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Green Valley

by Katharine Yirsa Reynolds · English · Gutenberg #18801 · 479,093 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Green Valley

Author: Katharine Yirsa Reynolds

Illustrator: Nana French Bickford


        
Release date: July 10, 2006 [eBook #18801]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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GREEN VALLEY

by

KATHARINE REYNOLDS

Frontispiece by Nana French Bickford







[Frontispiece: They came to her hand in hand and said not a word.]




Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers ------ New York
Copyright, 1919,
by Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved




  Dedication

  TO ALL THE LITTLE ONE-HORSE TOWNS WHERE
  LIFE IS SWEET AND ROOMY AND OLD-FASHIONED;
  WHERE THE DAYS ARE FULL OF SUNSHINE AND
  RAIN AND WORK; WHERE NEIGHBORS REALLY
  NEIGHBOR AND MEN AND WOMEN ARE LIFE-SIZE




AUTHOR'S NOTE

This book was written to cure a heartache, to ease a very real and bad
case of homesickness.  I wrote it just for myself when I was very
nearly ten thousand miles away from home and knew that I couldn't go
back to the U. S. A. for two long years.  It is a picture of a little
Yankee town, the town I tried so hard to see over ten thousand miles of
gray-green ocean.

When I was sailing from New York for South America that sunny June
morning in 1913, about the last thing the last friend hurrying down the
gangplank said was this:

"Of course you are going to be homesick.  But it's worth it."

And I laughed.

But before that long stretch of gray-green ocean was plowed under I
knew--oh, I knew--that I was going to be most woefully homesick for the
U. S. A.

A certain tall Swede from New Jersey and I discovered that fact about
the same minute Fourth of July morning.  We were standing on the deck,
staring miserably back over the awful miles to where somewhere in that
lost north our town lay with flags fluttering, picnic baskets getting
into trains and everybody out on their lawns and porches.

We didn't look at each other after that first glance--that Swede and I.
And we said the sunlight hurt our eyes.

Three months later I was sitting under the velvet-soft, star-sown night
sky of the Argentine cattle country.  I had seen volcano-scarred
Martinique and had watched the beautiful island of Barbados rising like
a fairy dream out of a foamy sea.

I had marveled at the endless beauties of Rio lying so picturesquely in
its immense harbor and at the foot of its great, shaggy, sun-splashed,
smoke-wreathed mountains.  I had tramped through unsanitary Santos and
loved it because it looked like Chicago in spite of its mountains and
banana trees.  I had witnessed a wonderful fiesta in Buenos Aires and
had churned two hundred miles up the La Plata when it was bubbling with
rain.  And I had had a tooth pulled in Paysandu, the second largest
city in Uruguay.

All that in three months! And there were still a million wonders to
see.  I loved and shall always love these radiant, sun-drenched
uncrowded lands.  But my heart was heavy as lead.  For I was homesick.
My eyes were tired of alien starshine, of alien, unfamiliar things, and
my heart cried out for the little home towns of my own country.

But I could not go back for many, many months.  So I learned Spanish
and hobnobbed with wonderfully wise and delightful Spanish
grandmothers.  I grew to love some darling Indian babies.  I
interviewed interesting South American cowboys and discussed war and
socialism with an Argentine navy officer.  I exchanged calls and true
blue friendships with soft-voiced Englishwomen.  And I took tea and
dinner aboard the ships of Welsh sea captains from Cardiff.

I had a wonderful time.  I filled my notebook, took pictures and
collected souvenirs.  I laughed and told stories.  Folks down there
said I was good company.

But oh!  In the hush of a rain-splashed night, when the fire in the
grate dozed and dreamed and a boat siren somewhere out on the inky La
Plata wailed and moaned through the black night, my heart flew back
over those gray-green waves to a little town that I knew in the U. S.
A.  And to ease my longing I wrote Green Valley.

KATHARINE REYNOLDS.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

     I  EAST AND WEST
    II  SPRING IN GREEN VALLEY
   III  THE LAST OF THE CHURCHILLS
    IV  A RAINY DAY
     V  CYNTHIA'S SON
    VI  GOSSIP
   VII  THE WEDDING
  VIII  LILAC TIME
    IX  GREEN VALLEY MEN
     X  THE KNOLL
    XI  GETTING ACQUAINTED
   XII  THE PATH OF TRUE LOVE
  XIII  AUTUMN IN GREEN VALLEY
   XIV  THE CHARM
    XV  INDIAN SUMMER
   XVI  THE HOUSEWARMING
  XVII  THE LITTLE SLIPPER
 XVIII  THE MORNING AFTER
   XIX  A GRAY DAY
    XX  CHRISTMAS BELLS
   XXI  FANNY'S HOUR
  XXII  BEFORE THE DAWN
 XXIII  FANNY COMES BACK
  XXIV  HOME AGAIN




GREEN VALLEY

CHAPTER I

EAST AND WEST

"Joshua Churchill's dying in California and Nanny Ainslee's leaving
to-night for Japan!  And there's been a wreck between here and Spring
Road!"

Fanny fairly gasped out the astounding news.  Then she sank down into
Grandma Wentworth's comfortable kitchen rocker and went into details.

"The two telegrams just came through.  Uncle Tony's gone down to the
wreck.  I happened to be standing talking to him when Denny came
running out of the station.  Isn't it too bad Denny's so bow-legged?
Though I don't know as it hinders him from running to any noticeable
extent.  I had an awful time trying to keep up so's to find out what
had happened.  I bet you Nan's packing right this minute and just
loving it.  My--ain't some people born lucky?  Think of having the
whole world to run around in!"

The telephone tinkled.

"Yes, Nan," Grandma smiled as she answered, "I know.  Fanny's just this
minute telling me.  Yes, of course I can.  I'll be over as soon as my
bread's done baking.  Yes--I'll bring along some of my lavender to pack
in with your things."

"Land sakes, Grandma," exclaimed Fanny, "don't stop for the bread.
I'll see to that.  Just you git that lavender and go.  And tell Nanny
I'll be at the station to see her off."

Up-stairs in a big sunny room of the Ainslee house Grandma Wentworth
looked reproachfully at a flushed, busy girl who was laughing and
singing snatches of droll ditties the while she emptied closets and
dresser drawers and tucked things into four trunks, two suitcases and a
handbag.

"Nanny, are you never going to settle down and stay at home?" sighed
Grandma.

"Yes, ma'am," Nanny's eyes danced, "some day when a man makes me fall
in love with him and there are no more new places to go to.  But so
long as I am heartfree and footfree, and there's one alien shore
calling, I'll have the wanderlust.  I declare, Grandma, if that man
doesn't turn up soon there will be no new places left for a honeymoon!"

Grandma smiled in spite of herself.  There were things she wanted very
much to say and other things she wanted very much to ask; but the
trunks had to get down to the station and already the afternoon sun was
low.

The two women worked feverishly and almost in silence so that when the
packing was done they might get in the little visit both craved before
the months of separation.

Nanny finally jumped on the trunks, snapped them shut, locked them and
watched the expressman carry them down and out into his waiting dray.
Then she sat down with a trembling little laugh.

"There--it's over and I'm really going!  I have been to just about
every country but Japan.  I believe father would rather have skipped
off alone this time.  It seems to be some suddenly important
international crisis that we are going over to settle.  That's why we
are going East the roundabout way.  We must stop at Washington for
instructions, then again at London and Paris."

"Nanny," mused Grandma, "there's a good many years difference in our
ages but there's only one woman I ever loved as I love you.  I think I
might have loved your mother but she died the very first year your
father brought her here.  And she was ailing when she came.  The other
woman that meant so much to me used to go traveling too.  I always
helped her with her packing.  Then one day she packed and went away,
never to come back."

"Was that Cynthia Churchill?" Nan asked gently.

"Yes--Cynthia.  She was dearer than a sister to me, and neither of us
dreamed that a whole wide world would divide us."

"Why did she go, Grandma?"

"Because a Green Valley man well-nigh broke her heart."

"A Green Valley man did--_that_?  Oh, dear!  And here I have been
hoping that some day I might marry a Green Valley man myself."

"Nanny, I expect I'm old and foolish but I've been hoping and hoping
that you'd marry a home boy and fearing you'd meet up with some one on
your travels who would take you away from us forever.  It would be hard
to see you go."

The last sunbeam had faded away and golden twilight filled the room.
Outside little day noises were dying out.

"Grandma dear, don't you worry about me.  I intend to marry a Green
Valley man if possible.  But even if I didn't I'd always come back to
Green Valley."

"No, you wouldn't.  You couldn't, any more than Cynthia could.  Cynthia
loved this town better even than you love it.  Yet she is lying under
strange stars in a foreign land, far from her old home.  Her father,
they say, is dying in California.  I suppose the old Churchill place
will go now unless Cynthia's son comes back to take it over.  But that
isn't likely."

"Why--did Cynthia Churchill leave a son?" wondered Nanny.

"Yes.  He must be a few years older than you.  He was born and raised
in India.  'Tisn't likely he'd come to Green Valley now that he's a man
grown.  Still, if Joshua Churchill dies out there in California, that
boy will come into all his grandfather's property."

"Well," Nanny stood up and walked to the window from which she could
see the fine old home of the Churchills, "if any one willed me a lovely
old place like that Churchill homestead I'd come from the moon to claim
it, let alone India."

"Nanny, are you sure there's no boy now in Green Valley who could keep
you from roaming?  I thought maybe Max Longman or Ronny Deering--"

"No--no one yet, Grandma.  I like them all--but love--no.  Love, it
seems to me, must be something very different."

"Yes, I know," sighed Grandma.

When Uncle Tony returned from viewing the wreck he assured his townsmen
that it was a wreck of such beautiful magnitude that traffic on the
Northwestern would be tied up for twenty-four hours.  It was feared
that Mr. Ainslee would not be able to get his train and would have to
drive five miles to the other railroad.

However Uncle Tony was reckoning things from a Green Valley point of
view.  As a matter of fact the wreckage was sufficiently cleared away
so that the eastbound trains were running on time.  It was the
westbound ones that were stalled.  The Los Angeles Limited Pullmans
stood right in the Green Valley station.  They were still standing
there when Nanny and her father came to take the 10:27 east.

Perhaps nothing could explain so well Nanny Ainslee's popularity as the
gathering of folks who came to see her off.

Fanny had stopped at the drug store and bought some headache pills.

"This excitement and hurry and you not scarcely eating any supper is
apt to give you a bad headache.  They'll come handy.  And here's some
seasick tablets.  Martin says they're the newest thing out.  And oh,
Nanny, when you're seeing all those new places and people just take an
extra look for me, seeing as I'll never know the color of the ocean."

Uncle Tony was tending to Nanny's hand luggage and in his heart wishing
he could go along, even though he knew that one week spent away from
his beloved hardware store would be the death of him.

It was a neighborly crowd that waited for the 10:27.  And as it waited
Jim Tumley started singing "Auld Lang Syne."  He began very softly but
soon the melody swelled to a clear sweetness that hushed the laughing
chatter and stilled the shuffling feet of the Pullman passengers who
crowded the train vestibules or strolled in weary patience along the
station platform.

Then the 10:27 swung around the curve and the good-bys began.

"So long, dear folks!  I shall write.  Don't you dare cry, Grandma.
I'll be back next lilac time.  Remember, oh, just remember, all you
Green Valley folks, that I'll be back when the lilacs bloom again!"

Nanny's voice, husky with laughter and tears, rippled back to the
cluster of old neighbors waving hats and handkerchiefs.  They watched
her standing in the golden light of the car doorway until the train
vanished from their sight.  Then they drifted away in twos and threes.

From the dimmest corner of the observation platform a man had witnessed
the departure of Nanny Ainslee.  He had heard Jim's song, had caught
the girl's farewells.  And now he was delightedly repeating to himself
her promise--"I'll be back when the lilacs bloom again."

Then quite suddenly he stepped from the train and made his way to where
the magenta-pink and violet lights of Martin's drugstore glowed in the
night.  He bought a soda and some magazines and asked the druggist an
odd question.

"When," asked the stranger, smiling, "will the lilacs bloom again in
this town?"

Martin, who for hours had been rushing madly about, waiting on the
thirsty crowd of stalled visitors, stopped to stare.  But he answered.
Something in the mysteriously rich face of the big, brown boy made him
eager to answer.

"From the middle of next May on into early June."

The stranger smiled his thanks in a way that made Martin look at his
clerk with a mournful eye.

"Jee-rusalem!  Now, Eddie, why can't you smile like that?  Say, if I
had _that_ fellow behind this soda counter I'd be doing a rushing
business every night."

When the Limited was again winging its way toward the Golden West and
train life had settled down to its regular routine, one dining-car
waiter was saying to another:

"Yes, sah--the gentleman in Number 7 is sure the mighty-nicest white
man I eber did see.  And he sure does like rice.  Says he comes from
India where everybody eats it all the time.  I ain' sure but what that
man ain' a sure-enough prince."




CHAPTER II

SPRING IN GREEN VALLEY

Traveling men have a poor opinion of it.  Ministers of the gospel have
been known to despair of it.  Socially ambitious matrons move out of it,
or, if that is not possible, despise it.  Real estate men can not get
rich in it.  And humorless folk sometimes have a hard, sad time of it in
Green Valley.

But Uncle Tony, the slowest man in town but the very first at every fire
and accident, says that once, when the Limited was stalled at the Old
Roads Corner, a crowd of swells gathered on the observation platform and
sized up the town.

One official, who--Uncle Tony says--couldn't have been anything less than
a Chicago alderman, said right out loud:

"Great Stars!  What peace--and cabbages!"

And another said solemnly, said he, "This is the place to come to when
you have lost your last friend."  And there was no malice, only a hungry
longing in his voice.

The stylish, white-haired woman who, Uncle Tony guessed, must have been
the alderman's wife, said, "Oh--John!  What healing, lovely gardens!"

There's always a silly little wind fooling around the Old Roads Corners
and so you get all the sweet smells from Grandma Wentworth's herb garden
and all the heavenly fragrance that the flower gardens of this end of
town send out.

Standing there you can look into any number of pretty yards but
especially Ella Higgins'.  Of course Ella's yard and garden is a wonder.
It's been handed down from one old maid relative to another till in
Ella's time it does seem as if every wild and home flower that ever
bloomed was fairly rooted and represented there.  It's in Ella's garden
that the first wild violets bloom; where the first spring beauty nods
under the bushes of bridal wreath; where the last chrysanthemum glows.

Everybody in town got their lilies-of-the-valley roots and their yellow
roses from Ella.  Her peonies and roses, pansies and forget-me-nots are
known clear over in Bloomingdale and bespoken by flower lovers in Spring
Road.  And as for her tulips, well--there are little flocks of them
everywhere about, looking for all the world like crowds of gayly dressed
babies toddling off to play.

The only time that poor Fanny Foster came near making trouble was when
she said that of course Ella's place was all right but that it had no
style or system, and that you couldn't have a proper garden without a
gardener.  Ella had scolded Fanny's children for carelessly stripping the
lilacs.

Fanny Foster is as wonderful in her way as Ella's garden, though not so
beautiful at first sight.  Of course Green Valley loves Fanny Foster.
Green Valley has reason to.  Fanny did Green Valley folks a great service
one still spring morning.  But strangers just naturally misunderstand
Fanny.  They see only a tall, sharp-edged wisp of a woman with a mass of
faded gold hair carelessly pinned up and two wide-open brown eyes fairly
aching with curiosity.  You have to know Fanny a long time before the
poignant wistfulness of her clutches at your heart, before you can know
the singular sweetness of her nature.  And even when you come to love her
you keep wishing that her collars were pinned on straight and that her
skirts were hung evenly at the bottom.  There are those who remember the
time when Fanny was a beautiful girl, happy-go-lucky but always
kind-hearted.  Now she is famous for her marvelous instinct for news
gathering and her great talent in weaving the odds and ends of
commonplace daily living into an interesting, gossipy yarn.  Green Valley
without Fanny Foster would not be Green Valley, for she is a town
institution.

However, before going any further into Green Valley's special characters
and institutions it would be well to get a general feel of the town into
one's mind.  For it is only when you know how cozily Green Valley sets in
its hollows, how quaintly its old tree-shaded roads dip and wander about
over little sunny hills and through still, deep woods that you can guess
the charm of it, can believe in the joyousness of it.  For Green Valley
is a joyous, sweetly human old town to those who love and understand it.

Take an early spring day when the winter's wreck and rust and deadness
seem to be everywhere.  Yet here in the Green Valley roads and streets
little warm winds are straying, looking for tulip beds and spring
borders.  The sunshine that elsewhere looks thin and pale drops warmly
here into back yards and ripples ever so brightly up and down Rabbit's
Hill, where the hedges are turning green and David Allan is plowing.

The willows back of Dell Parsons' house are budding and all aquiver with
the wildly glad, full-throated warblings of robins, bluebirds, red-winged
blackbirds and bobolinks.  While somewhere from the swaying tops of last
year's reeds, up from the grassy slopes of Churchill's meadow, comes the
sweet, clear call of meadow larks.

In the ditches the cushioning moss is green and through the brown tangled
weeds along Silver Creek the new grass is peeping.  The sunny clearing
back of Petersen's woods will be full of mushrooms as the days deepen.
And already there are big golden dandelions in Widow Green's orchard.

In these still, warm noons you can hear through the waiting, echoing air
the laughing shouts of playing children and the low-dropping honk of the
wild geese that in a scarcely quivering line are sailing northward across
the reedy lowlands which the gentle spring rains will turn into soft,
violet, misty marshes.

The last bit of frost has thawed out of the old Glen Road and in the
young sunshine it seems to laugh goldenly as it climbs up, up to Jim
Gray's squatty, weathered little farmhouse.  The eastern windows of this
little silver-gray house are gay with blossoming house plants and across
the back dooryard, flapping gently in the spring breeze, is a line of
gayly colored bed quilts.  For Martha Gray has begun her house-cleaning.

The woodsy part of Grove Street, the part that was opened up only five
years ago and is called Lovers' Lane because it curves and winds
mysteriously through a lovely bit of woodland, is already shimmering with
the life and beauty of spring.

Down on Fern Avenue, which is a wide, grassy road and no avenue at all,
Uncle Roger Allan is carefully painting his chicken coops.  Roger Allan
is a tall, twinkling, smooth-shaven old man, and he lives in a house as
twinkling and as tidy as himself.  He is a bachelor, but years ago he
took little David from the dead arms of an unhappy, wild young stepsister
and has brought him up as his own.  People used to know the reasons why
Roger Allan had never married but few remember now.  Here he is at any
rate, painting his chicken coops and standing still every now and then to
stare off at Rabbit's Hill where his boy, tall, sturdy David Allan, is
plowing the warm, black fields.

Up in a narrow lane, at the side window of a blind-looking little house,
sits Mrs. Rosenwinkle.  She is German and badly paralyzed and she
believes that the earth is flat and that if you walked far enough out
beyond Petersen's pasture you would most certainly fall off.  She also
believes that only Lutherans like herself can go to heaven.  But to-day,
beside the open window, with a soft, wooing, eiderdown little breeze
caressing her face, she is happy and unworried, her eyes busy with the
tender world and the two chubby grandchildren tumbling gleefully about in
the still lane.

In his little square shoe shop built out from his house Joe Baldwin is
arranging his spring stock in his two modest show windows.  Joe is a
widower with two boys, a gentle voice, a gentle, wondering mind, and a
remarkable wart in the very center of his left palm.  His shop is a
sunny, cheerful room with plenty of benches and chairs.  The little shop
has a soft gray awning for the hot days and a wide-eyed competent stove
for cold ones.  Nobody but Grandma Wentworth and such other folks like
Roger Allan ever suspect the real reason for all those comfortable
sitting-down places in Joe's shop.  And Joe never tells a soul that it is
just an idea of his for keeping his own two boys and the boys of other
men under his eye.  In Joe's gentle opinion the hotel and livery barn and
blacksmith shop are not exactly the best places for young boys to
frequent.  But of course Joe never mentions such opinions out loud even
to the boys.  He just makes his shop as inviting and homelike as
possible, keeps the daily papers handy on the counter and a basket of
nuts or apples maybe under his workbench.  He is never lonely nor does he
miss a bit of news though he seldom goes anywhere but to the barber shop
on Saturdays and to church on Sundays.

Out on her sunny cellar steps sits Mrs. Jerry Dustin, sorting onion sets
and seed potatoes.  She is a little, rounded old lady with silvery hair,
the softest, smoothest, fairest of complexions, forget-me-not eyes and a
smile that is as gladdening as a golden daffodil.  Few people know that
she has in her heart a longing to see the world, a longing so intense, a
life-long wanderlust so great that had she been a man it would have swept
her round the globe.  But she has never crossed the State line.  She has
big sons and daughters who all somehow have inherited their father's
stay-at-home nature.  Her youngest boy, Peter, however, is only seventeen
and on him she has built her last hopes.  He, like herself, has a gipsy
song in his heart and she often dreams of the places they will visit
together.

