Various

By Johnson Morton

It was the boast of the summer dwellers in Roscoe that they had not spoiled the place. Mr. William Bangs was reiterating this to his wife’s niece, who stood regarding his potato patch rather disdainfully through the glamour of a lorgnette.

“You see, Annie, my house is no better than my neighbors’, my land not so good,” he went on. “We keep no servants, in the accepted sense, only the girls whom you have seen—farmers’ daughters from the mountain road—or, as your aunt Mary will put it, ‘We look to the hills whence cometh our help.’ And the outside work is done by Paterson Roscoe and myself, with occasional aid in haying time. The Smiths live in quite the same fashion, the Jacksons, with all their money, just as simply, and the Babbits and Thomases follow the lead. As a result”—he dug his hoe into a hill of potatoes and Miss Jenkins drew back a high-heeled slipper from the contact—“we have an ideal community. The villagers haven’t lost their proper sense of democracy and equality. And we—the outsiders—have learned much from meeting these plain, simple folk on their own ground. So I don’t really approve of this plan of yours. It’s a tremendous innovation. We’ve got on quite well enough for nearly four years without entertainments, save those which are, so to speak, indigenous and natural. I don’t at all like the idea of vaudeville, and I abhor a raffle!”

“But the church does need the money so much, Uncle William,” the girl interrupted, “and it’s a Unitarian church, so the raffle doesn’t matter. Mr. Blythe says he sees no objection to it if it’s conducted properly, and everyone is so interested. All the Pungville people will come in quite a procession, and Tom Mason is to drive the performers over on his coach.”

“Oh, if Tom Mason’s the reason”—uncle William’s hoe rested helplessly—“there’s nothing more to be said.” Annie frowned behind a smile. “But we’ve been thanking Heaven every night of our lives that nineteen stiff miles lay between us and that barbarous Pungville.”

He picked up a handful of warm, brown potatoes and threw them into the basket.

“My dear girl, you’re a wonder! You’ve been here five days, and you’ll tear down in just that time what it has taken us four years to build up.”

“Then have I your blessing?”

The girl showed roguish under her insistence, but uncle William shook his head. “The best you’ll get from me, young woman, is a most reluctant sufferance. You are hopeless. I don’t see why you asked me at all, with the thing as good as settled. Go on; but don’t come back to your old uncle with the demoralization of an entire village on your conscience.”

“Nonsense!” laughed the other. “That won’t trouble me one bit. Just now I’m much more concerned as to what you’re to do for us at the fair—something that will be popular and yet entail no loss of dignity.” She regarded him quizzically. “Ah! I have it! Fortunes told by the cards! A magician in gown and fez, behind a curtain. Slight extra charge, flattering and profitable alike.” She clapped her hands and Mr. Bangs groaned.

“Don’t make me face details yet.”He struck at another potato hill, and Annie turned to the road. “Wait a minute,” he called after her; “this is serious. Have you spoken to Miss Pamela yet?”

“Miss Pamela Roscoe, you mean? No, of course not; why should I?”

“Why should you?” Uncle William leaned on his hoe and fixed her with stern eye. “Easier a brick without straw, a law without a legislature, than to foist an idea, a plan, a measure on this village save in one way. My dear Annie, haven’t you found out in five days that Miss Pamela is chief of the clan? Sister, aunt, cousin, in varying degrees, to every Roscoe and Collamer in the township—and there are no others worthy the count. Don’t you know that she lives in the biggest house, has money in the bank, owns railroad stock, preserves opinions and never goes out of doors? That last is enough to surround her with a wall of mystery, and her own personality does the rest. Her position is almost feudal; the others may be jealous, most of the women are, for she is as acquisitive as she is dogmatic, and somehow she has been able to deflect nearly all the family possessions to her own line of inheritance; but, though they scold behind her back, they bend the knee, every one of them.

