Friendship Village. Gale Zona

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СКАЧАТЬ he laid the book back in his bag, the train was jolting across the switches beside the gas house, and the lights of Friendship were all about the track.

      "Why don't you get off?" he reiterated, in his tone a descending scale of simple hospitality. "Come to our house and stop a spell. Come for tea," he added; "I happen to know we're goin' to hev hot griddle-cakes an' sausage gravy."

      She shook her head sharply and in silence.

      Doctor June stood for a moment meditatively looking down at her.

      "There's a friend of yours at our house to-day, for all day," he observed.

      "I ain't any friends," replied the girl, obstinately, "without you mean use' to be. An' I don't know if I had then, either."

      "Yes. Yes, you have, Delia," said Doctor June, kindly. "He was asking about you last time he was here – kind of indirect."

      "Who?" she demanded, but it was as if something within her wrung the question from her against her will.

      "Abel Halsey," Doctor June told her, "Abel Halsey. Remember him?"

      Instead of answering she looked out the window at the Friendship Depot platform, and: —

      "Ain't he a big minister in the City?" I barely heard her ask.

      "No," said Doctor June; "dear me, no. Abel's still gypsyin' it off in the hills. I expect he's out there by the depot with the busses now, come to meet me in his buggy. Better let him take us all home to griddle-cakes, Delia?" he pressed her wistfully.

      "I couldn't," she said briefly. And, as he put out his hand silently, "Don't you let anybody know't you saw me!" she charged him again.

      When he was gone, and the train was slackening in the station, she moved close to the window. If I had been lonely… I must have caught a certain cheer in the look of the station and in the magnificent, cosmic leisure of the idlers: in Photographer Jimmy Sturgis, in his leather coat, with one eye shut, stamping a foot and waiting for the mail-bag; in old Tillie, known up and down the world for her waffles, and perpetually peering out between shelves of plants and wax fruit set across the window of the "eating-house"; in Peleg Bemus, wood-cutter, stumping about the platform on his wooden leg, wearing modestly the prestige he had won by his flute-playing and by his advantage of New York experience – "a janitor in the far east, he was," Timothy Toplady had once told me; in Timothy Toplady himself, who always meets the trains, but for no reason unless to say an amazed and reproachful – "Blisterin' Benson! not a soul wants off here"; and in Abel Halsey, that itinerant preacher, of whom Doctor June had spoken. Abel was a man of grace, Bible-taught, passioning for service, but within him his gentle soul burned to travel, and his white horse, Major Mary, and his road wagon and his route to the door of many a country church were the sole satisfactions of his wanderlust; and next to these was his delight to be at a railway station when any train arrived, savouring the moment of some silent familiarity with distance. I delighted in them all, and that night, as I looked, I wondered how it would seem to me if I were returning to it after many years; and I could imagine how my heart would ache.

      As the train moved on, the girl whom Doctor June had called Delia More turned her head, manifestly to follow for a little way each vanishing light and figure; and as the conductor came through the car and she spoke to him, I saw that she was in a tingle of excitement.

      "You sure," she asked, "that you stop to the canal draw?"

      "Uh?" said the conductor, and when he comprehended, "Every time," he said, "every time. You be ready when she whistles." He hesitated, manifestly in some curiosity. "They ain't a house in a mile f'om there, though," he told her.

      "I know that," she gave back crisply.

      When I heard her speaking of the canal draw, I found myself wondering; for a woman is not above wonder. There, where the trains stopped just perceptibly I myself was wont to leave them for the sake of the mile walk on the quiet highroad to my house. That, too, though it chanced to be night, for I am not afraid. But I wondered the more because other women do fear, and also because mine was the only house between the canal draw and Friendship Village; and manifestly the shortest way to reach the village would have been to alight at the station. But I held my peace, for the affairs of others should be to those others an efficient disguise; and moreover, the greater part of one's wonder is wont to come to naught.

      Yet, as I seemed to follow this woman out upon the snow and the train kept impersonally on across the meadows, I could not but see that her bags were many and looked heavy, and twice she set them down to rearrange. I think a ghost of the road could have done no less than ask to help her. And I did this with an abruptness of which I am unwilling master, though indeed I had no need to assume impatience, for I saw that my quiet walk was spoiled.

      When I spoke to her, she started and shrank away; but there was an austerity in the lonely white road and in the country silence which must have chilled a woman like her; and her bags were many and seemed heavy.

      "Much obliged to you," she said indistinctly. "I'd just as li've you should take the basket, if you want."

      So I lifted the basket and trudged beside her, hoping very much that she would not talk. For though for my own comfort I would walk far to avoid treading on a nest, or a worm, or a magenta flower (and I loathe magenta), yet I am often blameful enough to wound through the sheerest bungling those who talk to me when I would rather be silent.

      The night was one clinging to the way of Autumn, and as yet with no Winter hinting. The air was mild and dry, and the sky was starry. I am not ashamed that on a quiet highroad on a starry night I love to be silent, and even to forget concerns of my own which seem pressing in the publicity of the sun; but I am ashamed, I own, to have been called to myself that night by a little choking breath of haste.

      "I can't go – so fast," my companion said humbly; "you might jest – set the basket down anywheres. I can – "

      But I think that she can hardly have heard my apology, for she stood where she had halted, staring away from me. We were opposite the cemetery lying in its fence of field stone and whitewashed rails.

      "O my soul, my soul!" I heard her say. "I'd forgot the graveyard, or I couldn't never 'a' come this way."

      At that she went on, her feet quickening, as I thought, without her will; and she kept her face turned to me, so that it should be away from that whitewashed fence. And now because of the wound she had shown me, I walked a little apart in the middle of the road for my attempt at sympathy. So we came to the summit of the hill, and there the dark suddenly yielded up the distance. The lamps of the village began to signal, lights dotted the fields and gathered in a cosey blur in the valley, and half a mile to westward the headlight that marked the big Toplady barn and the little Toplady house shone out as if some one over there were saying something.

      "You live here in Friendship?" the girl demanded abruptly.

      I could show her my house a little way before us.

      "Ever go inside the graveyard?" she asked.

      Sometimes I do go there, and at that answer she walked nearer to me and spoke eagerly.

      "Air all the tombstones standin' up straight, do you know?" she said. "Hev any o' their headstones fell down on 'em?"

      This I could answer too, definitely enough; for Friendship Cemetery, by the vigilance of the Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality, is kept in no less scrupulous order than the Friendship parlours.

      "Well, that's a relief," she said; "I couldn't get it СКАЧАТЬ