And while she is waiting for Peter to grow up she travels about and
around Green Valley.  She wanders far up the Glen Road into the deep
fairy woods between Green Valley and Spring Road.  Here she strays alone
for hours, searching for ferns and adventure.

Once a week she rides away to the city where she spends the morning in
the gay and crowded stores and the afternoon in the Art Institute.  She
never wearies of seeing pictures.  She never, if she can help it, misses
an exhibition, and whenever the day's doings have not tired her too much
this little old lady will steal off to the edge of the great lake and
dream of what lies in the world beyond its rim.  She often wishes she
could paint the restless stretch of water but though she knows its every
mood and though she is a wonderful judge of pictures she can not
reproduce except in words the lovely nooks and beauty spots of her little
world.

Perhaps it is this knowledge of her limitations that causes that little
strain of wistful sadness to creep into her voice sometimes and that
sends her very often out beyond the town, south along Park Lane to the
little Green Valley cemetery.

She loves to read on the mossy stones the unchanging little histories, so
brief but so eloquent, some of them.  The stone that interests her most
and that each time seems like a freshly new adventure is the simple shaft
that bears no name, no date, just the tenderly sweet and pathetic little
message:

    "I miss Thee so."

Mrs. Jerry Dustin knows very well for whom that low green bed was made
and who has had that little message of lonely love cut into stone.  But
she longs to know the rest of the story.

Sometimes she has a real adventure.  It was here at the cemetery one day
that she met Bernard Rollins, the artist.  He was out sketching the
fields that lie everywhere about, rounding and rolling off toward the
horizon with the roofs of homesteads and barns just showing above the
swells, with crows circling about the solitary clusters of trees, and men
and horses plodding along the furrows.

No artist could have passed Mrs. Jerry Dustin by, for in her face and
about her was the beauty that she had for years fed her soul.  So Rollins
spoke to her that summer day and they are friends now, great friends.
She visits his studio frequently and he tells her all about France or
Venice or wherever he has spent his busy summer.  And she sits and
listens happily.

Rollins bought out what used to be in Chicago's young days an old tavern
and half-way house.  It was a dilapidated old ruin, crumbling away in a
shaggy old orchard full of gnarled and ancient apple trees, satin-skinned
cherry trunks, some plums and peaches, and tangled shrubs of all kinds.

With the aid of his wife Elizabeth, some dollars and much work, Rollins
transformed the old ruin into the sort of a country place that one reads
about and imagines only millionaires may have.  They say that when Old
Skinflint Holden saw the transformation he stood stock-still, then tied
his team to the artistic hitching post under the old elms and went in
search of Rollins.  He found him in the orchard in the laziest of
hammocks literally worshipping the flowering trees all about him.  Old
Skinflint Holden was awed.

"Jehohasaphat!  Bern, how did you do it?"

"Oh," smiled the artist, "we cleaned and patched it, put on a new bit
here and there and sort of nursed it into shape.  Doc Philipps gave us
bulbs and seeds and loads of advice and then Elizabeth, I guess, sort of
loved it into a home."

"Well--I guess," mused Skinflint Holden.  "Must have cost you a pretty
penny?"

"Why, no, it didn't.  I'm telling you it wasn't a matter of dollars so
much as love.  If you use plenty of that you can economize on the money
somewhat.  Of course, it means work but love always means service, you
know."

Old Skinflint Holden couldn't understand that sort of talk.  It was said
that love was one of the things he knew nothing about.  His great star
was money.  He had had a chance to buy the old tavern but had seen no
possibilities in it of any kind.  So he had passed it up and now a man
whose star was love and home had made a paradise of the hopeless ruin.

"And I'll be danged if he didn't have a whole small field of them there
blue lilies that the children calls flags, over to one corner looking so
darn pretty, like a chunk of sky had dropped there.  I'd a never believed
it if I hadn't saw it.  I guess Doc Philipps didn't give him them."

Rollins is a great crony of Doc Philipps who almost any day of the year
may be caught burrowing in the ground.  For Doc Philipps is a tree maniac
and father to every little green growing thing.  He knows trees as a
mother knows her children and he never sets foot outside his front gate
without having tucked somewhere into the many pockets about his big
person a stout trowel, some choice apple seeds, peach and cherry stones
or seedlings of trees and shrubs.  In every ramble, and he is a great
walker, he searches for a spot where a tree seedling might grow to
maturity and the minute he finds such a place off comes his coat, back
goes his broad-rimmed hat and out comes the trowel and seed.  Travelers
driving along the road and catching sight of the big man on his knees say
to each other, "There's Doc Philipps, planting another tree."

Up in the big, prim old Howe house sits Madam Howe.  She is called Madam
to distinguish her from her daughter-in-law, Mrs. George Howe.  She is a
regal old lady of eighty-three and spends most of her time in her room
up-stairs where are gathered the wonderful heirlooms,--older, far older
than she.

There is the mellow brown spinning wheel, and armchairs nearly two
hundred years old and a walnut table that was mixed up in countless
weddings and a beautifully carved old chest and a brocade-covered settee.
There are old, old books and family portraits and there is the wonderful
Madam herself, regal and silver-haired.  If she likes you she will take
you to her great room and tell you about the Revolutionary War as it
happened in and to her family; and about her great ride westward in the
prairie schooner; about the Indians and the babyhood of great cities, and
the lovely wild flowers of the virgin prairie; about the wild animals,
the snakes, the pioneer men and women of what is now only the Middle West.

She will take from out that age-darkened, beautiful chest dresses and
bits of lace and samplers like the one that hangs framed above her
writing desk and tells how it was stitched by one,

      ABIGAIL WINSLOW PAGE,
          Age 13.

There is one thing you must always remember if you wish to stand in
Madam's good graces.  You must never sit down on the brocade-covered
settee with the beautiful rose wreath hand-carved on its gracefully
curving walnut back.  Some day when she gets to know you very well she
will tell you of the wonderful love stories that were enacted on that
settee.  She will begin away, away back with some great-great-grandmother
or some great-grand-aunt and come gradually down to her own time and
history; and as she tells of the young years of her life, her eyes will
go dreaming off into the past and she will forget you entirely.  And you
will slip away from that great room and leave her sitting there, regal
and silver haired, her face mellow and sweet with the golden memories of
far, by-gone days.

You can wander in this happy, aimless fashion all about Green Valley, go
in and out its deep-rooted old homes, stroll through its tree-guarded old
streets, and at every turn taste romance and adventure, revel in beauty
of some sort.  Even the old, red-brick creamery, ugly in itself, is a
thing of beauty when seen against a sunset sky.

The people who pass you on the streets all smile and nod, stranger though
you are.  And if you happen to be at the little undistinguished depot
just as the 6:10 pulls in, you will see pouring joyously out of it the
Green Valley men, those who every day go to the great city to work and
every night come thankfully back to their little home town to live.

They hurry along in twos and threes, waving newspaper and hand greetings
to the home folks and the store proprietors who stand in their doorways
to watch them go by.

There is a fragrant smell of supper in the air and a slight feel of
coming rain.  Here and there a mother calls a belated child.  Doors slam,
dogs bark and a baby frets loudly somewhere.  In somebody's chicken coop
a frightened, dozing hen gargles its throat and then goes to sleep again.
The frogs along Silver Creek and in Wimple's pond are going full blast,
and in her fragrant herb garden stands Grandma Wentworth.  She is looking
at the gold-smudged western sky and watching the sweet, spring night sift
softly down on Green Valley.

She stands there a long time sensing the great tide of new life that is
flushing the world into a new, tingling beauty.  She sees the lacy
loveliness of the birches, the budding green glory of her garden.  Then
she smiles as she tells herself:

"It won't be long now till the lilacs bloom again.  Nanny will be here
soon now.  And who knows!  Cynthia's boy may come back to live in his
mother's old home."




CHAPTER III

THE LAST OF THE CHURCHILLS

Even in beautiful Los Angeles days can be rainy and full of gnawing
cold and gloom.

On such a day Joshua Churchill lay dying.  He could have died days
before had he cared to let himself do so.  But he was holding on grimly
to the life he no longer valued and held off as grimly the death he
really craved.  He was waiting for the coming of the boy who was so
soon to be the last of the Churchills.

He meant, this grim old man, to live long enough to greet the boy whom
he remembered first as a baby, then as a little chap of ten, and later
as a shy boy of seventeen.

Joshua Churchill had been to India several times.  But he had never
stayed long.  He said that no man who had spent the greater part of his
life in Green Valley could ever be happy or feel at home anywhere else.

Joshua Churchill went to India to see his daughter and grandson; but
mostly to coax that daughter's wonderful husband to give up his
fanatically zealous work among the heathen of the Orient and come and
live in peace and plenty in a little Yankee town where there was a drug
store and a post office and a mossy gray old stone church with a mellow
bell in its steeple.

The wonderful and big son-in-law always listened respectfully to his
big Yankee father-in-law.  Then he would smile and point to the little
brown babies lying sick in their mothers' arms.

"Somebody," he would say gently, "must help and heal and neighbor with
these people."

As there was no answer that could be made to this the Yankee
father-in-law said nothing.  But the very last time he was in India he
looked sharply at his daughter and then said wearily and bitterly:

"Sinner and saint--we men are all alike.  We each in our own way kill
the women we love.  Cynthia is dying for a sight of Green Valley and
Green Valley folks."

At that Cynthia's husband cried out.  But Joshua Churchill did not stay
to argue.  He went away and never came back.  He wanted of course to go
back to Green Valley.  But he could not bear to live alone in the big
house where he had once been so happy.  So he went instead into exile.
And now he was dying in California.

As for Cynthia's husband, he discovered when it was too late to do any
good that while he had been saving the souls and the children of alien
women and men he had let the woman who was dearer to him than life die
slowly and unnoticed.  Saints have always done that and they always
will.

Joshua Churchill meant to stay alive long enough to explain the
shortcomings of both saints and sinners to the boy who was the last of
the Churchills.  He had half a mind to exact a promise from the boy.
He meant too to tell him a long and a rather strange story and implore
him to beware of a number of things.

But when Cynthia's son,--tall, bronzed and serene, smiled down on the
old man who even in death had the look of a master, the warnings, the
bitterness melted away and Joshua Churchill smiled back and sighed
gratefully.

"Well, son,--I don't know as that saint father of yours and your
sinning granddad made such a mess of things after all.  It's something
to give the world a man.  Go back home to Green Valley and marry a
Green Valley girl."

And without bothering to say another word Joshua Churchill died.

Nanny came back to her valley town when the budded lilacs dripped with
rain and the wooded hillsides were blurred with spring mists.

But Green Valley rain never bothered Nanny Ainslee.  Those who were not
out to greet her telephoned as soon as they heard she was back home
again.

And just as she had gone to help pack, Grandma Wentworth came to help
unpack.  There were three trunks besides those Nanny had taken, from
Green Valley.  Nanny laughed and chuckled as she explained.

"The joke's on father.  We met up with a nice American chap on our
travels.  He was so likable that father, who was pretty homesick by
that time and would have loved anything American, fell in love with
him.  I can't quite understand why I didn't lose my head too.  I came
mighty near it once or twice.  But the minute I'd think of that boy
here in Green Valley I'd grow cool and calm.  That's all that saved me,
I believe.  But father was quite taken with him and being a man he felt
sure that I must be.  He was so sure that my maiden days were over that
he dared to be funny.  One day he sent up these three brand new trunks
to the hotel.  Said I might as well get my trousseau while I was
gadding about this time.  Well--I was pretty mad for a minute.  But I
concluded that father wasn't the only one in our family who is fond of
a joke.  So I just blushed properly and went off shopping.  And I tell
you, Grandma, Green Valley will just grow cross-eyed looking at the
pretties that I have in these treasure chests.  I showed Dad every
mortal thing I bought and asked his advice and was oh, so shy--and
wondered if he just _could_ let me spend so much; and Dad just laughed
and said he guessed an only daughter could be a bit extravagant, and to
just go ahead.  So I smiled again shyly and demurely and went ahead.
And when not so much as a bit of ribbon or a chiffon veil could be
squeezed in anywhere I shut those trunks and sat on them and swung my
feet and bet Dad that I wouldn't marry that boy after all.  And he was
so sure that he was rid of me at last and that he could start out on
his next trip blissfully free and alone that he bet me Jim Gray's
Gunshot that I'd be married in six months to the gentleman in question.
Of course it was a disgraceful business, the two of us betting on a
thing like that, but somehow we never thought of that, we were so busy
teasing each other.  Well, of course Dad lost.  I refused that nice
chap three times in one week.  And here I am, heart-free still, with
three trunks of booty and the finest, blackest, and swiftest little
horse in the county--mine.  This has certainly been a profitable trip!
Poor Dad, he's so delightfully old-fashioned.  He does so believe in
early marriages and husbands and wedding veils.  And he thinks that
twenty-three is absolutely a grewsome age.  Poor Dad!  And he says too
that for what I have done to him in this trunk deal I shall be duly
punished.  That the good Lord who looks after the fathers of willful,
old-maidish daughters will see to that.  Why, he has gone so far as to
say that he wouldn't be surprised if I wound up by marrying some weird
country minister.  Fancy that!  Why, that from father is almost a
curse.  And he's worried sick about my riding Gunshot.  But I shall
manage.  So expect to see me dash up to your gate in great style any
day now."

"Nanny," warned Grandma, "I don't trust that horse either.  You'd
better be mighty careful.  That horse isn't mean but it's young and
scary."

Nan however laughed at fear and rode all about and around Green Valley
town.  And then one evening when she was least watchful and tired from
the long day's sport, a glaring red motor came honking unexpectedly
around the corner.  So sudden was its appearance, so startling its body
in the sunset light, so shrill its screeching siren, that the young
horse reared.  And Nan, caught unprepared, was helpless.

From the various groups of people standing about figures detached
themselves and shot across the square.  But before any one could reach
her or even see how it happened, a tall stranger was holding the daring
girl close against his breast with one arm, and the quivering young
horse with the other.

He was reassuring the frightened animal and looking quietly down at the
girl's face against his breast.  Under that quiet look Nan's blue-white
lips flushed with life and she tried to smile gratefully.  When he
smiled back and said, "So you _did_ get back by lilac time," Nan was
well enough to wonder what he meant.  And the little crowd of rescuers
arrived only just in time to hear Nanny thanking him.

But when he asked her where in Green Valley town Mary Wentworth lived
everybody stared and listened.  Even Nan came near staring.  But after
the puzzled look her face broke into a smile.

"Oh--you mean Grandma Wentworth?"

He smiled too and said, "Perhaps.  I am a stranger in Green Valley.
But my mother was a Green Valley girl.  She was Cynthia Churchill and
Mary Wentworth was her dearest friend."

"Then you are--why, you must be--" stammered Nanny.

"I am Cynthia Churchill's son."

"From India?" questioned Nan.

"From India," he said quietly.

From out the group of Green Valley folks, now dim in the May twilight,
a voice spoke.

"You may come from India but if you are Cynthia Churchill's son you are
a Green Valley man and this is home.  So I say--welcome home."

Roger Allan, straight and tall and speaking with a sweetness in his
voice those listening had never heard before, stepped up to the young
man with outstretched hand.

The young stranger looked for a moment at the dimming streets, into the
kindly faces about him, and then shook hands gladly.

"It is good to be home," he said, "but I wish I had mother here with
me."




CHAPTER IV

A RAINY DAY

On a rainy day Green Valley is just as interesting as it is in the
sunshine.  Somehow though the big trees sag and drip and the wind sighs
about the corners there is nothing mournful about the streets.

The children go to school just as joyously in raincoats and rubber
boots.  Their round glad faces, minus a tooth here and there, smile up
at you from under big umbrellas.  After the school bell rings the
streets do get quiet but there is nothing depressing about that; for as
you pass along you see at doors and windows the contented faces of busy
women.

Old Mrs. Walley sits at her up-stairs front window sewing carpet rags.
Grandma Dudley at her sitting room window is darning her
grandchildren's stockings and carefully watching the street.  Whenever
anybody passes to whom she wants to talk she taps on the window with
her thimble.  She is a dear entertaining old soul but hard to get away
from.  Women with bread at home waiting to be put into pans and men
hungry for their supper try not to let Grandma Dudley catch sight of
them.

Bessie Williams always makes cinnamon buns or doughnuts on rainy days.
She always leaves her kitchen door open while she is doing this because
she says she likes to hear the rain while she is working--that it
soothes her nerves.

So as you come up from around Bailey's strawberry patch and Tumley's
hedge you get a whiff of such deliciousness as makes your mouth water.
And more than likely Bessie sees you and comes running out with a few
samples of her heavenly work.  As you dispose of those cinnamon buns
you forget that Bessie's voice is a trifle too high and too sweet, and
that she is inclined to be at times a bit overly religious and too
watchful of what she calls "vice" in people.

Over in front of the hotel Seth Curtis is standing up in his wagon and
sawing his horses' mouths cruelly.  Seth has been so viciously
mistreated in his youth that he now abuses at times the very things
that he loves.  He has paid two hundred and fifty dollars apiece for
those horses and is mighty proud of them.  But Seth's temper is never
good on a rainy day.  Rain means no teaming and a money loss.  Seth is
a mite too conscious of money.  At any rate, the loss of even a dollar
makes him a sullen and at the least provocation an angry man.  He isn't
liked much except by his wife and children.

In his home Seth is gentle and kind.  Maybe because here he finds the
love and trust that all his life he has craved and been denied.  Few of
his neighbors know how he laughs and romps and sings with his children
and what wonderful yarns he tells them, all made up out of his own head.

He is known to come from York State and has a Yankee shrewdness that
some people say can at times be called something else.  He is wide and
square-shouldered though short, has a round stubborn head of reddish
hair with a promising bald spot, close-set blue eyes and an annoying,
almost an insulting habit of paying all his bills promptly and asking
odds and favors of nobody.

To-day he was to have taken a load of stones, granite niggerheads of
all sizes, up to Colonel Stratton's place.  The Colonel is going to
make a fern bed around his summer house.

Colonel Stratton is a real military colonel.  He wears burnsides and
they are very becoming.  He has the most beautifully located residence
in Green Valley and like Doc Philipps has some of the most beautiful
trees in town.  The great silver-leaf poplar guarding the wide front
lawns and the magnificent hardwood maples are the pride of the
colonel's heart.

The colonel has a cultivated garden that keeps his gardener pretty
busy.  But the wild-flower garden along the rambling old north fence
the colonel tends himself.  In June it is a hedge of lovely wild roses
followed a little later by masses of purple phlox.  Then come the
meadow lilies and the painted cup and so on, until in late October you
can not see the old fence for the goldenrod, asters and gentians.

Today the colonel hoped to work on his fern bed but the weather being
what it is he takes instead from his well-filled book shelves "The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" and settles down to a day of
solid joy.

In the big, softly stained house that stands in the solemn shade of
immense pines, just diagonally across from the colonel's house, lives
and labors Joshua Stillman, a man with the most wonderful memory, the
readiest tongue when there is real need of it, a little man brimful of
the most varied information and the sharpest humor.

For forty years and more he has been Green Valley's self-appointed
librarian.  He draws no salary except the joy of doing what he loves to
do and he squanders, as his friends truly suspect, much secret money of
his own on it.  The library is housed in the old church in a room so
small and dark that it hides the big work of this little man.

Joshua Stillman must be old but nobody ever thinks of what his age
might be, he is so very much alive.  He goes to the city every day and
comes back early every afternoon.  As he so seldom talks about himself
nobody knows exactly what he does except that it has to do with books
and small print.

Like Madam Howe, Joshua Stillman comes from the Revolutionary War
district and has great family traditions to uphold.  He upholds them
with great humor.  Not only is he full of old war and family lore, but
he has been mixed up with things literary.  He has known men such as
Lowell and tells yarns about Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

He too came West in a prairie schooner and remembers all its wildness,
its uncouthness, its railroadless state.  And he tells marvellous
stories about snakes, Indians and the little Chicago town built out on
the mudflats.  He remembers very well indeed the steady stream of
ox-teams toiling over the few crude state roads.  And he has in his
house rare volumes, valuable editions of famous works.  He lets you
examine these if he thinks you are trustworthy and have a gentle way
with books.

There is another rare soul, the Reverend Alexander Campbell, who must
be introduced this rainy spring day.  He is a retired Green Valley
minister and is full of humor and wisdom.  He is an easily traced
descendant of the Scottish Stuarts.  On a rainy day you will always
find him busy writing up the history of his family.  Not that he
himself cares a fig for his genealogy.  He is writing the book because
it gives him something to do and earns him a little peace from the
women folks.

He is a man whom the Lord has seen fit to try with a host of female
relatives, all family proud.  He can fight the Devil and has done so
quite gallantly in four or five volumes of really good old-fashioned
sermons, "books," as he will tell you with a twinkle in his eye, "that
nobody could or would read nowadays."  But he can not fight the women
of his family, so with a mournful chuckle he sits down every rainy day
and labors mightily on this great "historical work."

On sunny days he goes about his grounds, petting his trees and his
chickens, and working in his garden.  He has several ingenious methods
of fighting weeds and raises the earliest, best and latest sweet corn
in Green Valley.