“You really must see her and get her consent, or gradually you will have the whole village backing out of its agreements. You’d better go before she hears of the plan from anyone else. I dare say you’re too late already. You’ll need all your diplomacy, and I wouldn’t attempt it till after dinner. Get some points from your aunt Mary. We’ll talk it over by and by. Now, speaking of dinner, do you mind taking these potatoes to Cassandra as you go by the kitchen door? They’re my very first. They’re late enough, but I guess I’m a week ahead of Smith, anyway. Thank you.” He turned to his work again.

Miss Pamela Roscoe lived in a large house freshly painted white, with dark green blinds, chronically closed. To the front door wandered a box-bordered gravel path, and up this avenue Annie Jenkins walked in the red radiance of the September afternoon. Like a good soldier, she had donned her brightest armor, and her muslin skirts flicked in a friendly yet business-like way against the green. She raised the heavy brass knocker, its rattle shook the door and echoed through an empty hall.

Miss Pamela Roscoe heard the sound, and went softly, with no show of haste, to a window that commanded what is, in local parlance, known as a handsome view of the front porch, from which vantage she remarked her visitor through peeping shutters.

But she waited—it is not considered good form in Roscoe to admit a stranger too eagerly—for a decent interval to elapse. Thanks to aunt Mary’s coaching, Annie did not knock again, but stood in pretty decision with her eyes straight before her. A leisurely footstep sounded within; the latch lifted with dignity, the door opened a crack at first, then more widely; and, outlined against a blacker background, stood the tall, stern, forbidding figure of Miss Pamela Roscoe herself!

She was a lady of fateful appearance, black-haired and pale, with a marvelous impression of preservation. Her manner was of the nil admirari sort, and her voice what Annie afterward described as mortuary. The girl murmured her name, a wan smile welcomed her.

“Come right in, Miss Jenkins,” the gloomy voice began, “only I don’t want you should step off that oilcloth. I ain’t going to get that carpet all tracked up. You go right on into the front room”—a gaunt arm pushed her toward a darker space—“and I’ll open up there in a minute.”

Miss Pamela, at the window, threw back the shutter, rolled up a curtain and the western sunlight filled the place. Annie took the chair which her hostess dusted ostentatiously, a stout, wooden rocker with a tidy—Bo-Peep in outline stitch in red—flapping cozily at its back but Miss Roscoe still stood.

“It ain’t hospitable, I know,” her monotone apologized; “a first visit, too—but I’m going to ask you to excuse me a minute right at the set-off. When you knocked, I was buying some berries of the Collamer twins, and just a-measuring of them. I don’t allow no one to measure in my house but myself, if they are my grand-nephews, and I most ought to go back to the summer kitchen to finish and pay ’em—if you don’t mind. There’s the album and last week’s paper, and you just make yourself to home till I get back.”

Left alone, in somewhat austere comfort, Miss Jenkins’ eyes wandered over the room, from the strips of bunting at the windows—black alternating with red, white and blue, which a card in pale, cramped writing explained: “In Memory of Garfield, 1881”—to two elaborate fly-catchers which did duty as chandeliers from vantage points of the ceiling. The simpler, made of straw tied with bows of red worsted, paled before the glories of the other—a structure of silver cardboard in cubes, the smaller depending from the corners of the larger in diminishing effect, ribbon-bound, with a gleaming pearl bead in the center of each.

A pair of strange tables, laden with still stranger ornaments, filled the larger spaces of the floor and bore testimony to the prowess of some pioneer in the line of industrial adornment.

“Poor soul,” thought the girl, “here is the decorative instinct untrammeled by imitation. Individuality inherent! Unkind fate, furnishing no models, has produced originality.” She walked toward the larger table for closer scrutiny just as Miss Pamela re-entered the room. A faint accent of gratification colored the latter’s voice.

