Part 4

"I wondered a little at Mis' Emmons not saying anything to her about the letter we'd found, that made us know somebody would have to do something. But just as we was starting out, Mis' Emmons says to me low, 'Don't let's say anything about his father yet. I have a plan--I want to think it over first.' And I liked knowing that already she had a plan, and I betted it was a plan that would be born four-square to its own future.

"Insley stood holding the door open. The rain had stopped altogether now, and the night was full of little things sticking their heads up in deep grasses and beginning to sing about it. I donno about what, but about something nice. And Insley was looking toward Robin, and I see that all the ancestors he'd ever had was lingering around in his face, like they knew about something he was just beginning to know about. Something nice--nicer than the little outdoor voices.

"'Good night, Miss Sidney,' he says. 'And what a good night for Christopher!' And he looked as if he wanted to add: 'And for me.'

"'Good night, Mis' Emmons,' I says. 'It's been an evening like a full meal.'

IV

"By messenger the next day noon come a letter for me that made me laugh a little and that made me a little bit mad, too. This was it:--

"'Dear Calliope:

"'Come up and help straighten things out, do. This place breathes desolation. Everything is everywhere except everything which everyone wants, which is lost. Come at once, Calliope, pray, and dine with me to-night and give me as much time as you can for a fortnight. I'm having some people here next week--twenty or so for over the Fourth--and a party. A company, you know! I need you.

"'ALEX PROUDFIT.'

"It was so exactly like Alex to send for me just plain because he wanted me. Never a word about if I was able or if I wasn't putting up berries or didn't have company or wasn't dead. I hadn't heard a sound from him in the two years or more that he'd been gone, and yet now it was just 'Come,' like a lord. And for that matter like he used to do when he was in knickerbockers and coming to my house for fresh cookies, whether I had any baked or not. But I remember actually baking a batch for him one day while he galloped his pony up and down the Plank Road waiting for them. And I done the same way now. I got my work out of the way and went right up there, like I'd always done for that family in the forty years I could think back to knowing them, when I was a girl. I guessed that Alex had lit down sudden, a day or so behind his telegram to the servants; and I found that was what he had done.

"Proudfit House stands on a hill, and it looks like the hill had billowed up gentle from underneath and had let some of the house flow down the sides. It was built ambitious, of the good cream brick that gives to a lot of our Middle West towns their colour of natural flax in among the green; it had been big in the beginning, and to it had been added a good many afterthoughts and postscripts of conservatory and entrance porch and sun room and screened veranda, till the hill couldn't hold them all. The house was one of them that was built fifty years ago and that has since been pecked and patted to suit modern uses, pinched off here and pulled off there to fit notions refining themselves gradual. And all the time the house was let to keep some nice, ugly things that after a while, by mere age and use-to-ness, were finally accepted wholesale as dignified and desirable. The great brown mansard roof, niched and glassed in two places for statues--and having them, too, inside my memory and until Mr. Alex pulled them down; the scalloped tower on a wing; the round red glass window on a stairway--these we all sort of come to agree to as qualities of the place that couldn't be changed no more'n the railroad track. Tapestries and water-colours and Persian carpets went on inside the house, but outside was all the little twists of a taste that had started in naked and was getting dressed up by degrees.

"Since the marriage of her daughter Clementina, Madame Proudfit had spent a good deal of time abroad, and the house had been shut up. This shutting up of people's houses always surprises me. When I shut up my house to go away for a couple of months or so, I just make sure the kitchen fire is out, and I carry the bird down to Mis' Holcomb's, and I turn the key in the front door and start off. But land, land when Proudfit House is going to be shut, the servants work days on end. Rugs up, curtains down, furniture covered and setting around out of place, pictures and ornaments wrapped up in blue paper--I always wonder _why_. Closing my house is like putting it to sleep for a little while, but closing Proudfit House is some like seeing it through a spasm and into a trance. They done that to the house most every summer, and I used to think they acted like spring was a sort of contagion, or a seventeen-year locust, or something to be fumigated for. I supposed that was the way the house looked when Alex got home to it, and of course a man must hate it worse than a woman does, because he doesn't know which end to tell them to take hold of to unravel. So I went right up there when he sent for me--and then it was a little fun, too, to be on the inside of what was happening there, that all the village was so curious about.