But men like the Colonel and Joshua Stillman and the Reverend Alexander
Campbell are representatives of Green Valley's leisure class.  They
give Green Valley its high peace, its aristocratic flavor.  But they
are a little remote from the town's workday life, being given to dreams
and memories and scholarly pursuits.  They know little of the doings
and talks that go on in Billy Evans' livery barn, or the hotel.  They
do, of course, go to the barber shop, the bank and the postoffice, and
always when abroad give courteous greeting to every townsman.  But they
have never sat in the smoky, red-painted blacksmith shop or among the
patriarchs and town wits who in summer keep open-air sessions on the
wide, inviting platform in front of Uncle Tony's hardware store, and in
winter hold profound meetings around the store's big, glowing stove.

Uncle Tony's is the most social spot in town and is from a
news-gathering point of view most ideally situated.  Sitting in one of
the smooth-worn old armchairs that Uncle Tony always keeps handy, you
can view the very heart of Green Valley's business life.  Without
turning your head scarcely you can keep an eye on Martin's drug store,
keep tab on the comings and goings of the town's two doctors, and the
hotel's arriving and departing guests.  If a commotion of any kind
occurs in front of Robert Hill's general store you see all the details
without losing count of the various parties who go in and out of Green
Valley's new bank.

Twice a day the active part of Green Valley dribbles into the
post-office where friends instantly pair off and mere acquaintances
stand idly by and discuss the weather.  Besides its mail, Green Valley
usually buys two cents' worth of yeast and a dozen of baker's buns and
then goes down the street and orders its regular groceries at Jessup's.

Jessup's has been the one Green Valley grocery store ever since the
flood or thereabout, so venerable an establishment is it.  Green Valley
would as soon think of changing its name as permitting a new grocer to
open up a rival store.  And nobody dreams of disloyalty when buying
trifles at the post-office.  In fact housewives are openly glad that
Dick, the postmaster, has taken to keeping strictly fresh yeast for
their leisure days and nice bakery things for times of stress and
unexpected company.

Dick Richards is a small, smiling, curly-headed man who looks older
than he should.  This is because he wears a big man's mustache and is a
self-made boy.  His parents died when he was barely old enough to
realize his loss and since then he has fought the world without a
single weapon unless cheerfulness and a giant patience can be called
weapons.  Small, ungifted, he early learned to be content with little.
But side by side with this cheerful content is always the giant hope of
great things to come.  And so though Green Valley buys only its yeast
and buns over his little counter he is happy and wraps each purchase up
carefully.  And all the time he is thoughtfully, carefully setting out
other handy things and aids to the harassed housewife.  For with his
giant patience Dick is waiting,--waiting and planning for a time that
is coming, that he knows must come.  He talks these matters over with
no one except Joe Baldwin.  He and Joe are great friends.  Joe's little
shop is such a restful, hopeful place and Joe himself a gentle rather
than a loud and swearing man.  One can talk things over joyfully with
Joe and feel sure of having one's confidence understood and kept.  Like
Joe, Dick shrinks a little from the noisy, wholly earthy atmosphere of
the livery barn and blacksmith shop.  He and Joe often go together of a
Saturday to the barber shop.  They usually stay after closing hours for
the barber is their mutual friend.

This barber, John Gans, is a talker, a somewhat fierce and vehement
little man who lectures on many subjects but mostly on human rights and
politics.  Joe and Dick, both silent men, look with awe at John's great
mental and discoursive powers.  And because his views are theirs they
listen with something like joyful gratitude to hear their own thoughts
so clearly and fearlessly expressed.

The fiery little barber is thought by some to be a German anarchist and
by others a Russian socialist.  Joe and Dick have been repeatedly
warned against him.  But they are his loyal friends at all times.  This
three-cornered friendship is little understood by the town and
ridiculed as a childish thing by the great minds that foregather at
Uncle Tony's.

But Grandma Wentworth remarked one Saturday afternoon, right in the
heart of town too, when Main Street was so crowded that everything that
was said aloud would be told and retold at church the next moraine and
repeated through the countryside the week following,--pointing to Joe,
Dick and John who all three happened to be going to the bank for
change,--"There go Green Valley's three good little men.  And that
makes me think.  I have another letter from Nanny Ainslee from Italy
enclosing foreign stamps for John."

Now until then nobody knew that John Gans was collecting stamps.  But
that's Grandma Wentworth.  She always knows things about people that
nobody else knows.  And when any Green Valley folks go a-traveling they
sooner or later write to Grandma Wentworth.  Sooner or later they get
homesick for Green Valley and they write for news to the one person
who, they know, will not fail to answer.

Of course some of them, like Jamie Danby, get into trouble.  Jamie ran
away from home with a third-rate show.  The show got stranded somewhere
in the western desert and Jamie wanted to come home.  He knew that his
mother would be glad to see him but he wasn't at all sure of his
father.  So he wrote to Grandma Wentworth, begging her to fix things
up.  And she did.

And there was Tommy Dudley who went away home-steading somewhere out
West and who writes regularly to Grandma Wentworth in this fashion:

". . . for heaven's sake send me your baking-powder biscuit recipe and
how do you make buckwheat pancakes, and send me all kinds of vegetable
seeds and what's good for chicken lice and a sore throat, and tell
Carrie Bailey I ain't forgot her and that as soon as I've got things
going half-way straight here I'll come back and get her.  Just now the
dog, the mules and chickens and a family of mice and I are all living
peacefully together in the one room but we're awful healthy if a good
appetite is any kind of a sign.  I can't write to Carrie because her
folks open all her letters and they'd nag her into marrying that old
knock-kneed, squint-eyed, fat-necked son-of-a-gun of an Andrew Langly,
if they thought she was having anything to do with a worthless heathen
cuss like me.  And say, Grandma, throw in some of your flower seeds,
those right out of your own garden, you know, the tall ones along the
fence and the little ones with the blue eyes and the still white ones
that smell so sweet.  You don't know how lonesome I get off here.  I've
got that picture of you in the sunbonnet right where it's handy, but
how I wish I had a picture of you without the sunbonnet so's I could
see your face, and say, Grandma, since I've been alone out here I've
come to see the sense in praying now and then, and tell Freddy Williams
I'll knock the stuffin's out of him when I hit town which will be in
about two years at the latest.  He knows what for.  Is Hank Lolly still
talking his way into three square meals a day and drinks, and is all
the news still ground over at Uncle Tony's gossip factory and is Mert
Hagley as big a tightwad as ever and is it true that Billy Evans
married a red-headed girl from Bloomingdale and started a livery barn,
and has Green Valley got a minister yet that's suitable to you and
Uncle Roger Allan?  I'll have to stop and run out to the mail box with
this.  The nearest one is twenty-five miles away but that's near in
this country and now for pity's sake, Grandma, don't forget . . ."

She didn't forget a thing.  The messages were all delivered, the seeds
sent off and every question fully answered.  Grandma did more than
that.  She had Nanny Ainslee take pictures of the various Green Valley
institutions while going full blast.  How Tommy laughed at the familiar
faces in Uncle Tony's armchairs and at Hank Lolly leaning up against
the livery barn, and how homesick he grew as he looked at the crowd
getting off at the station, and the school children playing in the old
school yard where he used to play.  The picture of Grandma Wentworth
and Carrie standing on Grandma's front porch hurt his throat and shook
him strangely.  That was Tommy Dudley.

And there was Susie Melton.  Grandma saved and remade Susie that time
she went to New York to see the world.  Susie had taught a country
school for twenty years, ever since she was sixteen, and that trip to
New York was her first vacation.  Susie was an innocent soul and the
very second day in the great city some heartless thief took everything
out of her purse but a two-cent stamp.  Susie was panic-stricken and
the only thing she could think of was Grandma Wentworth's face.  So she
took that stamp and sent a letter to Green Valley and it was Grandma
Wentworth who really managed that vacation though to this day nobody
but she herself knows how and she won't tell.  Susie came back so
rejuvenated, with such color in her cheeks, such brightness in her
eyes, and so much snap and spunk in her system that Jake Tuttle up and
married her two months after she came home.  And he's been happy ever
since for in spite of her school-teaching handicap Susie has turned out
to be a born cook and housewife.  And as if to make up to her those
twenty colorless years Providence sent Susie twin boys at the end of
her first year and twin girls at the end of the third.

This blossoming out of little drab Susie Melton was a shock to Green
Valley.  But Grandma Wentworth wasn't a mite surprised and said she
knew that Susie would come into her own some day.  As for Jake, he is
so in love with his rosy little wife and his four good-looking children
that he just goes on raising bumper crops without hardly knowing how he
does it.  And he says he doesn't hanker much after heaven; that home is
plenty good enough for him.  And when he goes to town Jake takes care
to tie his team in front of Billy Evans' place instead of the hotel.

"Not that I can't take a drink or two and stop," he explained to Billy,
"but I have good cider and buttermilk and Susie's grape juice to home
and the smartest of us ain't any too wise while we stand beside a bar.
And I'd ruther go home dead than go back to Susie and the children the
least bit silly with liquor.  When the Almighty sends a man like me a
family like mine He's got something in His mind and I ain't agoing to
spoil things just for a drink or two of slops."

So on rainy days Billy's office is the gathering place for such men as
find the atmosphere in the hotel and blacksmith shop a little too
fragrantly spirited for their eventual domestic happiness.

Not that Billy is a teetotaler.  No, indeed.  He has his drink whenever
he wants it.  And he good-naturedly permits such staggering wretches as
the hotel refuses to accommodate to sleep it off in his barns.  And he
is the only man in Green Valley who ever seriously hired Hank Lolly and
kept him sober twelve hours at a stretch.  The other business men make
considerable fun of Billy's hired help; the trifling boys he hires,
boys that everybody else has tried and sent packing.  Billy says
nothing though he did explain fully to Grandma Wentworth once.

"You see it's like this, Grandma.  I ain't fixed to pay fancy wages
just yet and those kids that everybody runs down ought to be off the
streets doing something.  Of course some of them _are_ trifling.  But I
ain't such a stickler for sharp-edged goodness myself nor in any way at
all virtuous.  I'm terrible easy-going myself and I know just how kids
like Charlie Pinley feel working for a man, a careful, exact man like
Mr. James D. Austin.  By gosh! if I had to work a whole week for Mr.
Austin I'd kill myself.  Never could stand too much neatness and
worrying about time being money and human nature too full of meanness.
No, sir,--I can't live like that.  I guess maybe it's because I'm kind
of no-account myself that I understand these kids and they understand
me.  They all like horses same as me and I pay them all I can afford
and will do more for them when things pick up and grow.

"Now there's people as laugh about me hiring Hank Lolly.  I guess it's
the first time Hank has ever held a job longer than a week.  But I tell
you, Grandma, I like Hank and I understand him.  And I don't ever think
I'm fit enough myself to be forever preaching at him about reforming.
I figure that what a man eats and drinks is none of my business in a
way.  But I did explain to Hank that if he would come and work for me
I'd furnish him with so many drinks every day and meals and a
comfortable place to sleep.  I showed him that it was better to be sure
of a few drinks every day than to get blind drunk on a week's wages and
then go weeks maybe without a decent spree, without decent meals, maybe
without underwear and an overcoat.  And Hank saw the sense of that.  He
gets his meals up at the house.  My old woman (Billy's wife was a
pretty girl of twenty-three and still a bride) sides in with what I'm
doing and she sets Hank down every day to three square meals.  And a
man just can't hold so much liquor on a comfortably filled stomach.
Anyhow, Hank is doing fine and I'm putting a few dollars in the bank
unbeknownst for him.  I can't trust him just yet with any noticeable
amount of cash.  But I'm never down on him for his drinking.  No, sir!
Every time he feels that he must get drunk or die why he just comes up
and tells me and I get him whatever he thinks he needs for his jag and
let him get full right here where I can watch him.  Why--Grandma, Hank
has an easier life than I have.  He doesn't need to worry about
anything and he knows it.  And I'll be goshed if I don't think he's
improving.  He don't need a jag near so often as he used to and I can
trust him now with any kind of work.  Why, only last week I gave him a
moving job, a big one, and sent him off twenty miles with my two best
teams.  And he brought those loads of furniture back O. K., dry and
without a scratch, though I couldn't sleep all night listening to the
buckets of rain dashing against the house and thinking of Hank drunk
out there in it with the furniture and wagons in splinters and the
horses dead maybe.  And honest, when I saw him pull up into the barns,
I just hauled him off that seat and--well--I just said things, told him
what I thought of him and how I appreciated what he'd done.  'And now,
Hank,' I says, 'you can have the greatest old jag you've ever planned
on for this.'

"And I'm goshed if he didn't laugh out kind of funny and says he,
'Billy, I'm so goldarned wet right now that I couldn't stand another
drop of wetness anywhere.  But all these five hours that the rain was
a-sloshing me I kept thinking of them there apple dumplings with cream
that Mrs. Evans makes (Hank always calls the old woman Mrs. Evans).
So, Billy, if it's all the same to you and I could get full on them
there apple dumplings, why, them's my choice.'

"Well--say, I just jumped to the telephone and I guess the old woman
was making apple dumplings before I got through talking.  Anyway, Hank
filled up so that he said he felt like a flour barrel with an apple
tree a-sprouting out of it.  And Doc Philipps says it's a good sign,
Hank liking sweet things that way, because a man soaked in alcohol
can't abide sweets.

"And so that's Hank.  Now this week I hired that little spindle-legged
Barney boy.  I hired him to keep this dumbed office clean so's my old
woman wouldn't raise such hell every time she steps in here.  I'm
goshed if this here stove don't get fuller of ashes quicker than any
other stove in Green Valley.  And you know the boys who come in here do
spit about careless like and that dumbed screen door is always open and
the calendars do get specked up considerable.  And the old woman is
just where I don't want her being upset about anything.

"Well, I hired that Barney boy to keep the place clean.  You know that
So-and-So (we won't mention any names) fired him because he said the
kid stole money.  Well, now--Grandma, you know that's a hard thing to
start out a boy in life with in a town of this size, especially a
little spindle-legged one at that.  I felt real sorry for the young one
so I calls him in here day before yisterday and I says:

"'Look here, Barney, could you keep this place clean?'

"'Sure,' he says.

"'All right, then sail in now.  The broom's right behind the door
somewheres and scarcely used and there's sawdust and rags somewheres in
the barn.  Ask Hank about them.  And Barney,' I says, 'here's the money
in this right-hand drawer.  Sometimes people come in when everybody's
out and you might have to make change.'

"The boy kind of flushed but I didn't let on I noticed.  I only said,
'You know, Barney, I'm just beginning this business and I'm poor so you
keep a sharp eye on the change and help me get this business going
lickety-split so's we'll all be rich together.  For when the profits go
up here the wages are going up.  It isn't just my livery barn, Barney,
but yours, too, so just you go to it and if ever you want anything or
make a mistake just you come and tell me and it'll be all right.'

"Now, Grandma, that's all I said to that young one and I'll be goshed
if I don't think that kid's turning out to be the best bet I've made.
But, of course, I always think that about every one of them.  But,
honestly, Grandma, Barney has brought in five new customers and last
week he kept chinning and holding on to a sixth man that come in here
until I came in and made the deal.  Never let go of him a minute and
just entertained him to kill time and give me a chance to get here.
And I'm going to buy some books to learn myself and Barney bookkeeping.
We can't none of us keep books here and that dumbed account book is
lost every time you want it and I've got the poorest memory.  Of
course, now and then a party comes in and tries to get out of paying
but the boys usually settle him and so I don't lose much that way.  But
the old woman wants me to do this slick and proper and her word goes.
So Barney and I are going to study.

"I'm telling you all this, Grandma, because you always did understand
my crazy way of doing things ever since that time when you sent me to
the store for that can of molasses and I give the money to the tramp
instead.  Remember?"

Billy laughed heartily at the memory and Grandma Wentworth laughed,
too, laughed so hard that she had to wipe her eyes.  And she smiled all
the way home.

"Some day," said Grandma Wentworth to her old friend and neighbor,
Roger Allan, "I'll ask some minister to preach a sermon on 'God's
Humor.'  I suppose that the Almighty gets so tired running things just
so and listening to petitions for sunshine and petitions for rain and
to prayers for automobiles and diamonds and interest on mortgages and
silk stockings, death and babies that some days he just gets tired of
being a serious God and shuffles things up for a joke.  And, mark me,
Roger, that boy, Billy Evans, is just one of God's tender jokes.  If
only people would see that and laugh.

"Now, Billy has no money sense, no business ability.  That's what the
real business men like George Hoskins and all the old blessed Solomons
at Uncle Tony's say.  Yet Billy is making money.  His business is
growing just because without knowing it Billy has got hold of the
biggest force in the world to run his business.  He's just using
love,--plain, old-fashioned love,--and love is making money for Billy.
He's picked out of the very gutters all the human waste and rubbish
that the others, the wise business men, threw there and with the town's
worst drunkard and half a dozen mistreated, misborn, misunderstood boys
he's playing the business game and winning.  He's got the knack of
making his help feel like partners and he's so square and sensible in
his dealings with them that they are all ready to die for him.  Now if
that isn't the greatest kind of a business gift I want to know.

"And every time I think of smiling, untidy Billy Evans with a pretty
wife as neat as wax, living in a house that she has made as sweet and
pretty as a picture--well--I just laugh.  Nobody but God could have
arranged things and balanced them up like that.  Talk about any of us
improving things in this world!  If we'd only learn to mind our own
business as well as God minds His."

But very few besides Grandma Wentworth understood Billy and his livery
barn.  Even Joe Baldwin failed to see just what Billy was doing in his
droll, unconscious, warm-hearted way.  Still Joe liked Billy.  In fact,
everybody liked Billy.  And he was welcomed everywhere and nowhere more
than in George Hoskins' blacksmith shop.

Next to the bank building George Hoskins was considered the most solid
thing in town.  He was the brawny blacksmith and people said a very
rich man.  He was big in every way.  Big in body, big in temper, big in
his friendships, big in his drinks.  He was indeed so big a man that he
did not know how to be mean or little in any way.  He did not know his
own great strength nor think much of the weakness of his fellows.  His
grand proportions and great simplicity were what attracted men to him.
Women did not know and so could not like him.

To them George Hoskins was a great, grimy ogre.  George, big in all
things, was big in his love for the tiny woman who was his wife.  Other
women George did not see though he spoke to them on the street.  He had
pleaded on bended knees for the love of his tiny woman and when he got
her all other women became just strange shadows.  So only his wife and
Doc Philipps knew how tender a heart was his.

Green Valley housewives caught glimpses of this man's great figure
towering above the roaring forge and saw the crowd of lesser men, their
husbands, gathered about him.  They went home and told each other that
George Hoskins was a big, rude brute, that he drank like a fish and
would bring the town to ruin, for he was the village president.

And while they were saying these things about George Hoskins he was
perhaps throwing out of his shop some smug traveling man who had
stepped into it to get in out of the rain and had mistakenly tried to
make himself at home there by telling a filthy yarn that sullied all
womanhood.

These then are a few of the many human attractions of Green Valley.
They are listed here to give the right sort of setting and the proper
feel to this story of Green Valley life.




CHAPTER V

CYNTHIA'S SON

So Cynthia's son came home and Green Valley took him to its heart and
loved him as it had loved his mother long ago.  Everywhere he was
spoken of as Cynthia's boy and no one seemed to remember that he was
born in heathen India instead of in the old porticoed house on the
Churchill farm.

Green Valley knew that very first week, of course, that Cynthia's son
was very nearly twenty-eight years old and that his full name was John
Roger Churchill Knight.  But what it did not know for some weeks was
that among other interesting things Cynthia's son was a minister, a
duly certified preacher of the gospel.  It was remembered in a general
way that Cynthia's husband had been some sort of a wonderful foreign
missionary or something; but a man who was Joshua Churchill's only
grandchild and heir needed no other ancestor.  So Green Valley was
astounded one Sunday morning, when the Reverend Campbell was
unexpectedly ill, and the Reverend Courtney off somewhere answering a
new call, and Green Valley without a pastor, to have Cynthia's boy
quietly offer to take charge of the services.

If Green Valley was astounded to hear that Cynthia's son was a minister
it was too awed to speak in anything but an amazed whisper of that
first sermon that the tall young man from India talked off so quietly
from the pulpit of the old gray stone church.

To this day they tell how without a scrap of paper to look at, without
raising his voice in the slightest, this boy made Green Valley listen
as it had never listened before.  For an hour he talked and for that
length of time Green Valley neighbored with India, saw it as plainly as
if it was looking over an unmended, sagging old fence right into
India's back yard.

With the simplicity of a child this boy with Cynthia Churchill's eyes
and smile and voice told of Indian women and children and Indian homes.
The colors, the smells, the mystic beauty and the dark tragedy of it he
painted and then very gently and easily he told of his trip back to his
mother's home town and so without a jar he landed his listeners,
wide-eyed, breathless and prayerfully thankful for their manifold
blessings back in their own sunlit and tree-guarded streets.

