So she stayed in the kitchen, and it was characteristic of Friendship that when its women learned that she was there, they all went—either deliberately or for a drink of water—to speak with her. And they all did learn that she was there. "Who you got in the kitchen?" was a part of the small talk from guest to hostess. The men stayed "in the other part of the house," Doctor June and Eppleby Holcomb sending by me some cordial word to Delia. I think that they cannot do these things anywhere else with such beautiful delicacy.
When my other guests had taken leave, Calliope stayed to help in the search for Mis' Postmaster Sykes's pickle fork and two of Mis' Helman's napkins (the latter marked with L because the store had been out of papier-maché H's, and it didn't matter what letter so long as you knew it meant you) and all the other borrowed articles whose mislaying made any Sodality gathering a kind of panic. Moreover, Calliope had been helping and we, and Delia, had been far too busy to taste supper.
We would have said that the true life of the evening was done instead of just beginning. But when we entered the kitchen, we found Delia More serving the supper on an end of the baking table, while warming his hands at the range stood Abel Halsey.
"I came in across the track, from the hills," Abel explained to me. "I didn't know you had doings till I tied and blanketed—an' I came on in anyhow, back way. I'm in luck too. I haven't had supper."
We four sat down in that homely cheer, and before us was the Sodality's exquisite cookery. It was good to have Abel there. Since my coming to Friendship I had seen him often, and my wonder at him had deepened. He was alive to the finger-tips and by nature equipped to conquer through sheer mentality, but he seemed deliberately to have fore-gone the prizes for the tasks of the lower places. Not only so, but he who understood all fine things seemed to regard his tastes as naïveté, and to have won away from them, as if he had set "above all wisdom and subtlety" the unquenchable spirit which he knew. And withal he was so merry, so human, so big, and so good-looking. "Handsome as Calvert Oldmoxon," the older ones in Friendship were accustomed to say,—save Calliope, whom I had never heard say that,—but I myself, if I had not had my simile already selected, would have said "as Abel Halsey." If a god were human, I think that Abel would have been very like a god. And to this opinion his experiences were continually bearing witness.
That night, for example, he was in the merriest humour, and told us a tale of how, that day, the sky had fallen. There had been down on the Pump pasture, deep fog, white and thick and folded in, and above him blue sky, when he had emerged on the Hill Road and driven on with his eyes shut. ("When I need an adventure," he said, "I just trot old Major Mary with my eyes shut. Courting death isn't half as costly as they think it is.") And when he had opened his eyes, the sky was gone, and everything was white and thick and folded in and fabulous. Obviously, as he convinced us, the sky had fallen. But he had driven on through it and in it, and had found it, as I recall his account, to be made of inextinguishable dreams. These, Abel ran on, are on the other side of the sky for anybody who claims them, and our sandwiches were, above all sandwiches, delicious. He was so merry that Calliope and I, by a nod or a smile of understanding, played our rôle of merely, so to say, proving that the films were right—for you may have an inspired conversational photographer, but unless you are properly prepared chemically he can get no pictures. As Calliope had said of her evening with Eb and Elspie, "the air in the room was easy to get through with what you had to say—it was that kind of evening." Sometimes I wonder if an hour like that is real time; or is it, instead, a kind of chronometrical fairy, having no real existence on the dial, but only in essence.
As I think of it now the hour, if it was an hour, was simply a background for Delia More. For it was not only Calliope and I who responded to Abel's light-hearted talk, but, little by little, it was Delia too. Perhaps it was that faint spark in her—fanned to life on the night of her coming home, so that she "took stock"—which we now divined faintly quickening to Abel's humour, his wisdom, even his fancies. Save in her bitterness, on that first night, I had not heard her laugh; and it was as if something were set free. I could not help looking at her, but that did not matter, for she did not see me. She was listening to Abel with an almost childish delight in her face; and in her eyes was the look of one in a place before unvisited.
Some while after we had moved away from the table and sat together about the cooking range, we heard the questioning horn of a motor. We knew that it would belong to the Proudfits, since for us in Friendship there exists no other motor, and moreover this one was standing at my gate. Abel went out there and came back to tell us that the car had been in town to fetch the Proudfits' lawyer, and that Madame Proudfit had kindly sent it for Delia "and spoilt everything," he added frankly. As he said that, Abel looked at her, and I saw that a dream may persist through personality itself. As I have said, if a god were human, Abel would have been like a god; and in nothing more so than in this understanding of the immortalities.
Calliope stood up and caught, and held, my eyes in passing.
"Let's you and Abel and I take Delia home in the automobile," she said; "there ain't anything so good for folks as fresh air."