Part 9

He looked down at me, frowning a little. One of the little yellow chicks in the coop got out between the bars just then, and was just falling on its nose when he caught it--I s’pose bill is more biologic, but it don’t sound so dangerous--and he was tucking it back in, gentle, with its mother, while he answered me, testy:

“Lord, Calliope,” he says, “a flood’s a flood. Can’t you keep things separate?”

“No, sir,” I says, “I can’t. Nor I don’t believe the Lord can either.”

Ain’t it like things was arranged to happen in patterns, same as crystals? For it was just in them next two minutes that two things happened: The first was that a boy came riding over on his wheel from the telegraph office and give a telegram to Timothy. And Timothy opened it and waved it over his head, and come with it over to us:

“First contribution for the flood-suffers!” says he. “They telephoned the news over to Red Barns and listen at this: ‘Put me down for Twenty-five dollars towards the flood folks food. Zachariah Roper.’”

I looked over to Timothy straight.

“Zachariah Roper,” I says, “that owns the cement plant that some of the Flat folks got in the way of?”

Timothy jerked his shoulder distasteful. “The idear,” says he, “of bringin’ up business at a time like this.”

With that I looked over at Silas, and I see him with the scarcest thing in the world for him--a little pinch of a smile on his face. Just for a minute he met my eyes. Then he looked down to get his hand a little farther away from where the old hen in the coop had been picking it.

And the other thing that happened was that up in front of me come running little Mrs. Bitty Marshall, and her eyes was full of tears.

“Oh, Mis’ Marsh,” she says, “what do you s’pose I done? I come off and left my lace curtain. I took it down first thing and pinned it up in a paper to bring. And then I come off and left it.”

Before I could say a word Silas answered her:

“The water’ll never get up that far, Mis’ Marshall,” he says, “don’t you worry. Don’t you worry one bit. But,” says he, “if anything does happen to it, Mis’ Marshall, I’ll tell you now you can have as good a one as we’ve got in the store, _on me_. There now, you’ve had a present to-day a’ready!”

I guess she thanked him. I donno. All I remember is that pretty soon everybody begun to move towards town and I moved with ’em. And while we walked the whole thing kind of begun to take hold of me, what it meant, and things that had been coming to me all the morning came to me all together--and I wanted to chant ’em a chant, like Deborah (but pronounced Déborah when it’s a relative). And I wanted to say:

“O Lord, look down on these eighty families, old and young and real young, that we’ve lived neighbor to all our lives, and yet we don’t know half of ’em, either by name or by face, till now. Till now!

“And some of them we do know individual has showed up here to-day with a back-ground of families, wives and children they’ve got, just like anybody--Tippie that drives the dray and that’s helped moved everybody; for twelve years he’s moved my refrigerator out and my cook stove in, and vicious verses, as regular as Spring come and Autumn arrived; and there all the time he had a wife, with a cameo pin, and three little Tippies in plaid skirts and pink cheeks, asking everybody for a drink of water just like your own child, and one of ’em so nice that he might of been anybody’s instead of just Tippie’s.

“And Mamie Felt, that does up lace curtains of them that can afford to have ’em done up and dries ’em on a frame so’s they hang straight and not like a waterfall with its expression blowing sideways, same as mine do--there’s Mamie with her old mother and a cripple brother that we’ve never guessed about, and that she was doing for all the whole time.

“And Absalom Ricker’s old mother, that’s mourning bitter because she left her coral pin with a dog on behind on the Flats that her husband give it to her when they was engaged ... and we knew she was married, but not one of us had thought of her as human enough ever to have been engaged. And Mis’ Haskitt with her new black dress, and Mis’ Dole with her clean-ironed clothes bars, and Mis’ Bitty Marshall with her baby and her little chickens and her lace curtain, and Bitty with his grocery store.

“Lord, we thank thee for letting us see them, and all the rest of ’em, _close up to_.

“We’re glad that now just because the Mad river flowed into the homes that we ain’t often been in or ever, if any, and drove up to us the folks that we’ve never thought so very much about, we’re glad to get the feeling that I had when I heard our grocery-boy knew how to hand-carve wood and our mail man was announced to sing a bass solo, that we never thought they had any regular lives, separate from milk and mail.

“And let us keep that feeling, O Lord! Amen.”

