Part 8

There was a panting sweep and scurry for the edges of the room, as instantly a gong on the wall sounded with the alarm, and the two big sliding doors went back, scattering like feathers the innumerable Javanese trifles that had been tacked there. Forward, down the rug-hung vista, plunged the two big horses of the department. We saw the Java tea-table borne to earth, the Javanese exhibits adorning outlying counters swept away, and all the "decoration probabilities" vanish in savage wreck. Then the quaintly picturesque harnesses fell to the horses' necks, their hoofs trampled terrifyingly on the loose boards of the floor, and forth from the yawning doors the horses pounded, dragging the _pièce de résistance_, with garlands on its sides, the pink zouave cushion crushed beneath it, and the flag of the Netherlands streaming from the stack. Horses rushed thither in competition, came thundering at the doors, and galloped to place before the two carts. I think not a full minute can have been consumed. But the ruin of the Java entertainment committee's work was unbelievably complete. Though there had been not a fire in Friendship Village in two years, that night, of all nights, Jimmy Sturgis's "hay-barn," for the omnibus horses, "took it on itself," it was said, "to go to work an' burn up." And Jimmy's barn is outside the city limits, so that the _pièce de résistance_ had to be used. And Jimmy is in the fire-department, so that the company galloped informally to the rescue without the benefit of the mayor's authority.

As the last of the department disappeared, and the women of the committee stood looking at one another--tired with the deadly tiredness of a day such as theirs--a little blue linen figure sprang upon a chair and clasped her hands behind her, and a blue ostrich feather lifted and dipped as she spoke.

"Quickly!" Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson cried. "All hands at work now! Mrs. Sykes, will you set up the tea-table? You can get more dishes from my house. Mrs. Toplady, this booth, please. You can make it right in no time. Mrs. Holcomb, you will have to do your booth entirely over--you can get some things from my house. Miss Marsh--ah, Calliope Marsh, you must go to my house for my lace curtains--"

She smiled ingratiatingly and surely arbitrarily, for we all knew full well that there was absolutely nothing to smile at. And with that Calliope's indignation, as she afterward said, "kind of crystallized and boiled over." I remember how she stood, hugging her thin little arms and speaking her defiance.

"I donno how you feel, Mis' Johnson," she said dryly, "but, _my_ idea, Bedlam let loose ain't near quaint enough for a Java entertainment. Nor I don't think it's what you might say real Java, either. Things here looks to me too flexible. I'm goin' home an' go to bed."

There was no doubt what the rest meant to do. With one impulse they turned toward the door as Calliope turned, and silently they took the way that the _pièce de résistance_ had taken before them. Little Mrs. Johnson stood on her chair making many gestures; but no one went back.

Calliope looked straight before her.

"My feet ache like I done my thinkin' with 'em," she said, "an' my head feels like I'd stood on it. An' what's it all for?"

"Regular clock performance," Mis' Postmaster Sykes assented. "We've ticked hard all day long an' ain't got a thing out of it. I often think it's that way with my housework, but I did think the Ladies' Missionary could tick, when it _did_ tick, for eternity. I'm tuckered to the bone."

"Nobody knows," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was Mame-Bliss, "how my poor neck aches. It's there I suffer first an' most."

Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was walking behind the rest, took three great steps and caught us up and spoke, a little breathlessly:--

"Land, land," she said, "I guess I'll go home an' pop some corn. Seems to me it'd smell sort of cosy an' homelike an' soothin' down. It's a grand thing to smell when you're feelin' far off from yourself."

Calliope laughed a little then.

"Well," she said, "anyhow I ain't got my silk waist to get into--and I didn't hev a nice one to put on anyway. I was wishin' I had, and now my wish has come true by bein' took away from me, bodily--like they will. But just the same--"

She turned on the walk and faced us, and hugged her thin little arms.

"A while ago," she said, "I give that little woman there six months to get herself the cold shoulder all around. Well, the time ain't up yet--but both my shoulders feels stone cold!"

IX

THE COLD SHOULDER

There is something more about Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson.

