Chapter 2

It thus happened that little Amelia Wheeler was possessed of three beautiful dresses, although she did not know it.

For a long time neither of the two conspiring grandmothers dared divulge the secret. Mrs. Diantha was a very determined woman, and even her own mother stood somewhat in awe of her. Therefore, little Amelia went to school during the spring term soberly clad as ever, and even on the festive last day wore nothing better than a new blue gingham, made too long, to allow for shrinkage, and new blue hair-ribbons. The two grandmothers almost wept in secret conclave over the lovely frocks which were not worn.

“I respect Diantha,” said Grandmother Wheeler. “You know that. She is one woman in a thousand, but I do hate to have that poor child go to school to-day with so many to look at her, and she dressed so unlike all the other little girls.”

“Diantha has got so much sense, it makes her blind and deaf,” declared Grandmother Stark. “I call it a shame, if she is my daughter.”

“Then you don't venture--”

Grandmother Stark reddened. She did not like to own to awe of her daughter. “I VENTURE, if that is all,” said she, tartly. “You don't suppose I am afraid of Diantha?--but she would not let Amelia wear one of the dresses, anyway, and I don't want the child made any unhappier than she is.”

“Well, I will admit,” replied Grandmother Wheeler, “if poor Amelia knew she had these beautiful dresses and could not wear them she might feel worse about wearing that homely gingham.”

“Gingham!” fairly snorted Grandmother Stark. “I cannot see why Diantha thinks so much of gingham. It shrinks, anyway.”

Poor little Amelia did undoubtedly suffer on that last day, when she sat among the others gaily clad, and looked down at her own common little skirts. She was very glad, however, that she had not been chosen to do any of the special things which would have necessitated her appearance upon the little flower-decorated platform. She did not know of the conversation between Madame and her two assistants.

“I would have Amelia recite a little verse or two,” said Madame, “but how can I?” Madame adored dress, and had a lovely new one of sheer dull-blue stuff, with touches of silver, for the last day.

“Yes,” agreed Miss Parmalee, “that poor child is sensitive, and for her to stand on the platform in one of those plain ginghams would be too cruel.”

“Then, too,” said Miss Acton, “she would recite her verses exactly like Lily Jennings. She can make her voice exactly like Lily's now. Then everybody would laugh, and Amelia would not know why. She would think they were laughing at her dress, and that would be dreadful.”

If Amelia's mother could have heard that conversation everything would have been different, although it is puzzling to decide in what way.

It was the last of the summer vacation in early September, just before school began, that a climax came to Amelia's idolatry and imitation of Lily. The Jenningses had not gone away that summer, so the two little girls had been thrown together a good deal. Mrs. Diantha never went away during a summer. She considered it her duty to remain at home, and she was quite pitiless to herself when it came to a matter of duty.

However, as a result she was quite ill during the last of August and the first of September. The season had been unusually hot, and Mrs. Diantha had not spared herself from her duty on account of the heat. She would have scorned herself if she had done so. But she could not, strong-minded as she was, avert something like a heat prostration after a long walk under a burning sun, nor weeks of confinement and idleness in her room afterward.

When September came, and a night or two of comparative coolness, she felt stronger; still she was compelled by most unusual weakness to refrain from her energetic trot in her duty-path; and then it was that something happened.

One afternoon Lily fluttered over to Amelia's, and Amelia, ever on the watch, spied her.

“May I go out and see Lily?” she asked Grandmother Stark.

“Yes, but don't talk under the windows; your mother is asleep.”

Amelia ran out.

“I declare,” said Grandmother Stark to Grandmother Wheeler, “I was half a mind to tell that child to wait a minute and slip on one of those pretty dresses. I hate to have her go on the street in that old gingham, with that Jennings girl dressed up like a wax doll.”

“I know it.”

“And now poor Diantha is so weak--and asleep--it would not have annoyed her.”

“I know it.”

Grandmother Stark looked at Grandmother Wheeler. Of the two she possessed a greater share of original sin compared with the size of her soul. Moreover, she felt herself at liberty to circumvent her own daughter. Whispering, she unfolded a daring scheme to the other grandmother, who stared at her aghast a second out of her lovely blue eyes, then laughed softly.

