The Tinder Box by Maria Thompson Daviess

M >> Maria Thompson Daviess >> The Tinder Box

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11

Now, why did I write weeks ago that I would like to witness an encounter
between Jane and Henrietta! I didn't mean it, but I got it!

Without ruffling a hair or changing color Jane stepped out of the Hupp
and faced the foe. Henrietta is a tiny scrap of a woman, intense in a
wild, beautiful, almost hunted kind of way, and she is so thin that it
makes my heart ache. She is being fairly crushed with the beautiful
depending weight of her mother and the responsibility of the twins, and
somehow she is most pathetic. I made a motion to step between her and
Jane, but one look in Jane's face stopped me.

"Dear," she said, in her rich, throaty, strong voice as she looked
pleadingly at the militant midget facing her. Suddenly I was that
lonesome, homesick freshman by the waters of Lake Waban, with Jane's
awkward young arm around me, and I stood aside to let Henrietta come
into her heritage of Jane. "Don't you want to come with us?" was the
soft question that followed the commanding word of endearment.

"No!" was the short, but slightly mollified answer as Henrietta dug her
toes into the dust and began to look fascinated.

"I'm glad you don't want to come, because I've got some very important
business to ask you to attend to for me," answered Jane, in the brisk
tone of voice she uses in doing business with women, and which interests
them intensely by its very novelty and flatters them by seeming to endow
them with a kind of brain they didn't know they possessed. "I want you
to go upstairs and get my pocketbook. Be careful, for there is over a
hundred dollars in the roll of bills--Evelina will give you the key to
the desk--and go down to the drug store where they keep nice little
clocks and buy me the best one they have. Then please you wind it up
yourself and watch it all day to see if it keeps time with the clock in
your hall, and if it varies more than one minute, take it back and get
another. While you are in the drug store, if you have time, won't you
please select me a new tooth-brush and some nice kind of paste that you
think is good? Make them show you all they have. Pay for it out of one
of the bills."

"Want any good, smelly soap?" I came out of my trance of absolute
admiration to hear Henrietta ask in the capable voice of a secretary to
a millionaire. Her thin little face was flushed with excitement and
importance, and she edged two feet nearer the charmer.

"It would be a good thing to get about a half dozen cakes, wouldn't it?"
answered Jane, with slight uncertainty in her voice as if leaving the
decision of the matter partly to Henrietta.

"Yes, I believe I would," Henrietta decided judicially. "The 'New Mown
Hay' is what Jasper got for Petunia because he hit her too hard last
week and swelled her eye. They is a perfumery that goes with it at one
quarter a bottle. That makes it all cheaper."

"Exactly the thing, and we mustn't spend money unnecessarily," Jane
agreed. "But I don't want to trespass on your time, Henrietta, dear,"
she added with the deference she would have used in speaking to the
President of the Nation League or the founder of Hull House.

"No, ma'am, I'm glad to do it, and I'll go quick 'fore it gets any later
in the day for me to watch the clock," answered Henrietta in stately
tones that were very like Jane's and which I had never heard her employ
before.

And before any of the three of us got our breath her bare little feet
were flashing up my front walk.

"Help!" exclaimed Polk as he leaned back from his wheel and fanned
himself with his hat. "Do you use the same methods with grown beasts
that you do with cubs?" he added weakly.

"It's the same she has always used on me, only this is more dramatic.
Beware!" I said with a laugh as I insisted on just one squeeze of Jane's
white linen arm as she was climbing back into the car.

"That's a remarkably fine child and she should have good, dependable,
business-like habits put in the place of faulty and useless ones. Her
profanity will make no difference for the present and can be easily
corrected. Don't interfere with her attending to my commissions,
Evelina. Let's start, Mr. Hayes." And Jane settled herself calmly for
the spin out Providence Road.

"All the hundred dollars all by herself, Jane?" I called after them.

"Yes," floated back positively in the wake of the Hupp.

For several hours I attended to the business of my life in a haze of
meditation. If Henrietta ticks off the same number of minutes on the
woman-clock from Jane's standpoint, that Jane has marked off from her
own mother's, high noon is going to strike before we are ready for it.

But it was only an hour or two of high-minded communing with the future
that I got the time for, before I was involved in the whirl of dust that
swirled around the storm center, to darken and throw a shadow over
Glendale about the time of the publication of the Glendale News, which
occurs every Thursday near the hour of noon, so that all the subscribers
can take that enterprising sheet home to consume while waiting for
dinner, and can leave it for the women of their families to enjoy in the
afternoon.