Did you ever look through an old school-book of your own and, say, on the history picture of Vesuvius in eruption impose your own memory of Pompeii, visited in these twenty years since you studied about it; and have you not stared hard at the time between and felt yourself some one other than that one who once dreamed over the Vesuvius picture? Or, years after you read the Letters, you have made a little mark below Cicero's cry from exile, "Oh, that I had been less eager for life!" and you look at the cry and at the mark, and you and one of these become an anachronism--but you are not sure which it is that so becomes. So now, in reading over these notes some while after I have set them down, I am minded here to give you my look ahead to the end of the summer and to slip in some account of what happened as a closing of the tale. And I confess that something about me--perhaps it is the Custodian herself--likes this way of pretending a freedom from time and of looking upon its fruit to say which seeds have grown and which have not.

Friendship Village is not superstitious, but when curious coincidences occur we do, as we say, "take down note." And it did seem like a judgment upon us that, a little time after the Java fiasco, and while indignation was yet at high noon, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson fell ill.

At first I think we affected not to know it. When she did not appear at church, none of us mentioned it for a Sunday or two. Then when some one casually noted her absence we said, "Oh, wasn't she? Got little cold, likely." That we saw her no more down town or "brushing up" about her door we facilely laid to chance. When the village heard that her maid--who always offended by talking almost in a whisper--had once or twice excused her mistress to callers, every one shut lips and hardened hearts and said some folk acted _very_ funny about their calling duties. But when, at the twelve o'clock breakfast of the new minister's wife--("Like enough breakfast at noon was a real Bible custom," the puzzled devotees solved that amazing hour), Mrs. Johnson did not appear, the village was forced to admit that something must be wrong.

Moreover, against its will the behaviour of young Mr. Johnson was gravely alarming Friendship. Mr. Johnson was in real estate and insurance in the city, and this did not impress the village as a serious business. "Because, what does he _sell_!" as Abigail Arnold said. "We know he don't own property. He rents the very house they live in. A doctor's a doctor an' he gives pills, an' a store's a store with the kind o' thing you need. But it don't seem like that man could make a real good livin' for her, dealin' vague in nothin' that way." His income, it was felt, was problematical, and the village had settled it that what the Oliver Wheeler Johnsons' had was chiefly wedding presents "an' high-falutin' tastes." But, in the face of the evidence, every afternoon at three o'clock the young husband ordered a phaëton from Jimmy Sturgis and came home from the city to take his wife to drive. Between shutters the village saw that little Mrs. Johnson's face did look betrayingly pale, and the blue ostrich plume lay motionless on her bright hair.

"I guess Mis' Johnson's real run down," her acquaintances said to one another uneasily. Still we did not go to see her. The weeks went by until, one morning, Calliope met the little new Friendship doctor on the street and asked him about his patient.

"I up an' ask' him flat out," Calliope confessed afterward; "not that I really cared to be told, but I hated to know I was heathenish. You don't like the feelin'. To know they ain't heathens is all that keeps some folks from _bein_' 'em. Well, so I ask' him. 'Doctor Heron,' s'I, 'is that Mis' Johnson real sick, or is she just sickish?' He looks at me an'--'Looks pretty sick, don't she?' s'e. 'Well,' s'I, 'I've seen folks look real rich that wa'n't it by right-down pocketbook evidence.' 'Been to see her?' s'e. 'No,' s'I, short. 'Might drop in,' s'e, an' walks off, lookin' cordial. That little Doctor Heron is that close-mouthed I declare if I don't respect him same as the minister an' the pipe-organ an' the skippin' hills."

So, as midsummer passed and found the little woman still ailing, I obeyed an idle impulse and went one evening to see her. I recall that as soon as I had crossed her threshold the old influence came upon me, and I was minded to run from the place in sheer distaste of the overemphasis and the lifted, pointed chin and the fluttering importances of her presence. I was ashamed enough that this should be so, but so it was; and I held my ground to await her coming to the room only by a measure of will.

I sat with Mrs. Johnson for an hour that evening. And it would seem that, as is the habit of many, having taken my own way I was straightway possessed to draw others after me. There are those who behave similarly and who set cunningly to work to gain their own ends, as, for example, I did. For one night soon I devised a little feast, which I have always held to be a good doorway to any enterprise, and, at the Friendship-appointed supper hour of six, I made my table as fair as possible, as has been done in like case ever since butter was first served "in a lordly dish." And my guests were Calliope, without whom no festival is wholly in keeping, and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and Mis' Postmaster Sykes, and that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady.

