As to that conversation itself, we really do not care for feverish animation. We allow ourselves long pauses while we creak our rockers, pleasantly torpid. Should our emptiness become too acute, there is always one subject that can fill it. We always have the sick. We report to each other anxiously that So-and-So is having “a poor spell,” a condition that, if obstinate, will result in the poor man or woman’s “doctoring,” a perilous substitute for home treatment. We have our hereditary nostrums of combinations quainter than Shakespeare’s cauldron, and home-made brews of herbs that sound almost Chaucerian. There is suggestion still more remote in “hemlock tea.” I am not certain of its ingredients, but its effect is to produce a state of affairs known as a “hemlock sweat.” A “hemlock sweat” is the last resort before sending for the doctor, and it generally brings him.
If our interest in our diseases should ever flag, we have, of course, always, our neighbors. In Littleville, gossip has become an art, in so far as it possesses the perfection of pungency without taint of malice, like the chat of an inquisitive Good Samaritan. When Littleville talks about its neighbors, I listen in reverence before a penetration I have never seen anywhere else. Littleville has not gone abroad to study human nature; it has stayed at home, and watched every flicker of its neighbor’s eyelash, has marked each step taken from toddling infancy to toddling old age, has listened to every word uttered from babyhood to senility. Oh, Littleville knows its own; and knowing its own, knows other folk too. New-comer though I am, I should venture no pretense in the face of that slumbering twinkle in Littleville’s eyes,—Littleville, sharp of tongue and genial in deeds.
This grace of Littleville charity, charity, keen-eyed yet tender, can be, I suppose, the possession of stationary people only; of people who have been babies together, have wedded and worked, been born and been buried together, whose parents and grandparents also are unforgotten, whose dead lie on white-dotted hillsides in every one’s knowledge. The thought of this bond of permanence, of memories, has its wistfulness for us others. You can never be very hard on the woman, however fallen, who was once the little Sallie to share her cooky with you at recess; and, however his poor grizzled head be addled now with drink and failure, a man is still the little Joey whose bare feet trod with yours the stubble of forbidden midnight orchards.
All the world looks askance at a gypsy, and we are gypsies, we clericals; yet never gypsies more involuntary, more home-loving at heart. We are pilgrims, never dropping, as we sojourn in parish after parish, the pilgrim cloak of an affable reserve. Back to the edges of my memory, we ourselves have been always the Ministry. Sundays in that straight front pew, week-days in that well-watched rectory, always the Ministry, never ourselves. But here at last in my little town, is that straight cloak of ministerial decorum slipping from us? May we set down our scrip and staff? At last do we dare to be ourselves, neighbors with neighbors? Do we dare to be part of a place? Perhaps.
Already in brief years I have acquired a little of that admitted intimacy with a community that comes only through knowing some bit of its history for one’s self and not on hearsay; for I have observed the course of several of our thrifty Littleville courtships whereby our youngsters in their later teens set themselves sturdily beneath the yoke of matrimony, promptly bringing forth a procession of babes, as promptly led to baptism. Also I have stood with the rest in our little graveyard when some old neighbor has been laid to rest. I share with the rest the memory of kind old hands grown motionless, and chirrupy old voices now stilled; so that some of these graves, turning slowly from raw soil to kindlier green, are mine, the stranger’s.
Because those newer graves are mine, I may linger in more assured friendliness among the older ones, for to me these brief white-portaled streets of this other Littleville are kindly too; so that I like to go a-calling here also, letting my fancy knock at these low green mounds beneath the mat of periwinkle, above which sometimes flash the blue wings of birds or of sailing butterfly, while just beyond the fence the bobolinks go singing above the clover-fields. Country graveyards are pleasant places; at least ours has no gloom of tangled undergrowth and dank cypress shadow, for we are a house-wifely company, and we like all things well swept and shipshape, even cemeteries.
Even the tragedies the marbles tell are softened now. There are many little gravestones in our cemetery, recording little lives long ago cut short. Many of them belong to that winter I have heard about, a winter long before antitoxin or even disinfectants, when one Sunday in Littleville twenty children lay dead. It was sad then, but to-day to the tune of soaring bobolinks I must be thinking how gayly the little ones put on their winglets all together, and, a white flock, went trooping off, shepherded by angels. In a village graveyard where the dead lie so cozily close to home, in a graveyard so blue above and green below, one has to remember how many things are sadder than death.
I come back from reverie as the ’bus bell goes tinkling by, beyond the white-arched gate, and I rise to gaze to see who has come to us from the world, for the ’bus comes from the train, and the train comes from far away, where the world runs its whirligig, far from Littleville.
The ’bus connects us with life. When one arrives at home, usually at nightfall, there always is the old ’bus man at the train step, peering up and stretching out both welcoming arms to receive our packages and bags. When he has stowed all away, in he climbs rheumatically, and off we trundle, rattling and wheezing along, for driver and horses and ’bus are all in the last stages of decrepitude. The lantern hung between the shafts plays out its straight jet of light, but within it is so dark that I cannot guess our whereabouts until we draw up at the hotel. The hotelkeeper comes out in his shirt-sleeves to receive the fat agents we have brought him, and, peering hospitably into the dark recesses, gives me welcome too. Off and on we rumble, and as we draw rein at the post-office, the post-master, shouldering the mail-bag, spies me and extends his hearty handshake; from the newspaper office near by, where the editor is working, comes a hazarded greeting, to which I respond cheerily from my dark hole, and become forthwith one of to-morrow’s items.
On and up the hill. I can just discern the white belfry against the blue-black sky. Beyond the church is the rectory, and there a lantern on the step and a ruddy door flung wide. I have drawn up, returning, to rectory doors before, but somehow in Littleville it is different; to-morrow, on Sunday, Littleville will be glad I have come back, and will say so, at church, for in Littleville Sunday is different, too.