# Twenty-four:Four

Extracted from Harper's magazine, Vol.92 1895-96, pp. 264–277. Accompanying illustrations omitted.
TWENTY-FOUR: FOUR.
BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS
MRS. FORTITUDE FILLEBROWN had neuralgia at the base of the brain, and Melissy Pulsifer had sent for the doctor. When Melissy experienced a similar disorder she called it a headache behind. But Mrs. Fillebrown had neuralgia at the base of the brain.
Now it snowed—only a New England February knows how it snowed—and the road to the village was blocked. Melissy got badly drabbled wading over to Silas Whey's to ask Silas to send Adoniram out with old Peter Parley to bring the doctor. Melissy came home soaked.
"You'll be down yourself," sighed Mrs. Fillebrown. "We might die here for all anybody would know or care."
"I've got my bitters," said Melissy, dryly.
"Then you have to recover from the bitters," suggested Melissy's employer, with the tinge of sarcasm which a neuralgic diathesis lends to the workings of the most literal mind.
One does not say Melissy's "mistress." Melissy was a Yankee and a neighbor. She did not serve. She "accommodated." But she had accommodated Mrs. Fillebrown affectionately for nearly ten years—ever since Joe Fillebrown died, and was buried in Northwest Peony churchyard, and Mrs. Fillebrown had erected a dutiful slab of Rutland marble to his not altogether blessed memory.
There is no fidelity more attractively loyal than the fidelity of an American domestic, when one is privileged to command a good specimen of its intelligence and energy. Mrs. Fillebrown had been thus fortunate. The two women had grown fond of each other, as solitary women do (unless they hate) in silent, manless country homes, where the little that life has to offer is shared and made the most of with pathetic and democratic interest.
"It dooz snow, "observed Melissy, looking out of the window at the white whirlwind. It swept between the two women and their nearest neighbor, a revolving wall, solid and sardonic. It seemed to shut them apart from all the world.
"It's reely r'arin' up," said Melissy. "I guess the doctor 'll hev high jinks wallerin' through them drifts along by Silas's."
Mrs. Fillebrown groaned. Melissy Pulsifer would have dug her way through the snow to the village on her hands and knees if she could have cured the base of Mrs. Fillebrown's brain. But in that finer activity which we call tact, Melissy did not excel. Mrs. Fillebrown thought that this was because Melissy was too healthy.
It grew later, and late. It grew dull, and dusk. The doctor did not come. The storm increased viciously. The drift began to block the back yard, an ominous garrison, tall and impregnable, piling against the shed; and over towards Silas Whey's the road lay even and high, winding like a white, unbroken river to the unseen town.
Adoniram and Peter Parley had not been known to return. The stanch old-fashioned house, dating from the days when carpenters built "on honor," trembled through all its oaken skeleton. Now and then plaster rattled from somewhere overhead; a blind broke loose in the kitchen, and swung slapping till it smashed the window-pane. When Melissy went to fix it, she came back covered with snow.
"Do brush it off!" complained Mrs. Fillebrown. "You look like a dead person. Isn't that doctor in sight yet?"
"I've het you up some beef tea," replied Melissy, cheerfully.
It was growing quite dark in the sitting-room. Melissy pugnaciously delayed to light the lamps, showing therein the possession of more delicacy of imagination than we gave her credit for.
"She don't know how late it is," thought Melissy. "And there ain't no call she should."
The faces of the two women stood out like satin masks, white above their dark dresses, in the gathering dusk. Their forms were scarcely visible to each other. Neither spoke. The maid stood by the window, staring out. The mistress, from the lounge, where she lay covered with the blue and red afghan that Melissy crocheted at Christmas, watched her.
Mrs. Fillebrown thought how important Melissy was to her. There was no one else—she had nobody else in the world. This seemed worse sometimes than neuralgia at the base; and Mrs. Fillebrown's imagination could no farther go.
Her face twitched with two kinds of pain—the one that the doctor prescribed for, when he could get there, and the one that no doctor could cure. She had been a handsome woman when Joe Fillebrown courted her; trouble had taken her color and contour, but had left her fineness of feature, and that carriage of the head which only a woman who is or once was beautiful ever has.
Now Melissy had never been handsome. But there was a look about her kind eyes and resolute white mouth that seemed beautiful to the other lonely woman, as Melissy stood sturdily challenging the storm for the first symptom of the doctor's approach.
"'Taint no use," said Melissy, suddenly, at last. "He's blocked. We've gotter make a night on't without him. I'll het you up the soapstones, and get you to bed, and set by you. I can sleep in my blanket-wrapper as comf't'ble as they make 'em. There ain't no use mincin'of it. He ain't a-comin'. He's wallerin' on the road somewheres with Adoniram and Peter Parley."
She smoothed her white apron over her chocolate calico dress, drew the curtains decidedly, and lighted the double burner with blue crepe silk shade. The faces of the two women took on a moribund hue in the cold color of the lamp.
Melissy's prophecy, as is not at all sure to be the case with the pessimism of optimistic people, proved accurately correct. The doctor did not get through till daylight; and Mrs. Fillebrown's neuralgia, with the eccentricity characteristic of that wilful disorder, had fled before him.
She was so much better when he dug his way to her front gate that she was delightfully cross. The doctor treated the symptom gleefully, as he would the squalls of a convalescent baby.
"I won't go through another such night, not even to please Providence!" snapped Mrs. Fillebrown. "We might starve, or freeze, or be murdered in our beds here—for all Northwest Peony. It's no sort of way to live. I'm going to have a man in the house if I live till the snow-plough gets out!"
"There ain't nobody but Adoniram and old Mr. Ginger. He's deef as a seraphim on a gravestone, and drags on the left side sence he had his stroke," remarked Melissy. "An' I'd like to know how long you'd hev Adoniram perfumin' up this house—feelin' the way you do about caows."
