Part 7

"'Some nights off,'" she says. "Oh, if you think _that_ is the way he looks at it--There is no way in this world that I would rather spend my evenings," she says, "than to sit here with my husband."

"Yes," I says, "I s'pose that's true. I s'pose that's true of most wives. And it's something they've got to get over thinking is so important."

She gasped. "Get over--" she says. "Then," says she, "they'll have to get over loving their husbands."

"Oh, dear, no, they won't--no, they won't," says I. "But they'll have to get over thinking that selfishness is love--for one thing. Most folks get them awful mixed--I've noticed that."

But she broke down again, and was sobbing on the arm of the chair. "To think," she says over, "that now it'll never, never be the same again. From now on we're going to be just like other married folks!"

That seemed to me a real amazing thing to say, but I saw there wasn't any use talking to her, so I just let her cry till it was time to go and feed the baby. And then she sat nursing him, and breathing long, sobbing breaths--and once I heard her say, "Poor, poor little Mother's boy!" with all the accent on the relationship.

I walked back into the middle of the long, soft, wine-colored room, trying to think if I s'posed I'd got so old that I couldn't help in a thing like this, for I have a notion that there is nothing whatever that gets the matter that you can't help some way if you're in the neighborhood of it.

Delia was just shutting the outside door of the apartment. And she came trotting in with her little, formal, front-door air.

"Two ladies to see you, Miss Marsh," she says. "Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb."

No sooner said than heard, and I flew to the door, all of a tremble.

"For the land and forevermore," says I. "Where from and what for?"

There they stood in the doorway, dressed, I see at first glance, in the very best they'd got. Mis' Holcomb, that is the most backward-feeling of any of our women, was a step behind Mis' Toplady, and had hold of her arm. And Mis' Toplady was kind of tiptoeing and looking round cautious, to see if something not named yet was all right.

"There ain't any company, is there?" she says, in a part-whisper.

"No," says I, "not a soul. Come on in."

"Well," says she, relaxing up on her bones, "I asked the girl, and she says she'd see. What's the use of _being_ a hired girl if you don't know who you've let in?"

"Sit down," says I, "and tell me what you're doing here, and why you've come. Is anything the matter? I see there ain't, though--with you in your best clothes. Throw off your things."

"Calliope," says Mis' Holcomb, "you'd never guess." She leaned forward in her chair. "We ain't come up for a single thing," says she, "not a thing!"

Mis' Toplady leaned forward, too. "And the fare a dollar and ninety-six cents each way," says she, "and us a-staying at a hotel!"

"Go on," says I. "How long you going to be here?"

"Oh, mercy, only to-night," Mis' Holcomb says. "Why, the room is two-fifty just for us to sleep in it. I told him we shouldn't be setting in it a minute, but I guess he didn't believe me."

"Well, go on," says I. "Tell me what you've come for?"

Mis' Toplady leaned back and looked round her and sighed--and anybody could of told that her sigh was pleased and happy.

"Calliope," says she, "we've run away to stay overnight and one day on our chicken money, because we got so dead tired of home."

Mis' Holcomb just giggled out.

"It's a fact," she says. "We thought we'd come while you was here, for an excuse. But we were just sick of home, and that's the truth."

I looked at them, stupefied, or part that. Mis' Toplady and Mame, that's been examples of married contentment for thirty years on end, hand-running! It begun to dawn on me, slow, what this meant, as Mis' Toplady begun to tell me about it.

"You know, Calliope," she says, "the very best home in the world gets--"

Then I jumped up. "Hold on," I says. "You wait a minute. I'll be straight back again."

I run down the hall to the bedroom where Ellen was. She was just laying the baby down--even in my hurry I stopped to think what a heavenly and eternal picture that makes--a mother laying a baby down. There's something in the stooping of her shoulders and the sweep of her skirt and the tender drooping of her face, with the lamp-light on her hair, that makes a picture out of every time a baby is laid in his bed. The very fact that Ellen looked so lovely that way made me all the more anxious to save her.

"Ellen," I says, "come out here, please."

I pulled her along, with her hair all loose and lovely about her face--Ellen was a perfect picture of somebody's wife and a little baby's mother. You never in the world would have thought of her as a human being besides.

