A Woman Named Smith Part 9

"Er--what I came over to say, is that I've got some fine bulbs, myself, this year, particularly fine bulbs--eh, Schmetz?--and more than I need for myself. Will you share them with me, Miss Smith?

Please! I--well, I'd be really grateful if you would," said this overgrown boy.

"We'll be enchanted," Alicia said instantly. "When can we have them, please?"

"Now!" cried the doctor, with brightening eyes. "By jingo, I'll get 'em this minute, and plant 'em for you, too!"

And he did. He was on his knees, trowel in hand, shouting to Riedriech, who had come outside for a few minutes' happy arguing with his good friend the doctor, that the socialist argument boiled down amounts to about this--that one should do without boiled eggs for breakfast now, in order that the proletariat may have baked hen for dinner in the millennium; which is lunacy; anybody with a modic.u.m of brains--

"Brains!" snorted Riedriech. "What is it you know about brains? _No_ doctor knows what is on the inside of brains! You make tinkerings mit the inside plumbings, _Gott bewahre_! and cut up womens and cats and such-like poor little dumb beasts and says you, 'Now I know all about the brains of man.' It is right there where you are wrong, Comrade Geddes!"

"_Habet!_" said Comrade Geddes.

"Look you," said the old visionary, with sudden pa.s.sion, "look you on the little bulb here, so dirty and ugly you hide him in the ground quick. So! But by and by comes up green shoots, and blossoms.

So it is with the great thoughts of men, the deep race-thoughts, Comrade Geddes--seeds, bulbs, germs, all of them, in the ugly husks of the common people. Out of our muck and grime they come, the little green shoots which the fool will say is poison, maybe, but which the wise know and labor and make room for. I, Riedriech, and workers like me, we go into our graves nothing but husks. But it is out of the buried hearts of us comes green things growing; and then--_die Blumen! die Blumen!_" said the cabinet-maker, with a still, far-away look.

"And," he finished, with a sad smile, "it is _our_ flowers that you put in vases of gold on your altars. And you say, 'Listen: Jesus the carpenter talks plain words to his fishermen friends.' And, 'Hus.h.!.+

Burns the plowman makes songs in the field!'"

The doctor looked up, and his eyes were very tender; his smile made me wonder. With a swift, friendly hand he patted the rougher hand of the other. And it was at this opportune moment that Mary Magdalen led around a corner of Hynds House no less personages than Mrs.

Haile and Miss Martha Hopkins. Their eyes fell upon Doctor Richard Geddes. They looked at each other. They looked at Alicia and me. And I knew their thoughts: "Sirens, both of you!" said Miss Hopkins's eyes.

"How do you do, Doctor Geddes!" said both ladies, as demurely as cats. _I_ should have felt like a boy caught stealing jam. He went right on planting bulbs.

"h.e.l.lo, Martha. What's on the carpet now?" he greeted that lady, airily. "Writing another paper on 'The Ironic Note in Chivalry'? How about 'The Effect of the Pre-Raphaelites upon the Feeble-minded'? Or is it the 'Relation of the Child to Its Mother,' this time?"

"You will have your little joke, Doctor," smiled Miss Hopkins, a dish-faced blonde with a cultured expression.

"Joke?" The doctor stared up at her. "Joke? Gad, I'd like to believe it!" He turned to Alicia and me, politely: "Miss Hopkins," he informed us, "moves among us clothed in white samite. She is our center of culture; Hyndsville revolves around her."

He went on putting a bulb in the place prepared for it. His eyebrows twitched slightly, but his mouth was smileless; Miss Hopkins was smiling, and not at all displeased. Mrs. Haile was bland and blank, as befits a minister's wife. Alicia's eyes were downcast, but a wicked dimple came and went in her cheek. She looked ravis.h.i.+ngly pretty, the bright hair breaking into curls about her temples, her young face colored like a rose. I do not blame Doctor Richard Geddes for stopping in his work to stare at her with unabashed pleasure, but I do not think it was diplomatic.

Mrs. Haile apologized for calling when we were so very busy. They had just stopped in pa.s.sing, because they were reorganizing their missionary society and wanted to see if they couldn't interest us in the good work. Their day-school in Mozambique needed another teacher, and their hospital in Bechua.n.a.land had to have more beds.

Doctor Geddes got to his feet, slapped our garden soil from his knees, and shook his tawny mane. His eyes were no longer sweet.

"Miss Smith and Miss Gaines, thank you for the opportunity of playing in the sand in pleasant company. Mrs. Haile, Miss Hopkins, I go to attend some home-grown n.i.g.g.e.rs who of course don't need a hospital, nor even a decent school, in our Christian midst. Ladies, good afternoon!" He made a fleering motion of the hand and was gone.

Mrs. Haile and Miss Hopkins smiled indulgently. Evidently, Doctor Geddes was one brother they were willing to forgive though he offended them until seventy times seven.

Alicia and Miss Martha Hopkins walked down the garden path together and Mrs. Haile fell into step with me. In a low voice she thanked me, hurriedly, for having dropped that dreadful suit. And were we--she hesitated--were we going to be regular communicants?

