Chapter XXXI: The Hundredth Anniversary

IT may not possess any interest to the reader, but I feel that
we have been together so long (if he has not skipped) that he
_will_ be interested to know that early in September an editor
in New York wrote me, saying that he would take a long story of
mine at such a figure that—well, our summer outing was more than
paid for and on receipt of the check I stopped keeping a hotel
and insisted on my “guests” becoming guests—a distinction with a
wide difference.

Golden rod was yellowing the lanes and fields and roads, and
here and there purple asters were foretelling the approach of
winter. The nights were getting chilly and providing an
excellent excuse for pine knot wood fires, around which we all
gathered and told stories or listened to Cherry’s piano music or
to heated but amicable art discussions on the part of the three
brushmen.

Two goal points beckoned us to the future; one of them the
centennial anniversary of good old Mrs. Hartlett, the other the
cattle show at Oakham.

The former would fall on September 16th; the latter on October
3rd, and the day after the cattle show our happy household would
break up. We expected to go down with the rest and open up our
flat and we regretted the necessity of doing so, as the time
approached.

We had grown to love the country in all its moods and I felt
sure that in winter also we would find it full of the stimulus
of life, but even with James for a companion, we knew that
Minerva would not outstay the first snow storm, and since his
situation with the liveryman now only awaited my announcement
and his acceptance of it, we were going to count the winter in
New York as simply so many days of anticipation of the next
summer’s joys with perhaps the same crowd of congenial people,
and it might be two of them keeping house in a new bungalow.

After all, Hepburn was better fitted than Sibthorp to make a
husband for Cherry. She was a girl with luxurious tastes and the
very fact that she could live our simple life and be happy
argued that she would make an ideal helpmate for the man who had
been born with a diamond encrusted spoon in his mouth.

Mrs. Warden thought that Billy also was smitten, but if so
Cherry did not know it.

The centenary of Mrs. Hartlett fell on a perfect day. The
morning broke, cool and cloudless and a brisk west wind policed
the air all day and kept it free from disorderly elements.

At three o’clock we all went over to her house on foot. Sibthorp
and the artists had ransacked a greenhouse at Egerton and were
loaded down with roses: Hepburn had been fortunate enough to buy
a century plant in bloom and the rest of us bore other
offerings.

On the little lawn in front of her house sat Mrs. Hartlett on a
stiff-backed chair that had belonged to her grandfather. She was
alert and smiling and actually rosy. Her hundred year old eyes
sparkled with animation and she was just as proud of having
achieved a century as any wheelman ever was.

There were at the lowest estimate two hundred people gathered on
the lawn about the old lady, and I’ll venture to say that not
five of them were there out of idle curiosity. There were
Minerva and James and the president of the Egerton National
Bank, and the pastors of three churches of different protestant
denominations and a comparatively newly arrived Hungarian
family, to whom Mrs. Hartlett had been “neighbourly,” and Father
Hogan and the Guernseas and the man whose pipe I had returned.
(He had brought Mrs. Hartlett a peach pit basket, which he had
whittled himself and which gave her great joy, as she said it
was exactly like one that her brother had given her in 1812).

But to go back to the guests. Such a heterogeneous collection of
people one does not often see, and yet they all had one common
object; to render homage to a woman who, for a century, had
breathed a spirit of kindliness and tolerance that was American
in the best sense. Yankee farmer, Hungarian immigrant, Pat
Casey—who was there, alert and smiling—all were the better for
Mrs. Hartlett’s having lived so long a life, and each one felt
it in his own way.

And almost every one present had brought a gift. In some
instances they were trifling affairs—like the peach pit
basket—but the kindly spirit of giving was there, and I doubt
not that Mrs. Hartlett valued the little carving for the sake of
the associations it brought up full as well as she did the
handsome antique chair that the Guernseas gave her.

One of the last arrivals was a man who had walked many miles to
visit her on her birthday. He drew after him a toy express
wagon.

He was patriarchal in appearance, with a long white beard and
eyes more shrewd than kindly, and yet it was a kindly spirit
that had drawn him ten miles out of his accustomed itinerary
that he might pay his respects to the woman who had never bought
a single one of his wares, but who had always given him a
pleasant salutation and had more than once invited him to come
in and partake of berries and milk, or, if it was wintertime, to
have a cup of coffee and fortify himself against the elements.

It was Isidor Pohalski, an old man about thirty years Mrs.
Hartlett’s junior, a peddler by occupation, who in summer drew
his wares around the country on a little express wagon and in
winter drew them on a boy’s sled. (So they told me.)

He had brought a present too, a bertha of Belgian lace, and when
I saw him and Father Hogan and Rev. Mr. Hughson and the bank
president and the artists so near together it gave me a kind of
lion and lamb feeling that smacked of the millennium.

“Do you mean it for me?” asked Mrs. Hartlett, recognising the
beautiful lace.

Isidor nodded, saying nothing. His English was for but one at a
time. In a crowd he was reduced to signs.

