“And flies,” suggested Mrs. Capron—“there’s a many thinks that flies has got souls (though not the Board of Health). But even flies—look at me! I keep sugar and molasses for ’em in their own saucer, and if they come to their last end that way, why, they must die likin’ it, and it’s what they chose for theirselves.”
Mrs. Capron drew the string of her netted catchall tight. She hawked, drew her upper lip down over the lower, and buttoned up the tight-fitting coat of mohair.
“Them cruelties of yourn will haunt you, Frenzy,” summed up both ladies; “there’s verses in the Bible for just such things,” exclaimed the visitors together; then they all went in, the two friends turning their attention to Miss Giddings’s household arrangements, offering her advice and counsel as to her clothes and the management of her kitchen range.
There were no more words about the cruelties except that that night in the long, wandering prayer in which Mrs. Capron, as leader of the meeting, had ample opportunity to score against any one whom she fancied delinquent, or against whom she had a private grudge, she inserted into her petition:
“And from all needless cruelties, keep us, O Lord. The bird that hops onto our sill”—Mrs. Capron did not specify whether sparrow or nightingale, but she implored fervently—“help us to remember it’s one of Thy birds and set no snare for it, and the—er—the innercent creepin’ things mindin’ their own business and praisin’ Thee—defend ’em from our impident croolties ... help us to live and let live and refrain from all light-minded killin’ and irreligious trap-settin’.”
Little Johnnie Tyarck, sitting big-eared and thin-faced alongside of his mother’s angular orisons, rubbed puzzled eyes. Johnnie wondered if Mrs. Capron, always severe in her attitude toward boys, could possibly have learned about those twenty-five hop-toads he had corralled in a sewer-pipe, carefully stopping up the ends of the pipe with mud and stones. The interned hop-toads had haunted Johnnie—and yet—and yet— Well, there was something insolent and forthputting about hop-toads—they breathed with their stomachs, had morose mouths, and proved themselves crassly superfluous and useless in the general scheme. Some one, it had seemed to Johnnie, should discipline hop-toads.
Behind Johnnie’s wispy little head was the grizzled one of Mr. Bloomby, the ragman. Mr. Bloomby, it was understood, was invariably haled to prayer-meeting by Mrs. Bloomby, a person of extreme virtue.
As Mrs. Capron’s prayer to be defended from cruelties proceeded, Mr. Bloomby became rather hot under the celluloid collar he had extracted from recent collections of rags—he wondered if it could have possibly got round that he had once built a fire, a small but provocative fire, under a recalcitrant mule in order to persuade the mule to draw a load which he, Mr. Bloomby, deemed entirely adapted to the mule’s capacity. Mr. Bloomby mentally confronted the inexperienced Supreme Being with data as to mules and the way a mule would try to get even with you.
But there was one person on whom Mrs. Capron’s prayer made little, if any, impression. Miss Frances Giddings bowed her sallow face into her wobbly, gloved hand. “Five waters must I pass my hands through, O Lord,” she prayed, “but never will I neglect Thy roses!” Into her mind swept clouds of fresh, heavenly bloom. With a dedication to beauty that she did not know was pagan, she lost herself in the dream of eternal gardening.
Nevertheless, the story of Frances Giddings’s “cruelties” got about. There was much discussion over the dark revelations made by Mrs. Capron and Mrs. Tyarck. Morning wrappers conferred in basements; lead-wrapped crimps met in cellars; in church there were eyeglasses that glittered judgment. Just how was the village of Ivy Corners to look upon a person whose backyard was full of contraptions—this one for cats, that one for locusts; pitfalls for inquiring chickens, fly-paper for migrating ants! Under the amazing elasticity of village imagination it was finally evolved and told with indrawn breath that there had been cruelty like that “in the family.” A Giddings, ancestor of Miss Frances, forgotten till now, but revamped for especial significance, was said to have been “dog-catcher,” and in this governmental disguise to have inflicted incredible torments upon the stray animals of his impounding. Then came horrified descriptions of Miss Frenzy, head tied up, a flaming wad of newspaper on a broom, attacking the diaphanous intrenchments of caterpillars. These recitals, all working up to an hysterical crescendo, were pounded like so many coffin-nails in the final burial of a shy, gentle personality. Little by little the impression grew stronger that Miss Frenzy, though still out of jail, was both cruel and “queer,” and between these judgments and her sensitive appreciation of them, the tall, stooping figure was seen less and less among intimate gatherings of Ivy Corners.