Part 5

Julie had gotten up as though to serve her, and stood waiting behind the counter, but Elizabeth waved a protesting hand. “Oh don’t mind me. I’ll just look about and make myself at home, and if I find anything I like I’ll let you know. That’s a right pretty hat--that red one. What’s the price of it?--Oh well,” she continued, after Julie had told her, “I’ll wait a while. You’ll have to put it down ’fore the season’s over. People ain’t payin’ much for hats a war year like this. It ain’t patriotic. Besides it ain’t a style that would suit everybody. But it looks good on me, don’t it? Red’s one of my best colors.”

She put on the hat, and preened herself before Julie’s mirror. In her pink dress, crowned by the red hat, she made a garish flash of color, given back in duplicate from the mirror. Her overpowering personality dominated the place. Julie had been working all day and was tired. Glancing across, she saw her own sober little figure with its pale face mirrored beside Elizabeth’s pink and red. For a moment she contemplated the two figures side by side in sharp contrast, then she stooped to her sewing once more. Elizabeth saw the reflections and laughed. “We look kind of funny together, don’t we,” she said complacently. Then she moved to get a better view of herself, and Julie’s reflection was blotted out by her dominant pink.

“You ain’t got your mirror in a very good light,” she informed Julie. “If I was you, I’d hang it over on that side; and I’d get a better one. This don’t make people look their best, an’ what you want in a shop like this is a glass that’ll just make people look better’n they ever looked in their lives before, so they’ll think, ‘My, ain’t that hat becomin’!’ An’ then they’ll buy the hat, an’ never know it was the mirror all the time. That’s the way to sell hats, dearie! Oh, I could show you a heap about running your shop.”

Julie said nothing, but went steadily on with her sewing, her needle weaving deftly in and out of the soft blue material she was at work on; but Elizabeth was too completely wrapped up in her own atmosphere to be aware of the other’s unresponsiveness.

“I always did know about hats,” she went on. “It seems like it’s a kind of a gift with me. I can always tell what kind of a hat a person ought to wear. Now you--you ought to wear something kind of startling to bring you into view. If you don’t have it, you’re the kind of mousey little woman that slips by without any one’s payin’ any attention. I looked at you on Sunday, and I says, ‘That little woman kind of needs something to bring her out. Now what is it?’ I says, sort of turning you over in my mind, like you taste cake-batter to see what it needs. And all at once it came to me: ‘It’s a hat,’ I says, ‘a cerise turban: _that_ would do the trick.’ If folks didn’t notice a thing else about you, they’d see that turban. You ain’t got just the color I had in mind,” she went on, surveying the hat counter, “but,” taking up a green turban, “this is kind of the shape I mean. Now if you had a piece of cerise silk you could fix this right over for yourself. Lemme see how it looks on you.”

But Julie shrunk hastily away. “No, no thank you,” she said with that quick breathlessness that was a nervous trick with her. “No, I never wear cerise, and I don’t care for that shape on myself.”

“Oh, all right then,” Elizabeth retorted, laying down the hat in a pique. “You can suit yourself. I was just trying to show you how you could attract a little attention. But you’re just like my husband; he sort of wants to slink through the world without anybody noticing him. I tell him a person would think he was a submarine, he’s so anxious to have that ‘low visibility’ the papers are always talking about these days. I declare, I’d like to put a cerise turban on _him_--a red hat like what the Popes wear in the Catholic Church. Maybe he couldn’t get by without folks seein’ that! ‘Look a’ here, Tim,’ I’m always sayin’ to him, ‘What’s the matter with you? It ain’t going to kill you if folks sees you. Come out into the open,’ I says. ‘You can’t hide behind _my_ skirts all the time.’ But the more I talk at him, the more he goes in the ground an’ pulls the hole in after him. I declare, I think it’ll be a right good thing if the draft does take him.”

“The draft?” Julie looked up quickly.

“Mm--h’m,” Elizabeth nodded. “He’s liable to be called any time now. He just took this little job here while he was waiting. That’s why I didn’t bring any of my furniture with me. I got a nice house and a lot of elegant furniture in Lynchburg where we was, an’ we’ll go back there after the war. The paper he worked on there’s just suspended for a while. The editor an’ owner’s both gone to the front. Well, you don’t catch me stayin’ on here if Tim’s drafted. I’ll go on back to my own home. I got plenty of friends there. But say--_he’ll_ make a great soldier, won’t he? I always tell him Tim’s short for timid with him. You can laugh if you want. I know just how funny he always strikes folks.”

