Part 5

Philip frowned and refused, but Caleb snatched his hand in a vise-like grasp and fairly dragged him from his seat. Half angry, half defiant, yet full of the spirit of any man who finds himself "in for it," whatever "it" may be, Philip dropped upon the piano stool which Grace had vacated, and attacked the keys as if they were sheaves of wheat and he was wielding a flail. He played the music as he had played it to Caleb, with the accent and swing of a march, yet with all the runs and variations with which country worshippers are wont to embroider it, and the hearers were so "wrought up" by it that they began the hymn with a roaring "attack" that was startling even to themselves. Grace, seeing no seat within reach, and unwilling to turn her back to the people, retired to one end of the piano, under one of the candles, from which position, on the raised platform in front of the pulpit, she beheld a spectacle seldom seen in its fulness except by ministers during a time of religious excitement--a sea of faces, many of them full of the ecstacy of faith and anticipation, others wild with terror at the doom of the impenitent.

Like most large-souled women, Grace was by nature religious and extremely sympathetic, and unconsciously she looked pityingly and beseechingly into many of the troubled faces. Her eyes rested an instant, unconsciously, on those of one of the stalwart sinners who had brought the piano to the church. In a second the man arose, strode forward, and dropped upon his knees. Grace looked at another,--for the six were together on one bench,--and he, too, came forward. Then a strange tumult took possession of her; she looked commandingly at the others in succession, and in a moment the entire six were on their knees at the altar.

"Great hell!" bellowed the ruffian who had been tossed through the window, into which he had climbed halfway back in his eagerness to hear the music. Then he tumbled into the church, got upon his feet, and hurried forward to join the other sinners at the mourners' bench, which had already become so crowded that Caleb was pressing the saints from the front seats to make room for coming penitents.

The hymn ended, but Philip did not know it, so he continued to play. Grace whispered to him, and when he had reached the last bar, which he ended with a crash, he abruptly seated himself on the pulpit steps and felt as if he had done something dreadful and been caught in the act. Grace reseated herself at the instrument; and as the minister, with the class leaders, Sunday-school teachers, and other prominent members of the church were moving among the penitents, counselling and praying, and the regular order of song and prayer had been abandoned or forgotten, she played the music of the hymns that had been designated by the minister on the previous day. Some of the music was plaintive, some spirited, but she played all with extreme feeling, whether the people sang or merely listened. She played also all newer church music that had appealed to her in recent years, and when, at a very late hour, the congregation was dismissed, she suddenly became conscious of the most extreme exhaustion she had ever known. As she and her husband were leaving the church, one of the penitents approached them and said:--

"Bless the Lord for that pianner--the Lord an' you two folks."

"Amen!" said several others.

Philip and Grace walked home in silence; but when they were within doors, Philip took his wife's hands in his, held them apart, looked into Grace's eyes, which seemed to be melting, and exclaimed:--

"Grace Somerton--my wife--a revivalist!"

"Is Saul also among the prophets?" Grace retorted, with a smile which seemed to her husband entirely new and peculiar. "It was your music that started the--what shall I call it?"

VII--AN ACTIVE PARTNER

THE piano remained at the church several days, for the revival effort was too successful to be discontinued. Night after night Grace played for saints and sinners, and the minister, who was far too honest to stretch the truth for the sake of a compliment, told her that the playing drew more penitents than his prayers and sermons. Caleb remained faithful to his duties at the store every day, but the sound of the church bell in the evening made him so manifestly uneasy, and eager to respond, that Philip volunteered to look after all customers and loungers who might come in before the customary time for closing. But customers and loungers were few; for the church was temporarily the centre of interest to all of the good and bad whose evenings were free. There was no other place for Philip himself to go after the store was closed, for was not his wife there? Besides, the work soon began to tell on Grace; for the meetings were long, and the air of the tightly packed little church became very stifling, so Philip sometimes relieved Grace so that she might go to the door for fresh air.

