"Oh, but, Mrs. Miller, when our dear Mrs. Bettersworth----"

"That's what I was thinking of," Mrs. Miller put it over her.

"Well for my part," declared Mrs. d.i.n.kelspiel, with the air of not caring who knew it, "I don't want my girls to sell tickets or anything; it makes 'em too forward." Mrs. Harvey, whose husband was in hardware, began to tell discursively about a perfectly lovely entertainment they had had in Newton Centre for the missionary society, which Mrs. Miller took exception to on the ground of its frivolity.

"I don't know," she maintained, "if the Lord's work ain't hindered by them sort of comicalities as much as it's helped."

I am not sure where this discussion mightn't have landed us if the general attention had not been distracted just then by my husband, an hour before his time, coming through the front gate and up the walk. He had evidently forgotten my tea party, for he came straight to me, and backed away precipitately through the portieres as soon as he saw the a.s.sembled ladies sitting about the wall. It was not that which disturbed us; any Higgleston male would have done the same, but it was plain in the brief glimpse we had of him that he looked white and stricken. A little later we heard him in the back of the house making ambiguous noises such as not one of my guests could fail to understand as the precursor of a domestic crisis. I could see the little flutter of uneasiness which pa.s.sed over them, between their sense of its demanding my immediate attention and the fear of leaving before the expressed time. Fortunately the stroke of five released them. The door was hardly shut on the last silk skirt when I ran out and found him staring out of the kitchen window.

"Well?" I questioned.

"I thought they would never go," he protested. "Come in here." He led the way to the living room as if somehow he found it more appropriate to the gravity of what he had to impart, and yet failed to make a beginning with his news. He shut the door and leaned against it with his hands behind him for support.

"Has anything happened?"

"Happened? Oh, I don't know. I've lost my job."

"Lost? Burton Brothers?" I was all at sea.

He nodded. "They're closing out; the manager's in town to-day. He told us...." By degrees I got it out of him. Burton Brothers thought they saw hard times ahead, they were closing out a number of their smaller establishments, centering everything on their Chicago house. Suddenly my thought leaped up.

"But couldn't they give you something there ... in Chicago?" I was dizzy for a moment with the wild hope of it. Never to live in Higgleston any more--but Tommy cut me short.

"They've men who have been with them longer than I have to provide for.... I asked."

"Oh, well, no matter. The world is full of jobs." Looking for one appealed to me in the light of an adventure, but because I saw how pale he was I went to him and began to kiss him softly. By the way he yielded himself to me I grasped a little of his lost and rudderless condition, once he found himself outside the limits of a salaried employment. I began to question him again as the best way of getting the extent of our disaster before us.

"What does Mr. Rathbone say?" Rathbone was our working tailor, a thin, elderly, peering man of a sort you could scarcely think of as having any existence apart from his shop. He used to come sidling down the street to it and settle himself among his implements with the air of a brooding hen taking to her nest; the sound of his machine was a contented clucking.

"He was struck all of a heap. They're better fixed than we are." Tommy added this as an afterthought as likely to affect the tailor's att.i.tude when he came to himself. "They" were old Rathbone and his daughter, one of those conspicuously blond and full-breasted women who seem to take to the dressmaking and millinery trades by instinct. As she got herself up on Sunday in her smart tailoring, with a hat "from the city," and her hair amazingly pompadoured, she was to some of the men who came to our church, very much what the bra.s.s teakettle was to me, a touch of the unattainable but not unappreciated elegancies of life. Tommy admired her immensely and was disappointed that I did not have her at the house oftener.

"They've got her business to fall back on," Tommy suggested now with an approach to envy. He had never seen Miss Rathbone as I had, professionally, going about with her protuberant bosom stuck full of pins, a tape line draped about her collarless neck, and her skirt and belt never quite together in the back, so he thought of her establishment as a kind of stay in affliction.

"And I have the stage," I flourished. It was the first time I had thought of it as an expedient, but I glanced away from the thought in pa.s.sing, for to say the truth I didn't in the least know how to go about getting a living by it. I creamed some chipped beef for Tommy's supper, a dish he was particularly fond of, and opened a jar of quince marmalade, and all the time I wasn't stirring something or setting the table, I had my arms around him, trying to prop him against what I did not feel so much terrifying as exciting. We talked a little about his getting his old place back in Taylorville, and just as we were clearing away the supper things we saw Miss Rathbone, with her father tucked under her arm, pa.s.s the square of light raying out into the spring dusk from our window, and a moment later they knocked at our door. It was one of the things that I felt bound to like Miss Rathbone for, that she took such care of her father; she did everything for him, it was said, even to making up his mind for him, and this evening by the flare of the lamp Tommy held up to welcome them, it was clear she had made it up to some purpose. It must have been what he saw in her face that made my husband put the lamp back on the table from which the white cloth had not yet been removed, as if the clearing up was too small a matter to consort with the occasion.

