Part 9

Calliope Marsh had been having a "small company." Though nominally she was hostess to twenty of us, invited there for six o'clock supper, yet we did not see Calliope until supper was done. Mis' Postmaster Sykes had opened the door for us, had told us to "walk up-stairs to the right an' lay aside your things," and had marshaled us to the dining-room and so to chairs outlining the room. And there the daughters of most of the guests had served us while Calliope stayed in the kitchen, with Hannah Hager to help her, seasoning and stirring and "getting it onto the plates." Afterward, flushed and, I thought, lovably nervous, Calliope came in to receive our congratulations and presently to hear good-nights. But I, who should have hurried home to Madame Josephine, the modiste from town who that week called my soul her own, waited for a little to talk it over--partly, I confess, because a fine, driving rain had begun to fall.

We sat in the kitchen while Calliope ate her own belated supper on a corner of the kitchen table; and on another corner, thin, tired little Hannah Hager ate hers. And, as is our way in Friendship, Hannah talked it over, too--that little maid-of-all-work, who was nowhere attached in service, but lived in a corner of Grandma Hawley's cottage and went tirelessly about the village ministering to the needs of us all.

"Everything you hed was lovely, Miss Marsh," Hannah said with shining content and a tired sigh. "You didn't hev a single set-back, did you?"

"Well, I dunno," Calliope doubted; "it all tastes like so much chips to me, even now. I was kind o' nervous over my pressed ham, too. I noticed two o' the plates didn't eat all theirs, but the girls couldn't rec'lect whose they was. Did you notice?"

"No, sir, I didn't," Hannah confessed with a shake of the head at herself. "I did notice," she amended brightly, "that Mis' Postmaster Sykes didn't make way with all her cream, but I guess ice-cream don't agree with her. She's got a kind o' peculiar stomach."

"Well-a, anybody hev on anything new?" Calliope asked with interest. "I couldn't tell a stitch anybody hed on. I don't seem to sense things when I hev company."

There was no need for me to give evidence.

"Oh!" Hannah said, as we say when we mean a thing very much, "didn't you see Lyddy Eider?"

"Seems to me I did take it in she hed on something pink," Calliope remembered.

Little Hannah stood up in her excitement.

"Pink, Miss Marsh!" she said. "I should say it was. Pink with cloth, w'ite. The w'ite," Hannah illustrated it, "went here an' so, in points. In between was lace an' little ribbon, pink too. An' all up so was buttons. An' it all rustled w'en she stirred 'round. An' it laid smooth down, like it was starched an' ironed, an' then all to once it'd slimpse into folds, soft as soft. An' every way she stood it looked nice--it didn't pucker nor skew nor hang wrong. It was dressmaker-made, ma'am," Hannah concluded impressively. "An' it looked like the pictures in libr'ry books. My! You'd ought 'a' seen Gramma Hawley. She fair et Lydia up with lookin' at her."

I, who was not yet acquainted with every one in Friendship, had already observed the two that day--brown, bent Grandma Hawley and the elaborately self-possessed Miss Eider, with a conspicuously high-pitched voice, who lived in the city and was occasionally a guest in the village. The girl, who I gathered had once lived in Friendship, was like a living proof that all village maids may become princesses; and the brooding tenderness of the old woman had impressed me as might a mourning dove mothering some sprightly tanager.

"Gramma Hawley brought her up from a little thing," Calliope explained to me now, "and a rich Mis' Eider, from the city, she adopted her, and Gramma let her go. I guess it near killed Gramma to do it--but she'd always been one to like nice things herself, and she couldn't get them, so she see what it'd mean to Lyddy. Lyddy's got pretty proud, she's hed so much to do with, but she comes back to see Gramma sometimes, I'll say that for her. Didn't anybody else hev on anything new?"

"No," Hannah knew positively, "they all come out in the same old togs. When the finger-bowl started I run up in the hall an' peeked down the register, so's to see 'em pass out o' the room. Comp'ny clo'es don't change much here in Friendship. Mis' Postmaster Sykes says yest'day, when we was ironin': 'Folks,' she says, 'don't dress as much here in Friendship as I wish't we did. Land knows,' Mis' Sykes says, '_I_ don't dress, neither. But I like to see it done.'"

