The Tinder-Box Part 14

"Don't want to hear a word she has to say! All 'as the crackling of thorns under a pot'--all the talk of fools."

"But surely you are not afraid to listen to her, Uncle Peter," I dared to say, and then stood away.

"Afraid, afraid--never was afraid of anybody in my life, Augusta not excepted!" he exclaimed, as he rose in his wrath. "The men of this town will show the uprising hussies what we think of 'em, and put 'em back to the heels of men, where they belong--belong--hey?"

And before I could remonstrate with him he was marching down the street like a whole regiment out on a charge that was to be one of extermination, or complete surrender.

The Crag told me that evening that the Mayor's office of Glendale had reeked of brimstone, for hours, and the next Sunday Aunt Augusta sat in their pew at church, militantly alone, while he occupied a seat in the farthest limits of the amen corner, with equal militancy.

But Uncle Peter's att.i.tude during the time of Jane's campaign for general Equality in Glendale was pathetically like that of an old log, that has been drifting comfortably down the stream of life with the tide that bore its comrades, and suddenly got its end stuck in the mud so that it was forced to stem alone the very tide it had been floating on.

Jane didn't throw any rocks at anybody's opinions or break the windows of anybody's prejudices. She had the most lovely heart to heart talks with the women separately, collectively, and in both small and large bunches. I had them in to tea in the combinations that she wanted them, and I must say that she was the loveliest thing with them that could be imagined. She was just her stiff, ugly self, starchily clad in the most beautifully tailored white linen, and they all went mad about her. The Pup and the Kit clutched at her skirts until anybody else would have been a ma.s.s of wrinkles, and the left breast of her linen blouse did always bear a slight impress of little Ned's head. The congeniality of Jane and that baby was a revelation to me and his colic ceased after the first time she kneaded it out of his fat little stomach with her long, slim, powerful hands according to a first-aid method she had learned in her settlement work, with Mamie looking on in fear and adoration. It may have been bloodless surgery but I suspect it of being partly hypnotism, because the same sort of surgery was used on the minds of all my women friends and with a like result.

The subject of the rally was a fine one for everybody to get together on from the start and, before any of them realized that they were doing anything but plan out the details of a big spread, the like of which they had been doing for hospitable generations, for the railroad Commission, they were organized into a flouris.h.i.+ng Equality League, with officers and by-laws and a sinking fund in the treasury.

"Now, Evelina," said Jane, as she sat on the edge of my bed braiding her heavy, sleek, black braid that is as big as my wrist and that she declares is her one beauty, though she ought to know that her straight, strong-figure, ruddy complexion, aroma of strength and keen, near-sighted eyes are--well, if not beauties, something very winning, "we must not allow the men time to get sore over this matter of the League. We must make them feel immediately that they are needed and wanted intensely in the movement. They must be asked to take their place, shoulder to shoulder, with us in this fight for better conditions for the world and mankind in general. True to our theory we must offer them our comradely affection and openly and honestly express our need of them in our lives and in our activities. I was talking to Mrs.

Carruthers and Nell and Mrs. Hall and Caroline, as well as your Cousin Martha, about it this afternoon and they all agreed with me that the men would have cause to be aggrieved at us about seeming thus to be organizing a life for ourselves apart from theirs, with no place in it provided for them. Mrs. Carruthers said that she had felt that the Reverend Mr. Haley had been deeply hurt already at not being masked to open any of the meetings with prayer, and she volunteered to talk to him and express for herself and us our need of him."

"That will be easy for Sallie, for she has been expressing need of people in her fife as long as she has been living it," I answered with a good-natured laugh, though I would have liked to have that interview with the Dominie myself. He is so enthusiastic that I like to bask in him once in a while.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "We must not allow the men to get sore over this matter of the League"]

"I asked young Mr. Hayes to take me fis.h.i.+ng with him to-morrow in order to have a whole quiet day with him alone so that we could get closely in touch with each other. I have had very little opportunity to talk with him, but I have felt his sympathy in several interested glances we have exchanged with each other. I am looking forward to the establishment of a perfect friends.h.i.+p with him."

I told myself that I was mistaken in thinking that the expression in Jane's eyes was softened to the verge of dreaminess and my inmost soul shouted at the idea of Jane and Polk and their day alone in the woods.

Since that night that Polk humiliated me as completely as a man can humiliate a woman, he has looked at me like a whipped child, and I haven't looked at him at all I have used Jane as a wide-spread fan behind which to hide from him. How was I to know what was going on on the other side of the fan?

It is a relief to realize that in the world there are at least a few women like Jane that don't have to be protected from Polk and his kind.

