The Tinder-Box Part 8

"I wouldn't in the least mind telling Mr. James how I like him--if you think it is all right," Nell mused, looking pensively at the first pale star that was rising over Old Harpeth. "I would enjoy it, because I have always adored him, and it would be so interesting to see what he'd say."

"Nell," I said suddenly with determination, "do it! Tell any man you like how much you like him--and see what happens."

"I feel as if--as if"--Nell faltered and I don't blame her; I wouldn't have said as much to her--"I feel that to tell Mr. James I love _him_ would ease the pain, the--pain--that I feel about Polk. It would be so interesting to tell a man a thing like that."

"Do it!" I gasped, and went foot in the cla.s.s in romantics.

If any jungle explorer thinks he has mapped and charted a woman's heart he had better pack up his instruments of warfare and recorders and come down to Glendale, Tennessee.

Nell and I must have talked further along the same lines, but I don't remember what we said. I have recorded the high lights on the conversation, but long after I lost her I kept my whirlwind feeling of amazement. It was like trying to balance calmly on the lid of the tinder-box when you didn't know whether or not you had touched off the fuse.

Has honeysuckle-garbed Old Harpeth been seeing things like this go on for centuries and not interrupted? I think I would have been sitting there questioning him until now, if Lee and Caroline hadn't stopped at the gate and called to me.

I think Lee was giving Caroline this stroll home from the post-office in the twilight as an extra treat in her week's allowance of him, and she was so soft and glowing and sweet and pale that I wonder the Cherokee roses on my hedge didn't droop their heads with humility before her.

"What's a lovely lady doing sitting all by herself in the gloaming?" Lee asked in his rich, warm voice.

I hate him!

"Come take a walk with us, Evelina, dear," Caroline begged softly, though I knew what it would mean to her if I should intrude on this precious hour with her near-lover.

Please, G.o.d--if I seem to be calling You into a profane situation I can't help it; I must have help!--show me some way to a.s.sist Caroline to make Lee into a real man and then get him for herself. She must have him and he needs her. And show me a way quick! Amen!

Jane, I hope you will be able to pick the data out of this jumble, but I doubt it. Anyway I'm grateful for the lock and key on this book.

As I stood at the gate and watched Lee and Caroline saunter down the moon-flecked street a mocking bird in the tallest of the oak twins that are my roof shelter called wooingly from one of the top boughs and got his answer from about the same place on the same limb.

If a woman starts out to be a trained nurse to an epidemic of love-making, she is in great danger of doing something foolish her own self. I am even glad it is prayer-meeting night for Mr. Haley; he is safe in performing his rituals. He might misunderstand this mood.

I wonder if I ever was really over in sunny France being wooed and happy!

Of course, I decided the first night I was here that, as circ.u.mstances over which I had no control had decreed that Cousin James should stand in the position of enforced protector to me, decent, communistic femino-masculine honor demands that I refrain from any manoeuvers in his direction to attract his thoughts and attention to the feminine me. I can only meet him on the ordinary grounds of fellows.h.i.+p. And I suppose the glad-to-see him coming up the street was of the neuter gender, but it was very interesting.

"What did Dodson have to say--is he coming across?" I demanded of him before he got quite to my gate.

"Not if he can help it," he answered as he came close and leaned against one of the tall stone posts, so that his grandly shaped head with its ante-bellum squirls of hair was silhouetted against the white-starred wistaria vine in a way that made me frantic for several buckets of monochrome water-colors and a couple of brushes as big as those used for white-was.h.i.+ng. In about ten great splotches I could have done a masterpiece of him that would have drawn artistic fits from the public of gay Paris. I never see him that I don't long for a box of pastels or get the ghost of the odor of oil-paint in my nose.

"The whole thing will be settled in a month," he continued, with a sigh that had a hint of depression in it and an astral shape of Sallie manifested itself hanging on his shoulder. However, I controlled myself and listened to him. "There is to be a meeting of the directors of both roads over in Bolivar in a few weeks and they are to come to some understanding. The line across the river is unquestionably the cheapest and best grade and there is no chance of getting them to run along our bluff--unless we can show them some advantage in doing so, and I can't see what that will be."

"What makes it of advantage for a railroad to run through any given point in a rural community like this, Cousin James?" I asked, with a glow of intellect mounting to my head, the like of which I hadn't felt since I delivered my Junior thesis in Political Economy with Jane looking on, consumed with pride.

"Towns that have good stock or grain districts around them with good roads for hauling do what is called 'feeding' a railroad," he answered.

"Bolivar can feed both roads with the whole of the Harpeth Valley on that side of the river. They'll get the roads, I'm thinking. Poor old Glendale!"