"Do you know what you two have done, with your pianner-playin'?" asked Caleb, when the revival concluded. "You've not only snatched a lot of sinners that have been dodgin' ev'rybody else for years, but folks is so grateful to you that four or five customers of other stores are goin' to give you their trade the comin' year. I was sure 'twould work that way, but I didn't like to tell you."

"I'm glad you didn't; for if you had, the music would have stopped abruptly. There are places to draw the line in advertising one's business,--my business,--and the church is one of them."

"Good! That's just the way I thought you'd feel, but I'm mighty glad to know it for sure. Church singin' 'll be mighty dismal, though, when you take that pianner back home."

As Caleb spoke, he looked beseechingly at Philip, who utterly ignored the look and maintained an impassive face. Then Caleb transferred his mute appeal to Grace, who looked troubled and said:--

"There ought to be some way out of it."

"Where there's a will, there's a way," Caleb suggested.

Philip frowned, then laughed, and said:--

"Suppose you think up a way--but don't let there be any delay about getting the piano back to the house."

"Well, it's a means of grace at the church."

"So it is at home, and I need all the means of grace I can get, particularly those that are nearest home, while I am breaking myself in to a new business."

Caleb had the piano brought back to the parlor, but he reverted to it again and again, in season and out of season, until Philip told Grace that there was no doubt that his uncle was right when he wrote that Caleb would sometimes insist on being helped with projects of his own.

"That wasn't all," Grace replied. "He wrote also that he advised you to give Caleb his way at such times, or your life would be made miserable until you did, and that the cost of Caleb's projects would not be great."

"H'm! I wonder if uncle knew the cost of a high-grade upright piano? Besides, I need all my time and wits for the business, and Caleb's interruptions about that piano are worrying the life out of me. To make matters worse, there's a new set of commercial travellers coming in almost every day--this is the season, while country merchants are beginning to get money, in which they hope to make small sales for quick pay, and they take a lot of my time."

"You ought to have a partner--and you have one, you know--to see those people for you; and she will do it, if you'll let her."

"My partner knows that she may and shall do whatever she likes," said Philip, "but, dear girl, 'twould be like sending a sheep among wolves to unloose that horde of drummers upon you."

"I've had to deal with men, in some city stores in which I worked," Grace replied, "and some of them reminded me of wolves--and other animals; but I succeeded in keeping them in their places. I know the private costmarks on all of our goods, and I know the qualities of many kinds of goods better than you or Caleb, and both of you will be within call for consultation whenever I'm puzzled; so let me try. 'Twill give me an excuse to spend all of my spare time in the store; so whenever a drummer comes in, you can refer him to me. Say I'm the buyer for the concern. 'Twill sound big; don't you think so?"

"Indeed I do! I wonder where a young woman got such a head for business."

"Strange, isn't it," Grace replied, with dancing eyes which had also a quizzical expression, "as she's been several years behind counters, great and small, and listened to scores of buyers and drummers haggle over fractions of a cent in prices?"

"And for about that much time," said Philip, reminiscently, "her husband was a mere clerk and correspondent, yet thought himself a rising business man! Have your own way, partner--managing partner, I ought to say."

The next day was a very busy one, yet Caleb found time to say something about instrumental music as a means of grace in churches, and to get a sharp reply. Several commercial travellers came in and were astonished at being referred to a handsome, well-dressed young woman. Grace disposed of them rapidly and apparently without trouble. When husband and wife sat down to supper, Philip said:--

"How did the managing partner get along to-day?"

"I bought very little," Grace replied.

"You saved Caleb and me a lot of time. I've never seen Caleb so active and spirited as he has been this afternoon. It made me feel guilty, for I was rude to him this morning for the first time. Just when I was trying to think my hardest about something, he brought up again the subject of the church and the piano."

"Poor Caleb! But he won't do it again, for I've settled the matter."

"You've not been tender-hearted enough to give up the piano?"

"Oh, no, but I--we, I mean--have taken the county agency for a cabinet-organ firm."

