Mother, who had not seen the meaning gestures that mammy had been making toward her volcanic right side, was inclined to make light of the sins of the twins, and suggested that they come out from behind the stove, so that the minute the rain held up a little they could run on down to the ice-factory and tell the man to hurry with the ice. We were going to have our favorite caramel cream that night.
But with mother's advent into the kitchen the pains in mammy's side grew much worse, and she began suggestions that she didn't know but what the Lord was going to strike her with another spell, "for the old dominecker rooster had been crowin' sad all day!"
The rain kept on, and late in the afternoon the ice-man telephoned that some of the machinery at the factory was broken, so there would be no ice! Then father's rheumatism suddenly grew so bad that we had to stop our preparations for the feast, and spent half an hour searching for the stopper to the hot-water bag. He must have that bag put to his shoulder, he declared, but after we gathered all the essentials together and put it there he could not stand it on account of the heat!
Upon going back to the kitchen to temper the water down a little I was astounded at mammy's declaration that, if Dilsey would go down to the cabin and bring up her easy chair, while I held an umbrella over it, she would try to stay up long enough to direct us about finishing that dinner! Did ever a girl have such dreams and such nightmares mixed up together?
Night descended rapidly, as night has ever had a way of doing when you are in a fearful hurry, and mother was distractedly searching through her recipe book for a dessert that could be quickly made, yet when finished would be grand enough to set before gubernatorial timber!
Her maternal love had caused her steadily to refuse my help with the dessert, and she made me run on up-stairs for a final bath and a few minutes of manicuring before time to dress. "Be sure to dress carefully," she had bidden me, as she always does, for sometimes I am inclined to be a little absent-minded in the matter of hooks and eyes; but her warning was superfluous to-night.
"Make yourself beautiful—an' skase," is Mammy Lou's favorite slogan in the campaign after masculine admiration, and I had prepared to carry it out so far as nature and instinct would permit. I had carefully pressed my prettiest white gown, a filmy, ruffled thing, and spread it out on my bed, with a petticoat that was long enough, but not too long, lying conveniently near. Where is the woman who has not shed tears and used feminine profanity because she could not find exactly the right petticoat at an eleventh-hour dressing?
As I came into my room I glanced toward the bed with a feeling of complacency, then I turned on the lights and looked more closely. My hopes fell and I saw that the gown had shared in the general determination of everything on the place to go wrong that afternoon because we were so particularly anxious that all should go right. A window near the bed had been left open, in the hurry and confusion, and the dress had seemed to drink in every bit of dampness that it could find lying around loose. It looked as limp and dejected as if it had slept in an upper berth the night before. I had no other thin dress that was available, with all its attachments, at that hour, so I laid aside my ambition to look romantic and slipped on a shirt-waist—with a collar so stiff that it scratched my neck until I looked as if I bore the marks of the guillotine.
Toward eight o'clock, after it was inky dark, and mother had got her dessert safely stored away in the refrigerator to cool, she and I were taking a breathing spell in the dining-room, although we were holding our breath every other minute, listening for the approach of wheels, when the night began to be made hideous by the sounds of the most violent calf distress down in the lot.
"Ba-a-a-h! Ba-a-a-a-ah!" came in hoarse, hollow bellows to our already overstrained ears.