Because they had arrived so unsuspectingly I own myself to have felt guilty enough when, in that comfortable half-hour after a new and delectable dessert had been pronounced upon, I suggested with what casualness I might summon that we five pay a visit that night to Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson.

"Land!" said Mis' Holcomb, "I've thought I would an' then I've thought I wouldn't till I feel all two-faced about myself. I donno. Sometimes I think one way an' sometimes I think the other. Are you ever like that?"

"I s'pose," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, majestically, "that them in our position ought to overlook. I donno's 'twould hurt us any to go," she added graciously.

Calliope's eyes twinkled.

"That's it," she said; "let them that's got the social position to overlook things be Christian an' overlook 'em."

That great Mis' Amanda Toplady folded her hands, dimpled like a baby giant's.

"I'd be glad to go," she said simply; "I've got some grape jell that looks to me like it wasn't goin' to keep long, an' I'd be thankful to be on terms with her so's I could carry it in to her. They ain't a single other invalid in Friendship."

Calliope sprang to her feet and crossed her little arms, a hand hugging either shoulder.

"Well said!" she cried; "do let's go! I'm sick to death of slidin' off the subject whenever it comes up in my mind."

So, in the fair October dusk, we five went down the Plank Road--where Summer lingers late. The air was gentle with the soft, impending dark. I wonder why the colonnade of sweet influences, down which we stepped, did not win us to themselves. But I remember how, instead, our imminent visit drew us back to the days of Mrs. Johnson's coming, so that presently we were going over the incident of the Java entertainment, and, as Calliope would have put it, "crystallizing and boiling over" again in the old distaste.

But when we reached the little cottage of the Johnsons, our varied motives for the visit were abruptly merged in a common anxiety. For Doctor Heron's buggy stood at the gate and the little one-story cottage was dark save for a light in what we knew to be a corner bedroom. The hallway was open to the night, but though we could distinctly hear the bell jingle in the kitchen no one answered the summons. Then, there being somewhere about a murmur of voices, Calliope stepped within and called softly:--

"Doctor, Doctor Heron--you there? Is they anything we can do?"

The doctor came momentarily to the lighted doorway down the hall.

"That you, Calliope?" he said. "You might come here, will you? Tell the rest to sit down somewheres. And you tell Mr. Johnson he can come."

On which, from out the dark living room, some one emerged very swiftly and without a word pushed by us all where we were crowded in the passage and strode down to the little lighted chamber. Calliope hurried after him, and we four shrank back in sudden dread and slipped silently into the room which the young husband had left, and stood together in the dimness. Was she so sick? In that room he must have heard the door-bell as we had heard it, and yet he had not answered. Was it possible that we had come too late?

While we waited we said nothing at all, save that great Mis' Amanda Toplady, who said three times or four, "Oh, dear, oh, dear, I'm always waitin' till somethin's too late--either me or the other thing." It seemed very long before we heard some stir, but it can have been only a few minutes until the doctor came down the little hall and groped into the room. In answer to all that we asked he merely occupied himself in lighting a match and setting it deliberately to the candles on the table and adjusting their shades. They were, we noted afterward, the same candles whose presence we had detected and derided at those long ago tête-à-tête suppers in that house. The light glowed on the young doctor's pale face as he looked at us, each in turn, before he spoke. And when he had done with his slow scrutiny--I think that we cannot wholly have fancied its accusation--he said only:--

"Yes, she's pretty sick. I can't tell yet."

Then he turned and closed the outer door and stood leaning against it, looking up the hall.

"Miss Marsh!" he called.

But why did the man not tell us something, we wondered; and there flashed in my mind Calliope's reference to the pipe-organ and the skipping hills. At all events, Calliope would tell us.

And so she did. We heard her step in the hall, coming quickly and yet with a manner of exceeding care. I think that with the swift sense which wings before intelligence, the others understood before they saw her, even as I understood. Calliope stopped in the doorway as if she could trust herself to go no farther. And she was holding something in her arms.