“Very well,” said she, “if you dare.”

“I rather think I dare!” said Grandmother Stark. “Isn't Diantha Wheeler my own daughter?” Grandmother Stark had grown much bolder since Mrs. Diantha had been ill.

Meantime Lily and Amelia walked down the street until they came to a certain vacant lot intersected by a foot-path between tall, feathery grasses and goldenrod and asters and milkweed. They entered the foot-path, and swarms of little butterflies rose around them, and once in a while a protesting bumblebee.

“I am afraid we will be stung by the bees,” said Amelia.

“Bumblebees never sting,” said Lily; and Amelia believed her.

When the foot-path ended, there was the riverbank. The two little girls sat down under a clump of brook willows and talked, while the river, full of green and blue and golden lights, slipped past them and never stopped.

Then Lily proceeded to unfold a plan, which was not philosophical, but naughtily ingenious. By this time Lily knew very well that Amelia admired her, and imitated her as successfully as possible, considering the drawback of dress and looks.

When she had finished Amelia was quite pale. “I am afraid, I am afraid, Lily,” said she.

“What of?”

“My mother will find out; besides, I am afraid it isn't right.”

“Who ever told you it was wrong?”

“Nobody ever did,” admitted Amelia.

“Well, then you haven't any reason to think it is,” said Lily, triumphantly. “And how is your mother ever going to find it out?”

“I don't know.”

“Isn't she ill in her room? And does she ever come to kiss you good night, the way my mother does, when she is well?”

“No,” admitted Amelia.

“And neither of your grandmothers?”

“Grandmother Stark would think it was silly, like mother, and Grandmother Wheeler can't go up and down stairs very well.”

“I can't see but you are perfectly safe. I am the only one that runs any risk at all. I run a great deal of risk, but I am willing to take it,” said Lily with a virtuous air. Lily had a small but rather involved scheme simply for her own ends, which did not seem to call for much virtue, but rather the contrary.

Lily had overheard Arnold Carruth and Johnny Trumbull and Lee Westminster and another boy, Jim Patterson, planning a most delightful affair, which even in the cases of the boys was fraught with danger, secrecy, and doubtful rectitude. Not one of the four boys had had a vacation from the village that summer, and their young minds had become charged, as it were, with the seeds of revolution and rebellion. Jim Patterson, the son of the rector, and of them all the most venturesome, had planned to take--he called it “take”; he meant to pay for it, anyway, he said, as soon as he could shake enough money out of his nickel savings-bank--one of his father's Plymouth Rock chickens and have a chickenroast in the woods back of Dr. Trumbull's. He had planned for Johnny to take some ears of corn suitable for roasting from his father's garden; for Lee to take some cookies out of a stone jar in his mother's pantry; and for Arnold to take some potatoes. Then they four would steal forth under cover of night, build a camp-fire, roast their spoils, and feast.

Lily had resolved to be of the party. She resorted to no open methods; the stones of the fighting suffragettes were not for her, little honey-sweet, curled, and ruffled darling; rather the time-worn, if not time-sanctified, weapons of her sex, little instruments of wiles, and tiny dodges, and tiny subterfuges, which would serve her best.

“You know,” she said to Amelia, “you don't look like me. Of course you know that, and that can't be helped; but you do walk like me, and talk like me, you know that, because they call you 'CopyCat.'”

“Yes, I know,” said poor Amelia.

“I don't mind if they do call you 'Copy-Cat,'” said Lily, magnanimously. “I don't mind a bit. But, you see, my mother always comes up-stairs to kiss me good night after I have gone to bed, and tomorrow night she has a dinner-party, and she will surely be a little late, and I can't manage unless you help me. I will get one of my white dresses for you, and all you have to do is to climb out of your window into that cedar-tree--you know you can climb down that, because you are so afraid of burglars climbing up--and you can slip on my dress; you had better throw it out of the window and not try to climb in it, because my dresses tear awful easy, and we might get caught that way. Then you just sneak down to our house, and I shall be outdoors; and when you go up-stairs, if the doors should be open, and anybody should call, you can answer just like me; and I have found that light curly wig Aunt Laura wore when she had her head shaved after she had a fever, and you just put that on and go to bed, and mother will never know when she kisses you good night. Then after the roast I will go to your house, and climb up that tree, and go to bed in your room. And I will have one of your gingham dresses to wear, and very early in the morning I will get up, and you get up, and we both of us can get down the back stairs without being seen, and run home.”

