o' Mr. Loneway--Mr. John Loneway?"
+
+I was sorry that I could not answer "yes." He was so expectant that I
+had the sensation of having failed him.
+
+"Him an' I lived in the same building in East Fourteenth Street there,"
+he said. "That is to say, he lived top floor back and I was janitor.
+That was a good many years ago, but whenever I get an introduction to
+anybody that's been in New York, I allus take an interest. I'd like to
+know whatever become of him."
+
+He scrupulously waited for our question, and then sat down beside the
+oven door and laid his axe across his knees.
+
+"It was that hard winter," he told us, "about a dozen years ago. I'd hev
+to figger out just what year, but most anybody on the East Side can tell
+you. Coal was clear up an' soarin', an' vittles was too--everybody
+howlin' hard times, an' the Winter just commenced. Make things worse,
+some philanthropist had put up two model tenements in the block we was
+in, an' property alongside had shot up in value accordin' an' lugged
+rents with it. Everybody in my buildin' 'most was rowin' about it.
+
+"But John Loneway, he wasn't rowin'. I met him on the stairs one mornin'
+early an' I says, 'Beg pardon, sir,' I says, 'but you ain't meanin' to
+make no change?' I ask him. He looks at me kind o' dazed--he was a
+wonderful clean-muscled little chap, with a crisscross o' veins on each
+temple an' big brown eyes back in his head. 'No,' he says. 'Change? I
+can't move. My wife's sick,' he says. That was news to me. I'd met her a
+couple o' times in the hall--pale little mite, hardly big as a baby, but
+pleasant-spoken, an' with a way o' dressin' herself in shabby clo'es
+that made the other women in the house look like bundles tied up
+careless. But she didn't go out much--they had only been in the house a
+couple o' weeks or so. 'Sick, is she?' I says. 'Too bad,' I says.
+'Anything I can do?' I ask him. He stopped on the nex' step an' looked
+back at me. 'Got a wife?' he says. 'No,' says I, 'I ain't, sir. But they
+ain't never challenged my vote on 'count o' that, sir--no offence,' I
+says to him respectful. 'All right,' he says, noddin' at me. 'I just
+thought mebbe she'd look in now and then. I'm gone all day,' he added,
+an' went off like he'd forgot me.
+
+"I thought about the little thing all that mornin'--layin' all alone up
+there in that room that wa'n't no bigger'n a coal-bin. It's bad enough
+to be sick anywheres, but it's like havin' both legs in a trap to be
+sick in New York. Towards noon I went into one o' the flats--first floor
+front it was--with the kindlin' barrel, an' I give the woman to
+understand they was somebody sick in the house. She was a great big
+creatur' that I'd never see excep' in red calico, an' I always thought
+she looked some like a tomato ketchup bottle, with her apron for the
+label. She says, when I told her, 'You see if she wants anything,' she
+says. 'I can't climb all them stairs,' she answers me.
+
+"Well, that afternoon I went down an' hunted up a rusty sleigh-bell I'd
+seen in the basement, an' I rubbed it up an' tied a string to it, an'
+'long in the evenin' I went upstairs an' rapped at Mr. Loneway's door.
+
+"'I called,' I says, 'to ask after your wife, if I might.'
+
+"'If you might,' he says after me. 'I thank the Lord you're somebody
+that will. Come in,' he told me.
+
+"They had two rooms. In one he was cookin' somethin' on a smelly
+oil-stove. In the other was his wife; but that room was all neat an'
+nice--curtains looped back, carpet an' all that. She was half up on
+pillows, an' she had a black waist on, an' her hair pushed straight
+back, an' she was burnin' up with the fever.
+
+"'Set down an' talk to her,' he says to me, 'while I get the dinner,
+will you? I've got to go out for the milk.'
+
+"I did set down, feelin' some like a sawhorse in church. If she hadn't
+been so durn little, seems though I could 'a' talked with her, but I
+ketched sight of her hand on the quilt, an'--law! it wa'n't no bigger'n
+a butternut. She done the best thing she could do an' set me to work.
+
+"'Mr. Bemus,' she says, first off--everybody else called me Peleg--'Mr.
+Bemus,' she says, 'I wonder if you'd mind takin' an old
+newspaper--there's one somewheres around--an' stuffin' in the cracks of
+this window an' stop its rattlin'?'
+
+"I laid my sleigh-bell down an' done as she says; an' while I fussed
+with the window, that seems though all Printin' House Square couldn't
+stuff up, she talked on, chipper as a squirrel, all about the buildin',
+an' who lived where, an' how many kids they was, an' wouldn't it be nice
+if they had an elevator like the model tenement we was payin' rent for,
+an' so on. I'd never 'a' dreamt she was sick if I hadn't looked 'round a
+time or two at her poor, burnin'-up face. Then bime-by he brought the
+supper in, an' when he went to lift her up, she just naturally laid back
+an' fainted. But she was all right again in a minute, brave as two, an'
+she was like a child when she see what he'd brought her--a big platter
+for a tray, with milk-toast an' an apple an' five cents' worth o' dates.
+She done her best to eat, too, and praised him up, an' the poor soul
+hung over her, watchin' every mouthful, feedin' her, coaxin' her,
+lookin' like nothin' more'n a boy himself. When I couldn't stand it no
+longer, I took an' jingled the sleigh-bell.
+
+"'I'm a-goin',' I says, 'to hang this outside the door here, an' run
+this nice long string through the transom. An' to-morrow,' I says, 'when
+you want anything, just you pull the string a time or two, an' I'll be
+somewheres around.'
+
+"She clapped her hands, her eyes shinin'.
+
+"'Oh, _goodey_!' she says. 'Now I won't be alone. Ain't it nice,' she
+says, 'that there ain't no glass in the transom? If we lived in the
+model tenement, we couldn't do that,' she says, laughin' some.
+
+"An' that young fellow, he followed me to the door an' just naturally
+shook hands with me, same's though I'd been his kind. Then he followed
+me on out into the hall.
+
+"'We had a little boy,' he says to me low, 'an' it died four months ago
+yesterday, when it was six days old. She ain't ever been well since,' he
+says, kind of as if he wanted to tell somebody. But I didn't know what
+to say, an' so I found fault with the kerosene lamp in the hall, an'
+went on down.
+
+"Nex' day I knew the doctor come again. An' 'way 'long in the afternoon
+I was a-tinkerin' with the stair rail when I heard the sleigh-bell ring.
+I run up, an' she was settin' up, in the black waist--but I thought her
+eyes was shiney with somethin' that wasn't the fever--sort of a scared
+excitement.
+
+"'Mr. Bemus,' she says, 'I want you to do somethin' for me,' she says,
+'an' not tell anybody. Will you?'
+
+"'Why, yes,' I says, 'I will, Mis' Loneway,' I says. 'What is it?' I
+ask' her.
+
+"'There's a baby somewheres downstairs,' she says. 'I hear it cryin'
+sometimes. An' I want you to get it an' bring it up here.'
+
+"That was a queer thing to ask, because kids isn't soothin' to the sick.
+But I went off downstairs to the first floor front. The kid she meant
+belonged to the Tomato Ketchup woman. I knew they had one because it
+howled different times an', I judge, pounded its head on the floor some
+when it was maddest. It was the only real little one in the
+buildin'--the others was all the tonguey age. I told what I wanted.
+
+"'For the land!' says Tomato Ketchup, 'I never see such nerve. Take my
+baby into a sick room? Not if I know it. I s'pose you just come out o'
+there? Well, don't you stay here, bringin' diseases. A hospital's the
+true place fer the sick,' she says.
+
+"I went back to Mis' Loneway, an' I guess I lied some. I said the kid
+was sick--had the croup, I thought, an' she'd hev to wait. Her face
+fell, but she said 'all right an' please not to say nothin',' an' then I
+went out an' done my best to borrow a kid for her. I ask' all over the
+neighbourhood, an' not a woman but looked on me for a cradle
+snatcher--thought I wanted to abduct her child away from her. Bime-by I
+even told one woman what I wanted it for.
+
+"'My!' she says, 'if she ain't got one, she's got one less mouth to
+feed. Tell her to thank her stars.'
+
+"After that I used to look into Mis' Loneway's frequent. The women on
+the same floor was quite decent to her, but they worked all day, an'
+mostly didn't get home till after her husband did. I found out somethin'
+about him, too. He was clerk in a big commission house 'way down-town,
+an' his salary, as near as I could make out, was about what mine was,
+an' they wa'n't no estimatin' that by the cord at all. But I never heard
+a word out'n him about their not havin' much. He kep' on makin' milk
+toast an' bringin' in one piece o' fruit at a time an' once in a while a
+little meat. An' all the time anybody could see she wa'n't gettin' no
+better. I knew she wa'n't gettin' enough to eat, an' I knew he knew it,
+too. An' one night the doctor he outs with the truth.
+
+"Mr. Loneway an' I was sittin' in the kitchen while the doctor was in
+the other room with her. I went there evenin's all the time by then--the
+young fellow seemed to like to hev me. We was keepin' warm over the
+oil-stove because the real stove was in her room, an' the doctor come in
+an' stood over him.
+
+"'My lad,' he says gentle, 'there ain't half as much use o' my comin'
+here as there is o' her gettin' strengthenin' food. She's got to hev
+beef broth--cer'als--fresh this an' fresh that'--he went on to tell him,
+'an' plenty of it,' he says. 'An' if we can make her strength hold out,
+I think,' he wound up, 'that we can save her. But she's gettin' weaker
+every day for lack o' food. Can you do anything more?' he ask' him.
+
+"I expected to see young Mr. Loneway go all to pieces at this, because I
+knew as it was he didn't ride in the street-car, he was pinchin' so to
+pay the doctor. But he sorter set up sudden an' squared his shoulders,
+an' he looked up an' says:--
+
+"'Yes!' he says. 'I've been thinkin' that to-night,' he says. 'An' I've
+hed a way to some good luck, you might call it--an' now I guess she can
+hev everything she wants,' he told him; an' he laughed some when he said
+it.
+
+"That sort o' amazed me. I hadn't heard him sayin' anything about any
+excruciatin' luck, an' his face hadn't been the face of a man on the
+brink of a bonanza. I wondered why he hadn't told her about this luck o'
+his, but I kep' quiet an' watched to see if he was bluffin'.
+
+"I was cleanin' the walk off when he come home nex' night. Sure enough,
+there was his arms laid full o' bundles. An' his face--it done me good
+to see it.
+
+"'Come on up an' help get dinner,' he yelled out, like a kid, an' I
+thought I actually seen him smilin'.
+
+"Soon's I could I went upstairs, an' they wa'n't nothin' that man hadn't
+brought. They was everything the doctor had said, an' green things, an'
+a whol' basket o' fruit an' two bottles o' port, an' more things
+besides. They was lots o' fixin's, too, that there wa'n't a mite o'
+nourishment in--for he wa'n't no more practical _nor_ medicinal'n a
+wood-tick. But I knew how he felt.
+
+"'Don't tell her,' he says. 'Don't tell her,' he says to me, hoppin'
+'round the kitchen like a buzz-saw. 'I want to surprise her.'
+
+"You can bet he did, too--if you'll overlook the liberty. When he was
+all ready, he made me go in ahead.
+
+"'_To-ot!_' says I, genial-like--they treated me jus' like one of 'em.
+'_To-ot!_ Lookey-_at_!'
+
+"He set the big white platter down on the bed, an' when she see all the
+stuff,--white grapes, mind you, an' fresh tomatoes, an' a glass for the
+wine,--she just grabs his hand an' holds it up to her throat, an'
+says:--
+
+"'Jack! Oh, Jack!' she says,--she called him that when she was
+pleased,--'how did you? _How did you?_'
+
+"'Never you mind,' he says, kissin' her an' lookin' as though he was
+goin' to bu'st out himself, 'never you ask. It's time I had some luck,
+ain't it? Like other men?'
+
+"She was touchin' things here an' there, liftin' up the grapes an'
+lookin' at 'em--poor little soul had lived on milk toast an' dates an' a
+apple now an' then for two weeks to my knowledge. But when he said that,
+she stopped an' looked at him, scared.
+
+"'John!' she says, 'you ain't--'
+
+"He laughed at that.
+
+"'Gamblin'?' he says. 'No--never you fear.' I had thought o' that
+myself, only I didn't quite see when he'd had the chance since night
+before when the doctor told him. 'It's all owin' to the office,' he says
+to her, 'an' now you eat--lemme see you eat, Linda,' he says, an' that
+seemed to be food enough for him. He didn't half touch a thing. 'Eat all
+you want,' he says, 'an', Peleg, poke up the fire. There's half a ton o'
+coal comin' to-morrow. An' we're goin' to have this _every day_,' he
+told her.
+
+"Land o' love! how happy she was! She made me eat some grapes, an' she
+sent a bunch to the woman on the same floor, because she'd brought her
+an orange six weeks before; an' then she begs Mr. Loneway to get an
+extry candle out of the top dresser draw'. An' when that was lit up she
+whispers to him, and he goes out an' fetches from somewheres a guitar
+with more'n half the strings left on; an' she set up an' picked away on
+'em, an' we all three sung, though I can't carry a tune no more'n what I
+can carry a white oak tree trunk.
+
+"'Oh,' she says, 'I'm a-goin' to get well now. Oh,' she says, 'ain't it
+heaven to be rich again?'
+
+"No--you can say she'd ought to 'a' made him tell her where he got the
+money. But she trusted him, an' she'd been a-livin' on milk toast an'
+dates for so long that I can pretty well see how she took it all as
+what's-his-name took the wild honey, without askin' the Lord whose make
+it was. Besides, she was sick. An' milk toast an' dates'd reconcile me
+to 'most any change for the better.
+
+"It got so then that I went upstairs every noon an' fixed up her lunch
+for her, an' one day she done what I'd been dreadin'. 'Mr. Bemus,' she
+says, 'that baby must be over the croup now. Won't you--won't you take
+it down this orange an' see if you can't bring it up here awhile?'
+
+"I went down, but, law!--where was the use? The Ketchup woman grabs up
+her kid an' fair threw the orange at me. 'You don't know what disease
+you're bringin' in here,' she says--she had a voice like them gasoline
+wood-cutters. I see she'd took to heart some o' the model-tenement
+social-evenin' lectures on bugs an' worms in diseases. I carried the
+orange out and give it to a kid in the ar'y, so's Mis' Loneway'd be
+makin' somebody some pleasure, anyhow. An' then I went back upstairs an'
+told her the kid was worse. Seems the croup had turned into cholery
+infantum.
+
+"'Why,' she says, 'I mus' send it down somethin' nice an' hot to-night,'
+an' so she did, and I slips it back in the Loneway kitchen unbeknownst.
+She wa'n't so very medicinal, either, bless her heart!
+
+"'Tell me about that baby,' she says to me one noon. 'What's its name?
+Does it like to hev its mother love it?' she ask me.
+
+"I knew the truth to be that it didn't let anybody do anything day or
+night within sight or sound of it, an' it looked to me like an imp o'
+the dark. But I fixed up a tol'able description, an' left out the
+freckles an' the temper, an' told her it was fat an' well an' a boy.
+That seemed to satisfy her. Its name, though, sort o' stumped me. The
+Tomato Ketchup called it mostly 'you-come-back-here-you-little-ape.' I
+heard that every day. So I said, just to piece out my information, that
+I thought its name might be April. That seemed to take her fancy, an'
+after that she was always askin' me how little April was--but not when
+Mr. Loneway was in hearin'. I see well enough she didn't want he should
+know that she was grievin' none.
+
+"All the time kep' comin', every night, another armful o' good things.
+Land! that man he bought everything. Seems though he couldn't buy
+enough. Every night the big platter was heaped up an' runnin' over with
+everything under the sun, an' she was like another girl. I s'pose the
+things give her strength, but I reck'n the cheer helped most. She had
+the surprise to look forward to all day, an' there was plenty o' light,
+evenin's; an' the stove, that was drove red-hot. The doctor kep' sayin'
+she was better, too, an' everything seemed lookin' right up.
+
+"Seems queer I didn't suspect from the first something was wrong. Seems
+though I ought to 'a' known money didn't grow out o' green wood the way
+he was pretendin'. It wasn't two weeks before he takes me down to the
+basement one night when he comes home, an' he owns up.
+
+"'Peleg,' he says, 'I've got to tell somebody, an' God knows maybe it'll
+be you that'll hev to tell her. I've stole fifty-four dollars out o' the
+tray in the retail department,' says he, 'an' to-day they found me out.
+They wasn't no fuss made. Lovett, the assistant cashier, is the only one
+that knows. He took me aside quiet,' Mr. Loneway says, 'an' I made a
+clean breast. I said what I took it for. He's a married man himself, an'
+he told me if I'd make it up in three days, he'd fix it so's nobody
+should know. The cashier's off for a week. In three days he's comin'
+back. But they might as well ask me to make up fifty-four hundred. I've
+got enough to keep on these three days so's she won't know,' he says,
+'an' after that--'
+
+"He hunched out his arms, an' I'll never forget his face.
+
+"I says, 'Mr. Loneway, sir,' I says, 'chuck it. Tell her the whole thing
+an' give 'em back what you got left, an' do your best.'
+
+"He turned on me like a crazy man.
+
+"'Don't talk to me like that,' he says fierce. 'You don't know what
+you're sayin',' he says. 'No man does till he has this happen to him.
+The judge on the bench that'll send me to jail for it, he won't know
+what he's judgin'. My God--_my God!_' he says, leanin' up against the
+door o' the furnace room, 'to see her sick like this--an' _needin'
+things_--when she give herself to me to take care of!'
+
+"Course there wa'n't no talkin' to him. An' the nex' night an' the nex'
+he come home bringin' her truck just the same. Once he even hed her a
+bunch o' pinks. Seems though he was doin' the worst he could.
+
+"The pinks come at the end of the second day of the three days the
+assistant cashier had give him to pay the money back in. An' two things
+happened that night. I was in the kitchen helpin' him wash up the dishes
+while the doctor was in the room with Mis' Loneway. An' when the doctor
+come out o' there into the kitchen, he shuts the door. I see right off
+somethin' was the matter. He took Mr. Loneway off to the back window,
+an' I rattled 'round with the dishes an' took on not to notice. Up until
+when the doctor goes out--an' then I felt Mr. Loneway's grip on my arm.
+I looked at him, an' I knew. She wasn't goin' to get well. He just
+lopped down on the chair like so much sawdust, an' put his face down in
+his arm, the way a schoolboy does--an' I swan he wa'n't much more'n a
+schoolboy, either. I s'pose if ever hell is in a man's heart,--an' we
+mostly all see it there sometime, even if we don't feel it,--why, there
+was hell in his then.
+
+"All of a sudden there was a rap on the hall door. He never moved, an'
+so I went. I whistled, I rec'lect, so's she shouldn't suspect nothin'
+from our not goin' in where she was right off. An' a messenger-boy was
+out there in the passage with a letter for Mr. Loneway.
+
+"I took it in to him. He turned himself around an' opened it, though I
+don't believe he knew half what he was doin'. An' what do you guess come
+tumblin' out o' that envelope? Fifty-four dollars in bills. Not a word
+with 'em.
+
+"Then he broke down. 'It's Lovett,' he says, 'it's Lovett's done
+this--the assistant cashier. Maybe he's told some o' the other fellows
+at the desks next, an' they helped. They knew about her bein' sick. An'
+they can't none of 'em afford it,' he says, an' that seemed to cut him
+up worst of all. 'I'll give it back to him,' he says resolute. 'I can't
+take it from 'em, Peleg.'
+
+"I says, 'Hush up, Mr. Loneway, sir,' I says. 'You got to think o' her.
+Take it,' I told him, 'an' thank God it ain't as bad as it was. Who
+knows,' I ask' him, 'but what the doctor might turn out wrong?'
+
+"Pretty soon I got him to pull himself together some, an' I shoved him
+into the other room, an' I went with him, an' talked on like an idiot so
+nobody'd suspect--I didn't hev no idea what.
+
+"She was settin' up in the same black waist, with a newspaper hung
+acrost the head o' the iron bed to keep the draught out. All of a
+sudden,--
+
+"'John!' says she.
+
+"He went close by the bed.
+
+"'Is everything goin' on good?' she ask' him.
+
+"'Everything,' he told her right off.
+
+"'Splendid, John?' she ask' him, pullin' his hand up by her cheek.
+
+"'Splendid, Linda,' he says after her.
+
+"'We got a little money ahead?' she goes on.
+
+"'Bless me, if he didn't do just what I had time to be afraid of. He
+hauls out them fifty-four dollars an' showed her.
+
+"She claps her hands like a child.
+
+"'Oh, _goodey_!' she says; 'I'm so glad. I'm so glad. Now I can tell
+you,' she says to him.
+
+"He took her in his arms an' kneeled down by the bed, an' I tried to
+slip out, but she called me back. So I stayed, like an' axe in the
+parlour.
+
+"'John,' she says to him, 'do you know what Aunt Nita told me before I
+was married? "You must always look the prettiest you know how," Aunt
+Nita says,' she tells him, '"for your husband. Because you must always
+be prettier for him than anybody else is." An', oh, dearest,' she says,
+'you know I'd 'a' looked my best for you if I could--but I never
+had--an' it wasn't your fault!' she cries out, 'but things didn't go
+right. It wasn't anybody's fault. Only--I _wanted_ to look nice for you.