"Have a telephone," suggested the doctor, with the cosmopolitan air that he wore when he had been to Boston, and felt that he was what he called "in touch with the world." "It is cheaper than a man, and more protection. You are quite able, Mrs. Fillebrown, to afford these modern improvements. Really, I should feel much easier about you."
These last words touched Mrs. Fillebrown; for the doctor, with the emotional economy of his kind, was not lavish of his sympathy. She said to Melissy twice that day, "The doctor says he should feel easier about me."
She told Mrs. Whey so, when that good neighbor came in after the storm to verify the startling rumor that Mrs. Fillebrown had ordered a telephone put up in her bedroom, possible burglars and actual neuralgia being offered as the chief excuses for this incredible act. Silas came himself, and Mrs. Fillebrown's lawyer, Wiley X. Toyl, the minister's wife, the grocer from Peony Centre, the dressmaker, the sweet-potato man, and four of Mrs. Fillebrown's Sunday-school class. Mrs. Fillebrown had not received so many calls—who could say when? She grew quite chatty and cheerful. She was not used to being an object of public interest or attention.
"I have signed the contract," she said, "under Mr. Wiley X. Toyl's advice. The instrument is to go in next week. The doctor says he shall feel so much easier about me."
She repeated this phrase with a pathetic comfort at which it is not easy for a fine sympathy to smile. She was so starved for common human affection that she eagerly devoured the professional substitute for it—that pseudo-sympathy, that discreet dose of friendly interest, which is all that so many ailing and lonely women get from any source. Not that there was the palest tinge of sentiment in the attitude of her mind towards her doctor. She would as soon have thought of romancing about Silas Whey, or even old Mr. Ginger. She was an experienced, indeed a cynical, widow, holding all masculine admiration at a cold distance, and the doctor was the infatuated bridegroom of a brand-new second wife. But he was the only person in the world (except Melissy) who knew how Mrs. Fillebrown felt, was sorry, and sometimes said so.
Most of us learn some one lesson out of life's primer better than all the rest put together. Many of us study it in the form of a reiterated or monotonous trouble by which the unseen Power seems trying to screw some particular idea into our dull heads. Fortitude Fillebrown had learned the weakness of man, and what it means to woman. We might add that she had discovered the incurability of neurotic disorders; but that is secondary. You have seen carpenters screwing "bits" into hard wood, and have watched the shrinking, shrieking fibre as the tool bores its way. Supplant the wood by the living human brain, and that is neuralgia. But the boring, physical agonies of all the years of her lonely life, in which she had so little else to think of except the bit and the bore, were transport beside that other kind of pain which a strong and loving woman endures when she first admits to herself that the man she loves does not deserve her warm and wasted trust, and that her marriage is a definite mistake.
It had come gradually to Fortitude Fillebrown, as the consciousness of most such misfortunes comes. There was the slight but growing neglect, the intermittent tenderness, the increasing absence from home, the sharp and sharper word, the cooling indifference, unrecognized by the man himself, the occasional, then the frequent, domestic "scene."
When he lost his situation (Joe was a railroad man), from that sheer carelessness of temperament which we hesitate to call shiftlessness when we find it in one we love, she did not take the incident too much to heart. She owned their pretty home, and had enough for two to live on, with the old-fashioned economy to which her father had trained her. (He was master of the Peony Centre High-School, and had written an arithmetic successful in its day.) But Joe liked other ways. He developed habits as foreign to her simple ideas as the milieu of Monte Carlo. It took her a long time to understand what these meant. The wife is the last person to hear the truth about the life of a dissipated man. Rumors reached her on vague wings, and she buffeted them away as if they had been bats. But one night he came home unmistakably and savagely drunk.
From that hour she began to cast up the black items in the long sum by which a woman tries to solve the problem—given dead honor and dying love, how preserve enough happiness to keep alive on and save a home?
"Give me time, Forty," Joe said, in one of his best moments, "and I'll come out right yet. You're quick, my girl, you know. Let a fellow have his rope, and don't yank him in and give him up because he tugs on it. I'm not all bad yet, Forty. Be patient with me, girl, as long as you can—won't you?"
Joe wore upon his watch-guard a little iron Greek cross that his wife had put there once to signalize some one of his repentant vows to be or do something that she had asked him, and when he said this, Joe fingered the iron cross nervously. He always did the day after a spree. The trinket grew to have a sickly association in her mind with the piteous reaching out of irreclaimable weakness after strength which it is too weak to know that it cannot command.
Patient at first she was, or she thought she was; it amounted to the same thing in her mind, if not in Joe's. But, as Joe said, Fortitude was "quick." The recorder of her history does not claim that she was a perfect wife. There are some women nearly that; one wonders at their number.
But Fortitude Fillebrown was more human than superior—a loving, impulsive, warm-hearted, quick-tongued woman. She found it hard to forgive. Things rankled. She brooded. Sometimes she nagged. Her sense of outraged womanhood was stronger in her than the warm, maternal pity for a man, which is often the sweetest thing in the wife of a better husband than Joe Fillebrown.
"You women don't understand us men," Joe said, one day, rather drearily.
In short, Fortitude's patience broke when her heart did, and this was bad.
Her courage followed her patience. Bitterly sometimes she gibed at the irony of her own brave name. When things were at their worst she was half conscious that she had not the pluck of women she had read of, or of one or two she had known. But she did not know a great many people. She lived an uneventful life. After Joe died it grew secluded. She dreamed, and remembered, and had neuralgia, and answered Melissy.
Indeed, Joe took himself off in a painful way; and one need not wonder that Fortitude was never quite the woman after that black time that she was before.
Only Melissy ever knew the facts; but Melissy was in the dining-room putting away the silver, and the door was not latched.
Joe had come home very drunk the night before; had slept through the stupor which disgusts a woman with his sex in a way that no man can ever understand, and was "coming to," after supper, in a ferocious mood. He had put on his hat to go out again. His wife remonstrated. He turned and clinched his fist, and without a moment's hesitation brought it down on her neck and shoulders. It was the first time he had ever struck her. She cried out, and he struck her again.