“I--I don’t want to laugh,” Julie protested. “I--oh, I think the war’s awful!” she burst out. “I don’t want to laugh over any one’s going.”

“Oh, well,” Elizabeth said carelessly. “I wouldn’t be s’prised if the war didn’t make a man out of him--the drill an’ all would be fine. But I tell him he’d better mind out, or he’ll be the goat of the whole camp.”

Finding no chair to sit in, Elizabeth had been drifting about the shop, inspecting one showcase after another; now she came to rest at the counter behind which Julie was seated, and leaning nonchalantly against it, she did what was to Julie an amazing thing. She opened a gilt vanity-bag which she had been swinging, and taking from it a cigarette case, selected one and proceeded to light it with a knowing air. Julie knew, of course, that women did smoke cigarettes somewhere, but she had never seen them do it, much less light one in her discreet little shop. She was used to seeing the mountain women out in the country smoke pipes; indeed, her own grandmother on her father’s side had smoked and chewed as well. “But that’s different,” she told herself now. Her grandmother’s corncob pipe before a stone hearth seemed wholly in keeping with the old woman’s kerchief-covered head, her spinning wheel, her loom, and patchwork quilts. Not so Elizabeth’s insolent cigarette. That appeared to Julie an affront to her mother’s spirit, which always seemed to her still hovering dimly in the background of the little shop. She and her mother, living their gentle reserved lives there together, had made up the atmosphere, the soul, of the little establishment, pouring into it all the timid modesty, gentle propriety, and sincerity of their own hearts. They had neither of them had a brave or robust attitude toward life, but they had nevertheless woven a pattern that was adorned with a thousand tendernesses toward one another, with exquisite bits of understanding consideration, with gentle courtesies and kindnesses toward their neighbors, and with a careful honesty in all their dealings. Timid as they were, they yet had wrought an unseen mesh of life that had a delicate beauty all its own. And now to Julie, all that past that her mother and she had woven together was outraged by Elizabeth’s cigarette.

“I’ve got to stop her! She shan’t smoke here in my shop. What would mother say?” she thought breathlessly to herself, trying to control the tremor that ran through her hands, so that she might set even stitches in her work. “I’ve _got_ to stop her! It’s my shop. She’s got no business to smoke here. Why, I wouldn’t let my best friend smoke here!” But though she protested these things to herself, Julie could not whip her courage up to bringing them forth in spoken words, and Elizabeth continued to puff out long blue columns of smoke, watching them with satisfaction, while with an affected gesture, she flecked her ashes here and there over the clean floor. She was in truth a little disappointed that her cigarette had provoked no comment. She had expected Julie at least to look startled, and was prepared to defend herself with condescending patronage. Julie’s silence was disconcerting, for Elizabeth possessed none of the spiritual antennæ with which to sense another’s atmosphere if unexpressed by word or gesture. She strolled back to the mirror, and under cover of patting her hair into place peeped at Julie’s reflection to see if she was being watched from behind her back. But Julie, whose weakness it was to have antennæ far too sensitive to another’s atmosphere, knew what Elizabeth expected, and kept her eyes resolutely upon the threading of her needle. It was a little defiant clash between the two women, of which Julie was fully aware, but which Elizabeth realized only from her own standpoint.

At this moment Aunt Sadie Johnson bustled into the shop, and having none of Julie’s delicate hesitancy, exploded the hidden situation with a startled exclamation.

“Julie,” she began, “I just ran in to see if that white ruchin’ I got you to order for me--Well, for the _mercy sake_!” she broke off, suddenly catching sight of Elizabeth. “Well, my lands!” she continued, staring frankly, and unafraid of drawing upon herself the full fire of the cigarette.

It was some such violent attention as this that Elizabeth had hoped for.

“What’s the matter?” she inquired in her most superior manner. “Oh,” feigning surprise, “my cigarette? Why surely, Mrs. Johnson, I’m not the first woman you’ve seen smoke.”

“That you ain’t!” Aunt Sadie retorted promptly. “I’ve seen a plenty of ’em do it.”