Jane is one of the hunted that has turned and has come back to meet the pursuer with outstretched and disarming hand. This, I suspect, is to be about her first real tussle; skoal to the victor!

"I advised your Aunt Augusta to ask you to talk again to your Uncle Peter, and Nell is to seek an interview with Mr. Hardin at her earliest opportunity, though I think the only result will be instruction and uplift for Nell, as a more illumined thing I never had said to me on the subject of the relation of men and women than the one he uttered to me last night, as he said good-by to me out on the porch in that glorious moonlight that seems brighter here in Glendale than I have ever seen it out in the world anywhere else."

"What did he say?" I asked perfectly naturally, though a double-bladed pain was twisted around in my solar plexus as the vision of Jane's last night interview in the moonlight with the Crag, and Nell's soon-to-be-one, hit me broadside at the same time. I haven't had one by myself with him for a week.

"Why, of course, women are the breath that men draw into their lungs of life to supply eternal combustion," was what he said when I asked him point-blank what he thought of the League. "Only let us breathe slowly as we ascend to still greater elevations with their consequent rarefied air," he added, with the most heavenly thoughtfulness in his fine face.

"Did it ever occur to you, Evelina, that your Cousin James is really a radiantly beautiful man? How could you be so mistaken, as to both him and his personal appearance, as to apply such a name as Crag to him?"

Glendale is going to Jane's head!

"Don't you think he looks scraggy in that long-tailed coat, shocks of taggy hair and a collar big enough to fit Old Harpeth?" I asked deceitfully.

Why shouldn't I tell Jane what I really thought of Cousin James and discuss him broadly and frankly? I don't know! Lately I don't want to think about him or have anybody mention him in my presence. I've got a consciousness of him way off in a corner of me somewhere and I'm just brooding over it. Everybody in town has been in this house since Jane has been here, all the time, and I haven't seen him alone for ages it seems. Maybe that's why I have had to make a desert island inside myself to take him to.

"And I have been thinking since you told me of the situation in which he and Mrs. Carruthers have been placed by this financial catastrophe, how wonderful it will be if love really does come to them, when her grief is healed by time. He will rear her interesting children into women that will be invaluable to the commonwealth," Jane continued as she tied a blue bow on the end of her long black plait.

"Do you think that there--there are any signs of--of such a thing yet?"

I asked with pitiful weakness as I wilted down into my pillow.

"Just a bit in his manner to her, though I may be influenced in my judgment by the evident suitability of such a solution of the situation," she answered as she settled herself back against one of the posts of my high old bed and looked me clean through and through, even unto the sh.o.r.es of that desert island itself.

"I hope you have been noting these different emotional situations and reactions among your friends carefully in your record, Evelina," she continued in an interested and biological tone of voice and expression of eye. "In a small community like this it is much easier to get at the real underlying motive of such things than it is in a more complicated civilization. I have seen you transcribing notes into our book. Since I have come to Glendale I am more firmly determined than ever that the att.i.tude of emotional equality that we determined upon in the spring is the true solution of most of the complicated man-and-woman problems. I am anxious to see it tried out in five other different communities that we will select. I would not seem to be indelicate, dear, but I do not see any signs of your having been especially drawn emotionally towards any of your friends, though your att.i.tude of sisterly comrades.h.i.+p and frankness with them is more beautiful than I thought it was possible for such a thing to be. You are not being tempted to s.h.i.+rk any of your duties of womanhood because of your interest in your art, are you? I will confess to you that the thing that brought me down upon you was your news of this commission for the series of station-gardens. I think you will probably work better after this side of your nature is at rest.

Of course, a union with Mr. Hall would be ideal for you. You must consider it seriously."

The "must" in Jane's voice sounded exactly like that "must" looked in Richard's telegram, which has been enforced with others just as emphatic ever since.

There are some men who are big enough to take a woman with a wound in her heart and heal both it and her by their love. Richard is one of that kind. What could any woman want more than her work and a man like that?

After Jane had laid her strong-minded head on the hard pillow, that I had had to have concocted out of bats of cotton for her, I laid my face against my own made of the soft breast feathers of a white flock of hovering hen-mothers and wept on their softness.

A light was burning down in the lodge at the gate of Widegables. He hasn't gone back to his room to sleep, even when I have Jane's strong-mindedness in the house with me. I remember that I gave my word of honor to myself that I wouldn't try any of my modern emotional experiments on him the first night I slept in this house alone, with only him over there to keep me from dying with primitive woman fright. I shall keep my word to myself and propose to Richard if my contract with Jane and the Five seems to call for it. In the meantime if I choose to cry myself to sleep it is n.o.body's business.