For no reason at all seemingly Green Valley began to wipe its eyes and
come out of its trance.  Neighbor looked at neighbor and strange things
were seen to have happened.

Old man Wiley, the aged and chronically sleepy janitor was actually
sitting wide awake.  Old Mrs. Vingie, who for years annoyed every Green
Valley parson by holding her hand to her right ear and pretending to be
deafer than she really was, was sitting bolt upright, both ears and
hands forgotten.  For once Dolly Beatty forgot to fuss with her hat or
admire her hands in the new lavender gloves two sizes too small.  The
choir even forgot to flirt and yawn and never once looked bored or
superior.

Jimmy Rand, after having carefully inserted in his hymn book a copy of
Diamond Dick's latest exploits, forgot to read it.  And the row of
little boys whose mothers always made them sit in the very first pew
never so much as thought of kicking each other's shins or passing a
hard pinch down the line or even quietly swapping lucky stones and fish
hooks for a snake skin or a choice piece of colored glass.

Why, it was even reported that Mert Hagley so far forgot himself as to
absent-mindedly drop a bill into the basket when it came by.  Some
said, of course, that Mert was after the repair work on the old
Churchill homestead but those nearest Mert swore that this could not
be, that Mert had looked as surprised as those around him when he saw
what he had done.  Green Valley laughed and said a miracle had
happened.  And even Seth Curtis got curious and remarked that he had
half a mind to go and hear the boy himself, that anybody who could peel
a bill off of Mert Hagley's roll was surely a curiosity.

Cynthia's son had walked with Roger Allan through the twilight of his
first real day in Green Valley to Grandma Wentworth's cottage and the
three had sat talking until the small hours.  Then Grandma had taken
Cynthia's tall son up-stairs into the large airy guest room.  She came
down a little later to find Roger gazing at a framed photograph of a
long gone day.

She came and looked too at the group of young faces.  At herself, then
a girl of eighteen; at the boy beside her who later became her husband;
and at Cynthia, lovely Cynthia Churchill, laughing out at life in her
sweet yet serious way.

"Well, Roger," Grandma spoke softly with a hint of tears in her voice,
"we have waited years, you and I, for a message from her, a heart
message.  And now it has come--it has come.  She has sent us her boy."

"Yes," breathed Roger Allan, "she has sent us the message--she has sent
me her son."

They knew, these two, why he had come.  It may be that even the tall
young man whose father and mother were sleeping the long sleep in
far-off India may have guessed why in the end the frail but still
lovely mother had begged him to go back to Green Valley, to its sweet
old homes and warm-hearted folk.  To bring comfort and find it--that
had been the little mother's plan.

He believed he would find it.  The loneliness that had tired him so
ever since his mother slipped away was no longer a sharp, never silent
pain, a great emptiness, but rather a sweet sorrow that was almost a
friend.

He slept in the big airy room with its patchwork quilt of blue and
white, its rugs and curtains to match, and looked at pictures of his
mother.  From the windows he watched the sun rise and shine on the
merry little hills and the yellow road that wound up to his mother's
old home.  As he breathed in the wine of the spring mornings he
comprehended the great hunger, the wild longing, that at times must
have overwhelmed the little mother in those last days in India.  And he
thought he understood those last words of hers.

"Son, you must stay with your father as long as he needs you.  But when
that duty is over you must go back to the little green town on the
other side of the world.  Your father and I brought a message to India.
You must take one back to my people.  Oh, you will love it--you will
love it--the little dear town full of friends and everywhere the
fragrance of home.  Oh, there are many there who will love you for my
sake and who will make up to you for--me."

Her hand caressed his hair and her voice trailed off into a sigh for
she knew what he didn't, wouldn't believe--that she was never to see
that little green town across the gray-green ocean waves.

At the very last she had whispered:

"Oh, Boy of Mine, when you go home greet them all for me.  And if ever
you go to rummaging about in the attic remember you must never open the
square trunk with the brass nail heads unless Mary Wentworth is there
to explain.  Tell Mary I love her and that I am not sorry.  She will
understand."

So as he looked out of Grandma Wentworth's upstairs windows he
remembered those last talks and understood that yearning for home.
When he had been in Green Valley only a few weeks the old life began to
grow vague and unreal.  The mother was real and near.  But the splendid
figure of his father was fading into a strange memory.  He was a father
to be proud of, that strong, cool, selfless man who had asked nothing
of life but to take what it would of him.

He had seemed so towering, so enduring, that preacher father.  Yet when
the frail mother went the strong man followed within a year.  So then
there was nothing to do but go home to Green Valley.  He went.  And the
spirit of the vivid little mother seemed to have come with him.  Every
day that he spent in the town that had reared her seemed to bring her
nearer.  He could picture her going about the sunny roads and friendly
streets and stopping to chat and neighbor with Green Valley folks.

So he too roamed over the town and chatted and neighbored as he felt
she would have done.  That was how he came to know every nook and
cranny, every turn of the happily straying roads and all the lame, odd,
damaged and droll characters that make a town home just as the
broken-nosed pitcher, the cracked old mirror in an up-stairs bedroom,
and the sagging old armchair in the shadowy corner of the sitting room
make home.

Not only did he come to know these people but he understood them.  For
his was the quick eye and interpreting heart willed him by a great
father and an equally great mother.  And because he came into Green
Valley with a fresh mind and a keen appetite for life nothing escaped
him, not even old Mrs. Rosenwinkle sitting in paralyzed patience beside
the open window of her little blind house.

He was strolling one day up the little grassy lane, thinking that it
led into the cool, thick grove back of the little house that stared so
blindly out into the green world.  He had been following a new bird and
it had darted into the grove.  So he came upon the little house and the
still grim old soul who sat at the open window as if to guard that
little end of the world.

It was a snug, still spot, that little green lane, and was so carpeted
with thick grasses and screened with verdure that the harsh noises of a
chattering, working world could not ruffle its peace and serenity.
Cynthia's son filled it and the still, lonely old woman was fascinated
with his bigness, his merry gladness, but most of all with his
understanding friendliness.  She told him all her story, her past
trials and present griefs.  And he told her strange things about people
he had seen in other parts of the world, blind people living in foul
alleys instead of sunny lanes, crippled ones with neither home nor kin
of any kind.  He told her much but made no effort to convince her that
the earth was round, and when he went he left with her the very fine
pair of field glasses with which he had been tracking the wonderful
song bird that had escaped him.  He showed her how to use them and for
the first time in fifteen years old Mrs. Rosenwinkle forgot that she
was paralyzed.

When he came in to his supper that evening Cynthia's son wanted to know
why old Mrs. Rosenwinkle couldn't have a wheel-chair, one of those that
she could work with her hands.  He said that he thought she must be
pretty tired sitting beside that window even if it was open.  And why
couldn't she have a window on each of the other sides of her room?

Grandma stared.

"My stars--boy!  There's no reason that I know of why that old body
can't have a wheel chair or more windows.  Only Green Valley hasn't
ever thought of it.  She's always been so set in her notions and so out
of the way of things that I expect we have forgotten her."

The third time that Cynthia's son brought little Jim Tumley home
because the little man's wandering feet could not find their way to
shelter, he wanted to know why little Jim was not in the choir.  So
Grandma told him, and it was his turn to be puzzled.

"But I don't understand.  The church is for the weak, the needy, the
blind, maimed and foolish who don't know how to seek happiness wisely.
The happy, strong, sensible people don't, as a matter of fact, need
looking after," said Cynthia's son.

"My!" laughed Grandma, "I believe I've heard that or read that
somewhere.  Do they really practice that kind of religion in aged
India?  In these parts the churches are still built by the good for the
good and the unfit have to shift for themselves."

But when he asked why Jim Tumley didn't have a piano to take up his
spare time and keep him out of harm's way, Grandma was a bit
scandalized.

"Why, people in Jim Tumley's circumstances don't own pianos.  It
wouldn't be proper.  A second-hand organ is all they have any right to
be ambitious for.  Why, Mary Tumley would no more think of touching her
savings, of buying a piano, than I would think of buying a second black
silk or a diamond ring.  So much style would be wicked."

"But if it would help to save the little man--if--"

"Well," smiled Grandma, "I'll mention it to Mary the very next time I
see her."

"Do.  And while you are about it you might ask Jim to sing a solo for
us both Sunday morning and evening.  If little Jim Tumley doesn't sing
I won't talk," said the Reverend John Roger Churchill Knight.

So Joshua Churchill's rich grandson, Cynthia's son, traveled the high
roads and low roads and had all manner of experiences and adventures
and he discovered many stray, odd facts which later came in mighty
handy.

He rode out into the country districts with Hank Lolly, sitting beside
that worthy on the high wagon seat and listening most carefully to the
description of every farm, its inmates, the barn dimensions and
contents, the depth of the well, cost of the silo, number of pigs,
sheep, the amount of tiling, and the make of the family graphophone.

Sometimes busy farm wives came hurrying out from the back or side
doors, wiping their hands on their aprons, to ask Hank to take a mess
of peas or beans to a less fortunate neighbor or to carry a basket of
dishes over to the next farm where the thrashers were going to be for
supper; and "Hank, just bring me a setting of turkey eggs from Emily
Elby's.  I've 'phoned and she has them all ready."

Mrs. Tooley, up the Elmwood road, entrusted the obliging Hank with the
following message:

"Tell Doc Mitchell that if he don't get my new set of teeth ready for
the thrashing I'll hev the law on him for breaking up my happy home.
Two of my old beaux're coming to the thrashing and if they was to see
me without my teeth they'd jest naturally make Jim miserable and me a
divorcee."

Mrs. Bodin was sending her daughter, Stella, some little overalls made
over for the twins from their grandpa's and a bottle of home made cough
medicine "and one of my first squash pies for Al.  And here's a pie for
your trouble, Hank, and a few of these cookies you said you like."

Hank stowed everything carefully away, with no show of nervous haste,
and when they were well started remarked to John Churchill Knight:

"You know the best part of staying sober is that you get taken in on so
many things and almost you might say into so many families.  People
tell you things and ask your help and advice and by gum after awhile
you get to feeling that maybe you're somebody too instead of jest a
mess of miserableness.  Why, I've got friends jest about everywhere, I
guess.

"There's them as asks me sarcastic like if I don't find this kind of
work dry and lonesome but I jest ask them to come along and see.  Why,
do you see that there house yonder?  Those folks are relatives of Billy
Evans' and as soon as ever I turn this corner, Mollie, that's the
youngest girl, will start the graphophone going with my favorite piece.
The last time I come by I found a box of candy on the mail box for me.
That was from Winnie, the oldest, for bringing home her new dress from
the dressmaker's.

"Yes, sir, it's jest wonderful how human and pleasant everybody is.
Why, if I jest keep on a-being sober and associating with folks like
this--why--I'm jest naturally bound to be kind of decent myself.  And
when you think of what I was--well--there's no use in talking--I was
low--jest low.  Ask anybody but Billy Evans and they'll tell you fast
enough.  Of course Billy's naturally prejudiced and his word ain't
hardly to be credited.

"And here I am on a nice summer morning riding with the minister and
with the whole country acting as if I'd always been decent."

Maybe it was Hank who first called him the minister.  It may of course
have been that old Mrs. Rosenwinkle, who, not knowing his name for some
time, explained him to her daughter as "the new preacher of the lost."

At any rate, when Fanny Foster came to make her periodical report it
was found that to the lonely, the outcast and the generally unfit
Cynthia's son was "the new minister."  And his influence was already
felt by those who as yet regarded him as just a Green Valley boy who
was helping out.  Fanny Foster voiced this sentiment in Joe Baldwin's
shop when she was paying for the four patches Joe had just put on her
second best pair of shoes.

"Well--I shouldn't wonder if Green Valley hadn't got a minister to its
taste at last.  He hasn't been regularly appointed and I guess he don't
realize himself that he's it but I'm pretty sure that the minute Parson
Courtney steps out that's just what's going to happen.  Of course
there's them that says it can't.  Mr. Austin says it would be a
terrible mistake, that he's too young; and Seth Curtis says no rich man
would be fool enough to pester himself with a dinky country church.
But I guess people like Seth and Mr. Austin ain't the kind of people
that have much to say.  He's doing regular minister's work, comforting
the sick and picking up the fallen and pacifying the quarrelsome, and
it's work like that that'll elect him.

"And he's getting mighty popular, let me tell you, even with them that
no other minister could please or get near.  There's old Mrs.
Rosenwinkle.  She loves him just because he never tried to tell her
that the earth was round.  Why, she says he's as good as any Lutheran.
And Hank Lolly said that maybe when that new suit Billy's ordered him
out of the new mail-order catalogue gets here, he'll go hear him
preach.  It seems the minister's been driving around with Hank all over
creation and Hank says he can get along with him as easy as he does
with Billy.

"And did you hear what he did for Jim Tumley?  It seems the minister
told Grandma Wentworth what a fine voice Jim had and what an ear for
music.  And he was most surprised that Jim never even had a second-hand
organ of his own in the house but had to go over to his sister's, Mrs.
Hoskins, for to play a little tune when the fancy took him.  He said it
was an awful pity that a man who wanted music so badly and was always
so obliging at weddings and funerals and entertainments should be
without a proper instrument.  And Grandma just said, 'My land, nobody's
ever thought of that but I'll speak of it.'

"Well, she did and the consequence is that Mary Tumley is so nervous
she can't sleep.  She says if she takes the savings out of the bank
there won't be enough money for a Keeley cure, or a respectable funeral
for Jim in case he dies.  She's struggled and struggled but come to the
conclusion that it wouldn't be right and would set an awful example to
the Luttins next door, who are extravagant enough as it is.

"But it's my notion that Jim Tumley will get his organ and maybe a
piano.  I saw him going in with Frank Burton on that early morning
train and it means something.  Besides, Grandma told me that Frank
fairly hates himself for not thinking of it before and waiting like a
born idiot for a boy to come all the way from India and tell him what
to do for his best friend.

"Agnes Tomlins says she's got a good mind to go and see the minister
about Hen.  She says that if Hen don't quit abusing her and tormenting
her she's going to leave him; that her sister Mary over in Aberdeen has
a big up-stairs bedroom all aired and waiting for her.  It seems that
Hen's more than contrarily stubborn lately.  He's contradicted Agnes
publicly time and again and gone against her in private till Agnes says
there's no living with him.

"But she says she would overlook everything except Hen's keeping a
secret drawer in his chiffonier.  It seems Hen has gone and locked that
bottom drawer and Agnes can't either buy or borry a key that will open
it.  And she can't find where Hen has hid his, try as she may.  And
when she mentions that drawer to Hen, saying she wants to red up, he
lets on like he don't know what she's talking about but he does,
because he told Doc Philipps, when he went to see about his liver, that
if he couldn't wear a soft collar or a soft hat like other men and keep
a dog and smoke in the house, and eat strawberries or whistle or go to
ball games on Sundays and prize fights on the sly, why, there was one
thing he could do and would have and that was a drawer, a whole
chiffonier drawer, all to himself.  And that he bet there weren't many
men in Green Valley that could say as much.  Hen just swore that he
intends to have something all his own and that nobody'll open that
drawer except over his dead body.

"Dolly Beatty was sitting in the waiting room and heard him.  Of
course, she's a great friend of Bessie Williams and told her and Bessie
told Laura Enbry and of course it got to Agnes.  So she's going to
speak to the minister and maybe get a divorce, which will be the first
divorce scandal in Green Valley.

"Now that's the sort of thing that goes on in Green Valley.  And if the
new minister is supposed to calm these troubled waters he's got my
sympathy.  Joe, I think you're charging me ten cents too much for these
patches.  They're not as big as the ones you put on the other pair and
those were fifty cents."

So without a conscious move on anybody's part Cynthia's son became
Green Valley's minister.  All the necessary rites gone through, Green
Valley accepted him as it accepted the sunshine and rain, the larks and
wild roses, and all the other gifts that heaven chose to send.

Roger Allan and Grandma Wentworth began to call him John.  But Nanny
Ainslee always spoke of him and addressed him as Mr. Knight.  And he
discovered after a time that for some strange reason he did not like
this.

One day he mentioned the matter.  He was walking home from church with
her.  Mr. Ainslee had invited him up for Sunday dinner and the party of
them were chatting pleasantly as they walked along together.

In asking him a question Nan addressed him as Mr. Knight.  Then it was
that he stopped and made his startling request.  He addressed them all
but he meant only Nan.

"I wish," he said suddenly, "you would not call me Mr. Knight."

Mr. Ainslee and Billy hid a smile, said nothing and walked on.  But Nan
stopped in amazement.

"Why not?" she asked a little breathlessly.

"Nobody else does.  I was never called that in India.  It makes me feel
lonely, and a stranger here."

"But," Nanny's voice was colorless and almost dreary, even though a
wicked little gleam shot into her eyes, "what in the world shall I call
you?  I can't call you--_John_.  And 'parson' always did seem to me
rather coarse and disrespectful."

He had stopped when she did and now was looking straight down into her
eyes.  Before the hurt and surprise and bewilderment in his face the
wicked little gleam retreated and a deep pink began to flush Nanny's
cheeks.  The suspicion crossed her mind that this tall young man from
India with the unconquered eyes and the directness of a child might be
a rather difficult person to deal with.

He just stood there and looked at her and said never a word.  Then he
quietly turned and walked on up the road with her.

For the first time in her life Nanny felt queer in the company of a
man, queer and puzzled and almost uncomfortable.  She was not a flirt
and her remark was commonplace and trivial.  Yet this new chap was
taking it seriously and making her feel insincere and trifling.  She
told herself that she was not going to like him and kept her eyes
studiously on the road and wayside flowers.

They mounted the front steps in silence but before he opened the door
to let her pass in he paused and waited for her to raise her eyes to
his.  She did it much against her will.  He spoke then as if they two
were all alone in the world together.

"It is true that you have not known me long.  But I have known you for
some time.  I saw you leave Green Valley one summer night last year and
I came from the West two months before I should have just to see if you
got safely back at lilac time."

At that Nanny's eyes lost all their careful pride and he saw them
lovely with surprise.  So he explained.

"I was standing on the back platform of the Los Angeles Limited the
night you went East with your father."

Then a smile that the Lord gives only now and then, to a man that He is
sure He can trust, flitted over the tall boy's face as he added:

"And the very first evening I came back to Green Valley I held you in
my arms--rescued you."

He laughed boyishly, plaguing her.  But she stood motionless with
amazement,--too angry to say a word.  When that smile came her anger
faded.  Through her heart there flashed the mad conviction, through her
mind the certain knowledge, that for her in the time to come the height
of bliss would be to cry in this strange man's arms.

Then she recollected herself and flamed with shame so bitter that her
lower lip quivered and she hoped he would ask her again to call him
John so that she could make him pay for her momentary madness.

But he never asked again.  It seemed he was not that kind of a man.




CHAPTER VI

GOSSIP

The last and surest sign of spring's arrival in Green Valley is gossip.
The mornings may be ever so full of meadow larks, the woods moistly
sweet and carpeted with spring's frail and dainty blossoms, but no one
dreams of letting the furnace go out or their base burner get cold
until they see Fanny Foster flitting about town at all hours of the day
and behold the array of shiny armchairs standing so invitingly in front
of Uncle Tony's hardware store.

When these two great news agencies open up for business Green Valley
laughs and goes to Martin's drug store to buy moth balls and talks
about how it's going to paint its kitchen woodwork and paper its
upstairs hall and where it's buying its special garden seed.

Then the whole town wakes up and comes outdoors to work and talk.
There are fences to be mended and gardens to be planted and houses to
be cleaned and all the winter happenings to be gone over.  All the
doctor cases have to be discussed critically and the winter invalids,
strong once again, come out to visit one another and compare notes.
Letters from special relatives and former Green Valley souls are passed
around and read and all new photographs and the winter's crop of fancy
work exhibited and carefully examined.

Everybody talks so much that nobody listens very carefully, only half
hearing things.  And when the spring madness and gladness begin to
settle and people start to repeat the things they only half heard
strange and weird tales are at times the result.  And from these spring
still more fantastic rumors and versions that ripple over Green Valley
like waves of sunshine or cloud shadows, sometimes causing much joy and
merriment and sometimes considerable worry and uneasiness.

And all these rumors come eventually to Uncle Tony's where they are
solemnly examined, edited and frequently so enhanced and touched up in
color and form as to sound almost new.  Then they are sent out again to
begin life all over.  Many of them die but some live on and on, and
after a sufficient test of time become a part of the town chronicles.

Everybody, of course, takes a hand at helping a yarn get from house to
house but nobody makes such a specialty of this sort of social work as
Fanny Foster.  There are some Green Valley folks who attribute Fanny's
up and down thinness to this wearing industry yet both men and women
are always glad to see her and her reports always drive blue cares away
and provoke ripples of sunny laughter.