And I says right out of the fullness of the lump in my throat:

“Don’t these folks seem so much more folks than they ever did before?”

Mis’ Merriman that was near me, answered up:

“Why, of course,” she says, “they’re in trouble. Ain’t you no compassion to you?”

“Some,” says I, modest, “but where’d that compassion come from? It didn’t just grow up now, did it?--like Abraham’s gourd, or whoever it was that had one?”

“Why, no,” she says irritable. “It’s in us all, of course. But it takes trouble to bring it out.”

“Why does it take trouble to bring it out?” I says and I looked ahead at us all a-streaming down Daphne Street, just like it was some nice human doings. “Why does it? Here’s us all, and it only takes a minute to get us all going, with our hands in our pockets and lumps in our throats and our sympathy just as busy as it ever was for our little family in-four-walls affairs. Now,” I says, “that love and sympathy, and them pockets and them throats are all here, just the same, day after day. What I want to know is, what are them things doing with themselves when nobody is in active trouble?”

And then I said my creed:

“O, when we get to working as hard to keep things from happening as we work when it’s happened, won’t living be fun?”

“Well, of course we couldn’t prevent floods,” says Mis’ Merriman, “and them natural things.”

“Shucks!” I says, simple. “If we knew as much about frosts and hurricanes as we do about comets--we’d show you. And do you think it’s any harder to bank in a river than it is to build a subway--_if_ there was the same money in it for the company?”

Just then the noon whistles blew--all of ’em together, round-house and brick-yard, so’s you couldn’t tell ’em apart; and the sun come shining down on us all, going along on Daphne Street. And all of a sudden Mis’ Merriman looked over to me and smiled, and so I done to her, and I saw that our morning together and our feeling together had made us forget whatever there’d been between us to forget about. And I ain’t ever in my life felt so kin to folks. I felt kinner than I knew I was.

* * * * *

That night, tired as I was, I walked over to see Mis’ Sykes’s night-blooming cereus--I don’t see enough pretty things to miss one when I can get to it. And there, sitting on Mis’ Sykes’s front porch, with her shoes slipped off to rest her feet, was Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame Bliss.

“Mis’ Sykes is out getting in a few pieces she washed out and forgot,” says Mame, “and the Marshalls is all down town in a body sending a postal to say they’re safe. Silas went too.”

“The _Marshalls_!” says I. “Are they _here_?”

Mame nodded. “Silas asked ’em,” she says. “Him and Bitty’ve been looking over grocery stock catalogues. Silas’s been advising him some.”

Mame and I smiled in concert. But whether the flood done it, or whether we done it--who cared?

“But, land, _you_, Mame!” I says. “I thought you--I thought Mis’ Sykes....”

“I know it,” says Mame. “I was. She did. But the first thing I knew to-day, there we was peeling potatoes together in the same pan, and we done it all afternoon. I guess we kind of forgot about our bad feeling....”

I set there, smiling in the dark.... I donno whether you know a village, along toward night, with the sky still pink, and folks watering their front lawns and calling to each other across the streets, and a little smell of bon-fire smoke coming from somewheres? It was like that. And when Mis’ Sykes come to tell us the flower was beginning to bloom, I says to myself that there was lots more in bloom in the world than any of us guessed.

THE PARTY

Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman done her mourning like she done her house work--thorough. She was the kind of a housekeeper that looks on the week as made up of her duties, and the days not needing other names: Washday, Ironday, Mend-day, Bakeday, Freeday, Scrubday, and Sunday--that was how they went. With them nothing interfered without it was a circus or a convention or a company or the extra work on holidays. She kept house all over her, earnest; and when the Fire Chief died, that was the way she mourned.

When I say mourning I mean what you do besides the feeling bad part. She felt awful bad about her husband, but her mourning was somehow kind of separate from her grieving. Her grieving was done with her feelings, but her mourning was done more physical, like a diet. After the first year there was certain things she would and wouldn’t do, count of mourning, and nothing could change them.

Weddings and funerals Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman stayed true to. She would go to either. “Getting connect’ or getting buried,” she said, “them are both religious occasions, and they’s somethin’ so sad about either of ’em that they kind of fit in with weeds.”

But she wouldn’t go to a party if there was more than three or four to it, and not then if one of ’em was a stranger to her. And she wouldn’t go to it unless it was to a house--picnics, where you sat around on the ground, she said, was too informal for them in mourning. Church meetings she went to, but not club meetings, except the Cemetery Improvement Sodality ones. It was like keeping track of etiquette to know what to do with Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman.

