The Tinder-Box Part 6

"Yes, Henrietta, but you--"

"Ain't she whole all over and clean?"

"Yes, but--"

"Couldn't n.o.body do any better than that with one of them twins. I won't try. If I have to 'muse her it has to be in my own way." And with her head in the air the Bunch marched up the walk to the house.

At this Polk shouted and the rest of us laughed.

"Polk, please don't encourage Henrietta in the way she treats me and her little sisters," Sallie begged between her laughs and her half-swallowed sobs. "I need my friends' help with my children, not to have them make it hard for me. Henrietta is devoted to you and you could influence her so for the best. Please try to help me make a real woman out of her and not some sort of a terrible--terrible suffragette."

Sallie is the most perfectly lovely woman I almost ever saw. She has great violet eyes with black lashes that beg you for a piece of your heart, and her mouth is as sweet as a blush rose with cheeks that almost match it in rosiness. She and the babies always remind me of a cl.u.s.ter rose and roses, flower and buds, and I don't see why every man that sees her is not mad about her. They all used to be before she married, and I suppose they will be again as soon as the crepe gets entirely worn off her clothes. As she stood with the bubbly baby in her arms and looked up at Polk I couldn't see how he could take it calmly.

"Sallie," he answered seriously, with a glint in his eyes over at me, "if you'll give me a few days longer, I will then have found out by experience what a real woman is and I'll begin on Henrietta for you accordingly."

"Don't be too hard on the kiddie," Cousin James answered him with the crinkle in the corner of his eyes that might have been called shrewd in eyes less beautifully calm. "Let's trust a lot to Henrietta's powers of observation of her mother and--her neighbors." He smiled suddenly, with his whole face, over both Sallie and me, and went on down the street in a way that made me sure he was forgetting all about all of us before he reached the corner of the street.

"Isn't that old mossback a treat for the sight of G.o.ds and men?" asked Polk with a laugh as we all stood watching the old gray coat-tails flapping in the warm breeze that was rollicking across the valley.

"I don't know what I would do without him," said Sadie softly, with tears suddenly misting the violets in her eyes as she turned away from us with the baby in her arms and went slowly up the front walk of Widegables.

"Please come stay with me a little while, Evelina," she pleaded back over her shoulder. "I feel faint."

I hesitated, for, as we were on my side of the Road, Polk was still my guest.

"Go on with Sallie, sweetie," he answered my hesitating. "I don't want the snapped-off fraction of a declaration like you were about to offer me. I can bide my time--and get my own." With which he turned and got into his car as I went across the street.

Jane, I feel encouraged. I have done well to-day to get half way through my declaration of independence--though he doesn't think that is what it is going to be--to Polk. If I can just tell him how much I love him, before he makes love to me we can get on such a sensible footing with each other. I'll command the situation then.

But suppose I do get Polk calmed down to a nice friends.h.i.+p after old Plato's recipe, what if I want to marry him?

Do I want to marry a friend?

Yes, I do!

No--no!

CHAPTER V

DEEPER THAN SHOULDERS AND RIBS

There are many fundamental differences between men and women which strike deeper than breadth of shoulders and number of ribs on the right side.

Men deliberately unearth matters of importance and women stumble on the same things in the dark. It is then a question of the individual as to the complications that result. One thing can be always counted on. A woman likes to tangle life into a large ma.s.s and then straighten out the threads at her leisure--and the man's leisure too.

Glendale affairs interest me more every day.

This has been a remarkable afternoon and I wish Jane had been in Glendale to witness it.

"Say, Evelina, all the folks over at our house have gone crazy, and I wish you would come over and help Cousin James with 'em," Henrietta demanded, as I sat on my side porch, calmly hemming a ruffle on a dress for the Kitten. Everybody sews for the twins and, as much as I hate it, I can't help doing it.

"Why, Henrietta, what is the matter?" I demanded, as I hurried down the front walk and across the road at her bare little heels. By the time I got to the front gate I could hear sounds of lamentation.

"A railroad train wants to run right through the middle of all their dead people and Sallie started the crying. Dead's dead, and if Cousin James wants 'em run over. I wants 'em run over too." She answered over her shoulder as we hurried through the wide front hall.

