Odd, or even?

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Book .W To 1 1 0 Gopght N^ .. 3

COPVRIGHT DEPOSIT.

Chapter I. Between

“ Middle-class ! I ’ve no patience ! ” said Miss Ammah, with her nose nearly horizontal. “We’re all middle-class. We’re all between somebody and somebody else. But you need n’t be middling. It’s only middling that’s mean, anywhere.”

“ And yet, Miss Ammah, your grocer’s ftimily — ”

“ Grocer 1 What ’s a grocer ] Look in your Webster. Your father ’s a grocer.”

“ Why, Miss Ammah ! Papa sells cargoes,"

Miss Ammah was great on etymologies. “ What his vessels are charged with, that is 1 ”

“ Of course — I suppose so.” Tjie two first words came at once, the last three dubiously and slower ; as if the girl, between her periods, mistrusted that she might be jumping into a trap.

“ And Mr. Raxley sells what his warehouse is charged with. Where ’s the difference ? ”

Euphemia spoke now. It had been Helen before.

“ Papa studies the world,” she said proudly. “ He brings things over the seas. The other man takes what he brings and sells it over a counter.”

“The other man studies his neighborhood and what his neighbors want ; but you have reason, Euphemia. Only they both stand between ; that is what I said. And it is a round and round. Nobody is actually bottom and nobody is actually top, any more than they are on the globe.”

“ And yet there is a top and a bottom and a between to everything that exists on the globe,” said Frances, — “ society.

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schools, families. I know, for I ’m a between ; and that ’s why nobody settles or thinks where I ’in to go this summer. Phemie and Helen have got invitations, — they always have, — and the little ones are to go with mamma ; but I ’m skipped, so far. I suppose I shall be perceived and picked up, somehow, in the packing, as other odds and ends are. Not that I ’m an end,” she corrected herself, saving her unities of speech, “ only an odd, — number five, tucked in at the middle.”

Nobody minded Frances and her queer sayings. She was always an odd, as she declared.

“ This doesn’t settle the calling,” said Euphemia. “ I don’t know why we should worry to return a visit that was altogether accidental, any way, when we can’t keep up the acquaintance, and there are loads of people we really do know, and owe to. We shall never get round.”

“ That comes of taking your friendships in cargoes,” quoth Miss Ammah.

“ And of being so lovely to the accidentals when you did n’t mean anything continuing ; practising the high bred that is too high bred to be sniffy, when you’re going to turn out sniffy after all,” said uncompromising, clear-sighted France. “For my part, I’d rather go see the.Raxleys any day than the Talfreys. Btit w'hy can’t we be like the planets 1 ” she concluded suddenly, with the utmost freshness of simple suggestion, and looking up innocently, as she paused for information.

“ Don’t be utterly nonsensical ! ” said Euphemia impatiently. She thought France meant something about being high and established enough in the firmament to shine on all alike ; and if there was anything Euphemia could not bear, it was the slightest hint that there was any effort in their social life, or that they needed to be “ like ” anybody.

“ Am 1 1 ” asked France meekly. “ I was only thinking that they never go out of their orbits. They just let the conjunctions come about as the way leads and the time comes round. Why can’t people keep on their own ways, and meet and be pleasant when it happens so ? Why must there be duty calls 1 so called because duty is exactly — ”

“Now don’t quote Lucus — ”

BETWEEN.

“ I 'm not going to. Don’t do it yourself.”

“ Don’t you really know what you are going to do with yourself, — what you ’re going to be done with, — this summer, France 1” Miss Ammah shook her head at the maid offering her a superfluous hot waffle, pushed her chair back from the table, and turned her face suddenly toward Frances, where she sat with the cat in her lap, teasing its ears.

“ No, ma’am.”

“Then come with me up to Fellaiden.”