"Calliope," we said; "Calliope...."

She looked down at that which she held, and then she looked at us. And the tears were in her eyes, but her face was brighter than I have ever known it.

"It's a baby," she said, "a little bit of a baby. _Her_ baby. An' it makes me feel--it makes me feel--oh," she broke off, "don't it make you feel that way, too?"

We looked at one another, and avoided one another's look, and then looked long at the baby. I do not remember that we said anything at all, or if we did so, that it bore a meaning. But an instant after Calliope gave the baby to the nurse who appeared in the doorway, we all tiptoed down to the kitchen by common consent. And it was plain that Mrs. Johnson's baby made us feel that way, too.

In our desire to be of tardy service we did the most absurd things. We took possession of the kitchen, rejoicing that we found the supper dishes uncared for, and we heated a great kettle of water, and washed and wiped and put away, as softly as we could; and then we "brushed up around." I think that only the need of silence kept us from cleaning windows. When the nurse appeared--who had arrived that day unknown of Friendship--we sprang as one to do her bidding. We sent the little maid to bed, we tidied the living room, walking tiptoe, and then we went back through the kitchen and sat down on the little side "stoop." And all this time we had addressed one another only about the tasks which we had in hand.

After a little silence,

"The milkman was quite late this morning," observed Mis' Holcomb.

"Well, he's begun to deliver in cans instead o' bottles," Mis' Sykes explained; "it takes him some longer to get around. He says bottles makes his wife just that much more to do."

Then we fell silent again.

It was Calliope, sitting on the porch step outside, where it was dark, who at last had the courage to be articulate.

"I hope--I _hope_," she said, "she's goin' to be all right."

Mis' Sykes shaded her eyes from the bracket lamp within.

"I'll go bail," she said, "that little you-do-as-I-say chin'll carry her through. I'm glad she's got it."

Just then we heard the thin crying of the child and we could divine Calliope, that on the step where she sat she was hugging her arms and rocking somewhat, to and fro.

"Like enough," she said, "oh, like enough--folks ain't so cramped about runnin' their own feelin's as they think they are!"

To this we murmured something indefinite in sound but positive enough in sense. And we all knew what we all knew.

"Let's go out around the house to the front gate," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady, abruptly. "Have any of you ladies got two handkerchiefs?"

"I've got two," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, "an' I ain't used either one. Do you want the one with essence or the one without?"

"I ain't partial," said Mis' Amanda.

We rose and stumbled along the grassy path that led round the house. At the gate we met Doctor Heron.

"Well," he said slowly, "well." And after a moment, "Will--will any of you be here in the morning?" he asked.

"Yes," we all said simply.

"That's good," he commented shortly, "I didn't know."

We five had to separate at the first corner to go our home ways, and we stood for a moment under the gas-light. I remember how, just then, Peter's father came singing past us, like one of the Friendship family who did not understand his kinship. Even as we five had not understood ours.

"You haven't got a shawl, hev you?" Mis' Sykes said to me solicitously.

"The nights have been some chilly on a person's shoulders for a day or two now," said Mis' Holcomb.

Calliope put her hand up quickly to her throat.

"Quit," she said. "All of you. Thank God. An' shake hands. I tell you, after this I bet I'll run my own feelin's about folks or I'll bring down the sky an' make new feelin's! Oh," said Calliope, "don't her--an' _now_--an' the baby--an'--oh, an' that bright star winkin' over that hitchin' post, make things seem--easy? Good night. I can't stand out here any longer."

But when we had gone away a few steps, Calliope called us back. And as we turned again,

"To bring down the sky," she repeated, "I bet that's the way God meant us to do. They ain't any of us got enough _to_ us to piece out without it!"

X

EVENING DRESS

I have said that Daphne Street has been paved within the past year, but I had not heard of the manner in which the miracle had been wrought until the day when Calliope's brief stay in the village ended and she came to tell me good-by--and, more than incidentally, to show me some samples of a dress which she might have, and a dress which she wouldn't have, and a dress which she had made up her mind to have.