So then I introduced them, and I sat down there with them--the two I knew so well, and the one I'd got to know so well so sudden. And two of them were nearly sixty, and one was not much past twenty; but the three of them had so much in common that they were almost like one person sitting there with me, before the fire.

"Now," says I, "Mis' Toplady, go ahead. You needn't mind Ellen. She'll understand."

After a little bit, Mis' Toplady did go ahead.

"Well, sir," Mis' Toplady said, "I dunno what you'll think of us, but this is the way it was. I was sitting home by the dining-room table with Timothy night before last. We had a real good wood fire in the stove, and a tin of apples baking in the top, that smelled good. And the lamp had been filled that day, so the light was extra bright. And there was a little green wood in the fire that sort of sung--and Timothy set with his shoes off, as he so often does evenings, reading his newspaper and warming his stocking feet on the nickel of the stove. And all of a sudden I looked around at my dining-room, the way I'd looked at it evenings for thirty years or more, ever since we went to housekeeping, and I says to myself, 'I hate the sight of you, and I wish't I was somewheres else.' Not that I do hate it, you know, of course--but it just come over me, like it has before. And as soon as my tin of apples was done and I took them into the kitchen, I grabbed my shawl down off the hook, and run over to Mis' Holcomb's. And when I shut her gate, I near jumped back, because there, poking round her garden in the snow in the dark, was Mame!

"So," Mis' Toplady continued, "we hung over the gate and talked about it. And we came to the solemn conclusion that we'd just up and light out for twenty-four hours. We told our husbands, and they took it philosophic. Men understand a whole lot more than you give them credit for. They know--if they're any _real_ good--that it ain't that you ain't fond of them, or that you ain't thankful you're their wife, but that you've just got to have things that's different and interesting and--and tellable. Anyhow, that's the way Mame and I figgered it out. And we got into our good clothes, and we came up to the city, and went to the hotel, and got us a bowl of hot oyster soup apiece. And then we had the street-car ride out here, and we'll have another going back. And we've seen you. And we'll have a walk past the store windows in the morning before train-time. And I bet when we get home, 'long towards night, our two dining-rooms'll look real good to us again--don't you, Mame?"

"Yes, sir!" Mame says, with her little laugh again. "And our husbands, too!"

I'd been listening to them--but I'd been watching Ellen. Ellen was one of the women that aren't deceived by outside appearances, same as some. Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb didn't look any more like her city friends than a cat's tail looks like a plume, but just the same Ellen saw what they were and what they were worth. And when they got done:

"Do you mean you are going back to-morrow?" she says.

"Noon train," says Mame, "and be home in time to cook supper as natural as life and as good as new."

Ellen kept looking at them, and I guessed what she was thinking: A hundred miles they'd come for a change, and all they'd got was two street-car rides and a bowl of oyster soup apiece and this call, and they were going home satisfied.

All of a sudden Ellen sat up straight in her chair.

"See," she says, "it's only eight o'clock. Why can't the four of us go to the theater?"

The two women sort of gasped, in two hitches.

"Us?" they says.

Ellen jumped up. "Quick, Calliope," she says. "Get your things on. Delia can stay with the baby. I'll telephone for a taxi. We can decide what to see on the way down. You'll go, won't you?" she asks 'em.

"Go!" says they, in one breath. "Oh--yes, _sir_!"

In no time, or thereabouts, we found ourselves down-stairs packing into the taxicab. I was just as much excited as anybody--I hadn't been to a play in years. Ellen told us what there was as we went down, but they might have been the names of French cooking for all they meant to us, and we left it to her to pick out where we were to go.

When we followed her down the aisle of the one she picked out, just after the curtain went up, where do you think she took us? _Into a box!_ It was so dark that Mis' Toplady and Mame never noticed until the curtain went down, and the lights came up, and we looked round.

As for me, I could hardly listen to the play. I was thinking of these two dear women from the village, and what it meant to them to have something different to do. But even more, I was watching Ellen, that had set out to make them have a good time, and was doing her best at it, getting them to talk and making them laugh, when the curtain was down. But when the curtain was up, it seemed to me that Ellen wasn't listening to the play so very much, either.