She staggered, and her face turned a terrible color. She was not hurt much—in her flesh—a mere bruise that passed away next day. But her heart received a mortal wound.
All the pride of her sex, her maiden years, her father's name, her wifehood—its outraged fidelity and tenderness—leaped up. She walked with a firm step to the front door and opened it. She stretched her hand out—she had a hand with a fine profile—and pointed into the dark.
"Go!" she articulated, distinctly.
"Very well," said Joe; "that'll suit me. The house is yours, as you say."
Now Fortitude had said nothing of the kind. She only stood still—that was all—and pointed through the open door.
Joe gave one sodden glance at her majestic figure; he scarcely raised his eyes to the face, solemn as an antique marble, that frowned above the level of his low gaze. He stood feebly fingering the iron cross upon his watch-chain.
She remembered afterwards that he took off his hat; then he went down the steps. He called back once through the dark, "Good-by, girl."
She did not answer. And she never saw Joe again.
She expected him for a few days, and Melissy set his plate at the table every night. But he did not come. And one evening Mrs. Silas Whey came in, with the minister and his wife, and the three divided between them, as best they could, the news which they bore.
There had been a fire at Peony Centre; it was in a low hotel or boarding-house. Joe was staying there; he had been on a steady spree since he left home. It was a bitter night, and blew a gale. The rustic fire department used up the water-supply, and looked on while the house went down.
Seven people—some men, some women, some drunk, some sober, were smothered or burned.
Joe had got out of the building, it was quite certain. But he was seen to go back.
There was a cry that a little serving-maid, an uncouth, ignorant Swede, but a week in the country, was entrapped and perishing in the attic. It was believed that Joe went back to save the little maid.
They covered his face and brought him home to his wife. His clothes were ashes, but the iron cross on his watch-guard had not burned. Pitiful symbol of the metal that was lacking in the man! Sacred sign of the touch of dedication which transmutes feebler frailty than Joe's into character! Pathetic memory of those unrecorded scenes, those hopes and despairs, those ecstasies and agonies, known only to the dead man and to his living wife!
She broke when she saw the iron cross, and the women about her trembled before her cry.
With her own shaking fingers she removed the cross from Joe's poor body. From that hour she wore it on a ribbon, out of sight, against her heart. And from that hour she mourned and loved him.
Now Melissy marvelled much at this. A few months after Joe was buried, "I calc'late," said Melissy to herself, "she'd take another lickin' to get him back agin."
When Joe had been dead so many years that Melissy almost lost track of them, "Lordy," thought Melissy, "I calc'late she'd take a lickin' every day to set her eyes on him for a spell."
Melissy supposed it was because she had never been married that she found it so hard to understand the grief of the drunkard's widow. The old maid did not respect the wife altogether for this mystery of conjugal allegiance.
"When a man ain't wuth it," mused Melissy, "he ain't wuth."
Melissy welcomed anything, even a modern improvement, that would alleviate the desolation of the house. She was very much interested in the telephone.
"It's all over taown!" she cried, gleefully. "Some they call it onchristian extravagance, and some says the money'd better go to the A.B.C.F.M., or the W.C.T.U.,or the Widder's Mite. But Silas Whey he's a-talkin'- of puttin' one in himself; an 1 him a deacon! He says, seein' the poles run right by, he didn't s'pose the company'd charge nothin' extry. And Wiley X. Toyl, I hear he's ordered already. You've sot the fashion now, I do declare."
"So seems," said Mrs. Fillebrown, blushing importantly. "These modern improvements are very interesting."
She went to the post-office that morning herself, although the wind was northwest and neuralgic, to mail a letter subscribing to a popular scientific periodical. She felt what she called a mental stimulus quite new to her drowsy and dreamy life.
She was gone some time—so many people stopped her to say how glad they were to see her out, and when was her "instrumunt" going in?—and when she came home she was surprised to hear voices in the house.
She stepped into the hall softly, and closed the door without noise. Melissy's obvious tones rose with their own familiar positiveness upon her employer's astonished ear.
"You don't catch me! What? Me? Put my mouth into that hole? Lordy! give me the cullender and show me how to handle the darn thing. Looks like a tunnel a man had got a patent on without askin' his wife if it would let syrup through. So? I feel like a fritter fried too long. What 'll I do naow?"
Mrs. Fillebrown walked softly through the dining-room. The door of her bed-room was open. In that sacred apartment boldly appeared Melissy and a man. The "instrument," in the visible form of the neat oaken desk of the long-distance and metallic circuit, stood already in position against the wall.
Melissy sat at the desk. The local manager, in no wise loath to expend the time of the corporation in Melissy's stimulating society, stood twitching an amused mustache behind her. Neither of the two observed Mrs. Fillebrown.
"Now talk," said the affable manager. "Say something."
Melissy put her mouth to the transmitter and the receiver to her ear. She flushed with embarrassment, and sat in abnormal silence.
"Look a-here," said Melissy, meekly. "I can't think of a dumb thing to say."
She laid the receiver down weakly. Her strong, red fingers fumbled on the desk.
"Then it's the first time, I'll warrant," suggested the manager, wickedly.
Melissy fired at the fuse. She picked up the receiver stoutly, and in a defiant tone began:
"Here—you. Hello! Hel—lo! Yes. I hear you. Yes, I said I heard you. Hel—hum—ho! This corporation's got an awful sarsy manager. I'll say that for it."
Melissy choked, and sank back.
"Ring up now," directed the manager, amiably. "Call up some one else. You've got to learn."
"I don't know who to call," pleaded Melissy, faintly.
Who had ever seen Melissy embarrassed before? It took the greatest of contemporaneous monopolies to disconcert the Yankee girl who "accommodated" for an income.
"Call up your grocer, and see if there isn't somebody in the store you know," observed the manager, with the ingenuity of his class. "Ask for 32:5."
