Part 10

"'Ladies, ladies,' says Mis' Sykes, stern, 'we ain't votin' _yet_. Has anybody got anything else to offer? Let the discussion be free.'

"'What do we get a monument for, anyway?' says Mis' Toplady, hemming peaceful. 'Why don't we stick the money onto the new iron fence for Cemetery, same as we've been trying to do for years?'

"'That's what I was thinking,' says Abagail Arnold, smiling. 'Whenever I make one of my layer cakes for Sodality Annual, and frost it white and make mounds of frosted nuts on top, I always wish Cemetery had a fence around so's I could make a frosting one on the edge of the cake, appropriate.'

"'Why, but my land, Abagail,' says Mis' Holcomb, 'can't you see the differ'nce between workin' for a dead iron fence and working for the real, right down Dead that once was the living? Where's your humanity, I'd like to know, and your loyalty to Friendship Village inhabitants that was, that you set the old iron fence over against 'em. What's a fence beside folks?'

"All this time Mis' Emmons, there in the front parlour, had just sat still, stitching away on some little garment or other, but now she looked up quick, as if she was going to speak. She even begun to speak with a 'Madame President' that covered up several excited beginnings. But as she done so, I looked through the folding doors and see her catch sight of somebody out in the street. And I looked out the bay-window in the back parlour and I see who it was: it was a man, carefully guiding a little bit of a man who was walking on the flat board top of the Sykes's fence. So, instead of speaking formal, all Mis' Emmons done was to make a little motion towards the window, so that her contribution to the debating was nothing but--

"'Madame President--look.'

"We all looked, them in the out-of-range corners of the room getting up and holding their work in their aprons, and peering past; and us in the back parlour tried for glimpses out the side bay-window, past Mis' Sykes's big sword fern. And so the most of us see Insley walking with Christopher, who was footing it very delicate and grave, picking out his places to step as if a real lot depended on it.

"'That's Chris,' says Mis' Emmons, simple, 'that's come to us.' And you'd of said she hardly spoke the 'us' real conscious of herself. She looked round at us all. 'Let's have him in for a minute,' she says.

"'The little soul! Let's so do,' Mis' Amanda Toplady says, hearty.

"It was Mis' Emmons that went to the door and called them, and I guess Insley, when he see her, must of wondered what made her face seem like that. He went on up town, and the little chap come trotting up the walk.

"When Chris come in Mis' Sykes's front parlour among all the women, there run round that little murmuring sound that a crowd of women uses to greet the coming in their midst of any child. And I s'pose it was a little more so than ever for Chris, that they hadn't all seen yet--'count of so few being out the night he come and 'count of his having been up to Proudfit House 'most ever since. Us in the back parlour went crowding in the front, and some come down to the hall door to be the nearer. Mis' Amanda Toplady, hunting in her deep pocket, this time for a lozenger, says fervent above the rest:--

"'The little soul.'

"And he did resemble one, standing there so shy and manly in his new little brown clothes.

"Mis' Emmons's eyes was bright, and I thought I see a kind of challenge in her way of drawing the child towards her.

"'Chris,' she says, 'tell them what you had in your paper bag when you came to the church the other night.'

"Chris remembered: Sugar rolls and cream-puffs and fruit-cake, he recites it grand. 'My supper,' he adds, no less grand. 'But that was 'cause I didn't have my dinner nor my breakfast,' he explains, so's we wouldn't think he'd had too much at once.

"'What was the matter with your foot?' Mis' Emmons goes on.

"Christopher had a little smile that just about won you--a sort of abashed little smile, that begun over by one side of his mouth, and when he was going to smile that way he always started in by turning away his head. He done this now; but we could all hear what he said. It was:--

"'My biggest toe went right through a hole, an' it choked me awful.'

"About a child's foot hurting, or a little sore heel, there is something that makes mothers out of everybody, for a minute or two. The women all twittered into a little ripple of understanding. Probably to every woman there come the picture of the little cold, wet foot and the choked toe. I know I could see it, and I can see it yet.

"'Lambin',' says Mis' Toplady, in more than two syllables, 'come here for a peppermint.'