I suspect that the digestion of Jane's Equality rally invitation
interfered with the digestion of much fried chicken, corn, and sweet
potatoes, under the roof-trees of the town and I spent the afternoon in
hearing results and keeping up the spirits of the insurgents.

Caroline came in with her head so high that she had difficulty in seeing
over her very slender and aristocratic nose, with a note from Lee
Greenfield which had just come to her, asking her to go with him in his
car over to Hillsboro to spend the day with Tom Pollard's wife, a visit
he knows she has been dying to make for two months, for she was one of
Pet's bridesmaids. He made casual and dastardly mention that there would
be a moon to come home by, but ignored completely the fact that Tuesday
was the day on which he had been invited by the League, of which he knew
she was a member, to meet and rally around the C. & G. Commission.

I helped her compose the answer, and I must say we hit Lee only in high
spots. I could see she was scared to death, and so was I, but her dander
was up, and I backed mine up along side it for the purpose of support.
Besides I feel in my heart that that note will dynamite the rocky old
situation between them into something more easily handled.

She had just gone to dispatch the missive by their negro gardener when
Mamie and Sallie came clucking in. Mamie's face was pink and
high-spirited, but Sallie was in one complete slump of mind and body.

"Mr. Haley has just stopped by to say that he thinks no price is too
great to pay for peace, and fellowship, and good-will in a community,"
she said, as she dropped into a rocker and looked pensively after the
retreating figure of the handsome young Dominie, who had accompanied
them to the gate but wisely no farther. He didn't know that Jane had
gone with Polk.

"And women to pay the price," answered Mamie, spiritedly. "I have just
told Ned that as yet I do not know enough to argue the question of
woman's wrongs with him, but I have learned a few of her rights. One of
_mine_ is to have him accept any invitation I am responsible for having
my friends offer him, and to accompany me to the entertainment if I
desire to go. I reminded him that I had not troubled him often as an
escort since my marriage. He was so scared that he almost let little Ned
drop out of his arms, and he got in an awful hurry to go to town, but he
asked me to have his gray flannels pressed before Tuesday and to buy him
a blue tie to go with a new shirt he has. I never like to spank Ned or
the children, but I must say it does clear the atmosphere."

"You don't think we could put it off or--or--" Sallie faltered.

"No!" answered Mamie and I together, and as I spoke I called Jasper to
set out more rockers and have Petunia get the tea-tray ready, for I saw
Aunt Augusta go across the road to collect Cousin Martha and Mrs.
Hargrove and the rest, while Nell whirled by in her rakish little car on
her way to the Square and called that she would be back.

When Nell used a thousand dollars of her own money, left her by her
grandmother, to buy that little Buick, Glendale promptly had a spell of
epilepsy that lasted for days. The whole town still dodges and swears
when it sees her coming, for she drives with a combination of feminine
recklessness and masculine speed that is to say the least alarming. To
see Aunt Augusta out for a spin with her is a delicious sight.

And it was most interesting to listen to a minute description of the
composite fit thrown by the male population of Glendale, at their rally
invitation, but as time was limited I finally coaxed the conversation
around to the subject of the viands to be offered the lordly creatures
in the way of propitiation for the insult that we were forcing them to
swallow by taking matters in our own hands, and then we had a really
glorious time.

I am glad I have had a year or more in Paris, months in Italy, weeks in
Berlin, and a sojourn in England, just so that I can be sure myself and
assure the others with authority that there are no such cooks in all the
world as the women in the Harpeth Valley of Tennessee, United States of
America.

The afternoon wore away on the wings of magic, and the long, purple
shadows were falling across the street, a rustle of cool night wind was
stirring the tree-tops and the first star was coming timidly out into
the gloaming, before they all realized that it was time to hurry and
scurry under roof-trees.

Lee Greenfield was waiting at the gate for Caroline.

Just as Henrietta had taken a last peep at the clock on the hall table
and gone to answer Sallie's call to come and help Aunt Dilsie in the
bedding of the Kitten and the Pup, Polk's Hupp stopped at the gate, and
he and Jane came up the front walk in the twilight together.