Before the last act, Ellen had to get back to the baby, so we left the two of them there and went home.

"Alone in the box!" says Mame Holcomb, as we were leaving. "My land, and my hat's trimmed on the wrong side for the audience!"

"Do we have to go when it's out?" says Mis' Toplady. "Won't they just leave us set here, on--and on--and on?"

I remember them as I looked back and saw them, sitting there together. And something, I dunno whether it was the wedding-trip poplin dress, or the thought of the two dining-rooms where they'd set for so long, or of the little lark they'd planned, sort of made a lump come and meet a word I was trying to say.

We'd got out to the entry of the box, when somebody came after us, and it was little bit of Mame Holcomb, looking up with eyes bright as a blue jay's at the feed-dish.

"Oh," she says to Ellen, "I ain't half told you--neither of us has--what this means to us. And I wanted you to know--we both of us do--that the best part is, you so sort of _understood_."

Ellen just bent over and kissed her. And when we came out in the hall, all light and red carpet, I see Ellen's eyes were full of tears.

And when we got in the taxicab: "Ellen," I says, "I thank you, too--ever so much. You did understand. So did I."

"I don't know--I don't know," she says "But, Calliope, how in the world do you understand that kind of thing?"

So I said it, right out plain:

"Oh," I says, "I guess sheer because I've seen so much unhappiness, and on up to divorce, come about sole because married folks _will_ hunt in couples perpetual, and not let themselves be just folks."

When we got home--and we hadn't said much more all the way there--as we opened the living-room door, I saw that we'd got there first, before Russell. I was glad of that. Ellen ran right down the hall to the baby's room, and I took off my things and went down to the end of the room where the couch was, to lay down till she came back.

I must have dozed off, because I didn't hear Russell come in. The first I knew, he was standing with his back to the fire, filling his pipe. So I looked in his face, when he didn't know anybody was looking.

He had evidently walked home, and had come in fresh and glowing and full of frosty air, and his cheeks were ruddy. He was smiling a little at something or other, and altogether he looked not a bit like the tired man that had come home that night to dinner.

Then I heard the farther door click, and Ellen's step in the hall.

He looked toward the door, and I saw the queerest expression come in his face. Now, there was Russell, a man of twenty-seven or eight, a grown man that had lived his independent life for years before he had married Ellen. And yet, honestly, when he looked up then, his face and his eyes were like those of a boy that had done something that he had been scolded for. He looked kind of apologetic and explanatory--a look no man ought to be required to look unless for a real reason. It seems so--ignominious for a human being to have to look like that when they hadn't done a thing wrong.

My heart sank some. I thought of the way Ellen had been all slumped down in that easy chair, crying and taking on. And I waited for her to come in, feeling as if all the law and the prophets hung on the next few minutes--and I guess they did.

She'd put on a little, soft house-dress, made you-couldn't-tell-how, of lace, with blue showing through, kind of like clouds and the sky. But it was her face I looked at, because I remembered the set look it had when she'd told Russell good-by. And when I see her face now there in all that sky-and-clouds effect, honest, it was like a star.

"Hello, dear," she says, kind of sweet and casual, "put a stick of wood on the fire and tell me all about it."

I tell you, my heart jumped up then as much as it would of if I'd heard her say "I will" when they were married. For this was their new minute.

"Sit here," he says, and pulled her down to the big chair, and sat on the low chair beside her, where I'd seen him first. Only now, the baby wasn't there--it was just the two of them.

"Did you beat them all to pieces?" she asks, still with that blessed, casual, natural way of hers.

He smiled, sort of pleased and proud and humble. "I did," he owns up. "You're my wife, and I can brag to you if I want to. I walloped 'em."

He told her about the game, saying a lot of things that didn't mean a thing to me, but that must have meant to her what they meant to him, because she laughed out, pleased.

"Good!" she says. "You play a corking game, if I do say it. Do you know, you look a lot better than you did when you came home to dinner? I hate to see you look tired like that."