"Isn't there anything to feed the monsters this side of the river?" I demanded, indignant at the barrenness of the south side of the valley of Old Harpeth.

"Very little unless it's the scenery along the bluff," he replied, with the depression sounding still more clearly in his voice and his shoulders drooped against the unsympathetic old stone post in a way that sent a pang to my heart.

"Jamie, is all you've got tied up in the venture?" I asked softly, using the name that a very small I had given him in a long ago when the world was young and not full of problems.

"That's not the worst, Evelina," he answered in a voice that was positively haggard. "But what belongs to the rest of the family is all in the same leaky craft. Carruthers put Sallie's in himself, but I invested the mites belonging to the others. Of course, as far as the old folks are concerned, I can more than take care of them, and if anything happens there's enough life insurance and to spare for them. I don't feel exactly responsible for Sallie's situation, but I do feel the responsibility of their helplessness. Sallie is not fitted to cope with the world and she ought to be well provided for. I feel that more and more every day. Her helplessness is very beautiful and tender, but in a way tragic, don't you think?"

I wish I had dared tell him for the second time that day what I did think on the subject but I denied myself such frankness.

Anyway, men are just stupid, faithful children--some of them faithful, I mean.

I felt that if I stood there talking with the Crag any longer, I might grow pedagogical and teach him a few things so I sent him home across the road. I knew all six women would stay awake until they heard him lock them in, come down to the lodge and lock his own door.

It is very unworthy of me to enjoy his playing a watch-dog of tradition across the road to an emanc.i.p.ated woman like myself. The situation both keeps me awake and puts me to sleep--and it is sweet, though I don't know why.

G.o.d never made anything more wonderful than a good man,--even a stupid one. Lights out!

CHAPTER VI

MAX AND THE ASAFETIDA SPOON

I do wish the great man who is discovering how to put people into some sort of metaphysical pickle that will suspend their animations until he gets ready to wake them up, would hurry up with his investigations, so he can catch Sallie before she begins to fade or wilt. Sallie, just as she is, brought to life about five generations from now, would cause a sensation.

Some women are so feminine that they are sticky, unless well spiced with deviltry. Sallie's loveliness hasn't much seasoning. Still, I do love her dearly, and I am just as much her slave as are any of the others. I can't get out of it.

"Do you suppose we will ever get all of the clothes done for the twins?"

Nell sighed gently as we sat on my porch whipping yards of lace upon white ruffles and whipping up our own spirits at the same time.

Everybody in Glendale sews for Sallie's children and it takes her all her time to think up the clothes.

"Never," I answered.

"She's coming, and I do believe she has got more of this ruffling. I see it floating down her skirt," Nell fairly groaned.

Nell ought to like to sew. She isn't emanc.i.p.ated enough to hate a needle as I do. But the leaven is working and she's rising slowly. It might be well for some man to work the dough down a little before she runs over the pan. That's a primitively feminine wish and not at all in accordance with my own advanced ideas.

I was becoming slightly snarled with my thread, and I was glad when Sallie and her sweetness seated itself in the best rocker in the softest breeze, which Nell had vacated for her.

"Children are the greatest happiness in life and also the greatest responsibility, girls," she said, in her lovely rich voice that always melts me to a solution of sympathy whenever she uses it pensively on me.

"Of course, I should be desolate without mine, but what could I do with them, if I didn't have all of you dear people to help me with them?"

Her wistful dependence had charm.

I looked at the twin with the yellow fuzz on the top of its head that has hall-marked it as the Kitten in my mind, seated on Sallie's lap with her head on Sallie's shoulder looking like a baby bud folded against the full rose, and I couldn't help laughing. Kit had been undressed three times after her bath this morning while Cousin Martha, Cousin Jasmine and Mrs. Hargrove argued with each other whether she should or shouldn't have a sc.r.a.p of flannel put on over her fat little stomach. Henrietta finally decided the matter by being impudent and sensible to them all about the temperature.

"Don't you all 'spose G.o.d made the sun some to heat up Kit's stomach?"

she demanded scornfully, as she grabbed the little roly-poly bone of contention and marched off with her to finish dressing her on the front porch in the direct rays of her inst.i.tuted heater.

The household at large at Widegables can never agree on the clothing of the twins and Henrietta often has to finish their toilets thus, by force. Aunt Dilsie being reduced by her phthisic to a position that is almost entirely ornamental, Henrietta's strength of character is the only thing that has made the existence of the twins bearable to themselves or other people.

As I have said before, I do wish that some day in the future you will come under the direct rays of Henrietta's influence, Jane, dear!