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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 54676 ***
+
+FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
+
+BY
+
+ZONA GALE
+
+AUTHOR OF "FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," "THE LOVES
+OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE," ETC.
+
+NEW YORK
+GROSSET & DUNLAP
+PUBLISHERS
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1909,
+
+BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909. Reprinted
+November, 1909; April, 1912.
+
+
+_Norwood Press
+J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
+Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._
+
+
+To
+
+MY FRIENDS IN PORTAGE
+WISCONSIN
+
+
+Certain of the following chapters have appeared in _Everybody's_, _The
+American Magazine_, _The Outlook_, _The Woman's Home Companion_, and
+_The Delineator_. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous
+permission to reprint these chapters, and to Messrs. Harper Brothers for
+permission to reprint the sonnet in Chapter XI.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER                         PAGE
+    I. OPEN ARMS                   1
+
+   II. INSIDE JUNE                15
+
+  III. MIGGY                      33
+
+   IV. SPLENDOUR TOWN             43
+
+    V. DIFFERENT                  62
+
+   VI. THE FOND FORENOON          81
+
+  VII. AFRAID                     96
+
+ VIII. THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT    116
+
+   IX. THE COLD SHOULDER         136
+
+    X. EVENING DRESS             148
+
+   XI. UNDERN                    176
+
+  XII. THE WAY THE WORLD IS      191
+
+ XIII. HOUSEHOLDRY               206
+
+  XIV. POSTMARKS                 223
+
+   XV. PETER                     248
+
+  XVI. THE NEW VILLAGE           258
+
+ XVII. ADOPTION                  274
+
+XVIII. AT PETER'S HOUSE          293
+
+  XIX. THE CUSTODIAN             309
+
+
+
+
+Friendship Village Love Stories
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+OPEN ARMS
+
+
+Although it is June, the Little Child about whom I shall sometimes write
+in these pages this morning brought me a few violets. June violets. They
+sound unconvincing and even sentimental. However, here they are in their
+vase; and they are all white but one.
+
+"Only one blue one," said Little Child, regretfully; "May must be 'most
+dead by mistake."
+
+"Don't the months die as soon as they go away?" I asked her, and a
+little shocked line troubled her forehead.
+
+"Oh, no," she said; "they never die at all. They wait and show the next
+months how."
+
+So this year's May is showing June how. As if one should have a kind of
+pre-self, who kept on, after one's birth, and told one what to live and
+what not to live. I wish that I had had a pre-self and that it had kept
+on with me to show me how. It is what one's mother is, only one is so
+occupied in being one's born self that one thinks of her worshipfully
+as one's mother instead. But this young June seems to be chiefly May,
+and I am glad: for of all the months, May is to me most nearly the
+essence of time to be. In May I have always an impulse to date my
+letters "To-morrow," for all the enchantment of the usual future seems
+come upon me. The other months are richly themselves, but May is all the
+great premonitory zest come true; it is expectation come alive; it is
+the Then made Now. Conservatively, however, I date my May letters merely
+"To-morrow," and it is pleasant to find a conservative estimate which no
+one is likely to exceed. For I own that though there is a conservatism
+which is now wholly forbidden to me, yet I continue to take in it a
+sensuous, stolen pleasure, such as I take in certain ceremonies; and I
+know that if I were wholly pagan, extreme conservatism would be my chief
+indulgence.
+
+This yet-May morning, then, I have been down in the village, gardening
+about the streets. My sort of gardening. As in spring another looks
+along the wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the
+upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence I peered round this
+wall and that for faces and things in the renascence of recognition, or
+in the pleasant importance of having just been born. Many a gate and
+façade and well-house, of which in my absence I have not thought even
+once, has not changed a whit in consequence. And when changes have come,
+they have done so with the prettiest preening air of accomplishment: "We
+too," they say, "have not been idle."
+
+Thus the streets came unrolling to meet me and to show me their
+treasures: my neighbour's new screened-in porch "with a round extension
+so to see folks pass on the cross street"; in the house in which I am to
+live a former blank parlour wall gravely regarding me with a magnificent
+new plate glass eye; Daphne Street, hitherto a way of sand, now become a
+thing of proud macadam; the corner catalpas old enough to bloom; a white
+frame cottage rising like a domestic Venus from a once vacant lot of
+foam-green "Timothy"; a veranda window-box acquired, like a bright
+bow-knot at its house's throat; and, farther on, the Herons' freshly
+laid cement sidewalk, a flying heron stamped on every block. I fancy
+they will have done that with the wooden heron knocker which in the
+kitchen their grandfather Heron himself carved on sleepless nights.