France had brought it down upon her now, the others thought. Neither Helen nor Euphemia wmuld have gone to Fellaiden to pass the summer for anything. There was a dead silence in the room for forty seconds, partly because all of them were also struck with wonder at the invitation itself; since Miss Ammah, able to monopolize and pay for it, had held on to Fellaiden as a monopoly for the last five years. She had discovered it ; she paid seven dollars a week for her board, where the price was only five, and had everything her own comfortable way there : hence, she was not disposed to open it to irruptions and demoralizations, even when her especial friends intimated how much they should like to come up for a few w^eeks, if there w'ould be room for them. Upon the silence the door opened, and Mrs. Everidge, the mother of the young ladies, came in.

“Mamma,” cried France, “Miss Ammah w'ants me to go up to Fellaiden with her this summer. Do you suppose she means it 1 ”

Miss Ammah took up her knitting from a basket on the 4tag^re, and left them to settle it.

“ How should you like it 1 ” asked Mrs. Everidge, used to the family friend’s original ways.

“ Middling,” said France demurely.

“ There ’s nothing middling, you’ll find, at Fellaiden, France Everidge,” said Miss Ammah. “Yes, there is, too; it’s two miles up a three-mile bill.”

“ A funny kind of middling,” said Helen.

“ It ’s their kind,” said Miss Ammah.

“ I ’ll go,” said France. “ I never got so far up in the world

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as that. It’s just the step beyond for me. There’s a fate in it. Only the . middle will be dropped out of this family, and they ’ll miss it. They ’ll be all old ones and little ones, and nobody to fall back on or be handed over to. I am sorry for the Everidges.”

You notice she had not thanked Miss Ammah at all for her invitation. That was simply because Miss Ammah always liated to be thanked.

I wish to moralize in about three lines. A mean condition in life, between any two in genuine order, is not contemptible, as Miss Ammah has said. The mean condition is to feel middling, and to refuse the fact. Then comes pretence to the fact one considers be3mnd, and that is the meanest condition of all.

The Everidges were a nice family, pleasant among themselves, and with much possibility of pleasantness outward from among themselves. They were only in danger of being spoiled by the thing that Miss Ammah attacked, and I have put in a moral. For though papa did studj'^ the world, and bring things from over seas, — which was rather a grand way of expressing that he owned two or three barques and schooners, among other things, and brought sugars and coffees from wherever in South America or the West Indies he could buy and load from largest and cheapest crops ; that he received consignments of finer specialties from the Mediterranean, and even the far East ; that he had invested in a Florida orange-grove since the w’ar, and made a good deal of money every winter, for the first few years, on the trips of the Foambell to the St. Johns, — and though, besides all this, he had, like the rest of the world, after the big Rebellion let all latent rebellions loose, slidden from his old-fashioned, steady, inherited business into the nominalities, and made lucky dips into stocks and bonds, — as lucky withdrawals, also, by that rare instinct of probabilities which gets ahead of storms in trade, as the calculators at Washington get ahead with their cautions of the wheel and march of cyclones, — and so had stood for a keen man and a bold operator among business men, and represented to his family and immediate dependents and admirers all the kingdom of the commercial world and the glory of it, — this was not the whole of possible height

t

BETWEEN.

or sure-fast place, and they all knew it. It was a way and a h^lp to something, but it was a thing of to-day in itself, and tch morrow might change it. Rather, even, was it not alread}',. in essential respects, the thing of yesterday, which the hard, uncertain, shifting to-day was fast changing from all established centre and solid, confident advance 1

“ Papa studied the world.” They had learned that by heart, and to be proud of it, almost in their babyhood ; but the world had been something of a queer, uncertain book to study in the later times, with the whirling of its leaves in the wind, and the shutting down of chapter after chapter, till it seemed as if the whole volume of the current order of things were ta be closed up, perhaps ; and men, missing the old lines and connections, felt themselves failing in their hearts for fear, as the cross readings turned to threatening prophecies.

