CHAPTER XI
"Come on in, the egg-nog's fine," Rufe called out to us as we came up the walk to the side gate this morning, a beautiful Christmas morning, after a long tramp down through the wood lot and up the ravine.
"Come on out, the ozone's finer," Cousin Eunice sang back at him; then stopped still, leaned against the gate-post and looked up at the mistletoe hanging in the trees all about.
"You can get ozone three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, egg-nog but one!" he hollered again, but I saw him set his glass down and start to swing Waterloo up on his shoulder. No matter how long they have been married you can always find Rufe wanting to be where Cousin Eunice is, and vice versa.
Long ago anybody reading in my diary would have seen that mother is the kind of woman who loves to mother anything that needs it, from a little chicken with the gapes to a college professor out in a storm without his rubbers; and the latest notion she has taken up is to see that Miss Martha Claxton, one of the teachers in a girls' school that has been opened up near here, shall not get homesick during the week-ends. We all like her, Mammy Lou even saving the top of the churning every Friday to make cottage cheese for her; and Cousin Eunice said she knew she was a kindred spirit as soon as she said she could eat a bottle of olives at one sitting and loved Baby Stuart's picture. So we invited her to go walking with us this morning and Cousin Eunice told her all about her courting in the ravine.
I also knew about her peculiarity, which Cousin Eunice didn't; but I didn't like to mention it, for Miss Claxton had smashed her eye-glasses all to pieces yesterday and was wearing an embroidered waist and a string of coral, so instead of looking intellectual, as she usually does, she looked just like other girls. But the men of our family all laugh at her behind her back and call her "The Knocker," because she carries a hammer with her on all her rambles instead of a poetry book, and knocks the very jiblets out of little rocks to see if they've got any fossils on their insides. In other words, she is a geologist. A person ought not to blame her though until she has had time to explain to them that her father was professor of it and had a chair in a college when she was born. So he taught her all about rocky subjects when she was little, and she's crazy about it. Still, I would rather be with a person that is crazy about geology than one that isn't crazy at all. I hate medium people. But, as I have said, we are all very fond of her, although she has never done anything since I've known her that would be worth writing about in this book, not having any lover; so it has been lying on the shelf all covered with dust ever since Jean left. Sometimes I think I'll never find another Jean!
To get back to my subject, though, this morning was lovely—cool enough to keep your hair in curl (if you were a grown lady) and warm enough to make your cheeks pink. Cousin Eunice said she couldn't go back into the house while the sunshine was so golden, so we leaned our elbows on the fence and Miss Claxton examined a handful of pebbles she had picked up on our walk. Pretty soon Rufe came out with Waterloo on his shoulder and in his hands a horse that can walk on wheels and a mule that can wag his head, ears, legs and tail and say, "queek, queek," all at the same time.
"Oh, Rufe, isn't it lovely?" Cousin Eunice said, looking away toward the hills and sighing that half-sad sigh that rises in you when you see something beautiful and can't eat it nor drink it nor squeeze it.
"Isn't what lovely, your complexion?" he answered, just to tease her, for Rufe loves the outdoors as much as any of us, and if Waterloo takes after his mother and father both, he will never sleep in anything more civilized than a wigwam.
"Don't joke," she said. "It's too beautiful—and too fleeting! Just think, in another week we'll be back, dwelling with the rest of the fools amid the tall buildings!"
"It is everything you say," he answered soberly, looking in the direction she pointed, and he seemed to have that happy, hurting feeling that comes to you when you look at Lord Byron's picture, or smell lilies-of-the-valley.
"Don't you feel light on a morning like this?" Cousin Eunice said again, still looking at the hills. "Couldn't you do anything?"
"Anything!" he echoed. "Even push my paper to the hundred thousand mark—or carry a message to Garcia."
"Especially the message to Garcia! Now couldn't you?" she said with a bright smile. "I could do that myself, without even mussing up my white linen blouse!"
Miss Claxton looked up at them with a puzzled look, and Rufe and Cousin Eunice unhitched hands.
"Miss Claxton," Rufe began with a half-teasing twinkle in his eyes (I had heard father telling him a while ago about Miss Claxton being a knocker), "this little affair about the message to Garcia happened a bit this side of the Eocene age, so maybe you haven't bothered your head about it. I might explain that——"
"Nobody asked you to, sir," she said, with such a rainbow of a smile at him that I was surprised. If she could smile like that at a married man what would she do at a single one? "I know a lot more things than I look to—with my glasses on! That carrying the message to Garcia was a brave thing to do, even aside from the risks. It is heroic to do the thing at hand. I'm trying to learn that lesson myself. I'm being a schoolmarm and wearing glasses to look like one, instead of following my natural bent in the scientific field," she wound up, still smiling.