+An' since I've been sick,' she says, 'it's made me wretched, wretched to
+think I didn't hev nothin' to put on but this black waist--this homely
+old black waist. You never liked me to wear black,' I rec'lect she says
+to him, 'an' it killed me to think--if anything should happen--you'd be
+rememberin' me like this. You think you'd remember me the way I was when
+I was well--but you wouldn't,' she says earnest; 'people never, never
+do. You'd remember me here like I look now. Oh--an' so I thought--if
+there was ever so little money we could spare--won't you get me
+somethin'--somethin' so's you could remember me better? Somethin' to
+wear these few days,' she says.
+
+"He breaks down then an' cries, with his face in her pillow.
+
+"'Don't--why, don't!' she says to him; 'if there wasn't any money, you
+might cry--only then I wouldn't never hev told you. But
+now--to-morrow--you can go an' buy me a little dressing-sacque--the kind
+they have in the windows on Broadway. Oh, _Jack_!' she says, 'is it
+wicked an' foolish for me to want you to remember me as nice as you can?
+It ain't--it _ain't_!' she says.
+
+"Then I give out. I felt like a handful o' wet sawdust that's been
+squeezed. I slid out an' downstairs, an' I guess I chopped wood near all
+night. The Tomato Ketchup's husband he pounded the floor for me to shut
+up, an' I told him--though I never was what you might call a impudent
+janitor--that if he thought he could chop it up any more soft, he'd
+better engage in it. But then the kid woke up, too, an' yelled some, an'
+I's afraid she'd hear it an' remember, an' so I quit.
+
+"Nex' mornin' I laid for Mr. Loneway in the hall.
+
+"'Sir,' I says to him when he come down to go out, 'you won't do nothin'
+foolish?' I ask' him.
+
+"'Mind your business,' he says, his face like a patch o' poplar ashes.
+
+"I was in an' out o' their flat all day, an' I could see't Mis' Loneway
+she's happy as a lark. But I knew pretty well what was comin'. Mind you,
+this was the third day.
+
+"That night I hed things goin' in the kitchen an' the kettle on, an' I's
+hesitatin' whether to put two eggs in the omelet or three, when he comes
+home. He laid a eternal lot o' stuff on the kitchen table, without one
+word, an' went in where she was. I heard paper rustlin', an' then I
+heard her voice--an' it wasn't no cryin', lemme say. An' so I says to
+myself, 'Well,' I says, 'she might as well hev a four-egg omelet,
+because it'll be the last.' I knew if they's to arrest him she wouldn't
+never live the day out. So I goes on with the omelet, an' when he come
+out where I was, I just told him if he'd cut open the grapefruit I hed
+ever'thing else ready. An' then he quit lookin' defiant, an' he calmed
+down some; an' pretty soon we took in the dinner.
+
+"She was sittin' up in front of her two pillows, pretty as a picture.
+An' she was in one o' the things I ain't ever see outside a store
+window. Lord! it was all the colour o' roses, with craped-up stuff like
+the bark on a tree, an' rows an' rows o' lace, an' long, flappy ribbon.
+She was allus pretty, but she looked like an angel in that. An' I says
+to myself then, I says: 'If a woman _knows_ she looks like that in them
+things, an' if she loves somebody an', livin' or dead, wants to look
+like that for him, I want to know who's to blame her? I ain't--Peleg
+Bemus, he ain't.' Mis' Loneway was as pretty as I ever see, not barrin'
+the stage. An' she was laughin', an' her cheeks was pink-like, an' she
+says,--
+
+"'Oh, Mr. Bemus,' she says, 'I feel like a queen,' she says, 'an' you
+must stay for dinner.'
+
+"I never seen Mr. Loneway gayer. He was full o' fun an' funny sayin's,
+an' his face had even lost its chalky look an' he'd got some colour, an'
+he laughed with her an' he made love to her--durned if it wasn't enough
+to keep a woman out o' the grave to be worshipped the way that man
+worshipped her. An' when she ask' for the guitar, I carried out the
+platter, an' I stayed an' straightened things some in the kitchen.
+An' all the while I could hear 'em singin' soft an' laughin'
+together ... an' all the while I knew what was double sure to come.
+
+"Well, in about an hour it did come. I was waitin' for it. Fact, I had
+filled up the coffee-pot expectin' it. An' when I heard the men comin'
+up the stairs I takes the coffee an' what rolls there was left an' I
+meets 'em in the hall, on the landing. They was two of 'em--constables,
+or somethin'--with a warrant for his arrest.
+
+"'Gentlemen,' says I, openin' the coffee-pot careless so's the smell
+could get out an' circ'late--'gentlemen, he's up there in that room.
+There's only these one stairs, an' the only manhole's right here over
+your heads, so's you can watch that. You rec'lect that there ain't a
+roof on that side o' the house. Now, I'm a lonely beggar, an' I wish't
+you'd let me invite you to a cup o' hot coffee an' a hot buttered roll
+or two, right over there in that hall window. You can keep your eye
+peeled towards that door all the while,' I reminds 'em.
+
+"Well, it was a bitter night, an' them two was flesh an' blood. They
+'lowed that if he hadn't been there they'd 'a' had to wait for him,
+anyway, so they finally set down. An' I doled 'em out the coffee. I
+'lowed I could keep 'em an hour if I knew myself. Nobody could 'a' done
+any different, with her an' him settin' up there singin' an' no manner
+o' doubt but what it was for the last time.
+
+"I'd be'n 'round consid'able in my time an' I knew quite a batch o'
+stories. I let 'em have 'em all, an' poured the coffee down 'em. They
+was willin' enough--it wa'n't cold in the halls to what it was outside,
+an' the coffee was boilin' hot. An' if anybody wants to blame me, they'd
+hev to see her first, all fluffed up same as a kitten in that pink
+jacket-thing, afore I'd give 'em a word o' hearin'.
+
+"In the midst of it all I heard the Tomato Ketchup's kid yell. I
+remembered that this'd be my last chanst fer _her_ to see the kid when
+she could get any happiness out of it. I didn't think twice--I just
+filled up the cups o' them two, an' then I sails downstairs, two at a
+time, an' opened the door o' first floor front without rappin'. The kid
+was there in its little nightgown, howlin' fer fair because it had be'n
+left alone with its boy brother. The Tomato Ketchup an' her husband was
+to a wake. I picked up the kid, rolled it in a blanket, grabbed brother
+by the arm, an' started up the stairs.
+
+"'Is the house on f-f-fire?' says the boy brother.
+
+"'Yes,' says I, 'it is. An' we're goin' upstairs to hunt up a
+fire-escape,' I told him.
+
+"At the top o' the stairs I sets him down on the floor an' promises him
+an orange, an' then I opens the door, with the kid on my arm. It had
+stopped yellin' by then, an' it was settin' up straight, with its eyes
+all round an' its cheeks all pinked-up with havin' just woke up, an' it
+looked awful cute, in spite of its mother. Mis' Loneway was leanin'
+back, laughin', an' tellin' him what they was goin' to do the minute she
+got well; but when she see the baby she drops her husband's hand and
+sorter screams out, weak, an' holds out her arms. Mr. Loneway, he hardly
+heard me go in, I reckon--leastwise, he looks at me clean through me
+without seein' I was there. An' she hugs the kiddie up in her arms an'
+looks at me over the top of its head as much as to say she understood
+an' thanked me.
+
+"'Its ma is went off,' I told 'em apologetic, 'an' I thought maybe you'd
+look after it awhile,' I told 'em.
+
+"Then I went out an' put oranges all around the boy brother on the hall
+floor, an' I hustled back downstairs.
+
+"'Gentlemen,' says I, brisk, 'I've got two dollars too much,' says
+I--an' I reck'n the cracks in them walls must 'a' winked at the notion.
+'What do you say to a game o' dice on the bread-plate?' I ask' 'em.
+
+"Well, one way an' another I kep' them two there for two hours. An'
+then, when the game was out, I knew I couldn't do nothin' else. So I
+stood up an' told 'em I'd go up an' let Mr. Loneway know they was
+there--along o' his wife bein' sick an' hadn't ought to be scared.
+
+"I started up the stairs, feelin' like lead. Little more'n halfway up I
+heard a little noise. I looked up, an' I see the boy brother a-comin',
+leakin' orange-peel, with the kid slung over his shoulder, sleepin'. I
+looked on past him, an' the door o' Mr. Loneway's sittin' room was open,
+an' I see Mr. Loneway standin' in the middle o' the floor. I must 'a'
+stopped still, because something stumbled up against me from the back,
+an' the two constables was there, comin' close behind me. I could hear
+one of 'em breathin'.
+
+"Then I went on up, an' somehow I knew there wasn't nothin' more to wait
+for. When we got to the top I see inside the room, an' she was layin'
+back on her pillow, all still an' quiet. An' the little new pink jacket
+never moved nor stirred, for there wa'n't no breath.
+
+"Mr. Loneway, he come acrost the floor towards us.
+
+"'Come in,' he says. 'Come right in,' he told us--an' I see him smilin'
+some."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+AN EPILOGUE
+
+
+When Peleg had gone back to the woodshed, Calliope slipped away too. I
+sat beside the fire, listening to the fine, measured fall of Peleg's
+axe--so much more vital with the spirit of music than his flute; looking
+at Calliope's brown earthen baking dishes--so much purer in line than
+the village bric-a-brac; thinking of Peleg's story and of the life that
+beat within it as life does not beat in the unaided letter of the law.
+But chiefly I thought of Linda Loneway. Linda Loneway. I made a picture
+of her name.
+
+So, Calliope having come from above stairs where I had heard her moving
+about as if in some search, I think that I recognized, even before I
+lifted my eyes to it, the photograph which she gave me. It was as if the
+name had heard me, and had come.
+
+"It's Linda," Calliope said. "It's Linda Proudfit. An' I'm certain,
+certain sure it's the Linda that Peleg knew."
+
+"Surely not, Calliope," I said--obedient to some law.
+
+Calliope nodded, with closed eyes, in simple certainty.
+
+"I _know_ it was her that Peleg meant about," she said. "I thought of it
+first when he said about her looks--an' her husband a clerk--an' he said
+he called her Linda. An' then when he got to where she mentioned Aunt
+Nita--that's what her an' Clementina always calls Mis' Ordway, though
+she ain't by rights--oh, it is--it is...."
+
+Calliope sat down on the floor before me, cherishing the picture. And
+all natural doubts of the possibility, all apparent denial in the real
+name of Linda Proudfit's poor young husband were for us both presently
+overborne by something which seemed viewlessly witnessing to the truth.
+
+"But little Linda," Calliope said, "to think o' her. To think o'
+_her_--like Peleg said. Why, I hardly ever see her excep' in all silk,
+or imported kinds. None of us did. I hardly ever 'see her walk--it was
+horses and carriages and dance in a ballroom till I wonder she
+remembered how to walk at all. Everything with her was cut good, an'
+kid, an' handwork, an' like that--the same way the Proudfits is now. But
+yet she wasn't a bit like Mis' Proudfit an' Clementina. They're both
+sweet an' rule-lovin' an' ladies born, but--" Calliope hesitated,
+"they's somethin' they _ain't_. An' Linda was."
+
+Calliope looked about the room, seeking a way to tell me. And her eyes
+fell on the flame on her cooking-stove hearth.
+
+"Linda had a little somethin' in her that lit her up," she said. "She
+didn't say much of anything that other folks don't say, but somehow she
+meant the words farther in. In where the light was, an' words mean
+differ'nt an' better. I use' to think I didn't believe that what she saw
+or heard or read was exactly like what her mother an' Clementina an'
+most folks see an' hear an' read. Somehow, she got the inside out o'
+things, an' drew it in like breathin', an' lit it up, an' lived it more.
+I donno's you know what I'm talkin' about. But Mis' Proudfit an'
+Clementina don't do that way. They're dear an' good an' generous, an'
+lots gentler than they was before Linda left 'em--an' yet they just wear
+things' an' invite folks in an' see Europe an' keep up their French an'
+serve God, an' never get any of it rill lit up. But Linda, she _knew_.
+An' she use' to be lonesome. I know she did--I know she did.
+
+"I use' to look at her an' wish an' wish I wa'n't who I am, so's I could
+a' let her know I knew too. I use' to go to mend her lace an' sell orris
+root to her--an' Madame Proudfit an' Clementina would be there, buyin'
+an' livin' on the outside, judicious an' refined an' rill right about
+everything; but when Linda come in, she sort o' reached somewheres,
+deep, or up, or out, or like that, an' got somethin' that meant it all
+instead o' gnawin' its way through words. It was like other folks was
+the recipe an' Linda was the rill dish. They was the way to be, but she
+was the one that was.
+
+"Well, then one year, when she come home from off to school, this young
+clerk followed her. I only see 'em together once--he only stayed a day
+an' had his terrible time with Jason Proudfit an' everybody knew it--but
+even with seein' 'em that once, I knew about him. I don't care who he
+was or what he was worth--he was lit up, too. I donno why he was a clerk
+nor anything of him--excep' that the lit kind ain't always the
+money-makers--but he could talk to her her way. An' when I see the four
+of 'em drive up in front of the post-office the day he come, Mis'
+Proudfit an' Clementina talkin' all soft an' interested an' regular
+about the foreign postage stamps they was buyin', an' Linda an' him
+sittin' there with foreign lands fair livin' in their eyes--I knew how
+it would be. An' so it was. They went off, Linda with only the clothes
+she was wearin' an' none of her stone rings or like that with her. An'
+see what it all done--see what it done. Jason Proudfit, he wouldn't
+forgive 'em nor wouldn't hear a word from 'em, though they say Mis'
+Linda wrote, at first, an' more than once. An' then when he died two
+years or so afterwards, an' Mis' Proudfit tried everywhere--they wa'n't
+no trace. An' no wonder, with a differ'nt name so's nobody should find
+out how poor they was--an' death--an' like enough prison...."
+
+Calliope stood up, and in the pause Peleg's axe went rhythmically on.
+
+"I'm goin' to be sure," she said. "I hate to--but o' course I've got to
+be rill certain, in words."
+
+She went out to the shed, taking with her the photograph, and closed the
+door. Peleg's axe ceased. And when she came back, she said nothing at
+all for a little, and the axe did not go on.
+
+"We mustn't tell Mis' Proudfit--yet," she put it, presently, "not till
+we can think. I donno's we ever can tell her. The dyin'--an' the
+disgrace--an' the other name--an' the hurt about Linda's _needin'
+things_ ... Peleg thinks not tell her, too."
+
+"At least," I said, "we can wait, for a little. Until they come home."
+
+I listened while, her task long disregarded, Calliope fitted together
+the dates and the meagre facts she knew, and made the sad tally
+complete. Then she laid the picture by and stood staring at the
+cooking-range flame.
+
+"It ain't enough," she said, "bein'--lit up--ain't enough for folks, is
+it? Not without they're some made out o' iron, too, to hold it--like
+stoves. An' yet--"
+
+She looked at me with one of her infrequent, passionate doubtings in her
+eyes.
+
+"--if Mis' Proudfit an' Clementina had just of been lit too," she said,
+"mebbe--"
+
+She got no farther, though I think it was not the opening of the door by
+Peleg Bemus that interrupted her. Peleg did not come in. He said
+something of the snow on his shoes, and spoke through the door's
+opening.
+
+"I'm a-goin to quit work for to-day, Mis' Marsh," he told her. "Seems
+like I'm too dead tired to chop."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+THE TEA PARTY
+
+
+As spring came on, and I found myself fairly identified with the life of
+Friendship,--or, at any rate, "more one of us," as they said,--I
+suggested to Calliope something which had been for some time pleasantly
+in my mind: might I, I asked one day, give a tea for her?
+
+"A tea!" she repeated. "For _me_? You know they give me a benefit once
+in the basement of the Court House. But a private tea, for me?"
+
+And when she understood that this was what I meant,
+
+"Oh," she said earnestly, "I'd be so glad to come. An' you an' I can
+know the tea is for me--if you rilly mean it--but it won't do to say it
+so'd it'd get out around. Oh, no, it won't. Not one o' the rest'll come
+near if you give it _for_ me--nor if you give it _for_ anybody. Mis'
+Proudfit, now, she tried to give a noon lunch on St. Patrick's day for
+Mis' Postmaster Sykes, an' the folks she ask' to it got together an'
+sent in their regrets. 'We're just as good as Mis' Postmaster Sykes,'
+they give out to everybody, 'an' we don't bow down to her like that.' So
+Mis' Proudfit she calls it a Shamrock Party an' give it a day later. An'
+every one of 'em went. It won't do to say it's _for_ me."
+
+So I contented myself with planning to seat Calliope at the foot of my
+table, and I found a kind of happiness in her child-like content, though
+only we two knew that the occasion would do her honour. If Delia had
+been available we would have told her, but Delia was still in Europe,
+and would not return until June.
+
+Calliope was quite radiant when, on the afternoon of the tea, she
+arrived in advance of the others. She was wearing her best gray
+henrietta, and I noted that she had changed her cameo ring from her
+first to her third finger. ("First-finger rings seem to me more
+everyday," she had once said to me, "but third-finger I always think
+looks real dressy.") She was carrying a small parcel.
+
+"You didn't ask to borrow anything," she said shyly; "I didn't know how
+you'd feel about that, a stranger so. An' we all got together--your
+company, you know--an' found out you hadn't borrowed anything from any
+of us, an' we thought maybe you hesitated. So we made up I should bring
+my spoons. They was mother's, an' they're thin as weddin' rings--an'
+solid. Any time you want to give a company you're welcome to 'em."
+
+When I had laid the delicate old silver in its place, I found Calliope
+standing in the middle of my living-room, looking frankly about on my
+simple furnishings, her eyes lingering here and there almost lovingly.
+
+"Bein' in your house," she said, "is like bein' somewheres else. I don't
+know if you know what I mean? Most o' the time I'm where I belong--just
+common. But now an' then--like a holiday when we're dressed up an'
+sittin' 'round--I feel differ'nt an' _special_. It was the way I felt
+when they give the William Shakespeare supper in the library an' had it
+lit up in the evenin' so differ'nt--like bein' somewheres else. It'll be
+that way on Market Square next month when the Carnival comes. I guess
+that's why I'm a extract agent," she added, laughing a little. "When I
+set an' smell the spices I could think it wasn't me I feel so _special_.
+An' I feel that way now--I do' know if you know what I mean--"
+
+She looked at me, measuring my ability to comprehend, and brightening at
+my nod.
+
+"Well, most o' Friendship wouldn't understand," she said. "To them
+vanilla smells like corn-starch pudding an' no more. An' that reminds
+me," she added slowly, "you know Friendship well enough by this time,
+don't you, to find we're apt to say things here this afternoon?"
+
+"Say things?" I repeated, puzzling.
+
+"We won't mean to," she hastened loyally to add; "I ain't talkin' about
+us, you know," she explained anxiously, "I just want to warn you so's
+you won't be hurt. I guess I notice such things more'n most. We won't
+mean to offend you--but I thought you'd ought to know ahead. An' bein'
+as it's part my tea, I thought it was kind o' my place to tell you."
+
+She was touching the matter delicately, almost tenderly, and not more,
+as I saw, with a wish to spare me than with a wish to apologize in
+advance for the others, to explain away some real or fancied weakness.
+
+"You know," she said, "we ain't never had anybody to, what you might
+say, tell us what we can an' what we can't say. So we just naturally say
+whatever comes into our heads. An' then when we get it said, we see
+often that it ain't what we meant--an' that it's apt to hurt folks or
+put us in a bad light, or somethin'. But some don't even see that--some
+go right ahead sayin' the hurt things an' never know it _is_ a hurt. I
+don't know if you've noticed what I mean," Calliope said, "but you will
+to-night. An' I didn't want you should be hurt or should think hard of
+them that says 'em."
+
+But how, I wondered, as my guests assembled, could one "think hard" of
+any one in Friendship, and especially of the little circle to which I
+belonged: My dear Mis' Amanda Toplady, Mis' Photographer Sturgis, Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, who, since our Thanksgiving, seemed, as
+Calliope put it, to have "got good with the universe again"; the Liberty
+sisters, for that day once more persuaded from their seclusion, and Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes, with, we sometimes said, "some right to hev her
+peculiarities if ever anybody hed it." Of them all the Friendship phrase
+of approval had frequently been spoken: That this one, or that, was "_at
+heart_, one o' the most all-round capable women we've got."
+
+I had hoped to have one more guest--Mrs. Merriman, wife of the late
+chief of the Friendship fire department. But I had promptly received her
+regrets, "owing to affliction in the family," though the fire chief had
+died two years and more before.
+
+"But it's her black," Calliope had explained to me sympathetically; "she
+can't afford to throw away her best dress, made mournin' style, with
+crape ornaments. As long as that lasts good, she'll hev to stay home
+from places. I see she's just had new crape cuffs put on, an' that means
+another six months at the least. An' she won't go to parties wearin'
+widow weeds. Mis' Fire Chief Merriman is very delicate."
+
+My guests, save Calliope, all arrived together and greeted me, I
+observed, with a manner of marked surprise. Afterward, when I wondered,
+Calliope explained simply that it was not usual for a hostess to meet
+her guests at the door. "Of course, they're usually right in the midst
+o' gettin' the supper when the company comes," she said.
+
+My prettiest dishes and silver were to do honour to those whom I had
+bidden; and boughs of my Flowering-currant filled my little hall and
+curved above the line of sight at table, where the candle shades lent
+deeper yellows. I delighted in the manner of formality with which they
+took their places, as if some forgotten ceremonial of ancient courts
+were still in their veins, when a banquet was not a thing to be entered
+upon lightly.
