Emerance stood silently looking on. “Mr. Emerance,” Parthenope said, desperately, “will you lend me fifty cents till my cousins come back? I have been very foolish and I am ashamed. But—”
She stopped at a look of dismay in his face as great as her own. “Yes, yes,” he began. “Very gladly, if—”
He was feeling in his pockets, one after another — those eight or ten pockets with which his clothes seemed so needlessly equipped. It was still the day of fractional currency, and from one pocket he brought forth a small wad of greenish paper worth twenty-five cents; from another a ten-cent note, and from yet another two five-cent notes; it was apparently all his store, but a desperate search revealed a lurking nickel, and the sum was made up and put into the palm of the gypsy, which, it seemed to Parthenope, had been stretched out all the time. They both drew a great sigh.
The gypsy smiled. “Have your fortune told, too, gentleman!”
“Thank you,” Emerance replied; “I can’t afford it.”
As they walked back to their place on the threshold, Parthenope, with her face averse, seemed not to hear him as he said, “I will never try that again.” He went on, as if philosophically interested in his explanation: “I had the notion of bringing no money with me and frankly living on what I could earn by any work I happened to pick up. But it won’t answer. It’s too much like living off the country, as the tramps do.” —
“Yes,” she said, “I have been living off the country — like a tramp. Thank you, Mr. Emerance,” and she faced him flushed with a resentment that she knew was not real.
Apparently he knew it, too, for he was not abashed. “You don’t mean that,” he said, simply.
She was not to be outdone in frankness, if it came to that. “No; I said it because I was ashamed of my stubbornness and heedlessness.”
He protested. “Oh, I should have liked to try it myself if I had supposed I had the money,” he said.
“You didn’t think of my borrowing of you?”
“No, I didn’t think of that. I’m glad I had it to lend. It was a rather narrow escape.”
He did not laugh, as Parthenope now thought He might, to relieve the tension. Perhaps he would not feel it respectful to laugh, and that was nice of him. It was so nice that it encouraged her to take the aggressive with him again. “You seem to be quite in the experimental stage,” she mocked.
“I like to try things, yes,” he assented. “Don’t you?”
“Girls mustn’t. A girl couldn’t go about the country alone, even with her pocket — if she had one — full of money. I don’t believe that the Shakers themselves would take in a destitute girl if she strayed up to the Office door. Are you going to stay with them?”
“They have no work for me. I am going to ask Mr. Kite for farm-work, and then, if he has none for me, I shall inquire round among the other farmers.” Women like to take liberties with spirits that they feel they can trust any lengths, and Parthenope now abandoned Herself to the opportunity. “Shall you tell them you can sleep in the barn?”
“I wouldn’t specify it,” Emerance returned from the gravity which he had put on. “But I would rather sleep in some of their barns than some of their bedrooms. There’s more air.”
She came to him from another point: “I thought you were going to start a cooking-school for summer boarders.”
“Yes; I should really like to do that, but I haven’t found the right place.”
“You might,” she went on, “get the Shakers to give you a room and invite the country people in to learn. Only they wouldn’t come. No, you must begin with summer boarders. Why don’t you go down to Ellison, below here? There are lots of summer boarders there. But I believe you want to get them in a camp where they won’t have anything to eat but what you give them. Well, the Shaker woods, here, are big enough for a camp, and they would lend them to you.” He fell in with her joking: “The difficulty would be to get the summer boarders to camp; that would be harder than getting them to cook.”
“Yes, but if you like to try things! Do you mean to say that you expect to go experimenting through life?” she said, reverting to a former point.
“I hardly know what I expect.”
“It seems to me that the first thing is to have a definite ideal,” Parthenope urged, with a New England ideal indefinitely coming to the top in her speech.
“I’m not sure. But how can you have a definite ideal without experimenting for it?”
“You can think it out beforehand. Nothing was ever accomplished without a high ideal.” When she had said this it seemed to her that it was not absolutely true. So she hedged: “Of course there are a great many good things that one does from the impulse of the moment. But could you have that impulse without having the ideal?”