"We don't dress much here in Friendship Village," she observed. "Not but what we'd like to, but we ain't the time nor the means nor the places to wear to. But they was one night--"

She looked at me, as always when she means to tell a story, somewhat with the manner of asking a permission.

"None of the low-neck' fashion-plates used to seem real to us," she said. "We used to look at 'em pinned up in Lyddy Ember's dressmakin' windows, ah-ahing in their low pink an' long blue, an' we'd look 'em over an' think tolerant enough, like about sea-serpents. But neither the one nor the other bit hold rill vital, because the plates was so young an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an' we was old an' busy, like you get, an' considered past the dressin' age. Still, it made kind of a nice thing to do on the way home from the grocery hot forenoons--draw up there on the shady side, where the street kitters some into a curve, an' look at Lyddy's plates, an' choose, like you was goin' to get one.

"Land knows we needed some oasises on that street from the grocery up home. Daphne Street, our main street, didn't always use' to be what it is now--neat little wooden blocks an' a stone curb. You know how it use' to be--no curb an' the road a sight, over your shoe-tops with mud in the wet, an' over your shoe-tops with sand when it come dry. We ladies used to talk a good deal about it, but the men knew it meant money to hev it fixed, an' so they told us hevin' it fixed meant cuttin' the trees down, an' that kept us quiet--all but the Friendship Married Ladies Cemetery Improvement Sodality.

"Mis' Postmaster Sykes was president o' the Sodality last year, you know,--she's most always president of everything,--an' we'd been workin' quite hard all that winter, an' had got things in the cemetery rill ship-shape--at least I mean things _on_ the cemetery was. An' at one o' the July meetin's last summer Mis' Sykes up an' proposed that we give over workin' for the dead an' turn to the livin', an' pave the main street of Friendship Village.

"'True,' she says, 'our constitution states that the purpose of our Sodality shall be to keep up the graves of our townspeople an' make 'em attractive to others. But,' says she, 'when they ain't enough of us dead to occupy all the time, the only Christian way to remedy that is to work for folks before they die, while we're waitin' for their graves.'

"This seemed reasonable, an' we voted unanimous to pave Daphne Street. An' on the way home Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Timothy Toplady an' I see Timothy Toplady settin' in the post-office store, an' we went in to tell him an' Silas Sykes about it. But before we could start in, Silas says, eyebrows all eager, 'Ain't you heard?'

"'Heard what?' says his wife, kind o' cross, bein' he was her wedded husband an' she _hadn't_ heard.

"''Bout Threat Hubbelthwait,' says Silas, lookin' at Mis' Toplady an' me, bein's Mis' Sykes was his wife. 'Drunk again,' says Silas, 'an' fiddlin' for dear life, an' won't let anybody into the hotel. Mis' Hubbelthwait has gone over to her mother's, an' the hired girl with her; an' Threat's settin' in the bar an' playin' all the hymn tunes he knows.'

"It wasn't the first time it had happened, you know. Threat an' his wife an' the hired girl keep the only hotel in Friendship Village--when Threat is sober. When he isn't, he sometimes closes up the house an' turns out whoever happens to be there, an' won't let a soul in--though, of course, not much of anybody ever comes to Friendship anyway, excep' now an' then an automobile on its way somewheres. An' there Threat will set in the bar, sometimes most of one week, sometimes most of two, an' scrape away on the only tunes he knows--all hymns, 'Just As I Am,' an' 'Can A Little Child Like Me?' Threat don't mean to be sacrilegious; he shows that by never singin' them two hymns in church, when they're give out.

"'Land!' says Mis' Sykes, when Silas got through, 'what men are!'

"'We ain't so much as woman, lemme tell you,' says Silas, right crisp. Which wasn't what he meant, an' we all laughed at him, so he was a little mad to start with.

"'The Sodality's decided to pave Daphne Street,' Mis' Sykes mentions then, simple.

"'Pave _what_?' shouts Silas--Silas always seems to think the more you do in sound the more you'll do in sense.

"'Do _what_ to Daphne Street?' says Timothy, whirlin' from the peanut roaster.

"'Pave Daphne Street,' says Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' me, wonderin'.