Everybody in town has tried their hand at hating Fanny and despising
her and ignoring her and putting her in her place.  But everybody has
long ago given it up.  Stylish and convention-loving newcomers are
always disgusted and keep her at arm's length.  But sooner or later
such people break an arm or a leg right in the midst of strawberry
canning maybe and it so happens that nobody sees them do this but
Fanny.  And when this does happen they don't even have to mortify
themselves by calling her.  She just comes of her own accord,
forgetting the cruel snubbings.  She fixes that stand-offish person as
comfortable as can be, makes them laugh even, and telephones to the
doctor.  Then she rolls up her sleeves and without so much as an apron
has those strawberries scientifically canned and that messy kitchen
beautifully clean.

And the curious, the pitifully, laughably incomprehensible part of it
is that in her own house Fanny absolutely never can seem to take the
least interest.  Her own dishes are always standing about unwashed.
Her kitchen is spoken of in horrified whispers; her children,
buttonless, garterless, mealless, stray about in all sorts of improper
places and weather.  The whole town is home to them but they generally
feel happiest at Grandma Wentworth's.  She sets them down in her
kitchen to a hot meal and then makes them sew on their buttons under
her watchful eye.  Sooner or later, usually later, Fanny comes as
instinctively as her children to Grandma's door to report Green Valley
doings.

This particular spring things promised to be unusually lively.  But the
rains, though gentle, had been persistent and Fanny was a full two
weeks behind with her news schedule.  But if late, her report was
thorough.  She dropped wearily into Grandma's soft cushioned kitchen
rocker, slipped her cold feet without ceremony into the warm stove oven
and began:

"Good land!  I never see such a town and such people and such weather!
Jim Tumley's drunk again and as sick as death and Mary's crying over
him as usual and blaming the hotel crowd.  She says he's a good man and
don't care for liquor at all and that their liking to hear him sing
ain't no reason for getting him drunk and a poor way of showing their
thanks and appreciation, and that they all know that he can't stand it,
him being weak in the stomach that way, like all the Tumleys.  Mary's
just about ready to give up everything and everybody, she's that
discouraged.

"Well--that's one mess and now there's Uncle Tony in another.  It seems
Uncle Tony sold Seth Curtis a hand axe for a dollar and ten cents.  Of
course Seth paid for it like he always does--right away.  But you know
how forgetful Uncle Tony is getting.  Well, it seems he clean forgot
about Seth paying and sent in a bill for a dollar.  And now Seth's
hanging around, wanting his ten cents back and saying mean, smart
things.

"And that lazy, gossiping crowd of worthless men folks was just killing
themselves laughing and making fun of poor Uncle Tony, sitting right in
his very own chairs and warming their lazy feet at his comfortable
fire.  Uncle Tony happened to be out and those loafers just started in
and what they said about that kind old man made my blood boil.  They
were all mean enough, with Seth egging them on every now and then about
that dime that he was cheated out of.  But Mert Hagley was the worst.
Of course, everybody knows Mert's just dying to hog Uncle Tony's
business along with his shop, as if the stingy thing wasn't rich enough
already.  Well, when Mert heard about that ten-cent mistake he said it
was about time there were a few business changes in Green Valley, that
a few business funerals would help a lot and freshen up things; that
Uncle Tony was no business man, and a lot of that sort of stuff.  And
of course Hughey Mason, being a smart Aleck, pipes up and says, 'That's
so, Uncle Tony is no business man.  Why, Tom Hall says that when you
find Uncle Tony's emporium locked at eleven o'clock of a winter morning
you can bet your bottom dollar Uncle Tony's home shaking down the
furnace, and if it's closed at four of a summer afternoon Uncle Tony's
sneaked off home to mow the lawn.'

"Well, those idiots and old hypocrites were talking just like that,
goodness knows how long.  They never took the trouble to see if Uncle
Tony was really around or not.  But all of a sudden I looked around the
corner of the middle row of shelves and there was that poor old man
sitting as still as death in his cashier's cage and looking sick to
death.  You know he wouldn't cheat a soul, and as for that store, he'd
die without it.  It's all the family he has.  Well I had stepped in
there to buy a couple of flat-irons.  The children mislaid mine.  But I
walked right out for I didn't want to call him out to wait on me.

"I was so mad I just walked around the block till I met Mrs. Jerry
Dustin right at Simpson's corner and I told her the whole thing.  She
was as hurt about it as Uncle Tony and kept holding on to Simpson's
garden fence and saying, 'Dear me, Fanny, we must do something.  I have
a message for Tony, anyway, and this is just the time to deliver it.'

"So back we went and we met Uncle Tony stepping in at the front door
too.  He must have sneaked out the back way and come around the front
so's not to let on he'd heard anything.  He was kind of white and
miserable about the mouth and his eyes looked out kind of blind.  But
he smiled when Mrs. Jerry Dustin said, 'Good morning, Tony.'  I
wonder," Fanny digressed, "if it's true that Uncle Tony wanted to marry
Mrs. Dustin once.  Sadie Dundry says so but you know how unreliable
Sadie is about what she knows.

"Well, anyhow, those miserable men things around that stove just smiled
at Uncle Tony like so many Judases and all commenced talking at once.
But Mrs. Dustin didn't give them much chance.  She just took up all
Uncle Tony's attention and time.  She bought and bought, being real
careful of course to ask only for the things she knew he had; and to
top it all she bought four quarts of robin's-egg blue paint.  You know
that's Uncle Tony's favor-ite woodwork paint and nobody goes in there
for paint but what he's trying to get them to buy robin's-egg blue.
Seems his mother's kitchen on the old farm was done that way and Uncle
Tony's never been able to see any other color.

"Well, I thought those four cans of paint was about the highest kind of
good luck but when Mrs. Dustin give her message I nearly fell dead, and
as for them old he-gossips they were about paralyzed, I guess.  Why
even you, Grandma, couldn't hardly guess what that message was;" here
Fanny pulled up a sagging stocking and hurried on lest she should be
interrupted.

"It was nothing more nor less than that Bernard Rollins, the artist,
wants to paint Uncle Tony's portraiture.  'And, of course, Tony,' said
Mrs. Dustin in that sweet way of hers, 'you won't refuse, will you?'
And I declare the lovely way she looked at him and he at her I come
near believing Sadie might be right by accident.  But, land--in this
town everybody has growed up with everybody else and somebody is always
saying that somebody is sweet on somebody else or was when he or she
were young.

"So there's that portraiture to look forward to.  And now there's that
yarn that some careless busybody started about Nanny Turner being left
a fortune of eighteen thousand dollars.  Everybody's been crazy,
praising her luck to her face and envying her behind her back.
Everybody most but Dell Parsons.  Dell felt sick when she heard it
because she and Nanny have been such friends and Dell just knew that no
matter how they'd both try to keep things the same there'd always be
that eighteen-thousand-dollar difference between them when now there's
nothing dividing them but a little low honeysuckle fence with a gate
cut through it.  And there would, of course.  Nanny'd be on one side,
cutting aprons out of nice new gingham, and Dell'd be on the other,
cutting _her_ aprons out of Jim's old shirt backs.

"But as soon as Nanny heard it she up and told everybody it wasn't so,
that she and Will wouldn't thank anybody for a fortune now that they've
paid for their home and garden.

"I met Jessie Williams in the drug store.  She was buying dye to do
over her last year's silk and she says Nanny was a fool to contradict a
fine story like that.  That she should have said nothing and used the
rumor to her social advantage.  Jessie says that story alone would have
brought that uppish Mrs. Brownlee that's moved into that stylish new
bungalow next to Will Turner's to time and sociability.  Though the
daughter isn't uppish a bit, so Nanny and Dell says, and visits right
over the fence and just loves the children.  But she don't know
anything seemingly--the daughter don't.  Wears fancy caps and
high-heeled shoes to work in mornings and was caught planting onion
sets root up and doing dishes without an apron and drying them without
scalding them first.  But they say she's awful sweet and pretty, in
spite of her terrible ignorance.

"Old Mr. Dunn told me this Mrs. Brownlee was a bankrupt's widow, that
when the husband died there was nothing left but this Green Valley lot,
which he bought absent-mindedly one day, and his life insurance which
though was a good one.  And the widow having no money didn't want to
stay amongst her rich city friends and so she's come here.  They say
she hates Green Valley like poison but that the girl Jocelyn thinks
it's fun living here, even though her hands are blistered and there's
no place to go evenings.  I heard that David Allan's been plowing up
the Brownlee garden lot and helping the girl set things out.

"And now, Grandma, what of all things do you suppose has happened?  Old
man Mullin's back.  Nobody can hardly believe it.  He's been gone these
ten years and nobody blamed him a mite when he left that miserly,
nagging wife of his and went off to California.  Why, they say she
nearly died giving him a ten-cent piece every week for spending money
and that he used to work on the sly unbeknownst to her to get money for
his tobacco and then didn't dare smoke it where she could see him.  And
he's come back.  Some say he's got so much money of his own that she
can't worry him and that he's got to be so deaf besides that he's safe
more or less.

"And as if that wasn't enough, there's talk of Sam Ellis's selling the
hotel and going out of business.  It seems since the two boys and the
girl came back from college they've talked nothing but temperance and
prohibition.  Not that they are a mite ashamed of Sam.  But not one of
them will step into the hotel for love or money.  And Sam's beginning
to think as they do, seems like.  For they say he was awful mad when he
heard about Jim Tumley getting so full he was sick.  Sam was out that
afternoon and he says Curley Watson, his barkeeper, is a danged
chucklehead.  And that ain't all.  They're saying that Sam told George
Hoskins to let up on the drinks the other night, that maybe he could
stand it but other men couldn't.  And Sam the hotel keeper, mind you!
Of course Sam is well off but still the men haven't got over it yet.
They say you could have heard a pin drop and that George stood with his
mouth open for five full minutes.

"Somebody told John Gans that there was going to be another barber shop
in town and so he's excited.  And Mr. Pelly and Mrs. Dudley had their
first fight this year over their chickens.  Mr. Pelly swears she lets
them out a-purpose before he's awake in the morning and Mrs. Dudley
says that if he don't mend his fence and hurts a feather of a single
one of her animals she'll have him before Judge Hewitt.

"Of course, Marion Travers is spending every cent of her husband's
salary on new clothes, trying to get in with the South End crowd.  And
Sam Bobbins has given up trying to raise violets to make a sudden
fortune.  He's changed his mind and gone to raising mushrooms down in
his cellar.  Simpson's gray horse is dead, the lame one, and one of the
White twins cut his head pretty bad on a toy engine and Benny Smith's
wife is giving strawberry sets away.  Jessups are all out of tomato
plants and onion sets and won't get any more, but Dick has them,
besides a real tasty looking lot of garden seed.  Ella Higgins actually
found that Dick had two kinds of flower seed that she'd never grown or
heard of.

"Mrs. Rosenwinkle's full of rheumatism with all joints swelled and says
the world is coming to a terrible end.  I guess she figures though that
she and those two grandchildren of hern will be about all that's left
after the thing blows over.  My land, ain't some folks ignorant!
And--what was I going to say--oh, yes, of course Robinson ain't
expected to live--and well--what _was_ it I was going to say--something
that begins with a c--good land, there's the 6:10 and I bet John's on
it.  He never misses his train twice in a year's time.  Get out of
here, children.  You know your father wants to see you all at home when
he gets there."

There was a scramble for the door and Grandma Wentworth's heart ached
for John Foster, the big, silent, steady man who brushes his girls'
hair every Sunday morning and brings them fresh hair ribbons and who
somehow manages to get them to Sunday School looking half respectable.
John never says a word scarcely to any one, from one week's end to the
other.  He never spends a free hour away from home, he never invites a
man to his house, and he seldom smiles except at the children or when
visiting with Grandma Wentworth or Roger Allan, his two friends and
nearest neighbors.  Sometimes he goes for long walks with his girls and
little Bobby.  Most people think him a fool and he knows it.

Grandma Wentworth sighed a little as she thought of John Foster.  Then
she put fresh wood on her fire and poked at the stove grate till it
glowed.  She smiled as she remembered Fanny's report.

"Well, spring is here for certain.  Now we'll have a wedding and some
new babies.  They always come next."

Then sitting there beside her glowing stove Grandma fell to dreaming of
Green Valley and the Green Valley folks of other days, Green Valley as
it used to be in the springs of long ago.  Of the days when Roger Allan
was a young, strength-mad fellow and Richard Wentworth was his chum and
her lover.  And she remembered too how right Sadie Dundry was.  For
Uncle Tony, in the springs of long ago, had loved the girl who was now
Mrs. Jerry Dustin.

They were such wander-mad dreamers, Tony and Rosalie, and exactly alike
in those days.  They used to go together to watch an occasional picnic
train or election special go through the station, and they thought
because they were so exactly alike they would most surely marry.  But
life, that wisely and for posterity's sake mates not the like but the
unlike, brought Jerry Dustin on the scene,--good, practical,
stay-at-home Jerry Dustin.  And the girl who used to sit with Tony on
the station bench and watch the trains pull out into the wide big world
left her childhood friend sitting alone and went to Jerry, answered his
smile and call.

So Tony sits alone, for he still visits the station on sunny
afternoons.  But now he doesn't sit on the bench but perches on the top
rail of the fence and curls his toes about the lower one.

Bernard Rollins caught him sitting so once, day-dreaming over the past.
It was Tony's face as Rollins saw it then,--full of a young, boyish
wistfulness and sweet pain, unmarred dreams and unstained, unbroken
illusions,--that Rollins wanted to paint.  Rollins knew that Mrs.
Dustin was a great friend of Tony's and that she would be the best
person to coax a consent from the shy, gentle old man.

Life, mused Grandma, was a matter full of sweet and incomprehensible
things,--things that now, after long years when the stories were almost
finished, seemed right and just enough but that at the time were cruel
and hard to bear.  There was Roger Allan and that lonely stone in the
peaceful cemetery.  It still seemed a cruel tragedy.  Like Mrs. Jerry
Dustin she wondered often about it.

The soft spring night was full of memories and the wood fire sang of
them sadly, sweetly and softly.  Grandma rose and mentally shook
herself.

"I declare, I believe I'm lonely or getting old or something," Grandma
chided herself; "here I am poking at the bygone years like an old maid
with the heartache and here's the whole world terribly alive and
needing attention.  And here's Cynthia's boy back from India, and a
real Green Valley kind of minister, I do believe; a straightforward
chap to tell us of life, its miracles and mysteries; of God and
eternity as he honestly thinks, but mostly of love and the little happy
ways of earthly living.  A man who won't be always dividing us into
sheep and goats but will show us the sheep and the goat in ourselves.
This is a queer old town and it almost seems as if a minister wouldn't
hardly have to know so much about heaven as about fighting neighbors
and chickens, gossiping folks like Fanny and drunken ones like Jim
Tumley.  Well, maybe,--"

But just then she looked up and found David Allan laughing at her from
the doorway.

"Stop dreaming and scolding yourself, Grandma," laughed David.
"There's a little city girl living up on the hill back of Will Turner's
who needs you most awful bad.  I offered to bring her down here but she
thinks it wouldn't be proper.  She says you haven't called and she
wants to do things right and that maybe you wouldn't want to know her.
She's mighty lonely and strange about Green Valley ways of doing
things.  I most wished to-day that I was a woman so I could help her.
Her mother's been sick more or less since they come here and she's
looking after things herself.  I'd like to help her but there's things
a man just can't tell a girl or do for her.  Uncle Roger sent me over
here to tell you to come across and talk about some church matters with
him.  But I think this little girl business ought to be tended to right
away."

"Rains and gossip and new girls and first violets.  I declare, it _is_
spring, David.  And Nanny Ainslee is back.  Of course, I'll see about
that little girl.  You tell her I'm coming to call on her the day after
tomorrow.  Tell her I'll come up the woodsy side of her garden and I'll
be wearing my pink sunbonnet and third best gingham apron."

Grandma took up a pan of fresh light biscuit, rolled them up in a crisp
linen cloth and started out with David.

Outdoors she stopped and breathed deeply.

"I declare, David, I was almost lonesome before you stepped in but now
I feel--well, spring mad or something.  I do believe we'll have a
wedding soon and a real old-fashioned springtime."




CHAPTER VII

THE WEDDING

Grandma Wentworth got her wedding but not just the kind of a wedding
she had expected.

"Though, when you stop to think of it, an elopement is about as proper
a spring happening as I know of.  It's due mostly to this weather.  We
had too much rain in April and nothing but sweet sunshine and mad
moonlight ever since."

Most Green Valley courtships and weddings are conducted in a more or
less public and leisurely fashion and elopements are rare.  Green
Valley was at first inclined to be a little shocked and resentful about
this performance.  Weddings do not happen every day and Green Valley
was so accustomed to knowing weeks beforehand what the bride was going
to wear, and how many of the two sets of relatives were to be there,
and who was giving presents and what, and what the refreshments were
going to cost, and just how much more this was than what the bride's
mother could afford to spend, that there was a little murmur of
astonishment, resentment even, when it was found that just a bare, bald
marriage had been perpetrated in the old town.  Green Valley did not
resent the scandal of the occurrence.  It was the absence of details
that was so maddening.  But gradually these began to trickle from
doorstep to doorstep and by nightfall Green Valley was crowding out of
its front gates with little wedding gifts under its arms.

It seems that little, meek, eighteen-year-old Alice Sears had eloped
with twenty-one-year-old Tommy Winston.  She explained her foolishness
in a little letter which she left on the kitchen table for her mother.
The letter ran something like this:


Dear Mother:--

It's no use waiting any longer for any of the good times or new dresses
you said I'd have by and by.  We never have any good times and I'm
tired waiting for a real new hat.  Tommy's going to buy me one with
bunches of violets on it and he don't drink, so it's alright and you
don't need to worry.  I'll live near and be handy and don't you let
father swear too much at you because I did this.

    Your loving child,
      ALICE.


When Mrs. Sears found the letter she read it six times, over and over
till she knew it by heart.  It wasn't the first such letter she had
ever had.  When Johnny went off to Alaska or somewhere away off,
because his father took the twenty-five dollars that the
nineteen-year-old boy had saved so prayerfully for a bicycle, Johnny
had left just such a letter.  When Jimmy went away he left a letter
that sounded very much like it on the top of his mother's sewing
machine.

It wasn't a bicycle with Jimmy.  It was chickens.  Jimmy was wild over
chickens.  He was a great favorite with Frank Burton.  He helped Frank
about the coops and was so handy that Frank paid him regular wages and
gave him several settings of eggs.  And in no time the boy had a
thriving little chicken business that might have grown into bigger
things.  But Sears sold the whole thing out one day when he wanted
money worse than usual.  And Jimmy, white to the very roots of his
reddish-brown hair, cursed his father and left home.  He wandered
about, the Lord knows where, but eventually joined the army.  He wrote
home once to tell his mother what he had done and to say that he
intended to save all his pay for the three years and start a chicken
farm with it somewhere.

And now gentle, little, eighteen-year-old Alice was gone too.

Mrs. Sears sat down and cried in that patient, helpless, miserable way
of hers.  She didn't know just what she was crying for, herself or the
children.  Life was a hopeless, unmanageable tangle that seemed to give
her nothing and take her all.  So Mrs. Sears sat and cried.  It was a
habit she had.

Fanny Foster came along just then.  She had run over to see if she
couldn't borrow a cake of yeast.  She was going to town in an hour, she
said, but she wanted to set her bread before she went and she'd bring
yeast back with her and--

"Why, for pity's sake alive, Mrs. Sears, what's the matter?"

That was just Fanny's luck or perhaps her misfortune, her happening on
events first-hand that way.  She read the letter of course, sympathized
with Mrs. Sears, patted her check and told her not to worry, that
everything would be all right and to set right still, that she'd be
right back to do the dishes and stay with her.

And Fanny hurried to town, talking all the way.  She came back in
record time but by the time she had her hands in Mrs. Sears' dishpan
Green Valley was already buzzing with astonishment.  Some were shaking
their heads in utter unbelief, some were smiling and one or two who had
slept badly were saying something like this:

"Well, did you ever!  And you never can tell.  Those meek, quiet little
things are usually deep.  And the dear Lord only knows what the true
state of things is.  And poor Mrs. Sears!  Of course, she's done her
best, but isn't it too bad to have a batch of children turn out so kind
of disappointing and her so meek and patient and hard-working!"

In three hours the news had gotten out to the out-lying homes and
Sears, the little bride's father, heard it as he was nailing siding on
one of the two new bungalows that were being built in that part of
Green Valley.

When Sears heard the rumor he put down his hammer and quit work.  He
was a man who made a practice of quitting work at the least
provocation.  He said what a man needed most was self-respect and he,
Will Sears, would have it at any cost.  He had it.  In fact, he was so
respectful and thoughtful of himself that he never had time to respect
the rights of any one else.

Green Valley saw him going home and because Green Valley knew him well
and respected him not at all it took no pains to hush its chatter, and
so he heard a good deal that it may have done him good to hear.  At any
rate, it sort of prepared him for what came later.

He stamped into the house and wanted to know why in this and that he
hadn't been told about all this before he went to work, and what in
this and that she meant by such doings and goings on.

And Mrs. Sears, whose greatest daily trial was getting her husband off
to work on such mornings as he felt so inclined, said tearfully:

"Why, father, you know that when I'm getting you off of a morning I
wouldn't see a twenty-dollar gold piece if it was right before my eyes
on the table.  I never found the piece of paper with Alice's letter on
it till you'd gone and I'd set down for a cup of coffee."