+
+Quite in ignorance of the Japanese custom of sipping tea while the first
+course is arriving, it is our habit in Friendship to inaugurate "supper"
+by seeing the tea poured. In deference to this ceremony a hush fell
+immediately we were seated, and this was in courtesy to me, who must
+inquire how each would take her tea. I think that this conversation
+never greatly varied, as:--
+
+"Mrs. Toplady?" I said at once, the rest being understood.
+
+"Cream and sugar, _if_ you please," said that great Amanda heartily, "or
+milk if it's milk. I take the tea for the trimmin's."
+
+Then a little stir of laughter and a straying comment or two about, say,
+the length of days at that time of year, and:--
+
+"Mrs. Sykes?"
+
+"Just milk, please. I always say I don't think tea would hurt _anybody_
+if they'd leave the sugar alone. But then, I've got a very peculiar
+stomach."
+
+"Mrs. Holcomb?"
+
+"I want mine plain tea, thank you. My husband takes milk and the boys
+like sugar, but I like the taste of the tea."
+
+At which, from Libbie Liberty: "Oh, Mis' Holcomb just says that to make
+out she's strong-minded. Plain tea an' plain coffee's regular woman's
+rights fare, Mis' Holcomb!" And then, after more laughter and Mis'
+Holcomb's blushes, they awaited:--
+
+"Mrs. Sturgis?"
+
+"Not any at all, thank you. No, I like the tea, but the tea don't like
+me. My mother was the same way. She never could drink it. No, not any
+for me, though I must say I should dearly love a cup."
+
+"Miss 'Viny?"
+
+"Just a little tea and the rest hot water. Dear me, I shouldn't go to
+sleep till _to-morrow_ night if I was to drink a cup as strong as that.
+No--a little more water, please. I s'pose I can send it back for more if
+it's still too strong?"
+
+"Miss Libbie?"
+
+"Laviny just wants the canister pointed in her direction, an' she thinks
+she's had her tea. Lucy don't dare take any. Three lumps for me, please.
+I like mine surup."
+
+"Calliope?"
+
+"Oh," said Calliope, "milk if there's any left in the pitcher. An' if
+there ain't, send it down clear. I like it most any way. Ain't it queer
+about the differ'nce in folks' tastes in their tea and coffee?"
+
+That was the signal for the talk to begin with anecdotes of how various
+relatives, quick and passed, had loved to take their tea. No one ever
+broached a real topic until this introduction had had its way. To do so
+would have been an indelicacy, like familiar speech among those in the
+ceremony of a first meeting.
+
+Thus I began to see that in spite of Calliope's distress at the ways of
+us in Friendship, a matchless delicacy was among its people a dominant
+note. Not the delicacy born of convention, not that sometimes bred in
+the crudest by urban standards, but a finer courtesy that will spare the
+conscious stab which convention allows. It was, if I may say so, a
+_savoir faire_ of the heart instead of the head. But we had hardly
+entered upon the hour before the ground for Calliope's warning was
+demonstrated.
+
+"There!" she herself bridged a pause with her ready little laugh, "I
+knew somebody'd pass me somethin' while I was saltin' my potato. My
+brother, older, always said that at home. 'I never salt my potato,' he
+use' to say, 'without somebody passes me somethin'."
+
+Next instant her eyes flew to my face in a kind of horror, for:--
+
+"We've noticed that at our house, too," Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss
+observed, vigorously using a salt-shaker, "but then I always believe,
+myself, in havin' everything properly seasoned in the kitchen before it
+comes on to the table."
+
+"See!" Calliope signalled me fleetly.
+
+But no one else, and certainly not Mis' Holcomb herself, perceived the
+surface of things vexed by a ripple.
+
+"Well, now," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady heartily, "that _is_ so
+about saltin' your potato. I know it now, but I never thought of it
+right out before. Lots o' things are true that you don't think of right
+out. Now I come to put my mind on it, I know at our house if I cut up a
+big plate o' bread we don't eat up half of it; but just as sure as I
+don't, I hev to get up from the table an' go get more bread."
+
+"I know--we often speak of that!" and "So my husband says," chimed Mis'
+Holcomb and Mis' Sturgis.
+
+"Seems as if I'd noticed that, too," Calliope said brightly.
+
+Whereupon: "My part," Miss Lucy Liberty contributed shyly, "I always
+like to see a great big plate of good, big slices o' bread come on to
+the table. Looks like the crock was full," she added, laughing heartily
+to cover her really pretty shyness, "an' like you wouldn't run out."
+
+Calliope's glance at me was still more distressed, for my table showed
+no bread at all, and my maid was at that moment handing rolls the size
+of a walnut. But for the others the moment passed undisturbed.
+
+"I've never noticed in particular about the bread," observed Mis'
+Sykes,--she had great magnetism, for when she spoke an instant hush
+fell,--"but what _I_ have noticed"--Mis' Sykes was very original and
+usually disregarded the experiences of others,--"is that if I don't make
+a list of my washing when it goes, something is pretty sure to get lost.
+But let me make a list, an' even the dust-cloths'll come back home."
+
+Everybody had noticed that. Even Libbie Liberty assented, and exchanged
+with her sister a smile of domestic memories.
+
+"An' every single piece has got my initial in the corner, too," Mis'
+Sykes added; "I wouldn't hev a piece o' linen in the house without my
+initial on. It don't seem to me rill refined not to."
+
+Calliope's look was almost one of anguish. My hemstitched damask napkins
+bear no saving initial in a corner. But no one else would, I was
+certain, connect that circumstance, even if it was observed, with what
+Mis' Sykes had said.
+
+"It's too bad Mis' Fire Chief Merriman wouldn't come to-day," Calliope
+hastily turned the topic. "She can't seem to get used to things again,
+since Sum died."
+
+"She didn't do this way for her first husband that died in the city, I
+heard," volunteered Mis' Sturgis. "Why, I heard she went out _there_,
+right after the first year."
+
+"That's easy explained," said Mis' Sykes, positively.
+
+"Wasn't she fond of him?" asked Mis' Holcomb. "She seems real clingin',
+like she would be fond o' most any one."
+
+"Oh, yes, she was fond of him," declared Mis' Sykes. "Why, he was a
+professional man, you know. But then he died ten years ago, durin' tight
+skirts. Naturally, being a widow then wasn't what it is now. She
+couldn't cut her skirt over to any advantage--a bell skirt is a bell
+skirt. An' they went out the very next year. When she got new cloth for
+the flare skirts, she got colours. But the Fire Chief died right at the
+height o' the full skirts. She's kep' cuttin' over an' cuttin' over, an'
+by the looks o' the Spring plates she can keep right on at it. She
+really can't afford to go _out_ o' mournin'. I don't blame her a bit."
+
+"She told me the other day," remarked Libbie Liberty, "that she was real
+homesick for some company food. She said she'd been ask' in to eat with
+this family an' that, most hospitable but very plain. An' seems though
+she couldn't wait for a company lay-out."
+
+"She won't go anywheres in her crape," Mis' Sykes turned to me,
+supplementing Calliope's former information. "She's a very superior
+woman,--she graduated in Oils in the city,--an' she's fitted for any
+society, say where who _will_. We always say about her that nobody's so
+delicate as Mis' Fire Chief Merriman."
+
+"She don't take strangers in very ready, anyway," Mis' Holcomb explained
+to me. "She belongs to what you might call the old school. She's very
+sensitive to _every_thing."
+
+The moment came when I had unintentionally produced a hush by serving a
+salad unknown in Friendship. When almost at once I perceived what I had
+done, I confess that I looked at Calliope in a kind of dread lest this
+too were a _faux pas_, and I took refuge in some question about the
+coming Carnival. But my attention was challenged by my maid, who was in
+the doorway announcing a visitor.
+
+"Company, ma'am," she said.
+
+And when I had bidden her to ask that I be excused for a little:--
+
+"Please, ma'am," she said, "she says she has to see you _now_."
+
+And when I suggested the lady's card:--
+
+"Oh, it's Mis' Fire Chief Merriman," the maid imparted easily.
+
+"Mis' Fire Chief Merriman!" exclaimed every one at table. "Well
+forevermore! Speakin' of angels! She must 'a' forgot the tea was bein'."
+
+In my living-room, in her smartly freshened spring toilet of mourning,
+Mis' Fire Chief Merriman rose to greet me. She was very tall and slight,
+and her face was curiously like an oblong yellow brooch which fastened
+her gown at the throat.
+
+"My dear friend," she said, "I felt, after your kind invitation, that I
+must pay my respects _during_ your tea. Afterwards wouldn't be the same.
+It's a tea, and there couldn't be lanterns an' bunting or anything o'
+the sort. So I felt I could come in."
+
+"You are very good," I murmured, and in some perplexity, as she resumed
+her seat, I sat down also. Mis' Merriman sought in the pocket of her
+petticoat for a black-bordered handkerchief.
+
+"When you're in mourning so," she observed, "folks forget you. They
+don't really forget you, either. But they get used to missing you
+places, an' they don't always remember to miss you. I did appreciate
+your inviting me to-day so. Because I'm just as fond of meeting my
+friends as I was before the chief died."
+
+And when I had made an end of murmuring something:--
+
+"Really," she went on placidly, "it ought to be the custom to go out in
+society when you're in mourning if you never did any other time. You
+need distraction then if you ever needed it in your life. An' the chief
+would 'a' been the first to feel that too. He was very partial to going
+out in company."
+
+And when I had made an end of murmuring something else:--
+
+"You were very thoughtful to give me an invitation for this afternoon,"
+she said. "An' I felt that I must stop in an' tell you so, even if I
+couldn't attend."
+
+Serenely she spread her black crape fan and swayed it. In the
+dining-room my guests proceeded with their lonely salad toward a
+probable lonely dessert. At thought of that dessert and of that salad, a
+suggestion, partly impulsive and partly flavoured with some faint
+reminiscence, at once besieged me, and in it I divined a solution of the
+moment.
+
+"Mrs. Merriman," I said eagerly, "may I send you in a cup of strawberry
+ice? I've some early strawberries from the city."
+
+She turned on me her great dark eyes, with their flat curve of shadow
+accenting her sadness.
+
+"I'm sure you are very kind," she said simply. "An' I should be pleased,
+I'm sure."
+
+I rose, hesitating, longing to say what I had in mind.
+
+"I'd really like your opinion," I said, "on rather a new salad I'm
+trying. Now would you not--"
+
+"A salad?" Mis' Merriman repeated. "The chief," she said reflectively,
+"was very partial to all green salads. I don't think men usually care
+for them the way he did."
+
+"Dear Mrs. Merriman," said I at this, "a cup of bouillon and a bit of
+chicken breast and a drop of creamed cauliflower--"
+
+"Oh," she murmured, "really, I couldn't think--"
+
+And when I had made my cordial insistence she looked up at me for a
+moment solemnly, over her crape fan. I thought that her eyes with that
+flat, underlying curve of shadow were as if tears were native to them.
+Her grief and the usages of grief had made of her some one other than
+her first self, some one circumscribed, wary of living.
+
+"Oh," she said wistfully, "I ain't had anything like that since I went
+into mourning. If you don't think it would be disrespectful to him--?"
+
+"I am certain that it would not be so," I assured her, and construed her
+doubting silence as capitulation.
+
+So I filled a tray with all the dainties of our little feast, and my
+maid carried it to her where she sat, and then to us at table served
+dessert. And my strange party went forward with seven guests in my
+dining-room and one mourner at supper in my living-room.
+
+"How very, _very_ delicate!" said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, in an emphatic
+whisper. "Mis' Fire Chief Merriman is a very superior woman, an' she
+always does the delicate thing."
+
+And now as I met Calliope's eyes I saw that the dear little woman was
+looking at me with a manner of unmistakable pride. In spite of her
+warning to me and what she thought had been its justification during the
+supper, here was an occasion to reveal to me a delicacy unequalled.
+
+Thereafter, in deference to my mourning guest in the next room, we all
+dropped our voices and talked virtually in whispers. And when at last we
+rose from the table, complete silence had come upon us.
+
+Then, the tray not having yet been brought from that other room, I
+confess to having found myself somewhat uncertain how to treat a
+situation so out of my experience. But the kind heart of my dear Mis'
+Amanda Toplady was the dictator.
+
+"Now," she whispered, tip-toeing, "we must all go in an' speak to her.
+Poor woman--she don't call anywheres, an' she stays in mournin' so long
+folks have kind o' dropped off goin' to see her. Let's walk in an' be
+rill nice to her."
+
+Mis' Fire Chief Merriman sat as I had left her, and the tray was before
+her on my writing-table. She looked up gravely and greeted them all, one
+by one, without rising. We sat about her in a circle and spoke to her
+gently on subjects decently allied to her grief: on the coming meeting
+of the Cemetery Improvement Sodality; on the new styles in mourning; on
+the deaths in Friendship during the winter; and on two cases of typhoid
+fever recently developed in the town. (The Fire Chief had died of
+"walking typo.") And Mis' Merriman, gravely partaking of strawberry ice
+and cake and bonbons, listened and replied and, with the last morsel,
+rose to take her leave.
+
+It was then that my unlucky star shone effulgent. For, as she was
+shaking hands all round:--
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Merriman," I said, with the gentlest intent, "would you care
+to come out to see my dining-room? My Flowering-currant was very early
+this year--"
+
+To my horrified amazement Mis' Fire Chief Merriman lifted her
+black-bordered handkerchief to her face and broke into subdued sobbing.
+Suddenly I understood that all the others were looking at me in a kind
+of reproachful astonishment. My bewilderment, mounting for an instant,
+was precipitately overthrown by the sobbing woman's words.
+
+"Oh," Mis' Merriman said indistinctly, "I'm much obliged to you, I'm
+sure. But how can you think I would? I haven't looked at lanterns an'
+bunting an' such things since the Fire Chief died. I don't know how I'm
+ever going to stand the Carnival!"
+
+In deep distress I apologized, and found myself adrift upon a sea of
+uncharted classifications. Here were niceties of distinction which
+escaped my ruder vision, trained to the mere interchange of signals in
+smooth sailing or straight tempest, on open water. But I knew with grief
+that I had given her pain--that was clear enough; and in my confusion
+and wish to make amends, I caught up from their jar on the hall table my
+Flowering-currant boughs and thrust them in her hands.
+
+"Ah," I begged breathlessly, "at all events, take these!"
+
+On which she drew away from me and shook her head and fairly fled down
+the path, her floating crape brushing the mother bushes of my offending
+offering. And I was helplessly aware that sympathetic silence had fallen
+on the others and that the sympathy was not for me.
+
+"But what on earth was the matter?" I entreated my guests.
+
+It was that great Mis' Amanda Toplady who slipped her arm about me and
+explained.
+
+"When we've got any dead belongin' to us," she said, "we always carry
+all the flowers we get to the grave--an', of course, we don't feel we
+_can_ carry them that's been used for a company. It's the same with Mis'
+Fire Chief. An' she can't bear even to see flowers an' things that's
+fixed for a company, either. Of course, that's her privilege."
+
+Mis' Sykes took my hands.
+
+"You come here so lately," she said, "you naturally wouldn't know what's
+what in these things, here in Friendship. An' then, of course, Mis' Fire
+Chief Merriman is very, _very_ delicate."
+
+Calliope linked her arm in mine.
+
+"Don't you mind," she whispered; "we're all liable to our mistakes."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Half an hour after tea my guests took leave.
+
+"I enjoyed myself so much," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss; "you
+look tired out. I hope it ain't been too much for you."
+
+"Entertainin' is a real job," said Mis' Sturgis, "but you do it almost
+as if you liked it. I enjoyed myself _so_ much."
+
+"I'll give bail you're glad it's over," said Libbie Liberty,
+sympathetically, "even if it did go off nice. I enjoyed myself ever so
+much."
+
+"_Ever_ so much," murmured Miss Lucy, laughing heartily.
+
+"Good night. Everything was lovely. I enjoyed myself very much," Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes told me. "And," she said, "you'll hear from me very,
+_very_ soon in return for this."
+
+"Now don't you overdo, reddin' up to-night," advised my dear Mis' Amanda
+Toplady. "Just pick up the silver an' rense it off, an' let the dishes
+set till mornin', _I_ say. I _did_ enjoy myself so much."
+
+"Good-by," Calliope whispered in the hall. "Oh, it was beautiful. I
+_never_ felt so special. Thank you--thank you. An'--you won't mind those
+things we said at the supper table?"
+
+"Oh, Calliope," I murmured miserably, "I've forgotten all about them."
+
+I went out to the veranda with her. At the foot of the steps the others
+had paused in consultation. Hesitating, they looked up at me, and Mis'
+Sykes became their spokesman.
+
+"If I was you," she said gently, "I wouldn't feel too cut up over that
+slip o' yours to Mis' Merriman. She'd ought not to see blunders where
+they wasn't any meant. It'd ought to be the heart that counts, _I_ say.
+Good-by. We enjoyed ourselves very, _very_ much!"
+
+They went down the path between blossoming bushes, in the late afternoon
+sun. And as Calliope followed,--
+
+"That's so about the heart, ain't it?" she said brightly.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+WHAT IS THAT IN THINE HAND?
+
+
+"Busy, busy, busy, busy all the day. Busy, busy, busy. And busy ..."
+
+"There goes Ellen Ember, crazy again," we said, when we heard that cry
+of hers, not unmelodious nor loud, echoing along Friendship streets.
+
+Then we usually ran to the windows and peered at her. Sometimes her long
+hair would be unbound on her shoulders, sometimes her little figure
+would be leaping lightly up as she caught at the lowest boughs of the
+curb elms, and sometimes her hand would be moving swiftly back and forth
+above her heart.
+
+"If your heart is broken," she had explained to many, "you can lace it
+together with 'Busy, busy, busy ...' Sing it and see! Or mebbe your
+heart is all of a piece?"
+
+Once, when I had gone to Miss Liddy's house, I had found Ellen in a
+skirt fashioned of an old plaid shawl of her father's, her bare
+shoulders wound in the rosy "nubia" that had been her mother's, and she
+was dancing in the dining-room, with surprising grace, as Pierrette
+might have danced in Carnival, and singing, in a sweet, piping voice, an
+incongruous little song:--
+
+    O Day of wind and laughter,
+      A goddess born are you,
+    Whose eyes are in the morning
+      Blue--blue!
+
+"I made that up," she had explained, "or I guess mebbe I remembered it
+from deep in my skull. I like the feel of it in my mouth when I speak
+the words."
+
+I used to think that Miss Liddy was really a less useful citizen than
+Ellen. For though Miss Liddy worked painstakingly at her dressmaking,
+and even dreamed over it little partial dreams, Ellen, mad or sane, made
+a garden, and threw little nosegays over our fences, and exercised a
+certain presence, latent in the rest of us, which made us momentarily
+gentle and in awe of our own sanity.
+
+When, one spring morning, a week before the Friendship Carnival, she
+passed down Daphne Street with her plaintive, musical "Busy, busy,
+busy ..." Doctor June and the young Reverend Arthur Bliss sat on Doctor
+June's screened-in porch discussing a deficit in the Good Shepherd's
+Orphans' Home fund for the fiscal year. Ever since the wreck of the
+Through, Friendship had contributed to the support of the Home,--having
+first understood then that the Home was its patient pensioner,--and now
+it was almost like a compliment that we had been appealed to for help.
+
+Doctor June listened with serene patience to what his visitor would say.
+
+"Tension," said the Reverend Arthur Bliss, squaring his splendid young
+shoulders, "tension. Warfare. We, as a church, are enormously equipped.
+We have--shall we say?--the helmets of our intelligence and the swords
+of our wills. Why, the joy of the fight ought to be to us like that of a
+strong man ready to do battle, oughtn't it--oughtn't it?"
+
+Doctor June, his straight white hair outlining his plump pink face,
+nodded; but one would have said that it was rather less at the Reverend
+Arthur than at his Van Houtii spiraea, which nodded back at him.
+
+"My young friend," said Doctor June, "will you forgive me for saying
+that it is fairly amazing to me how the church of God continues to use
+the terms of barbarism? We talk of the peace that passeth understanding,
+and yet we keep on employing metaphors of blood-red war. What does the
+modern church want of a helmet and a sword, if I may ask? Even
+rhetorically?"
+
+"The Christian life is an eternal warfare against the forces of sin, is
+it not?" asked the Reverend Arthur Bliss in surprise.
+
+"Let me suggest," said Doctor June, "that all good life is an eternal
+surrender to the forces of good. There's a difference."
+
+The visitor from the city smiled very reverently.
+
+"I see, sir," he said, "that you are one of those wonderful
+non-combatants. You are by nature sanctified--and that I can well
+believe."
+
+"I am by nature a miserable old sinner," rejoined the doctor, warmly.
+"Often--often I would enjoy a fine round Elizabethan oath--note how that
+single adjective condones my poor taste. But I hold that good is
+inflowing and that it possesses whom it may possess. If a man is too
+busy fighting, it may pass him by."
+
+"But surely, sir," said the young clergyman, "you agree with me that a
+man wins his way into the kingdom of light by both a staff and a sword?"
+
+"You will perhaps forgive me for agreeing with nothing of the sort,"
+said the doctor, mildly; "I hold that a man takes his way to the light
+by grasping whatever the Lord puts in his hand--a hammer, a rope, a
+pen--and grasping it hard."