I didn't want to go to St. Polycarp's any more, and it was on the tip of my tongue to give a politely evasive reply, when our eyes met and held each other. I saw the naked truth in hers--the pitiful truth of the slim, poor, aristocratic little parish; the old church overtaken and surpa.s.sed by its more modern and middle-cla.s.s rivals; and the minister's family struggling along on a salary that would have made a hod-carrier strike. She was neatly dressed; she looked like a gentle-woman, but one in straightened circ.u.mstances. I made a rapid mental calculation.

"Why, yes, I think I can say we shall. Now, Mrs. Haile, I am a business woman, and if I speak bluntly you must pardon it. Miss Gaines and I can give two hundred dollars a year between us--fifty for the church; one hundred and fifty to be added to the minister's present salary."

I knew what that meant to her, and she must have known I knew, but she didn't show it by so much as the quiver of an eyelash. Only a faint, faint color showed in her sallow cheek, and she bowed, half-formally, half-friendly.

"Thank you, Miss Smith," said she, gallantly. And she added, with a glimmer of humor in her worried eyes: "As you say you're a business woman, may I say I hope you will get your money's worth?"

At that I laughed, and she with me.

We walked down our garden path, chatting innocuously and amiably, until of a sudden they caught sight of the little Love, the gay, charming, naked little Love, holding his torch above his curl-crowned head. You miss him, when you come up the broad drive from the front gate, for Nicholas Jelnik put him in the secretest, greenest, sweetest spot in all our garden, and you must go down a winding path to find him.

"So it wasn't an idle tale: they did find it, really!" breathed Miss Hopkins, staring with all her eyes. And I knew with great certainty why _she_ had come to Hynds House that afternoon.

"Forgotten all these many years, and now here, like the dead come to life!" murmured Mrs. Haile, abstractedly. "How strange!"

"It was said he bought it for his mother, because it looked so like himself as a child," said Miss Hopkins. Then she remembered her duty, held up two fingers before her eyes, and squinted through them critically:

"Charming, but don't you think the pose strained? It's an example of eighteenth-century work, placid enough, but it lacks that plastic, fluidic serenity, that divine new touch of truth, that is revivifying art since the great Rodin lighted the torch anew."

Heaven knows what else she said. It sounded like a paper on art to me, and I have a terror of papers on art. They are, Alicia informs me, purple piffle. Yet Alicia drank in every word Miss Hopkins uttered, though the dimple came and went in her cheek.

"You seem interested in art, Miss Gaines." Having torn the poor little peasant Love to tatters, Miss Hopkins descended to us groundlings.

"I don't always seem to know what art is," admitted Alicia, dovelike.

The lady who "moved among us clothed in white samite" smiled encouragingly.

"That is because you are really little more than a child," she said kindly. "When you begin to _grow_, you will improve your mind."

Alicia puckered her brows. "Ah, but I'm Iris.h.!.+" she said, seriously, "and the Irish hate to have to improve their minds. I imagine it takes an able-bodied mind to stand intensive cultivation," she added, guilelessly.

Miss Hopkins smiled: it was a masterpiece, that smile!

"But why, may I ask, did you choose such a situation for the statue?" she inquired critically. "Now, _I_ should never dream of tucking it in such an out-of-the-way place!"

The pucker came back to Alicia's brow.

"Shouldn't you?" she wondered. "I shall make a point of mentioning that to Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, if you don't mind. You see, he chose that spot, and we rather like it, ourselves."

Miss Hopkins stopped dead short, and Mrs. Haile started in spite of herself. Evidently, the situation was beyond them. Didn't we _know_?

How much had Judge Gatch.e.l.l seen fit to tell us? Alicia had dropped a bomb-sh.e.l.l that before night would detonate in every house in Hyndsville. They haven't very much to talk about in small towns, except one another, and when a plump mouse of gossip frisks about whisking his tail, why, it is cat nature to pounce upon it.

"Mr. Jelnik!" said Miss Hopkins, with an accent. "Oh, I see.

Well--he is a neighbor, of course. Certainly if Mr. Jelnik selected that particular spot for the statue--he of all people has the best right to do so--and to have his wishes considered."

"Of course. He has lived abroad, and seen everything of art there is to see," Alicia agreed, placidly. Which wasn't at all what Miss Hopkins meant.

We could see those two women turning the thing over and over in their minds--Nicholas Jelnik, last heir and descendant of Richard Hynds, tactily (perhaps even gladly; for had they not just witnessed the behavior of Doctor Richard Geddes?) accepting the interlopers in the house of his fathers! Nicholas Jelnik selecting the site for the statue Richard had brought home in pride, and Freeman had buried in sorrow! Miss Hopkins's stare dismissed me, s.h.i.+fted to Alicia, and discovered the cause of this shameless surrender of family pride.

Her lips tightened. With politely cold hopes that we should like Hyndsville, and warmer hopes that we would join the missionary society, they left us.

"Wedge Number One: The poor dear heathen, Sophy!" smiled Alicia.

"The P.D.H. can be a very present help in times of social trouble, can't he? I shall attend that missionary meeting, and take stock.

Incidentally (For goodness' sake, don't look so scandalized, Sophy Smith! this is a fight for our lives, so to speak!) incidentally, I shan't do the P.D.H. any harm. He won't be a bit worse than he was before, which is promising." She put two fingers before her laughing eyes, squinted through them, and drawled:

"You lack subtlety, Miss Smith. Cultivate your imagination, my dear!" in Miss Hopkins's best voice.

Riedriech stuck his grizzled head out at a window, cautiously: