The Tinder-Box Part 16

If he wants to go on wearing clothes like that I'm going to let him, even on the Senate floor, but I can't ever stand for Cousin Jasmine to cut his hair any more. I want to do it myself, and I'm going to tell her so, and why. She and I have cried over that miniature of the lost young Confederate cousin of hers and she'll understand me.

But as I think it over--it always is best to be kind, and I believe I'll let him get through this rally--it's just four days--free and happy man.

I don't know whether to go in and wake up Jane or not. I would like to go to sleep with that kiss revelation between us, but maybe it is my duty to the Five to extract some data from her while it is fresh, on the foam. I am afraid it is going to go hard with her, but somehow I have a newborn faith in Polk that makes me feel that he will make it as easy as he can for her.

Isn't it a glorious thing to realize that neither she nor I will have to sit and be tortured by waiting to see what those men are going to do?

CHAPTER IX

DYNAMITE

When a man injures a woman's feelings by any particular course of conduct to which she objects, the maternal in her rises to the surface and she treats and forgives him as she would a naughty child,--but a man makes any kind of woman-affront into a lover's quarrel. That is what masculine Glendale has been doing to its women folks for four days, and I believe everybody has been secretly enjoying it.

As to the rally, they have stood aside with their hands in their pockets and their noses in the air, and if it hadn't been for Aunt Augusta and Nell and Jane being natural-born carpenters and draymen, we might have had to give it up and let them go on with it to their own glory.

When Nell and Jane went to see Mr. Dodd about building the long tables to serve the barbecue dinner on, he said he was too busy to do it and hadn't even any lumber to sell.

Then things happened in my back yard that it sounds like a romance to write about. Jane sent me over to borrow the Crag's team and wagon and Henrietta and Cousin Martha and any of the rest of his woman-impedimenta that I could get. He was out of town, trying a case over at Bolivar, and wouldn't get back until Monday night.

I am glad he wasn't here, for it would have gone hard with me to treat him in the manner that Jane decided it was best for all the women in Glendale to treat all the men in this crisis. It sounded sweet and cold as mola.s.ses dispenses itself to you in midwinter, and I could see it was a strain on Mamie and Caroline and Mrs. Kirkland, Nell's mother, and young Mrs. Dodd, the carpenter's wife,--the Boston girl that married him before she realized him,--to keep it up from day to day.

Besides that I'm going to be a politician's wife--though he doesn't know it yet--and I want the Crag to be away from the necessity of taking any sides in this civilized warfare. That's one reason I am such a go-between for Uncle Peter and the League, I am making votes for my man, so I consider it all right for me never to deliver any of their messages to each other as they are given to me, but to twist them into agreeability to suit myself.

Sallie said the Dominie was entirely on our side and that was why she went walking with him Sunday afternoon. All the other men were cool to him and he is so sensitive.

But to get back to the back yard. I glory in writing it and want the Five to consider it as almost sacred data, though I hope they will never have to do likewise.

Jane and Nell and Aunt Augusta took the two axes and one large hammer and tore down my back fence while I and the others loaded the planks on the wagon. Jane appointed Henrietta to sit and hold the slow old horses in case they should have got demoralized by the militant atmosphere pervading Glendale and try to bolt. I never saw any human being enjoy herself as Henrietta did, and it was worth it all just to look into her radiant countenance.

Jane took all the hard top blows to do herself and left the unloosening of the lower nails to Aunt Augusta while Nell ripped off the planks that stuck. I could almost hear Nell's long, polished finger nails go with a rip every time she jerked a particularly tough old plank into subjection, and Aunt Augusta dispensed encouraging axioms about pioneer work as she banged along behind Jane. Jane herself looked as cool as a cuc.u.mber, didn't get the least bit ruffled, and had the expression on her face that the truly normal woman has while she is hemming a baby's flannel petticoat.

And though during the day many delightful crises were precipitated, the most interesting were the expressions that devastated Polk Hayes's and Lee Greenfield's faces as they came around the side of the house to see what all that hammering was about.

"Caroline!" exclaimed Lee, in perfect agony, as he beheld the lady of his ardent, though long-restrained, affections poised across the wheel of the wagon tugging at the middle of a heavy plank which Mrs. Dodd and I were pus.h.i.+ng up to her, while Mamie, the mother of seven, stood firmly on top of the wagon guiding it into place.

"Help!" gasped Polk, as he started to take the ax from Jane by force.

Then we all stopped while Jane quietly gurgled the mola.s.ses of the situation to them, and sent them on down the street sadder and wiser men. I thought Polk was going to cry on her shoulder before he was finally persuaded to go and leave us to our fate, and the expression on Lee's face as he looked up at torn, dirty, perspiring Caroline, with a smudge on her nose and blood on her hand from an absolutely insignificant scratch, was such as ought to have been on Ned's face as he ought to have been standing by Mamie with the asafetida bottle.

