Friendship Village Part 5

bring it in, all together--turkey ahead an' vegetables followin'. Mis'

Holcomb, you help 'em, won't you? An' then you can leave if you want.

Talk about an old-fashion' Thanksgivin'. My!"

"Who _has_ she got?" Libbie Liberty burst out, basting the turkey. "I declare, I'm nervous as a witch, I'm so curious!"

And then the clock struck twelve, and a minute after we heard Calliope tinkle a silvery summons on the call-bell.

I remember that it was Mis' Holcomb herself--to whom nothing mattered--who rather lost her head as we served our feast, and who was about putting in dishes both her oysters and her macaroni instead of carrying in the fair, brown, smoking bake pans. But at last we were ready--Mis' Holcomb at our head with the turkey, the others following with both hands filled, and I with the coffee-pot. As they gave the signal to start, something--it may have been the mystery before us, or the good things about us, or the mere look of the Thanksgiving snow on the window-sills--seemed to catch at the hearts of them all, and they laughed a little, almost joyously, those five for whom joy had seemed done, and I found myself laughing too.

So we six filed into the dining room to serve whomever Calliope had found "to do for." I wonder that I had not guessed before. There stood Calliope at the foot of the table, with its lighted candles and its Cloth-o'-Gold rose, and the other six chairs were quite vacant.

"Sit down!" Calliope cried to us, with tears and laughter in her voice.

"Sit down, all six of you. Don't you see? Didn't you know? Ain't we soul-sick an' soul-hungry, all of us? An' I tell you, this is goin' to do our souls good--an' our stomachs too!"

n.o.body dropped anything, even in the flood of our amazement. We managed to get our savoury burden on the table, and some way we found ourselves in the chairs--I at the head of my table where Calliope led me. And we all talked at once, exclaiming and questioning, with sudden thanksgiving in our hearts that in the world such things may be.

"I was hungry an' sick," Calliope was telling, "for an old-fashion'

Thanksgivin'--or anything that'd smooth life out some. But I says to myself, 'It looks like G.o.d had afflicted us by not givin' us anybody to do for.' An' then I started out to find some poor an' some sick--an'

each one o' you knows what I found. An' I ask' myself before I got home that day, 'Why not them an' me?' There's lots o' kinds o' things to do on Thanksgivin' Day. Are you ever goin' to forgive me?"

I think that we all answered at once. But what we all meant was what Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said, as she sat flushed and smiling behind the coffee-cups:--

"I declare, I feel something like I ain't felt since I don't know when!"

And Calliope nodded at her.

"I guess that's your soul, Mame Bliss," she said. "You can always feel it if you go to work an' act as if you got one. I'll take my coffee clear."

V

THE SHADOW OF GOOD THINGS TO COME

The Friendship accommodation reaches the village from the City at six o'clock at night, and we call the train the d.i.c.k Dasher, because d.i.c.k Dasher is its engineer. We "come out on the d.i.c.k Dasher" and we "go in on the Through"; but the Through is a kind of inst.i.tution, like marriage, while the d.i.c.k Dasher is a thing more intimate, like one's wedding. It was one winter night on the latter that I hardly heeded what I overheard.

"The Lord will provide, Delia," Doctor June was saying.

"I ain't sure," came a piping answer, "as they is any Lord. An' don't you tell anybody 'bout seein' me on this train. I'm goin' on through--west."

"Thy footfall is a silver thing, West----west!"

I said over to the beat of the wheels, but the words that I said over were more insistent than the words that I heard. I was watching the eyes of a motor-car carrying threads of streaming light, moving near the track, swifter than the train. It belonged, as I divined, to the Proudfits of Friendship, and it was carrying Madame Proudfit and her daughter Clementina, after a day of shopping and visiting in the town.

And when I saw them returning home in this airy fashion,--as if they were the soul and I in the stuffy d.i.c.k Dasher were the body,--I renewed a certain distaste for them, since in their lives these Proudfits seemed goblin-like, with no interest in any save their own picturesque flittings. But while I shrugged at myself for judging them and held firmly to my own opinion, as one will do, I was conscious all the time of the gray minister in the aisle of the rocking coach, holding clasped in both hands his big carpet-bag without handles. Over it I saw him looking down in grieved consternation at the little woman huddled in the rush seat.

"No Lord!" he said, "no Lord! Why, Delia More! You might as well say there ain't no life in your own bones."

"So they isn't," she answered him grimly. "They keep on a-goin' just to spite me."