“I see you looking at them stands,” she said; “mosaic, I call ’em. I made every stitch of ’em myself. Soft pine they are; my brother Nathan gave me the wood, and I’d been saving the pieces of crockery for years. You cut places in the wood and stick ’em in close in patterns with colors that look pretty together—sometimes you have to use a hammer—and then you sandpaper the rough places—it’s terrible on the hands—and put on a couple of coats o’ shellac. I call ’em pretty handsome. Cousin Parthenia Roscoe was here the day I was finishing them, and I tell you she admired ’em. Those crackle ware pieces were from an old pitcher of her mother’s that came to me—it got broken, and I worked ’em in at the corners. I don’t set no great store by that alum cross. They’re kind o’ common, but it turned out so nice I let it stand there. How did I make it? Why you just take a cross of wood and wind it with yarn and let it hang overnight in a solution of alum and water, and in the morning it’s all crystal. ’Tain’t no work; but, land’s sakes! there’s enough to make up in those wax autumn leaves; I call that a likely spray of woodbine. It took me the bigger part of three mornings to get it done, and ’twas in the winter I made it, so I didn’t have nothing to go by but my memory.”

She pinched the stiff little garland into a more aggressive attitude, and turned, with a sort of caress, to a jar of colored pampas grass that flaunted itself in the corner. Annie’s eyes followed the motion, and Miss Pamela answered the question in them by handing her the jar for a closer inspection.

There was pride in her voice as she spoke, though her tone was casual. “It’s just one of my what-not vases, I call ’em. I invented it myself. ’Twas a blacking bottle, to begin with, but I covered it with putty, good and thick, and then I stuck all them things on it. Here’s a peach-stone basket and a couple of Florida beans and some seashells that were brought me from down East. The sleeve buttons on the front were broken, but I think they stand up well, and that gold paint does set off the whole. It’s been imitated, you’ll find,” she added, dismally, “but the idea’s original with me.”

She replaced the jar in its corner. Then, as a sudden realization of the duty of a hostess seized her, she seated herself decorously in a stiff-backed chair opposite her visitor, and, adjusting primly what is technically known as a “front breadth,” gave herself unreservedly to polite inquiry.

“Is your health good?” she asked, with an air of expecting the worst.“Oh, very good, indeed,” said Annie, conscious that she brought disappointment on the wings of her voice.

“It has been a sickly season,” remarked the elder lady.

“I am always well,” laughed Annie, but it was the ghost of a laugh.

“And is Mr. Bangs well, and your aunt?” The voice rose at the last word—expectantly. And Annie clutched at the fact that she had left aunt Mary lying down at home.

“My uncle? Yes. But my aunt has a headache. Otherwise she’d have come with me this afternoon.”

“She’d better keep quiet.” Miss Pamela shook her head. “A cousin of mine, over Rutland way—Andromeda Spear, you’ve heard of her, maybe—your aunt always puts me in mind of her—she used to have headaches like that, and she wouldn’t hear to reason about ’em. So she kept on her feet when she’d ought to be lyin’ down, and one day—’twas a fall day, like this, I remember—she had a seizure in the hen house, and she never got over it—though she lingered for years,” she added, by way of consideration.

“But, you see, Miss Roscoe, we have no hen house,” retorted Annie, with a sort of flippant desperation.

“Well, there’s plenty of places,” remarked the other, sententiously. “Bed’s not the only place to die in, and I’ve always believed in proper precautions. You give Miss Bangs my respects, and tell her that she can’t be too careful.”

Then followed a fusillade of questions—the length of her stay, her graduation from college in June, her likelihood of marriage, and her religious beliefs.

Dazed, depleted, the girl’s answers grew monosyllabic, in spite of an air of forced gayety which she strove hard to maintain. Somehow the inherent and masterful depression of her hostess was weighing her down. Outside the sun had settled in clouds, and a somber twilight stole in through the window. The voice opposite droned on, engrossing, dominating, hypnotic. Annie realized that unless she roused herself she would relapse into permanent silence, and so, in a lucky pause, as her eyes fell upon a strange object hanging above the mantelpiece, she grew aggressive for the moment, and boldly asked a question herself.

“Pardon my interrupting, Miss Roscoe, but do you mind telling me what is that mysterious and interesting—thing?”

Miss Pamela’s gaze followed the turn of Annie’s head. She rose grimly from her seat and went to the further corner of the room, whence she abstracted a yardstick and stood before the fire-board. Deftly she pushed off a cloth that enshrouded the object, and disclosed what had evidently been, at one time, a chromo of vast dimensions; its bright gilt frame remained intact, but the picture itself was entirely obliterated by successive coatings of her useful gold paint, and to the center was affixed half of a flower basket—the flaring kind—cut longitudinally. This basket, also gilded heavily, was filled with a varied profusion of artificial fruits.

