The Tinder Box by Maria Thompson Daviess

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"It may have been that," Jane answered, in a most naively relieved tone
of voice. "But you don't know how happy I am, dear, to see that that
streak is only an occasional charming vein that shows in you, but that
you are now settling down steadily to your profession. I feel sure that
when these garden drawings are done, you and Mr. Hall will have found
your correct places in each other's lives and it will be just a glorious
example of how superbly a man and woman can work together at the same
profession. Mr. Hardin and I were talking about it just last night out
on the side porch, and though he said very little I could see how
gratified he was at the honors that had come to you and how much he
likes Mr. Hall."

That settled it, and I made up my mind that when the Harvest Lady left
us to-night to sink behind Old Harpeth, she wasn't going to leave me
weakly lonesome. She doesn't set until two o'clock, and I'm going to
take all the time I need.

And as serious and solemn as I feel over taking such a step for two as I
am deciding on, I can't help looking forward to scribbling a terse and
impersonal account of my having proposed to the man of my choice in this
strong-minded book, adding a few words of sage advice for the Five,
locking it and handing it, key and all, to Jane with a dramatic demand
that she put her hundred thousand dollars in the Trust Company and begin
to choose the Five from those she has had in mind.

Then before she has had time to read it, I am going to sneakily get it
back and blot or tear out some of the things I have written. I can
decide later what will be data and what will be dangerous to the cause.

"And you will be glad to have me--come and live for a time in your home
life, dear?" Jane recalled me to the question in hand by saying
wistfully. "I feel that I have never had such good friends before,
anywhere, as these of yours are to me, Evelina," she added.

That's one time I got Jane completely in my arms and showed her what a
really good hugging means south of Mason and Dixon's line. From later
developments I am glad she had that slight initiation. It must have been
serviceable to her New England disposition.

Then just as I was going to ask some of the plans she--and Polk--had
made, over came Cousin Jasmine, with Cousin Annie and Mary, with Mrs.
Hargrove puffing along behind them. They had come to see Jane, but I
was allowed to stay and have my breath knocked out by their mission.

It seems Jane had got a great big book from some firm in New York that
tells alt about herb-growing, and how difficult it is to get the ones
needed for condiments and perfumes, and offering to buy first-class
lavender and thyme and bergamot and sweet fern and things of that kind
in any quantities at a good price. She had shown it to the little old
ladies who had been secretly grieving at the separation from their
garden out on their poorly rented farm, and the leaven had worked--on
Mrs. Hargrove also. They go back to the farm and she with them! She had
decided on raising mint to both dry and ship fresh, because he of the
gay pajamas always liked to have it strong and fresh for the julep of
his ancestors. I hope she won't forget to take that pattern of Japanese
extraction with her and make some for the Crag now and then, for it will
save my time. Horrors!

"We have fully decided on our course of action, Jane, and Evelina,
dears," said Cousin Jasmine in a positive little manner that she would
have been as incapable of a month ago, as is a pet kitten of barking at
the family dog, "but we do so dread to break it to dear James, because
we feel that he may think we are not happy under his roof and be
distressed. Do you believe we shall be able to make him see that we must
pursue our independent life, though always needing the support of his
affection and interest?"

"I believe you will, Cousin Jasmine," I said, wanting to both laugh and
cry to see the Crag's burdens begin to roll off his shoulders like this.
And the tears that didn't rise would have been real ones, too, for I
found that, down in the corner of my heart, I had adored the picture of
my oak with the tender little old vines clinging around him. It was the
producing gourd I had most objected to and I couldn't see but she would
be there until I unclasped her tendrils.

But I was forgetting that, in the modern theory of thought-waves, it is
the simplest minds that get the ripples first and hardest. Sallie came
over just as soon as the other delegation had got home to take the twins
off her hands. Jane had gone upstairs to make more calculations on our
reconstruction, and I was trying to get a large deep breath.

"Evelina." she said, as she sank in a chair near me and fastened her
large, very young-in-soul, eyes on mine, "were you just joking Nell, or
did you mean it, when you said the other day that you thought it would
be cowardly of a woman not to show a man that she loved him, if he for
any reason was not willing to make the first advances to her?" Sallie is
perfectly lovely in the faint lavender and pink things that Jane made
her decide to get in one conversation, whereas while Nell and Caroline
and I had been looking up and bringing her surreptitious samples of all
colors from the store all summer.

"Well, I don't know that I exactly meant Nell to take it all to heart,"
I answered without the slightest suspicion of what was coming. "But I do
think, Sallie, it would be no more than honest, fearless, and within a
woman's own greater rights."

"Mr. Haley was saying the other evening that a woman's sweet dependence
was a man's most precious heritage," Sallie gently mused out on the
atmosphere that was beginning to be pretty highly charged.