Calliope, who is sixty and has a rosy, wrinkled face, looked sidewise down the long vista of the cooking-stove coals.

"Like to see it done!" she repeated. "Why, I get so raving hungry to see some colored dress-goods on somebody seem's though I'd fly. Black and brown and gray--gray and brown and black hung on to every woman in Friendship. Every one of us has our clo'es picked out so everlastin' _durable_."

Hannah sympathetically giggled with, "Don't they, though?"

"My grief!" Calliope exclaimed. "It reminds me, I got my mother's calicoes down to pass 'round and I never thought to take them in."

She went to her new golden oak kitchen cabinet--a birthday gift to Calliope from the Friendship church for her services at its organ--and brought us her mother's "calicoes"--a huge box of pieces left from every wool and lawn and "morning housework dress" worn by the Marshes, quick and passed, and by their friends. Calliope knew them all; and I listened idly while the procession went by us in sad-colored fabrics--"black and brown and gray--gray and brown and black."

I think that my attention may have wandered a little, for I was recalled by some slight stir made by Hannah Hager. She had risen and was bending toward Calliope, with such leaping wistfulness in her eyes that I followed her look. And I saw among the pieces, like a bright breast in sober plumage, a square of chambray in an exquisite color of rose.

"Oh--" said little Hannah softly, "hain't that just _beauti_-ful?"

"Like it, Hannah?" Calliope asked.

"My!" said the little maid fervently.

"It was a dress Gramma Hawley made for Lyddy Eider when she was a little girl," Calliope explained. "I dunno but what it was the last one she made for her. Pretty, ain't it? Lyddy always seemed to hanker some after pink. Gramma mostly always got her pink." Calliope glanced at Hannah, over-shoulder. "Why don't you get a pink one for _then_?" she asked abruptly; and, "When is it to be, Hannah?" she challenged her, teasingly, as we tease for only one cause.

On which I had pleasure in the sudden rose-pink of Hannah's face, and she sank back in her seat at the table corner in the particular, delicious anguish that comes but once.

"There, there," said Calliope soothingly, "no need to turn any more colors, 's I know of. Land, if they ain't enough sandwiches left to fry for my dinner."

When, presently, Calliope and I were in the dining-room and I was watching her "redd up" the table while Hannah clattered dishes in the kitchen, I asked her who Hannah's prince might be. Calliope told me with a manner of triumph. For was he not Henry Austin, that great, good-looking giant who helped in the post-office store, whose baritone voice was the making of the church choir and on whom many Friendship daughters would not have looked unkindly?

"I'm so glad for her," Calliope said. "She ain't hed many to love besides Gramma Hawley--and Gramma's so wrapped up in Lyddy Eider. And yet I feel bad for Hannah, too. All their lives folks here'll likely say: 'How'd he come to marry _her_?' It's hard to be that kind of woman. I wish't Hannah could hev a wedding that would show 'em she _is_ somebody. I wish't she could hev a wedding dress that would show them how pretty she is--a dress all nice, slim lines and folds laid in in the right places and little unexpected trimmings like you wouldn't think of having if you weren't real up in dress," Calliope explained. "A dress like Lyddy Eider always has on."

"Calliope!" I said then, laughing. "I believe you would be a regular fashion plate, if you could afford it."

"I would," she gravely admitted, "I'm afraid I would. I love nice clothes and I just worship colors." She hesitated, looking at me with a manner of shyness. "Sit still a minute, will you?" she said, "I'd like to show you something."

She went upstairs and I listened to Hannah Hager, clattering kitchen things and singing:

"He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons, To tie up my bonny brown ha--ir."

Pink chambray and the love of blue ribbons and Miss Lydia Eider in her dress that was "dressmaker-made." These I turned in my mind, and I found myself thinking of my visit to the town in the next week, for which Madame Josephine was preparing; and of how certain elegancies are there officially recognized instead of being merely divined by the wistful amateur in color and textile. How Calliope and Hannah would have delighted, I thought idly, in the town's way of pretty things to wear, such as Josephine could make; the way that Lydia Eider knew, in her frocks that were "dressmaker-made." Indeed, Calliope and Hannah and Lydia Eider had been physically cast in the same mold of prettiness and of proportion, but only Lydia had come into her own.

