ANTHY TAKES COMMAND
Anthy was always late in reaching the office, if she came at all, on Monday mornings. It was one of the days when old Mrs. Parker came to help her, and it was necessary that the week be properly started in the household of the Doanes.
It is said of Goethe that he was prouder of his knowledge of the science of optics—which was mostly wrong—than he was of his poetry. Genius is often like that. It was so in the case of old Mrs. Parker, who considered herself incomparable as a cook (and once—this is town report—baked her spectacles in a custard pie), and held lightly her genius as a journalist. On any bright morning she could go out on her stoop, turn once or twice around, sniff the breezes, and tell you in voluminous language what her neighbours were going to have for dinner, with interesting digressions upon the character, social standing, and economic condition of each of them.
Though she often tried Anthy's orderly soul, she was as much of a feature of the household on certain days every week as the what-not in the corner of the parlour. She had been coming almost as long as Anthy could remember. For years she had amused, provoked, and tyrannized over Anthy's father, troubled his digestion with pies, and given him innumerable items for the Star. She was as good as any reporter.
On this particular autumn morning Mrs. Parker was unusually quiet, for her. She evidently had something on her mind. She had called upstairs only once:
"Anthy, where did you put the cinnamon?"
Now, Anthy, as usual, upon this intimation, for old Mrs. Parker never deigned to ask directly what she was to do, had come downstairs, and by an adroit, verbal passage-at-arms, in which both of them, I think, delighted, had diverted her intention of making pumpkin pies and centred her interest upon a less ambitious pudding. On this occasion Mrs. Parker did not even offer to tell the story suggested by the catchword "cinnamon," of how a certain Flora Peters—you know, the Peterses of Hawleyville, cousins of the Hewletts—had once used pepper for cinnamon in a pie.
Anthy was fond of these mornings at home, especially just such crispy autumn mornings as this one. She loved to go about busily, a white cap over her bright hair, the windows upstairs all wide open to the sunshine, the cool breezes blowing in. She loved to have the beds spread open, and the rugs up, and plenty to do. At such times, and often also in the spring when she was working in her garden, she would break into bits of song, just snatches here and there, or she would whistle. In these moments of unconscious activity one might catch fleeting glimpses of the hidden Anthy. I like, somehow, more than almost anything else, to think of her as I saw her, a very few times, on occasions like these.
One song, or part of a song, I once heard her sing in an unguarded moment, a bit of old ballad in a haunting minor key, springs at this moment so clear in my memory that I can hear the very cadences of her voice. I don't know where the words came from, or what the song was, nor yet the music of it:
"It is not for a false lover
That I go sad to see,
But it is for a weary life
Beneath the greenwood tree."