“Seems though Aunt Hettie is more married now than she was when Uncle Eben was living,” her niece use’ to say.

It was on the little niece, Harriet Wells,--named for Mis’ Chief and come to live with her a while before the Fire Chief died,--it was on her that Mis’ Merriman’s mourning etiquette fell the heaviest. Harriet was twenty and woman-pretty and beau-interested; and Amos More, that worked in Eppleby’s feed store and didn’t hev no folks, he’d been shining round the Merriman house some, and Harriet had been shining back, modest and low-wicked, but lit. He was spending mebbe a couple of evenings a week there and taking Harriet to sociables and entertainments some. But when the Fire Chief died Mis’ Merriman set her foot down on Amos.

“I couldn’t stand it,” she says, “to hev a man comin’ here that wasn’t the Chief. I couldn’t stand it to hev sparkin’ an’ courtin’ goin’ on all around me. An’ if I should hev to hev a weddin’ got ready for in this house--the dressmakin’ an’ like that--I believe I should scream.”

So Amos he give up going there and just went flocking around by himself, and Harriet, she give all her time to her aunt, looking like a little lonesome candle that nothing answered back to. And Mis’ Merriman’s mourning flourished like a green bay tree.

It was into this state of affairs, more than a year after the Chief died, that Mis’ Merriman’s cousin’s letter come. Mis’ Merriman’s cousin had always been one of them myth folks that every town has--the relations and friends of each other that is talked about and known about and heard from and even asked after, but that none of us ever sees. This cousin, Maria Carpenter, was one of our most intimate myths. Next to the Fire Chief himself, Mis’ Merriman give the most of her time in conversation to her. She was real dressy--she used to send Mis’ Merriman samples of her clothes and their trimmings, and we all felt real well acquainted and interested; and she was rich and busy and from the city, and the kind of a relation it done Mis’ Merriman good to have connected with her, and her photograph with a real lace collar was on the parlor mantel. She had never been to Friendship Village, and we used to wonder why not.

And then she got the word that her cousin was actually flesh-an’-blood coming. I run in to Mis’ Merriman’s on my way home from town just after Harriet had brought her up the letter, and Mis’ Merriman was all of a heap in the big chair.

“Calliope,” she says, “the blow is down! Maria Carpenter is a-comin’ Tuesday to stay till Friday.”

“Well,” I says, “ain’t you glad, Mis’ Fire Chief? Company ain’t no great chore now the telephone is in,” I says to calm her.

She looked up at me, sad, over her glasses.

“What good is it to have her come?” she says. “I can’t show her off. There won’t be a livin’ place I can take her to. Nobody’ll see her nor none of her clothes.”

“It’s too bad,” I says absent, “it didn’t happen so’s you could give a company for Miss Carpenter.”

Mis’ Fire Chief burst out like her feelings overflowed themselves.

“It’s what I’ve always planned,” she says. “Many a night I’ve laid awake an’ thought about the company I’d give when Maria come. An’ Maria never could come. An’ now here is Maria all but upon me, an’ the company can’t be. I know she’ll bring a dress, expectin’ it. She knows it’s past the first year, an’ she’ll think I’ll feel free to entertain. I donno but I ought to telegraph her: _Pleased to see you but don’t you expect a company._ Wouldn’t that be more open an’ aboveboard? Oh, dear!” Mis’ Fire Chief says, rockin’ in her chair that wouldn’t rock, “I’m well an’ the house is all in order an’ I could afford a company if I didn’t go in deep. But I couldn’t bear to be to it. That’s it, Calliope; I couldn’t bear to be to it.”

I remember Mis’ Fire Chief kind of stopped then, like she thought of something; but I wasn’t looking at her. I was watching Harriet Wells that was standing by the window a little to one side. And I see her lift her hand and give it a little wave and lay it on the glass like a signal to somebody. And all of a sudden I knew it was half past ’leven and that Amos More went home early to his dinner at the boarding house so’s to get back at twelve-thirty, when Eppleby went for his, and that nine to ten it was Amos that Harriet was waving at. I knew it special and sure when Harriet turned back to the room with a nice little guilty look and a pink spot up high on both her cheeks. And something sort o’ shut up in my throat. It seems so easy for folks to get married in this world, and here was these two not doing it.