He did not answer directly. “I think you would have to experiment for a definite ideal.”
“No, you say that because you like experimenting. You said so yourself, or the same as said.”
“Yes, I do like it. That’s what makes life interesting. It’s all an experiment — life is.”
“Yes, and when you come to the end of life” — in her twenty-seventh year this seemed to her still ages away—” you have your experiment for your pains.”
“But you have been interested all the time.”
“I call that pagan.” She did not know why she called it so, but her words sounded convincing to her.
“I’m not sure the pagans were always wrong,” he said.
“They were wrong in the essentials,” she decided.
“Were they?” he asked.
“It doesn’t make them right to ask if they were.” They talked of various things, which she was always bringing back to the concrete, to herself and to him, when he had got them well away in the abstract. She had escaped from a great embarrassment, but she was not satisfied with her escape; she must somehow turn it into a triumph over him, but it was difficult, and there were phases of the situation in which it was as yet impossible. This Mr. Emerance was certainly a strange being. She had never felt before so much as if she were a disembodied spirit communing with another disembodied spirit, and she caught herself in a sigh as she saw the top of the wagon which held the returning Kelwyns rising above the swell of the road from the hollow toward the village.
She felt a subjective drop as from the clouds, but she alighted on her feet and ran toward them in the wagon, where before either of the Kelwyns had time to speak she said: “I want you to give me fifty cents, Cousin Elmer. I’ve had my fortune told, and Mr. Emerance lent it to me.”
Kelwyn stared, daunted by the violently foreshortened facts, but his wife easily grasped them and reached the vital point — that the girl was feverishly happy, and that it was doubtful whether she ought to be. As Emerance was slowly making his way toward them she explained to her husband that it was the gypsies whom they had met, and that, of course, Parthenope had had to borrow the money from Mr. Emerance.
She ended, to Kelwyn’s still clouded intelligence, “Give it to her, anyway, Elmer, and I will tell you about it afterward,” and with that he got the money out of his pocket and put it in the girl’s hand, which had been outstretched to him.
She turned and gave Emerance the fifty-cent note. “There!” she said, as if life, which was all experiment, could have had no more triumphant issue.
He asked Mrs. Kelwyn if he could not help her to get her purchases out of the wagon, while Kelwyn remained holding the horse, and Parthenope joined him in discharging the cargo.
Mrs. Kite witnessed their activities at her ease from her door in the ell. The sight of her seemed to remind Kelwyn of his wrongs. “I suppose Kite isn’t anywhere about,” he said. “Well, I will drive the horse into the barn and leave him there.”
“Let me take him, Mr. Kelwyn,” the young man entreated, putting himself at the horse’s head. “I’ll unharness the old fellow and give him his hay.”
Kelwyn refused. “No, I shall leave him in the wagon. It will be a lesson to them
. These people are getting insufferable. Kite agreed to hitch and unhitch the horse for me always, but half the time I have to do it for myself.” He hesitated, and then he said to the young man, “If you will kindly throw the barndoors open, however, I shall be greatly obliged to you.”
“Why, certainly,” Emerance said, and he walked ahead toward the barn.
Before they reached it the barn-doors were slid back from within, and Raney stood in the open space with his hands in his pockets disinterestedly regarding their progress. When they mounted the incline to the doorway, he took out his hands and said, “I put up the horse, Mr. Kelwyn.”
“Where is Kite?” Kelwyn asked, in reluctantly parting with his grievance.
“I put up your horse,” Raney; repeated, noncommittally.
XVIII
WITH the reason for his vexation, Kelwyn’s vexation passed and it passed the more quickly for finding his wife in very good humor when, after he had washed the smell of the leathern reins from his hands and gone about the house looking for her, he discovered her in what they called the guest-chamber putting it in the order it was idle to expect from Mrs. Kite.