Elizabeth was somewhat dashed, but she rallied as best she could. “Well,” she said, “I’m glad Hart’s Run ain’t such a back number as not to know that all the smart women smoke nowadays.”

“Smart?” Aunt Sadie cried, and went off into billows of large mirth. “Well, you may call ’em smart, but I dunno’s they look so stylish to me. There’s old Betty Willets from off Rocky Ridge. She drives her old wagon an’ broken-down horse into town, to collect the swill from folks’ backyards to take up to her hog. She’s one of our smart smokers. An’ they all smoke up Spitzer’s Holler--an’ chew too--they’re ’bout the lowest-down lot of folks we have ’round here. Oh, no, you ain’t the first I’ve seen smoke, not by a long sight. But it does look like a pity for a right young woman like you to be smoking and chewin’--it’ll just ruin your teeth.”

“Chew?” cried Elizabeth wildly. “You don’t think I chew tobacco, do you?”

“Oh, don’t tell me!” Aunt Sadie returned. “I never saw a woman yet who smoked, that she didn’t chew on the sly an’ dip snuff, too. Oh, I’d be the last person in the world to say there was any real harm in it,” she went on tolerantly, “with so many of our old folks still doin’ it; it’s only that I always did think chewin’ an’ spittin’--”

“I don’t chew!” Elizabeth cried furiously. “Of course I don’t! Who ever heard of such a thing? Well, I’m going,” she announced, flouncing to the door. “An’ I’ll say this, Miss Rose,” she added, “I don’t think _you’re_ any too polite either to strangers. In all the time I’ve been here, you’ve hardly said two words, and you haven’t so much as asked me to take a chair.” Angry tears leaped in her eyes, and she flung herself away out of the shop and up her own stairs.

“Well, the poor thing,” Mrs. Johnson said. “I made her mad all right! I reckon it was a sin, but I just couldn’t stand her airing ’round here with that cigarette, an’ showings off to us moss-backs. What’d you let her smoke in here for, Julie? You know your mother wouldn’t have liked it.”

“I didn’t know how to stop her,” Julie confessed helplessly.

“Well, I stopped her all right!” Aunt Sadie returned, shaken again by large laughter. “But ain’t the world funny, Julie? Here we’ve all come to look down on smokin’, and feel sort of ashamed of the old women that still do it, when along comes all the young smart Alecks, an’ says it’s the thing to do, an’ if you don’t do it, it just shows you’re right from the backwoods. Now ain’t that funny? If you just live long enough in the world, you’ll see everything turned upside down! But I feel kind of sorry for poor Mis’ Bixby,” she added tolerantly.

“_Sorry_ for her?” Julie’s eyes opened in astonishment.

“Yes,” the other nodded her large gray head. “Don’t you think it’s kind of pitiful to see a grown person putting so much confidence in fine clothes, and thinking she’s so grand showing off with a cigarette? When you’ve been up against real life like I have, that kind of cheap person seems right pitiful.”

“She just stifles me,” Julie said. “She’s so--so big an’ satisfied with herself.”

“Oh, I don’t know’s she’s so satisfied with herself. She wants you to think she is, an’ that’s why she tries to show off so.”

“Well, all the same she does stifle me,” Julie repeated.

“I reckon she does,” Aunt Sadie conceded, surveying Julie’s shrinking make-up with her shrewd and kindly eyes. “She stifles you, honey, an’ I b’lieve she’s just about choked that poor little husband of hers to death.”

“I don’t see why in the world he ever married her,” Julie said.

“Who? That little Bixby? I’ll bet he never married _her_--she married _him_.”

“I b’lieve that’s true!” Julie cried with conviction. “Yes, I just b’lieve that’s so.” Aunt Sadie’s statement seemed to her an illuminating discovery. Of course that was it. None of his real self had gone into the union; that accounted for his detached air, which had made her suppose at first that they were brother and sister.

“Of course it’s so,” Mrs. Johnson reaffirmed. “You’re so innocent, Julie, you still think the man does all the courtin’; but I’ll bet poor Bixby did mighty little. I wouldn’t wonder if she married him out of spite. I’ll bet there was another she wanted an’ couldn’t get, so she turned ’round an’ snapped up that little feller, just to show people she could get a man if she wanted one.”

“Well, anyway he isn’t all there,” Julie said absently, still pursuing her own line of thought.