Annie turned her chair. Miss Pamela cleared her throat and pointed with the yardstick.

“It’s not a thing, Miss Jenkins,” she began, with some severity, “but a sort of monument that I have made—I call it my ‘Memorial Fruit Piece.’” There was about Miss Roscoe something of the pride of the discoverer, and she warmed to her subject.

“You see, ours was a large family, and, from time to time, many of us were taken away—‘called home,’ you might say—and those that went left to those that remained a good many relics and keepsakes like. They came to mother first, and after mother’s death they came to me, and I had ’em round in bureau drawers and bandboxes and trunks, and they was in the way when I was cleaning house or making changes of arrangements, and I won’t say that such as was fabrics wasn’t attracting moths. But I couldn’t think of no way to remedy it. Till suddenly—let’s see, ’twas eleven weeks ago last Tuesday—the idea came to me, and I grouped ’em together, like you see ’em here—this tribute.”

Her yardstick touched the basket lovingly, as she went on: “That banana, on the extreme left, contains my grandfather’s gold-bowed spectacles, jest as he used to wear ’em. Gran’pa grew terrible deaf when he got to be an old man, and so he never heard a team coming up behind him one day when mother’d sent him down to the store for a loaf of bread. Miss Jenkins, them glasses was on his nose just as lifelike when they brought him in to us! My mother’s wedding ring is in that greengage plum next to the banana, and aunt Sophia Babcock’s is in that damson, a little below to the right.

“You see that peach? Pretty lifelike, I call it—well, there ain’t anything in it yet, but my great-uncle Bradly’s shirtstuds are in the Bartlett pear, just beyond, and that orange contains a Honiton lace collar that my mother wore the day she was married.

“And this Baldwin apple”—her voice grew intimate—“has in it some little relics of my own uncle Aaron Roscoe. He was a good man, and he felt the call early, and he journeyed to heathen lands to carry the glad tidings, and we never heard from him again—till quite recent, when these little relics was sent back.

“Do you remember my brother Willy? Gracious, no! What was I thinking of? Of course you don’t—your aunt Mary’d remember him, though. He was my youngest brother, and a great hand for all sorts of frolic and fun. Well, it’s more’n thirty years ago, but it seems just yesterday that he fell in the mill pond. Sister Coretta was with him, and she’d let him get out of her sight—which she hadn’t ought to—but, childlike, she’d got to playing with the shavings, and sticking ’em over her ears, and when she sensed things Willy wa’n’t nowhere to be found. They drawed off the water, and there he was, poor little thing, and they brought him home and laid him on the kitchen table, and then mother and I, we went through his pockets to see what there was, and there we found a bag of marbles, just as he’d had ’em—and he was a great hand for marbles. Well, mother she kept ’em in her bureau drawer for years, and whenever she’d open the bureau drawer it would make her feel bad, ’cause she’d think of Willy, and after mother’s death it made me feel bad to see ’em, ’cause I’d think of Willy and mother, too. Yet, somehow, I couldn’t think of no way to put ’em in here till suddenly it occurred to me in the night—’twas three weeks ago come Friday—and I got up then and there and I covered ’em each with purple silk and made ’em into that bunch of grapes on the extreme right.”

Miss Roscoe turned to her audience, her face rapt, as is the face of one who has gazed on a masterpiece. Annie recognized that now or never was her chance to state the errand that had brought her, to break through the strong reluctance that had held her at bay through the interview. She rose and held out her hand.

“It is—wonderful,” she looked toward the memorial, “and I can’t tell you how good it is of you to explain it all to me. I envy you the power you have of making—wonderful things.” The adjective crowded out every other in her vocabulary. “But I really came to ask you to do something for me, Miss Roscoe,” she smiled at the sphinxlike figure. “I’ve been getting up a sort of fair, and it’s going to be a great success—everybody in the village has promised to help, and my New York friends from Pungville are to give a sort of entertainment. I thought, you know—that you’d like to help, too, so I came to see what you’d be willing to do. We mean to have a sort of raffle.”