+
+"But the ungifted--what of the ungifted?" cried the Reverend Arthur
+Bliss.
+
+"In this sense, there are none," said Doctor June, briefly.
+
+"Busy, busy, busy all the day. Busy, busy, busy ..." sounded suddenly
+from the street in Ellen's thin soprano. Doctor June looked down at her,
+his expression scarcely changing, because it was always serenely soft.
+But the young clergyman saw with amazement the strange little figure
+with her unbound hair and her arms high and swaying, and as she took
+some steps of her dance before the gate, he questioned his host with
+uplifted brows.
+
+"A little mad," the doctor said, nodding, "like us all. She sings in the
+streets of a glad morning, and dances now and then. We take ours out in
+tangential opinions. It is nearly the same thing."
+
+The young clergyman's face lighted responsively at this, and then he
+deferentially clinched his argument.
+
+"There is a case in point," said he. "That poor creature there--what has
+the Lord put in her hand?"
+
+Doctor June looked thoughtful.
+
+"Nothing," he declared, "for any fight. But I'm not sure that she isn't
+made to be a leaven. The kingdom of God works like a leaven, you know,
+my dear young friend. Not like a dum-dum bullet."
+
+"But--that poor creature. A leaven?" doubted the Reverend Arthur Bliss.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder," said Doctor June, "I shouldn't wonder. I'm not so
+sure as I used to be that I can recognize leaven at first sight."
+
+"Ah, that's it!" cried his guest. "But a soldier, now, is a soldier!"
+
+Then they smiled their lack of acquiescence, and went back to the
+figures for the fiscal year.
+
+An hour later Doctor June stood alone on his garden walk, aimlessly
+poking about among his slips. He had done what he always did, following
+close on the heels of his well-established resolution never to do it
+again. He had pledged himself to try to raise one hundred dollars in
+Friendship for a pet philanthropy.
+
+"It's a kind of dissipation with me," he said, helplessly, and wandered
+down to his gate. "If I read an article about the Congo Free State or
+Women in India, it acts on me like brandy. I go off my head and give
+away my substance, and involve innocent people. But then, of course,
+this is different. It is always different."
+
+Then he heard Ellen's little song again. "Busy, busy, busy ..." she
+sang, and came round the corner from the town, catching at the lowest
+branches of the curb elms and laughing a little. At Doctor June's gate
+she halted and shook some lilacs at him.
+
+"Here," she said, "put some on your coat for a patch on your heart so's
+the break won't show. Ain't the Lord made the sun shine down this
+morning? Did you know there's a Carnival comin' to town?"
+
+"Like enough, Ellen," said Doctor June. "Like enough."
+
+"_Is_ one," she persisted. "They said about it in the Post-Office--I
+heard 'em. Dancin', an' parrots, an' jumpin' dogs."
+
+He stood looking at her thoughtfully as she arranged her flowers,
+singing under breath.
+
+"Ellen," he said, "will you tell Miss Liddy a few of us are going to
+meet here in my yard to-morrow afternoon, to talk over some
+money-raising? And ask her to come?"
+
+"I will," Ellen sang it, "I will an' I will. Did you mean me to come,
+too?" she broke off wistfully.
+
+"My stars, yes!" said Doctor June. "You're going to come early and help
+me, aren't you? I took that for granted."
+
+"Here's your lilacs," said Ellen, tossing him a nosegay. "I'll tell
+Liddy while she's eatin'. Liddy don't like me to talk much when she's
+workin'. But when she eats I can talk, an' I'll tell her then."
+
+She went on, singing, and Doctor June shook his head.
+
+"I don't know but Mr. Bliss is right," he said, "though I hope I can
+keep my doubts to myself and not brag about 'em, just to be the style.
+But it does look as if poor Ellen Ember came into the world
+empty-handed. As if the Lord didn't give her much of anything to work
+_with_."
+
+Summons to a meeting to talk over money-raising is, in Friendship, like
+the call to festivity in a different life. The cause never greatly
+matters. Interests appear eclectically to range from ice to coral. For
+let the news get about that there is to be a bazaar for China, a home
+bakery sale for the missionary station at Trebizond, or a Japanese tea
+for the Friendship cemetery fund, and we all sew or bake or lend dishes
+or sell tickets with the same infinity of zeal. The enterprise in hand
+absorbs our sense of the ultimate object; as when, after three days of
+hand-to-hand battle to wrest money for the freedmen from the patrons of
+a Kirmess at the old roller-skating rink, dear Mis' Amanda, secretary
+and door-tender, handed over our $64.85 with the wondering question:--
+
+"What do they mean by Freegman, anyway? What country is it they live
+in?"
+
+It was no marvel that Doctor June's garden was filled, that yellow
+afternoon, with many eager for action. Some of us knew that there was an
+Orphans' Home fund deficit; but more of us knew only that we were to
+"talk over some money-raising." I remember how, from the garden seat
+against the spiraea, the doctor faced us, all scattered about the
+antlered walk and its triangle of green, erect on golden oak and bright
+velvet chairs from within doors. And when he had told us of the shortage
+to which we were party, instantly the talk emptied into channels of
+possible pop-corn social, chicken-pie supper, rummage sale, art and loan
+exhibit, Old Settlers' Entertainment, and so on. After which Doctor June
+rose, and stood touching thoughtfully at the leaves which grew nearest,
+while he essayed to turn our minds from chicken-pot-pie-part-veal, and
+bib-aprons, to the eternal verities.
+
+"My friends," he said, "isn't there a better way? Let us, this time,
+give of our hearts' love to the little children of God, instead of
+buying pies and freezing ice cream in His name."
+
+There was, of course, an instant's hush in the garden. We were not used
+to paradoxes, and we felt as concave images must feel when they first
+look upon the world. It was as amazing as if we had been told that God
+grieves with us instead of afflicting us, as we held.
+
+"None of us has much money to give," Doctor June went on; "let us take
+the way that lies nearest our hand, and make a little money. God never
+permitted any normal human creature to come into His world unprovided
+with some means of making it better. Only, let us get outside our bazaar
+and chicken-pie faculties. Now what can we each do?"
+
+We sat still for a little, tentatively murmuring; and then Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss stood up by the sweet-alyssum urn.
+
+"Speakin' of what we can do," she said, "doin' ain't easy. Not when
+you're well along in years. Your ways seem to stiffen up some. When I
+was a girl, I could 'a' been quite an elocutionist if I could 'a' had
+lessons. I had a reg'lar born sense o' givin' gestures. But I never
+took. An' now I declare I don't know of anything I could do. It's the
+same way, I guess, with quite a number of us."
+
+Mis' Postmaster Sykes was in the arm-chair, and she sat still, queenly.
+
+"I could do some o' my embroidery," she observed, "but it's quite
+expensive stuff, an' I don't know whether it would sell rill well here
+in Friendship. I'd be 'most afraid to risk. An' I don't do enough
+cookin', myself, to what-you-might-say know how, any more."
+
+"Same with my sewing," observed Mis' Doctor Helman; "I put it all out
+now. I don't know as I could sew up a seam. That's the trouble, hiring
+everything done so."
+
+Those who did not hire everything done preserved a respectful silence.
+And Doctor June looked up in the elm trees.
+
+"The Lord," he said, "spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. The Lord
+said unto Moses, 'What is that in thine hand?' Moses had, you remember,
+nothing but a rod in his hand. But it was enough to let the people know
+that God had been with him--that the Lord had appeared unto him. Suppose
+the glory of the Lord, here in the garden, should ask us now, as it does
+ask, 'What is that in thine hand?' What have we got?"
+
+There was silence again, and we looked at one another doubtfully.
+
+"Land, Doctor!" said Libbie Liberty then, "I been tryin' for two years
+to earn a new parlour carpet, an' I ain't had nothin' in my hand to earn
+with. So I keep on sayin' I _like_ an old Brussels carpet--they're so
+easy to sweep."
+
+"My!" said Abigail Arnold, "I declare, I'd be real put to it to try to
+make extry money. 'Bout the only thing the Lord seems to 'a' put in my
+hand is time. I've got oodles o' that, layin' 'round loose."
+
+Mis' Photographer Sturgis was in the big garden chair, wrapped in a
+shawl, her feet on an inverted flower-pot.
+
+"I'm tryin' to think," she said, looking sidewise at the ground. "I
+donno's I know how I could earn a cent, convenient. It ain't real easy
+for women to earn. I think mebbe the Lord meant the men to be the
+Moseses."
+
+Mis' Amanda Toplady's voice rolled out, deep and comfortable, like a
+complaisant giant's.
+
+"Well said!" she remarked. "I'm drove to death all day. If anybody's to
+ask me what I got in my hand, I declare I guess I'd say, rill reverent:
+Dear Lord, I've got my hands full, an' that's about all I have got."
+
+So we went on, saying much or little as was our nature, but we were all
+agreed that we were virtually helpless--for Calliope was out of town
+that week, and not present to shame us.
+
+"What's in my hands?" said grim Miss Liddy Ember, finally, in her thin
+falsetto. "Well, I ain't got any rill, what-you-might-call hands. I just
+got kind o' cat's paws for my three meals a day an' my rent."
+
+Then, by her sister's side, Ellen Ember stood up. We had hardly noticed
+her, sitting there quietly playing with some of the doctor's flowers.
+But now we saw that she had hurriedly twisted her splendid hair about
+her head, and by this we understood that she was herself again. We had
+seen her come to herself like this on the street, and then she would go
+hurrying home, the tears running down her face in shame for her unbound
+hair and her singing and dancing. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes
+were shining as she rose now, and she looked appealingly pretty, one
+hand, palm outward, half hiding her trembling mouth. By her soft eyes,
+too, we knew that she was herself again.
+
+"You all know," she began, and dare not trust herself. "You all
+know ..." she said once more, and we understood what she would say.
+"What can I do?" she cried to us. "What is there I can do? I ain't got
+anything but my craziness! Oh, it seems like I _ain't_ much, an' so
+I'd ought to _do_ all the more."
+
+To soothe her, we took our woman's way of all talking at once. And then
+Doctor June called out cheerily that he felt the way Ellen did, that he
+wasn't a real Moses, for what had he--Doctor June--in his hand, and
+didn't we all know there was no money in pills? And then he told us how
+the Reverend Arthur Bliss was to be in town again on Wednesday of the
+next week, and would we not all think the matter over quietly, and meet
+with them on that evening, for cakes and tea?
+
+"As many of you as can," he said, "come with a plan to earn a dollar,
+and tell how you mean to do it. Ellen, you and I'll preside at the
+meeting, and hear what the rest say, and keep real still ourselves, like
+proper officers."
+
+But Ellen Ember would not be comforted. She stood with that one hand,
+palm outward, pressed against her lips, looking at us with big, brimming
+eyes.
+
+"I ain't got nothin' but my craziness, you know," she said over. And
+then, as she was going through the gateway, she turned to Doctor June.
+
+"Why, Wednesday's the first night o' the Carnival!" she cried. "You set
+the dollar meetin' on the first night o' the Carnival!"
+
+"My stars!" cried Doctor June, gravely. "And I might have been selling
+pills on the grounds!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All Friendship Village loves a Carnival. Once the word meant to me a
+Florentine _fiesta_ day, with a feast of colour, and of many little fine
+things, "real, like laughter." Now when I say "carnival" I mean the
+painted eruption by night from the market square of some town like
+Friendship, when lines broaden and waver grotesquely, when the mirth is
+in great silhouettes and Colour goes unmasked.
+
+I always make my way to such a place, for it holds for me the wonder of
+the untoward; as will a strolling Italian plodding past my house at
+night with his big, silent bear; or the spectacle of the huge, faded red
+ice-wagon, with powerful horses and rattling chains and tongs, and
+giants in blue denim atop the crystal; or the strange, copper world that
+dissolves in the fluid of certain sunsets. And that Wednesday night, a
+week later, on my way to the "dollar meeting" at Doctor June's, I turned
+toward the Friendship Carnival with some vestige of my youth clinging to
+the hem of things.
+
+I gave my attention to them all: The pop-corn wagon, an aristocratic
+affair that looked like a hearse; the little painted canaries and
+love-birds, so out of place and patient that I thought they must have
+souls to form as well as we; the sad little live monkey, incessantly
+dodging white balls thrown at him by certain immortals (who, when they
+hit him, got pipes); and the giant who flung "Look! Look! Look! Look!"
+through a megaphone, while a good little dog toiled up a ladder and then
+stood at the ladder's top in a silence that was all nice reticence and
+dignity. Also, the huge Saxon fellow who, at the portal of the Arabian
+Court of Art and Regular Cafe Restaurant, sang a love-song through a
+megaphone--"Tenderly, dearest, I breathe thy sweet name," he hallooed,
+with his free hand beckoning the crowd to the Court of Art.
+
+And then I saw the Lyric Dance Arcade and Indian Palace of Asiatic
+Mystery. And I found myself close to the platform, listening to the cry
+of a man in gilt knickerbockers.
+
+"Ladies! Gentlemen! All!" he summoned. "Never in the history of
+the show business has there been anything resemblin' this. Come
+here--here--here--here! See Zorah, queen of the West and princess of the
+East, who is about to begin one of her most sublimely sensational
+dances. See her, see her, you may never again see her! Graceful,
+glittering, genteel. Graceful, glittering, gen-te-e-e-l. I am telling
+you about Zorah, queen of the West and princess of the East, in her
+ancient Asiatic dance, the most up-to-date little act in the entire show
+business to-day. Here she is, waiting for you--you--you. Everybody
+that's got the dime!"
+
+Until he ceased, I had hardly noticed Zorah herself, standing in the
+canvas portico. The woman had, I then observed, a kind of appealing
+prettiness and a genuineness of pose. She was looking out on the crowd
+with the usual manner of simulated shyness, but to the shyness was given
+conviction by an uplifted hand, palm outward, hiding her mouth. I noted
+her small, stained face, her splendid unbound hair--and then a certain
+resemblance caught at my heart. And I saw that she was wearing a skirt
+made of a man's plaid shawl, and about her shoulders was a rosy,
+old-fashioned nubia. Her face and throat were stained, and so were her
+thin little arms--but I knew her.
+
+The performance, as the man had said, was about to begin, and already he
+was giving Zorah her signal to go within. Somehow I bought a ticket and
+hurried into the tent. The seats were sparingly occupied, and I saw, as
+I would have guessed, no one whom I knew in the eager, stamping little
+audience. In their midst I lost the slim figure that had preceded me,
+until she mounted the platform and swept before the footlights a stately
+courtesy.
+
+And there, in the smoky little tent, Ellen Ember began to dance, with
+her quite surprising grace--as Pierrette might have danced in Carnival.
+It was the charming, faery measure which she had danced for me in Miss
+Liddy's dining-room; and as she had sung to me then, so now, in a sweet
+piping voice, she sang her incongruous little song:--
+
+    O Day of wind and laughter,
+    A goddess born are you,
+    Whose eyes are in the morning
+    Blue--blue!
+    The slumbrous noon your body is,
+    Your feet are the shadow's flight,
+    But the immortal soul of you
+    Is Night.
+
+It seemed to me that I sat for hours in that hot little place, cut off
+from the world, watching. Again and again, to the brass blare of some
+hoiden tune, she set the words of the lyric that "she liked the feel
+of," and she danced on and on. And when at last the music shattered off,
+and she ceased, and ran behind a screening canvas, somehow I made my way
+forward through the crowd that was clapping hands and calling her back,
+and I gained the place where she stood.
+
+When I asked her to come with me, she nodded and smiled, with unseeing
+eyes, and assented quite simply, and then suddenly sat down before the
+lifted tent flap.
+
+"But I must wait for my money," she said. "That's what I came for--my
+money. They thought I'd never earn my dollar, but I have."
+
+At this I understood. And now I marvel how I talked at all to the man in
+gilt knickerbockers who arrived and haggled over the whole matter.
+
+Zorah, he explained, the sure-enough Zorah, had took down sick in the
+last place they made, an' they'd had to leave her behind. An' when he
+told about it down town that morning, this little piece here had up an'
+offered. Somethin' had to be done--he left it to me if they didn't. He
+felt his duty to the amusement park public, him. So he had closed with
+her for a dollar for three fifteen-minute turns--he give two shillings a
+turn, on the usual, but she'd hung out stout for the even money. An'
+she'd danced her three, odd but satisfactory. You could hand 'em queer
+things in the show business, if you only dressed the part. Yes, sure,
+here was the dollar. Be on hand to-morrow night? No? Sufferin' snakes,
+but was we goin' to leave him shipwrecked?
+
+Finally I got her away, and skirted the market-place with her dancing at
+my side, shaking her silver dollar in her shut palms and singing:--
+
+"Busy, busy, busy all the day. An' then I earned my dollar, my
+dollar--they never thought I'd earn my dollar ..."
+
+I remember, as we struck into the unlighted block where Miss Liddy's
+house stood, that I was struggling hard for my own serenity, so that for
+a moment I did not observe that Ellen stopped beside me. But I knew that
+she fell silent, and when I turned I saw her there on the dark walk
+hurriedly twisting her splendid hair about her head. And by that and by
+her silence I understood that she was suddenly herself, and of her own
+mind, as we say.
+
+On this, "Ellen!" said I quickly, "how fine of you to have earned your
+Orphans' Home dollar so soon. But you have beaten us all!"
+
+She had contrived to fasten her hair, and I saw her touching tentatively
+the folds of her strange dress. And so I made her know what she had
+done, as gently as I might, and with all praise I stilled her dismay and
+shame. And last I led her, as I was determined that I would do, past
+Miss Liddy's dark little house and on to the home of Doctor June.
+
+I think that I would not have dared take Ellen, just as she was, in her
+plaid skirt and her rosy nubia, into that black and brown
+henrietta-cloth assembly, if I had remembered that there was to be a
+stranger present. But this, in the events of the hour, I had quite
+forgotten. I remembered as I entered the room and came face to face with
+the Reverend Arthur Bliss, talking of the figures for the fiscal year.
+
+"--and the deficit," he was saying, "ought to be made up by us who are
+so well equipped to do it. With Paul, let us fight the good fight--of
+every day. This is to-day's fight. Now let us talk over our various
+weapons."
+
+Doctor June looked thoughtfully at his young guest, and in the older
+face was a brooding tenderness, like the tenderness of the father who
+longs to hold the child in quiet, in his arms.
+
+"Yes," said Doctor June, "'fighting' is one name for it. I am tempted to
+say that 'drudgery' is another name. Errantry, ministry, service, or
+whatever. It all comes to the same thing: 'What is that in thine hand?'
+Well, now, who of us is first?"
+
+"I think," said I then, "that Ellen Ember is first."
+
+She would have shrunk back from the doorway to the passage, but I put my
+arm about her, and then I told them. And when I had done, I remember how
+she threw up that pathetic hand of hers, palm outward, and this time it
+was over her eyes.
+
+"I'm a disgrace to all of you!" she said, sobbing, "an' to the whole
+Good Shepherd's Home. But I guess anyhow it's all the way I had. Seems
+like I ain't got nothin' in the world but my craziness!"
+
+There was silence for a moment, that rich silence which flowers in the
+heart. And then great Mis' Amanda Toplady spoke out, in her deep voice
+which now she some way contrived to keep firm.
+
+"Well said!" she cried. "I come here to say I'd give a dollar outright
+to get red o' the whole thing, rather'n to fuss. But now I ain't goin'
+to stop at a dollar. Seems like a dollar for me wouldn't be _moral_. I'm
+goin' to sell some strawberry plants--why, we got hundreds of 'em to
+spare. I can do it by turnin' my hand over. An' I expec' the Lord meant
+you should turn your hand over to find out what's in it, anyway."
+
+I think that then we tried our woman's way of all talking at once, but I
+remember how the shrill voice of Abigail Arnold, of the home bakery,
+rose above the others:--
+
+"Cream puffs!" she cried. "I got a rush demand for my cream puffs every
+Sat'day, an' I ain't been makin' 'em sole-because I hate to run after
+the milk an' set it. An' I was goin' to get out o' this by givin' fifty
+cents out o' the bakery till. An' me with my hands full o' cream
+puffs...."
+
+"Hens--hens is what mine is," Libbie Liberty was saying. "My grief, I
+got both hands full o' hens. I wouldn't sell 'em because I can't bear to
+hev any of 'em killed--they're tame as a bag o' feathers, all of 'em. I
+guess I ben settin' the hens o' my hand over against the heathen an' the
+orphans. An' now I'm goin' to sell spring chickens...."
+
+Mis' Sturgis in the rocking-chair was waving a corner of her shawl.
+
+"C-canaries!" she cried. "I can rise canary-birds an' sell 'em a dollar
+apiece in the city. I m-meant to slide out account o' my health, but it
+was just because I hate to muss 'round b-boilin' eggs for the little
+ones. I'll raise a couple or two--mebbe more."
+
+"My good land!" came Miss Liddy Ember's piping falsetto; "to think o' my
+sittin' up, hesitatin', when new dresses just falls off the ends o' my
+fingers. An' me in my right mind, too."
+
+Dear Doctor June stood up among us, his face shining.
+
+"Bless us," he said. "Didn't I have some spiraea in my hand right while I
+stood talking to you the other afternoon in my garden? And haven't I got
+some tricolored Barbary varieties of chrysanthemums, and some hardy
+roses and one thing and another to make men marvel? And can't I sell 'em
+in the city at a pretty profit? What I've got in my hand is seeds and
+slips--I see that plain enough. And my stars, out they go!"