"32:5!" demanded Melissy, in a fierce and resolute tone. "Mercy to Betsy! he says what do I want. What do I want?"
"Tell him you thought your young man was in the store, and you wanted a few words with him," commanded the godless manager.
Now Melissy's head was so muddled by this time, that she retained few if any intelligent ideas beyond the conviction that the corporation must be obeyed, on forfeit of the instrument.
Mechanically she repeated the terrible language which the manager put into her mouth. There was a moment's significant silence in the telephone. Then Melissy could hear peals of profane masculine laughter reverberating through the grocery store.
"I'll answer the lady," broke in a sturdy voice. "Hullo, Miss Melissy! I'm proud to talk to ye!"
Melissy's face burned a dark, brick red.
"Child of sin and sorrow!" she gasped. "That's Adoniram Whettlestone! That's Silas Whey's Adoniram! Mercy to Betsy! I never can hold up my head in Northwest Peony again. I'm done for. Adoniram Whey? Be you Adoniram Whettlestone?"
"Yes. I hear you. I wisht I didn't."
"No, I didn't. I never did. I'd 'a' died fust. This fellar give me the order of them words. This is the sarsiest corporation I ever— No. I hain't got nothin' to say to you over no blamed Noo York and Noo England Telephone instrumunt. No, sir. You may tell 'em so, too."
"What's that?"
"I'm a goin' to put this blame thing down offen my ear. I won't hear another word."
"What did you say? I didn't just get that. Say it again. Speak a little louder."
"Mercy to Betsy!"
At this juncture Mrs. Fillebrown made her presence manifest, and Melissy, with a burning face, flew to her for protection. "Take it!" she cried, throwing down the receiver. "Take the blame thing, an' do the foolin' for this here fambly yerself! It's fit to bring scandal on any decent house of women folks!"
With this, weeping for mortification, yet bridling through her tears, Melissy fled from the room.
It was now Mrs. Fillebrown's turn. She sat down with dignity, and picked up the receiver daintily, with her little finger crooked out the way she held a tea-spoon in company.
"It is very interesting," she sighed. "Whom shall I talk to?"
"How would the doctor do?" suggested the astute manager.
"Shall I have to pay for a professional call?" asked the lady, anxiously. "I haven't got two dollars' worth of neuralgia to-day."
Being reassured on this point, she put her lips to the transmitter and faintly murmured: "Is the doctor in? Somebody says he isn't in," she added, in a disappointed tone. "I think it is his second wife."
"Are you sure it isn't his first?" asked the jocular manager.
"I'm not a spiritualist," replied the new subscriber, with dignity. The manager, who was no natural fool, perceived that he had unwittingly called out the concealed severity of an amiable woman—had stumbled on the subject of Mrs. Fillebrown's dearest aversion. He murmured a deprecating apology.
"Dear me!" said Mrs. Fillebrown, suddenly blushing. "They say there are twins at the sweet-potato man's, and they can't tell when to expect the doctor."
At this instant the call-bell rang loudly. Mrs. Fillebrown jumped and trembled. The manager explained that this was not her own call, but a chronic interruption to which she was expected to pay no attention.
"Hev we got ter hev that kerwollopin' in our ears night 'n' day?" demanded Melissy at the door. "I'd sooner hev twins—or the Last Trumpet."
Four musical rings now pealed prettily through the solemn house.
"You answer it!" pleaded Mrs. Fillebrown. "I feel somehow—it is very foolish, I know—a little afraid of it. Well, if you think it best— Who's that? Doctor? Why, Doctor!" Her pale face flushed with pleasure. "Why, I can recognize his voice—that big, bass tone he has when he's hungry and cross. Doctor? Why, this is delightful. Thank you; I am very much better. I haven't had an attack for ten days. Now, if anything does happen, I can call you up, can't I? Two boys, did you say? How interesting! It never occurred to me that a sweet-potato man could have twins. I don't think I even knew he was a married man. You see, one thinks of him as a sweet-pota— Yes. Good-by, Doctor. You are always so kind! He says he shall feel so much easier about me," sighed Mrs. Fillebrown, gently, as she hung the receiver in its place. The manager bowed gravely.
"What have you been doing in the front hall, Melissy?" asked Mrs. Fillebrown, after the representative of the corporation had left the house.
"Oh, nothin'," observed Melissy, carelessly—"only offerin' that fellar a hot apple tart I had."
"Dear me, Melissy! I don't know about that. Is it quite—" Mrs. Fillebrown paused for a word. Had the telephone already begun to corrupt the manners of her irreproachable household?
"Waal," said Melissy, grimly, "I thought he needed a little more sarse. I told him so. I het it up, and put a table-spoonful cayenne pepper inside. Then I stirred in a teaspoonful of my bitters and a little lixypro 'n' some mustard. I told him I was lookin' to get a husband on my repootation for cookin'."
"Mercy on us, Melissy! Did the poor young man eat that tart?"
"A big mouthful!" cried Melissy, savagely. "He took a chaw when he got outside. I seen him."
With this spicy prelude the telephone entered Mrs. Fillebrown's household, and there it had been cherished for nearly a year at the time when these records find themselves again concerned with it.
It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of this third member of the family. As Melissy said, it was worth twenty men folks. She said it had better habits, and was more civil. Melissy averred that it was a sight more useful than a husband, and consider'ble less trouble than a family of children.