"Chris went right over to her. 'I been thirsty for a drink of water since all day,' he says confidential. 'Have you got one?'

"Mis' Toplady went with the child, and then Mis' Emmons took something from her bag and held it up. It was Christopher's father's letter that he'd brought with him that night.

"She read the letter out loud, in everybody's perfectly breathless silence that was broken only by Christopher laughing out in the kitchen. 'My friends,' Mis' Emmons says when she'd got through, 'doesn't it seem to you as if our work had come to us? And that if it isn't Chris himself, at least it ought to be people, live people--and not an iron fence or even a monument that will show from the railroad track?'

"And with that, standing in the doorway with my arms full of bedspread, I piped right up, just like I'd been longing to pipe up ever since that night at Mis' Emmons's when I'd talked with Insley:--

"'Yes, sir,' I says emphatic, 'it does. Without meaning to be sacrilegious in the least,' I says toward Mis' Sykes, 'I believe that the Dead is a lot better prepared to take care of themselves than a good many of the Living is.'

"There was a kind of a little pause at this, all but Mis' Sykes. Mis' Sykes don't pause easy. She spoke right back, sort of elevating one temple:--

"'The object of this meeting as the chair understands it,' says she, 'is to discuss money spending, _not_ idees.'

"But I didn't pay no more attention than as if I'd been a speaker in public life. And Mis' Toplady and Christopher, coming back to the room just then, I spoke to him and took a-hold of his little shoulder.

"'Chris,' I says, 'tell 'em what you're going to be when you grow up.'

"The little boy stood up with his back against the door-casing, and he spoke back between peppermints:--

"'I'm going to drive the loads of hay,' he declares himself.

"'A little bit ago,' I says to 'em, 'he was going to be a cream-puff man, and keep a church and manufacture black velvet for people's coffins. Think of all them futures--not to spend time on other possibilities. Don't it seem like we'd ought to keep him around here somewheres and help him decide? Don't it seem like what he's going to be is resting with us?'

"But now Mis' Sykes spoke out in her most presidential tone.

"'It would be perfectly impossible,' she says, 'for Sodality to spend its money on the child or on anybody else that's living. Our constitution says we shall work for Cemetery.'

"'Well,' says I, rebellish, 'then let's rip up our old constitution and buy ourselves a new pattern.'

"Mis' Sykes was getting to verge on mad.

"'But Sodality ain't an orphan asylum, Calliope,' says she, 'nor none of us is that.'

"'Ain't we--ain't we, Mis' Sykes?' I says. 'Sometimes I donno what we're for if we ain't that.'

"And then I just clear forgot myself, in one of them times that don't let you get to sleep that night for thinking about, and that when you wake up is right there by the bed waiting for you, and that makes you feel sore when you think of afterwards--sore, but glad, too.

"'That's it,' I says, 'that's it. I've been thinking about that a good deal lately. I s'pose it's because I ain't any children of my own to be so busy for that I can't think about their real good. Seems to me there ain't a child living no matter how saucy or soiled or similar, but could look us each one in the face and say, "What you doing for me and the rest of us?" And what could we say to them? We could say: "I'm buying some of you ginghams that won't shrink nor fade. Some of you I'm cooking food for, and some of you I'm letting go without it. And some of you I'm buying school books and playthings and some of you I'm leaving without 'em. I'm making up some of your beds and teaching you your manners and I'm loving you--some of you. And the rest of you I'm leaving walk in town after dark with a hole in your stocking." _Where's the line--where's the line?_ How do we know which is the ones to do for? I tell you I'm the orphan asylum to the whole lot of 'em. And so are you. And I move the Cemetery Improvement Sodality do something for this little boy. We'd adopt him if he was dead--an' keep his grave as nice and neat as wax. Let's us adopt him instead of his grave!'

"My bedspread had slipped down onto the floor, but I never knew when nor did I see it go. All I see was that some of them agreed with me--Mis' Emmons and Mis' Toplady and Mis' Hubbelthwait and Libby and even Mame that had proposed the monument. But some of the others was waiting as usual to see how Mis' Sykes was going to believe, and Mis' Sykes she was just standing there by the piano, her cheeks getting pinker and pinker up high on her face.

"'Calliope,' she said, making a gesture. 'Ladies! this is every bit of it out of order. This ain't the subject that we come together to discuss.'

"'It kind of seems to me,' says I, 'that it's a subject we was born to discuss.'

"Mis' Toplady sort of rolled over in her chair and looked across her glasses to Mis' Sykes.

"'Madame President,' says she, 'as I understand it this fits in all right. What we're proposing is to spend Sodality's money on this little boy just the same as though he was dead. I move we do so.'

"Two-three of 'em seconded it, but scairt and scattering.

"'Mis' Toplady,' says Mis' Sykes. 'Ladies! This is a good deal too headlong. A committee'd ought--'

"'Question--question,' demands Mis' Emmons, serene, and she met my eye and smiled some, in that little _we_-understand look that can pierce through a roomful of people like the wind.

"'Mis' Emmons,' says Mis' Sykes, wildish. 'Ladies! Sodality has been organized over twenty years, doing the same thing. You can't change so offhand--' You can't help admiring Mis' Sykes, for she simply don't know when she's beat. But this time she had a point with her, too. 'If we want to vote to amend the constitution,' she said, 'you've got to lay down your wishes on the table for one week.'

"'I daresay you have,' says Mis' Emmons, looking grave. 'Well, I move that we amend the constitution of this society, and I move that we do it next week at the open annual meeting of the Sodality.'

"'Second the motion,' says I, with my feet on my white bedspread.

"And somehow the phrase caught Christopher's ear, like a tune might to march by.

"'Second a motion--second a motion!' he chants to himself, standing by Mis' Toplady's knee.

VIII

"I had promised Insley to run in the Cadozas' after the meeting, and see the little boy; and Mis' Emmons having to go home before she started back to the Proudfits', Christopher walked along with me. When we got out to the end of Daphne Street, Insley overtook us on his way out to the Cadozas', too.

"His shoes were some muddy, and I guessed that he had been where of late he'd spent as much time as he could spare, both when he was in the village and when he was over to Indian Mound. Without digging down into his eyes, the same as some do to folks that's in trouble, I had sensed that there had come down on him everybody's hour of cutting something out of life, which is as elemental a thing to do as dying is, and I donno but it's the same kind as dying is besides. And he had been taking his hour in the elemental way, wanting to be alone and to kind of get near to the earth. I mean tramping the hills, ploughing along the narrow paths close to the barb' wire fences, plunging into the little groves. The little groves have such an' I-know look of understanding all about any difficulty till you walk inside of them, when all to once they stop seeming to know about your special trouble and begin another kind of slow soothing, same as summing things up will soothe you, now and then.

"Chris chattered to him, lovable.

"'I had some peppermenges,' he says, 'and I like hot ice-cream, too. Don't you? Can you make that?' he inquires, slipping his hand in Insley's.

"Of course this made a pang--when you're hurt, 'most everything makes a pang. And this must of brought back that one evening with Robin that he would have to remember, and all the little stupid jokes they'd had that night must of rose up and hit at him, with the awful power of the little things that don't matter one bit and yet that matter everything.

"'What can _you_ make, Chris?' Insley says to him. 'Can you make candy? And pull it--like this?'

"'Once a lady stirred me some an' cut it up in squares,' Chris explained, 'but I never did make any. My mama couldn't make candy, I guess, but she could make all other things--pancakes an' mittens an' nice stove fires my mama could make. The bag we got the salt in--she made me two handkerchiefs out of that bag,' he ended proudly.

"'Did she--did she?' Insley tempted him on.

"'Yes,' Chris went on, hopping beside him, 'but now I've got to hurry an' be a man, 'cause litty boys ain't very good things. Can you make po'try?' he wound up.

"'Why, Chris--can you?' Insley asked.

"'Well, when I was comin' along with my daddy that night I made one,' the child says. And when Insley questions him a little he got this much more out of him. 'It started, "Look at the trees so green an' fair,"' he says, 'but I forget the rest.'

"'Do you want to be a poet when you grow up?' Insley ask' him.