+
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, Mis' Mayor Uppers, even Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes--ah, they all knew what to do, knew it as if somebody
+had been saying it over and over, and as if they now first listened.
+
+But Ellen Ember sat crying, her face buried in her hands. And I think
+that she cannot have understood, even when Doctor June touched her hair
+and said something of the little leaven which leaveneth the whole lump.
+
+Last, the Reverend Arthur Bliss arose, and there was a sudden hush among
+us, for it was as if a new spirit shone in his strong young face.
+
+"Dear friends," he said, "dear friends ..." And then, "Lord God," he
+prayed abruptly, "show me what is that in my hand--thy tool where I had
+looked for my sword!"
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+PUT ON THY BEAUTIFUL GARMENTS
+
+
+"I donno," Calliope said, as, on her return, we talked about Ellen
+Ember, "I guess I kind o' believe in craziness."
+
+Calliope's laugh often made me think of a bluebird's note, which is to
+say, of the laughter of a child. Bluebirds are the little children among
+birds, as robins are the men, house-wrens the women, scarlet tanagers
+the unrealities and humming-birds the fairies.
+
+"Only," Calliope added, "I do say you'd ought to hev some sort o'
+leadin' strap even to craziness, an' that I ain't got an' never had. I
+guess folks thinks I'm rill lunar when I take the notion. Only thing
+comforts me, they don't know how lunar I rilly can be."
+
+Then she told me about 'Leven.
+
+"A shroud, to look rill nice," Calliope said, "ought to be made as much
+as you can like a dress--barrin' t' you can't fit it. Mis' Toplady an'
+Mis' Holcomb an' I made Jennie Crapwell's shroud--it was white mull and
+a little narrow lace edge on a rill life-like collar. We finished it the
+noon o' the day after Jennie died,--you know Jennie was Delia's
+stepsister that they'd run away from--an' I brought it over to my house
+an' pressed it an' laid it on the back bedroom bed--the room I don't use
+excep' for company an' hang my clean dresses in the closet of.
+
+"In the afternoon I went up to the City on a few little funeral
+urrants,--a crape veil for Jennie's mother an' like that,--you know
+Jennie died first. We wasn't goin' to dress her till the next
+mornin'--her mother wanted we should leave her till then in her little
+pink sacque she'd wore, an' the soft lavender cloth they use now spread
+over her careless. An' we wanted to, too, because sence Mis' Jeweler
+Sprague died nobody could do up the Dead's hair, an' Jennie wa'n't the
+exception.
+
+"Mis' Sprague, she'd hed a rill gift that way. She always done folks'
+hair when they died an' she always got it like life--she owned up how,
+after she begun doin' it so much, she used to set in church an' in
+gatherin's and find herself lookin' at the backs of heads to see if they
+was two puffs or three, an' whether the twist was under to left or over
+to right--so's she'd know, if the time come. But none of us could get
+Jennie's to look right. We studied her pictures an' all too, but best we
+could do we got it all drawed back, abnormal.
+
+"I was 'most all the afternoon in the City, an' it was pretty warm--a
+hot April followin' on a raw March. I stood waitin' for the six o'clock
+car an', my grief, I was tired. My feet ached like night in preservin'
+time. An' I was thinkin' how like a dunce we are to live a life made up
+mostly of urrants an' feetache followin'. _Yet_, after all, the right
+sort o' urrants an' like that _is_ life--an', if they do ache, 'tain't
+like your feet was your soul. Well, an' just before the car come, up
+arrove the girl.
+
+"I guess she was towards thirty, but she seemed even older, 'count o'
+bein' large an' middlin' knowin'. First I see her was a check gingham
+sleeve reachin' out an' she was elbowed up clost by me. 'Say,' she says,
+'couldn't you gimme a nickel? I'm starved hollow.' She didn't look it
+special--excep' as thin, homely folks always looks sort o' hungry. An'
+she was homely--kind o' coarse made, more like a shed than a dwellin'
+house. Her dress an' little flappy cape hed the looks o' bein' held on
+by her shoulders alone, an' her hands was midnight dirty.
+
+"I was feelin' just tired enough to snap her up.
+
+"'A nickel!' s'I, crisp, 'give you a nickel! An' what you willin' to
+give me?'
+
+"She looked sort o' surprised an' foolish an' her mouth open.
+
+"'Huh?' s'she, intelligent as the back o' somethin'.
+
+"'You,' I says, 'are some bigger an' some stronger'n me. What you goin'
+to give me?'
+
+"Well, sir, the way she dropped her arms down sort o' hit at me, it was
+so kitten helpless. I took that in rather than her silly, sort o'
+insultin' laugh.
+
+"'I can't do nothin',' she told me--an' all to once I saw how it was,
+an' that that was what ailed her. I didn't stop to think no more'n as if
+I didn't hev a brain to my name. 'Well,' I says, 'I'll give you a
+nickel. Leastways, I'll spend one on you. You take this car,' I says,
+'an' come on over to Friendship with me. An' we'll see.'
+
+"She come without a word, like goin' or stayin' was all of a piece to
+her, an' her relations all dead. When I got her on the car I begun to
+see what a fool thing I'd done, seemin'ly. An' yet, I donno. I wouldn't
+'a' left a month-old baby there on the corner. I'd 'a' _bed_ to 'a' done
+for that, like you do--I s'pose to keep the world goin'. An' that woman
+was just as helpless as a month-old. Some are. I s'pose likely,"
+Calliope said thoughtfully, "we got more door-steps than we think, if we
+get 'em all located.
+
+"When we got to my house I pumped her a pitcher o' water an' pointed to
+the back bedroom door. 'First thing,' s'I, blunt, 'clean up'--bein' as I
+was too tired to be very delicate. 'An',' s'I, 'you'll see a clean
+wrapper in the closet. Put it on.' Then I went to spread
+supper--warmed-up potatoes an' bread an' butter an' pickles an' sauce
+an' some cocoanut layer cake. It looked rill good, with the linen clean,
+though common.
+
+"I donno how I done it, excep' I was so ramfeezled. But I clear forgot
+Jennie Crapwell's shroud, layin' ready on the back bedroom bed. An'
+land, land, when the woman come out, if she didn't hev it on.
+
+"I tell you, when I see her come walkin' out towards the supper table
+with them fresh-ironed ruffles framin' in her face, I felt sort o'
+kitterin'-headed--like my i-dees had fell over each other to get away
+from me. The shroud fit her pretty good, too, barrin' it was a mite
+long-skirted. An' somehow, it give her a look almost like dignity. Come
+to think of it, I donno but a shroud does become most folks--like they
+was rilly well-dressed at last.
+
+"She come an' set down to table, quiet as you please--an' differ'nt.
+Your clothes don't make you, by any means, but they just do sort o' hem
+your edges, or rhyme the ends of you, or give a nice, even bake to your
+crust--I donno. They do somethin'. An' the shroud hed done it to that
+girl. She looked rill leaved out.
+
+"How she did eat. It give me some excuse not to say anything to her till
+she was through with the first violence. I did try to say grace, but she
+says: 'Who you speakin' to? Me?' An' I didn't let on. I thought I
+wouldn't start in on her moral manners. I just set still an' kep'
+thinkin': You poor thing. Why, you poor thing. You're nothin' but a
+piece o' God's work that wants doin' over--like a back yard or a poor
+piece o' road or a rubbish place, or sim'lar. An' this tidyin' up is
+what we're for, as I see it--only some of us lays a-holt of our own
+settin' rooms an' butt'ry cupboards an' sullars an' cleans away on
+_them_ for dear life, over an' over, an' forgets the rest. I ain't
+objectin' to good housekeepin' at all, but what I say is: Get your
+dust-rag big enough to wipe up somethin' besides your own dust. The
+Lord, He's a-housekeepin' too.
+
+"So, with that i-dee, I got above the shroud an' I begun on the woman
+some like she was my kitchen closet in the spring o' the year.
+
+"'What's your name?' s'I.
+
+"''Leven,' s'she.
+
+"'Leaven,' s'I, 'like the Bible?'
+
+"'Huh?' s'she.
+
+"'Why--oh, _'leven'_,' s'I, 'that ain't a name at all. That's a number.'
+
+"'I know it,' s'she, indiffer'nt, 'that was me. I was the 'leventh, an'
+they'd run out a'ready.'
+
+"'For the land,' s'I, simple.
+
+"An' that just about summed her up. They seemed to 'a' run out o'
+everything, time she come.
+
+"She hadn't been taught a thing but eat an' drink. Them was her only
+arts. Excep' for one thing: When I ask' her what she could do, if any,
+she says like she had on the street corner:--
+
+"'I can't do nothin'. I donno no work.'
+
+"'You think it over,' s'I. She had rill capable hands--them odd,
+undressed-lookin' hands--I donno if you know what I mean?
+
+"'Well,' s'she, sort o' sheepish, 'I can comb hair. Ma was allus sick
+an' me an' Big Lil--she's the same floor--combed her hair for her. But I
+could do it nicest.'
+
+"Wan't that a curious happenin'--an' Jennie Crapwell layin' dead with
+her hair drawn tight back because none of us could do it up human?
+
+"'Could you when dead?' s'I. 'I mean when them that has the hair is?'
+
+"An' with that the girl turns pallor white.
+
+"'Oh ...' s'she, 'I ain't never touched the dead. But,' s'she, sort o'
+defiant at somethin', 'I could do it, I guess, if you want I should.'
+
+"Kind o' like a handle stickin' out from what would 'a' been her
+character, if she'd hed one, that was, I thought. An', too, I see what
+it'd mean to her if she knew she was wearin' a shroud, casual as calico.
+
+"But when I told her about Jennie Crapwell, an' how they had a good
+picture, City-made, of her side head, she took it quite calm.
+
+"'I'll try it,' she says, bein' as she'd done her ma's hair layin' down,
+though livin'. 'Big Lil always helps dress 'Em,' she says, 'an' guess I
+could do Their hair.'
+
+"I got right up from the supper table an' took 'Leven over to Crapwell's
+without waitin' for the dishes. But early as I was, the rest was there
+before me. I guess they was full ten to Crapwell's when we got there,
+an' 'Leven an' I, we walked into the sittin'-room right in the midst of
+'em--that is, of what wasn't clearin' table or doin' dishes or sweepin'
+upstairs. Mis' Timothy Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss was
+the group nearest the door--an' the both of 'em reco'nized that shroud
+the minute they clamped their eyes on it. But me, bein' back o' 'Leven,
+I laid my front finger on to my shut lips with a motion that must 'a'
+been armies with banners. An' they see me an' kep' still, sudden an' all
+pent up.
+
+"'This,' s'I, 'is a friend o' mine. She's goin' to do up Jennie's hair
+from her City photograph.'
+
+"Then I hustled 'Leven into the parlour where Jennie was layin' under
+the soft lavender cloth. Nobody was in there but a few flowers, sent
+early. An' it was a west window an' open, an' the sky all sunset--like
+the End. 'Leven hung back, but I took her by the hand an' we went an'
+looked down at Jennie in that nice, gentlin', after-supper light--'Leven
+in Jennie's shroud an' neither of 'em knew it.
+
+"An' all out o' the air somethin' says to me, Now--_now_--like it will
+when you get so's you listen. I always think it's like the Lord had
+pressed His bell somewheres for help in His housekeepin'--oh, because
+_how_ He needs it!
+
+"So I says, ''Leven, you never see anybody dead before. What's the
+differ'nce between her an' you?'
+
+"'She can't move,' 'Leven says, starin' down.
+
+"'Yes, sir,' s'I, 'that's it. She's through doin' the things she was
+born to do, an' you ain't.'
+
+"With that 'Leven looks at me.
+
+"'I _can't_ do nothin',' she says again.
+
+"'Why, then,' says I, brisk, 'you're as good as dead, an' we'd best bury
+you, too. What do you think the Lord wants you 'round for?'
+
+"An' she didn't say nothin', only stood fingerin' the shroud she wore.
+
+"'Here,' s'I, then, 'is the comb. Here is Jennie's picture. The pins is
+in her hair. Take it down an' do it over. _There's_ somethin' to do an'
+ease her mother about Jennie not lookin' natural.'
+
+"An' with that I marched myself out an' shut the door.
+
+"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb was high-eyebrows on the other side of
+it, an' they come at me like _tick_ lookin' for _tock_.
+
+"'Well,' s'I, 'it _is_ Jennie's shroud she's wearin'. But I guess we'll
+hev to bury 'Leven in it to get it underground. _I_ won't tell her.'
+
+"I give 'em to understand as much as I wanted they should know,--not
+includin' exactly how I met 'Leven. An' we consulted, vague an'
+emphatic, like women will. There wasn't time to make another one an' do
+it up an' all. An' anyway, I was bound not to let the poor thing know
+what she'd done. The others hated to, too--I donno if you'll know how we
+felt? I donno but mebbe you sense things like that better when you live
+in a little town.
+
+"'Well said!' Mis' Amanda bursts out after a while, 'I'm reg'lar put to
+it. I can scare up an excuse, or a meal, or a church entertainment on as
+short notice as any, but I declare if I ever trumped up a shroud. An'
+you know an' I know,' she says, 'poor Jennie'd be the livin' last to
+want to take it off'n the poor girl.'
+
+"'An',' s'I, 'even if I should give her somethin' else to put on in the
+mornin', an' sly this into the coffin on Jennie, I donno's I'd want to.
+The shroud,' s'I, ''s been wore.'
+
+"Mis' Holcomb sort o' kippered--some like a shiver.
+
+"'I donno what it is about its bein' wore first,' s'she, 'but I guess it
+ain't so much what it is as what it ain't. Or sim'lar.'
+
+"An' I knew what she meant. I've noticed that, often.
+
+"In the end we done what I'd favoured from the beginnin': We ask' Mis'
+Crapwell if we couldn't bury Jennie in her white mull.
+
+"'A _shroud_,' says Mis' Crapwell, grievin', 'made by a dressmaker with
+buttons?'
+
+"'It's the part o' Jennie that wore it before that'll wear it now,' I
+says, reasonable, 'an' her soul never was buttoned into it anyways. An'
+it won't be now.'
+
+"An' after a while we made her see it, an' that was the first regular
+dress ever wore to a buryin' in Friendship, by the one that was the one.
+
+"I'll never forget when 'Leven come out o' that room, after she'd got
+through. We all went in--Mis' Crapwell an' Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb
+an' I, an' some more. An' I took 'Leven back in with me. An' as soon as
+I see Jennie I see it was Jennie come back--hair just as natural as if
+it was church Sunday mornin' an' her in her pew. We all knew it was so,
+an' we all said so, an' Mis' Crapwell, she just out cryin' like she'd
+broke her heart. An' when the first of it was over, she went acrost to
+'Leven, an' 'Oh,' s'she, 'you've give her back to me. You give her back.
+God bless you!' she says to her. An' when I looked at 'Leven, I see the
+'Huh?' look wasn't there at all. But they was a little somethin' on her
+face like she was proud, an' didn't quite want to show it--along of her
+features or complexion or somethin' never havin' had it spread on 'em
+before.
+
+"Nex' mornin' o' course 'Leven put on the shroud again. I must say it
+give me the creeps to see her wearin' it, even if it did look like
+everybody's dresses. I donno what it is about such things, but they make
+somethin' scrunch inside o' you. Like when they got a new babtismal dish
+for the church, an' the minister's sister took the old one for a cake
+dish.
+
+"S'I, to 'Leven, after breakfast:--
+
+"We're goin' to line Jennie's grave this mornin'. I guess you'd like to
+go with us, wouldn't you?'
+
+But I see her face with the old look, like the back o' somethin', or
+like you'd rubbed down the page when the ink was wet, an' had blurred
+the whole thing unreadable. An' I judged that, like enough, she knew
+nothin' whatever about grave-linin', done civilized.
+
+"'I mean, I thought mebbe you'd like to help us some,' I says.
+
+"'I would!' s'she, at that, rill ready an' quick. An' it come to me 't
+she knew now what _help_ meant. She'd learnt it the night before from
+Jennie's mother--like she'd learnt to answer a bell when Somebody
+pressed it. Only, o' course she never guessed Who it was ringin'
+it--like you don't at first.
+
+"So I made up my mind I'd take her to the cemet'ry. We done the work up
+first, an' 'Leven spried 'round for me, wipin' the dishes with the
+wipin' cloth in a bunch, an' settin' 'em up wrong places. An' I did hev
+to go in the butt'ry an' laugh to see her sweep up. She swep' up some
+like her broom was a branch an' the wind a-switchin' it.
+
+"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb stopped by for us, with the white cotton
+cloth an' the tacks, an' by nine o'clock we was over to the cemet'ry.
+The grave was all dug an' lined with nice pine boards, an' the dirt
+piled 'longside, an' the boards for coverin' an' the spades layin' near.
+Zittelhof was just leavin', havin' got in his pulley things to lower
+'em. Zittelhof's rill up to date. Him an' Mink, the barber, keep runnin'
+each other to see who can get the most citified things. No sooner'd
+Zittelhof get his pulleys than Mink, he put in shower-baths. An' when
+Mink bought a buzz fan, Zittelhof sent for the lavender cloth to spread
+over 'em before the coffin comes. It makes it rill nice for Friendship.
+
+"'Who's goin to get down in?' says Mis' Toplady, shakin' out the cloth.
+
+Mis' Toplady always use' to be the one, but she can't do that any more
+since she got so heavy. An' Mis' Holcomb's rheumatism was bad that day
+an' the grave middlin' damp, so it was for me to do. An' all of a sudden
+I says:--
+
+"''Leven, you just get down in there, will you? An' we'll tell you how.'
+
+"'_In the grave?_' says 'Leven.
+
+"I guess I'm some firm-mannered, just by takin' things for granted, an'
+I says, noddin':--
+
+"'Yes. You're the lightest on your feet,' I says--an' I sort o' shoved
+at her, bird to young, an' she jumped down in, not bein' able to help
+it.
+
+"'Here,' s'I, flingin' her an end o' cloth, 'tack it 'round smooth to
+them boards.'
+
+"'Mother o' God,' says she, swallowin' in her breath.
+
+"But she done it. She knelt down there in the grave, her poor, frowzy
+head showin,' an' she tacked away like we told her to, an' she never
+said another word. Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb didn't say nothin',
+either, only looked at me mother-knowin'. Them two--Mis' Toplady more'n
+anybody in Friendship, acts like bein' useful is bein' alive an' nothin'
+else is. They see what I was doin', well enough--only I donno's they'd
+'a' called it what I did, 'bout the Lord's housekeepin' an all. An' I
+knew I couldn't gentle 'Leven into the _i_-dee, but I judged I could
+shock it into her--same as her an' the Big Lil kind have to hev. Some
+folks you hev to shoot _i_-dees at, muzzle to brain.
+
+"I donno if you've took it in that when you're in a grave, or 'round
+one, your talk sort o' veers that way? Ours did. Mis' Banker Mason's
+baby had just died in March, an' the choir'd made an awful scandal,
+breakin' down in the fifth verse of 'One poor flower has drooped and
+faded.' They'd stood 'em in a half circle where they could look right
+down on the little thing. An' when the choir got to
+
+    "But we feel no thought of sadness
+    For our friend is happy now,
+    She has knelt in heartfelt gladness
+    Where the holy angels bow,
+
+they just naturally broke down an' cried, every one of 'em. An' then the
+little coffin was some to blame, too--it was sort of a little Lord
+Fauntleroy coffin, with a broad white puff around, an' most anybody
+would a' cried when they looked in it, even empty. But Doctor June, he
+just stood up calm, like his soul was his body, an' he begun to pray
+like God was there in the parlour, Him feelin' as bad as we, an' not
+doin' the child's death Himself at all, like we'd been taught--but
+sorrowin' with us, for some o' His housekeepin' gone wrong. An' by the
+time Banker an' Mis' Mason got in the close' carriage an' took the
+little thing's casket on their knees--you know we do that here, not
+havin' any white hearse--why, we was all feelin' like God Almighty was
+hand in hand in sorrow with us. An' it's never left me since. I know He
+is.
+
+"We talked that over while 'Leven tacked the evergreen on the white
+cloth. An' I know Mis' Toplady says she'd stayed with Mis' Banker Mason
+so much since then that she felt God had sort o' singled her--Mis'
+Toplady--out, to give her a chanst to do His work o' comfortin'. 'I've
+just let my house go,' s'she, 'an' I've got the grace to see it don't
+matter if I have.' Mis' Toplady ain't one o' them turtle women that
+their houses is shells on 'em, burden to back. She's more the bird
+kind--neat little nest under, an' wings to be used every day, somewheres
+in the blue.
+
+"So 'Leven done all Jennie Crapwell's grave. She must 'a been down in it
+an hour. An' when she got through, an' looked up at us from down in the
+green, an' wearin' Jennie's shroud an' all, I just put out my hands, to
+help her up, an' I thought, almost like prayin': 'Oh, raise up, you
+Dead, an' come forth--come forth.' Sort o' like Lazarus. An' I know I
+wasn't sacrilegious from what happened; for when Mis' Toplady an' Miss
+Holcomb come up to 'Leven an' says, rill warm, how well she'd done it
+an' how much obliged they was, I see that little look on the girl's face
+again like--oh, like she'd wrote somethin' on the blurry page, somethin'
+you could read.