"I feel fit as a fish now," says he. "There's something about an evening like that with half a dozen of 'em--it isn't the game. It's the--oh, I don't know. But it kind of--"

He petered off, and she didn't make the mistake of agreeing too hard or talking about it too long. She just nodded, and pretty soon she told him some little thing about the baby. When he emptied his pipe, she said she thought she'd go to bed.

But when she got up, he reached up and pulled her back in the chair again, and moved so that he set with his cheek against hers. And he says:

"I've got something to tell you."

She picked up his hand to lean her head on, and says, "What? Me?"--which I'd noticed was one of the little family jokes, that no family should be without a set of.

"Do you know, Ellen," he said, "to-night, when I went out to go over to Beldon's, I thought you didn't like my going."

"You did?" she says. "What made you think that?"

"The way you spoke--or looked--or kissed me. I don't know. I imagined it, I guess," says he. "And--I've got something to own up."

She just waited; and he said it out, blunt:

"It made me not want to come home," says he.

"Not want to come home?" she says over, startled.

He nodded. "Lacy and Bright both left Beldon's before I did," he says. "I thought probably--I don't know. I imagined you were going to be polite as the deuce, the way I thought you were when I went out."

"Oh," she says, "was I that?"

"So when Lacy and Bright made jokes about what their wives'd say if they didn't get home, I joined in with them, and laughed at the 'apron strings.' That's what we called it."

She moved a little away. "Did you do that?" she said. "Oh, Russell, I should hate that. I should think any woman would hate it."

"I know," he says. "I'm dead sorry. But I wanted you to know. And, dear--"

He got up and stood before her, with her hands crushed up in his.

"I want you to know," he says, kind of solemn, "that the way you are about this makes me--gladder than the dickens. Not for the reason you might think--because it's going to make it easy to be away when I want to. But because--"

He didn't say things very easy. Most men don't, except for their little bit of courting time.

"Well, thunder," he said, "don't you see? It makes me so sure you're my _wife_--and not just married to me."

She smiled up at him without saying anything, but I knew how balm and oil were curing the hurt that she thought she'd had that night when he went out.

"I've always thought of our each doing things--and coming home and telling each other about them," he says, vague.

"Of _my_ doing things, too?" she asks, quick.

"Why, yes--sure. You, of course," he says, emphatic. "Haven't you seen that I want you to do things sometimes, without me tagging on?"

"Is that the way you look at it?" she says, slow.

He gave her two hands a gay little jerk, and pulled her to her feet.

"Why," he said, "you're a person. And I'm a person. If we really love each other, being married isn't only something _instead_. It's something _plus_."

"Russell," she says, "how did you find that out?"

"I don't know," he says. "How does anybody find out anything?"

I'll never forget the way Ellen looked when she went close to him.

"By loving somebody enough, I think," she says.

That made him stop short to wonder about something.

"How did you find out, if it comes to that?" he asks.

"What? Me?" she says. "Oh, I found out--by special messenger!"

Think of Mis' Toplady and Mame being that, unbeknownst!

They turned away together, and walked down the room. The fire had burned down, and everything acted like eleven-o'clock-at-night. It made a nice minute. I like to think about it.

"To-morrow morning," she told him, "I'm going to take Calliope and two friends of hers to the dog show. And you--don't--have--to--come. But you're invited, you know."

He laughed like a boy.

"Well, now, maybe I _can_ drop in!" says he.

FOOTNOTE:

[5] Copyright, 1916, _Pictorial Review_.

THE ART AND LOAN DRESS EXHIBIT[6]

"We could have a baking sale. Or a general cooking sale. Or a bazaar. Or a twenty-five-cent supper," says I.

Mis' Toplady tore off a strip of white cloth so smart it sounded saucy.

"I'm sick to death," she said, "of the whole kit of them. I hate a baking sale like I hate wash-day. We've had them till we can taste them. I know just what every human one of us would bring. Bazaars is death on your feet. And if I sit down to another twenty-five-cent supper--beef loaf, bake' beans, pickles, cabbage salad, piece o' cake--it seems as though I should scream."

"Me too," agrees Mis' Holcomb.

