Friendship Village

"'Do what?' says Mis' Merriman, rill snappish.

"Elspie looks around at us then as if she first rilly took us in. An' when she sees Eb an' me standin' together, she give us a little smile – an' she sort o' answered to us two.

"'Why,' she says, 'I ain't got anybody, anywheres here, dead or alive, that belongs. The dead is all other folks's dead, an' the livin' is all other folks's folks. An' when I see all the graves down here that they don't nobody know who's they are, I thought mebbe one of 'em wouldn't care – if I kind of – adopted it.'

"At that she sort o' searched into Mis' Merriman's face, an' then Elspie's head went down, like she hed to excuse herself.

"'I thought,' she said, 'they must be so dead – an' no names on 'em an' all – an' their live folks all dead too by now – nobody'd care much. I thought of it yesterday when we was walkin' down here,' she said, 'an' I picked out the grave – it's the littlest one here. An' then when we come back past where the funeral was, an' I see them flowers – seemed like I hed to see how 'twould be to put 'em on my grave, that I'd took over. So I come early an' done it. But I was goin' to lay 'em right back where they belong – I truly was.'

"I guess none of us hed the least i-dea what to say. We just stood there plain tuckered in the part of us that senses things. All, that is, but one of us. An' that one was Eb Goodnight.

"I can see Eb now, how he just walked out o' the line of us standin' there, starin', an' he goes right up to Elspie an' he looks her in the face.

"'You're lonesome,' s'he, kind o' wonderin'. 'You're lonesome. Like – other folks.'

"An' all to once Eb took a-hold o' her elbow – not loose an' temporary like he shook hands, but firm an' four-cornered; an' when he spoke it was like his voice hed been starched an' ironed.

"'Mis' Fire Chief,' s'he, lookin' round at her, 'I's to let you know this week whether I'd take over the store. Well, yes,' he says, 'if you'll give me the time on it we mentioned, I'll take it over. An' if Elspie'll marry me an' let me belong to her, an' her to me.'

"'Marry you?' says Elspie, understandin' how he'd rilly spoke to her. 'Me?'

"Eb straightened himself up, an' his eyes was bright an' keen as the edge o' somethin'.

"'Yes, you,' he says gentle. 'An' me.'

"An' then she looked at him like he was lookin' at her. An' it come to me how it'd been with them two since the night they'd locked up my house together. An' I felt all hushed up, like the weddin' was beginnin'.

"But Timothy an' Silas, they wa'n't feelin' so hushed.

'Look a-here!' says Timothy Toplady, all pent up. 'She ain't discharged from the county house yet.'

"'I don't care a dum,' says Eb, an' I must say I respected him for the 'dum' – that once.

"'Look a-here,' says Silas, without a bit o' delicacy. 'She ain't responsible. She ain't – '

"'She is too,' Eb cut him short. 'She's just as responsible as anybody can be when they're lonesome enough to die. I ought 'a' know that. Shut up, Silas Sykes,' says Eb, all het up. 'You've just et a hot breakfast your wife hed ready for you. You don't know what you're talkin' about.'

"An' then Eb sort o' swep' us all up in the dust-pan.

"'No more words about it,' s'he, 'an' I don't care what any one o' you says – Mis' Cally nor none o' you. So you might just as well say less. Tell 'em, Elspie!'

"She looked up at him, smilin' a little, an' he turned toward her, like we wasn't there. An' I nudged Mis' Merriman an' made a move, an' she turns right away, like she'd fair forgot the funeral flowers. An' Timothy an' Silas actually followed us, but talkin' away a good deal – like men will.

"None of us looked back from the top o' the hill, though I will own I would 'a' loved to. An' about up there I heard Silas say: —

"'Oh, well. I am gettin' kind o' old an' some stiff to take a new business on myself.'

"An' Timothy, he adds absent: 'I don't s'pose, when you come right down to it, as Alice County'll rilly care a whoop.'

"An' Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, she wipes up her eyes, an', 'It does seem like courtin' with Sum's flowers,' she says, sighin', 'but I'm rill glad for Eb.'

"An' Eb not bein' there to agree with her, I says to myself, lookin' at the mornin' sun on the cemetery an' thinkin' o' them two back there among the baskets an' set pieces – I says, low to myself: —

"'Oh, glory, glory, glory.'

"For I tell you, when you see a livin' soul born in somebody's eyes, it makes you feel pretty sure you can hev one o' your own, if you try."

XII

OF THE SKY AND SOME ROSEMARY

When the Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality had its Evening Benefit at my house, Delia More came to help in the kitchen. She steadfastly refused to be a guest. "I'd love bein' 'round there," she said, "over the stove, or that way. But I can't —can't be company – yet. When I think of it, it's like a high swing."

So she stayed in the kitchen, and it was characteristic of Friendship that when its women learned that she was there, they all went – either deliberately or for a drink of water – to speak with her. And they all did learn that she was there. "Who you got in the kitchen?" was a part of the small talk from guest to hostess. The men stayed "in the other part of the house," Doctor June and Eppleby Holcomb sending by me some cordial word to Delia. I think that they cannot do these things anywhere else with such beautiful delicacy.