"'Yes, I do,' the child says ready. 'I think I'll be that first an' then I'll be the President, too. But what I'd rather be is the sprinkler-cart man, wouldn't you?'

"'Conceivably,' Insley says, and by the look on his face I bet his hand tightened up on the child's hand.

"'At Sodality,' I says, 'he just told them he was going to drive loads of hay. He's made several selections.'

"He looked at me over the child's head, and I guess we was both thinking the same thing: Trust nature to work this out alone? 'Conceivably,' again. But all of a sudden I know we both burned to help to do it. And as Insley talked to the child, I think some touch of his enterprise come back and breathed on him. In them few last days I shouldn't wonder if his work hadn't stopped soaring to the meaning of spirit and sunk down again to be just body drudgery. He couldn't ever help having his old possessing love of men, and his man's strong resolution to keep a-going, but I shouldn't wonder if the wings of the thing he meant to do had got folded up. And Christopher, here, was sort of releasing them out again.

"'How's the little Cadoza boy?' I ask' him pretty soon.

"'He's getting on,' he says. 'Dr. Barrows was down yesterday--he wants him for a fortnight or so at the hospital in town, where he can have good care and food. His mother doesn't want him to go. I hoped you'd talk with her.'

"Before we got to the Cadoza house Insley looked over to me, enigmatish. 'Want to see something?' he says, and he handed me a letter. I read it, and some of it I knew what it meant and some of it I didn't. It was from Alex Proudfit, asking him up to Proudfit House to the house party.

" ... Ain't it astonishing how awful festive the word 'house party' sounds. 'Party' sounds festive, though not much more so than 'company' or 'gathering' that we use more common. 'Ball,' of course, is real glittering, and paints the inside of your head into pictures, instantaneous. But a house party--maybe it's because I never was to one; maybe it's because I never heard of one till late in life; maybe it's because nobody ever had one before in Friendship Village--but that word give me all the sensation that 'her golden coach' and 'his silver armour' and 'good fairy' used to have for me when I was a little girl. 'House party!' Anything shiny might happen to one of them. It's like you'd took something vanishin', like a party, and just seized onto it and made it stay longer than Time and the World ever intended. It's like making a business of the short-lived.

"Well, some of Alex's letter went about like this:--

"'Join us for the whole time, do,' it says, and it went on about there being rather an interesting group,--'a jolly individualist,' I recollect he says, 'for your special benefit. He'll convert you where I couldn't, because he's kept his love for men and I haven't. And of course I've some women--pretty, bless them, and thank the Lord not one of them troubling whether she loves mankind or not, so long as men love her. And there you have Nature uncovered at her task! I shall expect you for every moment that you can spare....' I remember the wording because it struck me it was all so like Alex that I could pretty near talk to it and have it answer back.

"'Tell me,' Insley says, when I handed the letter back to him, 'you know--him. Alex Proudfit. Does he put all that on? Is it his mask? Does he feel differently and do differently when folks don't know?'

"'Well,' I says, slow, 'I donno. He gives the Cadozas their rent, but when Mis' Cadoza went to thank him, once, he sent down word for her to go and see his agent.'

"He nodded, and I'd never heard him speak bitter before. 'That's it,' he says, 'that's it. That's the way we bungle things....'

"We'd got almost to the Cadozas' when we heard an automobile coming behind us, and as we stood aside to let it go by, Robin's face flashed past us at the window. Mis' Emmons was with her, that Robin had come down after. Right off the car stopped and Robin jumped out and come hurrying back towards us. I'll never forget the minute. We met right in front of the old tumble-down Cadoza house with the lilacs so high in the front yard that the place looked pretty near nice, like the rest of the world. It was a splendid afternoon, one that had got it's gold persuaded to burst through a gray morning, like colour from a bunch of silver buds; and now the air was all full of lovely things, light and little wind and late sun and I donno but things we didn't know about. And everyone of them seemed in Robin's face as she came towards us, and more, too, that we couldn't name or place.