She had on his flannel coat over her linen one and his expression was
one of glorified and translucent daze. I didn't look at her--I felt as
if I couldn't. I was scared! For a second she held me in her arms and
kissed me, _really_--the first time she had ever done it in all my
life--and then went on upstairs with a nice, cool good-night and "thank
you" to Polk.

"Evelina," he said, as he handed me the empty lunch-basket and also the
empty fish-bucket, the first he had ever in his life brought in from
Little Harpeth, "I was right about that Hallelujah chorus being the true
definition of the real woman--only they are more so. I have seen a
light, and you pointed the way. Will you forgive me for being what I
was--and trust me--with--with--good-night!" He was gone!

Jane's kiss had been one of revelation--to me!

For a long time I sat out there in the cool, hazy, windy autumn
twilight breeze, that was heavy with the scent of luscious wild grapes
and tasseled corn, fanning the flame of loneliness in me until I
couldn't have stood it any longer if a tall gray figure of relief had
not come up the street and called me down to my front gate.

"Hail the instigator of a bloodless revolution," laughed the Crag as I
stopped myself with difficulty on the opposite side of the gate from
him. "The city fathers will have to capitulate, and now for the reign of
the mothers!"

"And the same old route to subjection chosen, through their stomachs to
their civic hearts," I answered impudently.

Overlooking my pertness he went on:

"Mayor Shelby was at home with Mrs. Augusta for two hours after dinner
and, as I came by the post-office, I heard him telling Polk in
remarkably chastened, if not entirely chaste language, that it was
'better to let the women have their kick-up on a feeding proposition
than on something worse,' as he classically put it."

"I know it is a great victory," I answered weakly, "but I'm too tired to
glory in it. I wish I was Sallie's Puppy being trotted across Aunt
Dilsie's knee, or Kit, getting a rocking in Cousin Martha's arms."

"Would any other arms do for the rocking?" came in a queer, audacious
voice, with a note in it that stilled something in me and made all the
world seem to be holding its breath.

"I'm tired of revoluting and it's--it's tenderness I want," I faltered
in a voice that hardly seemed strong enough to get so far up out of my
heart as to reach the ears of the Crag as he bent his head down close
over mine. He had come on my side of the gate at the first weak little
cry I had let myself make a minute or two before.

[Illustration: "Is this right?" he asked]

"Is this right?" he asked, as he gently took me in his arms, hollowed
his shoulder for a place for my head, and leaning against the old
gate he began to swing me gently to and fro, his cheek against my hair
and humming Aunt Dilsie's

"Swing low sweet chariot, fer to carry me home."

It was.

I know now what I want and I am going to have it. I'll fight the whole
world with naked hands for him. And I'm also going to find some way to
get him with all his absurd niceties of honor intact, just because that
will make him happier.

I'll begin at the beginning and some way unclasp those gourdy tendrils
that Sallie has been strangling him with. I will bunch all the rest of
his feminine collection and take them on my own hands. I'm going to make
a Governor out of him, and then a United States Senator and finally a
Supreme Judge. Help! Think of the old Mossback being a progressive, but
that's my party and Jane's.

I know he is going to hate terribly to have me ask him to marry me, and
I hate to hurt him so, but it is my duty to get Jane's fifty thousand
dollars so the Five may be as happy as I am to-night; only there aren't
five other Crags. I know it will be a life-long mortification to him to
have me do it, but he lost his chance to-night grand-mothering me. Still,
I did turn my lips away. I was not quite ready then--I am now.

If he wants to go on wearing clothes like that I'm going to let him,
even on the Senate floor, but I can't ever stand for Cousin Jasmine to
cut his hair any more. I want to do it myself, and I'm going to tell her
so, and why. She and I have cried over that miniature of the lost young
Confederate cousin of hers and she'll understand me.

But as I think it over--it always is best to be kind, and I believe I'll
let him get through this rally--it's just four days--free and happy man.

I don't know whether to go in and wake up Jane or not. I would like to
go to sleep with that kiss revelation between us, but maybe it is my
duty to the Five to extract some data from her while it is fresh, on the
foam. I am afraid it is going to go hard with her, but somehow I have a
newborn faith in Polk that makes me feel that he will make it as easy as
he can for her.

Isn't it a glorious thing to realize that neither she nor I will have to
sit and be tortured by waiting to see what those men are going to do?

