At the Age of Eve Part 6

"A boy or girl's responsible for they sins as soon as the b.u.mps breaks out on they faces," she was telling them this afternoon, when the storm was at its worst, and the two sat huddled with Grapefruit behind the stove, like poor little frightened chickens in a fence corner.

Mother, who had not seen the meaning gestures that mammy had been making toward her volcanic right side, was inclined to make light of the sins of the twins, and suggested that they come out from behind the stove, so that the minute the rain held up a little they could run on down to the ice-factory and tell the man to hurry with the ice. We were going to have our favorite caramel cream that night.

But with mother's advent into the kitchen the pains in mammy's side grew much worse, and she began suggestions that she didn't know but what the Lord was going to strike her with another spell, "for the old dominecker rooster had been crowin' sad all day!"

The rain kept on, and late in the afternoon the ice-man telephoned that some of the machinery at the factory was broken, so there would be no ice! Then father's rheumatism suddenly grew so bad that we had to stop our preparations for the feast, and spent half an hour searching for the stopper to the hot-water bag. He must have that bag put to his shoulder, he declared, but after we gathered all the essentials together and put it there he could not stand it on account of the heat!

Upon going back to the kitchen to temper the water down a little I was astounded at mammy's declaration that, if Dilsey would go down to the cabin and bring up her easy chair, while I held an umbrella over it, she would _try_ to stay up long enough to direct _us_ about finis.h.i.+ng that dinner! Did ever a girl have such dreams and such nightmares mixed up together?

Night descended rapidly, as night has ever had a way of doing when you are in a fearful hurry, and mother was distractedly searching through her recipe book for a dessert that could be quickly made, yet when finished would be grand enough to set before gubernatorial timber!

Her maternal love had caused her steadily to refuse my help with the dessert, and she made me run on up-stairs for a final bath and a few minutes of manicuring before time to dress. "Be sure to dress carefully," she had bidden me, as she always does, for sometimes I am inclined to be a little absent-minded in the matter of hooks and eyes; but her warning was superfluous to-night.

"Make yourself beautiful--an' _skase_," is Mammy Lou's favorite slogan in the campaign after masculine admiration, and I had prepared to carry it out so far as nature and instinct would permit. I had carefully pressed my prettiest white gown, a filmy, ruffled thing, and spread it out on my bed, with a petticoat that was long enough, but _not_ too long, lying conveniently near. Where is the woman who has not shed tears and used feminine profanity because she could not find exactly the right petticoat at an eleventh-hour dressing?

As I came into my room I glanced toward the bed with a feeling of complacency, then I turned on the lights and looked more closely. My hopes fell and I saw that the gown had shared in the general determination of everything on the place to go wrong that afternoon because we were so particularly anxious that all should go right. A window near the bed had been left open, in the hurry and confusion, and the dress had seemed to drink in every bit of dampness that it could find lying around loose. It looked as limp and dejected as if it had slept in an upper berth the night before. I had no other thin dress that was available, with all its attachments, at that hour, so I laid aside my ambition to look romantic and slipped on a s.h.i.+rt-waist--with a collar so stiff that it scratched my neck until I looked as if I bore the marks of the guillotine.

Toward eight o'clock, after it was inky dark, and mother had got her dessert safely stored away in the refrigerator to cool, she and I were taking a breathing spell in the dining-room, although we were holding our breath every other minute, listening for the approach of wheels, when the night began to be made hideous by the sounds of the most violent calf distress down in the lot.

"Ba-a-a-h! _Ba-a-a-a-ah!_" came in hoa.r.s.e, hollow bellows to our already overstrained ears.

"It's that hateful little Jersey," mother said, starting up and going toward the kitchen. "He has his head caught in the fence again!"

"You sit still," I said, drawing her back toward her chair, "I'll go and send Penates to unfasten him."

There were savory odors in the kitchen, and mammy was so interested in the final outcome of the meal that she had abandoned her temporary throne and was stirring around the stove as usual. The three little negroes were gathered at the window, looking out into the blackness and listening with enjoyable horror at the turbulent sounds from the cow-lot.

"Go and unfasten him, Penates," I said. "He'll kill himself and us, too, with that noise!"

But Penates looked at me to see if I could be in earnest. When he saw that I was he began to whine.

"I's a-skeered to!" he half whimpered.

"The idea! A great big boy like you! What are you afraid of?"

"Granny's done tol' us the devil's gwiner ketch us," he began, and, as he saw mother coming in at the kitchen door, he looked appealingly toward her; but the nerve-racking strain of the afternoon had done its work with her--and the calf voice was something frightful!

"Your granny's an old idiot," she said forcefully, looking with wrath toward the stove, where mammy was peering into the oven in an entirely detached fas.h.i.+on. "You go straight and unfasten that calf!"

"Mis' Mary, I declare he'll ketch me ef I so much as step outside the do' there in the dark! Granny's jus' now tol' us he's watchin' ever'

minute to ketch us--"

"Lou, you ought to be ashamed of yourself to stuff these children's minds full of lies!" mother said, exasperated out of all semblance of her gentle, even-tempered self by the piled-up mishaps of the afternoon and the anguish of the present moment.