“Parthenope,” Mrs. Kelwyn explained, “is in the kitchen with Mrs. Kite, and Mr. Emerance has gone to help them. He is going to stay to supper, and I shall invite him to stay with us to-night; it’s no more than is due to ourselves.”
“Yes,” Kelwyn assented; “I felt shabby about our letting him go before.”
“It would have been forcing it if we had kept him,” Mrs. Kelwyn evaded the point. “But it’s pleasant to be able to make it up to him. He seems really nice.”
“Yes, but we know nothing more about him than we did at first.”
“Oh yes, we do. Parthenope found him at the school examination, and he corrected some of the exercises. He is cultivated, in a way. He seems to have all sorts of ideas, she says.”
“Plenty of people have all sorts of ideas, my dear.”
“Well, I’m glad on her account he is here to make another evening pass agreeably. It’s dull for her. She thinks he behaved very delicately about lending her the money. He didn’t offer to lend it. And it was by the merest chance that he had it. He was going about, expecting to live by the work he got from the farmers. I don’t understand it exactly; but as long as he doesn’t offer to borrow money himself—”
“Yes.”
The supper was not such a triumph as the former supper had been, or perhaps it was merely not such a novelty. Emerance had consented to be Mrs. Kelwyn’s guest, and she would not let him join in the help that Parthenope offered Mrs. Kite after the meal was over. Perhaps because it lacked the former inspiration of an open fire, or perhaps because Kelwyn was tired, the talk languished, and presently Emerance made an excuse of wishing to tell Mrs. Kite something about the bread for breakfast, and left the Kelwyns. He must have despatched his instructions very promptly, for they seemed at once to hear him talking with Parthenope under the window in the dry summer night.
“Well, now,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, “Parthenope is being amused, I am sure. Don’t you think he is really very delicate-minded?”
“He is rather vague-minded; but he may be delicate-minded, too.” Kelwyn took that tone toward his guest because he had found it well, in agreeing with his wife about people they both liked, to let her do most of the liking.
In the morning they all decided to go to the Shaker meeting, but at the hour when they were to start Emerance failed to join the Kelwyns, and Parthenope said she would go and look for him. Mrs. Kite was standing at her door dressed for the meeting, very ladylike in her Sunday gown and bonnet. She said she guessed Emerance and the boys were out in the barn, and Parthenope pushed on, thanking her. In the barn she saw the three boys through the open door, spellbound by something Mr. Emerance was doing. He was lifting a pitchfork, with a block of wood stuck on its tines, to the roof of the barn, where there was a cluster of swallows’ nests. He lowered it a little and then pushed it upward. Something fell from the block and struck on the barn floor at his feet like a small piece of wet clay. He bent over it with a sharp “Ah, that’s too bad!” while the boys clustered about him. “Well, we must keep on trying,” he said, and he put the thing, whatever it was, back on the block and lifted it again.
Francy Kelwyn caught sight of Parthenope at the barn-door and explained to her, excitedly: “It’s a little swallow, and it fell out of the nest, and Mr. Emerance is putting it back to its father and mother.”
The parent birds were wheeling overhead with keen cries of anxiety, and, whether it was their interference or the sense of the girl looking that caused the young man’s aim to falter, he failed again, and the swallow fell with that moist thump as before. He took it up and examined it.
She came in and joined the group. “It’s done for,” Emerance said, sadly, and she rose to her normal height in suggesting, “Perhaps it’s been experimented with too much.”
“More than was good for it, anyway,” he assented. “It’s certainly dead. I ought to have got a ladder.”
“Now,” the Kite boy exulted, “we will have fun burying it.”
The Kelwyn boys, attaching themselves on either side to the girl’s skirt, implored her, “Oh, may we have fun burying it, Cousin Thennie?”
“No, no,” she answered, severely, shaking them loose. “There is no time if you are going to the Shaker meeting with us.”
“To see the Shakers dance?” They jumped up and down with clasped hands and ran out before her, the Kite boy with them. He was not asked to go to the meeting, but he would have the whole fun of burying the swallow to himself.