Aunt Sadie was startled. “Why, what on earth do you mean? Why, Julie, you don’t think he’s wanting, do you? He’s right nervous an’ scary lookin’, I know, but I wouldn’t for a minute say he was feeble-minded.”

“No, no, of course I don’t mean that!” Julie protested.

“Well, I shouldn’t think you would. Why, he’s real smart in his trade. I heard Mr. McLane bragging about him in the post office this morning. He said they never did have such a good printer on the _News_ before. Said he seemed to understand high-class printing better’n anybody he’d ever known. No, whatever he is, he certainly ain’t feeble-minded.”

“Oh, no, of course not,” Julie reiterated. “Of course I didn’t mean that. I just meant she didn’t get the whole of him. She doesn’t own all of him.”

“Well, maybe so. I’m sure I hope so--the poor little feller,” Aunt Sadie returned.

IX

The Bixbys settled themselves down in Mrs. Johnson’s rooms over Julie Rose’s little shop, and thereafter the lives of these two new people were constantly crossing the thread of Julie’s life, all of them together weaving that unseen pattern in the garment of existence.

Elizabeth Bixby and her landlady fell into an indifferent intimacy. Aunt Sadie was a sociable person well up in her sixties. The immediate pressure of life was over for her, except when some one of her children, all of whom were married, needed her in an emergency. The years had drifted her into a rather pleasant backwater where she had leisure to look about her and to enjoy what small diversions Hart’s Run had to offer. Her gray eyes, set in a broad, weather-beaten face, were shrewd but tolerant. She viewed human nature clearly, but not unkindly.

“You got to take people like you find ’em,” she was apt to state. Of Elizabeth Bixby she said, “Oh, well, the poor thing, maybe I’d’ve put a little more sweetening in, if I’d had the makin’ of her; but I didn’t mix her batter, so it’s no concern of mine. I’m kind of sorry for her, she craves so to have people notice her, an’ wants her own way so bad; but she’s right good company, too, when everything’s going to suit her.” Thus she explained their intimacy, and together they went almost nightly to the moving pictures.

Elizabeth was lonesome, and had a good deal of spare time to kill. Some of it she killed in Aunt Sadie’s society. The rest she made away with by lying in bed late,--Mr. Bixby always got his own breakfast,--by fitful housekeeping, by gossip and cheap fiction, and by much attention to her clothes. And all that she did went by to the blare of popular songs ground out on her gramophone, for, as she told Aunt Sadie, “If there’s one thing I hate more’n another it’s nothin’ doin’. I got to have some kind of stir goin’ on all the time, if it’s nothin’ more’n the gramophone.”

Her uncertain and slovenly habits were the very antithesis of Julie’s well-ordered and conscientious ones. At a certain early hour Julie arose; at another certain hour she had her breakfast; and by another her rooms were tidied and her shop open for the day. After the Bixbys moved in, she became accustomed to hearing Mr. Bixby every morning at a regular time getting his own breakfast; his habits, when they did not depend on Elizabeth, were as methodical as her own. His breakfast varied in time not more than five minutes from morning to morning, but his dinner, which Elizabeth prepared, swung backward and forward across the face of the clock.

As Julie finished her own breakfast and started her house-cleaning for the day, she was used now to hearing Mr. Bixby’s tiptoe footsteps creeping about overhead. The footsteps were so timid, so stealthy, that she guessed he went in terror of an outburst of irritability from Elizabeth if he awakened her. He was not always successful in keeping quiet. One morning there was a sudden clatter and crash of tinware, and immediately on the heels of it, a flood of abuse from his wife.

When Mr. Bixby came down the outside stairs that morning Julie was sweeping her front steps. He paused after they had exchanged their customary shy good morning.

“I was mighty sorry I made all that racket right over your head just now,” he apologized awkwardly.

“Oh, that was all right,” she assured him quickly. “A person can’t help pans falling down sometimes.”

“It was the pie plates,” he confided. “Seems like they just stand there on edge watching their chance to jump down on a feller, and they ain’t never satisfied to let one of the bunch go alone, but all of ’em got to rattle down together.” There was in his eyes now that rueful twinkle which she had seen before. He offered it tentatively to her, a deprecatory, whimsical comment on his own inaptitude.

It was like a shy animal peeping forth from its hole, ready to whisk away at the first unsympathetic gesture.