+
+"Jennie was buried that afternoon at sharp three. It was a sad funeral,
+'count o' Jennie's trouble, an' all. But it was a rill big funeral an'
+nicely conducted, if I do say that done the managin'. Mis' Postmaster
+Sykes seated the guests--ain't she the kind that always seems to be one
+to stand in the hall at funerals with her hat off, to consult about
+chairs an' where shall the minister lay his Bible, an' who'd ought to be
+invited to set next the bier? An' she always takes charge o' the
+flowers. Mis' Sykes can tell you who sent what flowers to who for years
+back, an the wordin' on the pillows. She's got a rill gift that way. But
+I done the managin' behind the scenes, an' it went off rill well, an' I
+got the minister to drop a flower on Jennie's coffin instead of a pinch
+o' dirt. An' one chair I did see to: right in the bay, near Jennie, I
+set 'Leven--I guess with just a kind of a blind feelin' that I wanted to
+get her _near_. Near the flowers or the singin' or what the minister
+said or,--oh, near the mystery an' God speakin' from the dead, like He
+does. Anyway, I shoved her into the bay window back o' the casket, an'
+there I left her in behind a looped-back Nottingham--settin' in Jennie's
+shroud an' didn't either of 'em know it.
+
+"It was a queer chapter for Doctor June to read, some said--but I guess
+holy things often is queer, only we're better cut out to see queer than
+holy. Anyway, his voice went all mellow and gentle, boomin' out soft an'
+in his throat, all over the house. It was that about ..." Calliope
+quoted piecemeal:--
+
+"'Awake, awake, put on thy strength ... put on thy beautiful garments, O
+Jerusalem, the holy city ... shake thyself from the dust, arise and sit
+down ... loose thyself from the bonds of thy neck, O captive daughter of
+Zion ... how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that
+bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace, that bringeth good tidings
+of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion: Thy God
+reigneth! Break forth into joy, sing together ... depart ye, depart ye,
+go ye out from thence, touch no unclean thing ... be ye clean, that bear
+the vessels of the Lord....'
+
+"Sometimes a thing you've heard always will come at you sudden, like a
+star had fell on your very head. It was that way with me that day. 'Put
+on thy beautiful garments ...' I says over, 'Put 'em on--put 'em on!'
+An' all the while I was seein' to the supper for the crowd that was
+goin' to be there--train relations an' all--I kep' thinkin' that over
+like a song--'Put 'em on--put 'em on--put 'em on!' An' it was in me yet,
+like a song had come to life there, when they'd all gone to the
+cemetery--'Leven with 'em--an' I'd got through straightenin' the
+chairs--or rather crookedin' 'em some into loops from funeral lines--an'
+slipped over to my house, back way. For I ain't sunk so low as to be
+that sympathetic that I'll stay to supper after the funeral just because
+I've helped at it. There's a time to mourn an' there's a time to eat,
+an' you better do one with the bereaved an' slip home to your own
+butt'ry shelf for the other, _I_ say.
+
+"I was just goin' through the side yard to my house when I see 'em
+comin' back from the cemetery, an' I waited a little, lookin' to see
+what was sproutin' in the flower-bed. It was a beautiful, beautiful
+evenin'--when I think of it it seems I can breathe it in yet. It was
+'most sunset, an' it was like the West was a big, blue bowl with eggs
+beat up in it, yolks an' whites, some gold an' some feathery. But the
+bowl wa'n't big enough, an' it had spilled over an' flooded the whole
+world yellowish, or all floatin' shinin' in the air. It was like the
+world had done the way the Bible said--put on its beautiful garments. I
+was thinkin' that when 'Leven come in the front gate. She was walkin'
+fast, an' lookin' up, not down. Her cheeks was some pink, an' the light
+made the shroud all pinkey, an' she looked rill nice. An' I marched
+straight up to her, feelin' like I was swimmin' in that lovely light:--
+
+"''Leven,' I says, ''Leven--it's like the whole world was made over
+to-night, ain't it?'
+
+"'Yes,' says she--an' not 'Huh?' at all.
+
+"'Seems like another world than when we met on the street corner, don't
+it?' I says.
+
+"'Yes,' she says again, noddin'--an' I thought how she'd stood there on
+the sidewalk, hungry an' her hands all black, an' believin' she couldn't
+do anything at all. An' it seemed like I hed sort o' scrabbled her up
+an' held her over a precipice, an' said to her: 'See the dead. Look at
+yourself. Come forth--come forth! Clean up--do somethin' to help,
+anything, if it's only tackin' on evergreens an' doin' the Dead's hair
+up becomin'--' oh, I s'pose, rilly, I was sayin' to her: 'Put on thy
+beautiful garments. Awake. Put on thy strength.' Only it come out some
+differ'nt from me than it come from Isaiah.
+
+"I took a-hold of her hand--quite clean by the second day's washin',
+though I ain't much given to the same (_not_ meanin' second day's
+washin's). I didn't know quite what I was goin' to say, but just then I
+looked up Daphne Street, an' I see 'em all sprinkled along comin' from
+the funeral--neighbours an' friends an' just folks--an' most of 'em
+livin' in Friendship peaceful an'--barrin' slopovers--doin' the level
+best they could. Not all of 'em hearin' the Bell, you understand, nor
+knowin' it by name if they did hear. But in little ways, an' because it
+was secunt nature, just helpin', helpin', helpin' ... Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, Liddy Ember, Abagail Arnold an' her
+husband, that was alive then, hurryin' to open the home bakery to catch
+the funeral trade on the funeral's way back, Amanda an' Timothy Toplady
+rattlin' by in the wagon an' 'most likely scrappin' over the new
+springs ... an' all of 'em salt good at heart.
+
+"''Leven,' I says, out o' the fulness o' the lump in my throat, 'stay
+here with us. Find somethin' honest you can do, an' stay here an' do it.
+Mebbe,' I told her, 'you could start dressin' the Dead's hair. An'
+_help_ us,' I says, 'help us.'
+
+"She looked up in my eyes quick, an' my heart stood still. An' then it
+sunk down an' down.
+
+"'I want to go back ...' she says, 'I want to go back ...' but I'm glad
+to remember that even for a minute I didn't doubt God's position,
+because I remember thinkin' swift that if Him an' I had failed it wasn't
+for no inscrutable reason o' His, but He was feelin' just as bad over it
+as I was, an' worse.... 'I want to go back,' 'Leven finished up, 'an'
+get Big Lil, too.'
+
+"Oh, an' I tell you the song in me just crowded the rest o' me out of
+existence. I felt like a psalm o' David, bein' sung. I hadn't dreamed
+she'd be like that--I hadn't dreamed it. Why, some folks, Christian an'
+in a pew, never come to the part o' their lives where they want to go
+back an' get a Big Lil, too.
+
+"We stood there a little while, an' I talked to her some, though I
+declare I couldn't tell you what I said. You can't--when the psalm
+feelin' comes. But we stood out there sort o' occupyin' April, till
+after the big blue bowl o' feathery eggs had been popped in the big
+black oven, an' it was rill dark.
+
+"I forgot all about the shroud till we stepped in the house an' lit up,
+an' I see it. An' then it was like the song in me gettin' words, an' it
+come to me what it all was: How it rilly hadn't been Jennie's funeral so
+much as it had been 'Leven's--the 'Leven that was. But I didn't tell
+her--I never told her. An' she wore that shroud for most two years,
+mornin's, about her work."
+
+Calliope smiled a little, with her way of coming back to the moment from
+the four great horizons.
+
+"Land," she said, "sometimes I think I'll make some shrouds an' starch
+'em up rill good, an' take 'em to the City an' offer to folks. An' say:
+Here. Die--die. You've got to, some part o' you, before you can awake
+an' put on your beautiful garments an' your strength. I told you, you
+know," she added, "I guess sometimes I kind o' believe in craziness!"
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+IN THE WILDERNESS A CEDAR
+
+
+In answer to my summons Liddy Ember appeared before me one morning and
+outspread a Vienna book of coloured fashion-plates.
+
+"Dressmakin' 'd be a real drudgery for me," she said, "if it wasn't for
+havin' the colour plates an' makin' what I can to look like 'em.
+Sometimes I get a collar or a cuff that seems almost like the picture.
+There's always somethin' in the way of a cedar," she added blithely.
+
+"A cedar?" I repeated.
+
+She nodded, her plain face lighting. "That's what Calliope use' to call
+'em," she explained; "'I will plant in the wilderness the cedar,' you
+know--in the Bible." And I did recall the phrase on Calliope's lips, as
+if it were the theme of her.
+
+From this one and that one, and now and then from her herself, I had
+heard something of Calliope's love story. Indeed, all Friendship knew it
+and spoke of it with no possibility of gossip or speculation, but with a
+kind of genius for consideration. I did not know, however, that it was
+of this that Liddy meant to speak, for she began her story far afield,
+with some talk of Oldmoxon house, in which I lived, and of its former
+tenants.
+
+"Right here in this house is mixed up in it," she said; "I been thinkin'
+about it all the way up. Not very many have lived here in the Oldmoxon
+house, and the folks that lived here the year I mean come so quiet
+nobody knew it until they was here--an' that ain't easy to do in
+Friendship. First we knew they was in an' housekeepin'. Their accounts
+was in the name of a Mis' Morgan. We see her now an' then on the
+street--trim an' elderly an' no airs excep' she wouldn't open up a
+conversation an' she wouldn't return her calls. 'Most everybody called
+on her inside the two weeks, but the woman was never home an' she never
+paid any attention. She didn't seem to have no men folks, an' she
+settled her bills with checks, like she didn't have any ready money.
+Little by little we all dropped her, which she ought to of expected.
+Even when it got around that there was sickness in the house, nobody
+went near, we feelin' as if we knew as good as the best what dignity
+calls for.
+
+"But Calliope didn't feel the same about it. Calliope hardly ever felt
+the same about anything. That is, if it meant feelin' mean. She was a
+woman that worked, like me, but yet she was wonderful differ'nt. That
+was when we had our shop together in the house where we lived with the
+boy--I'll come to him in a minute or two. Besides lace-makin', Calliope
+had a piano an' taught in the fittin'-room--that was the same as the
+dinin'-room. Six scholars took. Sometimes I think it was her knowin'
+music that made her differ'nt.
+
+"We two was sittin' on our porch that night in the first dark. I know a
+full moon was up back o' the hollyhocks an' makin' its odd little
+shadows up an' down the yard, an' we could smell the savoury bed. 'Every
+time I breathe in, somethin' pleasant seems goin' on inside my head,' I
+rec'lect Calliope's sayin'. But most o' the time we was still an' set
+watchin' the house on the corner where the New People lived. They had a
+hard French name an' so we kep' on callin' 'em just the 'New People.' He
+was youngish an' she was younger an'--she wasn't goin' out anywheres
+that summer. She was settin' on the porch that night waitin' for him to
+come home. Before it got dark we'd noticed she had on a pretty white
+dress an' a flower or two. It seemed sort o' nice--_that_ bein' so, an'
+her waitin' there dressed so pretty. An' we sort o' set there waitin'
+for him, too--like you will, you know.
+
+"The boy was in the bed. He wa'n't no relation of Calliope's if you're
+as strict as some, but accordin' to my idea he was closer than
+that--closer than kin. He was the grandchild of the man Calliope had
+been goin' to marry forty-some years before, when she was twenty-odd.
+Calvert Oldmoxon he was--born an' bred up in this very house. He was
+quite well off an'--barrin' he was always heathen selfish--it was a
+splendid match for Calliope, but I never see a girl care so next to
+nothin' about that. She was sheer crazy about him, an' he seemed just as
+much so about her. An' then when everything was ready--Calliope's dress
+done an' layin' on their best-room bed, the minister stayin' home from
+conference to perform the ceremony, even the white cake made--off goes
+Calvert Oldmoxon with Martha Boughton, a little high-fly that had just
+moved to town. A new girl can marry anything she wants in Friendship if
+she does it quick. So Calliope had to put up from Martha Boughton with
+just what Jennie Crapwell had to take from Delia, more'n twenty-five
+years afterwards.
+
+"It was near thirty years before we see either of 'em again. Then, just
+a little before I'm tellin' you about, a strange woman come here to town
+one night with a little boy; an' she goes to the hotel, sick, an' sends
+for Calliope. An' when Calliope gets to the hotel the woman was about
+breathin' her last. An' it was Mis' Oldmoxon--Martha Boughton, if you
+please, an' dyin' on the trip she'd made to ask Calliope to forgive her
+for what she done.
+
+"An' Calliope forgive her, but I don't imagine Calliope was thinkin'
+much about her at the time. Hangin' round the bed was a little boy--the
+livin', breathin' image of Calvert Oldmoxon himself. Calliope was
+mad-daft over children anyway, though she was always kind o' shy o'
+showin' it, like a good many women are that ain't married. I've seen her
+pick one up an' gentle it close to her, but let anybody besides me come
+in the room an' see her an' she'd turn a regular guilt-red. Calliope
+never was one to let on. But I s'pose seein' that little boy there at
+the hotel look so much like _him_ was kind o' unbalancin'. So what does
+she do when Mis' Oldmoxon was cryin' about forgiveness but up an' ask
+her what was goin' to be done with the boy after she was dead. Calliope
+would be one to bring the word 'dead' right out, too, an' let the room
+ring with it--though that ain't the custom in society. Now'days they lie
+everybody 'way into the grave, givin' 'em to understand that their
+recovery is certain, till there must be a lots o' dumfounded dead, shot
+into the next world--you might say unbeknownst. But Calliope wasn't
+mincin' matters. An' when it come out that the dyin' woman hadn't seen
+Calvert Oldmoxon for thirty years an' didn't know where he was, an' that
+the child was an orphan an' would go to collateral kin or some such
+folks, Calliope plumps out to her to give her the child. The forgiveness
+Calliope sort o' took for granted--like you will as you get older. An'
+Mis' Oldmoxon seemed real willin' she should have him. So when Calliope
+come home from the funeral--she'd rode alone with the little boy for
+mourners--she just went to work an' lived for that child.
+
+"'"In the wilderness the cedar," Liddy,' she says to me. 'More than one
+of 'em. I've had 'em right along. My music scholars an' my lace-makin'
+customers an' all. An', Liddy,' she says to me sort o' shy, 'ain't you
+noticed,' she says, 'how many neighbours we've had move in an out that's
+had children? So many o' the little things right around us! Seems like
+they'd almost been born to me when they come acrost the street, so. An'
+I've always thought o' that--"In the wilderness the cedar"' she says,
+'an' they's always somethin' to be a cedar for me, seems though.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, sort o' sceptical, 'mebbe that's because you always
+plant 'em,' I says. 'I think it means that, too,' I told her. An' I knew
+well enough Calliope was one to plant her cedars herself. Cedars o'
+comfort, you know.
+
+"I've seen a good many kinds o' mother-love--you do when you go round to
+houses like I do. But I never see anything like Calliope. Seems though
+she breathed that child for air. She always was one to pretend to
+herself, an' I knew well enough she'd figured it out as if this was
+_their_ child that might 'a' been, long ago. She sort o' played
+mother--like you will; an' she lived her play. He was a real sweet
+little fellow, too. He was one o' them big-eyed kind that don't laugh
+easy, an' he was well-spoken, an' wonderful self-settled for a child o'
+seven. He was always findin' time for you when you thought he was doin'
+somethin' else--slidin' up to you an' puttin' up his hand in yours when
+you thought he was playin' or asleep. An' that was what he done that
+night when we set on the porch--comes slippin' out of his little bed an'
+sets down between us on the top step, in his little night-things.
+
+"'Calvert, honey,' Calliope says, 'you must run back an' play dreams.
+Mother wants you to.'
+
+"She'd taught him to call her mother--she'd had him about six months
+then--an' some thought that was queer to do, seein' Calliope was her age
+an' all. But I thought it was wonderful right.
+
+"'I did play,' he says to her--he had a nice little way o' pressin' down
+hard with his voice on one word an' lettin' the next run off his
+tongue--'I did play dreams,' I rec'lect he says; 'I dreamed 'bout
+robbers. Ain't robbers _distinct_?' he says.
+
+"I didn't know what he meant till Calliope laughs an' says, 'Oh,
+distinctly extinct!' I remembered it by the way the words kind o'
+crackled.
+
+"By then he was lookin' up to the stars--his little mind always lit here
+an' there, like a grasshopper.
+
+"'How can heaven begin,' he says, 'till everybody gets there?'
+
+"Yes, he was a dear little chap. I like to think about him. An' I know
+when he says that, Calliope just put her arms around him, an' her head
+down, an' set sort o' rockin' back an' forth. An' she says:--
+
+"'Oh, but I think it begins when we don't know.'
+
+"After a while she took him back to bed, little round face lookin' over
+her shoulder an' big, wide-apart, lonesome eyes an' little sort o'
+crooked frown, for all the world like the other Calvert Oldmoxon. Just
+as she come out an' set down again, we heard the click o' the gate
+acrost at the corner house where the New People lived, an' it was the
+New Husband got home. We see his wife's white dress get up to meet him,
+an' they went in the house together, an' we see 'em standin' by the
+lamp, lookin' at things. Seems though the whole night was sort
+o'--gentle.
+
+"All of a sudden Calliope unties her apron.
+
+"'Let's dress up,' she says.
+
+"'Dress up!' I says, laughin' some. 'Why, it must be goin' on half-past
+eight,' I told her.
+
+"'I don't care if it is,' she says; 'I'm goin' to dress up. It seems as
+though I must.'
+
+"She went inside, an' I followed her. Calliope an' I hadn't no men folks
+to dress for, but, bein' dressmakers an' lace folks, we had good things
+to wear. She put on the best thin dress she had--a gray book-muslin; an'
+I took down a black lawn o' mine. It was such a beautiful night that I
+'most knew what she meant. Sometimes you can't do much but fit yourself
+in the scenery. But I always thought Calliope fit in no matter what she
+had on. She was so little an' rosy, an' she always kep' her head up like
+she was singin'.
+
+"'Now what?' I says. For when you dress up, you can't set home. An' then
+she says slow--an' you could 'a' knocked me over while I listened:--
+
+"'I've been thinkin',' she says, 'that we ought to go up to Oldmoxon
+house an see that sick person.'
+
+"'Calliope!' I says, 'for the land. You don't want to be refused in!'
+
+"'I don't know as I do an' I don't know but I do,' she answers me. 'I
+feel like I wanted to be doin' somethin'.'
+
+"With that she out in the kitchen an' begins to fill a basket.
+Calliope's music didn't prevent her cookin' good, as it does some. She
+put in I don't know what all good, an' she had me pick some hollyhocks
+to take along. An' before I knew it, I was out on Daphne Street in the
+moonlight headin' for Oldmoxon house here that no foot in Friendship had
+stepped or set inside of in 'most six months.
+
+"'They won't let us in,' I says, pos'tive.
+
+"'Well,' Calliope says, 'seems though I'd like to walk up there a night
+like this, anyway.'
+
+"An' I wasn't the one to stop her, bein' I sort o' guessed that what
+started her off was the New People. Those two livin' so near by--lookin'
+forward to what they was lookin' forward to--so soon after the boy had
+come to Calliope, an' all, had took hold of her terrible. She'd spent
+hours handmakin' the little baby-bonnet she was goin' to give 'em. An'
+then mebbe it was the night some, too, that made her want to come up
+around this house--because you could 'most 'a' cut the moonlight with a
+knife.
+
+"They wa'n't any light in the big hall here when we rung the bell, but
+they lit up an' let us in. Yes, they actually let us in. Mis' Morgan
+come to the door herself.
+
+"'Come right in,' she says, cordial. 'Come right upstairs.'
+
+"Calliope says somethin' about our bein' glad they could see us.
+
+"'Oh,' says Mis' Morgan, 'I had orders quite a while ago to let in
+whoever asked. An' you're the first,' she says. 'You're the first.'
+
+"An' then it come to us that this Mis' Morgan we'd all been tryin' to
+call on was only what you might name the housekeeper. An' so it turned
+out she was.
+
+"The whole upper hall was dark, like puttin' a black skirt on over your
+head. But the room we went in was cheerful, with a fire burnin' up. Only
+it was awful littered up--old newspapers layin' round, used glasses
+settin' here an' there, water-pitcher empty, an' the lamp-chimney was
+smoked up, even. The woman said somethin' about us an' went out an' left
+us with somebody settin' in a big chair by the fire, sick an' wrapped
+up. An' when we looked over there, Calliope an' I stopped still. It was
+a man.
+
+"If it'd been me, I'd 'a' turned round an' got out. But Calliope was as
+brave as two, an' she spoke up.
+
+"'This must be the invalid,' she says, cheerful. 'We hope we see you at
+the best.'
+
+"The man stirs some an' looks over at us kind o' eager--he was oldish,
+an' the firelight bein' in his eyes, he couldn't see us.
+
+"'It isn't anybody to see me, is it?' he asks.
+
+"At that Calliope steps forward--I remember how she looked in her pretty
+gray dress with some light thing over her head, an' her starched white
+skirts was rustlin' along under, soundin' so genteel she seemed to me
+like strangers do. When he see her, the man made to get up, but he was
+too weak for it.
+
+"'Why, yes,' she answers him, 'if you're well enough to see anybody.'
+
+"An' at that the man put his hands on his knees an' leaned sort o'
+hunchin' forward.
+
+"'Calliope!' he says.
+
+"It was him, sure enough--Calvert Oldmoxon. Same big, wide-apart,
+lonesome eyes an' kind o' crooked frown. His hair was gray, an' so was
+his pointed beard, an' he was crool thin. But I'd 'a' known him
+anywheres.