When my other guests had taken leave, Calliope stayed to help in the search for Mis' Postmaster Sykes's pickle fork and two of Mis' Helman's napkins (the latter marked with L because the store had been out of papier-maché H's, and it didn't matter what letter so long as you knew it meant you) and all the other borrowed articles whose mislaying made any Sodality gathering a kind of panic. Moreover, Calliope had been helping and we, and Delia, had been far too busy to taste supper.

We would have said that the true life of the evening was done instead of just beginning. But when we entered the kitchen, we found Delia More serving the supper on an end of the baking table, while warming his hands at the range stood Abel Halsey.

"I came in across the track, from the hills," Abel explained to me. "I didn't know you had doings till I tied and blanketed – an' I came on in anyhow, back way. I'm in luck too. I haven't had supper."

We four sat down in that homely cheer, and before us was the Sodality's exquisite cookery. It was good to have Abel there. Since my coming to Friendship I had seen him often, and my wonder at him had deepened. He was alive to the finger-tips and by nature equipped to conquer through sheer mentality, but he seemed deliberately to have fore-gone the prizes for the tasks of the lower places. Not only so, but he who understood all fine things seemed to regard his tastes as naïveté, and to have won away from them, as if he had set "above all wisdom and subtlety" the unquenchable spirit which he knew. And withal he was so merry, so human, so big, and so good-looking. "Handsome as Calvert Oldmoxon," the older ones in Friendship were accustomed to say, – save Calliope, whom I had never heard say that, – but I myself, if I had not had my simile already selected, would have said "as Abel Halsey." If a god were human, I think that Abel would have been very like a god. And to this opinion his experiences were continually bearing witness.

That night, for example, he was in the merriest humour, and told us a tale of how, that day, the sky had fallen. There had been down on the Pump pasture, deep fog, white and thick and folded in, and above him blue sky, when he had emerged on the Hill Road and driven on with his eyes shut. ("When I need an adventure," he said, "I just trot old Major Mary with my eyes shut. Courting death isn't half as costly as they think it is.") And when he had opened his eyes, the sky was gone, and everything was white and thick and folded in and fabulous. Obviously, as he convinced us, the sky had fallen. But he had driven on through it and in it, and had found it, as I recall his account, to be made of inextinguishable dreams. These, Abel ran on, are on the other side of the sky for anybody who claims them, and our sandwiches were, above all sandwiches, delicious. He was so merry that Calliope and I, by a nod or a smile of understanding, played our rôle of merely, so to say, proving that the films were right – for you may have an inspired conversational photographer, but unless you are properly prepared chemically he can get no pictures. As Calliope had said of her evening with Eb and Elspie, "the air in the room was easy to get through with what you had to say – it was that kind of evening." Sometimes I wonder if an hour like that is real time; or is it, instead, a kind of chronometrical fairy, having no real existence on the dial, but only in essence.

As I think of it now the hour, if it was an hour, was simply a background for Delia More. For it was not only Calliope and I who responded to Abel's light-hearted talk, but, little by little, it was Delia too. Perhaps it was that faint spark in her – fanned to life on the night of her coming home, so that she "took stock" – which we now divined faintly quickening to Abel's humour, his wisdom, even his fancies. Save in her bitterness, on that first night, I had not heard her laugh; and it was as if something were set free. I could not help looking at her, but that did not matter, for she did not see me. She was listening to Abel with an almost childish delight in her face; and in her eyes was the look of one in a place before unvisited.

Some while after we had moved away from the table and sat together about the cooking range, we heard the questioning horn of a motor. We knew that it would belong to the Proudfits, since for us in Friendship there exists no other motor, and moreover this one was standing at my gate. Abel went out there and came back to tell us that the car had been in town to fetch the Proudfits' lawyer, and that Madame Proudfit had kindly sent it for Delia "and spoilt everything," he added frankly. As he said that, Abel looked at her, and I saw that a dream may persist through personality itself. As I have said, if a god were human, Abel would have been like a god; and in nothing more so than in this understanding of the immortalities.

Calliope stood up and caught, and held, my eyes in passing.

"Let's you and Abel and I take Delia home in the automobile," she said; "there ain't anything so good for folks as fresh air."

I brought a warm wrap for Delia, a crimson cloak of mine which, so to say, drew a line about her, defining her prettiness; and in the starlight we set off along the snowless Plank Road, Delia and Abel and I in the tonneau of the machine, and I silent. It had befallen strangely that over this road Delia More and I should be faring in the Proudfits' car, and beside her Abel Halsey as if, for such as he and she, a dream may, just possibly, come back.

"See," she said to Abel, "the sky has gone back up again."

"Yes," Abel assented, "one of the things even the sky can't do is to change the way things are."

"Oh, I know, I know …" said Delia More.

"I want you to feel that," said Abel, gently. "Things are the way things are, and no use trying to leave them out of it. Besides, you need them. They're foundation. Then you build, and build better. That's all there is to it, Delia."

She was silent, and Abel sat looking up at the stars.

"All there is to it except what I said about the other side of the sky," he said. "And then me. I'll help."

From my thought of these two I remember that I drifted on to some consideration of myself, for their presence opened old paths where were in durance things that did their best to escape, and were disquieting. I thought also of Calliope, of whose story I had heard a little from one and another. And it seemed to me that possibly Delia More's laughter and her wistfulness summed us all up.