I was relieved to have my husband take charge of the visit, especially as he made no motion to invite them into the front room where the remains of the bread and b.u.t.ter and the chairs against the wall would have apprised Miss Rathbone of my having entertained company on an occasion to which she had not been invited. It was part of Tommy's sense of social obligation that we ought never to neglect Mr. Rathbone, whom, though his connection with the business was as slight as my husband's, he insisted on regarding as in some sort a partner. So we sat down rather stiffly about the table still shrouded in its white cloth, as though upon it were about to be laid out the dead enterprise of Burton Brothers, and looked, all of us, I think, a little pleased to find ourselves in so grave a situation.

Miss Rathbone, who had always a great many accessories to her toilet, bags and handkerchiefs and scarves and things, laid them on the table as though they were a kind of insignia of office, and made a poor pretence to keep up with me the proper feminine detachment from the business which had brought them there. We neither of us, Miss Rathbone and I, had the least idea what the other might be thinking about or presumably interested in, though I think she made the more gallant effort to pretend that she did. On this evening I could see that she was full of the project for which she had primed her father, and was nervously anxious lest he shouldn't go off at the right moment or with the proper pyrotechnic.

I remember the talk that went on at first, because it was so much in the way of doing business in Higgleston, and impressed me even then with its fact.i.tious shrewdness, based very simply on the supposition that Capitalists--it was under that caption that Burton Brothers figured--never meant what they said. Capitalists were always talking of hard times; it was part of their deep laid perspicacity. Burton Brothers wished to sell out the business; was it reasonable to suppose they would think it good enough to sell and not good enough to go on with?

"Father thinks," said Miss Rathbone, and I am sure he had done so dutifully at her instigation, "that they couldn't ask no great price after talking about hard times the way they have."

It was not in keeping with what was thought to be woman's place, that she should go on to the completed suggestion. In fact, so far as I remember it never was completed, but was talked around and about, as if by indirection we could lessen the temerity of the proposal that old Rathbone and Tommy should buy out the shop on such favorable terms as Burton Brothers, in view of their own statement of its depreciation, couldn't fail to make.

"You could live over the store," Miss Rathbone let fall into the widening rings of silence that followed her first suggestion; "your rent would be cheaper, and it would come into the business."

I felt that she made it too plain that the chief objection that my husband could have was the lack of money for the initial adventure; but because I realized that much of my instinctive resistance to a plan that tied him to Higgleston as to a stake, was due to her having originated it, I kept it to myself. I had a hundred inarticulate objections, chief of which was that I couldn't see how any plan that was acceptable to the Rathbones, could get me on toward the Shining Destiny, but when you remember that I hadn't yet been able to put that concretely to myself, you will see how impossible it was that I should have put it to my husband. In the end Tommy was talked over. I believe the consideration of going on in the same place and under the same circ.u.mstances without the terrifying dislocation of looking for a job, had more to do with it than Miss Rathbone's calculation of the profits. We wrote home for the money; Effie wrote back that everything of mother's was involved in the stationery business, which was still on the doubtful side of prosperity, but Tommy's father let us have three hundred dollars.

The necessity of readjusting our way of life to Tommy's new status of proprietor, and moving in over the store, kept my plans for the dramatic exploitation of Higgleston in abeyance. It seemed however by as much as I was now bound up with the interest of the community, to put me on a better footing for beginning it, and on Decoration Day, walking in the cemetery under the bright boughs, between the flowery mounds, the Gift stirred in me, played upon by this touching dramatization of common human pain and loss. I recalled that it was just such solemn festivals of the people that I had had in mind to lay hold on and make the medium of a profounder appreciation. And the next one about to present itself as an occasion was the Fourth of July.

I detached myself from Tommy long enough to make my way around to two or three of the ladies who usually served on the committee.

"We ought to have a meeting soon now," I suggested; "it will take all of a month to get the children ready."

"That's what we thought," agreed Mrs. Miller heavily. "They was to our house Thursday----" She went on to tell me who was to read the Declaration and who deliver the oration.

"But," I protested, "that's exactly what they've had every Fourth these twenty years!"

"Well, I guess," said Mrs. Harvey, "if Higgleston people want that kind of a celebration, they've a right to have it."

"I guess they have," Mrs. Miller agreed with her.