Mrs. Fillebrown did not say much; but the apparent fact was that the grave without a hope would now have had less terror for her than existence without a telephone connection. The little nickel bell of 24:4 was always tinkling merrily through the lonely house. Business occasions demanding the use of the wire crowded upon the imagination of the subscriber. Friendship, neighborhood charity, and religion in turn combined their forces to supply Mrs. Fillebrown's telephone with steady occupation. Trade and the professions re-enforced each other in keeping the lady busy at her oaken desk. Silas Whey and Wiley X. Toyl added their addresses to the year-book, and their connections to Mrs. Fillebrown's list of electric intimacies. The monthly bills at the grocer's and the butcher's increased so fast that it ceased to be a mystery how these rural tradesfolk could afford telephones. Who could count the unnecessary chops and salads, the delusive patent soaps and dyspeptic canned things, that got into the kitchen because it was so easy for them to get through the telephone? Equally impossible was it to estimate the social excitements which that "instrument" brought into Mrs. Fillebrown's solitary life. Sitting there alone on winter days, in her desolate rooms, she visited, she entertained. Across that tiny, trembling wire all her little world came to her, and thereby she ventured out to it.
One day the Northwest Peony Church (having heard it rumored in Boston that the modern improvements in religion called upon all active parishes to keep open church), in a burst of Christian good sense, put a telephone into the vestry. Then Mrs. Fillebrown may be said to have begun to live; for then she found her hands and heart full (or, more precisely and telephonically speaking, her ears and mouth full) of the miseries of other people; and her own, like dissolving figures thrown through a stereopticon, retreated gently. In a word, the wife with a history, the widow with a bitter memory filling the place of a holy grief, the nervous invalid, the cynical recluse, had been added to the noble army of women whose romance has been sublimated into sacrifice. It took a year, but at the end of that year she was well on her way to become one of those neighborhood angels who glorify so many of the villages of New England with a gleam of splendid, moral life—some people name it altruism; some prefer an old-fashioned word, and call it Christianity.
24:4 had become the busiest number on the local exchange. The musical bell sang through its glass window at all hours of the day and many of the night. It had become quite the fashion in Northwest Peony to expect Mrs. Fillebrown to "fill up"—to meet those gaps in things which nobody else did or could. Was a watcher needed? Was a girl in trouble which only another woman and an older could understands? Was a young fellow bothered about his debts or his class oration? Ring up 24:4! Who will start the subscription to keep a forgotten old lady out of the poorhouse? Who will help out at the minister's while his wife brings the new baby into the world at the precise time when the other children have the measles? Who will look after those girls whom a drunken father sold to a Russian Finn? That boy who has been all winter with no flannels, and one old jacket over his little cotton shirt? Call up 24:4!
"We'll have to charge you hotel rates, Mrs. Fillebrown, if this goes on," said the manager, soothing his mustache. But he wouldn't have done it for his situation. He was proud of 24:4. Most people in Northwest Peony were. When three calls on this busy number came in one week from the Fresh-air Fund, and one from the State Industrial School, and another from the Women's Prison, the manager felt that his most important subscriber reflected credit on the exchange and on the corporation.
One night in early January Mrs. Fillebrown was very tired. She had been answering the bell all day when she was in, and it had been calling snappily for her all the time she was out. It was late. Melissy had gone to bed with a toothache. The house was quiet. The yard and street were still with the heavy stillness of a windless, winter night when the thermometer is low, and the moon is on the snow.
The last calls of a busy day were over. She had directed Wiley X. Toyl to pay the coal bill that he disputed for those poor Portuguese who had the grippe. She had told the dressmaker not to put on that expensive trimming. She had asked Mrs. Silas Whey how Silas's throat was, and wasn't there anything she could do? Oh, and how was Peter Parley's left hind ankle? She had ordered lemons from the grocer's for Rebecca at the Well. She had ordered extract of beef from the druggist's for the wife of the sweet-potato man, who had blessed the sweet-potato man and shocked the village by adding a cross-eyed, red-haired girl to her year-old twins.
Mrs. Fillebrown had told one of her Sunday- school scholars how to break an engagement, and another how to trim a bonnet. She had talked quite a while with the minister about the Junior Endeavor Convention, and as long again with his wife about the baby's croup and the little girl's composition. She had asked the doctor what she should do for Melissy's wisdom-tooth, and now she had hung the receiver up, and was lying on the lounge in the sitting-room under Melissy's blue and red afghan.
In one respect alone, it should be said, 24:4 had proved an astonishing disappointment to its subscriber. So little occasion to summon the doctor had lately arisen that Mrs. Fillebrown sometimes felt as if the final cause of her connection with the corporation had been defeated. Beyond a word in behalf of Melissy's toothache, or a prescription for old Mr. Ginger's "left side," or a friendly suggestion what to do for those girls in the parish who were making themselves preeminent by eating slate-pencils and chewing the margins of the religious newspapers, the doctor had found limited professional occupation over the wires of 24:4.
Mrs. Fortitude Fillebrown had grown round and rosy, cheerful and calm. The electric spark which completed her circuit with the warm, human world had brought into her life as much as it carried out.
If Mrs. Fillebrown was not quite a well woman, or if she never would be, she was too busy a one to have the time to know it; and on this particular evening it was an angry surprise suddenly to find that old bit boring "at the base of the brain." She met the fact with that exasperated scorn by which the mind receives those foes of the body which it believed itself to have routed. She would not telephone for the doctor—she set her teeth and clinched her hands and lay still. She felt as ashamed as if neuralgia had been a felony.
"I am only tired out," she said.
The call-bell rang, and she rose wearily to answer it. A young mother in the village who had lost her little girl that winter was going to Boston to consult a spiritualistic medium to-morrow. She telephoned to ask Mrs. Fillebrown to go with her.
"Not a step!" snapped Mrs. Fillebrown, with the decision of a kindly woman whose pet antipathy is unexpectedly aroused. "I won't go an inch with you on any such fool of an errand! You stay at home, Alicia, and say your prayers, and take round the subscription for the Orphans' Home, and put poor little Allie's dresses in a Home Missionary barrel. That's all I've got to say to you!"
She came back to the lounge, and crept under the blue and red afghan rather weakly. Indeed, she was tired—soul and body, tired out. She had reached one of those crevices to be found on the steeps of the most noble of lives, where sacrifice itself takes on the weariness and doubtfulness of all human endeavor, and where the climb seems hardly worth the muscle. To crawl in and stop seemed just for that one hour the intelligent thing to do.