And then Calliope came down, and she was bringing a long, white box. She sat before me with the box on her knee and I saw that she was flushing like a girl.

"I expect," she said, "you'll think I'm real worldly-minded. I dunno. Mebbe I am. But when I get out in company and see everybody wearing the dark shades like they do here in Friendship so's their dresses won't show dirt, I declare I want to stand up and tell 'em: 'Colors! Colors! What'd the Lord put colors in the world for? Burn up your black and brown and gray and get into somethin' _happy_-colored, and see the difference it'll make in the way you feel inside.' I get so," Calliope said solemnly, "that when I put on my best black taffeta with the white turnovers, I declare I could slit it up the back seam. And I've felt that way a long time. And that's what made me--"

She fingered the white box and lifted the cover from a mass of tissue-paper.

"When Uncle Ezra Marsh died sixteen years ago last Summer," she said, "he left me a little bit of money--just a little dab, but enough to mend the wood-shed roof or buy a new cook-stove or do any of the useful things that's always staring you in the face. And I turned my back flat on every one of them. And I put the money in my pocket and went into the city. And there," said Calliope breathlessly, "I bought this."

She unwrapped it from its tissues, and it was yards and yards of lustrous, exquisite soft silk, colored rose-pink, and responding in folds almost tenderly to the hand that touched it.

"It's mine," Calliope said, "mine. My dress. And I haven't ever hed the sheer, moral courage to get it made up."

And that I could well understand. For though Calliope's delicacy of figure and feature would have been well enough become by the soft pink, Friendship would have lifted its hands to see her so and she would instantly have been "talked about."

"Seems to me," Calliope said, smoothing the silk, "that if I could have on a dress like this I'd feel another kind of being--sort o' free and liberty-like. Of course," she added hurriedly, "I know well enough a pink dress ain't what-you-might-say important. But land, land, how I'd like one on me in company! Ain't it funny," she added, "in the city nobody'd think anything of my wearing it. In the city they sort of seem to know colors ain't wicked, so's they look nice. I use' to think," Calliope added, laughing a little, "I'd hev it made up and go to town and wear it on the street. All alone. Even if it was a black street. I guess you'll think I'm terrible foolish."

But with that the idea which had come to me vaguely and as an impossibility, took shape; and I poured it out to Calliope as a thing possible, desirable, inevitable.

"Calliope!" I said. "Bring the silk to my house. Let Madame Josephine make it up. And next week come with me to the city--for the opera. We will have a box--and afterward supper--and you shall wear the pink gown--and a long, black silk coat of mine--"

"You're fooling--you're _fooling_!" Calliope cried, trembling.

But I made her know how in earnest I was; for, indeed, on the instant my mind was made up that the thing must be, that the lonely pink dress must see the light and with it Calliope's shy hopes, long cherished. And so, before I left her, it was arranged. She had agreed to come next morning to my house, if Madame Josephine were willing, bringing the rose-pink silk.

"Me!" she said at last. "Why, me! Why, it's enough to make all the _me's_ I've been turn over in their graves. And I guess they hev turned and come trooping out, young again."

Then, as she stood up, letting the soft stuff unwind and fall in shining abandon, we heard a little noise--tapping, insistent. It was very near to us--quite in the little passage; and as Calliope turned with the silk still in her arms the door swung back and there stood Grandma Hawley. She was leaning on her thick stick, and her gray lace cap was all awry and a mist of the fine, driving rain was on her gray hair.

"I got m' feet wet," she said querulously. "M' feet are wet. Lyddy's gone to Mis' Sykes's. I comeback to stay a spell till it dries off some--"

"Grandma!" Calliope cried, hurrying to her, "I didn't hear you come in. I never heard you. Come out by the kitchen fire and set your feet in the oven."

Calliope had tossed the silk on the table and had run to the old woman with outstretched hand; but the outstretched hand Grandma Hawley did not see. She stood still, looking by Calliope with a manner rather than an expression of questioning.

"What is't?" she asked, nodding direction.

Calliope understood, and she slightly lifted her brows and her thin shoulders, and seemed to glance at me.

"It's some pink for a dress, gramma," she said.

Grandma Hawley came a little nearer, and stood, a neat, bent figure in rusty black, looking, down at the sumptuous, shining lengths. Then she laid her brown, veined hand upon the silk--and I remember now her fingers, being pricked and roughened by her constant needle, caught and rubbed on the soft stuff.