Mr. Everidge held on through the depression and the closing in : that was all the bravest and the strongest could do. That, for him, gave standing and honor of itself ; he was as proud of that as he had been of his push and energy in the time passed by. The household and social life went on, if not altogether as it had done in the gay, lavish days, yet without fear of stop or any pinching stint ; and the measure and the consciousness of the life went on with it. It was still the measure and consciousness of a making, as Mr. Everidge had made his money by enterprise fresh in the memory of all. It was not complete,, asserted beyond assertion : it depended much on the continuance of the external condition that wmuld let it go on making, and fulfil its chance before its chance should fail. Above- was. something that had been born, not made ; had been large and assured in all its generations ; that waited now, under loss and pressure, as a thing distinct from all such circumstance ; that had become a little more withdrawn and difficult, instead of Itess, during the quietness of days adverse.

Money, its elusive unreality so newly and everywhere proved, was, even where apjjarently retained, hardly the passport that it had been. People did not w^ant brilliant strangers with passports now : there was a reversion to the natural-bom and long-abiding. The stand must at least be upon some hi^ sort of verity and growth. Towards such stand, for whose attainment fair time is needful, and on their way to which the hard time checked people just where they happened to be, if it did not send them absolutely rolling down again, the Everidges were still conscious of precisely that slight upward strain that is a pleasure in its successful putting forth, but becomes a pain when it has to halt and hold its own. It told them that, broad as the brow of the hill might be, and almost insensible its gracious slope about the crown, they were yet on the slope, not the apex, — between that and the ruggeder dividing ridges and drops below ; so, in a sense, middling, as Miss Ammah said. But when Miss Ammah put it into words, it made them, — the elder ones, — as we have seen, a little fractious in their feeling.

France, the very middle individual of them all, with two sisters just older and taking the gloss off her dream of life by trying everything first and handing back the remnants to her, and two younger who demanded her time and her clothes faster than she could spare them, cared less, I think, for the collective middlingness than any of them. In fact, she w^as getting the beginning of certain theories of her own, rather rebellious against society ; so that Euphemia said to Mrs. Everidge, after the Fellaiden plan had been decided, “ There is one thing, mamma : she will come home worse than ever about her calls and her politeness, after Miss Ammah and the farm people.”

Perhaps here, in a couple of paragraphs, I had better tell you who Miss Ammah is.

Her name — the rest of it — is Tredgold. She has n’t a near relative in all the world, but she is family confidante and adviser and bosom friend to a score of families. And she won’t be breveted “ Aunt.” She is always, among these friends, Miss Ammah. She visits in town and out of town. She knows bankers and bakers. In the pretty suburb where the Everidge “ Place ” has been set up, she runs up and down, and is welcome, from Pine Hills to the “ Corner ” village. Within this distance are the usual gradings and shadings of suburban family and neighborhood, from the old people whose estates, in the time of the grandfathers, had been cut through by the first turnpike, to the newcomers into the last French roofed, turreted,

BETWEEN.

modern-convenienced dwelling on the last street laid out nearest the city limit, and built upon in a hurry, with one idea for twenty houses, just before the pulse of the annexation fever, six or seven years ago, went down.

Miss Ammah Tredgold does not “ live upon her friends.” On the contrary, her friends live so much upon her that she can only plead one visiting engagement against another as any excuse ; and a dozen households are ill-used in their feelings if she ventures to stay more than a fortnight at a time at her own handsome moorings in Hotel Berkeley'. Her sole chance of any soleness is her yearly hegira to the hills of Fellaiden.

She disappears with the dropping of the crocuses and daffodils, sometimes with the last snowflakes even, and is only known to have disappeared into a region where few citizens or suburbans would be tempted, if they could, to follow her ; and is spoken of as in the fastnesses, “ somewhei e.” They all know that, wherever it is, there is nothjng going on there ; it isn’t “a place,” at all, only a nook for one. She is as safe as a fox in her burrow. And now it was decided that France, the odd one of the Everidges, should disappear with her. About this there were already several minds in the family, — several minds in the parental mind, — although it w^as, as I have said, at once decided.

