"Chicken supper! Minstrel show! Oh, Ambrose." His wife"s snort was the acme of refinement. "Have you no soul? This pageant will be an inspiring thing. It will make for, I might almost say militate for, a community spirit. Other communities give pageant after pageant. Shall Granville lag behind? Here is a chance for a real community get-together. Here is a chance to give our young people the wonderful history of their native town----"
"And also a chance for all the Gulick tribe to parade around in colonial clothes with spinning wheels under their arms," put in Mr. Pottle.
"I"m afraid we can"t avoid that," admitted his wife, ruefully. "After all, they are our oldest family."
She meditated.
"I suppose," she mused, "that Mrs. P. Bradley Gulick would have to be the Spirit of Progress----"
"Progress shouldn"t be fat and wall-eyed," interposed Mr. Pottle. She ignored this.
"And I suppose that odious freckled daughter of hers would have to be the Spirit of Liberty or Civilization or something important, and I suppose that pompous Mr. Gulick would have to be the Pioneer Spirit--still, I think it could be managed. Now, you, Ambrose, can be----"
"I don"t want to be the spirit of anything," he declared. "Count me out, Blossom."
Mrs. Pottle a.s.sumed a hurt pout.
"For my sake?" she said.
"I"m no actor," he stated.
"Oh, I don"t want you to act," she said. "You"re to be treasurer."
He wrinkled up his nose and brow into a frown.
"The dirty work," he exclaimed. "That"s the way the world over. Us Pottles do the dirty work and the Gulicks get the glory. No, Blossom, no, no, no."
An appealing tear, and another, stole down her pink cheek.
"Mr. Gallup wouldn"t have treated me that way," she said. Mr. Gallup had been her first husband.
Mr. Pottle knew resistance was futile.
"Oh, all right. I"ll be treasurer."
She smiled. "Now one more tiny favor?"
"Well?"
"I want you to be the Spirit of History and read the historic epilogue."
"Me? I"m no spirit. I"m a boss barber."
"Well, if you don"t take the job, I suppose I can get one of the Gulicks."
He considered a second.
"All right," he said. "I"ll be the Spirit of History. But understand one thing, right here and now: I will not wear tights."
She conceded him that point.
"Say," he asked, struck by a thought, "how do you know what spirits are going to be in this? Who is going to write this thing, anyhow?"
"I am," said Mrs. Pottle.
--2
"It"s not decent," objected Mr. Pottle fervidly. "How can I keep the respect of the community if I go round like this?"
He indicated his pink knees, which blushed like spring rosebuds beneath a somewhat nebulous toga of cheese-cloth.
"If I can"t wear pants, I don"t want to be the Spirit of History," he added.
"For the fifth and last time," said the tired and hara.s.sed voice of Mrs.
Pottle, "you cannot wear pants. Spirits never do. That settles it. Not another word, Ambrose. Haven"t I trouble enough without my own husband adding to it?"
She pressed her brow as if it ached. Piles of costumes, mostly tinsel and cheese-cloth, shields, tomahawks, bridles and bits of scenery were strewn about the Pottle parlor. She sank into a Morris chair, and st.i.tched fiercely at an angel"s wing. Her eyes were the eyes of one at bay.
"It"s been one thing after another," she declaimed. "Those Gulicks are making my life miserable. And just now I had a note from Etta Runkle"s mother saying that if in the Masque of the Fruits and Flowers of Botts County her little Etta has to be an onion while little Gertrude Crump is a violet, she won"t lend us that white horse for the Paul Revere"s Ride Scene. So I had to make that hateful stupid child of hers a violet and change Gertrude Crump to an onion and now Mrs. Crump is mad and won"t let any of her children appear in the pageant."
"Well," remarked Mr. Pottle, "I don"t see why you had to have Paul Revere"s Ride anyhow. He didn"t ride all the way out here to Ohio, did he?"
"I know he didn"t," she replied, tartly, "I didn"t want to put him in.
But Mrs. Gulick insisted. She said it was her ancestor, Elijah Gulick, who lent Paul Revere the horse. That"s why I have to have Paul Revere stop in the middle of his ride and say,
"_Gallant stallion, swift and n.o.ble, Lent me by my good friend Gulick, Patriot, scholar, king of hors.e.m.e.n, Speed ye, speed ye, speed ye onward!_"
Mr. Pottle groaned.
"Is there anything in American history the Gulicks didn"t have a hand in?" he asked. "But say, Blossom, that horse of the Runkle"s is no gallant stallion. She"s the one Matt Runkle uses on his milk route.
Every one in town knows Agnes."
"I can"t help it," said Mrs. Pottle wearily. "Wendell Gulick, Jr., who plays Paul Revere, insisted on having a white horse, and Agnes was the only one I could get."
"They"re the insistingest people I ever knew," observed Mr. Pottle.
His wife gave out the saddest sound in the world, the short sob of thwarted authorship.
"They"ve just about ruined my pageant," she said. "Mrs. Gulick insisted on having that battle between the settlers and the Indians just because a great, great uncle of hers was in it. I didn"t want anything rough like that in my pageant. Besides it happened in the next county, and the true facts are that the Indians chased the settlers fourteen miles, and scalped three of them. Of course it wouldn"t do to show a Gulick running from an Indian, so she insisted that I change history around and make the settlers win the battle. None of the nice young men were willing to be Indians and be chased, so I had to hire a tough young fellow named Brannigan--I believe they call him "Beansy"--and nine other young fellows from the horseshoe works to play Indian at fifty cents apiece."
Mr. Pottle looked anxious.
"I know that Beansy Brannigan," he said. "How is that gang behaving?"
"Oh, pretty well. But ten Indians at fifty cents an Indian is five dollars, and we c-can"t afford it."
She was tearful again.