FullReads

There was a dead silence–so dead and lifeless that I could not tell whether they were offended or not; but I made my bow as usual, and began my discourse.

The lecture over, the Immaculate paid me my fee with punctilious courtesy, waiving the customary receipt; followed me to the cloak-room, helped me on with my coat, picked up one of the bags,–an auditor the other, and the two followed me down Jacob’s ladder into the night. Outside stood a sleigh shaped like the shell of Dr. Holmes’s Nautilus, its body hardly large enough to hold a four-months-old baby. This was surrounded by half the audience, anxious, I afterward learned, for a closer view of the man who had “sassed” the Manager. Some of them expected it to continue.

I squeezed in beside the bags and was about to draw up the horse blanket, when a voice rang out:

“Mis’ Plimsole’s goin’ in that sleigh, too.” It was at Mrs. Plimsole’s that I was to spend the night.

Then a faint voice answered back:

“No, I can just as well walk.” She evidently knew the danger of sitting next to an overcharged boiler.

Mrs. Plimsole!–a woman–walk–on a night like this–I was out of the sleigh before she had ceased to speak.

“No, madam, you are going to do nothing of the kind; if anybody is to walk it will be I; I’m getting used to it.”

She allowed me to tuck her in. It was too dark for me to see what she was like–she was so swathed and tied up. Being still mad–fires drawn but still dangerous, I concluded that my companion was sour, and skinny, with a parrot nose and one tooth gone. That I was to pass the night at her house did not improve the estimate; there would be mottoes on the walls–“What is home without a mother,” and the like; tidies on the chairs, and a red-hot stove smelling of drying socks. There would also be a basin and pitcher the size of a cup and saucer, and a bed that sagged in the middle and was covered with a cotton quilt.

The Nautilus stopped at a gate, beyond which was a smaller Jacob’s ladder leading to a white cottage. Was there nothing built on a level in Sheffield? I asked myself. The bags which had been hung on the shafts came first, then I, then the muffled head and cloak. Upward and onward again, through a door, past a pretty girl who stood with her hand on the knob in welcome, and into a hall. Here the girl helped unmummy her mother, and then turned up the hall-lamp.

Oh, such a dear, sweet gray-haired old lady! The kind of an old lady you would have wanted to stay–not a night with–but a year. An old lady with plump fresh cheeks and soft brown eyes and a smile that warmed you through and through. And such an all-embracing restful room with its open wood fire, andirons and polished fender–and the plants and books and easy-chairs! And the cheer of it all!

“Now you just sit there and get comfortable,” she said, patting my shoulder–(the second time in one night that a woman’s hand had been that of an angel). “Maggie’ll get you some supper. We had it all ready, expecting you on the six-ten. Hungry, aren’t you?”

Hungry! I could have gnawed a hole in a sofa to get at the straw stuffing.

She drew up a chair, waited till her daughter had left the room, and said with a twinkle in her eyes:

“Oh, I was glad you gave it to ’em the way you did, and when you sailed into that snivelling old Hard-shell deacon, I just put my hands down under my petticoats and clapped them for joy. There isn’t anybody running anything up here. They don’t have to pay for this lecture course. It was given to them by a man who is dead. All they think they’ve got to do is to dress themselves up. They’re all officers; there’s a recording secretary and a corresponding secretary and an executive committee and a president and two vice-presidents, and a lot more that I can’t remember. Everyone of them is leaving everything to somebody else to attend to. I know, because I take care of all the lecturers that come. Only last winter a lady lecturer arrived here on a load of wood; she didn’t lose her temper and get mad like you did. Maybe you know her; she told us all about the Indians and her husband, the great general, who was surrounded and massacred by them.”