The minds began to come out that same afternoon, when Miss Ammah had gone up to the Pines to stay her promised three days with the Johneses. It would be told of there, and it could n’t well be taken back now, but it would remain to be accounted for. For the Everidges held themselves, in some tacit and mystical fashion, as bound to account to the Johneses and the Talfreys and the Sindons — to say nothing of the Pyes whom I will speak of separately, presently — for all their new movements, as on some basis of reason recognizable to orthodox society; to show cause, of course all tacitly, and by way of merest natui'al and graceful mention, of their own whys, — why a Johnes or a Talfrey or a Sindou would have done likewise in the circumstance. They were bound — the Everidges — to run against no circumstance even that might not as well lie in these other people’s way ; else the Everidge way was obviously divergent, here and there, from the way of the haute volee, and was no high flight at all. It had not yet occurred to them that, in the great firmament, a different way, that might be a yet higher flight, was possible.

“ It will lose France out of everything for four months,” said Helen ; and then Euphemia added the remark about the calls and the politeness.

But it is Miss Ammah,” said their mother. “ And France isn’t really out yet, you know.”

“But she ought to* be in the way to be out, oughtn’t shel And as to Miss Ammah, — well, people have her for a week or two at a time, and it ’s the fashion to pull caps for her for that much : but whether anybody would go off and shut themselves up with her for all summer 1 I just wish it weren’t a little, five-dollar, up-country, nobody-knows-where farmhouse ! It seems rather like tucking poor France off out of our way. And she ’s too old to do that with^ and it ’s an exploded idea of the third-rate society novels, and I don’t half like it ! ” Euphemia said it pettishly, as people say things that it is no use to say ; and snapped her Iceland wool, as she pulled the thread from the middle of the ball.

“ You should n’t wind your wool at all,” observed Helen. “ If you had ‘ dropped ’ it, you would n’t have lost your thread.”

“ It should n’t have been either hollow-wound or dropped,” said Euphemia, “ but loose-balled over-hand. Miss Ammah did it for me.”

Miss Ammah, it was to be confessed, was not always alongside of the latest-accepted ways; and even in winding wools there is a latest-accepted.

so QUEER!

Chapter II

so QUEER !

Meanwhile, France had put on her hat, and taken some clubbooks which were to go next in order to those ladies, and walked over to the Miss Pyes’.

The Miss Pyes lived in a Bird’s Nest. They had taken the name and the notion half a lifetime ago from Miss Bremer’s famous Hellevi Hausgiebel, and had been carrying it out ever since “The Neighbors” was translated, and they — in their teens and twenties — had read it. They never considered the joke of its being called the Pyes’ Nest, as of course it was immediately ; or, if they thought of it, it was of an appositeness, not a satire. They never thought, even, of the appositeness of their own names, Christian and family. I suppose they never had the least idea how they were literally and continually illustrating them. Old-fashioned names of aunts and grandmothers, piously perpetuated — really, I meant no play on that word — from generation to generation, and kept on record in the columns of queer, varied hand-script between Malachi and Matthew in the family Bible.

Charity, and Barbara, and Margaret. Diminished to Chat and Bab and Mag among themselves, and even when they spoke of each other ; in the most innocent confidence that they were nevertheless, as they were always politely addressed, “ Miss Pye,” “ Miss Barbara,” and “ Miss Margaret ” when spoken of in general society outside. Also, it never occurred to them that “ Mag ” and “ Pye ” by any chance, got hyphened together on common lips, having no occasion to get hyphened together at home. In reality, they were most often alluded to and quoted under the formula used by Miss Margaret herself, — who, being the youngest of the sisters and the most active member of so-

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ciety, at once represented, gathered for, and voiced them all, as “Chat and Bab and I.”

