Friendship Village

Quite in ignorance of the Japanese custom of sipping tea while the first course is arriving, it is our habit in Friendship to inaugurate "supper" by seeing the tea poured. In deference to this ceremony a hush fell immediately we were seated, and this was in courtesy to me, who must inquire how each would take her tea. I think that this conversation never greatly varied, as: —

"Mrs. Toplady?" I said at once, the rest being understood.

"Cream and sugar, if you please," said that great Amanda heartily, "or milk if it's milk. I take the tea for the trimmin's."

Then a little stir of laughter and a straying comment or two about, say, the length of days at that time of year, and: —

"Mrs. Sykes?"

"Just milk, please. I always say I don't think tea would hurt anybody if they'd leave the sugar alone. But then, I've got a very peculiar stomach."

"Mrs. Holcomb?"

"I want mine plain tea, thank you. My husband takes milk and the boys like sugar, but I like the taste of the tea."

At which, from Libbie Liberty: "Oh, Mis' Holcomb just says that to make out she's strong-minded. Plain tea an' plain coffee's regular woman's rights fare, Mis' Holcomb!" And then, after more laughter and Mis' Holcomb's blushes, they awaited: —

"Mrs. Sturgis?"

"Not any at all, thank you. No, I like the tea, but the tea don't like me. My mother was the same way. She never could drink it. No, not any for me, though I must say I should dearly love a cup."

"Miss 'Viny?"

"Just a little tea and the rest hot water. Dear me, I shouldn't go to sleep till to-morrow night if I was to drink a cup as strong as that. No – a little more water, please. I s'pose I can send it back for more if it's still too strong?"

"Miss Libbie?"

"Laviny just wants the canister pointed in her direction, an' she thinks she's had her tea. Lucy don't dare take any. Three lumps for me, please. I like mine surup."

"Calliope?"

"Oh," said Calliope, "milk if there's any left in the pitcher. An' if there ain't, send it down clear. I like it most any way. Ain't it queer about the differ'nce in folks' tastes in their tea and coffee?"

That was the signal for the talk to begin with anecdotes of how various relatives, quick and passed, had loved to take their tea. No one ever broached a real topic until this introduction had had its way. To do so would have been an indelicacy, like familiar speech among those in the ceremony of a first meeting.

Thus I began to see that in spite of Calliope's distress at the ways of us in Friendship, a matchless delicacy was among its people a dominant note. Not the delicacy born of convention, not that sometimes bred in the crudest by urban standards, but a finer courtesy that will spare the conscious stab which convention allows. It was, if I may say so, a savoir faire of the heart instead of the head. But we had hardly entered upon the hour before the ground for Calliope's warning was demonstrated.

"There!" she herself bridged a pause with her ready little laugh, "I knew somebody'd pass me somethin' while I was saltin' my potato. My brother, older, always said that at home. 'I never salt my potato,' he use' to say, 'without somebody passes me somethin'."

Next instant her eyes flew to my face in a kind of horror, for: —

"We've noticed that at our house, too," Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss observed, vigorously using a salt-shaker, "but then I always believe, myself, in havin' everything properly seasoned in the kitchen before it comes on to the table."

"See!" Calliope signalled me fleetly.

But no one else, and certainly not Mis' Holcomb herself, perceived the surface of things vexed by a ripple.

"Well, now," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady heartily, "that is so about saltin' your potato. I know it now, but I never thought of it right out before. Lots o' things are true that you don't think of right out. Now I come to put my mind on it, I know at our house if I cut up a big plate o' bread we don't eat up half of it; but just as sure as I don't, I hev to get up from the table an' go get more bread."

"I know – we often speak of that!" and "So my husband says," chimed Mis' Holcomb and Mis' Sturgis.

"Seems as if I'd noticed that, too," Calliope said brightly.

Whereupon: "My part," Miss Lucy Liberty contributed shyly, "I always like to see a great big plate of good, big slices o' bread come on to the table. Looks like the crock was full," she added, laughing heartily to cover her really pretty shyness, "an' like you wouldn't run out."