For thirty years Milly Sears had called her husband "father" and now
that he had fathered all his children away from home she still called
him "father."  Poor Mrs. Sears had no sense of humor.

After her pitiful little explanation Mrs. Sears sank down into her
rocker and went back to weeping.  It was her way of taking life's
sudden turns.

Sears tore through the house and every once in a while he'd walk back
to the kitchen and swear.  Sears was not in any way a likeable man.
Though so self-respecting, he had all his life been careless about his
language and his breath.  That was probably the reason why his children
never got the habit of running out to meet him or bringing their thorns
and splinters for him to pull out with his jackknife.  He was a man who
never stopped in the front yard to see how the clover was coming up,
who never hoed around his currant bushes or ever found time to prune
his fruit trees.  He was in short a mean, selfish man who was yet
decent enough to know himself for what he was but not decent enough to
admit it and mend his ways.  It may be that he did not know how to go
about this.

At any rate, here he was, pacing back and forth in his still, empty
house, swearing and threatening all manner of terrible things.  That
was his way of showing his helplessness.

And all about this helpless, incompetent father and patiently sobbing
mother the Green Valley world buzzed and the prettiest kind of a May
day smiled.  All their life was a muddle with this dreary ending but
the world outside was as young, as bright, as promising as ever.
Something of this must have come to these two for Mrs. Sears' sobs
quieted and out in the front room Sears sank into a chair and grew
still.

And then it was that Fanny Poster, who had been flitting about like a
very spirit of help and curiosity, flitted down the road to Grandma
Wentworth's.  For Fanny felt that somebody had to do something and
Fanny knew that nobody could do it so efficiently as the strong, sweet,
gray-eyed Grandma Wentworth who, for all her sweetness, could yet
rebuke most sternly and fearlessly even while she helped and advised
wisely.

Green Valley had its generous share of philosophers and helpful spirits
but Grandma Wentworth towered above them all.  And every soul in the
village, when in trouble, turned to her as naturally as flowers turn
their faces to the sun.

Her little vine-clad cottage sat just beyond the curve where the three
roads met at Old Roads Corners.  Her back garden was full of the
choicest vegetables and sweetest-smelling herbs and there was a
heavenly array of flowers all about the front windows.  The neighbors
said that Grandma Wentworth's house and garden looked just like her and
ministers usually sent their spiritually hopeless cases to her because
she dared and knew how to say the soul-necessary things that no
bread-and-butter-cautious minister can find the courage to say.

The path to Grandma's house was worn smooth by the feet of the many who
came for advice, encouragement and for sheer love of the woman who
lived in that little garden.

And so Fanny went flying to Grandma now, perfectly, childishly
confident that Grandma would and could fix up everything.  She began to
talk as soon as she opened the door.  But what she saw in Grandma's
kitchen sent the words tumbling down her throat.

For there sat little Alice, eating a late breakfast with Grandma.  She
looked a little scared around the eyes but smiley round the mouth and
there was a gold ring on her left hand.

When Grandma caught sight of Fanny she smiled.

"Come right in, Fanny.  I've been expecting you.  But first let me make
you acquainted with Mrs. Tommy Winston.  That rascal of a boy run away
with her last night as far as Spring Road, where Judge Edwards married
them.  And then Tommy brought her here to me to spend the night while
he went and rented that funny little box of a house just back of that
stylish Mrs. Brownlee.  And that's where the wedding supper's going to
be to-night.  Of course you're invited.  I'm going right now to see
Milly Sears about what we must cook up and bake.  I was going over to
get you too to help out.  The little house'll need overhauling but I
know I can depend on you, Fanny.  Do your very best and there'll be--"

But by this time Fanny found her voice and began to tell about how
Sears was going on.  But Grandma only smiled and said, "Yes, of course,
I know.  But don't worry about that.  I'll attend to Will Sears.  You
two just skip along now to the house and start the wedding."

Grandma walked over to the Sears cottage without any show of worry or
hurry.  But she wasn't smiling.  Those gray eyes of hers were sparkling
with something very different.  And when Will Sears saw her coming in
the gate he was both relieved and uncomfortably uneasy.

She came right in and just looked at that desolate couple for a few
seconds.  Then:

"Will Sears," she asked briefly, "what are you aiming to do about this?"

Sears, who couldn't do anything, didn't know how to do anything about
it but swear, said pompously:

"What any decent, respectable, hard-working man would do,--bring back
the girl and horsewhip that whippersnapper."

Then Grandma, who knew just how much this sort of bluster was worth,
let herself go.

"Will Sears, if you honestly have an idea that you are a decent,
respectable, hard-working man, hold on to it for the love of heaven,
for you're the only human in this town that has any such notion."

"I work," Sears began defiantly.

"Oh, yes, Will, you work in a sort of a way; though I can remember the
time when Green Valley folks thought you were going to be a big
contractor.  You promised well but somehow you never worked hard
enough.  You work at things now to keep your own miserable self alive,
I guess, because when you get through using your week's wages there's
hardly enough left to keep bare life and decency in your family."

"I'm not a drunkard," Sears muttered, "and you know it."

"No, you're not a drunkard, Will Sears, more's the pity.  When it comes
to choosing between a man who gets openly drunk and staggers down Main
Street in drunken penitence to his wife and children and the man who
drinks just enough to be a surly, selfish brute and yet look half-way
respectable on the outside, why, give me the drunk every time.

"You don't get drunk, only just full enough to have your family afraid
and ashamed of you.  You have made life a hateful, shameful, miserable
existence for your wife and children.  You've robbed them of every
right and what pitiful little possessions, hopes and plans they'd been
able to find for themselves.  That's why John's in Alaska, Jimmy in the
army and Alice an eighteen-year-old wife.  A precious father you've
been to make your children choose the bitter snows, the jungle and a
doubtful future with a stranger to life with you, their father."

"I've fed my children and clothed them," again muttered Sears.

"Yes, Will, you have.  But--man, man--it takes more than just blood,
three begrudged meals a day and a skimpy calico dress to prove real
fatherhood.  But I'm not blaming you any more than I'm blaming this
wife of yours.

"For thirty years, Milly Sears, you've been so busy trying to be a
doormat saint that you had no time to be a strong, useful mother.  When
you married Will he was no worse than the average fellow.  He had
faults aplenty but he had goodnesses too, and hopes and dreams.  And
you, you Milly, let all the hopes and dreams die and the faults grow
and multiply.  Just by letting Will backslide, forget and grow careless.

"Somebody told you that patience was a pretty ornament.  It is if it's
the genuine article and properly used.  But letting a man spend his
wages hoggishly on himself and robbing his children and driving them
from their lawful home and cheating you out of every right and even
your self-respect is nothing to be patient about.  As for tears, they
have their uses, but they never mended wrongs that I know of.  It's
fool, weeping, patient women that make selfish, mean men.  It's plain,
honest, righteous anger that brings about the reforms in this world.

"If the first time that Will got ugly drunk or swearing cross about
nothing you had stood up for yourself and the children and reminded him
sharply of the decencies instead of crying softly and praying for
patience, you wouldn't be sitting here, the two of you, in an empty
house with your children God knows where.

"I've known you since before you were married and I'm sorry for you
because I know--"

Then it was that Grandma Wentworth began to talk as only she knew how.
She forgot nothing.  She recalled to that man and woman all the beauty
and the wonder of the beginning; the new furniture, the summer
moonlight when their home was young and they were waiting for their
first baby; his coming; his blue eyes and Jimmy's brown ones and little
Alice's gentle ways.  All the past sweetness that had been theirs and
was not wholly forgotten she brought back, and in the end when they
sobbed aloud she cried a bit with them, for they were of her
generation.  And then she rose to go.

"Well, now that I've had my say I'll tell you that I really came to
invite you to your daughter's wedding supper to-night.  Tommy Winston's
married your Alice sure enough, but he's a good boy even if he is
motherless and fatherless and has sort of shifted for himself in odd
ways.  He brought Alice to me last night all properly married and she's
been with me ever since, so everything is all right and respectable,
for which you may thank the dear Lord on bended knees.  Tommy's been
and rented the little Bently place over on the hill and is getting it
into shape with a few pieces of furniture.  It's such a doll house it
won't take much to furnish it.  I've found half a dozen things up attic
and, Milly, if you look around, you'll find plenty here to help start
the little new home in fair shape.  Thank heavens, life in Green Valley
is still simple enough so's people can every now and then marry for
love and not much of anything else.  Though Tommy's got a little
besides his horse and wagon.  He's already bought Alice a new hat and
fixings and he's going down to Tony's hardware store this afternoon to
order up a good cook stove.  So you see--"

But at this point Sears woke up and hoarsely, defiantly and a little
tremulously announced:

"He'll do no such thing.  I'm going down right now to buy that there
cook stove."

So that was settled and a new home peaceably, respectably started as
every home should be.  And it would have been hard to say who was the
busiest and happiest of all the people who helped make a wedding that
day.

By three o'clock, however, everything was about done and there were
only the final touches to be put on.  Grandma engineered everything
over the telephone and Green Valley responded whole-heartedly, as it
always did to all her work.

Fanny Foster had found time to run down to Jessup's and buy the bride a
first-class tablecloth and some towels.  Fanny was always buying the
most appropriate, tasty and serviceable things for other people and the
most outlandish, cheap and second-hand stuff for herself.  The
tablecloth was extravagantly good, as Grandma sternly told her.

But, "La--what of it!  I was saving the money to buy myself a silk
petticoat," Fanny defended herself.  "I wanted to know just once before
I died what and how it felt like to rustle up the church aisle instead
of slinking down it on a Sunday morning.  But I just think a silk
petticoat isn't worth thinking about when a thing like this happens."

So Grandma smiled and as she laid out her best black silk she made a
mental note of the fact that Fanny Foster was to have, sometime or
other, a silk petticoat, made up to her for this day's work and
self-sacrifice.  For Grandma was one of those rare practical people who
yet believed in respecting the foolish dreams of impractical humans.

So it came about that everybody who could walk was at Tommy's and
Alice's wedding.  The bride wore a beautifully simple dress that came
from Paris in Nan's trunk.  And there were roses in her hair and Tommy
hardly knew her, and her father and mother certainly did not, so dazed
were they.

The little doll house was already a home, with all of Green Valley
trooping in to leave little gifts and stopping long enough to shake
Tommy's hand and wish him luck and health and maybe twins.

Indeed, Alice Sears' elopement and wedding became a part of Green
Valley history, so great an event was it, what with the suddenness of
it and the whole town being asked and Nan Ainslee coming home so
providentially, and Cynthia's son making a speech.

The crowd was so great and so merry that the little Brownlee girl,
having tucked her fretful mother up in bed, stole out to the garden
fence and watched the doings with all a child's wistful eyes.  David
Allan, who happened to drift out that way, found her there and they
visited over the fence.  It took David quite a while to tell her what
it all meant, for she was of course a stranger to Green Valley and
Green Valley ways.

Grandma watched her town folk a little mistily that night and expressed
her opinion a little tremulously to Roger Allan.

"Roger, did you ever see a town so chockful of people that you have to
laugh over one minute and cry over the next?"

Nan's father, walking home with her through the quiet streets, stopped
to light a cigar.  When it was burning properly he remarked innocently
to his daughter:

"I don't know when I've met so unusually good-looking and likeable a
fellow as this minister chap, Knight."

Nan looked at her father with cold and suspicious eyes and her voice
when she answered was scornful.

"You thought, Mr. Ainslee, that you met the handsomest and most
likeable chap on earth in Yokohama--if you remember," she reminded him
icily.

"Yes, of course--I remember.  But I have come to believe that I was
somewhat mistaken in that boy in Yokohama.  He lacked something that
this chap has--an elusive quality that is hard to put a name to but
which is one of the big essentials that makes for success."

"Ministers," drawled Nanny wickedly, "have never been noticeably
successful in Green Valley."

"No," admitted her father, "they haven't.  And of course it's too bad
the boy's a minister.  He's badly handicapped, naturally.  Still, I
never remember when I'm with him that he is a parson.  It may be that
women feel the same way.  And you noticed that he had the good sense
not to wear a frock coat to this informal little wedding.  I can't
recall that he has ever worn a frock coat since he's been here.  I
think you'd like ministers, Nanny, if they weren't so given to wearing
frock coats.  In fact, I'm willing to bet that you are going to like
this wonderful boy from India immensely."

Nanny stood still and faced her father.

"I loathe ministers--in any kind of a coat," she explained firmly.
"And I'll bet no bets with you.  Such offers are unseemly in a man of
your years and already apparent grayness.  They are, moreover,
detrimental to my morals.  I should think you'd be ashamed,--and also
mindful of your former losses and mistaken prophecies."

"Oh," her father assured her, "I admit my losses and mistakes.  But I
have by no means lost hope or faith.  You never can tell.  I'm bound to
guess right some day.  And I'm rather partial to this minister chap.
It would be so natural and fitting a punishment for an irreverent young
woman.  For Nanny," the father added with teasing gentleness, "sweet as
you are and lovable, a little reverence and religion wouldn't hurt you."

"I've always heard it said," demurely recollected Nanny, "that girls
generally take after the father."

"That may be," agreed this particular father.  "In that case I should
think you'd be willing to marry a little religion into the family for
my sake, if not your own."

Nanny's patience was beginning to feel the strain.

"Mr. Ainslee," she warned him sternly, "if this was snowball time
instead of springtime in Green Valley, I'd snowball you black and blue."




CHAPTER VIII

LILAC TIME

To the knowing and observant and the loyal Green Valley is dear at all
times.  But what most touches and wakens a Green Valley heart is lilac
time.

There are on the Green Valley calendar many red-letter days beside the
regularly recurring national holidays, but lilac time, or Lilac Sunday,
is Green Valley's very own glad day.  It is in the spring what
Thanksgiving is in the fall and wanderers who can not get home for
Thanksgiving and Christmas ease their homesick hearts with promises of
lilac time in the old town.

On this particular Lilac Sunday, Nan, radiant and dressed in the sort
of clothes that only Nan knew how to buy and wear, was on her way to
church.  She was early and decided to pass the Churchill place.  She
always did at lilac time, for then it was fairly embedded in fragrance
and flowery glory.  She had cut the blooms from her own bushes and sent
them on.  She carried only a few of her most perfect sprays.  She saw
that the Churchill gardens too had been trimmed but plenty of beauty
remained.

She stopped a moment to admire the wonderful old red-brick house
glowing through the tender greens of spring.  Her eyes drank in its
beauty and then fell on two huge perfect lilac plumes on the bush
nearest her.  They were larger and lovelier than her own.

With a little smile Nan reached out to gather them.  She broke off the
first and was about to gather the other when Cynthia's son came slowly
and laughingly from around the bush.

"Let me get it for you.  You will soil your glove."

Nan was startled and unaccountably embarrassed.  She flushed with
something like annoyance.

"Mercy!  I had no idea you were anywhere about.  I suppose I'm greedy
but these did seem lovelier than mine.  This is Lilac Sunday and I
thought--perhaps nobody told you--that as long as you had so many you
wouldn't mind--I hope you don't think--"

She was so very evidently bothered over the whole affair, so
disconcerted, she who was always so coolly dignified, that he laughed
with boyish delight.

"Oh--don't explain, I understand," he begged.

The red in Nan's cheeks deepened.  She stiffened and half turned away.

"Goodness," she exclaimed to no one in particular, "how I _do_ dislike
ministers.  They always understand everything.  You just can't tell
them anything.  How I loathe them!  They're insufferable."

It was his turn to look a little startled and embarrassed.

"But you don't have to like me as a minister.  I don't want to be
_your_ minister."

She looked up to see just what he meant.  But he seemed to have
forgotten her, for the smile had gone from his eyes and though he
looked at her she knew that he didn't see her; that he was looking
beyond her at some one, something else.  When he spoke it was with a
winning gravity and a wistfulness that Nanny tried not to hear.

"I miss my mother more than any one here can guess.  Grandma Wentworth
is wonderful.  She is so wise and good and I love her.  But my mother
was young and gay and very beautiful.  She played and laughed and
talked with me.  She was the loveliest soul I ever knew.  You are very
much like her.  I have wanted you for a friend.  I never had a sister
but if I could have had I should have asked for a girl like you."

Oh, Nanny sensed the pitiful, childish loneliness of that plea!  The
wistfulness of the boy stabbed through her really tender heart.  But
Nanny Ainslee was a joyous, laughter-loving creature.  And the idea of
this boy whom already she half loved asking her to be his _friend_, his
_sister_!  Oh, it was childishly funny.  How her father would chuckle
if he knew that she who had dismissed so many suitors with platonic
friendliness and sisterly solicitude was now being offered that same
platonic friendliness and brotherly love.  It was too much for Nanny's
sense of humor!

So Nanny giggled.  She giggled disgracefully and could not stop
herself,--giggled even though she knew that the tall boy beside her was
flushing a painful red and slowly freezing into a hurt and painful
silence.  But she could not save herself or him.

"You had better let me cut you a few more sprays," he said at last
curtly.

She let him lay them in her arms and they walked to church in absolute
silence.  Nanny never knew that any living man could be so stubbornly
silent.  She was sorry and she wanted to tell him so.  But he gave her
no chance.  It seemed he was a young man who never asked for things
twice.  Nanny was sorry but she was also, for some incomprehensible
reason, angry.  And the sorrier she grew the angrier she became.
Cynthia's son seemed not to notice.  He walked straight on into the
church but Nanny stayed outside and held open court under the big horse
chestnuts in front of the church door.

She had left the olive groves and almond groves, the thick roses and
the blue waters of Italy, in order to be at home in time to see her
native town wrapped up in its fragrant lilac glory.

She stayed out now, her arms full of lilac plumes, watching the little
groups of her townspeople coming down the village streets toward the
church whose bell was tolling so sweetly through the warm, spring air.

Here came Mrs. Dustin with Peter and Joe Baldwin with his two boys and
Colonel Stratton with his sweet-faced wife.  From the opposite
direction came the Reverend Alexander Campbell with his wife in black
silk, his sister in gray silk, his elderly niece in blue silk and his
wife's second cousin in lavender.  There was Joshua Stillman and his
quiet daughter, Uncle Tony and Uncle Tony's brother William, with his
four girls and Seth Curtis' wife, Ruth.

Seth never went to church, having a profound scorn for the clergy.  But
he always fixed things so his wife could go.  He said ministers were
poor business men, selfish husbands and proverbially poor fathers, from
all he'd seen of them.  Somehow Seth was a singularly unfortunate man
in the matter of seeing things.  But there was no denying the fact that
he was an unusual husband.  He had been caught time and again by his
men friends and neighbors on a Sunday morning with one of his wife's
aprons tied about him, holding the baby in one arm, while he stirred
something on the stove with the other, and in various other ways
superintending his household while Ruth was at church.  But neither
jeers nor sympathy ever upset him.

"No, I can't say that I've ever hankered for sermons much.  They don't
generally tally with what I've seen and know of life.  But Ruth now can
get something helpful out of even a fool's remarks and comes home
rested and cheerful.  I figure that a woman as smart as Ruth about
working and saving sure earns her right to a bit of a church on Sunday
if she wants it.  And furthermore, I aim to give my wife anything in
reason that she wants.  It doesn't hurt any man to learn from a little
personal experience that babies aren't just little blessings full of
smiles and dimples but darn little nuisances, let me tell you.  This
little kid is as good as they make them but he gives me a backache all
over, puts bumps on my temper and ties my nerves up in knots.  And I've
discovered that just watching bread or pies or pudding is work.  And
when a man's peeled the potatoes and set the table and sliced the bread
and filled the water glasses and opened the oven a dozen times and
strained and stirred and mashed and salted and peppered, he begins to
understand why his wife is so tired after getting a Sunday dinner.  And
when he thinks of other days, washing days and ironing and baking and
scrubbing and sewing days, why, if he's anyway decent he begins to
suspect that he's darn lucky to get a full-grown woman to do all that
work for just her room and board.  And when he stops to count the times
she's tied his necktie, darned his socks and patched his clothes,
besides giving him a clean bed, a pretty sitting room to live in,
children to play with and brag about, and a bank book to make him sleep
easy on such nights as the storms are raging outside, why, a man just
don't have to go to church to believe in God.  He's got proofs enough
right in his kitchen.  It's the wife who ought to go if it's only to
sit still for an hour and get time to tell herself that there is a God
and that some day the work will let up maybe and her back won't ache
any more and Johnny won't be so hard on his shoes and Sammy on his
stockings.  Why, I tell you I'm afraid to keep Ruth from church, afraid
that if she loses her belief in a married woman's heaven she'll leave
me for somebody better or get so discouraged that she'll just hold her
breath and die."

So Ruth Curtis went to church every Sunday.  And Seth saw to it that
she always looked pretty.  This particular Lilac Sunday she was wearing
the sprigged dimity that Seth bought her over in Spring Road at
Williamson's spring sale.