Julie smiled. “Yes, I know,” she said, although she really had no whimsical twist like that in her own make-up. When pie plates fell for her, they fell, and there was no alleviating mirth about their descent.

He still lingered, looking at her wistfully, relaxing his nerves in her sympathetic atmosphere.

The street was almost empty. The little gardens up and down it made joyful bits of color, and the fresh morning air danced through the shimmering trees, and twinkled its feet over the sparkling grass. Here and there, spread on the small lawns, or depending from the garden fences or from the branch of a shrub, spider webs showed their lace, an ephemeral loveliness which would presently disappear as the day advanced. For a time life seemed to turn a kindly side to them both, and in the friendliness of each other’s presence, their real personalities--which were usually as invisible as the gossamer webs upon the grass--came forth in shy intercourse.

“I’m mightily afraid I’ll disturb you in the mornings, stepping around right over your head like that,” he confided.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she reassured him. “I’m always up and through my breakfast before you commence, and I think it’s nice to hear other folks stirring around and getting ready for the day, too.”

“Well, I made stir enough this morning, didn’t I?” He laughed. Then he was emboldened to a further confession. “I scared myself so bad I didn’t have the nerve to go on and get my breakfast.”

“Why! You haven’t had anything to eat?” she exclaimed.

He flushed. “Oh, it’s all right. I’ll get me some coffee over at the Monroe House. I didn’t want to disturb my wife again. She’s mighty apt to have one of her bad headaches in the morning,” he said, unconsciously revealing the real reason for his abandoning any further attempt at breakfast.

“I got some fresh coffee right on my stove this minute, an’ some hot biscuits still in the oven. I’d be mighty glad to give you a bite,” she offered impulsively.

At that, a quick embarrassed flush mounted to his forehead. “I’m much obliged,” he answered stiffly, “but I wouldn’t trouble you.”

His embarrassment communicated itself to her, entrapping them both in their frozen self-consciousness and destroying the little moment of friendly spontaneity.

“I must be going,” he said.

“Well,” she answered awkwardly, “I’m sorry you won’t try my coffee.”

For a moment more they lingered uncertainly, their real selves staring forth wistfully through the formality that their conventional selves were hastily assuming, like friendly children being dragged apart by stiff grown-ups. Then she began to sweep again, and he, with a constrained gesture toward his hat, went on his way.

X

Later in that month of June, Aunt Sadie Johnson gave a supper party. She said it did look like she ought to do something for Mr. Seabrook: which was merely a thin excuse, as she was a Presbyterian herself and therefore owed no hospitality to the new Methodist minister. She was, however, obsessed with the idea of finding a husband for Julie, although she was not as frank about it as Mrs. Dolly Anderson. With this in view, she had meant to ask only Julie and Brother Seabrook, but Elizabeth Bixby got wind of the small festivity and saw to it that she was included.

“She invited herself: she didn’t get no bid from me,” Aunt Sadie told Julie. “Oh, well, the poor thing, I reckon she’s lonesome, so we might as well have her; an’ anyhow we’ll give that poor little Bixby man a good feed for once in his life--good, that is, as Mr. Hoover’ll allow. We’ll have waffles anyhow. I reckon we can use that much flour this once, seein’ ’s I’ve eat almost nothing but corn bread all summer. I’ll get you to come in early an’ make ’em, Julie; you make the best waffles in town.”

Julie had no desire to meet Brother Seabrook so intimately and so soon again after her encounter with him in the church, but she could not screw her courage up to explain the matter even to Aunt Sadie. She blushed all over at the very thought of it now, merely in her own mind. So there was no escape for her. Accordingly, on the night of the supper she dressed early and went through to her hostess’s part of the house, to help set the table and to beat up the waffles.

“My, Julie! You look mighty nice in that little sprigged dress,” Aunt Sadie hailed her. “That little touch of blue just suits you. It helps to bring out the color of your eyes. I’ll bet your preacher takes notice.”

“Oh, no, he won’t!” Julie hastily replied. “That is,” she stammered, flushing, “I hope he won’t.”

“Oh, Julie, you’re so _young_,” Aunt Sadie told her tolerantly. “I don’t know what it is about you--you ain’t really young no more, an’ you don’t exactly look young; but someway you just seem to make every one think of you as nothin’ but a child.”