XIII
THE Town Hall was crowded and exceedingly hot. As Charity marched intoit third in the white muslin file headed by Orma Fry, she was consciousmainly of the brilliant effect of the wreathed columns framing thegreen-carpeted stage toward which she was moving; and of the unfamiliarfaces turning from the front rows to watch the advance of theprocession.
But it was all a bewildering blur of eyes and colours till she foundherself standing at the back of the stage, her great bunch of asters andgoldenrod held well in front of her, and answering the nervous glanceof Lambert Sollas, the organist from Mr. Miles's church, who had come upfrom Nettleton to play the harmonium and sat behind it, his conductor'seye running over the fluttered girls.
A moment later Mr. Miles, pink and twinkling, emerged from thebackground, as if buoyed up on his broad white gown, and brisklydominated the bowed heads in the front rows. He prayed energetically andbriefly and then retired, and a fierce nod from Lambert Sollas warnedthe girls that they were to follow at once with "Home, Sweet Home." Itwas 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 theworld. 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 thebrooding 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 furtivesignalling down the hall, Mr. Royall, emerging in turn, ascended thesteps of the stage and appeared behind the flower-wreathed desk. Hepassed close to Charity, and she noticed that his gravely set face worethe look of majesty that used to awe and fascinate her childhood. Hisfrock-coat had been carefully brushed and ironed, and the ends of hisnarrow black tie were so nearly even that the tying must have cost hima protracted struggle. His appearance struck her all the more because itwas the first time she had looked him full in the face since the nightat Nettleton, and nothing in his grave and impressive demeanour revealeda 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 himselfand began.
At first she paid no heed to what he was saying: only fragments ofsentences, sonorous quotations, allusions to illustrious men,including the obligatory tribute to Honorius Hatchard, drifted past herinattentive ears. She was trying to discover Harney among the notablepeople 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 thedesk, supported by Mrs. Miles and an important-looking unknown lady.Charity was near one end of the stage, and from where she sat the otherend of the first row of seats was cut off by the screen of foliagemasking the harmonium. The effort to see Harney around the corner of thescreen, or through its interstices, made her unconscious of everythingelse; but the effort was unsuccessful, and gradually she found herattention arrested by her guardian's discourse.
She had never heard him speak in public before, but she was familiarwith the rolling music of his voice when he read aloud, or held forthto the selectmen about the stove at Carrick Fry's. Today his inflectionswere richer and graver than she had ever known them: he spoke slowly,with pauses that seemed to invite his hearers to silent participation inhis 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 ofyou who have returned here today, to take contact with this little placefor a brief hour, have come only on a pious pilgrimage, and will go backpresently to busy cities and lives full of larger duties. But that isnot the only way of coming back to North Dormer. Some of us, who wentout from here in our youth... went out, like you, to busy cities andlarger duties... have come back in another way--come back for good. I amone of those, as many of you know...." He paused, and there was a senseof suspense in the listening hall. "My history is without interest, butit has its lesson: not so much for those of you who have alreadymade your lives in other places, as for the young men who are perhapsplanning even now to leave these quiet hills and go down into thestruggle. Things they cannot foresee may send some of those young menback some day to the little township and the old homestead: they maycome back for good...." He looked about him, and repeated gravely: "ForGOOD. There's the point I want to make... North Dormer is a poor littleplace, almost lost in a mighty landscape: perhaps, by this time, itmight 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 theirminds--that they wanted to come back for GOOD... and not for bad... orjust for indifference....
"Gentlemen, let us look at things as they are. Some of us have come backto our native town because we'd failed to get on elsewhere. One way orother, things had gone wrong with us... what we'd dreamed of hadn't cometrue. But the fact that we had failed elsewhere is no reason why weshould fail here. Our very experiments in larger places, even if theywere unsuccessful, ought to have helped us to make North Dormer a largerplace... and you young men who are preparing even now to follow the callof ambition, and turn your back on the old homes--well, let me say thisto you, that if ever you do come back to them it's worth while to comeback to them for their good.... And to do that, you must keep on lovingthem while you're away from them; and even if you come back against yourwill--and thinking it's all a bitter mistake of Fate or Providence--youmust 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 forwhat it's worth; after a while, I believe you'll be able to say, as Ican say today: 'I'm glad I'm here.' Believe me, all of you, the best wayto help the places we live in is to be glad we live there."