"What's your ambition?" Cousin Eunice said, looking at her wonderingly.
"Knowing what's to be known about Primitive Man," Miss Claxton answered. "He's the only man I ever cared a copper cent about!"
"Mine's writing a book that will make me famous overnight, I don't want to wait to awake some morning and find myself so," Cousin Eunice said, stooping over to set Waterloo's horse up on his wheels, for he would come unfixed every time Waterloo would yank him over a gravel; and all the time we were talking he kept up a chorus of "Fick horte! Fick horte!"
Rufe said his ambition was never to see an editor's paste-pot again, and he was turning to me to ask what mine is when the conversation was interrupted. I was glad that it was, for I should hate to tell them just what mine is. Somehow it is mostly about Sir Reginald de Beverley, and I'm old enough now to know that he may not be an English lord after all and dress in a coat of mail. He may be just a plain young doctor or lawyer, and we'll have to live in a cottage (only excuse me from a flat, I wouldn't live in a flat with Lord Byron) and maybe we'll just have chicken on Sunday. But as long as he has brown eyes and broad shoulders and lovely teeth I shall manage to do with crackers and peanut butter through the week. A woman will do anything for the man she loves.
But I didn't have to tell them all this, for just then we heard the gate click and saw our friend, Mr. Gayle, coming up the walk.
"There comes old Zephyr," Rufe said with a laugh. "It was the biggest lie on earth to name him Gayle. Even Breeze would have been an exaggeration."
"He's awfully smart," I told Rufe, for I hate to have my friends laughed at. "I know you and Julius joke about him on account of his gentle ways and broad-brimmed hats! Father says it's better to have something under your hat than to have so much style in its looks!"
"Well, he has something under his hat," Cousin Eunice said, "and hat enough to cover twice as much. But I think those old-timey things are becoming to him!"
"What is the subject about which he knows so much?" Miss Claxton asked, following him with her eyes until Dilsey let him in at the front door.
"Heaven," Rufe answered her, "and hell. He writes deep psychological stuff for the magazines and they pay him ten cents a word for it. He must spend his dimes building model tenements, for he certainly doesn't buy new hats with them."
"What does he say about Heaven and the other place?" Miss Claxton asked, much to our surprise, for we had thought she didn't care about anything but earth.
"He says they're both in your own heart. The Heaven side comes up when you've done a decent job at your work—and loved your office boy as your own nephew!"
"And——" Miss Claxton kept on.
"And the hell part comes into the limelight when you've done anything mean, such as——"
"Spanking your Waterloo when the telephone bell makes you nervous—not when he's bad," Cousin Eunice said, gathering Waterloo up in her arms and loving him. "Him's a precious angel, and mudder's a nasty lady to him lots of times."
"Aunt Mary is sending him out here to find us," Rufe said, as we saw Mr. Gayle coming out of the dining-room door. "I hope she's filled him so full of egg-nog that we can have some fun out of him!"
He had on a Sunday-looking suit of black clothes and a soft black tie in honor of the day, and was really nice-looking as he came up toward us. And Miss Claxton threw away the last one of her pebbles, no matter what they had on their insides, and commenced wiping her hands vigorously with her handkerchief.
"Thank goodness!" I thought as I watched her. "I shall go straight up-stairs and wipe the dust off my diary with my petticoat!"
I reckon Rufe and Cousin Eunice both thought that Mr. Gayle and Miss Claxton had met before, for they didn't offer to introduce them, but I knew they hadn't, so I was the one that had to do it. I had forgotten how The Ladies' Own Journal said it ought to be done, and I was kinder scared anyway; and when I get scared I always make an idiot of myself. So I just grabbed her right hand and his right hand and put them together and said, "Mr. Gayle, do shake hands with Miss Claxton!"
Well, they shook hands, but the others all laughed at me. Cousin Eunice said she was sorry she didn't know they hadn't met before, or she would have introduced them. But Mr. Gayle smiled at me to keep me from feeling bad.
"Never mind," he said, "I'm sure Ann's introduction is as good as anybody's. What she lacks in form she more than makes up for in sincerity."
I thought it was nice of him to say that, but I was so embarrassed that I got away from them as soon as I could. I went out to the kitchen to see if Mammy Lou was ready to stuff the turkey. Lares and Penates were on the floor playing with two little automobiles that Julius had brought them. Mammy Lou was fixing to cut up the liver in the gravy.
"Please don't," I began to beg her, "I'll go halves with Lares and Penates if you'll give it to me!"
"You don't deserve nothin'," she said, trying to look at me and not laugh. "I seen you out thar by the side gate, aggin' 'em on! Reckon you're in your glory, now that you've got a pair of 'em to spy on and write it all out in that pesky little book!"