Amelia was almost weeping. It was her worshiped Lily's plan, but she was horribly scared. “I don't know,” she faltered.

“Don't know! You've got to! You don't love me one single bit or you wouldn't stop to think about whether you didn't know.” It was the world-old argument which floors love. Amelia succumbed.

The next evening a frightened little girl clad in one of Lily Jennings's white embroidered frocks was racing to the Jenningses' house, and another little girl, not at all frightened, but enjoying the stimulus of mischief and unwontedness, was racing to the wood behind Dr. Trumbull's house, and that little girl was clad in one of Amelia Wheeler's ginghams. But the plan went all awry.

Lily waited, snuggled up behind an alder-bush, and the boys came, one by one, and she heard this whispered, although there was no necessity for whispering, “Jim Patterson, where's that hen?”

“Couldn't get her. Grabbed her, and all her tail-feathers came out in a bunch right in my hand, and she squawked so, father heard. He was in his study writing his sermon, and he came out, and if I hadn't hid behind the chicken-coop and then run I couldn't have got here. But I can't see as you've got any corn, Johnny Trumbull.”

“Couldn't. Every single ear was cooked for dinner.”

“I couldn't bring any cookies, either,” said Lee Westminster; “there weren't any cookies in the jar.”

“And I couldn't bring the potatoes, because the outside cellar door was locked,” said Arnold Carruth. “I had to go down the back stairs and out the south door, and the inside cellar door opens out of our dining-room, and I daren't go in there.”

“Then we might as well go home,” said Johnny Trumbull. “If I had been you, Jim Patterson, I would have brought that old hen if her tail-feathers had come out. Seems to me you scare awful easy.”

“Guess if you had heard her squawk!” said Jim, resentfully. “If you want to try to lick me, come on, Johnny Trumbull. Guess you don't darse call me scared again.”

Johnny eyed him standing there in the gloom. Jim was not large, but very wiry, and the ground was not suited for combat. Johnny, although a victor, would probably go home considerably the worse in appearance; and he could anticipate the consequences were his father to encounter him.

“Shucks!” said Johnny Trumbull, of the fine old Trumbull family and Madame's exclusive school. “Shucks! who wants your old hen? We had chicken for dinner, anyway.”

“So did we,” said Arnold Carruth.

“We did, and corn,” said Lee.

“We did,” said Jim.

Lily stepped forth from the alder-bush. “If,” said she, “I were a boy, and had started to have a chicken-roast, I would have HAD a chicken-roast.”

But every boy, even the valiant Johnny Trumbull, was gone in a mad scutter. This sudden apparition of a girl was too much for their nerves. They never even knew who the girl was, although little Arnold Carruth said she had looked to him like “Copy-Cat,” but the others scouted the idea.

Lily Jennings made the best of her way out of the wood across lots to the road. She was not in a particularly enviable case. Amelia Wheeler was presumably in her bed, and she saw nothing for it but to take the difficult way to Amelia's.

Lily tore a great rent in the gingham going up the cedar-tree, but that was nothing to what followed. She entered through Amelia's window, her prim little room, to find herself confronted by Amelia's mother in a wrapper, and her two grandmothers. Grandmother Stark had over her arm a beautiful white embroidered dress. The two old ladies had entered the room in order to lay the white dress on a chair and take away Amelia's gingham, and there was no Amelia. Mrs. Diantha had heard the commotion, and had risen, thrown on her wrapper, and come. Her mother had turned upon her.

“It is all your fault, Diantha,” she had declared.

“My fault?” echoed Mrs. Diantha, bewildered. “Where is Amelia?”

“We don't know,” said Grandmother Stark, “but you have probably driven her away from home by your cruelty.”

“Cruelty?”

“Yes, cruelty. What right had you to make that poor child look like a fright, so people laughed at her? We have made her some dresses that look decent, and had come here to leave them, and to take away those old gingham things that look as if she lived in the almshouse, and leave these, so she would either have to wear them or go without, when we found she had gone.”