+
+"Calliope, she just stood still. But when he reached out his hand, his
+lips parted some like a child's an' his eyes lookin' up at her, she went
+an' stood near him, by the table, an' she set her basket there an'
+leaned down on the handle, like her strength was gone.
+
+"'I never knew it was you here,' she says. 'Nobody knows,' she told him.
+
+"'No,' he says, 'I've done my best they shouldn't know. Up till I got
+sick. Since then--I--wanted folks,' he says.
+
+"I kep' back by the door, an' I couldn't take my eyes off of him. He was
+older than Calliope, but he had a young air. Like you don't have when
+you stay in Friendship. An' he seemed to know how to be easy, sick as he
+was. An' that ain't like Friendship, either. He an' Calliope had growed
+opposite ways, seems though.
+
+"'I'll go now,' says Calliope, not lookin' at him. 'I brought up some
+things I baked. I didn't know but they'd taste good to whoever was sick
+here.'
+
+"With that he covers one hand over his eyes.
+
+"'No,' he says, 'no, no, Calliope--don't go yet. It's you I come here to
+Friendship to see,' he told her.
+
+"'What could you have to say to me?' asks Calliope--dry as a bone in her
+voice, but I see her eyes wasn't so dry. Leastwise, it may not have been
+her eyes, but it was her look.
+
+"Then he straightens up some. He was still good-lookin'. When you was
+with him it use' to be that you sort o' wanted to stay--an' it seemed
+the same way now. He was that kind.
+
+"'Don't you think,' he says to her--an' it was like he was humble, but
+it was like he was proud, too--'don't you think,' he says, 'that I ever
+dreamed you could forgive me. I knew better than that,' he told her.
+'It's what you must think o' me that's kep' me from sayin' to you what I
+come here to say. But I'll tell you now,' he says, 'I'm sick an' alone
+an' done for. An' what I come to see you about--is the boy.'
+
+"'The boy,' Calliope says over, not understandin'; 'the boy.'
+
+"'My God, yes,' says he. 'He's all I've got left in the world.
+Calliope--I need the boy. I need him!'
+
+"I rec'lect Calliope puttin' back that light thing from her head like it
+smothered her. He laid back in his chair for a minute, white an' still.
+An' then he says--only of course his words didn't sound the way mine
+do:--
+
+"'I robbed your life, Cally, an' I robbed my own. As soon as I knew it
+an' couldn't bear it any longer, I went away alone--an' I've lived alone
+all exceptin' since the little boy come. His mother, my son's wife,
+died; an' I all but brought him up. I loved him as I never loved
+anybody--but you,' he says, simple. 'But when his father died, of course
+I hadn't any claim on the little fellow, I felt, when I'd been away from
+the rest so long. _She_ took him with her. An' when I knew she'd left
+him here I couldn't have kep' away,' he says, 'I couldn't. He's all I've
+got left in the world. I all but brought him up. I must have him,
+Cally--don't you see I must have him?' he says.
+
+"Calliope looks down at him, wonderful calm an' still.
+
+"'You've had your own child,' she told him slow; 'you've had a real
+life. I'm just gettin' to mine--since I had the boy.'
+
+"'But, good God,' he says, starin' up at her, 'you're a woman. An' one
+child is the same as another to you, so be that it ain't your own.'
+
+"Calliope looked almost as if he had struck at her, though he'd only
+spoke a kind o' general male idea, an' he couldn't help _bein'_ a male.
+An' she says back at him:--
+
+"'But you're a man. An' bein' alive is one thing to you an' another
+thing to me. Never let any man forget that,' she says, like I never
+heard her speak before.
+
+"Then I see the tears shinin' on his face. He was terrible weak. He
+slips down in his chair an' sets starin' at the fire, his hands hangin'
+limp over the arms like there wasn't none of him left. His face looked
+tired to death, an' yet there was that somethin' about him like you
+didn't want to leave him. I see Calliope lookin' at him--an' all of a
+sudden it come to me that if I'd 'a' loved him as she use' to, I'd 'a'
+walked over there an' then, an' sort o' gentled his hair, no matter
+what.
+
+"But Calliope, she turned sharp away from him an' begun lookin' around
+the room, like she see it for the first time--smoky lamp-chimney, old
+newspapers layin' 'round, used-up glasses, an' such like. The room was
+one o' the kind when they ain't no women or children. An' then, when she
+see all that, pretty soon she looked back at him, layin' sick in his
+chair, alone an' done for, like he said. An' I see her take her arms in
+her hands an' kind o' rock.
+
+"'Ain't the little fellow a care to you, Cally?' he says then, wistful.
+
+"She went over towards him, an' I see her pick up his pillow an' smooth
+it some an' make to fix it better.
+
+"'Yes,' she says then, 'you're right. He is a care. An' he's your
+grandchild. You must take him with you just as soon as you're well
+enough,' she says.
+
+"He broke clear down then, an' he caught her hands an' laid his face on
+'em. She stood wonderful calm, lookin' down at him--an' lookin'. An' I
+laid the hollyhocks down on the rug or anywheres, an' somehow I got out
+o' the room an' down the stairs. An' I set there in the lower hall an'
+waited.
+
+"She come herself in a minute. The big outside door was standin' open,
+an' when I heard her step on the stairs I went on ahead out to the
+porch, feelin' kind o' strange--like you will. But when Calliope come up
+to me she was just the same as she always was, an' I might 'a' known she
+would be. She isn't easy to understand--she's differ'nt--but when you
+once get to expectin' folks to be differ'nt, you can depend on 'em some
+that way, too.
+
+"The moon was noon-high by then an' filterin' down through the leaves
+wonderful soft, an' things was still--I remember thinkin' it was like
+the hushin'-up before a bride comes in, but there wasn't any bride.
+
+"When we come to our house--just as we begun to smell the savoury bed
+clear out there on the walk--we heard something ... a little bit of a
+noise that I couldn't put a name to, first. But, bless you, Calliope
+could. She stopped short by the gate an' stood lookin' acrost the road
+to the corner house where the New People lived. It was late for
+Friendship, but upstairs in that house a lamp was burnin'. An' that room
+was where the little noise come from--a little new cry.
+
+"'Oh, Liddy,' Calliope says--her head up like she was singin'--'Oh,
+Liddy--the New People have got their little child.'
+
+"An' I see, though of course she didn't anywheres near realize it then,
+that she was plantin' herself another cedar."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+HERSELF
+
+
+After all, it was as if I had first been told about refraction and then
+had been shown a rainbow. For presently Calliope herself said something
+to me of her having been twenty. One would as lief have broken the
+reticence of a rainbow as that of Calliope, but rainbows are not always
+reticent. I have known them suggest infinite things.
+
+In June she spent a fortnight with me at Oldmoxon house, and I wanted
+never to let her go. Often our talk was as irrelevant to patency as are
+wings. That day I had been telling her some splendid inconsequent dream
+of mine. It had to do with an affair of a wheelbarrow of roses, which I
+was tying on my trees in the garden directly the original blossoms fell
+off.
+
+Calliope nodded in entire acceptance.
+
+"But that wasn't so queer as my dream," she said. "My dream about
+myself--I mean my rill, true regular self," she added, with a manner of
+testing me.
+
+I think that we all dream our real, true, regular selves, only we do not
+dream us until we come true. I said something of this to Calliope; and
+then she told me.
+
+"It was when I was twenty," she said, "an' it was a little while
+after--well, things wasn't so very happy for me. But first thing I must
+tell you about the picture. We didn't have so very many pictures. But in
+my room used to be an old steel engraving of a poet, a man walkin'
+'round under some kind o' trees in blossom. He had a beautiful face an'
+a look on it like he see heaven. I use' to look at the picture an' look
+at it, an' when I did, it seemed almost like I was off somewheres else.
+
+"Then one night I had my dream. I thought I was walkin' down a long
+road, green an' shady an' quite wide, an' fields around an' no folks. I
+know I was hurryin'--oh, I was in such a hurry to see somebody, seems
+though, somebody I was goin' to see when I got to the end o' the road.
+An' I was so happy--did you ever dream o' being happy, I mean if you
+wasn't so very happy in rill life? It puts you in mind o' havin' a pain
+in your side an' then gettin' in one big, deep breath when the pain
+don't hurt. In rill life I was lonesome, an' I hated Friendship an' I
+wanted to get away--to go to the City to take music, or go anywheres
+else. I never had any what you might call rill pleasure excep' walkin'
+in the Depot Woods. That was a gully grove beyond the railroad track,
+an' I use' to like to sit in there some, by myself. I wasn't ever rill
+happy, though, them days, but in the dream--oh, I was happy, like on a
+nice mornin', only more so."
+
+Calliope looked at me fleetingly, as if she were measuring my ability to
+understand.
+
+"The funny part of it was," she said, "that in the dream I wasn't _me_
+at all. Not me, as you know me. I thought somehow _I_ was that poet in
+my picture, the man in the steel engravin' with a look like he see
+heaven. An' it didn't seem strange to me, but just like it had always
+been so. I thought I rilly was that poet that I'd looked at in the
+picture all my life. But then I guess after all that part wasn't so
+funny as the rest of it. For down at the end o' the road somebody was
+waitin' for me under trees all in blossom, like the picture, too. It was
+a girl, standin' there. An' I thought I looked at her--I, the poet, you
+know--an' I see that the girl was me, Calliope Marsh, lookin' just like
+I looked every day, natural as anything. Like you see yourself in the
+glass.
+
+"I know I wasn't su'prised at all. We met like we was friends, both
+livin' here in the village, an' we walked down the road together like it
+had always been that way. An' we talked--like you do when you're with
+them you'd rather be with than anybody else. I thought we was goin'
+somewhere to see somebody, an' we talked about that:--
+
+"'Will They be home, do you think?' I says.
+
+"An' the girl that was me says: 'Oh, yes. They'll be home. They're
+always home,' she told me. An' we both felt pleased, like when you're
+sure.
+
+"An' then--oh," Calliope cried, "I wish I could remember what we said. I
+wish I could remember. I know it was something that seemed beautiful,
+an' the words come all soft. It was like bein' born again, somewheres
+else. An' we knew just exactly what each other meant, an' that was best
+of all."
+
+She hesitated, seeking to explain that to me.
+
+"When I was twenty," she said, "I use' to want to talk about things that
+wasn't commonly mentioned here in Friendship--I mean, well, like little
+things I'd read about noted people an' what they said an' done--an' like
+that. But when you brought 'em up in the conversation, folks always
+thought you was tryin' to show off. An' if you quoted a verse o' poetry
+in company, my land, there was a hush like you'd swore. So gradually I'd
+got to keepin' still about such things. But in that dream we talked an'
+talked--said things about old noted folks right out an' told about 'em
+without beginnin' it 'I happened to read the other day.' An' I know I
+mentioned the sun on the leaves an' the way the clouds looked, right
+out, too, without bein' afraid the girl that was me would think I was
+affected. An' I said little things about--oh, like about goblins in the
+wood an' figgers in the smoke, without bein' scared that mothers would
+hear of it an' not let their children come to see me. An' then I made up
+things an' said--things I was always wantin' to say--like about
+expectin' to meet Summer walkin' down the road, an' so on: things that
+if I'd said so's they'd got out around Friendship, folks would 'a'
+thought I was queer an' not to be trusted to bring up their mail from
+town. I said all those kind o' things, like I was really born to talk
+what I thought about. An' the girl that was me understood what I meant.
+An' we laughed a good deal--oh, how we laughed together. That was 'most
+the best of all.
+
+"Well, the dream dwindled off, like they will. An' when I woke up, I was
+nothin' but Calliope Marsh, livin' in Friendship where folks cut a loaf
+o' bread on a baker's headstone just because he _was_ a baker. Rill life
+didn't get any better, an' I was more an' more lonesome in Friendship.
+Somehow, nobody here in town rilly matched me. They all knew what I said
+well enough, but when I spoke to 'em about what was rill interestin' to
+me, seemed like their minds didn't _click_, with that good little
+feelin' o' rilly takin' it in. My _i_-dees didn't seem to fit, quite
+ball an' socket, into nobody's mind, but just to slide along over. And
+as to _their_ i-dees--I rec'lect thinkin' that the three R's meant to
+'em Relations, Recipes, an' the Remains. Yes, all I did have, you might
+say, was my walks out in the Depot Woods. An' times like when Elder
+Jacob Sykes--that was Silas's father--said in church that God come down
+to be Moses's undertaker, I run off there to the woods feelin' all sick
+an' skinned in soul, an' it sort o' seemed like the gully understood.
+An' still, you can't be friends when they's only one of you. It's like
+tryin' to hold a dust-pan an' sweep the dirt in at the same time. It
+can't be done--not thorough. An' so settin' out there I used to take a
+book an' hunt up nice little things an' learn different verses, in the
+hopes that if that dream _should_ come back, I could have 'em to
+tell--tell 'em, you know, to the girl that was me. Because it hed got so
+by then that it seemed to me I was actually more that poet than I was
+Calliope Marsh. An' so it went along till the day I met him--the man,
+the poet."
+
+"The man!" I said. "But do you mean _the_ man--the poet--the one that
+was you?"
+
+Calliope nodded confidently.
+
+"Yes," she said, in her delicate excitement, "I do. Oh, I'll tell you
+an' you'll see for yourself it must 'a' been him. It was one early
+afternoon towards the end o' summer, an' I knew him in a minute. I'd
+gone up to the depot to mail a postal on the Through, an' he got off the
+train an' went into the Telegraph Office. An' the train pulled out an'
+left him--it was down to the end o' the platform before he come out. He
+didn't act, though, as if the train's leavin' him was much of anything
+to notice. He just went up an' commenced talkin' to the baggageman,
+Bill. But Bill couldn't understand him--Bill was sort o' crusted over
+the mind--you had to say things over an' over again to him, an' even
+then he 'most always took it different from what you meant. So I suppose
+that was why the man left him an' come towards me.
+
+"When I looked up in his face I stood still on the platform. He was
+young. An' he had soft hair, an' his face was beautiful, like he see
+heaven. It wasn't to say he was _exactly_ like my picture," Calliope
+said slowly. "For instance, I think the man at the depot had a beard,
+an' the poet in my picture didn't. But it was more his look, you might
+say. It wasn't like any look I'd ever seen on anybody in Friendship. His
+hands were kind o' slim an' wanderin', an' he carried a book like it was
+his only baggage. An' he had a way--well, like what he happened to be
+doin' wasn't all day to him. Like he was partly there, but mostly
+somewheres else, where everything was better.
+
+"'Perhaps this lady will know,' he says--an' it wasn't the way most of
+'em talks here in Friendship, you understand--'I've been askin' the
+luggageman there,' he says, an' he was smilin' almost like a laugh at
+what he thought I was goin' to answer, 'I've been askin' the luggageman
+there, if he knows of a wood near the station that I shall be likely to
+find haunted at this hour. I've to wait for the 4.20, an' it's a bad
+time of day for a haunted wood, I'm afraid. The luggageman didn't seem
+to know.'
+
+"An' then all at once I knew--I knew. Why, don't you see," Calliope
+cried, "I had to know! That was just the way we'd talked in my
+dream--kind of jokin' an' yet meanin' somethin', too--so's you felt all
+lifted up an' out o' the ordinary. An' then I knew who he was an' I see
+how everything was. Why, the girl that was me an' that was lonesome
+there in Friendship _wasn't_ me, very much. Me bein' Calliope Marsh was
+the chance part, an' didn't count. But things was rilly the way I'd
+dreamed o' their bein.' Somehow, I had another self. An' I had dreamed
+o' bein' that self. An' there he stood, on the Friendship depot
+platform."
+
+Calliope looked at me wistfully.
+
+"You don't think I sound crazy, do you?" she asked.
+
+And at my answer:--
+
+"Well," she said, brightening, "that was how it was. An' it was like
+there hadn't been any first time an' like there wouldn't be any end.
+Like they was things bigger than time--an' lots nicer than life. An' I
+spoke up like I'd always known him.
+
+"'Why, yes,' I says to him simple, 'you must mean the Depot Woods,' I
+said. 'They're always kind o' haunted to me. I guess the little folks
+that come in the en-gine smoke live in there,' I told him, smilin'
+because I was so glad.
+
+"I remember how su'prised he looked an' how his face lit up, like he was
+hearin' English in a heathen land.
+
+"'Upon my word,' he says, still only half believin' in me. 'An' do you
+go there often?' he ask' me. 'An' I daresay the little smoke folk talk
+to you, now?' he says.
+
+"'I go 'most every day,' I told him, 'but we don't say very much. I
+guess they talk an' I listen,' I says.
+
+"An' then the funny part about his askin' Bill for a haunted wood come
+over me.
+
+"'_Bill!_' I says. 'Did you actually ask Bill that?'
+
+"Oh, an' how we laughed--how we laughed. Just the way the dream had
+been. It seemed--it seemed such a sort o' _special_ comical," Calliope
+said, "an' not like a Sodality laugh. 'Seems though I'd always laughed
+at one set o' things all my life--my everyday life. An' this was a new
+recipe for Laugh, flavoured different, an' baked in a quick oven, an' et
+hot.
+
+"Well, we walked down the road together, like it had always been that
+way. An' we talked--like you do when you're with them you'd rather be
+with than anybody else. An' he ask' me, grave as grave, about the little
+smoke folks.
+
+"'Will They be home, do you think?' he says.
+
+"An' I says: 'Oh, yes. I know They will. They're always home.'
+
+"An' we both felt pleased, like when you're sure.
+
+"We went to walk in the Depot Woods. I remember how much he made me
+talk--more than I'd ever talked before, excep' in the dream. I know I
+told him the little stories I'd read about noted people, an' I said over
+some o' the verses I'd learned an' liked the sound of--I remembered 'em
+all for him, an' he listened an' heard 'em all just the way I'd said
+'em. That was it--he heard it all just the way I said it. An' I
+mentioned the sun on the leaves an' the way the clouds looked, right
+out--an' I knew he didn't think I was affected. An' I made up things an'
+said, too--things that was always comin' in my head an' that I was
+always wantin' to say. An' he'd laugh almost before I was through--oh,
+it was like heaven to have him laugh an' not just say, 'What on earth
+_are_ you talkin', Calliope Marsh?' like I'd heard. An' he kep' sayin',
+'I know, I know,' like he knew what I meant better than anything else in
+the world. Then he read to me out o' the book he had an' he told
+me--beautiful things. Some of 'em I remember--I've remembered always.
+Some of 'em I forgot till I come on 'em, now an' then, in books--long
+afterwards; an' then it was like somebody dead spoke up. I'm always
+thankful to get hold o' other people's books an' see if mebbe I won't
+find somethin' else he said. But a good many o' the things I s'pose I
+clear forgot, an' I won't know 'em again till in the next life. Like I
+forgot what we said in the dream, till they're both all mixed up an'
+shinin'.
+
+"We talked till 'most time for the 4.20 train. An' when it got towards
+four o'clock, I told him about my dream. It seemed like he ought to
+know, somehow. An' I told him how I dreamed I was him.
+
+"'You don't look like the one I dreamed I was,' I told him, 'but, oh,
+you talk the same--an' you pretend, an' you laugh, an' you seem the
+same. An' your face looks different from folks here in Friendship, just
+like his, an' it seems somehow like you saw things besides with your
+eyes,' I told him, 'like the poet in my picture. So I know it's you--it
+must be you,' I says.
+
+"He looked at me so queer an' sudden an' long.
+
+"'I'm a poet, too,' he said, 'if it comes to that. A very bad one, you
+know--but a kind of poet.'
+
+"An' then of course I was certain sure.
+
+"When he understood all about it, I remember how he looked at me. An' he
+says:--
+
+"'Well, an' who knows? Who knows?'
+
+"He sat a long time without sayin' anything. But I wasn't unhappy, even
+when he seemed so sad. I couldn't be, because it was so much to know
+what I knew.
+
+"'If I can,' he says to me on the depot platform, 'dead or alive, I'll
+come back some day to see you. But meanwhile you must forget me. Only
+the dream--keep the dream,' he says.
+
+"I tried to dream it again," Calliope told me, "but I never could. An'
+dead or alive, he's never been back, all these years. I don't even know
+his name--an' I remembered afterwards he hadn't asked me mine. But I
+guess all that is the chance part, an' it don't really count. Out o' the
+dream I've been, you might say, caught, tied up an' couldn't get
+out,--just me, like you know me,--with a big unhappiness, an' like that.
+But in the dream I dreamed myself true. An' then God let me meet myself,
+just that once, there in the Depot Woods, to show me it's all right, an'
+that they's things that's bigger than time an' lots nicer than life."
+
+Calliope sat silent, with her way of sighing and looking by; and it was
+as if she had suggested to me delicate things, as a rainbow will suggest
+them.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+THE HIDINGS OF POWER
+
+
+I divined the birches, blurred gray and white against the fog-bound
+cedars. In the haze the airy trunks, because of their imminence, bore
+the reality of thought, but the sterner green sank in the distance to
+the faint avail of speech. It was well to be walking on the Plank Road
+toward seven o'clock of a June morning, in a mist which might yield
+fellowship in the same ease with which it breathed on distinctions.
+
+Abel had told how, on that winter way of his among the hills, the sky
+has fallen in the fog and had surrendered to him a fellowship of dreams.