All of a sudden Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman jumped up on to her feet.

“Calliope Marsh,” says she, “I’ve got a plan. I can do it, if you’ll help me. Why can’t I give a company,” she says, “an’ not come in the room? A hostess has to be in the kitchen most of the time anyway. Why can’t I just stay there, an’ leave Maria be in the parlor, an’ me not be to the company at all?”

We talked it over, and neither of us see why not. Mis’ Sykes, when she gives her series of companies, three in three days running, she often don’t set foot in the parlor till after the refreshments are served. I remember once she was so faint she had to go back to the kitchen and eat her own supper, and we didn’t say good-by to her at all, except as some of us that knew her best went and stuck our heads out the kitchen door. So with all us ladies--we done the same way when we entertained, so be we give ’em any kind of a lay-out.

“I won’t say anything about the party bein’ for Maria, one way or the other,” she says; “I won’t make a spread about it, nor much of an event. I’ll just send out invites for a quiet time. Then when they come, you can stay in the room with Maria at first an’ get her introduced. An’ after that the party can go ahead on its own legs, just as well without me as with me. I could only fly in now an’ then anyhow, an’ talk to ’em snatchy, with my mind on the supper. Why ain’t it just as good to stay right out of it altogether?”

We see it reasonable. And a couple of days before Maria Carpenter was expected, Mis’ Fire Chief, she went to work, Harriet helping her, and she got her invitations out. They was on some black bordered paper and envelopes that Mis’ Fire Chief had had for a mourning Christmas present an’ had been saving. And they was worded real delicate, like Mis’ Fire Chief done everything:

Mrs. Merriman, At Home, Thursday afternoon, Four o’clock Sharp, Thimbles. Six o’clock Supper. Walk right in past the bell.

It made quite a little stir in Friendship Village, because Mis’ Merriman hadn’t been anywheres yet. But everybody took it all right. And anyway, everybody was too busy getting ready, to bother much over anything else. It’s quite a problem to know what to wear to a winter company in Friendship Village. Nobody entertains much of any in the winter--its a chore to get the parlor cleaned and het, and it’s cold for ’em to lay off their things, and you can’t think up much that’s tasty for refreshments, being it’s too cold to give ’em ice cream. Mis’ Fire Chief was giving the party on the afternoon of Miss Carpenter’s three o’clock arrival, in the frank an’ public hope that somebody would dance around during her stay and give her a return invite out to tea or somewheres.

The morning of the day that was the day, there come a rap to my door while I was stirring up my breakfast, and there was Harriet Wells, bare-headed and a shawl around her, and looking summer-sweet in her little pink muslin dressing sacque that matched her cheeks and showed off her blue eyes.

“Aunt Hettie wants to know,” she says, “whether you can’t come over now so’s to get an early start. She’s afraid the train’ll get in before we’re ready for it.”

“Land!” I says, “I know how she feels. The last company I give I got up and swep’ by lamplight and had my cake all in the oven by 6 A.M. Come in while I eat my breakfast and I’ll run right back with you and leave my dishes setting. How’s your aunt standing it?” I ask’ her.

“Oh, pretty well, thank you,” says Hettie, “but she’s awful nervous. She hasn’t et for two days--not since the invitations went out o’ the house--an’ last night she dreamt about the Chief. That always upsets her an’ makes her cross all next day.”

“If she wasn’t your aunt,” I says, “I’d say, ‘Deliver me from loving the dead so strong that I’m ugly to the living.’ But she _is_ your aunt and a good woman--so I’m mum as you please.”

Hettie, she sighs some. “She _is_ a good woman,” she says, wistful; “but, oh, Mis’ Marsh, they’s some good women that it’s terrible hard to live with,” she says--an’ then she choked up a little because she _had_ said it. But I, and all Friendship Village, knew it for the truth. And we all wanted to be delivered from people that’s so crazy to be moral and proper themselves, in life or in mourning, that they walk over everybody else’s rights and stomp down everybody’s feelin’s. My eyes filled up when I looked at that poor, lonesome little thing, sacrificed like she was to Mis’ Fire Chief’s mourning spree.

“Hettie,” I says, “Amos More goes by here every morning about now on his way to his work. When he goes by this morning, want to know what I’m going to tell him?”