"Oh, they ain't a pair!" I told her, slicing up the liver into three equal halves.
"They soon will be if they listen to you!"
"Never in this world! She says she never has cared for anybody but a person she calls 'Primitive Man!'"
"Dar now! I bet he fooled her!" she said with great pleasure, for next to a funeral she likes a fooling, and she is always excited when she forgets and says "Dar now." "If he has," she kept on, "she'd better do the nex' best thing and marry Mr. Gayle. He's got as good raisin' as ary man I ever seen, although he's a little pore. But they's some things I don't like about fat husban's—they can't scratch they own back!"
I was glad to keep her mind on marrying, for I thought I'd get a chance at the gizzard too, but she watched it like she watches her trunk-key when her son-in-law's around. I told her to go to the window and see what they were doing now, and she did it, poor old soul! When she came back the gizzard was gone, but she was so tickled that she didn't notice it.
"They've done paired off and gone down by the big tree to knock mistletoe out'n the top," she told me, her face shining with grease and happiness. "I knowed 'twould be a match! Needn't nuvver tell no nigger of my experience that folks is too smart to fall in love! Ever'body's got a little grain o' sense, no matter how deep it's covered with book-learnin'."
"Oh, they don't have to be smart at all," I told her, talking very fast to divert her mind from the gravy. "Father says if the back of a girl's neck is pretty she can get married if she hasn't sense enough to count the coppers in the contribution box."
"An' he tol' the truth," she said, stopping still with her hands on her hips like she was fixing for a long sermon. "An' furthermore, if she's rich she don't need to have neither. But marryin' for riches is like puttin' up preserves—it looks to be a heap bigger pile beforehan' than afterwards. An' many a man marries a rich girl expectin' a automobile when he don't git nothin' but a baby buggy!"
Mr. Gayle has been coming over so early every morning since that first morning that he met Miss Claxton, and staying so late that I haven't had much time to write. I've been too busy watching. I've often heard Doctor Gordon say that diseases have a "period of incubation," but I believe that love is one disease that doesn't incubate. It just comes, like light does when you switch on the electricity. This morning Mr. Gayle came so early that Rufe went into the sitting-room and began to poke fun at him, as usual.
"Hello, old man," he said, shaking hands with him. "I'm surely glad to see that it's you. Thought of course when the door-bell rang so soon after breakfast that it was an enlarged picture agent!"
"No, I'm far from being an enlarged anything," the poor man said, wiping off the perspiration from his forehead, for he must have walked very fast. "In fact, I'm feeling rather 'ensmalled,' as our friend, Ann, might say. I have never before so realized my utter unworthiness!"
"Bosh," Rufe said, slapping him on the shoulder in a friendly way. "Why, man, you're on to your job as well as anybody I ever saw. Why, your last article in The Journal for the Cognoscenti made me give up every idea of the old-fashioned Heaven I'd hoped for—a place where a gas bill is never presented, and alarm clocks and society editors enter not!"
"Mr. Clayborne would have been worth his weight in platinum as court jester to some melancholy monarch in the middle ages," Miss Claxton said, looking up from her crochet work which mother is teaching her and Cousin Eunice to do, because it has come back into style, to smile at Mr. Gayle.
"I'm not what Ann calls 'smart'!" he said in answer to her, "but I remember enough history to know that the other name for jester is fool. I shan't stay where people call me such names!" So he got up and went out, which gave Cousin Eunice and Waterloo and me an excuse to go too. So we left the lovers alone.
"Well, he's what I call a damn fool," Rufe said in a whisper as soon as the door was closed so they couldn't hear. "Coming over here every few minutes in the day, 'totin' a long face,' as mammy says, and hasn't got the nerve to say boo to a goose!"
"Saying boo to a goose wouldn't help his suit any," Cousin Eunice said; "besides, well-regulated young people don't get engaged in three days!"
"What ill-regulated young people you and I must have been!" Rufe said, then dodged Waterloo's ball which she threw at him, saying what a story! It was nearly two weeks before they got engaged.
"I advocate getting engaged in two hours when people are as much in love as those two we've just left. Gayle hasn't red blood enough in him to stain a chigoe's undershirt!"
Hasn't anything happened worth writing about until to-day, but it has been happening so thick ever since morning that my backbone is fairly aching with thrills. And I'm tired! Oh, mercy! But I'm going to stay awake to-night until I get it all written out even if I have to souse my head in cold water, or rouse up Waterloo.
Right after breakfast this morning Mr. Gayle happened to see Cousin Eunice go into the parlor by herself to crochet some extra hard stitches, and so he went in after her and said he would like to have a little talk with her if she didn't mind. Dilsey had left the window up when she finished dusting, which I was very glad to see, for I was in my old place on the porch. He told her he supposed he was the confoundedest ass on earth, but she said oh no, she was sure he wasn't so bad as that! Then he plunged right into the subject and said he was madly in love and didn't know how to tell it. Would she please help him out?