Miss Roscoe maintained her air of pathetic sternness.

“And wouldn’t you like to give something that we could take shares in—something, perhaps, that you have made—one of your what-not jars, or, if you’re very generous, why not the ‘Memorial Fruit Piece’?”

She stopped, somewhat staggered by the daring of her own suggestion. Miss Pamela had replaced the yardstick in its corner, and Annie was conscious of a vague relief when it was out of the way. She rested her hand on the Bo-Peep chair and waited.Miss Pamela folded her thin arms across her breast, and regarded her calmly.

“Miss Jenkins, I don’t think there’s going to be any fair,” she remarked, succinctly.

The blood of youth boiled at the finality of it. “Oh, yes, there is, Miss Roscoe; I told you that I’d made all the arrangements.”

“Well, I’ve been making some arrangements, too.”

“And everybody’s going to help—your cousin, Mrs. Collamer, and Dorothea Roscoe and Roscoe Collamer and Mrs. Collamer Roscoe and your cousin Paterson.”

“Paterson, indeed!” Miss Roscoe’s voice showed its first touch of warmth as she seized the conversation. “Miss Jenkins,” she said, “you’re a young woman, and a well-meaning one, and my feelings toward you are kindly. But a mistake has been made. There ain’t going to be any fair!

“I know all about your plans, knew ’em from the minute you started talking ’em over with the minister and cousin Parthenia, down at the meeting house. After she left you, she came right over and told me.”

“But she seemed very enthusiastic,” began Annie, feebly.

“Yes, seemed,” interrupted the older woman, “but she didn’t dare! Cousin Parthenia never set herself up against me yet, and she’s getting a little too well on in years to begin. Next day there was quite a meeting of our folks here. My back gate kept a-clicking till sundown. All but Paterson came, Miss Jenkins, and he’s less than half a Roscoe, and no Collamer at all. His mother was one of them white-livered Lulls, from Pomfret. He’s bound, anyway, to stand by you, because he’s getting wages from your uncle. Well, I settled it all then and there, this fair business, I mean, but I told them to wait, for I some expected to see you!”

Annie’s eyes opened wide. “I meant to come before; I’m afraid I am a little late.” Her attitude was deprecatory; it might have moved a stone, but it produced no impression on her listener.

“I’m afraid you are,” Miss Pamela assented, gloomily. “I’m an old woman, and there ain’t much left to me, but I don’t mean to let the authority that I’ve always had in my family be taken away by any outsider. If you’d come to me first, Miss Jenkins, things might have been arranged different; but that’s over now, and I was always one to let bygones be bygones.”

Annie had moved to the hall, while her hostess fumbled at the door. It opened and let in a whiff of cool air and sounds of crickets on the grass.

“Autumn is here,” remarked Miss Roscoe, impersonally, addressing the world at large. Then she called to the girl between the box rows. Was there a touch of amusement in the mortuary voice?

“I presume you’ll hear from the folks to-morrow that they’ve changed their minds. Do drop in again some time. I’ve enjoyed your visit, and don’t forget to tell Miss Bangs to be careful of her headache!”

At home they were all in the dining room. Annie stood in the doorway, taking the pins out of her straw hat.

“Well?” called uncle William from the head of the table.

“Far from it,” replied the girl. Her cheeks burned, as she shook her head, but there was a glint of laughter in her eyes. She smoothed out her veil, pinned it to the hat and tossed them both in the hall, as she sank into her chair.

“I’ll have a lot to tell you after supper, but here are a few facts to occupy you till then:

“First, there isn’t going to be any fair!

“Second, I believe I shall accept the Masons’ invitation, after all, and spend next week in Pungville.

“Third, behold in me a woman who knows when she is beaten!

“Last, my afternoon’s experiences have made me as hungry as a bear. Uncle William, I am preparing to eat four of those big, baked potatoes in front of you, and, Aunt Mary, please let Cassandra bring in a large pitcher of cream!”