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.