Suddenly, as she lay there in this supine mood which all strong beings know but few talk about, it seemed to her that she would give the whole—the whole brave, lonely play—for one of her husband's kisses.
This pang of womanly weakness surprised Mrs. Fillebrown the more because she really had thought so little about Joe for some time past. She was rather glad when the telephone rang again, and she had to stagger in to the bedroom to answer it. The summons came from the manager, who wished to know how she liked the looks of her name and number on the new year-book, and regretted that he should not have the pleasure of serving so valuable a subscriber much longer. He was going to marry a Boston operator, and expected to be promoted to a city exchange.
She had not left the desk before the bell struck once more, and Mr. Adoniram Whettlestone presented his compliments to Miss Melissy Pulsifer, and would like to know if she received that evening".
"She's gone to bed with a toothache, Adoniram," said Mrs. Fillebrown, patiently. "And I must say I should be obliged to you if you wouldn't call us up again to-night. It is the seventh time to-day, and, really, I must have a little rest myself. If you want Melissy, come after her, man fashion; but I can't do second-hand courting over the telephone for a steady occupation."
It seemed hardly worth while to go back into the sitting-room after this, and Mrs. Fillebrown lay down on her bed, too tired and too ill either to undress or to sit up. It must have been half past nine o'clock when the bell rang with a loud, imperious cry.
"Well?" said Mrs. Fillebrown, wearily. (A subscriber seldom says hilloa.)
"Mrs. Fillebrown," replied the manager, in the voice of an operator moved with the unexpected importance of a country exchange, "here's a Long Distance call for you."
"Who is it?" asked Mrs. Fillebrown, with reviving interest.
"I don't know. It is a call from Chicago."
"Must be some mistake. I don't know anybody in Chicago."
"There is no mistake. The call is from Chicago—24:4—Mrs. Fortitude Fillebrown. No mistake at all. I will shut everything else off, and keep the wire clear for you. Speak distinctly, but don't holler. Line connected."
"Good-evening, Chicago," cried Mrs. Fillebrown, thickly, at the top of her lungs.
"Are you Northwest Peony, 24:4?"
"Yes."
"Is this Mrs. Fillebrown's house?"
"Yes "
"Mrs. Fortitude Fillebrown's?"
"Yes."
"Mrs. Joseph Fillebrown's?"
"This is the house."
"Are you Mrs. Fortitude Fillebrown?"
"I am the lady."
"Forty!" called the voice from space, tremulously, "don't you know me?"
The receiver shook in Mrs. Fillebrown's hand. Her face and neck went a mortal color. Women have dropped dead from far less shocks.
"No," she said, after a moment's terrible silence, "I do not know you."
"Very well," from a thousand miles away replied the voice, in disappointment so evident as to have something piteous about it—"very well, that will suit me."
"Who are you?" gasped Mrs. Fillebrown, now in great agitation.
"I used to be Joe," said the unseen, more quietly. He spoke with remarkable distinctness and power of tone. The conversation which followed took place without more difficulty than Mrs. Fillebrown might have experienced in calling up Boston in a snow-storm or a gale. "Now listen to me closely, Forty. It's a long pull, and you'll have to give trained attention."
"I am listening. I am attending closely."
"So you say—Joe died?"
"Joe died, and I buried him."
"Good riddance, wasn't it? Got along better without him, didn't you, girl? Wouldn't want me back if you could get me, would you?"
"Are you Joe's ghost? For God's sake, what are you?"
"Wouldn't want him round again, did you say? Forty! Forty! tell a fellow! What's that? Did you say you'd be willing to take him back?"
"I'd thank God for the chance!"
"Rich or poor?"
"Rich or poor."
"Lucky or unlucky?"
"Lucky or unlucky."
"Good or bad?"
"Good or bad."
"Dead or living?"
"Dead or living," said the widow, solemnly. "I'd bless God for the chance to take my poor husband back."
"Then I'll call again," replied the voice from the winter night. "Good-by."
Silence succeeded. She strained her throat in calling, her ears in listening. No words followed. The wire roared in the frosty atmosphere.
"Finished!" cried the manager. She hung up the receiver, and for the first time in her life Mrs. Fillebrown fainted quite away.
She was a woman used to keeping her own counsel, and she told no person what had happened to her. When she came to her senses, lying stiff and uncovered there across her bed in the winter night, she found herself quaking with that terror which is not of this earth nor of its laws. For her hand touched the iron cross, cold upon her bosom beneath her loosened dress. The incredible significance of this little circumstance struck her chill and dumb.
Joe was dead. She had buried him. Her own hands had taken the trinket from his poor burned body.
Then who had tampered with the half-understood electric powers which men fancied themselves to have controlled? Then what had called to her across a thousand miles of winter night?
She thought, with a sudden flame upon her ashy cheeks, how impatient she had been with that woman whose little girl was dead. Suppose she had gone to the Boston medium with Alicia?
"Perhaps I should have found out—something," she thought, vaguely. Then, with the natural energy of a practical woman who has a morbidness in a healthy direction, she scorned herself for the thought. Towards all other human weakness trouble had taught her to be motherly and tolerant; but with the feebler side of mysticism, taken in the only form in which she knew it, that of the lower, vulgar order of séances and rappings and communications, she had never felt even a civil patience.
Now she trembled before a mystery more incredible, more unreasonable, than any tale of the dusk which she had ever read or heard.
"Such things are phenomena," she said. For she had been reading the scientific magazine to which she had subscribed.
The next night she locked herself in with her telephone, but the "phenomena" were not repeated. The night after and the day and night following passed with- out event. Mrs. Fillebrown dared not go out of hearing of the call-bell of 24:4. She shut herself into the house, and sent Melissy on all the errands, real and imaginary, which she found it possible to invent.