"I see--e--e! And you're going to torment the church into buying one, and you and Caleb are going to get up strawberry festivals and such things to raise the money, and the upshot will be that I'll have to subscribe a lot of cash to make up the deficiency. Ah, well, peace will be cheap at--"

"Phil, dear, don't be so dreadfully previous. The bargain is that the firm shall send us, without charge, a specimen instrument, which I've promised to display to the best advantage, and I've also promised to give elementary instruction to every one who manifests interest in it."

"Grace Somerton! The house will be full from morning till night. Country people will throng about such an instrument like children about a hand-organ. 'Twill be the end of your coming into the store to talk to the drummers, or even to see me."

"Oh, Phil! Where are your wits? I'm going to have the organ kept at the church, and let the most promising would-be learners and possible buyers do their practising there. The organ firm sells on instalments; we'll guarantee the instalments, for I'll select the buyers--who will want only smaller instruments--from among women who bring us chickens and butter and eggs and feathers and such things. So the church will be sure of an instrument more appropriate to congregational singing than a piano, and our piano won't be coveted, and we will make a little money, and by the time the next revival season arrives there will be at least a few people who can play, and perhaps some who are accustomed to closed windows and stuffy air, and won't get splitting headaches and lose five pounds of weight in a week, as I did."

"Allow me to catch my breath!" said Philip. "Give me some tea, please, quick!--no milk or sugar. I hope 'tis very strong. You've planned all this, yet there you sit, as natural and unassuming as if you'd never thought of anything but keeping house and being the sweetest wife in the world!"

"Thank you, but shouldn't sweetness have any strength and character? And what is business for, I should like to know, but to enable women to keep house--and keep their pianos, if they have any?"

"Caleb," said Philip, on returning to the store, "I want to apologize for answering you rudely this morning about that enraging piano. I was in a hard study over--"

"Don't mention it," said Caleb, with a beatific smile. "Besides, 'Providence tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' as the Bible says in hundreds of different ways. I s'pose your wife's told you what she's done about music for the church? Je--ru--salem! Ain't she a peeler, though?"

"She is indeed--if I may assume that a 'peeler' is an incomparable combination of goodness and good sense."

"That's about the meanin' of it, in my dictionary." Then Caleb fixed his eyes inquiringly upon Philip's face and kept them there so long that Philip asked:--

"What now, Caleb?"

"Nothin'," said Caleb, suddenly looking embarrassed. "That is, nothin' that's any o' my business."

"If 'twas mine, you needn't hesitate to mention it. You and I ought to be fair and frank with each other."

"Well," said Caleb, counting with a stubby forefinger the inches on a yardstick, "I was only wonderin'--that is, I want to say that you're a good deal of a man, an' one that I'm satisfied it's safe to tie to, an' I'm mighty glad you're in your uncle's place, but--for the land's sake, how'd you come to git her?"

Philip laughed heartily, and replied:--

"As most men get wives. I asked her to marry me. First, of course, I put my best foot forward, for a long time, and kept it there."

"Of course. But didn't the other fellers try to cut you out?"

"Quite likely, for most men have eyes."

"Wa'n't any of 'em millionnaires?"

"Probably not, though I never inquired. As she herself has told you, Mrs. Somerton was a saleswoman. Millionnaires do their courting in their own set, where saleswomen can't afford to be."

"That was great luck for you, wasn't it? Are there any women like her in their set?"

"I don't doubt they think so. Mrs. Somerton says there are plenty of them in every set, rich and poor alike. As for me,--'There's Only One Girl in the World'--you've heard the song?"

"Can't say that I have," Caleb replied, suddenly looking thoughtful, "but the idea of it's straight goods an' a yard wide. Well, sir, it's plain to me, an' pretty much ev'rybody else, that that wife o' yourn is the greatest human blessin' that ever struck these parts. Good women ain't scarce here; neither is good an' smart women. I s'pose our folks look pretty common to you, 'cause of their clothes, but they improve on acquaintance. Speakin' o' clothes--ev'rybody, even the best o' folks, fall short o' perfection in some particular, you know. The only way Mis' Somerton can ever do any harm, 'pears to me, is by always bein' so well dressed as to discourage some other women, an' makin' a lot of the gals envious an' discontented. She don't wear no di'monds nor gewgaws, I know, but for all that, she looks, day in an' day out, as if she was all fixed for a party or Sunday-school picnic, an'--But, say, 'I shouldn't wonder if I was on dangerous ground,' as one of our recruits remarked to me at Gettysburg after most of our regiment was killed or wounded."

