The Tinder-Box Part 15
"No!" was the short, but slightly mollified answer as Henrietta dug her toes into the dust and began to look fascinated.
"I'm glad you don't want to come, because I've got some very important business to ask you to attend to for me," answered Jane, in the brisk tone of voice she uses in doing business with women, and which interests them intensely by its very novelty and flatters them by seeming to endow them with a kind of brain they didn't know they possessed. "I want you to go upstairs and get my pocketbook. Be careful, for there is over a hundred dollars in the roll of bills--Evelina will give you the key to the desk--and go down to the drug store where they keep nice little clocks and buy me the best one they have. Then please you wind it up yourself and watch it all day to see if it keeps time with the clock in your hall, and if it varies more than one minute, take it back and get another. While you are in the drug store, if you have time, won't you please select me a new tooth-brush and some nice kind of paste that you think is good? Make them show you all they have. Pay for it out of one of the bills."
"Want any good, smelly soap?" I came out of my trance of absolute admiration to hear Henrietta ask in the capable voice of a secretary to a millionaire. Her thin little face was flushed with excitement and importance, and she edged two feet nearer the charmer.
"It would be a good thing to get about a half dozen cakes, wouldn't it?"
answered Jane, with slight uncertainty in her voice as if leaving the decision of the matter partly to Henrietta.
"Yes, I believe I would," Henrietta decided judicially. "The 'New Mown Hay' is what Jasper got for Petunia because he hit her too hard last week and swelled her eye. They is a perfumery that goes with it at one quarter a bottle. That makes it all cheaper."
"Exactly the thing, and we mustn't spend money unnecessarily," Jane agreed. "But I don't want to trespa.s.s on your time, Henrietta, dear,"
she added with the deference she would have used in speaking to the President of the Nation League or the founder of Hull House.
"No, ma'am, I'm glad to do it, and I'll go quick 'fore it gets any later in the day for me to watch the clock," answered Henrietta in stately tones that were very like Jane's and which I had never heard her employ before.
And before any of the three of us got our breath her bare little feet were flashing up my front walk.
"Help!" exclaimed Polk as he leaned back from his wheel and fanned himself with his hat. "Do you use the same methods with grown beasts that you do with cubs?" he added weakly.
"It's the same she has always used on me, only this is more dramatic.
Beware!" I said with a laugh as I insisted on just one squeeze of Jane's white linen arm as she was climbing back into the car.
"That's a remarkably fine child and she should have good, dependable, business-like habits put in the place of faulty and useless ones. Her profanity will make no difference for the present and can be easily corrected. Don't interfere with her attending to my commissions, Evelina. Let's start, Mr. Hayes." And Jane settled herself calmly for the spin out Providence Road.
"All the hundred dollars all by herself, Jane?" I called after them.
"Yes," floated back positively in the wake of the Hupp.
For several hours I attended to the business of my life in a haze of meditation. If Henrietta ticks off the same number of minutes on the woman-clock from Jane's standpoint, that Jane has marked off from her own mother's, high noon is going to strike before we are ready for it.
But it was only an hour or two of high-minded communing with the future that I got the time for, before I was involved in the whirl of dust that swirled around the storm center, to darken and throw a shadow over Glendale about the time of the publication of the Glendale News, which occurs every Thursday near the hour of noon, so that all the subscribers can take that enterprising sheet home to consume while waiting for dinner, and can leave it for the women of their families to enjoy in the afternoon.
I suspect that the digestion of Jane's Equality rally invitation interfered with the digestion of much fried chicken, corn, and sweet potatoes, under the roof-trees of the town and I spent the afternoon in hearing results and keeping up the spirits of the insurgents.
Caroline came in with her head so high that she had difficulty in seeing over her very slender and aristocratic nose, with a note from Lee Greenfield which had just come to her, asking her to go with him in his car over to Hillsboro to spend the day with Tom Pollard's wife, a visit he knows she has been dying to make for two months, for she was one of Pet's bridesmaids. He made casual and dastardly mention that there would be a moon to come home by, but ignored completely the fact that Tuesday was the day on which he had been invited by the League, of which he knew she was a member, to meet and rally around the C. & G. Commission.
I helped her compose the answer, and I must say we hit Lee only in high spots. I could see she was scared to death, and so was I, but her dander was up, and I backed mine up along side it for the purpose of support.
Besides I feel in my heart that that note will dynamite the rocky old situation between them into something more easily handled.
She had just gone to dispatch the missive by their negro gardener when Mamie and Sallie came clucking in. Mamie's face was pink and high-spirited, but Sallie was in one complete slump of mind and body.
"Mr. Haley has just stopped by to say that he thinks no price is too great to pay for peace, and fellowship, and good-will in a community,"
she said, as she dropped into a rocker and looked pensively after the retreating figure of the handsome young Dominie, who had accompanied them to the gate but wisely no farther. He didn't know that Jane had gone with Polk.
"And women to pay the price," answered Mamie, spiritedly. "I have just told Ned that as yet I do not know enough to argue the question of woman's wrongs with him, but I have learned a few of her rights. One of _mine_ is to have him accept any invitation I am responsible for having my friends offer him, and to accompany me to the entertainment if I desire to go. I reminded him that I had not troubled him often as an escort since my marriage. He was so scared that he almost let little Ned drop out of his arms, and he got in an awful hurry to go to town, but he asked me to have his gray flannels pressed before Tuesday and to buy him a blue tie to go with a new shirt he has. I never like to spank Ned or the children, but I must say it does clear the atmosphere."