On the third night Adoniram was in the kitchen, and Melissy was thoroughly preoccupied. Mrs. Fillebrown was alone in her sleeping-room, with the bolt drawn. The lamp with the ghastly blue silk shade was burning, and in its deadly color the widow, in her black dress, sat stolidly. No call had come in since supper. Mrs. Fillebrown watched the telephone with eyes in which there was more terror than longing. At half past nine she fancied that she saw the bell quiver behind its glass case. Then it struck.
She sprang to the desk. The manager was speaking.
"Mrs. Fillebrown, here's a Long Distance call for you again—New York."
"New York!"
"Connected."
With a clearness and distinctness which one might call appalling when one thought of the distance involved, the volume and articulation of voice began:
"Are you Northwest Peony, 24:4?"
"I am."
"Mrs. Fortitude Fillebrown's?"
"I am Mrs. Fillebrown."
"You are a mighty good operator for a subscriber. Hilloa, girl! Can you hear what I say?"
"I hear perfectly. But I don't know who you are."
"Try again! You've got a good Long Distance wire. You ought to recognize a voice no further than New York city.—Say, Forty! Come! Don't you know me?"
The woman's teeth chattered against the edge of the transmitter. Know the voice? Good God! She could not lie to Joe, just because he was a dead man. She did know the voice.
It was the voice that had courted her—and the voice that had cursed her. From that voice she had heard tenderness and blasphemy, manly love and unmanly recrimination, sodden song, self-pity, penitence, vows made only to be broken, and, oh, what love-making! Enough to melt and hold the heart of the stoniest woman in the bitter world.
"Joe!" she wailed; and three hundred miles of sensitive wire vibrated to her cry.
"Well, well, Forty! Why, girl! Why, my poor girl! Why, I thought— Upon my word, the girl thinks she's talking to a ghost. Say, Forty! I know I ought to be dead, but the fact is—can you make out to bear it?—you see, I'm not."
"Joe Fillebrown!" called the widow, with an access of moral and physical strength, "just because you're a dead spirit, you needn't take advantage of a poor live woman to deceive her. ... I took the iron cross off your burned corpse, and it's hanging around my neck."
"Whe—ew! You did, did you? I say, Forty! You always were almighty clever. I guess that evidence would hold in any court—and he'd be no kind of a ghost who didn't lose his case on it."
"Well, then!" cried the widow, in uncanny triumph. She felt an awful exaltation. She wondered what Alicia would say to this tremendous thing. How petty, how paltry, all those vulgar Boston "manifestations" seemed beside her own elect experience!
"Forty!" called the voice from New York, in a strange, changed tone. "Girl, I hate to disappoint you. But it isn't true."
"What isn't true?"
"You took the cross off the wrong fellow." .... But now from 24:4 there came no reply.
"Forty! Has somebody cut us off?"
"No; we are not cut off."
"I say, Forty! You see, I was a little tight that night, and this chap, he won at poker—and I was short of funds .... I was short, you know, occasionally, those days. So I was too tight to know any better—and I think I must have given him my watch."
"You—gave away—my iron cross?"
The words came with terrible distinctness. That little offence seemed worse to the woman at that moment than abuse, desertion, or death.
"Well," said the voice from New York, "haven't I been punished enough? I wasn't coming back to disgrace you! I meant—why, girl, don't you see?—I meant to try my hand at making a man of myself. It took a good while. I was going to make sure of it first."
Dead silence answered.
"If I haven't done that, I've done the next thing to it." urged the voice that was, but could not be, Joe's voice. "I've been manager of a big Western exchange. I telephone. That's my business. I can have any position I want. I'm doing well, Forty. And I haven't got drunk for six years and three months. I meant to serve seven steady years for you; but ten years without you (drunk or sober) is a good while, and—I couldn't stand it any longer, girl. I've got to that pass."
Then over the New York wire there broke the strangest message which that great line had ever known. It was the inarticulate pleading of a woman's sobs. They came one upon another far down from the depths which strong women never fathom in their own griefs—agonized entreaties, protests, appeals from fate to Heaven, and perhaps God knows what unuttered or unutterable forebodings.
"Oh, Forty! Why, Forty! Why, my poor girl! If you feel so badly—as that!—I won't bother you, my dear. I won't disgrace you. I meant to come home—when I'd made a man of myself, when I could make up to you for what happened; but I—can—give it .... up. I'll go back. I meant to take—the first train—to you."
"Joe! Joe! As soon as I can speak—Joe! Oh, for God's sake, don't let anybody cut us off now!"
"Forty! Do you want me? Did you say you did? Don't you bother about the wire. I'd like to see 'em cut off a manager on a D.H. message! Did you say you wanted me? Then, I swear, all hell sha'n't keep me! I'll be with you—dead or living—by to-morrow night!"
The communication shut down. Silence put her delicate finger upon the throbbing wire. The receiver fell from Mrs. Fillebrown's hand. She sat staring about her lonely room. She got up and snatched off the blue lamp shade; she hated the color suddenly. She wondered where that rose-red one had gone to that Joe used to like.
All the next day she lived in one of those sublimated dreams which make it possible for one to understand what it may be like to be a disembodied creature. Cherishing the thrilling secret, which still she did not dare to share with any living, she trod the floors of her house as if they had been floating clouds.
Melissy watched her; the Yankee girl's jaw dropped. "What in mercy to Betsy's got ye? There ain't no comp'ny comin'. Ain't this here house clean enough for you? And I'd like to know what you're a-movin' round the furnitoor in your room for. That bureau hain't stood there sence Mr. Fillebrown was buried. Why, that old red silk quilt's ben in the rag-bag this five year! Be you out of your senses?"
But Mrs. Fillebrown stared at Melissy solemnly. The question troubled her. Perhaps she was. She would not talk to Melissy. She spent the day in putting little things as Joe used to fancy them.