"Aha!" exclaimed Philip, when he rejoined his wife after the store closed for the day. "'Pride must have a fall'--that is, supposing you were proud of silencing Caleb concerning the piano. He has a torment in preparation for you, personally. He thinks you dress too handsomely--wear party clothes every day, and are likely to upset the heads of the village girls, and some women old enough to know better."

"Nonsense!" exclaimed Grace, flushing indignantly. "I've absolutely no clothes but those I owned when we were poor. I thought them good enough for another season, as no one here would have seen them before, and none of them was very badly worn." She arose, stood before the chamber mirror, and said:--

"This entire dress is made of bits of others, that were two, three, or four years old, and were painfully cheap when new."

"Even if they weren't," said Philip, "they were your own, and earned by hard work, and if ever again Caleb opens his head on the subject, I'll--"

"No, you won't! I don't know what you were going to do, but please don't. Leave Master Caleb to me."

"You don't expect to reason him into believing that you're less effectively dressed than you are?"

"I expect to silence him for all time," Grace replied, again contemplating herself in the mirror, and appearing not dissatisfied with what she saw. The next day she asked Caleb which, if any, of the calicoes in the store were least salable; the cheapest, commonest stuff possible, for kitchen wear. Caleb "reckoned" aloud that the best calico was cheap enough for the store-owner's wife, but Grace persisted, so she was shown the "dead stock,"--the leavings of several seasons' goods,--from which she made two selections. Caleb eyed them with disfavor, and said:--

"That purple one ain't fast color; the yaller one is knowed all over the county as the Scare-Cow calico. We might 'a' worked it off on somebody, if the first an' only dress of it we sold hadn't skeered a cow so bad that she kicked, an' broke the ankle of the gal that was milkin' her."

"Never mind, Caleb; the purple one can afford to lose some of its color, and--oh, I'll see about the other."

Three days later Grace, enveloped in a water-proof cloak, hurried through a shower from the house to the store, and on entering the back room, threw off the cloak. Caleb, who was drawing vinegar from a barrel, arose suddenly, with a half-gallon measure in his hands, and groaned to see his employer's wife, "dressed," as he said afterward, "like a queen just goin' onto a throne, though, come to think of it, I never set eyes on a queen, nor a throne, either." More deplorable still, she looked proud, and conscious, and as if demanding admiration. There was even a suspicion of a wink as she exclaimed:--

"Be careful not to let any of that vinegar run over and splash near me, Caleb! You know the purple isn't fast color!"

"Je--ru--salem!" exclaimed Caleb, dropping the measure and its contents, which Grace escaped by tripping backward to the shelter of a stack of grain-sacks. When she emerged, with a grand courtesy followed by a long, honest laugh, Caleb continued:--

"Well, I've read of folk's bein' clothed in purple an' fine linen, but purple an' Scare-Cow knocks me flat! Dressed in 'dead stock,' from head to foot, an' yit--Hello, Philip! Come in here! Oh! You're knocked pretty flat, too, ain't you? Well, I just wanted to take back what I said the other day about some folk's clothes. I don't b'lieve a dress made of them grain-sacks would look common on her!"

"How stupid of me!" Grace exclaimed. "Why didn't I think of the grain-sacks? I might have corded the seams with heavy dark twine, or piped them with red carpet-binding."

"I don't know what cordin' an' pipin' is," said Caleb, "but after what I've seen, I can believe that you'd only need to rummage in a big rag-bag awhile to dress like a queen--or look like one."