That's mixed up but the Five ought to catch the point.

It took up all of Sat.u.r.day afternoon and part of Monday morning, but we built those tables, thereby disciplining masculine Glendale with a severity that I didn't think could have been in us.

We all rested on Sunday, that is, ostensibly. Jane put down all sorts of things on paper that everybody had to do on Monday and on Tuesday.

Henrietta sat by her in a state of trance and it did me good to see Sallie out in the hammock at Widegables taking care of both the Kit and the Pup, laboriously a.s.sisted by panting Aunt Dilsie, because Jane explained to her so beautifully that she needed a lot of Henrietta's time, that Sallie acquiesced with good-natured bewilderment. Of course, Cousin Jasmine helped her some, but she was busy aiding Cousin Martha to beat up some mysterious eggs in the kitchen--with the shutters shut because it was Sunday. It was something that takes two days to "set" and was to be the _piece de resistance_, after the barbecue.

Mrs. Hargrove couldn't help Sallie at all with the kiddies, either, because she was looking through all her boxes and bundles for a letter from her son, which she thought said something about favoring woman's rights, and if it is like she thinks it is, she is going to go to the barbecue and get things nice and hot instead of having them brought to her cold.

I had hoped to get a few minutes Sunday afternoon to myself so I could go up into the garret and look through one of the trunks I brought from Paris with me to see how many sets of things I have got left. I am going to need a trousseau pretty soon, and I might need it more suddenly than I expect. I don't see any reason for people's not marrying immediately when they make up their minds, and my half of ours is made up strong enough to decidedly influence rapidity in his. But then I really don't believe that the Crag would care very much about the high lights of a trousseau, and it was just as well that Nell came in to get me to help her write a letter to National Headquarters to know if she could have any kind of a.s.signment in the Campaign for the Convention to alter the Const.i.tution in Tennessee when it meets next winter.

"Have you made up your mind fully to go in for public life, Nell?" I asked mildly. "Some of your friends might not like it very much and--and--"

"If you mean Polk Hayes, Evelina," Nell answered with the positiveness that only a very young person can get up the courage to use, "I have forgot that I was ever influenced by his narrow-minded, primitive personality at all. If I ever love and marry it will be a man who can appreciate and further my real woman's destiny."

"Well, then, that's all right," I answered with such relief in my heart that it must have showed in my voice and face. I had worried about Nell since I could see plainly, though she hasn't told me yet, and I am sure he doesn't realize it, that Jane had decided Folk's destiny. Nell is not twenty-one yet and she will find lots of men in the world that will be fully capable of making her believe they feel that way about her destiny, until they succeed in tying her up to using it for the real utilitarian purposes they are sure such a pretty woman is created for.

It will take men in general another hundred years yet, and lots of suffering, to realize that a woman's destiny is anything but himself, and get to housekeeping with her on that basis.

Of course, I see the justice and need of perfect equality in all things between the s.e.xes, emotional equality especially, but I hope the time will never come when men get as hungry to see their women folks as said feminists get to see them, after they have been away about four days out in the Harpeth Valley. It takes a woman's patience to stand the tug.

The Crag didn't jog into Glendale on his raw-boned old horse until one-thirty Monday night. I had been watching down Providence Road for him from my pillow ever since I put out my light at eleven, because Jane had decided that it was our duty to go to bed early so as to be as fresh as possible for the rally in the morning. She had walked to the gate with Polk at ten and hadn't come back until eleven, so, of course, she was ready to turn in. It was just foolish, primitive old convention that kept me from slipping on my slippers and dressing-gown--I've got the prettiest ones that ever came across the Atlantic, Louise de Mereton, Rue de Rivoli, Paris--and going down to the gate to see him for just a minute. That second he stood undecided in the middle of the road looking at my darkened house was agony that I'm not going to put up with very much longer.

Scientifically I feel that I'm thinking life with one lobe of my brain and breathing with one lung. Still I made myself go to sleep.

Everybody believes in G.o.d in a different kind of way, and mine satisfies me entirely. I know that the hairs of my head are numbered and that not a sparrow falls; and I don't stop at that. I feel sure that my tears are measured and my smiles are rejoiced over, and when I want a good day to come to me I ask for it and mostly get it. There never was another like the one He sent me down this morning on the first slim ray of dawn that slid over the side of Old Harpeth!

The sun was warm and jolly and hospitable from the arrival of its first rays, but the wind was deliciously cool and bracing and full of the wine of October. It came racing across the fields laden with harvest scents, bl.u.s.tering a bit now and then enough to bring down a shower of nuts or to make the yellow corn in the shocks in the fields rustle ominously of a winter soon to come.