+("Six hundred and twenty hours of Grandpa Heron's life hanging on our
+front door," his son's wife said; "I declare I feel like that bird could
+just about lay.") To see all these venturesome innovations, these
+obscure and pleasant substitutions, is to be greeted by the very annuals
+of this little garden as a real gardener in green lore might be
+signalled, here by a trembling of new purple and there by a yellow
+marching line of little volunteers.
+
+I do not miss from their places many friends. In this house and that I
+find a new family domiciled and to be divined by the subtle changes
+which no old tenant would ever have made: the woodpile in an
+unaccustomed place, the side shed door disused and strung for vines, a
+wagon now kept by a north and south space once sacred to the sweet-pea
+trench. Here a building partly ruined by fire shows grim, returned to
+the inarticulate, not evidently to be rebuilt, but to be accepted, like
+any death. But these variations are the exception, and only one
+variation is the rule, and against that one I have in me some special
+heritage of burning. I mean the felling of the village trees. We have
+been used wantonly to sacrifice to the base and the trivial, trees
+already stored with years of symmetry when we of these Midlands were the
+intruders and not they--and I own that for me the time has never wholly
+passed. They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel our lawns
+with twigs, they rot the shingles on our barns. It has seemed to occur
+to almost nobody to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too, are
+beginning to discern, so that when in the laying of a sidewalk we meet a
+tree who was there before we were anywhere at all, though we may not
+yet recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our love of a
+straight line, and our votive offering is to give the tree the
+walk--such a slight swerving is all the deference she asks!--and in
+return she blesses us with balms and odours.... For me these signs of
+our mellowing are more delightful to experience than might be the
+already-made quietudes of a nation of effected and distinguished
+standards. I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves an
+elemental gesture, though I personally would prefer not to be the one to
+have made the gesture. And this is my solace when with some
+inquisitioner I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine--an
+isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hemlock: verily, I say,
+it was so that we did here in the old days when there were forests to
+conquer, and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his blood as he
+has his genius for toil. And I try not to remember that if in America we
+had had plane trees, we should almost certainly have cut them into
+cabins.... But this morning even the trees that I missed could not make
+me sad. No, nor even the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers
+hanging on a street door which I passed. All these were as if something
+elementary had happened, needless wounds, it might be, on the plan of
+things, contortions which science has not yet bred away, but, as truly
+as the natural death from age, eloquent of the cosmic persuading to
+shape in which the nations of quietude and we of strivings are all in
+fellowship.
+
+In fellowship! I think that in this simple basic emotion lies my joy in
+living in this, my village. Here, this year long, folk have been
+adventuring together, knowing the details of one another's lives,
+striving a little but companioning far more than striving, kindling to
+one another's interests instead of practising the faint morality of mere
+civility; and I love them all--unless it be only that little Mrs. Oliver
+Wheeler Johnson, newly come to Friendship; and perhaps my faint liking
+for her arises from the fact that she has not yet lived here long enough
+to be understood, as Friendship Village understands. The ways of these
+primal tribal bonds are in my blood, for from my heart I felt what my
+neighbour felt when she told me of the donation party which the whole
+village has just given to Lyddy Ember:--
+
+"I declare," she said, "it wasn't so much the stuff they brought in,
+though that was all elegant, but it was the _Togetherness_ of it. I
+couldn't get to sleep that night for thinkin' about God not havin'
+anybody to neighbour with."
+
+It was no wonder, therefore, that when in the middle of Daphne Street my
+neighbour met me this morning, for the first time since my return, and
+held out her arms, I walked straight into them. Here is the secret, as
+more of us know than have the wisdom to acknowledge: fellowship,
+comradeship, kinship--call it what you will. My neighbour and I will
+understand.
+
+"I heard you was here," my neighbour said--bless her, her voice
+trembled. I suppose there never was such a compliment as that tremor of
+her voice.
+
+I am afraid that I am not going to tell what else she said. But it was
+all about our coming to Friendship Village to live; and that is a thing
+which, as I feel about it, should be set to music and sung in the
+wind--where Thoreau said that some apples are to be eaten. As for me, I
+nodded at my neighbour, and could do no more than that--as is the custom
+of mortals when they are face to face with these sorceries of Return and
+Meeting and Being Together.