Everything bright, curious, entertaining, — in things, talk, fact, — was collected at the Pyes’ Nest. Mag did most of the collecting, as I have said ; then they all fluttered and placed and admired sidewise, and chattered and babbled over the straws and sixpences, objective and metaphorical, that she had picked up. No malice about these last; only they thoroughly discussed everything in their bird fashion, and came to their conclusions ; held caucus and made platform., so to say, and were ready with their verdict, — no insignificant one, for that old record between Malachi and Matthew was thoroughly honored and clear-traced, away back to some Pye who had chanced to light on the Mayflower or the Speedwell, and come over with the Pilgrims.

“We all think. Chat and Bab and I.” The summing-up was circulated, as the details had been collected, by Miss Mag, in her little afternoon hoppings and perchings among the Pines and about the Corner.

So to take the social bull by the horns was to start a fact, equipped as you meant it to be, from the Pyes’ Nest.

France Everidge fully intended now to go to Fellaiden. The plan had begun between breakfast and after-dinner to look specifically attractive to her. It had also begun during dinner discussions to lean down, as it w-ere, on its weak side. Miss Ammah was not there to keep it up, and the weight of the little family doubts, with their half expression — a reflex beforehand of the “ way it might seem ” — was gathering, unbalanced, like freezing mist upon the wundward side of a boiigh. Nobody thought of actually opposing or interdicting, — that would not be done, France knew, with Miss Ammah’s already virtually accepted px-oposal, — but the cold-water spray of half-satisfaction was flung upon it, and was growing solid, pai’ticle by particle, and might somehow break it down. To help that, it must have broad sunshine let upon it. France, with a wise instinct rather than any deliberate management, held her peace against the ifs and buts, took all the previous settlement for granted, and remembered her errand to Miss Chat and Bab.

so QUEER !

We are going off to Fellaiden with our heroine, so it is possible we may not, in the whole progress of our tale, whose course cannot at the outset be altogether predicted, “ keek in ” again so leisurely at the Pyes’ Nest. The more, not the less, reason that we should take a discriminative look at it now, as France sits there with the three ladies, to whom the world has begun to look elderly, but with a certain curious sense of themselves having stopped somewhere a score of years ago to observe from a fixed point the outside process. Now and then Miss Bab would discern in a mild way that a winter influenza, or a depressing summer heat, had pulled Chat down a little, and that she ought to have the wine of iron for a while, and take to the glass of milk at lunch, — “ that always do set you up again, you know ” ; or she would remark anxiously, even of Margaret, who kept about on her feet, and brought in a certain open-air bloom with her from her daily outgoings, that her color was n’t quiie what it ought to be in the mornings, and that she had a bad way of settling down into her pillow that “ slept creases into her cheeks.” But it never seemed to occur to her that there was anything in the casual falling off, or the paleness, or tha delicate arcs each side her nose that began to quote Mag’s prettiness as something of the past referred to, which prescription or admonition could not reach, as they had done in the twenties ; or that the years had anything inexorable to do with the “want of accommodation” that the oculist told her of in her own eyesight, and for which she wore a ladylike pair of glasses over the fine work that had done the mischief “ that winter when she embroidered the deep borders for the library portidre.”

Chat’s hair was undeniably gray, in lines, — “ so early ! ” Bab would say. “ What do you suppose makes people, nowadays 1 ” And she would instance Pauline Talfrey, “ saow-white, at thirtythree ! ” In all this there was the sweetest actual unconsciousness. They told their ages to the census man without reserve ; nobody else asked. And between times they really forgot. They just went on living ; commented on the changes in society and in the town, and compared the things of to-day with those of other days, identifying themselves always with to-day and with the newest change ; importing all the fresh ideas to the Bird’s

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Nest, and really keeping themselves wonderfully fresh by virtue of their simple obduracy of self-location.