CHAPTER IX

DYNAMITE

When a man injures a woman's feelings by any particular course of
conduct to which she objects, the maternal in her rises to the surface
and she treats and forgives him as she would a naughty child,--but a man
makes any kind of woman-affront into a lover's quarrel. That is what
masculine Glendale has been doing to its women folks for four days, and
I believe everybody has been secretly enjoying it.

As to the rally, they have stood aside with their hands in their pockets
and their noses in the air, and if it hadn't been for Aunt Augusta and
Nell and Jane being natural-born carpenters and draymen, we might have
had to give it up and let them go on with it to their own glory.

When Nell and Jane went to see Mr. Dodd about building the long tables
to serve the barbecue dinner on, he said he was too busy to do it and
hadn't even any lumber to sell.

Then things happened in my back yard that it sounds like a romance to
write about. Jane sent me over to borrow the Crag's team and wagon and
Henrietta and Cousin Martha and any of the rest of his woman-impedimenta
that I could get. He was out of town, trying a case over at Bolivar, and
wouldn't get back until Monday night.

I am glad he wasn't here, for it would have gone hard with me to treat
him in the manner that Jane decided it was best for all the women in
Glendale to treat all the men in this crisis. It sounded sweet and cold
as molasses dispenses itself to you in midwinter, and I could see it was
a strain on Mamie and Caroline and Mrs. Kirkland, Nell's mother, and
young Mrs. Dodd, the carpenter's wife,--the Boston girl that married him
before she realized him,--to keep it up from day to day.

Besides that I'm going to be a politician's wife--though he doesn't know
it yet--and I want the Crag to be away from the necessity of taking any
sides in this civilized warfare. That's one reason I am such a
go-between for Uncle Peter and the League, I am making votes for my man,
so I consider it all right for me never to deliver any of their messages
to each other as they are given to me, but to twist them into
agreeability to suit myself.

Sallie said the Dominie was entirely on our side and that was why she
went walking with him Sunday afternoon. All the other men were cool to
him and he is so sensitive.

But to get back to the back yard. I glory in writing it and want the
Five to consider it as almost sacred data, though I hope they will never
have to do likewise.

Jane and Nell and Aunt Augusta took the two axes and one large hammer
and tore down my back fence while I and the others loaded the planks on
the wagon. Jane appointed Henrietta to sit and hold the slow old horses
in case they should have got demoralized by the militant atmosphere
pervading Glendale and try to bolt. I never saw any human being enjoy
herself as Henrietta did, and it was worth it all just to look into her
radiant countenance.

Jane took all the hard top blows to do herself and left the unloosening
of the lower nails to Aunt Augusta while Nell ripped off the planks that
stuck. I could almost hear Nell's long, polished finger nails go with a
rip every time she jerked a particularly tough old plank into
subjection, and Aunt Augusta dispensed encouraging axioms about pioneer
work as she banged along behind Jane. Jane herself looked as cool as a
cucumber, didn't get the least bit ruffled, and had the expression on
her face that the truly normal woman has while she is hemming a baby's
flannel petticoat.

And though during the day many delightful crises were precipitated, the
most interesting were the expressions that devastated Polk Hayes's and
Lee Greenfield's faces as they came around the side of the house to see
what all that hammering was about.

"Caroline!" exclaimed Lee, in perfect agony, as he beheld the lady of
his ardent, though long-restrained, affections poised across the wheel
of the wagon tugging at the middle of a heavy plank which Mrs. Dodd and
I were pushing up to her, while Mamie, the mother of seven, stood firmly
on top of the wagon guiding it into place.

"Help!" gasped Polk, as he started to take the ax from Jane by force.

Then we all stopped while Jane quietly gurgled the molasses of the
situation to them, and sent them on down the street sadder and wiser
men. I thought Polk was going to cry on her shoulder before he was
finally persuaded to go and leave us to our fate, and the expression on
Lee's face as he looked up at torn, dirty, perspiring Caroline, with a
smudge on her nose and blood on her hand from an absolutely
insignificant scratch, was such as ought to have been on Ned's face as
he ought to have been standing by Mamie with the asafetida bottle.
That's mixed up but the Five ought to catch the point.

It took up all of Saturday afternoon and part of Monday morning, but we
built those tables, thereby disciplining masculine Glendale with a
severity that I didn't think could have been in us.

