A Woman Named Smith. Marie Conway Oemler
town at large, and I seldom express my opinion publicly," finished the old jurist stiffly.
I heard that opinion with mingled emotions.
"But we like Mr. Jelnik," I said at last. "The injunction against him doesn't hold water. Personally, I feel like apologizing to him."
"Oh, no! One can't afford to cuddle an old vendetta, as Abishag dry-nursed old King David. I always hated Abishag!" Alicia said naïvely.
"My late client," said the judge enigmatically, "hadn't counted on you." He almost succeeded in looking human when he said it, and his eyes upon Alicia weren't at all frosty. Then he folded his papers, replaced them in his wallet, wiped his glasses, shot his cuffs, hoped we'd find Hynds House all we'd hoped, hoped the town would be to our liking, hoped he could be of further service to us, bowed creakily, and took his departure.
"Sophy," said Alicia, after a long pause, "if ever I had to rechristen this house, I'd call it Hornets' Nest."
We had not attended church on our first Sunday, because we were too tired. But on our second Sunday we plucked up heart of grace and went to St. Polycarp's.
The old town wore an air of Sabbath peace and quietness infinitely soothing to the spirit. People passed and repassed us. We knew they knew who we were. The old gentlemen, indeed, bowed to us with stately uncoverings of the head; the rest regarded us with the sort of impersonal and perfunctory interest one bestows upon uninteresting passing strangers. Nobody spoke to us, though the eyes of the young men were not unaware of Alicia's fairness.
In a great city, of course, one takes that sort of thing for granted; but in this small town, where everybody knew and spoke to everybody else, the effect was chilling.
"Talk about the sunny South!" murmured Alicia. "Why, my teeth want to chatter!"
During the services I was conscious of covert glances in our direction, but whenever a pair of feminine eyes met mine, they slid off like lizards and glided another way, with calculated Christian indifference. They weren't hostile, nor unfriendly: they were just deliberately indifferent. Nobody had the faintest notion of being heedful of us strangers among them; and I should be sorry for angels who expected to be entertained unawares in South Carolina!
When the congregation had filed out and gone about its leisurely business, the minister and his wife came forward to greet us. They were a bit nervous, remembering the diabolic uproar about Faith, Hope, and Charity. Mr. Haile was a mild-mannered little man of the saved-sheep type, with box-plaited teeth and a bleating voice. His wife had the worried face and the anxious eyes of the minister's helpmeet, and the painfully ready smile for newcomers who might, or might not, prove desirable parishioners.
She wanted to be nice to us as a Christian woman to women, but not too nice as the minister's wife of a church whose members looked upon us as interlopers. I had deputed Judge Gatchell to inform the trustees that the suit was dropped. I suppose Mrs. Haile was timid about broaching the delicate subject, for she ignored it with a nervous intensity that made me feel sorry for her. She and Mr. Haile would call just as soon as it was convenient for us to receive visitors; and then they shook hands with us, and I think they breathed a sigh of relief.
"Oh, Sophy! And we've got to keep on going there!—next Sunday, and Sunday after next Sunday, and maybe every Sunday after that until we die! Perhaps after a while some of them will bow to us, or maybe even say, 'How do you do?' but we'll feel as if we'd been put in cold storage every time we enter that door!" wailed Alicia.
"It is our Father's house," I reminded her.
"But I don't want to be made to feel like a spanked child, in anybody's house!" Alicia said, resentfully.
"You say that because you're Irish."
"You say I say it because I'm Irish because you're English." Then she screwed up her mouth like a coral button, and squinted her eyes: "I'm Irish, and you're English, and we're both American. Sophy, let's join my Irish and your English to our Yankee, and teach this town a lesson!"
"Barkis is willin'. But in the meantime let's go home and see what Mary Magdalen has for lunch."
We walked slowly, enjoying the calm, lovely late-summer day. Hyndsville at its best was a big, green, sprawling old town, a quaint, unpainted, leisurely, flowery, bird-haunted place, with glorious trees, and do-as-they-please, independent gardens. Nobody ever seemed to be in a hurry, and at first we used to wonder how they ever got anything done, or kept pace with the moving world; yet they did. Only, they did it without haste and without noise. And they were always polite. Though they should take your substance, your reputation, or even, perhaps, your life, they would do it like ladies and gentlemen.
We paused a while, just inside the big brick-pillared gate, and looked up the oak-arched garden path toward our house. Of course one can't expect an old fortress of a brick house that's been neglected for more than three quarters of a century to look spick and span inside of a brief fortnight, but already Hynds House was sitting up, so to speak, and taking notice.
Life had begun to flow back into it. Mary Magdalen had brought a dog with her—a yellow dog of unknown ancestry, of shamefaced demeanor, a ropy tail, splay feet, and a rolling eye; named, she and heaven alone knew why, Beautiful Dog.
He shunned Alicia and me because we were white people: Beautiful Dog was intuitively aware that colored people's dogs must meet white people with suspicion, aloofness, and reserve. When we fatuously sought to make friends with him, he tucked his tail between his legs, and shivered as if we made goose-flesh come out on his spine; and once when I took him by his rope collar he fell down and shrieked. But just let Mary Magdalen roll out an unctious, "Whah is yuh, Beaut'ful Dawg?" and his ears and tail went up, he curveted, and made uncouth movements with his splay feet, and grinned from ear to ear.
Doctor Geddes's Mandy had brought over the black kittens and their mother. Mary Magdalen made sure of their staying at home by the simple process of buttering their paws. In South Carolina, when you want a cat to stay in your house, you butter its paws and let it lick the butter off leisurely, the while you whisper in its left ear: "Stay in my house for keeps, cat!" The cat will ever thereafter play Ruth to your Naomi.
Our cat was Mrs. Belinda Black, and her children were Potty Black and Sir Thomas More Black, this last being a creature of noble mien and a meditative turn of mind.
"Homage and praise to Bast, the cat-headed, the wise one, the great goddess!" purred Alicia, stroking Mrs. Belinda Black's satiny head. "And may Sekhet the Cat of the Sun aid me, a devotee at her shrine, to butter the paws of some two-legged cats in Hyndsville!"
"You-all's dinnah 's waitin'." Mary Magdalen stubbornly held to the notion that any meal eaten between breakfast and night was dinner; lunch being sandwiches and fried chicken taken out of a basket at church picnics and eaten out of one's hand, or lap, for choice. "What was de text to-day, Miss Sophy? Ah sort o' likes to chaw easy on a mout'ful o' text whilst Ah 'm washin' up mah dishes."
We gave her the text, which happened to be one that fills every negro's heart with undiluted joy: "O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord." And we had the satisfaction of hearing her rolling out, to the clatter of pans and pots:
"Dry bones in de valley,
Ma-a-ah, La-a-awd!
Whut yuh gwine do wid dem dry bones,
Ma-ah-ah La-a-a-w-wd"
while we went up-stairs to change our frocks. We were still sharing one room then, finding it more convenient. And there, in front of our door, in a nest of ferns and mosses, was a great cluster of wild flowers, summer's last and autumn's first children. They had been gathered in no ordered garden, but taken from the skirts of the fields and the bosom of the woods; and Carolina the opulent, the beautiful, the free-handed, does not deck herself niggardly.
Alicia's face that had been so wistful lighted with a sudden joy. She gave a happy cry:
"Ariel!" she cried, "Ariel! Oh, what a heavenly thing, what a human thing to do! And to-day, too, just when we need a little bit of friendliness!" She looked