"He'd gone off when I got there, gone off on horseback on some business, but he'd left word that he'd be back in a little while, and would I help him out in the library. I knew what that meant. The books was all out of the shelves and packed in paper, and he wanted me to see that they got back into their right places, like I'd done many and many a time for his mother. So I worked there the whole afternoon, with a couple of men to help me, and the portrait of Linda Proudfit on the wall watching me like it wanted to tell me something, maybe about the way she went off and died, away from home; and a little after four o'clock a servant let somebody into the room.

"I looked up expecting to see Alex, and it surprised me some to see Insley instead. But I guessed how it was: that Alex Proudfit being a logical one to talk over Friendship Village with, Insley couldn't lose a day in bringing him his letter.

"'Well, Miss Marsh,' says he, 'and do you live everywhere, like a good fairy?'

"I thought afterwards that I might have said to him: 'No, Mr. Insley. And do you appear everywhere, like a god?' But at the time I didn't think of anything to say, and I just smiled. I'm like that,--if I like anybody, I can't think of a thing to say back; but to Silas Sykes I could talk back all day.

"We'd got the room part in order by then, and Insley sat down and looked around him, enjoyable. It was a beautiful room. I always think that that library ain't no amateur at its regular business of being a vital part of the home. Some rooms are awful amateurs at it, and some ain't no more than apprentices, and some are downright enemies to the house they're in. But that library I always like to look around. It seems to me, if I really knew about such things, and how they ought to be, I couldn't like that room any better. Colour, proportion, window, shadow--they was all lined up in a kind of an enjoyable professionalism of doing their best. The room was awake now, too--I had the windows open and I'd started the clock. Insley set looking around as if there was sighs inside him. I knew how, down in New England, his father's home sort of behaved itself like this home. But after college, he had had to choose his way, and he had faced about to the new west, the new world, where big ways of living seemed to him to be sweeping as a wind sweeps. He had chose as he had chose, and I suppose he was glad of that; but I knew the room he had when he was in town, at Threat Hubbelthwait's hotel, must be a good deal like being homesick, and that this library was like coming home.

"'Mr. Proudfit had just returned and would be down at once,' the man come back and told him. And while he waited Insley says to me:

"'Have you seen anything of the little boy to-day, Miss Marsh?'

"I was dying to answer back: 'Yes, I see Miss Sidney early this morning,' but you can't answer back all you die to. So I told him yes, I'd seen all three of them and they was to be up in the city all day to buy some things for Christopher. Mis' Emmons and Robin was both to come up to Proudfit House to Alex's house party--seems they'd met abroad somewheres a year or more back; and they was going to bring Christopher, who Mis' Emmons didn't show any sign of giving up while her plan, whatever it was, was getting itself thought over. So they'd whisked the child off to the city that day to get him the things he needed. And there wasn't time to say anything more, for in come Alex Proudfit.

"He was in his riding clothes--horseback dress we always call it in the village, which I s'pose isn't city talk, proper. He was long and thin and brown, and sort of slow-moving in his motions, but quick and nervous in his talk; and I don't know what there was about him--his clothes, or his odd, old-country looking ring, or the high white thing wound twice around his neck, or his way of pronouncing his words--but he seemed a good deal like a picture of a title or a noted man. The minute you looked at him, you turned proud of being with him, and you pretty near felt distinguished yourself, in a nice way, because you was in his company. Alex was like that.