In case you have never heard a calf with his head caught in the fence I will state, under oath, that the diabolical sounds of the Brocken scene in Faust are dulcet music compared with the cry for help that the terrified creature sends forth. It usually brings the neighbors for miles around to find out the cause of the trouble, or rather _why_ the trouble is permitted to continue--for every one who has ever heard it once knows its sound for ever. What an unlovely salute for Prince Charming when he should drive up in the rainy, black night, I was thinking in agony!

Mammy straightened up and looked at mother as steadfastly as she had looked the day she announced her determination of marrying Bill Williams, the "Yankee n.i.g.g.e.r."

"It's a _sin_ to teach children about the devil!" Mother's voice was a challenge.

"_Sin?_ Why, Mis' Mary!" Mammy's tones were husky with horror. "An'

you been a church member for thirty years!"

"Well, the devil has never entered into my calculations in all those thirty years," mother responded hotly, not observing that father had slipped up close behind her and was listening to the theological controversy with an amus.e.m.e.nt which had routed his rheumatism.

"Well--that's between you an' your Maker," mammy argued stoutly. "I'm goin' to treat _my_ devil with some respeck, if white folks _don't_ mention theirs no mo' than if he was a po' relation that lived in Arkansas!"

Father was smiling almost audibly, but mother was not looking in his direction--and the little Jersey had evidently found no balm in Gilead for his afflicted head!

"I don't believe there's any _such_ thing as a devil!" mother finally broke out with vehemence; and she had turned quickly around as if she would go to the cow-lot herself, when she beheld father standing there, a look of amazement upon his face.

"_Mary!_ Have I lived to hear you deny the faith of your fathers?"

But mother was in no mood for banter.

"Don't _you_ talk to me about the devil, Dan Fielding!" she said, facing him squarely, and reluctantly unfolding her daintiest linen handkerchief to wipe the little beads of perspiration from across her upper lip. "I've had enough to make me believe in him this day, with three politicians coming, and a thunder-storm, and a broken ice-factory, and rheumatism and gall-stones!"

"Well, you know _you_ were the one who suggested inviting them here,"

father defended himself, Adam-like.

"Well, maybe I was, but I should never have dreamed of such a thing if you hadn't said, with that woebegone look of yours that you wished you could see them and hear them talk about the latest phases of the situation! Then, just to please you, I suggested that it was too bad to let them go to that dreadful hotel for dinner, when it would be no trouble for Mammy Lou to prepare one of her delightful meals!"

"Of course, neither one of us could know beforehand how deucedly contrary everything was going to turn out to-day, else I should have told you _not_ to invite them"--father was reiterating in what he intended for a soothing tone, when all of a sudden I heard the tramp of feet upon the front porch, for my ears all the time had been straining in that direction, else I should never have heard them, far away as the kitchen is, and with that hideous noise.

"_Hus.h.!.+_" I implored, as the footfalls grew quite distinct and I pulled down my cuffs, settled my belt, fluffed my hair out a little more at the sides, and flicked a tiny feather off the toe of my shoe.

"They've come!"

"And Ann in a s.h.i.+rt-waist suit," mother sent after father as a final shot when he started toward the front part of the house, "and that bovine orchestra!"

She hurried into her bedroom and made a motion with her powder-puff before she followed father, while I stopped in the dining-room and gave a glance of satisfaction at the shaded lights, the old-fas.h.i.+oned good taste of the furnis.h.i.+ngs, and the quant.i.ties of roses. The table was perfect, and I knew mammy too well to doubt that the dinner, too, would be everything that palate or eye could desire; then I glanced into the great old gold-framed mirror hung above the mantelpiece.

"I believe he'll enjoy his dinner," I decided, nodding in a friendly fas.h.i.+on toward the reflection in the gla.s.s; and, hearing the voices still coming from the direction of the porch, I hurried on out there.

They had come! In truth they had come, but alas it was not Richard Chalmers and satellites! It was Miss Delia Badger, Mrs. Sullivan and Neva, drenched and bewildered, that Bob Hall, the fool, had brought from Bayville!

"Oh, Mrs. Fielding," poor Mrs. Sullivan was saying beseechingly, as she looked at mother's startled face, "_do_ you know what's happened to Tim? We was to stay another week at maw's, but when Bob Hall drove into Bayville at dinner-time to-day and said he'd come after somebody that wanted to get took back here to Mr. Fielding's house, I knew it must a-been Tim took sick and sent for me! So we all piled right in without waitin' for me to belt down my Mother-Hubbard!"

"Jumping Jerusalem!" said father, and the calf bellowed dismally.

Investigation had shown the Sullivan cottage to be locked and barred, and the supposition was that Tim, although not already sick, was in a fair way to be so in the morning, as persistent telephoning on my part finally located him at the drug store with a crowd of friends whose company was both cheering and inebriating.

"I better git Bob to drive down there an' git 'im," Mrs. Sullivan suggested forlornly, looking at Bob, who was leaning against one of the big, white columns and twirling his cap around on one finger.

"For heaven's sake, _don't_," father objected. "He'll be just as likely to drive up with the county undertaker as with Tim Sullivan!

I'll go myself."