"Doesn't a woman have to depend on her husband's tenderness and care all
of the time--time she is bearing a child, Sallie, even up to the
asafoetida spoon crisis?" I asked with my cheeks in a flame but
determined to stand my ground. "It does seem to me that nature puts her
in a position to demand so much support from him in those times that she
ought to rely on herself when she can. Especially as she is likely to
bring an indefinite number of such crises into their joint existence."

Sallie laughed, for she remembered the high horse I had mounted on the
subject of Mamie and Ned Hall the day after the Assembly dance.

And as I laughed suddenly a picture I had seen down at the Hall's
flashed across my mind. I had gone down to tell Mamie something Aunt
Augusta wanted her to propose next day at a meeting of the Equality
League about drinking water in the public school building. Mamie has
learned to make, with pink cheeks and shining eyes, the quaintest little
speeches that always carry the house--and even made one at a public
meeting when we invited the men to hand over our fifty dollars for the
monument. Ned's face was a picture as he held a ruffle of her muslin
gown between his fingers while she stood up to do it.

But the picture that flashed through my mind was dearer than that and I
put it away in that jewel-box that I am going to open some day for my
own man.

Both Mamie's nurse and cook had gone to the third funeral of the season
and Mamie was feeding the entire family in the back yard. The kiddies
were sitting in a row along the top of the back steps, eating cookies
and milk, with bibs around their necks,--from the twelve year old
Jennie, who had tied on hers for fun, down to the chubby-kins next to
the baby,--and Mamie was sitting flat on the grass in front of them
nursing little Ned, with big Ned sitting beside her with his arm around
both her and the baby. He was looking first down into her face, and then
at the industrious kiddie getting his supper from the maternal fount,
and then at the handsome bunch on the steps, as he alternately munched a
bite of his cookie and fed Mamie one, to the delight of the children.
The expression on his face as he looked at them, and her, and ate and
laughed, is what is back of all that goes to make the American nation
the greatest on earth. Amen!

"Sallie," I said, as I reached out and took her plump white hand in
mine, "our men are the most wonderful in the world and they are ours any
way we get them. They don't care how it is done, and neither do we, just
so we belong in the right way."

"Then you don't think it would be any harm for me to tell Mr. Haley I
think I could live on eighteen hundred dollars a year, until he gets
sent to a larger church?" was the bomb that, thus encouraged, Sallie
exploded in my face.

I'm awfully glad that I didn't get a chance to answer, for I don't want
to be responsible for the future failure or success of Mr. Haley's
ministry. Just then Henrietta burst into the room with the Kitten in her
arms.

"Keep her for me, Evelina, please, ma'am," she said, with the dearest
little chuckle, but not forgetting the polite "please," which Jane had
had to suggest to her just once. What you've done for that wayward
unmanageable genius of a child, Jane dear, makes you deserve ten of your
own. That is--help!

"Cousin Augusta and Nell and Dickie and me is a going out to watch the
man put the dyn'mite in the hole to blow the creek right up and
Glendale, too, so they can see if they is enough clean water to put in
the waterworks," she continued to explain. "Nell is a-going to take
Dickie in her car, and Cousin Augusta is a-going to take me and Uncle
Peter in her buggy. Dilsie have got the Kit and Cousin Marfy is
a-watching to see she don't do nothing wrong with her. Oh, may I go,
Sallie? Jane said I must always ask you."

"Yes, dearest," answered Sallie, immensely flattered by the deference
thus paid her.

"How wonderful an influence the little talks Mr. Haley has had with
Henrietta have had on her," she said, with such a happy glow on her face
as the reformed one departed that I succeeded in suppressing the laugh
that rose in me at the memory of Henrietta's account of the first one of
the series.

Men need not fear that the time will ever come when they will cease to
get the credit for making Earth's wheels go around, from the female
inhabitants thereof. So I smiled to myself and buried my face in the
fragrance under the bubbly Puppy girl's chin and coaxed her arms to clasp
around my neck.

They are the holy throb of a woman's life--babies. Less than ten
wouldn't satisfy me unless well scattered in ages, Jane. On some
questions I am not modern.

"Still I do feel so miserable leaving Cousin James so alone all winter,"
Sallie continued with the most beautiful sympathy in her voice, as she
looked out of the window towards Widegables. "I wonder if I ought to
make up my mind to stay with him? He loves the children so, and you know
the plans of Cousin Jasmine and the others to go back to their farm."

"But he'll have his mother left," I said quietly but very encouragingly.
I seemed to see the little green tendril that had unclasped from the oak
turning on its stem and winding tight again.

"Miss Mathers was encouraging Cousin Martha to go to Colorado to see
Elizabeth and her family for a long visit this winter. She hasn't seen
Elizabeth since her mother died and she was so much interested in the
easy way of traveling these days, as Miss Mathers described it, that she
asked her to write for a time-table and what a ticket costs, just this
morning. I really ought not to desert Cousin James."