We all rested on Sunday, that is, ostensibly. Jane put down all sorts of
things on paper that everybody had to do on Monday and on Tuesday.
Henrietta sat by her in a state of trance and it did me good to see
Sallie out in the hammock at Widegables taking care of both the Kit and
the Pup, laboriously assisted by panting Aunt Dilsie, because Jane
explained to her so beautifully that she needed a lot of Henrietta's
time, that Sallie acquiesced with good-natured bewilderment. Of course,
Cousin Jasmine helped her some, but she was busy aiding Cousin Martha to
beat up some mysterious eggs in the kitchen--with the shutters shut
because it was Sunday. It was something that takes two days to "set" and
was to be the _piece de resistance_, after the barbecue.

Mrs. Hargrove couldn't help Sallie at all with the kiddies, either,
because she was looking through all her boxes and bundles for a letter
from her son, which she thought said something about favoring woman's
rights, and if it is like she thinks it is, she is going to go to the
barbecue and get things nice and hot instead of having them brought to
her cold.

I had hoped to get a few minutes Sunday afternoon to myself so I could
go up into the garret and look through one of the trunks I brought from
Paris with me to see how many sets of things I have got left. I am going
to need a trousseau pretty soon, and I might need it more suddenly than
I expect. I don't see any reason for people's not marrying immediately
when they make up their minds, and my half of ours is made up strong
enough to decidedly influence rapidity in his. But then I really don't
believe that the Crag would care very much about the high lights of a
trousseau, and it was just as well that Nell came in to get me to help
her write a letter to National Headquarters to know if she could have
any kind of assignment in the Campaign for the Convention to alter the
Constitution in Tennessee when it meets next winter.

"Have you made up your mind fully to go in for public life, Nell?" I
asked mildly. "Some of your friends might not like it very much
and--and--"

"If you mean Polk Hayes, Evelina," Nell answered with the positiveness
that only a very young person can get up the courage to use, "I have
forgot that I was ever influenced by his narrow-minded, primitive
personality at all. If I ever love and marry it will be a man who can
appreciate and further my real woman's destiny."

"Well, then, that's all right," I answered with such relief in my heart
that it must have showed in my voice and face. I had worried about Nell
since I could see plainly, though she hasn't told me yet, and I am sure
he doesn't realize it, that Jane had decided Folk's destiny. Nell is not
twenty-one yet and she will find lots of men in the world that will be
fully capable of making her believe they feel that way about her
destiny, until they succeed in tying her up to using it for the real
utilitarian purposes they are sure such a pretty woman is created for.

It will take men in general another hundred years yet, and lots of
suffering, to realize that a woman's destiny is anything but himself,
and get to housekeeping with her on that basis.

Of course, I see the justice and need of perfect equality in all things
between the sexes, emotional equality especially, but I hope the time
will never come when men get as hungry to see their women folks as said
feminists get to see them, after they have been away about four days out
in the Harpeth Valley. It takes a woman's patience to stand the tug.

The Crag didn't jog into Glendale on his raw-boned old horse until
one-thirty Monday night. I had been watching down Providence Road for
him from my pillow ever since I put out my light at eleven, because Jane
had decided that it was our duty to go to bed early so as to be as fresh
as possible for the rally in the morning. She had walked to the gate
with Polk at ten and hadn't come back until eleven, so, of course, she
was ready to turn in. It was just foolish, primitive old convention
that kept me from slipping on my slippers and dressing-gown--I've got
the prettiest ones that ever came across the Atlantic, Louise de
Mereton, Rue de Rivoli, Paris--and going down to the gate to see him for
just a minute. That second he stood undecided in the middle of the road
looking at my darkened house was agony that I'm not going to put up with
very much longer.

Scientifically I feel that I'm thinking life with one lobe of my brain
and breathing with one lung. Still I made myself go to sleep.

Everybody believes in God in a different kind of way, and mine satisfies
me entirely. I know that the hairs of my head are numbered and that not
a sparrow falls; and I don't stop at that. I feel sure that my tears are
measured and my smiles are rejoiced over, and when I want a good day to
come to me I ask for it and mostly get it. There never was another like
the one He sent me down this morning on the first slim ray of dawn that
slid over the side of Old Harpeth!

The sun was warm and jolly and hospitable from the arrival of its first
rays, but the wind was deliciously cool and bracing and full of the wine
of October. It came racing across the fields laden with harvest scents,
blustering a bit now and then enough to bring down a shower of nuts or
to make the yellow corn in the shocks in the fields rustle ominously of
a winter soon to come.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11