+
+I am not yet wonted to the sweetness of our coming to Friendship Village
+to live, the Stranger and I. Here they still call him the Stranger; and
+this summer, because of the busts and tablets which he must fashion in
+many far places, so do I. Have I said that that Stranger of mine is a
+sculptor? He is. But if anyone expects me to write about him, I tell you
+that it is impossible. Save this: That since he came out of the mist one
+morning on the Plank Road here in Friendship Village, we two have kept
+house in the world, shared in the common welfare, toiled as we might
+for the common good, observed the stars, and thanked God. And this: that
+since that morning, it is as if Someone had picked us up and set us to
+music and sung us to the universal piping. And we remember that once we
+were only words, and that sometime we shall be whatever music is when it
+is free of its body of sound, and for that time we strive. But I repeat
+that these vagrant notes are not about this great Stranger, absent on
+his quests of holy soul prisoned in this stone and that marble, nor yet
+about our life together. Rather, I write about our Family, which is this
+loved town of ours. For we have bought Oldmoxon House, and here, save
+for what flights may be about and over-seas, we hope that we may tell
+our days to their end.
+
+My neighbour had both my hands, there in the middle of Daphne Street,
+and the white horse of the post-office store delivery wagon turned out
+for us as if he knew.
+
+"If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd have put on my other
+hat," my neighbour said, "but I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down
+for some rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't what they
+used to be, are they? One season an' they lay down life. I could jounce
+up an' down I'm so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed
+gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'. I heard the girl that
+was comin' to help you ain't comin' near."
+
+My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and she has done the
+disappointing by telegraph. I had almost said, publicly by telegraph.
+But I protest that I would rather an entire village should read my
+telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole city should care
+almost nothing for me or my telegrams either. And if you please, I would
+rather not have that telegram-reading criticised.
+
+"Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity, "I've got you one. She'll be
+up to talk to you in a day or two--I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can
+spell like the minister."
+
+I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her name with something of
+that sense of the inescapable to which the finality of my neighbour
+impressed me. As if I were to have said, "So, then, it is to be Miggy!"
+Or was it something more than that? Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and
+mine had struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have come to
+call the emotion of finality. I suppose that other people have it: that
+occasional prophetic sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses
+this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness of--shall I
+say?--brightness; a mental area of clearness; a quite definite physical
+emotion of yes-ness. But if the thing will not happen this says itself
+by a complementary apprehension of dim, down-sloping, vacant negation. I
+have seldom known this divination to fail me--though I am chary of using
+it lest I use it up! And then I do not always wish to know. But this
+morning my emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware: I _knew_ that
+it would be Miggy.
+
+"What a curious name," I said, in a manner of feebly fending off the
+imminent; "_why_ Miggy?" For it seemed to me one of those names instead
+of which any other name would have done as well and perhaps better.
+
+"Her name is Margaret," my neighbour explained, "and her mother was a
+real lady that come here from Off and that hard work killed her because
+she _was_ a lady. The father was bound there shouldn't be any lady about
+Miggy, but he couldn't seem to help himself. Margaret was her mother's
+name and so he shaved it and shrunk it and strained it down to Miggy.
+'No frills for nobody,' was his motto, up to his death. Miggy and her
+little sister lives with her old Aunt Effie that dress-makes real French
+but not enough to keep 'em alive on. Miggy does odd jobs around. So when
+I heard about your needin' somebody, I says to myself, 'Miggy!'--just
+like I've said it to you."
+
+It was not the name, as a name, which I would have said could be
+uppermost in my mind as I walked on that street of June--that May was
+helping to make fair. And I was annoyed to have the peace of my return
+so soon invaded. I fell wondering if I could not get on, as I usually
+do, with no one to bother. I have never wanted a helper at all if I
+could avoid it, and I have never, never wanted a helper with a
+personality. A personality among my strewn papers puts me in a fever of
+embarrassment and misery. Once such an one said to me in the midst of a
+chapter: "Madame, I'd like to ask you a question. What do _you_ think of
+your hero?" In an utter rout of confusion I owned that I thought very
+badly of him, indeed; but I did not add the truth, that she had
+effectually drugged him and disabled me for at least that day. My taste
+in helpers is for one colourless, noiseless, above all intonationless,
+usually speechless, and always without curiosity--some one, save for the
+tips of her trained fingers, negligible. As all this does sad violence
+to my democratic passions, I usually prefer my negligible self. So the
+idea of a Miggy terrified me, and I said to myself that I would not have
+one about. As I knew the village, she was not of it. She was not a part
+of my gardening. She was no proper annual. She was no doubt merely a
+showy little seedling, chance sown in the village.... But all the time,
+moving within me, was that serene area of brightness, that clear
+certainty that, do what I could, it would still be Miggy.