"But think how lonely Mr. Haley is down in the parsonage and of his
influence on Henrietta," I urged.

"Yes, I do feel drawn in both ways," sighed the poor tender gourd. "And
then you will be here by yourself, so you can watch over Cousin James,
as much as your work will allow you, can't you, Evelina?"

"Yes, I'll try to keep him from being too much alone," I answered with
the most deceitful unconcern.

"I see him coming to supper and I must go, for I want to be with him all
I can, if I am to leave him so soon. I may not make up my mind to it,"
with which threat Sallie departed and left me alone in the gloaming, a
situation which seems to be becoming chronic with me now.

If I had it, I'd give another hundred thousand dollars to the cause, to
hear that interview between Sallie and the Dominie. I wager he'll never
know what happened and would swear it didn't, if confronted with a
witness.

And also I felt so nervous with all this asking-in-marriage surging in
the atmosphere that it was with difficulty that I sat through supper
and listened to Jane and Polk, who had come in with her, plan town
sewerage. To-morrow night I knew the moon wouldn't rise until eleven
o'clock, and how did I know anyway that Sallie's emancipation might not
get started on the wrong track and run into my Crag? His chivalry would
never let him refuse a woman who proposed to him and he'll be in danger
until I can do it and tell the town about it.

Jane and Polk had promised Dickie and Nell to motor down Providence Road
as far as Cloverbend in the moonlight, and I think Caroline and Lee were
going too. Polk looked positively agonized with embarrassed sorrow at
leaving me all alone, and it was with difficulty that I got them off. I
pleaded the greatest fatigue and my impatience amounted to crossness.

After they had gone I dismissed Jasper and Petunia and locked the back
doors, put out all the lights in the house and retired to the side
steps, determined to be invisible no matter who called--and wait!

And for one mortal hour there I sat alone in that waning old moonlight,
that grew colder and paler by the minute, while the stiff breeze that
poured down from Old Harpeth began to be vicious and icy as it nipped my
ears and hands and nose and sent a chill down to my very toes.

Nobody came and there I sat!

Finally, with the tears tangling icily in my lashes, I got up and went
into the house and lighted the fat pine under the logs in the hall. They
had lain all ready for the torch for a whole year, just as I had lain
for a lifetime until a few weeks ago. Then suddenly they blazed--as I
had done.

My condition was pitiable. I felt that all nature had deserted me, the
climate, Indian summer, the harvest moon and my own charm, but my head
was up and I was going to crackle pluckily along to my blaze, so I
turned towards the door to go across the road and put my fate to the
test, even if I took pneumonia standing begging at his front door. I
hoped I would find him in the lodge and--

"Evelina," he exclaimed as he burst open my door, flung himself into the
firelight and seized my arm like a robber baron of the Twelfth Century,
making a grab for his lady-love in the midst of her hostile kindred, "I
thought I would never get here! I ran all the way up from the office.
Here's a telegram from Mr. Hall that says that the two roads have merged
and will take the bluff route past Glendale, and give us the shops,--and
wants to appoint me the General Attorney for the Southern Section. They
want me to come on to New York by the first train. Can you marry me in
the morning so we can take the noon express from Bolivar? I won't go
without you. Please, dear, please," and as he stood and looked at me in
the firelight, all the relief and excitement over his news died out of
his lovely eyes and just the want of me filled them from their very
depths.

For several interminable centuries of time I stood perfectly still and
looked into them daringly, drinking my fill for the first time and
offering him a like cup in my own.

"Eve," he said so softly that I doubt if he really spoke the word.

"Adam!" I let myself go, and at last pressed my answer against his lips
as he folded me tight and safe.

It must have been some time after, I am sure I don't know how long, but
I was most beautifully adjusted against his shoulder and he had my hand
pressed to his cheek, when the awfulness of what had happened brought me
straight up on my own feet and almost out of his arms.

"Oh, how could you have done it!" I fairly wailed, as I thought of what
this awful complication was going to lose for the Five to whom I felt
more tender in that second than I had ever felt before.

"Done what?" he demanded in alarm, pressing both my hands against his
breast and drawing me towards him again.

"Asked me to marry you when I--"

"I have been fighting desperately to see some way to offer myself and
all my impedimenta to you all this time, and this has made it all right,
don't you see, dear?" he interrupted me to say, as he took possession of
me again and held me with a tender fierceness, which had more of
suffering in it than passion. "I have always wanted you, Eve, since
before you went away, but it didn't seem right to ask you to come into a
life so encumbered as mine was. Poverty made it seem impossible, but
now, if you will be just a little patient with them all, I can
arrange--"

"I was going to arrange all that my own self, and now just see what you
have done to me and a whole lot of other women, besides making me
miserable all summer," and crowded so close under his chin that he
couldn't see my face, I told him all about the tinder-box Jane had
loaded and then set me on the lid to see that it exploded.