"Delia More--_De_-lia More," the wheels beat out, and it was as if I had heard the name often. Already I had noticed the woman. She had a kind of youth, like that of Calliope, who had journeyed in town on the Through that morning and who had somewhat mysteriously asked me not to say that she had gone away. But Calliope's persistent youthfulness gives her a claim upon one, while on this woman whom Doctor June perplexedly regarded, her stifled youth imposed a forlorn aloofness, made the more pathetic by her prettiness.

No one but the doctor himself was preparing to leave the train at Friendship. He balanced in the aisle alone, while the few occupants of the car sat without speaking--men dozing, children padding on the panes, a woman twisting her thin hair tight and high. Doctor June looked at those nearest to be sure of their tired self-absorption, but as for me, who sat very near, I think he had long ago decided that I kept my own thoughts and no others, since sometimes I had forgotten to give him back a greeting. So it was in a fancied security which I was loath to be violating, that he opened his great carpet-bag and took out a book to lay on the girl's knee.

"Open it," he commanded her.

I saw the contour of her face tightened by her swiftly set lips as she complied.

"Point your finger," he went on peremptorily. She must have obeyed, for in a kind of unwilling eagerness she bent over the page, and the doctor stooped, and together in the blurring light of the kerosene lamp in the roof of the coach they made out something.

"... the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things ..." I unwillingly caught, and yet not wholly unwillingly either. And though I watched, as if much depended upon it, the great motor-car of the Proudfits vanishing before us into the dark, I could not forbear to glance at the doctor, who was nodding, his kind face quickening. But the girl lifted her eyes and laughed with deliberate scepticism.

"I don't take any stock," she said, and within me it was as if something answered to her bitterness.

"No--no. Mebbe not," Doctor June commented with perfect cheerfulness.

"Some folks take fresh air, and some folks like to stay shut up tight.

But--'the shadow of good things to come.' I'd take that much stock if I was you, Delia."

As he laid the book back in his bag, the train was jolting across the switches beside the gas house, and the lights of Friendship were all about the track.

"Why don't you get off?" he reiterated, in his tone a descending scale of simple hospitality. "Come to our house and stop a spell. Come for tea," he added; "I happen to know we're goin' to hev hot griddle-cakes an' sausage gravy."

She shook her head sharply and in silence.

Doctor June stood for a moment meditatively looking down at her.

"There's a friend of yours at our house to-day, for all day," he observed.

"I ain't any friends," replied the girl, obstinately, "without you mean _use'_ to be. An' I don't know if I had then, either."

"Yes. Yes, you have, Delia," said Doctor June, kindly. "He was asking about you last time he was here--kind of indirect."

"_Who?_" she demanded, but it was as if something within her wrung the question from her against her will.

"Abel Halsey," Doctor June told her, "Abel Halsey. Remember him?"

Instead of answering she looked out the window at the Friendship Depot platform, and:--

"Ain't he a big minister in the City?" I barely heard her ask.

"No," said Doctor June; "dear me, no. Abel's still gypsyin' it off in the hills. I expect he's out there by the depot with the busses now, come to meet me in his buggy. Better let him take us all home to griddle-cakes, Delia?" he pressed her wistfully.

"I couldn't," she said briefly. And, as he put out his hand silently, "Don't you let _any_body know't you saw me!" she charged him again.

When he was gone, and the train was slackening in the station, she moved close to the window. If I had been lonely.... I must have caught a certain cheer in the look of the station and in the magnificent, cosmic leisure of the idlers: in Photographer Jimmy Sturgis, in his leather coat, with one eye shut, stamping a foot and waiting for the mail-bag; in old Tillie, known up and down the world for her waffles, and perpetually peering out between shelves of plants and wax fruit set across the window of the "eating-house"; in Peleg Bemus, wood-cutter, stumping about the platform on his wooden leg, wearing modestly the prestige he had won by his flute-playing and by his advantage of New York experience--"a janitor in the far east, he was," Timothy Toplady had once told me; in Timothy Toplady himself, who always meets the trains, but for no reason unless to say an amazed and reproachful--"Blisterin' Benson! not a soul wants off here"; and in Abel Halsey, that itinerant preacher, of whom Doctor June had spoken. Abel was a man of grace, Bible-taught, pa.s.sioning for service, but within him his gentle soul burned to travel, and his white horse, Major Mary, and his road wagon and his route to the door of many a country church were the sole satisfactions of his wanderl.u.s.t; and next to these was his delight to be at a railway station when any train arrived, savouring the moment of some silent familiarity with distance. I delighted in them all, and that night, as I looked, I wondered how it would seem to me if I were returning to it after many years; and I could imagine how my heart would ache.

As the train moved on, the girl whom Doctor June had called Delia More turned her head, manifestly to follow for a little way each vanishing light and figure; and as the conductor came through the car and she spoke to him, I saw that she was in a tingle of excitement.