"I think the mere exquisite girlishness of her come home to Insley as even her strength and her womanliness, that night he talked with her, had not moved him. I donno but in the big field of his man's dream, he had pretty near forgot how obvious her charm was. I'm pretty sure that in those days when he was tramping the hills alone, the thing that he was fighting with was that he was going to lose her companioning in the life they both dreamed. But now her hurrying so and her little faint agitation made her appeal a new thing, fifty times as lovely, fifty times as feminine, and sort of filling in the picture of herself with all the different kinds of women she was in one.

"So now, as he stood there with her, looking down in her face, touching her friendly hand, I think that was the first real, overhauling minute when he was just swept by the understanding that his loss was so many times what he'd thought it was going to be. For it was her that he wanted, it was her that he would miss for herself and not for any dear plans of work-fellowship alone. She understood his dream, but there was other things she understood about, too. A man can love a woman for a whole collection of little dear things--and he can lose her and grieve; he can love her for her big way of looking at things, and he can lose her and grieve; he can love her because she is his work-fellow, and he can lose her and grieve. But if, on top of one of these, he loves her because she is she, the woman that knows about life and is capable of sharing all of life with him and of being tender about it, why then if he loses her, his grieving is going to be something that there ain't rightly no name for. And I think it was that minute there in the road that it first come to Insley that Robin was Robin, that of all the many women that she was, first and most she was the woman that was capable of sharing with him all sides of living.

"'I wanted ...' she says to him, uncertain. 'Oh, I wish very much that you would accept the invitation to some of the house party. I wanted to tell you.'

"'I can't do that,' he answers, short and almost gruff. 'Really I can't do that.'

"But it seemed there was even a sort of nice childishness about her that you wouldn't have guessed. I always think it's a wonderful moment when a woman knows a man well enough to show some of her childishness to him. But a woman that shows right off, close on the heels of an introduction, how childish she can be, it always sort o' makes me mad--like she'd told her first name without being asked about it.

"'Please,' Robin says, 'I'm asking it because I wish it very much. I want those people up there to know you. I want--'

"He shook his head, looking at her, eyes, mouth, and fresh cheeks, like he wished he was able to look at her face _all at once_.

"'At least, at least,' she says to him rapid, then, 'you must come to the party at the end. You know I want to keep you for my friend--I want to make you our friend. That night Aunt Eleanor is going to announce my engagement, and I want my friends to be there.'

"That surprised me as much as it did him. Nobody in the village knew about the engagement yet except us two that knew it from that night at Mis' Emmons's. I wondered what on earth Insley was going to say and I remember how I hoped, pretty near fierce, that he wasn't going to smile and bow and wish her happiness and do the thing the world would have wanted of him. It may make things run smoother to do that way, but smoothness isn't the only thing the love of folks for folks knows about. I do like a man that now and then speaks out with the breath in his lungs and not just with the breath of his nostrils. And that's what Insley done--that's what he done, only I'm bound to say that I do think he spoke out before he knew he was going to.

"'That would be precisely why I couldn't come,' he said. 'Thank you, you know--but please don't ask me.'

"As for Robin, at this her eyes widened, and beautiful colour swept her face. And she didn't at once turn away from him, but I see how she stood looking at him with a kind of a sharp intentness, less of wonder than of stopping short.

"Christopher had run to the automobile and now he come a-hopping back.

"'Robin!' he called. 'Aunt Eleanor says you haf to be in a dress by dinner, and it's _now_.'

"'Do come for dinner, Mr. Insley,' Mis' Emmons calls, as Robin and Christopher went to join him. 'We've got up a tableau or two for afterward. Come and help me be a tableau.'

"He smiled and shook his head and answered her. And that reminded me that I'd got to hurry like wild, as usual. It was most six o'clock then,--it always _is_ either most six o'clock or most noon when I get nearest to being interested,--and that night great things was going to be going on. Mis' Sykes and Mis' Toplady and the School Board and I was going to have a tableau of our own.

"But for all that I couldn't help standing still a minute and looking after the automobile. It seemed as bad as some kind of a planet, carrying Robin off for forever and ever. And I wasn't so clear that I fancied its orbit.

"'I've got a whole string of minds not to go to that party myself,' I says, meditative.

"But Insley never answered. He just come on around the Cadozas' house.

IX