They had kept house together since they were indeed young girls ; and their early orphanage had contributed to their persistent feeling of being somehow still young things, since one always thinks of orphans so, and the church prayed every Sunday for them as “ fatherless children.”

They had had small means to manage at first, and had lived on. the same old carpets, darned and made over, till Mag said “ The venerable Brussels in the best parlor was all twine and tradition ’’ ; but investments had been turning out splendidly for them in the palmy years of inflation, and they had remodelled the cottage and replaced its furnishings, till John Pye and his Mag would never have known the Nest again, could they have bent their bright wings and alighted suddenly in it.

The low, painted wooden mantel in the sitting-room, where Captain Pye — for he had been a retired ship-master — used to keep his briarwood pipe and Indian tobacco-jar, and where his odd, crumpled slips of memorandum and calculation — oftener than not raggedly torn envelopes, made sacred and defendus by half a dozen pencilled figures — used to accumulate under a bronze thermometer-stand until Mrs. Pye would insist on his making a spring-cleaning of his own and beginning again, — was now a tall Eastlake, with plenty of real china ornaments from Canton ; a whole company of Russian peasants and pedlers and soldiers, with Emperor Nicholas First on horseback among them, in painted biscuit ; recent additions of Japan boxes and caddies and trays ; and gay fans, like openwinged butterflies, paired at the corners. Around the room, three feet and a half tall from the baseboard, stood great, meditative, dull-colored herons, on thei?' stilted legs, with their necks and bills looped backward upon humpy shoulders and forward on feathery-fringed breasts, each with oiie long-clawed foot hidden in water-grasses, and the other set on a broad, floating, weedy leaf. There were pomegranates — scarlet flowers and red-gold fruit among thorny twisted branches — above, and nothing between but a pale-gray, smooth expanse, that might stand for pale-hot, tropical atmosphere ; though what the herons had to so QUEER !

ir do with this, and the pomegranates overhead, might be wondered at. Miss Ammah, w'hen she called, had said that the herons ought to have been flamingoes ; but Miss Margaret assured her eagerly that there were no flamingoes at all among the dado patterns. They all came in regular styles, and it was no use to try to carry out a fancy or a suitableness. She had got the pomegranate border because Chat and Bab said the room wanted something livening, with all that brown and gray and dull green.

The library, which they once used and spoke of simply as the front parlor, had low bookshelves instead of the dado, quite in the authorized style ; here and there on the top of which were the orthodox little easels, with something in decorative porcelain or cloisonnee or painted tile set on edge upon them, in the prevailing charmingly useless way. Whatever nonsense was anywhere mixed up, however, was redeemed by the great square bay on the southwest side, full of rioting ivies and plumy ferns and bright little blossomy plants in bracket-pots and along the shelves ; while a perfect bank of splendid calla plants, their tall stems and shadowy, winglike leaves like ranks of Blake’s strange angels, and the white cups that had begun to unroll at Easter not yet all gone from among them, filled up the whole floor-tier.

“ Now that ’s a dado worth the while ! ” had said Miss Ammah. “ If you could get a thing painted like that, for a room where the lilies couldn’t be; or tufts and tangles of high brakes and ferns ; or flags, with the brown cat-tails. But those herons and storks and rhinoceroses ! ”

“ Oh, how queer you are ! Chat and Bab and I always say so ! and I tell you they don’t come in any such styles. You must take what other people have. And there are never rhinoceroses ! and we all think the herons are beautiful. So old-fashioned, you know, and in heraldry ! ”

“ So are griffins — and goats — and unicorns — and spotted dogs. But not walking around the wainscots.”

“ That ’s what I told you, and I should n’t want them if they were.” When, of course. Miss Ammah gave it up.

They were all three at home, sitting in the library, when

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France Everidge came in ; Chat and Bab, as usual, one with her palette and tile, and the other with her macrame cushion ; and Mag just returned and seated, with her bonnet-strings loosened, to tell what she had seen, what heard, and what adventured.