Emerance’s mind was apparently still dwelling on the tragedy. “I hope you don’t think I was experimenting recklessly with that wretched little swallow. I was really trying to befriend it.”
“Oh yes; I know,” the girl said, not sure that she did not find his tenderness a little weak. “But the carryall is at the door, and my cousins are in, and we shall be late—”
It was rather a close fit, with the two men in front and the women on the back seat, and a boy wedged between each couple. A little way from the house they overtook Mrs. Kite walking. Kelwyn leaned back toward his wife: “I didn’t know Mrs. Kite was going. Do you think we ought—”
“By no means! There isn’t an atom of room. Besides, she is used to it and wouldn’t thank us.”
A distress came into Emerance’s face. “Mrs. Kelwyn, I wish you would let me.”
“No, indeed, Mr. Emerance. I have my reasons.” She frowned mysteriously, and he submitted with a sigh.
The meeting was a large one that day. There were a number of visiting Brothers and Sisters from another family, and one of the Brothers, a noted preacher, was to speak. Whether it was knowledge of this fact or not, there was an unusual attendance from the world-outside, especially of summer-folks from Ellison. The singing was uncommonly brisk, and the Kelwyn boys had their reward in the dancing. After the Brothers and Sisters subsided from their thrilling march, and sat down motionless, with their large handkerchiefs opened napkinwise on their knees, the boys fell asleep in the warm air, one with his head in his cousin’s lap, and the other with his head boring into his mother’s side.
The visiting Brother launched into his discourse, and it proved an attack on the earthly order, on marriage and giving in marriage. He prefaced his polemic by telling the story of one of the Brothers lately gathered in at his village, whose conscience had not been at ease in the earthly order, and who had left his wife and children to live the angelic life in the Family there. The kindred on both sides had tried to prevent him, and had thrown all the social and legal obstacles they could in his way. The story was the inversion of some such experience as the effort to escape from the community into the world might have been if it had been recounted with like fervor and intensity. The preacher, a large man with a double chin and a burly paunch, praised the celibacy of the Shakers, and denounced marriage as it was in the country round. “Go through the graveyards,” he
said, “and read the records on the tombstones of the delicate females, sometimes two or three, the wives of one husband, whose lives have been sacrificed. Look at the large families of children that wore their mothers out and grew up untrained and uneducated.” He did not see how any sensible man or woman could hesitate to choose the better part and come and live, as that new Brother was living, away from the world and its snares in the safety of the Shaker home.
He seemed bigoted and conceited, but he gave evidence of sincerity.
Mrs. Kelwyn glanced from the face of the girl beside her, who seemed puzzled rather than abashed or offended, and then let her eye range along the faces of the men sitting together in their ranks on the other side of the house. They expressed varying degrees of amusement, but no very deep concern; a strong indignation and dissent shone from the faces of most of the women. Emerance, as she saw him, sat still, with his face fixed in a sculpturesque quiet on the speaker. He seemed unconscious of him, and probably he had early seized some thread of the discourse and had gone into himself with it where he was no longer aware of what the preacher was saying. She was glad to see that Kelwyn looked as if he would like to get up and protest. Some of the Shaker Brothers seemed troubled, but the death-masks of the Sisters wore only a passive sadness, as if they were oppressed by the sense of a mystery beyond their powers.
When Elder Nathaniel came forward and said, after the preacher sat down, “The meeting is dismissed,” Mrs. Kelwyn woke her children and led them away, as if she were shaking the dust off her feet for all three, and for her husband and her cousin as well.
Emerance went forward to unhitch the horse from the post at which he was slumbering as sweetly as if he had been indoors and had gone to sleep at the sermon, and he helped Mrs. Kelwyn to her place. He seemed cheerful, even gay. “I believe,” he said, “I am going to walk back through the woods,” and at this the Kelwyn boys, who had not yet been lifted into the wagon, each implored their mother, “Oh, let us walk back through the woods, mamma!”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 935