“Much thanks. Much thanks,” said Mrs. Hartlett, quaintly, being
one of those who talk to a foreigner with special idioms. She
held out her hand and shook his and said,

“You stay for lemonade? Yes?”

The Hebrew nodded and smiled and stayed.

There was one surprise connected with the very informal
exercises of the afternoon and that was the gift by Mrs. Hughson
on behalf of the people generally of a rouleau made up of one
hundred gold dollars.

“May your pathway to heaven be paved wid ’em,” said the
irrepressible Pat, stepping up and shaking hands with her.

“Thank you, sir,” said she, and Pat walked off with his head in
the air and brimming over with good feeling—and suppressed
oaths.

“Won’t you sing your song, Mrs. Hartlett?” asked Cherry.

“I’m afraid I’m not in very good voice to-day,” said the old
lady with an exaggerated simper and then she hastened to say,
“That’s what people used to say when I was a girl. There was
much more singing then than there is now, but it was always
considered right to apologise for one’s voice.”

She cleared her throat and then she turned to the doctor, who
sat near her, and said, “I wanted to dance, to-day, but Dr.
Ludlow says that at my age the less I dance the better for my
health—and I dare say he is right.”

She looked at the doctor, her eyes twinkling, and then she sang
a strange old song that I had never heard before. It was sung to
a quaint air that might have been by Purcell and that told of
what befell the daughters of a king who lived up in the “North
countree:”

“‘The king lived up in the North Countree
“‘Bow down downaday
“‘The king lived up in the North Countree
“‘The bough that bends to me
“‘The king lived up in the North Countree
“‘And he had daughters, one, two, three—
“‘I’ll prove true to my love,
“‘If my love proves true to me.’”

It was a melodramatic song and told of the death by drowning of
the youngest of the three daughters, and the phraseology was so
queer that it might easily have become comic; but the old lady
sang it with such simplicity; her voice, in spite of its
quavers, was so true and still bore such evidence of the silvery
quality that it had once contained, that my three artist friends
afterwards acknowledged that the song gave them a choky feeling
in the throat.

Sibthorp told them that one did not need to be an artist to have
choky feelings.

At the song’s conclusion Pat Casey turned to the Rev. Mr.
Hughson, by whose side he was standing, and said,

“She’s a dam good woman—glory be to God.”

Cherry had made some sort of lace arrangement for the hair,
three cornered and arabesque, and when Mrs. Hartlett had
finished singing she crowned her with it.

It wasn’t particularly becoming, but when I said so Ethel said I
was horrid.

Just after the singing I saw Minerva whisper something to James,
and the two went off. At the time I supposed that she had gotten
tired of standing around among white folks, with nothing to do,
and in a measure I had guessed right, but I was not prepared for
what followed.

The windows of Mrs. Hartlett’s parlour were open; it had been
her intention to hold her reception in the house until she saw
that it would be impossible with such an out-pouring of
neighbours and friends.

Suddenly from out the open windows came the sound of melodious
voices—negro voices singing one of the most plaintive of the
darkey melodies: “Steal Away to Jesus.”

Our proposed concert at Egerton had fallen through, owing to
various reasons. We had made it all right with Deacon Fotherby
by sending him the goodly amount of a collection taken up one
evening among the Clover Lodgers.

But when I heard the music and recognized that there were four
voices concerned in it I realized that the concert had merely
been changed in point of time and place and that we were now
listening to it, and that it was one of Minerva’s sudden
inspirations. She had come to Mrs. Hartlett’s with no gift and
the generous-hearted girl had proposed that she and James and
the others give the only thing in their power to give.

The effect was strangely beautiful. The voices were softened
just a little; they were in perfect accord and the four sang
with the sincerity of feeling that negroes always throw into
their songs, whether grave or gay.

“It’s Minerva’s present to you, dear,” said Cherry, leaning over
and patting Mrs. Hartlett’s hand.

“Niggers can _sing_, annyway,” was Pat’s Irish comment.

I think everyone present felt that he or she had some part in
the concert. It was what they all would have done if they had
been able, and as we listened to song after song, some
“spirituals,” some full of laughter, and saw the rapt expression
on the face of Mrs. Hartlett, we felt that the “century” was
being crowned felicitously through the happy idea of an ignorant
girl, whose heart was in the right place.

The thing that made Minerva a joy forever was that her heart
_was_ in the right place.

Perhaps that is why James had found it so easily.

* * * * *

When we went home at sunset from the old lady’s house Cherry
walked by her old-time playmate, Billy, and it struck me that he
might be thinking of becoming a rival to Sibthorp and Hepburn.

“It’s cruel in Cherry to let that young man walk with her,” said
I to Ethel.

“Oh, I don’t believe that he has ever thought of Cherry except
as an old friend,” said she.

“Well, if Cherry lets him walk with her much he will begin to
think Cherry is catching.”

“But she’s already caught,” said Ethel.

And we could hear Hepburn at that very moment singing a little
thing that Cherry was very fond of playing.

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