I wonder if a mist rises up to Heaven every night from all the woman-tears in all the world, and if G.o.d sees it, as it clings damp around the hem of His garment, and smiles with such warm understanding that it vanishes in a soft glow of sleep that He sends down to us!

Jane has arisen early several mornings and spent an hour before breakfast composing a masterly and Machiavellian letter of invitation from the Equality League to the inhabitants of Glendale and the surrounding countryside to and beyond Bolivar to attend the rally given by them in honor of the C. & G. Railroad Commission on Tuesday next. It is to come out to-day in the weekly papers of Glendale, Bolivar, Hillsboro, and Providence, and I hope there will not be so many cases of heart-failure from rage that the gloom of many funerals will put out the light of the rally. I hope no man will beat any woman in the Harpeth Valley for it, and if he does, I hope he will do it so neither Jane nor I will hear of it.

It was Aunt Augusta who thought up the insulting and incendiary plan of having the rally as an offering of hospitality from the League, and I hope if Uncle Peter is going to die over it he will not have the final explosion in my presence.

Privately I spent a dollar and a half sending a night-letter to Richard all about it and asking him if the Commissioners would be willing to stand for this feminist plank in the barbecue deal. He had sent me the nicest letter of acceptance from the Board when I had written the invitation to them through him, as coming from the perfectly ladylike feminine population of Glendale, and I didn't like to get them into a woman-whirlwind without their own consent. I paid the boy at the telegraph office five dollars not to talk about the matter to a human soul, and threatened to have him dismissed if he did, so the bomb-sh.e.l.l was kept in until this afternoon.

Richard replied to the telegram with characteristic directness:

Delighted to be in at the fight. Seven of us rabid suffragists, two on the fence, and a half roast pig will convert the other. Found no answer to my question in letter of last Tuesday. Must!

RICHARD.

It was nice of Jane to write out and get ready her bomb-sh.e.l.l and then go off with Polk, so as not to see it explode. But I'm glad she did.

However, I did advise her to take a copy of it along with the reels and the lunch-basket to read to him, as a starter of their day to be devoted to the establishment of a perfect friends.h.i.+p between them.

Polk didn't look at me even once as I helped pack them and their traps into his Hupp, but Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like Polk in his white flannels, and he and Jane made a picture of perfectly blended tailored smartness as they got ready for the break-away.

There are some men that acquire feminine obligations as rough cheviot does lint and Henrietta is one of Polk's when it comes to the fis.h.i.+ng days. He takes her so often that she thinks she owns him and all the trout in Little Harpeth, and she landed in the midst of the picnic with her fighting clothes on.

"Where are you and her going at,--fis.h.i.+ng?" she asked in a calmly controlled voice that both of them had heard before, and which made us quail in our boots and metaphorically duck our heads.

"Yes, we--er thought we would," he answered with an uncertainty of voice and manner that bespoke abject fear.

"I'll be d---- if you shall," came the explosion, hot and loud. "I want to go fis.h.i.+ng with you, Polk, my own self, and she ain't no good for nothing any way. You can't take her!"

"Henrietta!" I both beseeched and commanded in one breath.

"No, she ain't no good at all," was reiterated in the stormy young voice as Henrietta caught hold of the nose of the panting Hupp and stood directly in the path of destruction, if Polk had turned the driving wheel a hair's breadth. "Uncle Peter says that she is er going to turn the devil loose in Glendale, so they won't be no more whisky and no more babies borned and men will get they noses rubbed in their plates, if they don't eat the awful truck she is er going to teach the women to cook for their husbands. An' the men won't marry no more then at all, and I'll have to be a old maid like her."

Now, why did I write weeks ago that I would like to witness an encounter between Jane and Henrietta! I didn't mean it, but I got it!

Without ruffling a hair or changing color Jane stepped out of the Hupp and faced the foe. Henrietta is a tiny sc.r.a.p of a woman, intense in a wild, beautiful, almost hunted kind of way, and she is so thin that it makes my heart ache. She is being fairly crushed with the beautiful depending weight of her mother and the responsibility of the twins, and somehow she is most pathetic. I made a motion to step between her and Jane, but one look in Jane's face stopped me.

"Dear," she said, in her rich, throaty, strong voice as she looked pleadingly at the militant midget facing her. Suddenly I was that lonesome, homesick freshman by the waters of Lake Waban, with Jane's awkward young arm around me, and I stood aside to let Henrietta come into her heritage of Jane. "Don't you want to come with us?" was the soft question that followed the commanding word of endearment.