Softly the bell tolled and the last stragglers came hurrying leisurely,
every soul carrying the lovely fragrant plumes so that the church would
be sweet with the breath of spring.  Later, these armfuls of beauty
would be packed into huge boxes and shipped to the city hospitals to
gladden pain-racked bodies and weary hearts.

Nanny Ainslee was still outside waiting for Grandma Wentworth.  Lilac
Sunday Nanny always waited for Grandma and always sat with her, because
of a certain story that Grandma had told her once when the lamps were
not yet lit and the soft summer moonlight lay in windowed squares on
Grandma's sitting room floor.  Nanny began to inquire of the last
comers.  But Tommy and Alice Winston, still bridey and shy, said they
had seen nothing of her, and even Roger Allan supposed of course that
she must be in her favorite pew, known to the oldtimers as Inspiration
Corner.  For it had been observed that all ministers sooner or later
delivered their discourses to Grandma Wentworth.  They were always sure
of her undivided attention.  Other people's eyes and minds might
wander, some might be even openly bored, but Grandma's uplifted face
was always kindly and encouraging, even though the sermon was
hopelessly jumbled.  She was the surest, severest critic and yet each
man preached to her feeling that with the criticism would come
kindliness and the sort of mother comfort that Grandma somehow knew how
to give to the meanest and most blundering of creatures.  Indeed, it
was the least successful of Green Valley's ministers who had designated
Grandma's seat as Inspiration Corner.  And then had in a final burst of
wrath told Green Valley that like Sodom and Gomorrah it was doomed,
that no mere man preacher could save it, that its only hope lay in
Grandma Wentworth, who alone understood its miserable, petty orneriness.

He meant to leave town a sputtering, raging man, that minister,--full
of what he called righteous wrath.  But he went to say good-by to
Grandma and experienced a change of heart.

He began his farewell by unburdening his heart and soul of all the
ponderous doctrines that sunny, joyful Green Valley had refused to
listen to.  He spoke earnestly of the world's terrible need of
salvation, the fearful necessity for haste and wholesale repentance and
the awful menace of God's wrath.  And the fact that he was a man
entering his forties instead of his thirties made matters worse.

But Grandma listened patiently and when he was emptied of all his
sorrows and worriments she took him out into her herb-garden, seated
him where he could see the sunset hills and then she preached a
marvellous sermon to just this one man alone.  No one but he knows what
she told him but he went forth a humble, tired, quiet man, filled to
the brim with a sudden belief in just life as it is lived by a few
hundred million humans.  Five years later word came to Green Valley
that this same man was a much loved pastor somewhere in the mountains.
And Green Valley, perennially young, unthinking, joyous Green Valley,
laughed incredulously as a sweet-hearted but wrongly educated child
always laughs at a true fairy tale or a simple miracle.

"If I had the making and raising of ministers," Grandma was heard to
say, apropos of this clergyman, "about the first thing I'd set them to
learning would be to laugh, first at themselves and then at other
people.  And as for this repentance and exhortation business I believe
it is worn out.  Humans have gotten tired of that 'last call for the
paradise express.'  They like this world and its life and they know
they could be pretty decent if somebody would only explain a few little
things to them.  It isn't that they hate religion but they want to be
allowed to grow into it naturally and sanely.  Religion getting ought
to be the quietest, happiest process, just pleasant neighboring like
and comparing of ideas, with every now and then a holy hush when men
and women have suddenly sensed some big beauty in life.  All this noise
is unnecessary, for every living soul of us, barring idiots, repents
several times a day even though we don't admit it in so many words.
And as for righteous wrath--it's a good thing and I believe in it, but
like cayenne pepper it wants to be used sparingly and only at the right
place and on the right person.  Any one would think to hear some
ministers talk that the Almighty was a combination of Theodore
Roosevelt, the Kaiser and a New York Police Commissioner working the
third degree.

"I wonder what the colleges can be thinking of, turning loose such
stale foolishness and old canned stuff on a mellow, sunny little home
town like Green Valley that's full of plain, blundering but
well-meaning, God-fearing people who work joyfully at their business of
living and turn up more religion when they plow a furrow or make over
the wedding dress for the baby than these ministers can dig up out of
all their musty books.  I've prayed for all kinds of qualities in
ministers but I've come to the point where I ask nothing more of a
preacher than a laugh now and then, some horse sense and health.

"I used to think that only mature men ought to be sent out but now I
shall be glad to see a boy in the pulpit to show us the way to
salvation,--a boy it may be with a head full of foolish notions that
old folks say are not practical and some of which won't of course stand
wear; but a boy, with a glad young face, eyes full of faith and dreams
and the sort of insane courage and daring that only the young know.
Such a boy needs considerable education in certain earthly matters, of
course, but he's lovable and teachable and will in time grow into a
real, God-knowing, truth-interpreting man."

Oh, Grandma Wentworth was an authority on ministers--ministers and
babies.  And it was a baby that had kept her away from church this
Lilac Sunday; a little, merry, red-headed boy baby that had come in the
early morning to make glad the heart of unbusinesslike Billy Evans and
his neat businesslike wife.  For several hours Doc Philipps and Grandma
had despaired of both baby and mother, but when the pink dawn came
smiling over the world's rim Billy's little son was born alive and
unblemished and Billy's wife crept back from the Valley of the Shadow
and smiled a bit into Billy's white, stricken face.  And Billy looked
deep down into the brown eyes of the girl and the terrible numbness
went out of his muscles and the icy hardness from around his heart and
he slipped out into the morning world to thank the Great Spirit that
moved it for His mercy and wonderful gift.  He just stood on his front
doorstep and, looking about his pretty home and remembering the miracle
within the house, poured a great prayer into the heart of the glad
morning.

Billy's house was one of the most picturesque of the many pretty homes
in Green Valley.  It had been a ramshackle, tumbled-down old cabin lost
in a tangle of bushes and hidden from the road by a shabby, unsightly
row of old willows.  Billy was going to rent it for temporary barn
purposes but his wife, who had a nimble and a prophetic eye, made him
buy it.  Then, under her supervision Billy enlarged and remodeled it
and Billy's wife waved some sort of a fairy wand over it, for it became
over night a lovely, story-book home.  When everything was ready she
had the unsightly willows cut, revealing a gently rising stretch of
mossy sward ending in a cluster of old trees from which the cozy house
peeped roguishly, tantalizingly.  Two old walnuts guarded the little
footpath to the door and two huge lilac bushes screened the porch from
the too curious gaze of travelers on the road below.  Indeed, so
altogether taking and fascinating a bit of property did it become after
its transformation that it was said that two of Green Valley's real
estate men never went down that road without doing sums in their heads
and calling themselves names for overlooking such a bargain.  It takes
constructive imagination to be successful in real estate.

And now around this cozy home spot Billy wandered deliriously,
aimlessly.  It was the tolling of the church bell and the smell of the
lilacs that recalled to him the significance of the day.

"Why, he was born on Lilac Sunday and he's red-headed just like Her.
Gosh--I must a bin born lucky!"

Billy looked once more all about his story-book home and then his eyes
strayed away to Petersen's Woods, fairy green and already full of deep
shadowed aisles, full of fretted beauty and solemnity.  Beyond them lay
the creek, a pool of silver draped in misty morning veils.

"Gosh--I wish to God I was religious!" suddenly, contritely murmured
Billy Evans.  In high heaven the angels, and in Billy's kitchen Grandma
Wentworth, overheard and smiled.

When Hank Lolly came up from the livery barn for a late breakfast, his
face drawn and eyes full of fear for the man and woman who had been
family and home to him, Billy went down the footpath to meet him.

"It's all right, Hank!  He's here, red hair and all," Billy informed
him in the merest breath of a whisper.  Hank wiped his face in limp
relief and sat down quite suddenly on the grass beside the path.
Instinctively Billy sat down with him.

They said nothing for a time, just looked and looked at the wide blue
sky, the green sweet world, tried for perhaps the millionth time to
sense Eternity and the what-and-why-and-how of it all and then gave it
up and like children accepted the day, the little new life, the whole
wonder of it as happy children accept it all, on faith and with
untainted joy.  It was just good to be there and there was no doubting
the perfect May day.  So they sat reverently until Billy, looking again
at that mass of shimmering greens and into those church-like aisles,
said:

"Hank, some one of us had ought to go to church to-day.  I wish to God
I had kep' up going to Sunday school.  Mother got me started but she
died before she could get me started in on church.  So I never went.
It's a terrible thing for a man not to learn religion along with his
reading and writing and 'rithmetic.  I used to think it was nobody's
business whether I had any religion or not after mother died.  I knew
that where she was she'd understand.  But I see now it was a terrible
mistake thinking that way and not laying in a supply of religion.  A
man thinks he owns himself and that certain things are nobody's
business, but by-and-by along comes a wife or a red-headed baby and
things happen different from what you've ever expected, things that you
just got to have religion for, and gosh--what are you going to do then
if you ain't got any?"

This terrible situation being beyond the mental powers of Hank, that
soul just sat still until Billy puzzled a way out.

"Somebody'd ought to go to church from out this house to-day," went on
Billy in a low voice.  "Grandma Wentworth can't go on account of Her
and It.  I can't go because--gosh--I'm so kind of split, my head going
one way and my legs another, that as likely as not I'd wind up in the
blacksmith shop or the hotel or fall in the creek.  I ain't safe on the
streets to-day, Hank.  And, anyway, I've got to keep up fires and water
boiling and them dumb'd frogs under the willows from croaking so's She
can sleep to-night.  That leaves nobody but you, Hank."

Billy hesitated, realizing the enormity of the request he was about to
make.

"Hank--I wish to God, you'd go and sort of settle the bill up for me.
Just go, Hank, and tell Him, that's the Big Boss, how darned thankful
we all are about what's happened to-day and that we'll do right by the
little shaver and that we'll try to run the livery business so's He
won't find too many mistakes when He gets around to looking over the
books Barney and you and me's keeping.  And you might mention how we've
always made it a point to treat our horses well but will do better in
the future.  And tell Him I'll see that the Widow Green's spring
plowing is done sooner after this.  It was a darn shame her being left
last like that but that she never asked me, me being so easy-going and
she so neat, until the rest of them left her in the lurch.  And tell
Him I'll take the sheriff's job, though if there's one thing I can't do
it's watching people and jumping on them.  Just talk to Him that way,
Hank.  Put in any little thing you happen to think of and go as far as
you like in promises and subscriptions.  The business is moving and
what promises you and I can't keep She'll find a way to pay off.  And
here's a ten-dollar gold piece to drop in the hat when it comes around.
You--"

But Hank was standing now and looking at his employer with such terror
in every line of his weather-beaten face that Billy paused again.

"My God--Billy!  You ain't asking me--_me_--to--to--to--to go to
_church_?"  Hank's voice fairly squeaked and stuttered with the horror
that clutched him.

"Hank, if there was any one else--"

But Hank, shaking in every joint and muscle of his still flabby body,
wagged his head in utter misery.

"Billy, I'll do anything else for you and Mrs. Evans and little
Billy--anything but that.  I'll jump into Wimple's pond, get drunk,
sign the pledge--anything but that.  What you're a-wanting, Billy,
ain't to be thought of.  You're forgetting, Billy, what I was and what
I am.  Why, Billy, that there church belongs to the best people in this
town and it ain't for the likes of me to go into such vallyable places,
a-tramplin' on that there expensive carpet we both of us hauled free of
charge last September.  There's Doc Philipps and Tony and Grandma
Wentworth and any number of good friends of mine in there.  And do you
think I want to shame them and insult them by coming into their church,
disturbing the doings?  You just let things be and when Mrs. Evans is
up and around again she'll go like she always does when she's got
enough vittles cooked up for us men folks.  I'm a miserable, no-account
drunk, that's what I am, Billy Evans, and I ain't no proper person to
send on an errand to the Lord.  Why, church ain't for the likes of
me--it's--it's--"

But at this point language failed Hank entirely, and the enormity of
the proposed undertaking once more sweeping over him, Hank searched for
his bandanna and wiped the beads of cold sweat from around his mouth
and the back of his stringy neck.

Billy was silent.  He knew that Hank was right and that he had asked an
impossible service of his faithful helper.  Still there in the morning
sun glistened the green grove and through the holiness of the spring
morning tolled the old church bell.  So Billy rose and walked slowly
and a little sadly up the narrow path.  And Hank walked up with him.

It was in silence that they sat down to their late breakfast.  But in
the act of swallowing his tenth cornmeal pancake dripping with maple
syrup Hank had a sudden inspiration.  The misery in his face gave place
to a grim determination.

"Billy," he offered remorsefully, "I can't go to church for you, but
I'll tell you what I'll do.  I'll go to the dentist's and have these
bad teeth fixed that Doc and Mrs. Evans and you have been at me about.
Next to going to church that's the awfullest thing I know of and I'll
do it.  Doc says that bad teeth make a bad stomach and a bad stomach
makes a bad man and it may be so.  And as for that ten-dollar gold
piece, I don't see why you can't send that by Barney, same as you'd
send him to the bank for change or to Tony's to pay the gas bill.  When
I go back now I'll just send Barney along with it, and then I'll go see
Doc Mitchell and let him kill me with that there machine of his."

That's how it happened that a little thin hand caught Nanny Ainslee's
just as she was entering the church door and Barney of the spindle legs
begged frenziedly for assistance.

"Aw, Nan--look at this!" and he held out the gold piece.  "Billy Evans'
got a little baby down to his house and he's clean crazy.  Grandma
Wentworth's bossing the baby show and she says for you to take the
minister home to dinner.  And Billy's sent this here and wants me to
put it in the collection box and I don't dast.  Why, say, old man
Austin that passes the collection plate would have me pinched if he saw
me drop that in it.

"And, anyhow, I ain't been liked around here ever since last Christmas
when I got three boxes of candy by mistake.  And, gee--Nan, I don't
know what to do about it.  Billy Evans is the best man in this here
town and I'd do most anything for him, but he's such a good guy himself
he don't see that church ain't any place for a kid like me and that it
was a mistake to send me with this coin."

Nan's amazement gave way to sudden enlightenment.  She knew now why
Grandma Wentworth had not put in an appearance, and knowing Billy Evans
well, she instantly comprehended the situation.

"Barney, what in the world are you talking about, saying this church is
no place for you.  This is just the place for a boy who gets several
boxes of Christmas candy by mistake.  You come right along with me."

"Aw, Nan, why can't you drop it in for me?  I just ain't got the nerve.
I'd rather get all my teeth pulled like Hank is going to do.  Why, say,
Nan, just the sight of old Austin makes my hair curl.  I tell ya he
don't like me and I'll be pinched--"

But Nan had already drawn Billy's spindle-legged assistant inside and
as no man yet had been known to show anything but quiet pride when
escorting Nanny Ainslee, Barney straightened manfully and with an
outward serenity that amazed even himself he gracefully slid into a
seat, having first gallantly stepped aside to permit his gracious lady
to be seated.  And life being that morning especially a thing of tender
humor, they had no sooner settled themselves comfortably when Fanny
Foster, the last comer, sank down beside them, breathing heavily.

Fanny Foster was always late for church, not from any notion that a
late entrance was fashionable but because of some hitch in her domestic
affairs.  She always explained to the congregation afterward just what
had caused her delay and the congregation was always ready to listen to
her excuses, for they were as a rule highly original ones.

Fate was always sending Fanny the most thrilling experiences at the
most improper times.  The children were always falling into the cistern
or setting the barn afire as she was about to start out somewhere.  And
such things as buttonhooks and hairpins had a way of disappearing just
when she was in the greatest hurry.  Not that the lack of these toilet
necessities ever stopped Fanny from attending any town function.

If the buttonhook could not be found she set out with her shoes
unbuttoned, borrowing the necessary implement on the way.  If she had
no hairpins she put her hair up temporarily with two knitting needles
or lead pencils or anything like that that came handy, stopped at
Jessup's, bought her hairpins, and while reporting news in Mrs. Green's
kitchen did up her hair without the aid of brush, comb or mirror.

This trait Fanny came by naturally.  She had had a droll grandmother.
It was authentic history that once at the very moment when she was
getting ready to attend a Green Valley funeral this grandmother's false
teeth broke, leaving her somewhat dazed.  But only for a moment, for
she was a woman with a perfect memory.  She suddenly remembered that
the wife of the deceased had an old emergency set; so, slipping through
the back streets, she arrived at the house of grief, borrowed the new
widow's old teeth and wept as copiously and sincerely, albeit a little
carefully, over the remains as any one else there.

Now, scarcely waiting to regain her breath, Fanny turned to Nanny with
the usual explanations, only stopping to exclaim over Barney--"Land
sakes, Barney, what are you doing here!"  A breath and then in sibilant
whispers:

"Well--I thought I'd never get here.  When I come to dress I found the
children had cut up my corset into a harness for the dog and Jessup's
said they hadn't anybody to send up with a new one and John said he
couldn't go because his foot's bad, him having stepped on the rake
yesterday afternoon and not wanting to irritate it, so's he could go to
work tomorrow as usual.  And Grandma's up to Billy Evans' trying to
keep him from going crazy or I could have borrowed one of hers.  So I
'phoned Central to see if she couldn't hunt up somebody to bring me
that new corset from Jessup's.  Well, who does she get hold of but
Denny, just as he's going past with a telegram for Jocelyn Brownlee.
He brought the corset with the string gone and the box broken and asked
me to help him figure out what that telegram meant.  It said,

"'Coming better call it phyllis
      BOB.'


"There's few men that can write a proper letter.  We had to give it up.
And as if that wasn't enough, when I got to the creamery I met
Skinflint Holden and he told me there was a lot of disease amongst the
cattle and the men all got together and had a meeting and made Jake
Tuttle deputy marshal or something.  It's a wonder Jake wouldn't say
something.  I suppose he thinks the few old cows we have here in town
ain't worth saving.

"Well, anyhow, I was hurrying along so's not to be late and just as I
turned Tumley's hedge didn't Bessie come out with her face swollen so
she looked homelier than Theresa Meyer.  It seems she had a birthday
and Alex brought her a big box of chocolates and they give her the
toothache.  She went to Doc Mitchell but he put her off because he was
regulating and pulling every tooth in Hank Lolly's head.  She was just
sick to think she had to miss Lilac Sunday and Mr. Courtney's last
sermon, but she told me to be sure and listen and if he let on he was
sorry he was leaving not to believe him, because he's had everything
except the parlor furniture crated for a month.  They've been eating
off tin plates and drinking out of two enamel cups on the kitchen
table.  Bessie thinks that for a minister he's full of sin and
self-pride.  But I say even a minister--"

But at this point the hymn singing was over, the congregation settled
itself in comfortable attitudes, and the careful Mr. Courtney rose to
deliver his farewell sermon.

It was a sermon that stirred nobody.  Green Valley was as glad to see
the Reverend Courtney departing as he was to go.  His one cautious
reference to their pastorless state, for he did not know that Green
Valley had already selected its new minister, brought not a line of
worry to the faces turned so politely to the pulpit, for on Lilac
Sunday and to a farewell sermon Green Valley was ever polite.

Green Valley, listening, thought with relief of the Sundays ahead and
felt very much the way a hospitable housewife feels when an uncongenial
guest departs and the home springs back to its old cheery order and
family peace.

When the services were over Green Valley strolled out into the May
sunshine in twos and threes and stood about as always in little groups
to exchange the week's news.  Billy Evans' new happiness, the
ten-dollar gold piece and all its attending incidents were duly talked
over.  Under the horse chestnuts Max Longman was telling Colonel
Stratton how the day before Sam Ellis had at last leased the hotel to a
Chicago man.  It was reported that there was to be no new barber shop,
but that over on West Street a poolroom, also run by a city stranger,
was already doing business.  Several people had passed it that morning
on their way to church and all said it had a peculiar appearance.

"Looks like one of those woebegone city dens, with its green plush
curtains so you can't see what's going on inside.  All it needs is fly
specks on the windows and a strong smell at its side door.  That'll
come with time.  I hear you can play billiards and pool in there and
there's some slot machines for those too young to take a hand at cards."

So said Jake Tuttle, who now that he was a deputy sheriff on the watch
for diseases threatening his and his neighbors' cattle, suddenly
realized that there might be such a thing as a deputy sheriff to look
out for the physical and moral health of humans.

Green Valley listened to Max Longman's announcement and Jake's comment
and made up its mind to go around and see.  Sam Ellis' withdrawal from
business made Green Valley folks a little uneasy.  The hotel in other
hands might become a strange place.  For a moment an uncomfortable
feeling gripped those who heard.  Sam, an old friend and a neighbor,
with his genial good sense and old-fashioned hotel was one thing.  A
stranger from the big and wicked city was another.

Green Valley almost began to worry a bit.  But on the way home this
feeling wore off.  How could things change?  Why, there were the
Spencer boys taking turns at the ice-cream freezer on the back porch.
There was Ella Higgins coming out with a saucer of milk for her cat.
Downer's barn door was open and any one could see by the new buggy that
stood in it that Jack Downer's brother and family had driven in from
the farm for a Sunday dinner and visit.  Williamson's dog, Caesar, was
tied up,--a sure sign that Mel and Emmy had gone off to see Emmy's
folks over in Spring Road.  The chairs in Widow Green's orchard told
plainly that her sister's girls had come in from the city for the
week-end.  On the Fenton's front porch sat pretty Millie Fenton,
waiting to put a flower in Robbie Longman's buttonhole.  While
everybody knew that just next door homely Theresa Meyer was putting an
extra pan of fluffy soda biscuits into the oven as the best preparation
for _her_ beau.