It was at that crucial moment that Lily entered by way of the window.

“Here she is now,” shrieked Grandmother Stark. “Amelia, where--” Then she stopped short.

Everybody stared at Lily's beautiful face suddenly gone white. For once Lily was frightened. She lost all self-control. She began to sob. She could scarcely tell the absurd story for sobs, but she told, every word.

Then, with a sudden boldness, she too turned on Mrs. Diantha. “They call poor Amelia 'CopyCat,'” said she, “and I don't believe she would ever have tried so hard to look like me only my mother dresses me so I look nice, and you send Amelia to school looking awfully.” Then Lily sobbed again.

“My Amelia is at your house, as I understand?” said Mrs. Diantha, in an awful voice.

“Ye-es, ma-am.”

“Let me go,” said Mrs. Diantha, violently, to Grandmother Stark, who tried to restrain her. Mrs. Diantha dressed herself and marched down the street, dragging Lily after her. The little girl had to trot to keep up with the tall woman's strides, and all the way she wept.

It was to Lily's mother's everlasting discredit, in Mrs. Diantha's opinion, but to Lily's wonderful relief, that when she heard the story, standing in the hall in her lovely dinner dress, with the strains of music floating from the drawing-room, and cigar smoke floating from the dining-room, she laughed. When Lily said, “And there wasn't even any chickenroast, mother,” she nearly had hysterics.

“If you think this is a laughing matter, Mrs. Jennings, I do not,” said Mrs. Diantha, and again her dislike and sorrow at the sight of that sweet, mirthful face was over her. It was a face to be loved, and hers was not.

“Why, I went up-stairs and kissed the child good night, and never suspected,” laughed Lily's mother.

“I got Aunt Laura's curly, light wig for her,” explained Lily, and Mrs. Jennings laughed again.

It was not long before Amelia, in her gingham, went home, led by her mother--her mother, who was trembling with weakness now. Mrs. Diantha did not scold. She did not speak, but Amelia felt with wonder her little hand held very tenderly by her mother's long fingers.

When at last she was undressed and in bed, Mrs. Diantha, looking very pale, kissed her, and so did both grandmothers.

Amelia, being very young and very tired, went to sleep. She did not know that that night was to mark a sharp turn in her whole life. Thereafter she went to school “dressed like the best,” and her mother petted her as nobody had ever known her mother could pet.

It was not so very long afterward that Amelia, out of her own improvement in appearance, developed a little stamp of individuality.

One day Lily wore a white frock with blue ribbons, and Amelia wore one with coral pink. It was a particular day in school; there was company, and tea was served.

“I told you I was going to wear blue ribbons,” Lily whispered to Amelia. Amelia smiled lovingly back at her.

“Yes, I know, but I thought I would wear pink.”

THE COCK OF THE WALK

DOWN the road, kicking up the dust until he marched, soldier-wise, in a cloud of it, that rose and grimed his moist face and added to the heavy, brown powder upon the wayside weeds and flowers, whistling a queer, tuneless thing, which yet contained definite sequences--the whistle of a bird rather than a boy--approached Johnny Trumbull, aged ten, small of his age, but accounted by his mates mighty.

Johnny came of the best and oldest family in the village, but it was in some respects an undesirable family for a boy. In it survived, as fossils survive in ancient nooks and crannies of the earth, old traits of race, unchanged by time and environment. Living in a house lighted by electricity, the mental conception of it was to the Trumbulls as the conception of candles; with telephones at hand, they unconsciously still conceived of messages delivered with the old saying, “Ride, ride,” etc., and relays of post-horses. They locked their doors, but still had latch-strings in mind. Johnny's father was a physician, adopting modern methods of surgery and prescription, yet his mind harked back to cupping and calomel, and now and then he swerved aside from his path across the field of the present into the future and plunged headlong, as if for fresh air, into the traditional past, and often with brilliant results.