He stopped, and a murmur of emotion and surprise ran through theaudience. It was not in the least what they had expected, but it movedthem more than what they had expected would have moved them. "Hear,hear!" a voice cried out in the middle of the hall. An outburst ofcheers caught up the cry, and as they subsided Charity heard Mr. Milessaying to someone near him: "That was a MAN talking----" He wiped hisspectacles.
Mr. Royall had stepped back from the desk, and taken his seat in the rowof chairs in front of the harmonium. A dapper white-haired gentleman--adistant Hatchard--succeeded him behind the goldenrod, and began tosay beautiful things about the old oaken bucket, patient white-hairedmothers, and where the boys used to go nutting... and Charity began againto search for Harney....
Suddenly Mr. Royall pushed back his seat, and one of the maple branchesin front of the harmonium collapsed with a crash. It uncovered the endof the first row and in one of the seats Charity saw Harney, and in thenext a lady whose face was turned toward him, and almost hidden by thebrim of her drooping hat. Charity did not need to see the face. She knewat 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 thefall of the branch Miss Balch turned her head toward the stage, and inher pretty thin-lipped smile there lingered the reflection of somethingher neighbour had been whispering to her....
Someone came forward to replace the fallen branch, and Miss Balch andHarney were once more hidden. But to Charity the vision of their twofaces had blotted out everything. In a flash they had shown her thebare reality of her situation. Behind the frail screen of her lover'scaresses was the whole inscrutable mystery of his life: his relationswith other people--with other women--his opinions, his prejudices, hisprinciples, the net of influences and interests and ambitions in whichevery man's life is entangled. Of all these she knew nothing, exceptwhat he had told her of his architectural aspirations. She had alwaysdimly guessed him to be in touch with important people, involved incomplicated relations--but she felt it all to be so far beyond herunderstanding that the whole subject hung like a luminous mist on thefarthest verge of her thoughts. In the foreground, hiding all else,there was the glow of his presence, the light and shadow o
f his face,the way his short-sighted eyes, at her approach, widened and deepenedas if to draw her down into them; and, above all, the flush of youth andtenderness in which his words enclosed her.
Now she saw him detached from her, drawn back into the unknown, andwhispering to another girl things that provoked the same smile ofmischievous complicity he had so often called to her own lips. Thefeeling possessing her was not one of jealousy: she was too sure ofhis love. It was rather a terror of the unknown, of all the mysteriousattractions that must even now be dragging him away from her, and of herown powerlessness to contend with them.
She had given him all she had--but what was it compared to the othergifts life held for him? She understood now the case of girls likeherself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, buttheir 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 smotheringwaves, and the faces in the crowded hall began to dance like thepictures flashed on the screen at Nettleton. For an instant Mr. Royall'scountenance detached itself from the general blur. He had resumed hisplace in front of the harmonium, and sat close to her, his eyes on herface; and his look seemed to pierce to the very centre of her confusedsensations.... A feeling of physical sickness rushed over her--and thendeadly apprehension. The light of the fiery hours in the little houseswept back on her in a glare of fear....
She forced herself to look away from her guardian, and became aware thatthe oratory of the Hatchard cousin had ceased, and that Mr. Miles wasagain flapping his wings. Fragments of his peroration floated throughher bewildered brain.... "A rich harvest of hallowed memories.... Asanctified hour to which, in moments of trial, your thoughts willprayerfully return.... And now, O Lord, let us humbly and fervently givethanks for this blessed day of reunion, here in the old home to which wehave 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 oldpeople, in the courage and industry of its young men, in the piety andpurity of this group of innocent girls----" He flapped a white wing intheir direction, and at the same moment Lambert Sollas, with his fiercenod, struck the opening bars of "Auld Lang Syne." ...Charity staredstraight ahead of her and then, dropping her flowers, fell face downwardat Mr. Royall's feet.