"My soul," she said, "it's pink silk."

She lifted her face to Calliope, the perpetual trembling of her head making her voice come tremulously.

"That's what Abe Hawley was always talkin' when I married him," she said. "'A pink silk dress fer ye, Minnie. A fine pink silk to set ye off,' s' 'e over an' over. I thought I was a-goin' to hev it. I hed the style all picked out in my head. I know I use' to lay awake nights an' cut it out. But, time the cookin' things was paid for, the first baby come--an' then the other three to do for. An' Abe he didn't say pink silk after the fourth. But I use' to cut it out in the night, fer all that. I dunno but I cut it out yet, when I can't get to sleep an' my head feels bad. My head ain't right. It bothers me some, hummin' and ringin'. Las' night m' head--"

"There, there, gramma," said Calliope, and took her arm. "You come along with me and set your feet in the oven."

I had her other arm, and we turned toward the kitchen. And we were hushed as if we had heard some futile, unfulfilled wish of the dead still beating impotent wings.

In the kitchen doorway Hannah Hager was standing. She must have seen that glowing, heaped-up silk on the table, but it did not even hold her glance. For she had heard what Grandma Hawley had been saying, and it had touched her, who was so jealously devoted to the old woman, perhaps even more than it had touched Calliope and me.

"Miss Marsh, now," Hannah tried to say, "shall I put the butter that's left in the cookin'-butter jar?" And then her little features were caught here and there in the puckers of a very child's weeping, and she stood before us as a child might stand, crying softly without covering her face. She held out a hand to the old woman, and Calliope and I let her lead her to the stove. My heart went out to the little maid for her tears and to Calliope for the sympathy in her eyes.

Grandma Hawley was talking on.

"I must 'a' got a little cold," she said plaintively. "It always settles in my head. My head's real bad. An' now I got m' feet wet--"

II

To Madame Josephine, the modiste who sometimes comes to me with her magic touch, transforming this and that, I confided something of my plans for Calliope, asked her if she would do what she could. Her kindly, emotional nature responded to the situation as to a kind of challenge.

"_Bien!_" she cried. "We shall see. You say she is slim--_petite_--with some little grace? _Bien!_"

So when, next day, Calliope arrived at my house with her parcel brought forth for the first time in sixteen years, she found madame and me both tip-toe with excitement. And from some bewildering plates madame explained how she would cut and suit and "correct" mademoiselle.

"The effect shall be long, slim, excellent. Soft folds from one's waist--so. From one's shoulder--so. A line of velvet here and here and down. _Bien!_ Mademoiselle will look younger than everyone! _If_ mademoiselle would wave ze hair back a ver' little--so?" the French woman delicately advanced.

"Ma'moiselle," returned Calliope recklessly, "will do anything you want her to, short of a pink rose over one ear. My land, I never hed a dress before that I didn't hev to skimp the pattern and make it up less according to my taste than according to my cloth."

That day I sent to the city for a box at the opera. I chose "Faust," and smiled as I planned to sing the Jewel Song for Calliope before we went, and to laugh at her in her surprising rôle of Butterfly. "_Ah, je ris de me voir si belle._" A lower proscenium box, a modest suite at a comfortable hotel, a little supper, a cab--I planned it all for the pleasure of watching her; and all this would, I knew, be given its significance by the wearing of the anomalous, rosy gown. And I loved Calliope for her weakness as we love the whip-poor-will for his little catching of the breath.

On the day that our tickets came Calliope appeared before me in some anxiety.

"Calliope," I said, without observing this, "our opera box is, so to speak, here."

But instead of the light in her face that I had expected:

"What night?" she abruptly demanded.

"For 'Faust,' on Wednesday," I told her.

And instead of her delight of which I had made sure:

"Will the six-ten express get us in the city too late?" she wanted to know.

And when I had agreed to the six-ten express:

"It's all right then," she said in relief. "They can hev it a little earlier and take the six-ten themselves instead of the accommodation. Hannah and Henry's going to get married a' Wednesday," she explained. "I hev to be here for that."

Then she told me of the simple plan for Hannah Hager's marriage to her good-looking giant. Naturally, Grandma Hawley could not think of "giving Hannah a wedding," so these poor little plans had been for some time wandering about unparented.