VIII--THE PORK-HOUSE

COLD weather and the pork-packing season had arrived, and the lower floor of Somerton's warehouse was a busier place than the store. At one side "dressed" hogs, unloaded from farmers' wagons, were piled high; in the centre a man with a cleaver lopped the heads and feet from the carcasses, and divided the remainder into hams, shoulders, and sides, which another man trimmed into commercial shape; a third packed the product in salted layers on the other side. At the rear of the room two men cut the trimmings, carefully separating the lean from the fat, and with the latter filled, once in two or three hours, some huge iron kettles which sat in a brick furnace in the corner. At similar intervals the contents of the kettles were transferred to the hopper of a large press, not unlike a cider press, and soon an odorous wine-colored fluid streamed into a tank below, from which it was ladled through tin funnels into large, closely hooped barrels. The room was cold, despite the furnace; the walls, windows, and ceiling were reminiscent of the dust and smell of many pork-packing seasons. Early in the season Philip had dubbed the pork-packing floor "Bluebeard's Chamber," and warned his wife never to enter it. After a single glance one day, through the street door of the warehouse, Grace assured her husband that the prohibition was entirely unnecessary. She also said that she never had been fond of pork, but that in the future she would eschew ham, bacon, sausage, lard, and all other pork products.

When the sound of rapid, heavy hammering was audible in the Somerton sitting room and parlor, and when Grace asked where it came from, Philip replied, "The pork-house;" the cooper was packing barrels of sides, hams, or shoulders for shipment, or tightening the hoops of lard-barrels which were inclined to leak. When Grace wondered whence came the great flakes of soot on table-linen which had been hung out of doors to dry, Philip replied, "The pork-house;" probably the fire in the furnace was drawing badly and smoking too much. Frequently, when she went to the store and asked Caleb where her husband was, the reply would be, "The pork-house." If Philip reached home late for a meal, and Grace asked what had kept him, he was almost certain to reply, "The pork-house," and if, as frequently occurred later in the season, he retired so late that Grace thought she had slept through half the night, he groaned, in answer to her inevitable question, "The pork-house."

Then came a day when Grace detected an unfamiliar and unpleasing odor in the house. She suspected the napkins, then the tablecloth, and examined the rug under the dining-room table for possible spots of butter. Next she inspected the kitchen, which she washed and scoured industriously for a full day. Occasionally she detected the same odor in the store, as if she had carried it with her from the house, so she examined her dresses minutely, for the odor was reminiscent of cookery of some kind, although she had but a single dress for kitchen wear, and never wore it out of the house. She mentioned the odor to Philip, but he was unable to detect it in the air. One day it inflicted itself upon her even in church, and became so obnoxious that she spoke of it, instead of the sermon, as soon as the congregation was dismissed.

"I'm very sorry, dear girl, that you're so tormented," said Philip. "I wish I could identify the nuisance; then possibly I could find means to abate it. I know an odor is hard to describe, but do try to give me some clew to it."

"It reminds me somewhat of stale butter," Grace replied slowly, "and of some kinds of greasy pans, and of burned meat, and of parts of some tenement-house streets in the city, and some ash-cans on city sidewalks on hot summer mornings--oh, those days!--and of--I don't know what else."

"You've already named enough to show that 'tis truly disgusting and dreadful, and I do wish you and I could exchange the one of the five senses which is affected by it, for I never had much sense of smell."

By this time they were at home. Philip was unclasping his wife's cloak when Grace exclaimed suddenly:--

"There it is!"

"There what is?"

"That dreadful odor! Why, Phil, 'tis on your coat-sleeve! What, in the name of all that's mysterious--"

"That was my best coat in the city last winter, and I've never worn it here, except on Sundays."

"Then it must have taken the odor from some other garment in your closet."

Philip hurriedly brought his ordinary weekday coat to the sitting room, Grace moved it slowly, suspiciously, toward her nose, and soon exclaimed:--

"There it is--ugh! But what can it be?"

At that instant a well-known knock at the door announced Caleb, who had been invited to Sunday dinner.

"Don't be shocked, Caleb," said Philip; "we're not mending clothes on Sunday. 'Twill scarcely be an appetizer, apparently, but won't you pass this coat to and fro before your face a moment, and detect an odor, if you can, and tell us what it is?"

Caleb took the coat, did as requested, touched the cloth with his nose, and replied:--

"The pork-house."