"Oh, don't mind that," she answered kindly. "All earnest lovers are awkward. The Byronic ones are liars!"
He said he knew she would understand and help him with her valued advice!—— But, just what was he to say? And when was he to say it?
She told him she thought it would be a psychological moment to-night, the last night of the year, and they would all be going their different ways on the morrow. It would be very romantic to propose then, say on the stroke of twelve, or just whenever he could get himself keyed up to it. He said oh, she was the kindest woman in the world. She had taken such a load off his heart! He thought it would be a fine idea to propose just on the stroke of midnight—somehow he imagined the clock striking would give him courage! Oh, he felt so much better for having told somebody!
I felt that it would be a weight off my heart if I could tell somebody too, and just then I spied Rufe holding Waterloo up to see the turkeys down by the big chicken coop. I didn't waste a second.
"Oh, Rufe, you'll be surprised!" I said, all out of breath, and he turned around and looked thrilled. "Mr. Gayle is red-bloodier than you think!" Then I told him all about it. "Now aren't you sorry you called him a d—— fool?" I wasn't really minding about the cuss word, for Rufe isn't the kind of a man that says things when he's mad. He's as apt to say 'damn' when he's eating ice-cream as at any other time.
Rufe was delighted to hear that it was going to happen while they were still here to see it; and we went right back to the house and planned to sit up with Cousin Eunice and see them after they came out of the parlor on the glad New Year. Julius and Marcella were coming over to sit up with us anyhow to watch it in, so it wouldn't be hard to do.
Well, mother put enough fruit cake and what goes with it out on the dining-table to keep us busy as long as we could eat, but along toward ten o'clock we got so sleepy (being just married people and me) that Julius said let's run the clock up two hours. Marcella said no, that would cause too much striking at the same time, but she said if something didn't happen to hurry them up and put us out of our misery we would all be under the table in another five minutes. We were all so sleepy that everything we said sounded silly, so when a bright idea struck me it took some time to get it into their heads.
"Rufe's typewriter!" I said, jumping up and down in my joy, so it waked them up some just to look at me. "The bell on it can go exactly like a clock if you slide the top thing backwards and forwards right fast. I've done it a million times to amuse Waterloo!"
They said they knew I'd make a mess of it if I tried such a thing, but I told them if they took that view of what a person could do they never would be encouraged to try to do things. I knew I could do it! Marcella said then for Rufe to place the typewriter close up to the parlor door, and they would all go out on the front porch to keep the lovers from hearing them laugh. So out they all filed.
Well, it was an exciting moment of my life when I was sliding that thing backwards and forwards and thinking all sorts of heroic thoughts, but I gritted my teeth and didn't look up until I had got the twelve strokes struck. Then I went out on the front porch right easy and sat down by the others. Julius tucked his big coat around me and we all sat there a little while, laughing and shivering and shaking until I felt that I'd never had such a good time in my life! Then somebody whispered let's go in—and then the unexpected happened.
We heard a sound in the parlor close back of us and the first thing we knew there was Mr. Gayle raising the window that opens on to the porch, and he and Miss Claxton came over and looked out into the night. They couldn't see us if we sat still, close up against the wall; and it seemed that none of us could budge to save our lives!
It was a lovely moonlight night, clear and cold, that always reminds me of the night Washington Irving reached Bracebridge Hall (I just love it), and so he put his arm around her, Mr. Gayle I mean, not Washington Irving, and his voice was so clear and firm and happy that we all knew he had been accepted.
"Bid good morrow to the New Year, my love," he said and kissed her on the lips a long, long time. "There has been created for me this night not only a new year, but a new Heaven and——"
"And a new earth," she finished up softly, and they closed the window down.
"I hope she won't take her little hammer and knock on her new earth to see if it has petrified wiggle tails in it," Rufe said, after we had filed back into the house and moved the typewriter away from the door. But his voice was solemn when he said it, and we all felt like puppy dogs for being out there. And nobody said another word about staying up to see how they looked when they came out of the parlor.
The next day everybody made like they were very much surprised at the way it had turned out except Mammy Lou. She looked as happy when Miss Claxton told us the news as if she had got herself engaged again.
"You were right after all, mammy," Cousin Eunice told her. "In spite of all Miss Claxton's scientific knowledge she has preferred a man to a career!"
"An' shows her good sense, too," mammy answered, her old brown face running over with smiles, like molasses in the sunshine. "A man's a man, I can tell you; and a career's a mighty pore thing to warm your feet against on a cold night!"