Towards night she got into a white cashmere tea gown that she sometimes wore with black ribbons. She sent Melissy to a Christian Endeavor meeting with Adoniram Whey, and herself remained alone in the house.
The evening trains came in and went out. Time to ride, to walk, to crawl from the station elapsed. The last train roared down the valley. Wheels were heard; they passed the house. It came on to be nine o'clock. Her pale lips moved stiffly.
"If there's anything to it, he'll call me up again." But he did not call her up again. She sat by her telephone all night long. The bell did not ring. ... There was nothing to it.
Joe was dead; and she had been fooled, like the weakest of women, by a "manifestation."
"It is nothing but a modern improvement in spiritualism," she thought, coldly.
In the morning she put on her black dress again, and carried her insomniac face proudly to the breakfast table, where Melissy took one look at it, and rang up the doctor immediately.
But Mrs. Fillebrown said nothing to the doctor. He prescribed for neuralgia at the base of the brain. She looked at him, and said, "Thank you, doctor," and he went away.
A week passed; two; four. No more Long Distance messages came to the Peony Centre exchange for 24:4. Mrs. Fillebrown eyed her telephone with a sick horror, as she might some evil spirit that had conspired with all that was freakish and weak in Joe to work her this unutterable misery.
One night, at a late hour, it being nearly twelve of the clock, she lay in bed with the light burning. She could not sleep. Then, suddenly, while she lay watching the nickel bell through its glass protector, it rang. It rang with the wilful and commanding peal familiar to the business in the transmission of messages from officer to operator of the line.
In her night-dress as she was, she leaped to the receiver; and through it, as before, came the prudent prelude:
"Is this 24:4, Peony Centre?"
"It is."
"Is this Mrs. Joseph Fillebrown's?"
"I am Mrs. Fortitude Fillebrown."
"Forty! .... I'm almost home. I'm in Boston."
"I hear you"—coldly.
"Girl, I've been sick—"
"Yes. I hear what you say."
"On my honor, Forty! I wasn't well when I started. I only got so far and stopped. I've had pneumonia at the City Hospital. I've been delirious. I couldn't get to you."
"Lord have mercy upon me!" wailed Mrs. Fillebrown, piteously. ... It had all begun all over again. Joe had been on a spree.
"Fortitude Fillebrown!" A thunderous cry rushed across the wires. "You think I've been drinking again! I say, if you do, I won't come home—I'll never come home till I am a ghost. If you can't trust me, girl—now— I did my best to get to you, Forty," tremulously. "But I see you don't believe me. Good-by. Good-by, girl—good-by."
"I'll believe in you when I see you," said the widow, stoutly. "It's asking too much of me to believe in deceiving spirits. It isn't Scriptural. You come home, Joe, and give me a chance to believe in you."
"Will you want me, Forty?"—timidly.
"Come home and find out for yourself, Joe."
"Sure you want me?"
"Sure."
"Poor or rich? Lucky or unlucky?"
"Yes—God knows—yes."
"Sick or well?"
"Sick or well."
"Dead or living?"
"Dead or living."
"Then I'll be there to breakfast," said the unseen.
The message shut off abruptly. But in a few moments the bell called again.
"Forty! I forgot to tell you. I've kept track of you, you know, all this while. I never meant to let you get into any scrape. I wasn't so bad as that. And, girl, I can have the exchange at Peony Centre if you'd rather stay on in the old home. It's a small job—there's a bigger in Boston for the taking—but I'd like to please you. Think it over, will you?"
"I'll think it over, Joe."
"And, Forty, girl, do you think you care enough for me"—
"I never cared for any man but you, Joe Fillebrown, in all my life."
—"When I come, if I should want to kiss you, Forty? I might, you know."
"I'll tell you when I see you," said Mrs. Fillebrown, evasively, persisting in the shelter of her phrase.
She went to bed and slept like a little girl. In the morning she woke quietly. Ghost or man, she had somehow ceased to be afraid of Joe. She felt the sacred power of the marriage bond close around her solemnly. Better, oh, best, a thousand times, forever be true wife, let shame, misery, mystery, death, come as they will!
She told Melissy, vouchsafing no explanation of this fearful domestic irregularity, to wait breakfast for a little, and then she opened the front door and looked out.
The first train from the city was screaming down the valley. There would be no cab at the station. She almost wished she had sent Adoniram with old Peter Parley. But then she remembered that one cannot ask the use of a neighbor's carriage to meet a spirit.
She stood in her black dress looking down the road. A man was walking feebly up the little hill. It was slushy, and the walking was hard. He crawled along with bent head. As he came nearer she saw that his hair was gray. Her heart gave one wild leap, and fell. For, oh, Joe's curls were brown as a seal, and as soft! Poor Joe! Dead Joe!
She stepped back into the house. Then, God knew why, she turned.
He had seen her, and, appalled at her abrupt retreat, had stopped there in the snow and leaned against the fence. He was breathing fast and weakly. It would have taken less than the least of the little whims which control the great decisions of life to make the man turn back.
For it was Joe. And he thought she was ashamed of him, or that she was sorry she had told him to come home.
She ran out into the slush and got to him. He held out his hand, and she put hers into it.
Now at that moment she found these dreadful words in her mind: "This was the hand that struck me."
She looked up into his face. Haggard as it was with mortal sickness, still the firm lines and the direct eye of long abstinence were there. All the witnesses of Joe's face took oath for him.
In hers a solemn jury held its verdict back. A piteous mental confusion ran riot in her. What were those old words about being born again? Her Scientific Monthly had omitted to quote them in that strong paper treating of the physiological renewal of the cells conceded to occur once in so many years.
"The hand that did that died. This is a new Joe," she thought. And then she thought no more. But she took his wasted fingers and bent over them, and laid her lips to them and kissed them.
When she saw how sick a man he was, very naturally and quietly she said, "Breakfast is all ready, Joe," just as if nothing had happened, and he had only been out all night, and was sorry, and had come home quite himself.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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