"'I don't like having kept you waiting,' he says to Insley. 'I'm just in. By Jove, I've left Topping's letter somewhere--Insley, is it? thank you. Of course. Well, Calliope, blessings! I knew I could count on you. How are you--you look it. No, don't run away. Keep straight on--Mr. Insley will pardon us getting settled under his nose. Now what can I get you, Mr. Insley? If you've walked up, you're warm. No? As you will. It's mighty jolly getting back--for a minute, you know. I couldn't stop here. How the devil do you stop here all the time--or do you stop here all the time?...' All this he poured out in a breath. He always had talked fast, but now I see that he talked more than fast--he talked foreign.

"'I'm here some of the time,' says Insley; 'I hoped that you were going to be, too.'

"'I?' Alex said. 'Oh, no--no. I feel like this: while I'm in the world, I want it at its best. I want it at its latest moment. I want to be living _now_. Friendship Village--why, man, it's living half a century ago--anyway, a quarter. It doesn't know about A.D. nineteen-anything. I love the town, you know, for what it is. But confound it, I'm living _now_.'

"Insley leaned forward. I was dusting away on an encyclopædia, but I see his face and I knew what it meant. This was just what he'd been hoping for. Alex Proudfit was a man who understood that the village hadn't caught up. So he would want to help it--naturally he would.

"'I'm amazed at the point of view,' Alex went on. 'I never saw such self-sufficiency as the little towns have. In England, on the continent, the villages know their place and keep it, look up to the towns and all that--play the peasant, as they are. Know their betters. Here? Bless you. Not a man down town here but will tell you that the village has got everything that is admirable. They believe it, too. Electric light, water, main street paved, cemetery kept up, "nice residences," telephones, library open two nights a week, fresh lettuce all winter--fine, up-to-date little place! And, Lord, but it's a back-water. With all its improvements the whole _idea_ of modern life somehow escapes it--music and art, drama, letters, manners, as integral parts of everyday living--what does it know of them? It thinks these things are luxuries, outside the scheme of real life, like monoplanes. Jove, it's delicious!'

"He leaned back, laughing. Insley must have felt his charm. Alex always was fascinating. His eyes were gray and sort of hobnobbed with your own; his square chin just kind of threatened a dimple without breaking into one; his dark hair done clusters like a statue; and then there was a lot of just plain charm pouring off him. But of course more than with this, Insley was filled with his own hope: if Alex Proudfit understood some things about the village that ought to be made right, it looked to him as though they might do everything together.

"'Why,' Insley says, 'you don't know--you don't know how glad I am to hear you say this. It's exactly the thing my head has been full of....'

"'Of course your head is full of it,' says Alex. 'How can it help but be when you're fast here some of the time? If you don't mind--what is it that keeps you here at all? I don't think I read Topping's letter properly....'

"Insley looked out from all over his face.

"'I stay,' he says, 'just because all this _is_ so. It needs somebody to stay, don't you think?'

"'Ah, yes, I see,' says Alex, rapid and foreign. 'How do you mean, though? Surely you don't mean renouncing--and that sort of thing?'

"'Renouncing--no!' says Insley. 'Getting into the game.'

"He got his enthusiasm down into still places and outlined what he meant. It was all at the ends of his fingers--what there was to do if the town was to live up to itself, to find ways to express the everyday human fellowship that Insley see underneath everything. And Alex Proudfit listened, giving that nice, careful, pacifying attention of his. He was always so polite that his listening was like answering. When Insley got through, Alex's very disagreeing with him was sympathizing.

"'My dear man,' says he--I remember every word because it was something I'd wondered sometimes too, only I'd done my wondering vague, like you do--'My dear man, but are you not, after all, anticipating? This is just the way Nature works--beating these things into the heads and hearts of generations. Aren't you trying to do it all at once?'

"'I'm trying to help nature, to be a part of nature--exactly,' says Insley, 'and to do it here in Friendship Village.'

"'Why,' says Alex, 'you'll be talking about facilitating God's plan next--helping him along, by Jove.'

"Insley looks at him level. 'I mean that now,' he says, 'if you want to put it that way.'

"'Good Lord,' says Alex, 'but how do you know what--what he wants?'

"'Don't you?' says Insley, even.