"Me too," I says myself. "Still," I says, "we want a park--and we want to name it Hewitt Park for them that's done so much for the town a'ready. And if we ever have a park, we've got to raise some money. That's flat, ain't it?"

We all allowed that this was flat, and acrost the certainty we faced one another, rocking and sewing in my nice cool sitting-room. The blinds were open, the muslin curtains were blowing, bees were humming in the yellow-rose bush over the window, and the street lay all empty, except for a load of hay that lumbered by and brushed the low branches of the maples. And somewheres down the block a lawn-mower was going, sleepy.

"Who's that rackin' around so up-stairs?" ask' Mis' Toplady, pretty soon.

Just when she spoke, the little light footstep that had been padding overhead came out in the hall and down my stair.

"It's Miss Mayhew," I told them, just before Miss Mayhew tapped on the open door.

"Come right in--what you knocking for when the door sets ajar?" says I to her.

Miss Mayhew stood in the doorway, her rough short skirt and stout boots and red sweater all saying "I'm going for a walk," even before she did. Only she adds: "I wanted to let you know I don't think I'll get back for supper."

"Such a boarder I never saw," I says. "You don't eat enough for a bird when you're here. And when you ain't, you're off gallivanting over the hills with nothing whatever to eat. And me with a fresh spice-cake just out of the oven for your supper."

"I'm so sorry," Miss Mayhew says, penitent to see.

I laid down my work. "You let me put you up a couple o' pieces to nibble on," says I.

"You're so good. May I come too?" Miss Mayhew asks, and smiled bright at the other two women, who smiled back broad and almost tender--Miss Mayhew's smile made you do that.

"I s'pose them writing folks can't stop to think of food," Mis' Toplady says as we went out.

"Look at her lugging a book. What's she want to be bothered with that for?" Mis' Holcomb says.

But that kind of fault-finding don't necessarily mean unkindness. With us it was as natural as a glance.

Out in the kitchen, I, having wrapped two nice slices of spice cake and put them in Miss Mayhew's hand, looked up at her and was shook up considerable to see that her eyes were filled with tears.

I know I'm real blunt when I'm embarrassed or trying to be funny, but when it comes to tears I'm more to home. So I just put my hand on the girl's shoulder and waited for her to speak.

"It's nothing," Miss Mayhew says back to the question I didn't ask. "I--I--" she sobbed out quite open. "I'm all right," she ends, and put up her head like a banner.

To the two women in my sitting-room I didn't say a word of that moment, when I went back to them. But what I did say acted kind of electric.

"Now," says I, "day before yesterday was my sweeping day for the chambers. But I hated to disturb her, she set there scribbling so hard when I stuck my head in. She ain't been out of the house since. If you'll excuse me, I'll whisk right up there and sweep out now."

The women begun folding their work.

"Why, don't hurry yourselves!" I says. "Sit and visit till I get through, why don't you?"

"Go!" says Mis' Toplady. "We ain't a-going. We're going to help."

"I been dying to get up-stairs in that room ever since I see her fix it up," Miss Holcomb lets out, candid.

Miss Mayhew's room--she'd been renting my front chamber for a month now--was little and bare, but her daintiness was there, like her saying something. And the two women began looking things over--the books, the pictures--"prints," Miss Mayhew called them--the china tea-cups, the silver-topped bottles, and the silver and ivory toilet stuff.

"My, what a homely picture!" Mis' Holcomb says, looking at a scene of a Japanese lady and a mountain.

"What in the world is these forceps for?" says Mis' Toplady, balancing an ivory glove-stretcher with Miss Mayhew's initials on. I knew that it was, because I'd asked her.

"What she wants of a dust-cap I dunno," Mis' Holcomb contributes, pointing to the little lace and ribbon cap hanging beside the toilet-table.

And I'd wondered that myself. She put it on for breakfast, like she was going to do some work; then she never done a thing the whole morning, only wrote.

Then all of a sudden was when I come out with something surprising.

"Why," says I, "it's gone!"

"What's gone?" they says. And I was looking so hard I couldn't answer--bureau, chest of drawers, bookshelves, I looked on all of them. "It ain't here anywhere," says I, "and he was _that_ handsome--"