+But in Friendship Village, as I had often thought, there are dreams for
+every one; how should it be otherwise to us faring up and down Daphne
+Street (where Daphne's feet have been)? And yet that morning on the
+Plank Road where, if the fancy seized her to walk in beauty, our lady of
+the laurels might be met at any moment, her power seemed to me to be as
+frail as wings, and I thought that it would not greatly matter if I were
+to meet her.
+
+As if my thought of Abel Halsey had brought him, the beat of hoofs won
+toward me from the village; and presently Major Mary overtook me, and
+there was Abel, driving with his eyes shut. I hailed him, laughed at
+him, let him pick me up, and we went on through door after door of the
+fog, with now a lintel of boughs and now a wall of wild roses.
+
+"Abel," I remember saying abruptly, "dreams are not enough."
+
+"No," he replied, as simply as if we had been talking of it, "dreams are
+just one of the sources of power ... but doing is enough."
+
+I said weakly--perhaps because it was a morning of chill and fog, when a
+woman may feel her forlornest, look her plainest, know herself for dust:
+"But then--what about everybody's heart?"
+
+"Don't you know?" Abel asked, and even after those months in Friendship
+Village I did not know.
+
+"... use it up making some little corner better--better--better by the
+width of a hand..." said Abel. "As I could do," he added after a moment,
+"if I could get my chapel in the hills. Do you know, I've written to
+Mrs. Proudfit about it at last. I couldn't help it--I couldn't help it!"
+
+We came to the rise of the hill, where, but for the fog, we might have
+looked back on the village, already long astir. To the left, within its
+line of field stone and whitewashed rails and wild roses, the cemetery
+lay, like another way of speech. A little before us the mist hid the
+tracks, but we heard the whistle of the Fast Mail, coming in from the
+end of the earth.
+
+"Ah, well, I want some wild roses," said I--since a woman may always
+take certain refuges from life.
+
+"I'm coming back about noon," Abel told me; "I'll bring you a thousand."
+
+He drew up Major Mary, and we sat silent, watching for the train. And
+the Something which found in Abel its unfailing channel came
+companioning us, and caught me up so that I longed unspeakably to be
+about the Business which Abel and Calliope followed, and followed before
+all else.
+
+But when I would have said more, I noted on Abel's face some surprise,
+and then I myself felt it. For the Fast Mail from the East, having as
+usual come roaring through Friendship station with but an instant's
+stop, was now slowing at the draw. Through the thick white we perceived
+it motionless for a breath, and then we heard it beat away again.
+
+I wonder now, remembering, how I can have known with such singing
+confidence what was in store for me. It is certain that I did know, even
+though in the mist I saw no one alight. But as if at a summons I bade
+Abel let me descend, and somehow I gave him good-by; and I recall that I
+cried back to him:--
+
+"Abel! You _said_ the sky can fall and give one dreams."
+
+"Yes," he answered. "Dreams to use in one's corner."
+
+But I knew then and I know now that Abel's dreams flowed in his blood,
+and that when he gave them to his corner of the world he gave from his
+own veins; and I think that the world is the richer for that.
+
+When he had gone I stood still in the road, waiting. I distinguished a
+lintel of elms, a wall of wild roses; I heard a brave little bird
+twittering impatient matins, and the sound of nearing footsteps in the
+road. And then a voice in the mist said my name.
+
+There in the fog on the Plank Road we met as if there had come a
+clearness everywhere--we two, between whom lay that year since my coming
+to Friendship. Only, now that he was with me, I observed that the
+traitor year had slipped away as if it had never been, and had left us
+two alone in a place so sightly that at last I recognized my own
+happiness. And I understood--and this way of understanding leaves one a
+breathless being--that his happiness was there too.
+
+And yet it was only: "You.... But what an adventure to meet you here!"
+And from him: "Me. Here. Please, may we go to your house? I haven't had
+an _indication_ of breakfast." At which we laughed somewhat, with my,
+"How absurdly like you not to have had breakfast," and his, "How very
+shabby of you to feel superior because you happen to have had your
+coffee." So we moved back down the road with the clear little space in
+the fog following, following....
+
+A kind of passion for detail seized on us both.
+
+He said: "You're wearing brown. I've never seen you wear brown--I'm sure
+I haven't. Have I?"
+
+"My fur coat was brown," I escaped into the subject, "but then that
+hardly counts."
+
+"No," he agreed, "fur isn't a colour. Fur is just fur. No, I've never
+seen you in brown."
+
+"How did they let you off at the draw? How did you know about getting
+off at the draw?" I demanded.
+
+"You said something of your getting off there--in that one letter, you
+know...."
+
+"Yes, yes...."
+
+"You said something about getting off there on a night when you left the
+train with a girl who was coming home to the village--you know the
+letter?" he broke off, "I think it was that letter that finally gave me
+courage to come. Because in that I saw in you something new
+and--understanding. Well, and I remembered about the draw. I always
+meant to get off there, when I came."
+
+"You always meant ... but then how did you make them stop?"
+
+"I told the man I had to, and then he had to, too. There were four
+others who got off and went across the tracks, but we are not obliged to
+consider them."
+
+"From that," I said, "I would think it _is_ you, if I didn't know it
+couldn't possibly be!"
+
+Then I hurried into some recital about the Topladys, whose big barn and
+little house were lined faintly out as if something were making them
+feel hushed; and about Friendship, hidden in the valley as if it were
+suddenly of lesser import--how strange that these things should be there
+as they were an hour ago. And so we came to Oldmoxon House and went up
+the walk in silence save that, at the steps, "How long shall I tell them
+to boil your eggs?" I asked desperately, to still the quite ridiculous
+singing of the known world. But then the singing took one voice, a voice
+whose firmness made it almost hard, save that deep within it something
+was beating....
+
+"You know," said the voice simply, "if I come in now, I come to stay.
+You _do_ know?"
+
+"You come to breakfast...." I tried it.
+
+"I come to stay."
+
+"You mean--"
+
+"I come to stay."
+
+I rather hoped to affirm something gracious, and masterful of
+myself--not to say of him; but suddenly that whole lonely year was back
+again, most of it in my throat. And though I gave up saying anything at
+all, I cannot have been unintelligible. Indeed, I know that I was not
+unintelligible, for when, in a little while, Calliope, who was still
+with me, opened my front door and emerged briskly to the veranda, she
+seems to have understood in a minute.
+
+"Well said!" Calliope cried, and made a little swoop down from the
+threshold and stood before us, one hand in mine and one outstretched for
+his; "I knew, as soon as I woke up this morning, I felt special. I
+thought it was my soul, sittin' up in my chest, an' wantin' me to spry
+round with it some, like it does. But I guess now it was this. Oh,
+this!" she said. "Oh, I sp'ose I'd rilly ought to hev an introduction
+before I jump up an' down, hadn't I?"
+
+"No need in the world, Calliope," he told her; "come on. I'll jump,
+too."
+
+And that was an added joy--that he had read and re-read that one
+Friendship letter of mine, written on the night of Delia More's return,
+until it was as if he, too, knew Calliope. But before all things was the
+wonder of the justice and the grace which had made the letter of that
+night, when I, too, "took stock," yield such return.
+
+It was Calliope who led the way indoors at last, and he and I who
+followed like her guests. From the edges of consciousness I finally drew
+some discernment of the place of coffee and rolls in a beneficent
+universe, and presently we three sat at his breakfast table. And not
+until then did Calliope remember her other news.
+
+"Land, land," she said, "I like to forgot. Who do you s'pose I had a
+telephone from just before you come? Delia. She'd just got home this
+morning on the Fast Mail. An' the Proudfits'll be here, noon train."
+
+Delia indeed had come on the same glorified train that Abel and I had
+seen stop at the draw, only she had alighted at Friendship station and
+had hurried up to the Proudfits' to make ready for their home-coming.
+And since those whom we know best never come to Friendship without a
+welcome, it was instantly incumbent on us all to be what Calliope called
+"up in arms an' flyin' round."
+
+As soon as we were alone:--
+
+"I've planned noon lunch for 'em," Calliope told me; "I'm goin' to see
+to the meat--leg o' lamb, sissin' hot, an' a big bowl o' mint. Mis'
+Holcomb's got to freeze a freezer o' her lemon ice--she gets it smooth
+as a mud pie. Mis' Toplady, she'll come in on the baked stuff--raised
+rolls an' a big devil's food. An'--I'd kind o' meant to look to you for
+the salad, but I s'pose you won't want to bother now...." And when I had
+hastened to assume the salad, "Well, I _am_ glad," she owned, with a
+relieved sigh. "The Proudfit salads they can't a soul tell what
+ingredients is in 'em, chew high though we may. I know you know about
+them queer organs an' canned sea reptiles they use now in cookin'. I've
+come to the solemn conclusion I ain't studied physiology an' the animal
+sciences close enough myself to make a rill up-to-date salad."
+
+Before noon we were all at Proudfit House--to which I had taken care to
+leave word for Abel to follow me--and we were letting in the sun, making
+ready the table, filling the vases with garden roses; and in the library
+Calliope laid a fire "in case they get chilly, travellin' so," she said,
+but I think rather it was in longing somehow to summon a secret agency
+to that place where Linda Proudfit's portrait hung. For we had long been
+agreed that, as soon as she was at home again, Linda's mother must be
+told all that we knew of Linda. Thus, to Calliope and me, the time held
+a tragic meaning beneath the exterior of our simple cheer. But the time
+held many meanings, as a time will hold them; and the Voice of its new
+meaning said to me, as we all waited on the Proudfit veranda with its
+vines and its climbing rose and its canaries:--
+
+"I marvel, I _marvel_ at your bad taste. How can you leave the dear
+place and the dear people for me?"
+
+I love to recall the bustle of that arriving and how, as the motor came
+up the drive, Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss and Mis' Amanda ran down
+on the gravel and waved their aprons; and how Mis' Postmaster Sykes and
+Mis' Mayor Uppers and Mis' Photographer Sturgis, having heard the
+machine pass their doors, had issued forth and followed it and arrived
+at the Proudfits' with:
+
+"I was right in the midst of a basque, cuttin' over an old lining, but I
+told Liddy Ember: 'You rip on. I've _got_ to run over.' Excuse my looks.
+Well said! Back!"
+
+And, "Got here, did you? My, my, all tired out, I expect. Well, mebbe
+you think we won't feel relieved to see the house open again an' folks
+in it flyin' round. An' you look as natural as the first thunder-storm
+in the spring o' the year!"
+
+And, "Every day for two weeks," Mis' Sturgis said, "I've said to Jimmy:
+'Proudfits back?' 'No, sir,' s'he, 'not back yet.' An' so it went. Could
+you sleep any on the sleeper?"
+
+Then Calliope and Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb and the three newcomers
+hurried all but abreast to the kitchen to "see what they could find";
+and when Mis' Proudfit and Miss Clementina and Delia More had taken
+their places at the burdened table, we all sat about the edge of the
+room--no one would share in the feast, every one having to "get right
+back"--and asked of the journey, and gave news of Friendship Village in
+the long absence. I love to remember it all, but I think that I love
+best to remember their delicate acceptance of what that day had brought
+to me. Of this no one said a word, nor did they ask me anything, or seem
+to observe, far less to wonder. But when they passed me, one and another
+and another squeezed my hand or patted my arm or gave me their unwonted
+"dear."
+
+"What gentlefolk they are," my stranger said.
+
+"Noon lunch" was finished, and I had seen Calliope go with Madame
+Proudfit to the library and close the door, and we were all gathered in
+the hall, where Miss Clementina had opened a trunk and was showing us
+some pretty things, when some one else crossed the veranda and appeared
+in the doorway. And there was Abel, come with my wild roses.
+
+I do not think, however, that it can have occurred to Abel that I was in
+the room. Nor that any of the others were there, intent on the pretty
+things of Miss Clementina's trunk. But, his face shining, he went
+straight to Delia More; and he laid my roses in her arms, looking at her
+the while with a look which was like a passionate recognition of one not
+met for many years.
+
+I have said nothing of Delia More as she seemed to me that day of her
+return, for indeed I do not well know how to tell of her. But as he
+looked at her, it was all in Abel's eyes. I do not know whether it was
+that her spirit having been long "packed down in her," as Calliope had
+said, was at last loosed by the mysterious ministry of distance and the
+touch of far places, or whether, over there nearer Tempe, she had held
+converse with Daphne herself, who, for the sake of the Friendship bond
+between them, had taken for her own all that was wild and strange in the
+girl's nature. But this I know: that Delia More had come back among us a
+new creature, simple, gentle, humble as before, and yet somehow
+quickened, invested with the dignity of personality which, long ago, she
+had lost. And now she stood looking at Abel as he was looking at her.
+
+"Delia!" he said, and took her hand, and, "I brought you some wild roses
+to tell you we're glad you're back," said he, disposing of my hedge
+spoils as coolly as if I were not.
+
+"That's nice of you, Abel," she replied simply, "but it's nicer to think
+you came."
+
+"Why," Abel said, "you couldn't have kept me away. You couldn't have
+kept me away, Delia."
+
+He could not have done looking at her. And even after we had closed in
+before them and had gone on with our talk about the tray of the trunk, I
+think that we were all conscious, as one is conscious of a light in the
+room, that to Delia and Abel had come again the immemorial wonder.
+
+When the library door opened and Madame Proudfit and Calliope came out,
+a little hush fell upon us, even though none but I knew what that
+interval held for Linda's mother. Her face was tranquil--indeed, I think
+it was almost as if its ancient fear had forever left it and had given
+place to the blessed relief of mere sorrow. She stood for a
+moment--looking at them all, and looking, as if she were thankful for
+their presence. Then she saw Abel and held out both hands.
+
+"Abel!" she said, "Abel! I had your letter in Lucerne. I meant to talk
+it over with you--but now I know, I know. You shall have your little
+chapel in the hills. We will build it together--you and I--for Linda."
+
+But then, because Abel turned joyously and naturally to Delia to share
+with her the tidings, Madame Proudfit looked at Delia too, and saw her
+eyes. And,
+
+"You and Delia and I," she added gently.
+
+On which, with the kindliest intent, the happiness of us all overflowed
+in speech about the common-place, the trivial, the irrelevant, and we
+all fell talking at once there in the hall, and told one another things
+which we knew perfectly already, and we listened, nodding, and laughed a
+great deal at nothing in the world--save that life is good.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We three walked home together in the afternoon sunshine--the man who,
+through all this time in Friendship, had been dear, and Calliope and I.
+I thought that Daphne Street had never looked so beautiful. The tulip
+beds on the lawns had been re-filled for summer, a touch of bonfire
+smoke hung in the air, Eppleby Holcomb was mending his picket gate, and
+over many magic thresholds of the cool walks were lintels of the boughs.
+Down town Abigail Arnold was laying cream puffs in the home bakery
+window; at the Helmans' Mis' Doctor Helman, wound in a shawl and a
+fascinator, was training her matrimony vine; the Liberty sisters had let
+out their chickens and, posted in a great triangle, were keeping them
+well within Liberty lawn confines; Doctor June was working in his garden
+and he waved his hat at us like a boy. ("It's a year ago now they give
+him his benefit," Calliope remembered; "ice-cream an' strawberries an'
+cake. An' every soul that come in he treated, one after another. An'
+when they got hold of him an' told him what that was doin' to the
+benefit box, he wanted to know whose benefit it was, anyway. An' he kep'
+on treatin' folks up to the last spoonful o' cream. He said he never had
+such a good time since he was born. I donno but he showed us _how_ to
+give a benefit, too.")
+
+We were crossing the lawn to Oldmoxon House when I said to Calliope what
+it had been decided that day that I should say:--
+
+"Calliope," I asked, "could you be ready in a month or two to leave
+Friendship for good, and come to us in town, and live with us for
+always?"
+
+She looked up at one and the other of us, with her little embarrassed
+laugh.
+
+"You're makin' fun o' me," she said.
+
+But when we had explained that we were wholly serious, she stopped and
+leaned against one of the great trees before the house; and it was at
+Oldmoxon House rather than at us that she looked as she answered:--
+
+"I couldn't," she said quickly, and with a manner of breathlessness, "I
+couldn't. You know how I've wanted to leave Friendship, too, you know
+that. An' I want to yet, as far as wantin' goes. But wantin' to mustn't
+be enough to make you do things."
+
+She stood, her head held up as if she were singing, as Liddy Ember had
+said of her, her arms tightly folded, her cheeks flushing with her fear
+that we would not understand.
+
+"Oh," she said, "you know--you _know_ how I've always wanted nice
+things. Wanted 'em so it hurt. Not just from likin' 'em, either, but
+because some way I thought I could _be_ more, _do_ more, live up to my
+biggest best if I could only get where things was kind of educated
+an'--gentle. But every time I tried to go, somethin' come up--like it
+will, to shove you hard down into the place you was. Then I thought--you
+know 'bout that, I guess--I thought I was goin' to live here in Oldmoxon
+House, an' hev a life like other women hev. An' when that wasn't to be,
+I thought mebbe it was because God see I wasn't fit for it, an' I set to
+work on myself to make me as good as I knew--an' I worked an' worked,
+like life was nothin' but me, an' I was nothin' but a cake, to get a
+good bake on an' die without bein' too much dough to me. An' then all to
+once I see that couldn't be the only thing He meant. It didn't seem like
+He could 'a' made me sole in order to save me from hell. An' I begun to
+see He must 'a' made me to help in some great, big hid plan or other of
+His. An' quick as I knew that an' begun wantin' to help, He begun
+showin' me when to. That's how I mean what I said about the Bell. Times
+like Elspie, or 'Leven, or like that, I can hear it just as plain as
+plain--the Bell, callin' me to help Him."
+
+She looked hard at us, and, "I donno if you know what I'm talkin'
+about----" she doubted; but, at our answer,
+
+"Well," she added, "they's somethin' else. It's somethin' almost like
+what you've got--you two--an' like what Delia an' Abel have got. Lately,
+I don't _need_ to hear the Bell any more. I know 'bout it without. It's
+almost like I _am_ the Bell. Don't you see, it's come to be my power,
+just like love will be your power, if you rilly understand. An'
+here--here I know how. I've grown to Friendship, an' here I know what's
+what. An' if I went away now, where things is gentle an' like in books,
+I wouldn't know how to be any rill use. I can _be_ the Bell here--here I
+can have my power. In town I expect I couldn't be anything but just cake
+again--bakin' myself rill good, or even gettin' frosted; but mebbe not
+helpin'. An' I couldn't risk that--I couldn't risk it. It looks to me
+like helpin' is what I'm for."
+
+I think, as she said, Calliope was become the Bell; and at that moment
+she rang to us the call of sovereign clearness. This was the life that
+she and Abel followed, and followed before all else, and there lay the
+hiding of their power. "Just like love will be your power," she had
+said.
+
+When she had gone before us into the house--that was to have been her
+house--we two stood looking along the sunny Plank Road toward Daphne
+Street. And in the light lifting of the bonfire smoke it seemed to me
+that there moved a spirit--not Daphne, but another; one who walks less
+in beauty than in service; not our lady of the laurels, but our lady of
+the thorns.
+
+
+
+
+GROSSET & DUNLAP'S
+
+DRAMATIZED NOVELS
+
+A Few that are Making Theatrical History
+
+
+MARY JANE'S PA. By Norman Way. Illustrated with scenes from the play.
+
+Delightful, irresponsible "Mary Jane's Pa" awakes one morning to find
+himself famous, and, genius being ill adapted to domestic joys, he
+wanders from home to work out his own unique destiny. One of the most
+humorous bits of recent fiction.
+
+
+CHERUB DEVINE. By Sewell Ford.
+
+"Cherub," a good hearted but not over refined young man is brought in
+touch with the aristocracy. Of sprightly wit, he is sometimes a
+merciless analyst, but he proves in the end that manhood counts for more
+than ancient lineage by winning the love of the fairest girl in the
+flock.
+
+
+A WOMAN'S WAY. By Charles Somerville. Illustrated with scenes from the
+play.
+
+A story in which a woman's wit and self-sacrificing love save her
+husband from the toils of an adventuress, and change an apparently
+tragic situation into one of delicious comedy.
+
+
+THE CLIMAX. By George C. Jenks.
+
+With ambition luring her on, a young choir soprano leaves the little
+village where she was born and the limited audience of St. Judo's to
+train for the opera in New York. She leaves love behind her and meets
+love more ardent but not more sincere in her new environment. How she
+works, how she studies, how she suffers, are vividly portrayed.
+
+
+A FOOL THERE WAS. By Porter Emerson Browne. Illustrated by Edmund
+Magrath and W. W. Fawcett.
+
+A relentless portrayal of the career of a man who comes under the
+influence of a beautiful but evil woman; how she lures him on and on,
+how he struggles, falls and rises, only to fall again into her net, make
+a story of unflinching realism.
+
+
+THE SQUAW MAN. By Julie Opp Faversham and Edwin Milton Royle.
+Illustrated with scenes from the play.
+
+A glowing story, rapid in action, bright in dialogue with a fine
+courageous hero and a beautiful English heroine.
+
+
+THE GIRL IN WAITING. By Archibald Eyre. Illustrated with scenes from the
+play.
+
+A droll little comedy of misunderstandings, told with a light touch, a
+venturesome spirit and an eye for human oddities.
+
+
+THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. By Baroness Orczy. Illustrated with scenes from
+the play.
+
+A realistic story of the days of the French Revolution, abounding in
+dramatic incident, with a young English soldier of fortune, daring,
+mysterious as the hero.
+
+
+Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Friendship Village, by Zona Gale
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