“Yes’m,” says Hettie, simple, blushing up like a pink lamp shade when you’ve lit the lamp.

“I’m a-goin’ to tell him,” says I, “that I’m going to ask Eppleby Holcomb to let him off for a couple of ours or so this morning, an’ a couple more this afternoon. I want he should come over to Mis’ Fire Chief’s an’ chop ice an help turn freezer.” (We was going to feed ’em ice cream even if it was winter.) “I’m getting too old for such fancy jobs myself, and you ain’t near strong enough, and Mis’ Chief, I know how she’ll be. She won’t reco’nize her own name by nine o’clock.”

While I was finding out what cocoanut and raisins and such they’d got in stock, along come Amos More, hands hanging loose like he’d lost his grip on something. I called to him, and pretended not to notice Harriet’s little look into the clock-door looking-glass, and when he come in I ’most forgot what I’d meant to say to him, it was so nice to see them two together. I never see two more in love with every look of each other’s.

“Why, Harriet!” says Amos, as if saying her name was his one way of breathing.

“Good mornin’, Amos,” Harriet says, rose-pink and looking at the back of her hand.

Amos just give me a little nice smile, and then he didn’t seem to know I was in the room. He went straight up to her and caught a-hold of the fringe of her shawl.

“Harriet,” he says, “how long have I got to go on livin’ on the sight of you through that dinin’-room window? Yes, livin’. It’s the only time I’m alive all day long--just when I see you there, signalin’ me--an’ when I know you ain’t forgot. But I can’t go on this way--I can’t, I can’t.”

“What can I do--what can I do, Amos?” she says, faint.

“Do? Chuck everything for me--if you love me enough,” says Amos, neat as a recipe.

“I owe Aunt Hettie too much,” says Hettie, firm; “I ain’t that kind--to turn on her ungrateful.”

“I know it. I love you for that too,” says Amos, “I love you on account of everything you do. And I tell you I can’t live like this much longer.”

“Well said!” I broke in, brisk; “I can help you over this day anyhow. You go on down-town, Amos, and get the stuff on this list I’ve made out, and then you come on up to Mis’ Fire Chief’s. We need a man and we need you. I’ll fix it with Eppleby.”

They wasn’t any need to explain to Mis’ Fire Chief. She was so excited she didn’t know whether she was a-foot or a-horseback. When Amos got back with the things I’d sent for she didn’t seem half to sense it was him I was sending out in the woodshed to chop ice. She didn’t hev her collar on nor her shoes buttoned, and she wasn’t no more use in that kitchen than a dictionary.

“Oh, Calliope,” she says, in a sort of wail, “I’m so nervous!”

“You go and set down, Mis’ Fire Chief,” says I, “and button up your shoes. I’ve got every move of the morning planned out,” says I, “so be you don’t interrupt me.”

Of course it was her party and all, but they’s some hostesses you hev to lay a firm holt of, if you’re the helper and expect the party to come off at all. And I never see any living hostess more upset than was Mis’ Fire Chief. She give all the symptoms--not of a company, but of coming down with something.

“Oh, Calliope,” says she, “everything’s against me. I donno,” she says, “but it’s a sign from the Chief in his grave that I’m actin’ against his wishes an’ opposite to what widows should. The wood is green--hear it siss an’ sizzle in that stove an’ hold back its heat from me. The cistern is dry--we’ve hed to pump water to the neighbors. Not a hen has cackled this livelong mornin’ in the coop. The milkman couldn’t only leave me three quarts instead of four, though ordered ahead. An’ I feel like death--I feel like death,” says she, “part on account of the Chief--ain’t it like he was speakin’ his disapprovin’ in all these little minor ways?--an’ part because I know I’m comin’ down with a hard cold an’ I’d ought to be in bed all lard an’ pepper this livin’ minute. Oh, dear me! An’ Maria all but upon me. I don’t know how I’ll ever get through this day.”

“Mis’ Fire Chief,” says I, “you go and lay down and try to get some rest.”

“No, Calliope,” says she, “the beds is all ready for the company to lay their hats off, an’ the lounge pillows has been beat light on the line.”

“Well,” says I, “go off an’ take a walk.”

“Not without I walk to the cemetery,” says she, “an’ that I couldn’t bear. Not to-day.”