And a scene that beggars description met my eyes, as I stood in the living-room door. I hope this account I am going to try and write will get petrified by some kind of new element they will suddenly discover some day and the ma.n.u.script be dug up from the ruins of Glendale to interest the natives of the Argon age about 2800 A. D.

Sallie sat in the large armchair in the middle of the room weeping in the slow, regular way a woman has of starting out with tears, when she means to let them flow for hours, maybe days, and there were just five echoes to her grief, all done in different keys and characters.

Cousin Martha knelt beside the chair and held Sallie's head on her ample bosom, but I must say that the expression on her face was one of bewilderment, as well as of grief.

The three little Horton cousins sat close together in the middle of the old hair-cloth sofa by the window and were weeping as modestly and helplessly as they did everything else in life, while Mrs. Hargrove, in her chair under her son's portrait, was just plainly out and out howling.

And on the hearth-rug, before the tiny fire of oak chips that the old ladies liked to keep burning all summer, stood the master of the house and, for once in my life, I have seen the personification of masculine helplessness. He was a tragedy and I flew straight to him with arms wide open, which clasped both his shoulders as I gave him a good shake to arouse him from his paralyzation.

"What's the matter?" I demanded, with the second shake.

"I'm a brute, Evelina," he answered, and a sudden discouragement lined every feature of his beautiful biblical face. I couldn't stand that and I hugged him tight to my breast for an instant and then administered another earthquake shake.

"Tell me exactly what has happened," I demanded, looking straight into his tragic eyes and letting my hands slip from his shoulders down his arms until they held both of his hands tight and warm in mine.

Jane, I was glad that I had offered the cup of my eyes to him full of this curious inter-s.e.x elixir of life that you have induced me to seek so blindly, for he responded to the dose immediately and the color came back into his face as he answered me just as sensibly as he would another man.

"The men who are surveying the new railroad from Cincinnati to the Gulf have laid their experimental lines across the corner of Greenwood Cemetery and they say it will have to run that way or go across the river and parallel the lines of the other road. If they come on this side of the river they will force the other road to come across, too, and in that case we will get the shops. It just happens that such a line will make necessary the removal of--of poor Henry's remains to another lot. Sallie's is the only lot in the cemetery that is that high on the bluff. Henry didn't like the situation when he bought it himself, and I thought that, as there is another lot right next to her mother's for sale, she would not--but, of course, I was brutal to mention it to her.

I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me, Sallie." And as he spoke he extracted himself from me and walked over and laid his hand on Sallie's head.

"It was such a shock to her--poor Henry," sobbed little Cousin Jasmine, and the other two little sisters sniffed in chorus.

"To have railroad trains running by Greenwood at all will be disturbing to the peace of the dead," snorted Mrs. Hargrove. "We need no railroad in Glendale. We have never had one, and that is my last word--no!"

"Four miles to the railroad station across the river is just a pleasant drive in good weather," said Cousin Martha, plaintively, as she cuddled Sallie's sobs more comfortably down on her shoulder.

"I feel that Henry would doubt my faithfulness to his memory, if I consented to such a desecration," came in smothered tones from the pillowing shoulder.

And not one of all those six women had stopped to think for one minute that the minor fact of the disturbing of the ashes of Henry Carruthers would be followed by the major one of the restoration of the widow's fortune and the lifting of a huge financial burden off the strong shoulders they were all separately and collectively leaning upon.

I exploded, but I am glad I drew the Crag out on the porch and did it to him alone.

"Evelina, you are refres.h.i.+ng if strenuous," he laughed, after I had spent five minutes in stating my opinions of women in general and a few in particular. "But I ought not to have hurt Sallie by telling her about the lines until they are a certainty. It is so far only a possibility. They may go across the river anyway."

"And as for seeing Sallie swaddled in your consideration, and fed yourself as a sacrifice from a spoon, I am tired of it," I flamed up again. "It's not good for her. Feed and clothe her and her progeny,--men in general have brought just such burdens as that upon you in particular by their att.i.tude towards us,--but do let her begin to exert just a small area of her brain on the subject of the survival of the fit to live. You don't swaddle or feed me!"

"Eve," he said, softly under his breath as his wonderful gentle eyes sank down way below the indignation and explosiveness to the quiet pool that lies at the very bottom of my heart.

n.o.body ever found it before and I didn't know it was there myself, but I felt as if it were being drained up into Heaven.