I had just worked myself up to the point of how my incendiary mission
was about to touch off all the other love affairs in town, when he began
to shake so with disrespectful laughter that I felt that my dignity was
about to demand that I withdraw coldly from his arms, where I had just
got so warm and comfortable and at home; but with the first slight
intimation of my intention, which was conveyed by a very feeble indeed
loosening of my arms from around his Henry Clay collar, he held me
firmly against him and controlled his unseemly mirth, only I could still
feel it convulsing his left lung,--though as I had no business being
near enough to notice it, I felt it only fair not to.

"Please don't worry about those other Five dear women," he begged, in
the nicest and most considerate voice possible so that I tightened my
arms again as I listened. "If Miss Mathers doesn't feel justified in
giving up the dowries by your--your failure to prove the proposition, we
can just invite them all down here and in Glendale and Bolivar and
Hillsboro and Providence, to say nothing of the countryside, we can
plant them all cozily. I can delicately explain to their choices exactly
how to let them manage circumstances like--" he illustrated his scheme
just here until it took time for me to get breath to listen to the rest
of his apology--"this and there is no telling, with such a start as the
cult has got in the Harpeth Valley already, how far ft will spread.
Please forgive me, dear!"

"Yes," I answered doubtfully. Then I raised my head and looked him full
in the face as I made my declaration calmly but with the perfect
conviction that I still have and always will have, world without end.
"Yes, but don't you think for one minute I don't _know_ that what Jane
and I and all the most advanced women in the world are trying for is the
right and just and the only way for men and women to come logically into
the kind of heritage you and I have stumbled into. Absolute freedom and
equality between all human beings is going to be the price of Kingdom
Come. I shall always be humiliated that I got scared out in the
graveyard and didn't do it to you. It is going to be the regret of my
life."

"Truly, I'm sorry, sweetheart," he answered most contritely. "If I were
to take my hat and go back to the gate and come in again properly and
let you do it, would that make you feel any better?"

"No, it wouldn't," I answered quickly because why should I be separated
from him all the two and a half minutes it would take to play out that
farce, when I have been separated from him all the twenty-five years
that stretch from now back until the day of my birth? "I am going to
bear it bravely and hold up my head and tell Jane--"

"I wouldn't bother to hold up my head to tell her, Evelina," came from
the doorway in Polk's delighted drawl as he and Jane stepped into the
room. "Pretty comfortably placed, that head, I should say."

"Oh, Jane!" I positively wailed as I extracted myself from the Crag's
gray arms and buried myself in Jane's white serge ones that opened to
receive me. And the seconds that I rested silently there Polk spent in
shaking both of the Crag's hands and pounding him on the back so that I
grew alarmed.

"I didn't do it, Jane, I didn't do it," I almost sobbed with fear of
what her disappointment was going to be. "He beat me to it!"

"Truly. I'm sorry," Cousin James added to my apology as he stood with
his arm on Polk's shoulder.

"I dare you, _dare_, you to tell 'em, Jane," Polk suddenly said, coming
over and putting a hand on one of my shoulders and one on Jane's.

"Evelina and Mr. Hardin," Jane answered gallantly with her head assuming
its lovely independent pose, but with the most wonderful blush spreading
the beauty that always ought to have been hers all over her one-time
plain face, "the wager stands as won by Evelina Shelby. She had properly
prepared the ground and sowed the seed of justice and right thinking
that I--I harvested to-night. I had the honor of offering marriage to
Mr. Hayes just about fifteen minutes ago. I consider that mode of
procedure proved as feasible and as soon as I have received my answer,
whatever it is, I shall immediately proceed with making the endowment
and choosing the five young women according to the agreement."

"Polk!" I exclaimed, turning to him in a perfect panic of alarm. Could
he be trifling with Jane?

"Evelina," answered Polk, giving me a shake and a shove over in the
direction of the Crag, "you ought to know me better than to think I
would answer such a question as Jane put to me, while driving a cranky
car in waning moonlight. If you and James will just mercifully betake
yourselves out there on the porch in the cold for a few minutes I will
try and add my data to this equality experiment with due dignity. Go!"

We went!

"Love-woman," whispered the Crag, after I had broken it to him that we
were going to be a Governor of Tennessee, and not a railroad attorney,
and he had crooned his "Swing Low" over me and rocked me against his
breast for a century of seconds, down on my old front gate, "you are
right about the whole question. I see that, and I want to help--but if
I'm stupid about life, will you hold my hand in the dark?"

"Yes," I answered with both generosity and courage.

And truly if the world is in the dusk of the dawn of a new day, what can
men and women do but cling tight and feel their way--together?

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