"Alex Proudfit turned and touched a bell. 'Look here,' he says, 'you stay and dine, won't you? I'm alone to-night--Calliope and I are. Stay. I always enjoy threshing this out.'

"To the man-servant who just about breathed with a well-trained stoop of being deferential, his master give the order about the table. 'And, Bayless, have them hunt out some of those tea-roses they had in bloom the other day--you should see them, Calliope. Oh, and, Bayless, hurry dinner a bit. I'm as hungry as lions,' he added to us, and he made me think of the little boy in knickerbockers, asking me for fresh cookies.

"He slipped back to their topic, ranking it right in with tea-roses. In the hour before dinner they went on 'threshing it out' there in that nice luxurious room, and through the dinner, too--a simple, perfect dinner where I didn't know which to eat, the plates or the food, they was both so complete. Up to Proudfit House I can hardly ever make out whether I'm chewing flavours or colours or shapes, but I donno as I care. Flavours, thank my stars, aren't the only things in life I know how to digest.

"First eager, then patient, Insley went over his ground, setting forth by line and by line, by vision and by vision, the faith that was in him--faith in human nature to come into its own, faith in the life of a town to work into human life at its best. And always down the same road they went, they come a-canterin' back with Alex Proudfit's 'Precisely. It is precisely what is happening. You can't force it. You mustn't force it. To do the best we can with ourselves and to help up an under dog or two--if he deserves it--that's the most Nature lets us in for. Otherwise she says: "Don't meddle. I'm doing this." And she's right. We'd bungle everything. Believe me, my dear fellow, our spurts of civic righteousness and national reform never get us anywhere in the long run. In the long run, things go along and go along. You can't stop them. If you're wise, you won't rush them.'

"At this I couldn't keep still no longer. We was at the table then, and I looked over to Alex between the candlesticks and felt as if he was back in knickerbockers again, telling me God had made enough ponies so he could gallop his all day on the Plank Road if he wanted to.

"'You and Silas Sykes, Alex,' I says, 'have come to the same motto. Silas says Nature is real handy about taking her course so be you don't yank open cocoons and buds and like that.'

"'Old Silas,' says Alex. 'Lord, is he still going on about everything? Old Silas....'

"'Yes,' I says, 'he is. And so am I. Out by my woodshed I've got a Greening apple tree. When it was about a year old a cow I used to keep browst it down. It laid over on the ground, broke clean off all but one little side of bark that kept right on doing business with sap, like it didn't know its universe was sat on. I didn't get time for a week or two to grub it up, and when I did go to it, I see it was still living, through that little pinch of bark. I liked the pluck, and I straightened it up and tied it to the shed. I used to fuss with it some. Once in a storm I went out and propped a dry-goods box over it. I kept the earth rich and drove the bugs off. I kind of got interested in seeing what it would do next. What it done was to grow like all possessed. It was twenty years ago and more that the cow come by it, and this year I've had seven bushels of Greenings off that one tree. Suppose I hadn't tied it up?'

"'You'd have saved yourself no end of trouble, dear Calliope,' says Alex, 'to say nothing of sparing the feelings of the cow.'

"'I ain't so anxious any more,' says I, 'about sparing folks' feelings as I am about sparing folks. Nor I ain't so crazy as I used to be about saving myself trouble, either.'

"'Dear Calliope,' says Alex, 'what an advocate you are. Won't you be my advocate?'

"He wouldn't argue serious with me now no more than he would when he was in knickerbockers. But yet he was adorable. When we got back to the library, I went on finishing up the books and I could hear him being adorable. He dipped down into the past and brought up rich things--off down old ways of life in the village that he'd had a part in and then off on the new ways where his life had led him. Java--had Insley ever been in Java? He must show him the moonstone he got there and tell him the story they told him about it. But the queerest moonstone story was one he'd got in Lucknow--so he goes on, and sends Bayless for a cabinet, and from one precious stone and another he just naturally drew out romances and adventures, as if he was ravelling the stones out into them. And then he begun taking down some of his old books. And when it come to books, the appeal to Insley was like an appeal of friends, and he burrowed into them musty parchments abundant.