So Green Valley looked and smiled and went joyously home to its
fragrant, old-fashioned Sunday dinner.  New elements might and would
come but this smiling town would absorb them, mellow them to its own
golden hue and go on its way living and rejoicing.

Cynthia's son went to dinner with the Ainslees.  He walked with Mr.
Ainslee while Nan and her brother went on ahead.  Nan was almost
noisily gay but no one seemed to be at all aware of it.

The dinner was delicious and went off without the least bit of
embarrassment.  At the table Nan was as suddenly still as she had been
noisily gay.  She let the men do the talking while she scrupulously
attended to their wants.  Once she forgot herself and while he was
talking studied the face of Cynthia's son.  Her father caught her at it
and smiled.  This made her flush and to even up matters she
deliberately put salt instead of sugar into her father's after-dinner
cup of coffee.  Whereupon he, tasting the salt, made an irrelevant
remark about handwriting on the wall.




CHAPTER IX

GREEN VALLEY MEN

Close on the heels of Lilac Sunday comes Decoration Day.  And nowhere
is it observed so thoroughly as in Green Valley.

The whole week preceding the day there is heard everywhere the whir of
sewing machines.  New dresses are feverishly cut and made; old ones
ripped and remade.  Hats are bought, old ones are retrimmed.  Buggies
are repainted and baby carriages oiled.  Dick does a thriving business
in lemons, picnic baskets, flags, peanuts and palm-leaf fans, these
being things that Jessup's chronically forget to carry, regarding them
as trifles and rather scornfully leaving them to Dick, who makes a
point of having on hand a very choice supply.

This fury of work gradually dies down, to be followed by such an
epidemic of baking that the old town smells like a sweet old bakery
shop with its doors and windows wide open.  There is then every evening
a careful survey of the flower beds in the garden, a rigid economy of
blossoms and even much skilful forcing of belated favorites.

The last day is generally given over to hat buying, the purchasing of
the last forgotten fixings and clothes inspections.  From one end of
the town to the other clotheslines, dining-room chairs, porch rockers
and upstairs bedrooms are overflowing with silk foulards, frilled
dimities, beribboned and belaced organdies, not to mention the billows
of dotted swiss and muslin.

On short clotheslines, stretched across corners of back and side
porches or in the tree-shaded nooks of back yards, may be seen hanging
the holiday garments of Green Valley men.  But what most catches the
eye are the old suits of army blue flapping gently in the spring breeze
with here and there a brass button glinting.  There are a surprising
number of these suits of army blue just as there are a surprising
number of graves in the little Green Valley cemetery over which, the
long year through, flutters the small flag set there by loving hands
each Decoration Day.

There are all manner of cleaning operations going on in full view of
anybody and everybody who might be interested enough to look.  For
there is no streak of mean secretiveness in Green Valley folks.

This is the one time in the year when Widow Green takes off and "does
up" the yellow silk tidy that drapes the upper right-hand corner of her
deceased husband's portrait which stands on an easel in the darkest
corner of her parlor.  This little service is not the tender attention
of a loving and grieving wife for a sadly missed husband but rather a
patriotic woman's tribute to a man, who, worthless and cruel as a
husband, had yet been a gallant and an honorable soldier.

As the widow sits on the back steps carefully washing the tidy in a
hand basin and with a bar of special soap highly recommended by Dick,
she looks over into the next yard and calls to Jimmy Rand and asks him
whether he's going to march with the rest of the school children and
will there be anything special on the programme this year.  And he
tells her sure he's going to march.  Ain't he got a new pair of pants,
a blouse, a navy blue tie and a new stickpin?  And as for the
programme, he warns her to watch out "fur us kids because we're going
to be fixed up for something, but I dassent tell because it's a
surprise the teachers got up."

This is the one day in the year when Jimmy Rand polishes his
grandfather's shoes with scrupulous care and without demanding the
usual nickel.  He takes his payment in watching the blue army suit
swaying on the line under the tall poplars and in hearing the crowds on
Decoration Day shout themselves hoarse for old Major Rand.

It is the one time too when Old Skinflint Holden gets from his fellow
citizens and neighbors a certain grave respect, for they all know that
on the morrow among the men in blue will be this same Old Skinflint
Holden with a medal on his breast.

Though every preparation has seemingly been made days ago, still that
last night before the event is the very busiest time of all.

Joe Baldwin's little shop is crowded.  Jake Tuttle is there with the
four children, buying them the fanciest of footgear for the morrow.
The two Miller boys, who work in the creamery until nine every night
but have special leave this day to purchase holiday necessities, are
standing awkwardly near Joe's side door and waiting patiently for
Frankie Stevens and Dora Langely, better known as "Central," to depart
with their black velvet slippers, before making any effort to have Joe
try his wares on their awkward feet.  Little Johnny Peterson comes in
to inquire if Joe has sewed the buttons on his, Johnny's, shoes, and
Martha Gray has a hard time trying to decide which of two pairs of
moccasins are most becoming to her youngest baby.  Any number of youths
are hanging about waiting for Joe to get around to selling them a box
of his best shoe polish and some, getting impatient, wait on
themselves.  Joe, with his spectacles pushed up into his hair, is
rushing around from customer to customer and through it all is dimly
conscious of the fact that outside under the awning Dolly Beatty is
waiting anxiously for the men folks to get out before she ventures in
to buy her Joe's special brand of corn salve and bunion plaster.

And so it is all the way down Main Street.  In the gents' furnishings'
corner of Peter Sweeney's dry-goods store Seth Curtis is buying a new
hat, a little jaunty hat that seems to fit his head well enough but
doesn't somehow become the rest of him.  Seth looks best in a cap and
always wears one except, of course, on such state occasions as the
coming one.  He asks the Longman boys how he looks in the brown fedora
Pete has just put on his head and Max Longman laughs and wants to know
what difference it makes how a married man with a bald spot looks.
Then he turns away to pick out carefully the kind of tie that will make
him most pleasing in Clara's sight on the morrow.

In the ladies' department of that same store Jocelyn Brownlee is asking
for long, white silk gloves.  A little hush falls on the crowd of
feminine shoppers as Mrs. Pete gets the stepladder, mounts it and
brings down with a good deal of visible pride a pasteboard box
containing six pairs of white silk gloves that Pete bought three years
ago in a moment of incomprehensible madness, a thing which Mrs. Pete
has never until this minute forgiven him.

Jocelyn, pretty, eager, unaffected, selects the very first pair and is
wholly unconscious of the stir she has made.  It is only when David
Allan comes up and asks her if she is ready that she becomes confused
and conscious of the watching eyes of the other buyers.

She has promised to go to the Decoration Day exercises with David and
has hurried to buy gloves for the occasion not knowing, in her city
innocence, that gloves aren't the style in Green Valley, leastways not
for any outdoor festival.

David watches the gloves being wrapped up and that reminds him that it
wouldn't hurt to buy a new buggy whip, one of the smart ones with the
bit of red, white and blue ribbon on its tip that he saw standing in
Dick's window.

So he and Jocelyn go off together to get the whip.  It is the first
time that Jocelyn has been out in the village streets after nightfall
and she looks about her with eager eyes.

"My--how pretty the streets look and sound!  It's ever so much prettier
than village street scenes on the stage!" she confides to David.  And
David laughs and takes her over to Martin's for a soda and then,
because it is still early, he coaxes her to walk about town with him
and as a final treat they stop in front of Mary Langely's millinery
shop.

Mary Langely's shop stands right back of Joe Baldwin's place on the
next street.  Mary is a widow with two girls.  Dora is the Green Valley
telephone operator and Nellie is typist and office girl for old Mr.
Dunn who is Green Valley's best real estate and lawyer man.  He sells
lots, now and then a house, writes insurance and draws up wills,
collects bills or rather coaxes careless neighbors to settle their
accounts, and he absolutely does not believe in divorce or woman
suffrage.  These two matters stir the gentle little man to great wrath.
His wife is even a gentler soul than he is.  She is the eldest of the
Tumleys, sister of George Hoskins' wife and to Joe Tumley, the little
man with a voice as sweet as a skylark's.

You go to Mr. Dunn's office through a little low gate and you find an
old, deep-eaved, gambrel-roofed house with a hundred little window
panes smiling at you from out its mantle of ivy.  You love it at once
but you don't go in right away, because the great old trees won't let
you.  You go and stand under them and wonder how old they are and lay
your hand caressingly on the fine old trunks.  And then you see the
myrtle and violets growing beneath them and near the house clumps of
daisies and forget-me-nots.  And then you spy the beehives and the
quaint old well and you walk through the cool grape arbor right into
the little kitchen, where Mrs. Dunn, as likely as not, is making a
cherry pie or currant jell or maybe a strawberry shortcake.  She is a
delicious and an old-fashioned cook.  Why, she even keeps a giant
ten-gallon cooky jar forever filled with cookies, although there are
now no children in this sweet old manse.  Nobody now but Nellie Langely
who goes home every night to the millinery shop where she helps her
mother make and sell the bonnets that have made Mary Langely famous in
all the country round.

Green Valley folks have never quite gotten over wondering about Mary
Langely.  When Tom Langely was alive Mary was a self-effacing, oddly
silent woman.  People said she and Tom were a queer pair.  Tom had
great ambitions in almost every direction.  He even made brave
beginnings.  But that was all.  Then one day, in the midst of all
manner of ambitious enterprises, he grew tired of living and died.  And
then it was that Mary Langely rose from obscurity and made Green Valley
rub its eyes.  For within a week after Tom's death she had gathered
together all the loose ends of things that he had started, clapped a
frame second story on the imposing red brick first floor of the house
Tom had begun, converted this first floor into a store, and inside of a
month was selling hats to women who hadn't until then realized they
needed a hat.

There were more electric bulbs and mirrors in Mary's shop than in any
three houses in Green Valley.  That was why it was always the gayest
spot in town on the night preceding any holiday.

It was interesting and pleasant to watch through the brightly lighted
windows and the wide double glass doors the women trying on the gay
creations and hovering over the heaps of flowers and glittering
ornaments heaped upon the counters.

Jocelyn and David stood in the soft shadow of an old elm and while they
watched David explained the customers going in and coming out.  He told
her that the tall straight woman buying the spray of purple lilacs for
her last year's hat was the Widow Green.  The short, waddly woman
trying on the wide hat with the pink roses was Bessie Williams.  The
tall girl with the pretty braids wound round her head was Bonnie Don,
big Steve Meckling's sweetheart.  Steve, David explained, was so
foolishly in love that he was ready to commit murder if another lad so
much as looked at Bonnie.

The tall quiet man buying hats and ribbons for his girls was John
Foster.  And the little bow-legged one, with the hard hat two sizes too
big, was Hen Tomlins who always went shopping with his wife.

So Green Valley made its purchases and hastened home to pack its lunch
basket and lay out all its clothes on the spare-room bed.  Even as
David and Jocelyn walked home through the laughing streets, lights were
being winked out in the lower living rooms only to flash out somewhere
up-stairs where the family was wisely going to bed early.  No one even
glanced at the sky, for it was taken for granted that Green Valley
skies would do their very best, as a matter of course.


When the last star began to fade and the first little breath of a new
morning ruffled the soft gray silence a sudden sharp volley rang out.
It was the Green Valley boys setting off cannon crackers in front of
the bank.  And it must be said right here that that first signal volley
was about all the fireworks ever indulged in in Green Valley.  This
little town, nestling in the peaceful shelter of gentle hills and
softly singing woods, naturally disliked harsh, ugly sounds and was
moreover far too thrifty, too practical and sane a community to put
firearms and flaming death into the hands of its children.  Green
Valley patriotism was of a higher order.

At that sharp volley Green Valley awoke with a start and a laugh and
ran to put flags on its gateposts and porch pillars and loop bunting
around its windows.  And when the morning broke like a great pink rose
and shed its rosy light over the dimpling hills and lacy, misty
woodlands the old town was a-flutter with banners, everybody was about
through with breakfast and certain childless and highly efficient
ladies were already taking their front and side hair out of curl papers.

At eight o'clock sharp the school bell summoned the children.  Then a
little later the church bell summoned the veterans.  And by nine the
procession was marching down Maple Street, flags waving, band playing
and every face aglow.

First came the little tots all in white, the boy babies bearing little
flags and the girl babies little baskets of flowers, with little
Eleanor Williams carrying in her tiny hands a silken banner on which
Bessie Williams, her mother, had beautifully embroidered a dove and the
lovely word, "Peace."

Then came the older children, a whole corps it seemed of Red Cross
nurses, followed by a regiment of merry sailor boys.  There were
cowboys and Boy Scouts, boys in overalls and brownies.  There were
girls in liberty caps, crinolines and sunbonnets.

So grade after grade Green Valley's children came, a proud and happy
escort for the men in blue who followed.  Nanny Ainslee's father led
the veterans, sitting his horse right gallantly.  Nanny and her father
were both riding and so was Doc Philipps.

There were plenty of people on horseback but most of the town marched,
even The Ladies Aid Society, every member wearing her badge and new hat
with conscious pride and turning her head continually to look at the
children, as the head of the procession turned corners.  The young
married women with babies rode in buggies, from every one of whose
bulging sides flags drooped and fat baby legs and picnic baskets
protruded.

Everything went smoothly, joyously along, though a few incidents in
various parts of the procession caused smiles, gusts of laughter and
even alarm.

Jimmy Rand had a few anxious moments when the four fat puppies he
thought he had shut safely into the barn came yelping and tumbling
joyously into the very heart of the marching crowds.

Jim Tumley was down on the day's programme for several numbers.  But as
the line swung around the hotel and the spring winds stained with the
odors of liquor swept temptingly over him he half started to step out
of line.  But Frank Burton guessed his trouble and ordered Martin's
clerk, Eddie, to bring the little chap an extra large and fine soda
instead.

Mrs. Hen Tomlins upset things by ordering Hen back home to change his
shirt.  It seems that Hen had deliberately put on a shirt with a soft
collar and in the excitement of getting under way and trying to
remember which way her new hat was supposed to set Mrs. Hen had failed
to notice the crime until, her fears set at rest by Mary Langeley, she
turned around to see if Hen looked all right.

Uncle Tony was in a great state of excitement.  He was continually
leaving his place in The Business Men's Association to have a look from
the side lines at the imposing spectacle.

Here and there mothers close enough to their offspring were suggesting
a more frequent use of handkerchiefs and calling attention to
traitorous garters and wrinkled stockings.  Tommy Downey had forgotten
what his mother had told him about being sure to put his ears inside
his cap and those two appendages, burned and already blistered by the
hot May sun, stood out in solemn grandeur from his small, round,
grinning face.  The school teachers were keeping anxious eyes on their
particular broods and insisting that the eager feet keep solemn step to
the music.

Sam Ellis' new greenhorn hired girl, Francy, was sitting in the back
seat of the buggy, holding down the brimming baskets and leaning out as
far as possible so as not to miss anything that might happen at either
end as well as the middle of the procession.  She had been utterly
unable to pin on her first American hat with hatpins, so had wisely
tied it to her head with a large red-bordered handkerchief which she
had brought over from the old country.

Jocelyn Brownlee, sitting beside David in his smart rig, had begged him
to go last so that she could see everything.  This was her first
country festival and no child in that throng was so happily, wildly
eager to drain the day to the very last drop of enjoyment.

Jocelyn and David however did not end the procession.  Behind them,
though quite a way back, was Uncle Tony's brother William.  William was
driving his span of grays so slowly that the pretty creatures tossed
their heads restlessly, impatiently, lonely for the companionship of
the gay throng ahead.

But though their owner knew what they wanted he held them back sternly.
But he looked as wistfully as they at the fluttering flags and listened
as keenly to the puffs of music that the wind dashed into his face
every now and then.

Every Decoration Day Uncle Tony's brother William rode just so, slowly
and alone at the end of the gay procession.  On that day he was a
lonely and tragic figure.  Loved and respected every other day in the
year, on this he was shunned.  For he was the only man in all Green
Valley who, when conscripted, would not go to the war but sent a
substitute, one Bob Saunders.

Bob was killed at Gettysburg and nobody mourned him, not even his very
own sister though Green Valley was duly proud of the way he died.  Only
on this one day did Green Valley remember the man whose death was the
one and only worth while deed of a misspent life.  But on this one day
too Green Valley shunned the man who sent him to his death.

So every Decoration Day William came alone to put a wreath on Bob's
grave and watch the exercises from a distance.  When it was over he
went home--alone.  And Green Valley let him do it year after year.

He was never known to murmur at Green Valley's annual censure nor did
he ever seem to hope for forgiveness.  Green Valley had asked him once
why he had done it and he said that he would have been worthless as a
soldier because he did not believe in killing people and was himself
horribly afraid of being butchered.

Green Valley was appalled at this terrible confession, at the absence
in one of its sons of even the common garden variety of courage.  It
did its best for a while to despise William.  But it is hard work
despising an honest, quiet, just and lovable man.  So gradually William
was allowed to come home into Green Valley's life.  And it was only on
this one holiday that he was an outcast.  Neither did any one ever
remind William's children of what years ago their father had done.  But
of course they knew.  Their father had told them himself.  They were in
no way cast down.  They were all girls who loved their father and did
not believe in war.

In that fashion then, and in that order, Green Valley marched down Main
Street, up Grove, through lovely Maple and very slowly down Orchard
Avenue so that Jeremy Collins, who was bedridden because of a bullet
wound suffered at Shiloh, could see his old comrades with whom he could
no longer march.

All the way down Park Lane the band played its very best and loudest as
if calling from afar to those comrades who lay sleeping beneath the
pines and oaks of the little cemetery.  And just as the Green Valley
folks came in sight of the white headstones the Spring Road procession
came tramping over the old bridge, and Elmwood, with its flags and
band, was coming up the new South Road.  The three towns met nicely at
the very gates of the cemetery and together made the sort of sound and
presented the sort of sight that lingers in the heart long after other
things have faded from one's memory.

Then the bands grew still and there was quiet, a quiet that every
minute grew deeper so that the noisiest youngster grew round-eyed and
the fat sleek horses moved never a hoof.  And then, sweet and soft
through the waiting, hushed air, came the notes of Major Rand's cornet.
He was playing for his comrades as he had played at Shiloh, at
Chickamauga and many another place in the Southland.  He played all
their old favorites and then very, very softly the cornet wailed--"We
are tenting to-night on the old camp ground"--and somewhere beside it
little Jim Tumley began to sing.

From the high blue sky and the softly stirring tree-tops the words seem
to drop into little hearts and big hearts and the sweet, melting
sadness of them misted the eyes.  When the last feathery echo had died
away the men in blue passed two by two through the cemetery gate.
Reverend Campbell, who had been their chaplain, said a short prayer.
At its end the children, with their arms full of flowers, crowded up
and the men in blue stopped at every grave.  The little boys planted
their flags at the head and the little girls scattered the blossoms
deep.

From beyond the gates Green Valley and Spring Road and Elmwood watched
its heroes and its children.  In David Allan's smart rig sat a little
city girl, her face crumpled and stained like a rain-beaten rose.  She
was saying to no one in particular, "Oh--my daddy was a soldier too but
I know that he never had a Decoration Day like this."

The bands played again and each class went through its number on the
programme with grace and only a very few noticeable blunders.  Tommy
Downey, ears rampant, a tooth missing and a face radiant with joy and
absolute self-confidence, mounted the bunting and flag-draped stage and
in a booming voice wholly out of proportion to his midget dimensions
and in ten dashing verses assured those assembled that the man who wore
the shoulder straps was a fine enough fellow to be sure, but that it
was after all the man without them who had to win the day.

The old country roads rippled with applause and Tommy's mother,
forgetting for once Tommy's funny ears which were her greatest source
of grief, drew the funny little body close and explained to admiring
bystanders that Tommy "took" after one of her great-uncles, a soul much
given to speech making.

So number after number went off and then there came the speech of the
day.  It had been decided at the last moment that Doc Philipps must
make this, because the specially ordered and greatly renowned speaker,
one Daniel Morton from down Brunesville way, had at the last moment and
at his ridiculous age contracted measles.

Now Green Valley knew how Doc Philipps hated to talk about almost
everything except trees.  But Green Valley also knew that Doc could
talk about most anything if he was so minded.  He was, moreover, as
well known and loved in Spring Road and Elmwood as he was in his own
town.  So Green Valley folks leaned back, certain that this speech
would be worth hearing.

The bulky figure in army blue stepped to the edge of the platform and
for a silent minute towered above his neighbors like one of the great
trees he so loved.  Then, without warning or preface, he began to talk
to them.

"War is pretty--when the uniforms are new and the band is playing.  War
is glorious to read about and talk about--when it's all over

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