Johnny's mother was a college graduate. She was the president of the woman's club. She read papers savoring of such feminine leaps ahead that they were like gymnastics, but she walked homeward with the gait of her great-grandmother, and inwardly regarded her husband as her lord and master. She minced genteelly, lifting her quite fashionable skirts high above very slender ankles, which were hereditary. Not a woman of her race had ever gone home on thick ankles, and they had all gone home. They had all been at home, even if abroad--at home in the truest sense. At the club, reading her inflammatory paper, Cora Trumbull's real self remained at home intent upon her mending, her dusting, her house economics. It was something remarkably like her astral body which presided at the club.

As for her unmarried sister Janet, who was older and had graduated from a young ladies' seminary instead of a college, whose early fancy had been guided into the lady-like ways of antimacassars and pincushions and wax flowers under glass shades, she was a straighter proposition. No astral pretensions had Janet. She stayed, body and soul together, in the old ways, and did not even project her shadow out of them. There is seldom room enough for one's shadow in one's earliest way of life, but there was plenty for Janet's. There had been a Janet unmarried in every Trumbull family for generations. That in some subtle fashion accounted for her remaining single. There had also been an unmarried Jonathan Trumbull, and that accounted for Johnny's old bachelor uncle Jonathan. Jonathan was a retired clergyman. He had retired before he had preached long, because of doctrinal doubts, which were hereditary. He had a little, dark study in Johnny's father's house, which was the old Trumbull homestead, and he passed much of his time there, debating within himself that matter of doctrines.

Presently Johnny, assiduously kicking up dust, met his uncle Jonathan, who passed without the slightest notice. Johnny did not mind at all. He was used to it. Presently his own father appeared, driving along in his buggy the bay mare at a steady jog, with the next professional call quite clearly upon her equine mind. And Johnny's father did not see him. Johnny did not mind that, either. He expected nothing different.

Then Johnny saw his mother approaching. She was coming from the club meeting. She held up her silk skirts high, as usual, and carried a nice little parcel of papers tied with ribbon. She also did not notice Johnny, who, however, out of sweet respect for his mother's nice silk dress, stopped kicking up dust. Mrs. Trumbull on the village street was really at home preparing a shortcake for supper.

Johnny eyed his mother's faded but rather beautiful face under the rose-trimmed bonnet with admiration and entire absence of resentment. Then he walked on and kicked up the dust again. He loved to kick up the dust in summer, the fallen leaves in autumn, and the snow in winter. Johnny was not a typical Trumbull. None of them had ever cared for simple amusements like that. Looking back for generations on his father's and mother's side (both had been Trumbulls, but very distantly related), none could be discovered who in the least resembled Johnny. No dim blue eye of retrospection and reflection had Johnny; no tendency to tall slenderness which would later bow beneath the greater weight of the soul. Johnny was small, but wiry of build, and looked able to bear any amount of mental development without a lasting bend of his physical shoulders. Johnny had, at the early age of ten, whopped nearly every boy in school, but that was a secret of honor. It was well known in the school that, once the Trumbulls heard of it, Johnny could never whop again. “You fellows know,” Johnny had declared once, standing over his prostrate and whimpering foe, “that I don't mind getting whopped at home, but they might send me away to another school, and then I could never whop any of you fellows.”

Johnny Trumbull kicking up the dust, himself dust-covered, his shoes, his little queerly fitting dun suit, his cropped head, all thickly powdered, loved it. He sniffed in that dust like a grateful incense. He did not stop dust-kicking when he saw his aunt Janet coming, for, as he considered, her old black gown was not worth the sacrifice. It was true that she might see him. She sometimes did, if she were not reading a book as she walked. It had always been a habit with the Janet Trumbulls to read improving books when they walked abroad. To-day Johnny saw, with a quick glance of those sharp, black eyes, so unlike the Trumbulls', that his aunt Janet was reading. He therefore expected her to pass him without recognition, and marched on kicking up the dust. But suddenly, as he grew nearer the spry little figure, he was aware of a pair of gray eyes, before which waved protectingly a hand clad in a black silk glove with dangling finger-tips, because it was too long, and it dawned swiftly upon him that Aunt Janet was trying to shield her face from the moving column of brown motes. He stopped kicking, but it was too late. Aunt Janet had him by the collar and was vigorously shaking him with nervous strength.