"'By George,' Insley says once, 'I didn't dream there were such things in Friendship Village.'

"'Next thing you'll forget they're in the world,' says Alex, significant. 'Believe me, a man like you ought not to be down here, or over to Indian Mound, either. It's an economic waste. Nature has fitted you for her glorious present and you're living along about four decades ago. Don't you think of that?...'

"Then the telephone on the library table rang and he answered a call from the city. 'Oh, buy it in, buy it in, by all means,' he directs. 'Yes, cable to-night and buy it in. That,' he says, as he hung up, 'just reminds me. There's a first night in London to-night that I've been promising myself to see.... What a dog's life a business man leads. By the way,' he goes on, 'I've about decided to put in one of our plants around here somewhere--a tannery, you know. I've been off to-day looking over sites. I wonder if you can't give me some information I'm after about land around Indian Mound. I'm not saying anything yet, naturally--they'll give other people a bonus to establish in their midst, but the smell of leather is too much for them. We always have to surprise them into it. But talk about the ultimate good of a town ... if a tannery isn't that, what is it?'

"It was after nine o'clock when I got the books set right--I loved to handle them, and there was some I always looked in before I put them up because some of the pictures give me feelings I remembered, same as tasting some things will--spearmint and caraway and coriander. Insley, of course, walked down with me. Alex wanted to send us in the automobile, but I'm kind of afraid of them in the dark. I can't get it out of my head that every bump we go over may be bones. And then I guess we both sort of wanted the walk.

"Insley was like another man from the one that had come into the library that afternoon, or had been talking to us at Mis' Emmons's the night before. Down in the village, on Mis' Emmons's hearth, with Robin sitting opposite, it had seemed so easy to know ways to do, and to do them. Everything seemed possible, as if the whole stiff-muscled universe could be done things to if only everybody would once say to it: _Our_ universe. But now, after his time with Alex, I knew how everything had kind of _tightened_, closed in around him, shot up into high walls. Money, tanneries, big deals by cable, moonstones from Java, they almost made me slimpse too, and think, What's the use of believing Alex Proudfit and me belong to the same universe? So I guessed how Insley was feeling, ready to believe that he had got showed up to himself in his true light, as a young, emotioning creature who dreams of getting everybody to belong together, and yet can't find no good way. And Alex Proudfit's parting words must of followed him down the drive and out on to the Plank Road:--

"'Take my advice. Don't spend yourself on this blessed little hole. It's dear to me, but it _is_ a hole ... eh? You won't get any thanks for it. Ten to one they'll turn on you if you try to be one of them. Get out of here as soon as possible, and be in the real world! This is just make-believing--and really, you know, you're too fine a sort to throw yourself away like this. Old Nature will take care of the town in good time without you. Trust her!'

"Sometimes something happens to make the world seem different from what we thought it was. Them times catch all of us--when we feel like we'd been let down gentle from some high foot-path where we'd been going along, and instead had been set to walk a hard road in a silence that pointed its finger at us. If we get really knocked down sudden from a high foot-path, we can most generally pick ourselves up and rally. But when we've been let down gentle by arguments that seem convincing, and by folks that seem to know the world better than we do, then's the time when there ain't much of any rally to us. If we're any good, I s'pose we can climb back without rallying. Rallying gives some spring to the climb, but just straight dog-climbing will get us there, too.

"It was a lovely July night, with June not quite out of the world yet. There was that after-dark light in the sky that makes you feel that the sky is going to stay lit up behind and shining through all night, as if the time was so beautiful that celestial beings must be staying awake to watch it, and to keep the sky lit and turned down low.... We walked along the Plank Road pretty still, because I guessed how Insley's own thoughts was conversation enough for him; but when we got a ways down, he kind of reached out with his mind for something and me being near by, his mind clutched at me.