"You don't think we could put it off or--or--" Sallie faltered.
"No!" answered Mamie and I together, and as I spoke I called Jasper to set out more rockers and have Petunia get the tea-tray ready, for I saw Aunt Augusta go across the road to collect Cousin Martha and Mrs.
Hargrove and the rest, while Nell whirled by in her rakish little car on her way to the Square and called that she would be back.
When Nell used a thousand dollars of her own money, left her by her grandmother, to buy that little Buick, Glendale promptly had a spell of epilepsy that lasted for days. The whole town still dodges and swears when it sees her coming, for she drives with a combination of feminine recklessness and masculine speed that is to say the least alarming. To see Aunt Augusta out for a spin with her is a delicious sight.
And it was most interesting to listen to a minute description of the composite fit thrown by the male population of Glendale, at their rally invitation, but as time was limited I finally coaxed the conversation around to the subject of the viands to be offered the lordly creatures in the way of propitiation for the insult that we were forcing them to swallow by taking matters in our own hands, and then we had a really glorious time.
I am glad I have had a year or more in Paris, months in Italy, weeks in Berlin, and a sojourn in England, just so that I can be sure myself and a.s.sure the others with authority that there are no such cooks in all the world as the women in the Harpeth Valley of Tennessee, United States of America.
The afternoon wore away on the wings of magic, and the long, purple shadows were falling across the street, a rustle of cool night wind was stirring the tree-tops and the first star was coming timidly out into the gloaming, before they all realized that it was time to hurry and scurry under roof-trees.
Lee Greenfield was waiting at the gate for Caroline.
Just as Henrietta had taken a last peep at the clock on the hall table and gone to answer Sallie's call to come and help Aunt Dilsie in the bedding of the Kitten and the Pup, Polk's Hupp stopped at the gate, and he and Jane came up the front walk in the twilight together.
She had on his flannel coat over her linen one and his expression was one of glorified and translucent daze. I didn't look at her--I felt as if I couldn't. I was scared! For a second she held me in her arms and kissed me, _really_--the first time she had ever done it in all my life--and then went on upstairs with a nice, cool good-night and "thank you" to Polk.
"Evelina," he said, as he handed me the empty lunch-basket and also the empty fish-bucket, the first he had ever in his life brought in from Little Harpeth, "I was right about that Hallelujah chorus being the true definition of the real woman--only they are more so. I have seen a light, and you pointed the way. Will you forgive me for being what I was--and trust me--with--with--good-night!" He was gone!
Jane's kiss had been one of revelation--to me!
For a long time I sat out there in the cool, hazy, windy autumn twilight breeze, that was heavy with the scent of luscious wild grapes and ta.s.seled corn, fanning the flame of loneliness in me until I couldn't have stood it any longer if a tall gray figure of relief had not come up the street and called me down to my front gate.
"Hail the instigator of a bloodless revolution," laughed the Crag as I stopped myself with difficulty on the opposite side of the gate from him. "The city fathers will have to capitulate, and now for the reign of the mothers!"
"And the same old route to subjection chosen, through their stomachs to their civic hearts," I answered impudently.
Overlooking my pertness he went on:
"Mayor Shelby was at home with Mrs. Augusta for two hours after dinner and, as I came by the post-office, I heard him telling Polk in remarkably chastened, if not entirely chaste language, that it was 'better to let the women have their kick-up on a feeding proposition than on something worse,' as he cla.s.sically put it."
"I know it is a great victory," I answered weakly, "but I'm too tired to glory in it. I wish I was Sallie's Puppy being trotted across Aunt Dilsie's knee, or Kit, getting a rocking in Cousin Martha's arms."
"Would any other arms do for the rocking?" came in a queer, audacious voice, with a note in it that stilled something in me and made all the world seem to be holding its breath.
"I'm tired of revoluting and it's--it's tenderness I want," I faltered in a voice that hardly seemed strong enough to get so far up out of my heart as to reach the ears of the Crag as he bent his head down close over mine. He had come on my side of the gate at the first weak little cry I had let myself make a minute or two before.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Is this right?" he asked]
"Is this right?" he asked, as he gently took me in his arms, hollowed his shoulder for a place for my head, and leaning against the old gate he began to swing me gently to and fro, his cheek against my hair and humming Aunt Dilsie's
"Swing low sweet chariot, fer to carry me home."
It was.
I know now what I want and I am going to have it. I'll fight the whole world with naked hands for him. And I'm also going to find some way to get him with all his absurd niceties of honor intact, just because that will make him happier.
I'll begin at the beginning and some way unclasp those gourdy tendrils that Sallie has been strangling him with. I will bunch all the rest of his feminine collection and take them on my own hands. I'm going to make a Governor out of him, and then a United States Senator and finally a Supreme Judge. Help! Think of the old Mossback being a progressive, but that's my party and Jane's.
I know he is going to hate terribly to have me ask him to marry me, and I hate to hurt him so, but it is my duty to get Jane's fifty thousand dollars so the Five may be as happy as I am to-night; only there aren't five other Crags. I know it will be a life-long mortification to him to have me do it, but he lost his chance to-night grand-mothering me. Still, I did turn my lips away. I was not quite ready then--I am now.