"_I_ wanted," Calliope said, "she should be married in the church with Virginia creeper on the pew arms, civilized. But Hannah said that'd be putting on airs and she'd be so scairt she couldn't be solemn. Mis' Postmaster Sykes, she invited her real cordial to be married in her sitting-room, but Hannah spunked up and wouldn't. 'A sitting-room weddin',' s' she to me, private, ''d be like bein' baptized in the pantry. A parlor,' s' she, ''s the only true place for a wedding. And I haven't no parlor, so we'll go to the minister's and stand up in _his_ parlor. Do you think,' s' she to me, real pitiful, 'Henry can respec' me with no place to set m' foot in to be married but jus' the public parsonage?' Poor little thing! Her wedding-dress is nothing but a last year's mull with a sprig in, either. And her traveling-dress to go to the city is her reg'lar brown Sunday suit."

"And they are going to the minister's?" I asked.

"Well, no," Calliope answered apologetically. "I asked them to be married at my house. I never thought about the opera when I done it. I never thought about anything but that poor child. I guess you'll think I'm real flighty. But I always think when two's married in the parsonage and the man pays the minister, it's like the bride is just the groom's guest at the cer'mony. And it ain't real dignified for her, seems though."

I knew well what this meant: That Calliope would have "asked in a few" and "stirred up" this and that delectable, and gone to no end of trouble and an expense which she could ill afford. Unless, as she was wont to say: "When it comes to doing for other people there ain't such a word as 'afford.' You just go ahead and do it and keep some rational yourself, and the _afford_ 'll sort o' bloom out right, same's a rose."

So for Hannah, Calliope had caused things to "bloom right, same's a rose," as one knew by Hannah's happy face. On Tuesday she was helping at my house ("Brides always like extry money," Calliope had advanced when I had questioned the propriety of asking her to iron on the day before her marriage) and, on going unexpectedly to the kitchen I came on Hannah with a patent flat-iron in one hand and a piece of beeswax in the other, and Henry, her good-looking giant, was there also and was frankly holding her in his arms. I liked him for his manly way when he saw me and most of all that he did not wholly release her but, with one arm about her, contrived a kind of bow to me. But it was Hannah who spoke.

"Oh, ma'am," she said shyly, "I _hope_ you'll overlook. We've hed an awful time findin' any place to keep company, only walkin' 'round the high-school yard!"

My heart was still warm within me at the little scene as I went upstairs to see Calliope in her final fitting of the rose-pink gown, the work on which had gone on apace. And I own that, as I saw her standing before my long triple mirrors, I was amazed. The rosy gown suited the little body wonderfully and with her gray hair and delicate brightness of cheeks, she looked like some figure on a fan, exquisitely and picturesquely painted. The gown was, as Calliope had said that a gown should be, "all nice, slim lines and folds laid in in the right places, and little unexpected trimmings like you wouldn't think of having them if you wasn't real up in dress." It was a triumph for skillful madame, who had wrought with her impressionable French heart as well as with her scissors.

Calliope laughed as she looked over-shoulder in the mirrors.

"My soul," she said, "I feel like a sparrow with a new pink tail! I declare, the dress looks more like Lyddy Eider herself than it looks like me. Do you think I look enough like me so's you'd sense it _was_ me?"

"Mademoiselle," said Madame Josephine simply, "has a look of another world."

"I wish't I could see it on somebody," Calliope said wistfully; and since I was far too tall and madame not sufficiently "slendaire," Calliope cried:

"There's Hannah! She's downstairs helping, ain't she? Couldn't Hannah come upstairs a minute and put it on? We're most of a size!"

And indeed they were, as I had noted, cast in the same mold of proportion and prettiness.

So, with madame just leaving for the city, and I obliged to go down to the village, Calliope and Hannah Hager were left alone with the rose-pink silk gown, which fitted them both. Ought I not to have known what would happen?

And yet it came as a shock to me when, an hour later, as I passed Calliope's gate on my way home, she ran out and stood before me in some unusual excitement.

"Do they take back your opera boxes?" she demanded.

"No," I assured her, "they do not. Nor," I added suspiciously, "do folk take back their promises, you know, Calliope!"