Calliope's glance at me was still more distressed, for my table showed no bread at all, and my maid was at that moment handing rolls the size of a walnut. But for the others the moment passed undisturbed.

"I've never noticed in particular about the bread," observed Mis' Sykes, – she had great magnetism, for when she spoke an instant hush fell, – "but what I have noticed" – Mis' Sykes was very original and usually disregarded the experiences of others, – "is that if I don't make a list of my washing when it goes, something is pretty sure to get lost. But let me make a list, an' even the dust-cloths'll come back home."

Everybody had noticed that. Even Libbie Liberty assented, and exchanged with her sister a smile of domestic memories.

"An' every single piece has got my initial in the corner, too," Mis' Sykes added; "I wouldn't hev a piece o' linen in the house without my initial on. It don't seem to me rill refined not to."

Calliope's look was almost one of anguish. My hemstitched damask napkins bear no saving initial in a corner. But no one else would, I was certain, connect that circumstance, even if it was observed, with what Mis' Sykes had said.

"It's too bad Mis' Fire Chief Merriman wouldn't come to-day," Calliope hastily turned the topic. "She can't seem to get used to things again, since Sum died."

"She didn't do this way for her first husband that died in the city, I heard," volunteered Mis' Sturgis. "Why, I heard she went out there, right after the first year."

"That's easy explained," said Mis' Sykes, positively.

"Wasn't she fond of him?" asked Mis' Holcomb. "She seems real clingin', like she would be fond o' most any one."

"Oh, yes, she was fond of him," declared Mis' Sykes. "Why, he was a professional man, you know. But then he died ten years ago, durin' tight skirts. Naturally, being a widow then wasn't what it is now. She couldn't cut her skirt over to any advantage – a bell skirt is a bell skirt. An' they went out the very next year. When she got new cloth for the flare skirts, she got colours. But the Fire Chief died right at the height o' the full skirts. She's kep' cuttin' over an' cuttin' over, an' by the looks o' the Spring plates she can keep right on at it. She really can't afford to go out o' mournin'. I don't blame her a bit."

"She told me the other day," remarked Libbie Liberty, "that she was real homesick for some company food. She said she'd been ask' in to eat with this family an' that, most hospitable but very plain. An' seems though she couldn't wait for a company lay-out."

"She won't go anywheres in her crape," Mis' Sykes turned to me, supplementing Calliope's former information. "She's a very superior woman, – she graduated in Oils in the city, – an' she's fitted for any society, say where who will. We always say about her that nobody's so delicate as Mis' Fire Chief Merriman."

"She don't take strangers in very ready, anyway," Mis' Holcomb explained to me. "She belongs to what you might call the old school. She's very sensitive to everything."

The moment came when I had unintentionally produced a hush by serving a salad unknown in Friendship. When almost at once I perceived what I had done, I confess that I looked at Calliope in a kind of dread lest this too were a faux pas, and I took refuge in some question about the coming Carnival. But my attention was challenged by my maid, who was in the doorway announcing a visitor.

"Company, ma'am," she said.

And when I had bidden her to ask that I be excused for a little: —

"Please, ma'am," she said, "she says she has to see you now."

And when I suggested the lady's card: —

"Oh, it's Mis' Fire Chief Merriman," the maid imparted easily.

"Mis' Fire Chief Merriman!" exclaimed every one at table. "Well forevermore! Speakin' of angels! She must 'a' forgot the tea was bein'."

In my living-room, in her smartly freshened spring toilet of mourning, Mis' Fire Chief Merriman rose to greet me. She was very tall and slight, and her face was curiously like an oblong yellow brooch which fastened her gown at the throat.

"My dear friend," she said, "I felt, after your kind invitation, that I must pay my respects during your tea. Afterwards wouldn't be the same. It's a tea, and there couldn't be lanterns an' bunting or anything o' the sort. So I felt I could come in."