They had always rather held it out against me at Higgleston that I had never taken the village squabbles seriously, that I was reconciled too quickly for a proper sense of their proportions, and they must have reckoned without this quality in me now, for I was so far from realizing the deliberateness of the slight, that I thought I would go around on the way home and see our minister; perhaps he could do something. It appeared simply ridiculous that Higgleston shouldn't have the newest of this sort of thing when it was there for the asking.

I found him raking the garden in his third best suit and the impossible sort of hat affected by professional men in their more human occasions.

The moment I flashed out at him with my question about the committee, he fell at once into a manner of ministerial equivocation--the air of being man enough to know he was doing a mean thing without being man enough to avoid doing it. Er ... yes, he believed there had been a meeting ... he hadn't realized that I was expecting to be notified. I wasn't a regular member, was I?

"No," I admitted, "but last year----" The intention of the slight began to dawn on me.

"You see, the programme is usually made up from the children of the united Sunday schools...."

"I know, of course, but what has that?..." He did know how mean it was; I could see by the dexterity with which he delivered the blow.

"A good many of the mothers thought they'd rather not have them exposed to ... er ... professional methods." As an afterthought he tried to give it the cast of a priestly remonstrance which he must have seen didn't in the least impose on me.

I suppose it was the fear of how I might put it to one of his best paying parishioners that led him to go around to the store the next morning and make matters worse by explaining to Tommy that though the children weren't to be contaminated by my professionalism, it could probably be arranged for me to "recite something." To do Tommy justice, he was as mad as a hatter. Being so much nearer to village-mindedness himself, I suppose my husband could better understand the mean envy of my larger opportunity, but his obduracy in maintaining that I had been offended led to the only real initiative he ever showed in all the time I was married to him.

"I'd just like to _show_ them!" he kept sputtering. All at once he cheered up with a snort. "_I'll_ show them!" He was very busy all the evening with letters which he went out on purpose to post, with the result that when a few days later he made his contribution to the fireworks fund, he made it a little larger, as became a live business man, on the ground that he wouldn't be able to partic.i.p.ate as his wife had "accepted an invitation to take charge of the programme at Newton Centre." Newton Centre was ten miles away, and though I couldn't do much on account of the difficulty of rehearsals, I managed to make the announcement of it in the county paper convey to them that what they had missed wasn't quite to be sicklied over with Mrs. Miller's a.s.severation of a notable want of moral particularity at Newton Centre. The very first time I went out to a Sunday-school social thereafter it was made plain to me that if I wanted to take up the annual Library entertainment, it was open to me.

"And I always will say," Mrs. Miller conceded, "that there's n.o.body can make your children seem such a credit to you as Mrs. Bettersworth."

"It's a regular talent you have," Mrs. Harvey backed her up, "like a person in the Bible." This scriptural reference came in so aptly that I could see several ladies nodding complacently. Mrs. Ross sailed quite over them and landed on the topmost peak of approbation.

"I've always believed," she a.s.serted, "that a Christian woman on the stage would have an uplifting influence."

But by this time my ambition had slacked under the summer heat and the steady cluck of old Rathbone's machine and the mixed smell of damp woollen under the iron, and creosote shingle stains. There had been no loss of social standing in our living over the store; such readjustments in Higgleston went by the name of bettering yourself, and were commendable. But somehow I could never ask ladies to tea when the only entrance was by way of a men's furnishing store. The four rooms, opening into one another so that there was no way of getting from the kitchen to the parlour except through the bedroom, I found quite hopeless as a means of expressing my relation to all that appealed to me as inspiring, dazzling. Because I could not go out without making a street toilet, I went out too little, and suffered from want of tone. And suddenly along in September came a letter from O'Farrell offering me a place in his company, and a note from Sarah begging me to accept it. If up to that time I had not thought of the stage as a career, now at the suggestion the desire of it ravened in me like a flame.

CHAPTER VI

"And you never seem to think I might not _want_ my wife to go on the stage?"

I do not know what unhappy imp prompted Tommy to take that tone with me; but whenever I try to fix upon the point of reprehensibleness which led on from my writing to O'Farrell that I would join him in ten days in Chicago, to the tragic termination of my marriage, I found myself whirled about this att.i.tude of his in the deep-seated pa.s.sionate Why of my life. Why should love be tied to particular ways of doing things?

What was this horror of human obligation that made it necessary, since Tommy and I were so innocently fond of one another, that one of us should be made unhappy by it? Why should it be so accepted on all sides that it should be I? For my husband's feeling was but a single item in the total of social prejudice by which, once my purpose had gone abroad by way of the Rathbones, I found myself driven apart from the community interest as by a hostile tide, across which Higgleston gazed at me with strange, begrudging eyes. I recall how the men looked at me the first time I went out afterward, a little aslant, as though some ineradicable taint of impropriety attached in their minds to any a.s.sociation with the stage.