________________________________________________
_
CHAPTER XIII
THE Town Hall was crowded and exceedingly hot. As
Charity marched into it third in the white muslin file
headed by Orma Fry, she was conscious mainly of the
brilliant effect of the wreathed columns framing the
green-carpeted stage toward which she was moving; and
of the unfamiliar faces turning from the front rows to
watch the advance of the procession.
But it was all a bewildering blur of eyes and colours
till she found herself standing at the back of the
stage, her great bunch of asters and goldenrod held
well in front of her, and answering the nervous glance
of Lambert Sollas, the organist from Mr. Miles's
church, who had come up from Nettleton to play the
harmonium and sat behind it, his conductor's eye
running over the fluttered girls.
A moment later Mr. Miles, pink and twinkling, emerged
from the background, as if buoyed up on his broad white
gown, and briskly dominated the bowed heads in the
front rows. He prayed energetically and briefly
and then retired, and a fierce nod from Lambert Sollas
warned the girls that they were to follow at once with
"Home, Sweet Home." It was a joy to Charity to sing: it
seemed as though, for the first time, her secret
rapture might burst from her and flash its defiance at
the world. All the glow in her blood, the breath of
the summer earth, the rustle of the forest, the fresh
call of birds at sunrise, and the brooding midday
languors, seemed to pass into her untrained voice,
lifted and led by the sustaining chorus.
And then suddenly the song was over, and after an
uncertain pause, during which Miss Hatchard's pearl-
grey gloves started a furtive signalling down the hall,
Mr. Royall, emerging in turn, ascended the steps of the
stage and appeared behind the flower-wreathed desk. He
passed close to Charity, and she noticed that his
gravely set face wore the look of majesty that used to
awe and fascinate her childhood. His frock-coat had
been carefully brushed and ironed, and the ends of his
narrow black tie were so nearly even that the tying
must have cost him a protracted struggle. His
appearance struck her all the more because it was the
first time she had looked him full in the face since
the night at Nettleton, and nothing in his grave
and impressive demeanour revealed a trace of the
lamentable figure on the wharf.
He stood a moment behind the desk, resting his finger-
tips against it, and bending slightly toward his
audience; then he straightened himself and began.
At first she paid no heed to what he was saying: only
fragments of sentences, sonorous quotations, allusions
to illustrious men, including the obligatory tribute to
Honorius Hatchard, drifted past her inattentive ears.
She was trying to discover Harney among the notable
people in the front row; but he was nowhere near Miss
Hatchard, who, crowned by a pearl-grey hat that matched
her gloves, sat just below the desk, supported by Mrs.
Miles and an important-looking unknown lady. Charity
was near one end of the stage, and from where she sat
the other end of the first row of seats was cut off by
the screen of foliage masking the harmonium. The
effort to see Harney around the corner of the screen,
or through its interstices, made her unconscious of
everything else; but the effort was unsuccessful, and
gradually she found her attention arrested by her
guardian's discourse.
She had never heard him speak in public before,
but she was familiar with the rolling music of his
voice when he read aloud, or held forth to the
selectmen about the stove at Carrick Fry's. Today his
inflections were richer and graver than she had ever
known them: he spoke slowly, with pauses that seemed to
invite his hearers to silent participation in his
thought; and Charity perceived a light of response in
their faces.
He was nearing the end of his address..."Most of you,"
he said, "most of you who have returned here today, to
take contact with this little place for a brief hour,
have come only on a pious pilgrimage, and will go back
presently to busy cities and lives full of larger
duties. But that is not the only way of coming back to
North Dormer. Some of us, who went out from here in
our youth...went out, like you, to busy cities and
larger duties...have come back in another way--come
back for good. I am one of those, as many of you
know...." He paused, and there was a sense of suspense
in the listening hall. "My history is without
interest, but it has its lesson: not so much for those
of you who have already made your lives in other
places, as for the young men who are perhaps
planning even now to leave these quiet hills and go
down into the struggle. Things they cannot foresee may
send some of those young men back some day to the
little township and the old homestead: they may come
back for good...." He looked about him, and repeated
gravely: "For GOOD. There's the point I want to
make...North Dormer is a poor little place, almost lost
in a mighty landscape: perhaps, by this time, it might
have been a bigger place, and more in scale with the
landscape, if those who had to come back had come with
that feeling in their minds--that they wanted to come
back for GOOD...and not for bad...or just for
indifference....
"Gentlemen, let us look at things as they are. Some of
us have come back to our native town because we'd
failed to get on elsewhere. One way or other, things
had gone wrong with us...what we'd dreamed of hadn't
come true. But the fact that we had failed elsewhere
is no reason why we should fail here. Our very
experiments in larger places, even if they were
unsuccessful, ought to have helped us to make North
Dormer a larger place...and you young men who are
preparing even now to follow the call of ambition, and
turn your back on the old homes--well, let me say
this to you, that if ever you do come back to them it's
worth while to come back to them for their good....And
to do that, you must keep on loving them while you're
away from them; and even if you come back against your
will--and thinking it's all a bitter mistake of Fate or
Providence--you must try to make the best of it, and to
make the best of your old town; and after a while--
well, ladies and gentlemen, I give you my recipe for
what it's worth; after a while, I believe you'll be
able to say, as I can say today: 'I'm glad I'm here.'
Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places
we live in is to be glad we live there."
He stopped, and a murmur of emotion and surprise ran
through the audience. It was not in the least what
they had expected, but it moved them more than what
they had expected would have moved them. "Hear, hear!"
a voice cried out in the middle of the hall. An
outburst of cheers caught up the cry, and as they
subsided Charity heard Mr. Miles saying to someone near
him: "That was a MAN talking----" He wiped his
spectacles.
Mr. Royall had stepped back from the desk, and
taken his seat in the row of chairs in front of
the harmonium. A dapper white-haired gentleman--a
distant Hatchard--succeeded him behind the goldenrod,
and began to say beautiful things about the old oaken
bucket, patient white-haired mothers, and where the
boys used to go nutting...and Charity began again to
search for Harney....
Suddenly Mr. Royall pushed back his seat, and one of
the maple branches in front of the harmonium collapsed
with a crash. It uncovered the end of the first row
and in one of the seats Charity saw Harney, and in the
next a lady whose face was turned toward him, and
almost hidden by the brim of her drooping hat. Charity
did not need to see the face. She knew at a glance the
slim figure, the fair hair heaped up under the hat-
brim, the long pale wrinkled gloves with bracelets
slipping over them. At the fall of the branch Miss
Balch turned her head toward the stage, and in her
pretty thin-lipped smile there lingered the reflection
of something her neighbour had been whispering to
her....
Someone came forward to replace the fallen branch, and
Miss Balch and Harney were once more hidden. But to
Charity the vision of their two faces had blotted
out everything. In a flash they had shown her the bare
reality of her situation. Behind the frail screen of
her lover's caresses was the whole inscrutable mystery
of his life: his relations with other people--with
other women--his opinions, his prejudices, his
principles, the net of influences and interests and
ambitions in which every man's life is entangled. Of
all these she knew nothing, except what he had told her
of his architectural aspirations. She had always dimly
guessed him to be in touch with important people,
involved in complicated relations--but she felt it all
to be so far beyond her understanding that the whole
subject hung like a luminous mist on the farthest verge
of her thoughts. In the foreground, hiding all else,
there was the glow of his presence, the light and
shadow of his face, the way his short-sighted eyes, at
her approach, widened and deepened as if to draw her
down into them; and, above all, the flush of youth and
tenderness in which his words enclosed her.
Now she saw him detached from her, drawn back into the
unknown, and whispering to another girl things that
provoked the same smile of mischievous complicity he
had so often called to her own lips. The feeling
possessing her was not one of jealousy: she was too
sure of his love. It was rather a terror of the
unknown, of all the mysterious attractions that must
even now be dragging him away from her, and of her own
powerlessness to contend with them.
She had given him all she had--but what was it compared
to the other gifts life held for him? She understood
now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of
thing happened. They gave all they had, but their all
was not enough: it could not buy more than a few
moments....
The heat had grown suffocating--she felt it descend on
her in smothering waves, and the faces in the crowded
hall began to dance like the pictures flashed on the
screen at Nettleton. For an instant Mr. Royall's
countenance detached itself from the general blur. He
had resumed his place in front of the harmonium, and
sat close to her, his eyes on her face; and his look
seemed to pierce to the very centre of her confused
sensations....A feeling of physical sickness rushed
over her--and then deadly apprehension. The light of
the fiery hours in the little house swept back on her
in a glare of fear....
She forced herself to look away from her guardian,
and became aware that the oratory of the Hatchard
cousin had ceased, and that Mr. Miles was again
flapping his wings. Fragments of his peroration
floated through her bewildered brain...."A rich harvest
of hallowed memories....A sanctified hour to which, in
moments of trial, your thoughts will prayerfully
return....And now, O Lord, let us humbly and fervently
give thanks for this blessed day of reunion, here in
the old home to which we have come back from so far.
Preserve it to us, O Lord, in times to come, in all its
homely sweetness--in the kindliness and wisdom of its
old people, in the courage and industry of its young
men, in the piety and purity of this group of innocent
girls----" He flapped a white wing in their direction,
and at the same moment Lambert Sollas, with his fierce
nod, struck the opening bars of "Auld Lang
Syne."...Charity stared straight ahead of her and then,
dropping her flowers, fell face downward at Mr.
Royall's feet.
Content of CHAPTER XIII [Edith Wharton's novel: Summer]
_
Read next: CHAPTER XIV
Read previous: CHAPTER XII
Table of content of Summer
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