The maples on the bluff were garmented in royal crimson brocaded with yellow, the buck-bushes that grew along the edges of the rocks were strung with magenta berries and regiments of tall royal purple iron weeds and yellow-plumed golden-rod were marshaled in squads and clumps for a background for the long tables.

Jane and I with Henrietta were out by the old gray moss rock at the first break of day, installing Jasper and Petunia and a few of their _confreres_. Jasper has always been king of all Glendale barbecue-pits and he had had them dug the day before and filled with dry hickory fires all night, and his mien was so haughty that I trembled for the slaves under his command. His basket of "yarbs" was under the side of the rock in hoodoo-like shadows and the wagons of poor, innocent, sacrificed lambs and turkeys and sucking-pigs were backed up by the largest infernal pit. Petunia was already elbow deep in a cedar tub of corn meal for the pones, and another minion was shucking late roasting-ears and was.h.i.+ng the sweet potatoes to be packed down with the meat by eight o-clock. A wagon was to collect the baked hams and sandwiches and biscuits and confections of all variety and pedigree from the rest of the League at ten o'clock.

We didn't know it then but another wagon was already being loaded very privately in town with ice and bottles, gla.s.ses and lemons and mint and kegs and schooners. I am awfully glad that the Equality League had forgotten all about the wetting up of the rally, because I don't believe we would have been equal to the situation with Aunt Augusta and Jane both prohibition enthusiasts, but it did so promote the sentiment of peace and good cheer during the day for us to all feel that the men had not failed us in a crisis, as well as in the natural qualities inherent in their offering for the feast. There was a whole case of Uncle Peter's private stock. Could human nature have done better than that?

But if we did forget to provide the liquids, I am glad we had the foresight to provide other viands enough to feed a regiment, because a whole army came.

"Evelina," gasped Jane, as we stood on the edge of the bluff that commands a view of almost all the Harpeth Valley stretched out like the very garden of Eden itself, crossed by silver creeks, lined with broad roads and mantled in the richness of the harvest haze, "can all those wagons full of people be coming to accept our invitation?"

"Yes, they're our guests," I answered, with the elation of generations of rally-givers rising in my breast, as I saw the stream of wagons and carriages and buggies, with now and then a motor-car, all approaching Glendale from all points of the compa.s.s.

"Have we enough to feed them. Jasper?" she turned and asked in still further alarm.

"Nothing never give out in Glendale yit, since we took the cover offen the pits for Old Hickory in my granddad's time," he answered, with a trace of offense in his voice, as he stood over a half tub of b.u.t.ter mixing in his yarbs with mutterings that sounded like incantations. I drew Jane away for I felt that it was no time to disturb him, when the basting of his baked meats was just about to begin.

I was glad that about all the countryside had gathered, unhitched their wagons, picketed their horses, and got down to the enjoyment of the day before the motor-cars bringing the distinguished guests had even started from Bolivar. It was great to watch the farmers slap neighbors on the back, exchange news and tobacco plugs, while the rosy women folks grouped and ungrouped in radiant good cheer with children squirming and tangling over and under and around the rejoicings.

"This, Evelina," remarked Jane, with controlled emotion in her voice and a mist in her eyes behind their gla.s.ses, "is not only the bone and sinew but also the rich red blood in the arteries of our nation. I feel humbled and honored at being permitted to go among them."

And the sight of dear old Jane "mixing" with those Harpeth Valley farmer folk was one of the things I have put aside to remember for always. They all knew me, of course, and I was a bit teary at their greetings. Big motherly women took me in their arms and younger ones laid their babies in my arms and laughed and cried over me, while every few minutes some rugged old farmer would call out for Colonel Shelby's "little gal" and look searchingly in my face for the likeness to my fire-eating, old Confederate, politician father.

But it was Jane that took them by storm and kept them, too, through the crisis of the day. Jane is the _reveille_ the Harpeth Valley has been waiting for for fifty years. I thought I was, but Jane is it.

And it was into an atmosphere of almost hilarious enjoyment that the distinguished Commission arrived a few minutes before noon, just as Jasper's barbecue-pits were beginning to send forth absolutely maddening aromas.

Nell whirled up the hill first and turned her Buick across the road by the bluff with that rakish skill of hers that always sends my heart into my throat. And whom did she have sitting at her blue, embroidered linen elbow but Richard Hall himself? Good old big, strong dandy d.i.c.kie, how great it was to see him again, and if I had had my own heart in my breast it would have leaped with delight at the sight of him! But even the Crag's that I had exchanged mine for, though it was an entire stranger to d.i.c.kie, beat fast enough in sympathy with the dance in my eyes to send the color up to my face in good fas.h.i.+on as I hurried across a clump of golden-rod to meet him.