+
+... It is through this faint soothsaying, this conception which is
+partly of sight and partly of feeling, that some understanding may be
+won of the orchestration of the senses. I am always telling myself that
+if I could touch at that fluent line where the senses merge, I should
+occasionally find there that silent Custodian who is myself. I think,
+because emotion is so noble, that the Custodian must sometimes visit
+this line where the barrier between her and me is so frail. Her presence
+seems possible to me only for a moment, only, it may be, for the
+fraction of a second in which I catch the romance, the _idea_ of
+something old and long familiar. And when this happens, I say: She has
+just been there, between the seeing and the feeling, or between the
+seeing and the knowing. Often I am sure that I have barely missed her.
+But I am never quick enough to let her know....
+
+When I finished my walk and stepped under the poplars before my gate, I
+caught a faint exclamation. It was that Little Child, who had been
+waiting for me on my doorstep and came running to meet me and bring me
+the violets. When she saw me, she said, "Oh!" quickly and sweetly in her
+throat, and, as I stood still to taste the delight of having her run
+toward me, I felt very sorry for every one who has not heard that
+involuntary "Oh!" of a child at one's coming. Little Child and I have
+met only once before, and that early this morning, at large, on the
+village street, as spirits met in air, with no background of names nor
+auxiliary of exchange of names; but we had some talk which for me
+touched on eternal truth and for her savoured of story-telling; and we
+are friends. So now when she gave me the violets and explained to me Who
+was showing June how, I accepted this fair perception of the motherhood
+of May, this childish discernment of the familyhood of things, and,
+
+"Will you come some day soon to have another story?" I asked her.
+
+"Prob'ly I can," said Little Child. "I'll ask Miggy."
+
+"Miggy! But is it your Miggy, too?" I demanded.
+
+"It's my sister," said Little Child, nodding.
+
+I thought that the concreteness of her reply to my ill-defined query was
+almost as if she remembered how to understand without words. You would
+think that children would need to have things said out, but they are
+evidently closer to a more excellent way.
+
+So when I entered the house just now, I brought in with me a kind of
+premonitory Miggy, one of those ghostly, anticipatory births which we
+are constantly giving to those whom we have not met. As if every one
+had for us a way of life without the formality of being seen. As if we
+are a big, near family whether we want to be so or not. Verily, it is
+not only May and June, or Little Child and Miggy, who are found
+unexpectedly to be related; it is the whole world, it seems, and he is
+wise who quickens to many kinships. I like to think of the comrade
+company that already I have found here: June and Little Child and
+Miggy-to-be and my neighbour and Daphne Street and the remembered faces
+of the village and the hamadryads. I think that I include the very
+herons in the cement sidewalk. Like a kind of perpetual gift it is, this
+which my neighbour called _Togetherness_.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+INSIDE JUNE
+
+
+_The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough to
+it. This month comes within few houses, and if you want it you must go
+out to it. When you are within doors, knowing that out-of-doors it is
+June, the urge to be out there with it is resistless. But though you
+wade in green, steep in sun, breast wind, and glory in them all, still
+the day itself eludes you. It would seem, in June, that there should be
+a specific for the malady of being oneself, so that one might get to be
+a June day outright. However, if one were oneself more and more, might
+not one finally become a June day?..._
+
+Or something of this sort. I am quoting, as nearly as may be, from the
+Book of Our Youth, your youth and mine. Always the Book of Youth will
+open at a page like this. And occasionally it is as if we turned back
+and read there and made a path right away through the page.
+
+This morning a rose-breasted grosbeak wakened me, singing on a bough of
+box-elder so close to my window that the splash of rose on his throat
+almost startled me. It was as if I ought not to have been looking. And
+to turn away from out-of-doors was like leaving some one who was saying
+something. But as soon as I stepped into the day I perceived my old
+problem: _The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near
+enough_.
+
+I stood for a little at the front gate trying soberly to solve the
+matter--or I stood where the front gate should have been; for in our
+midland American villages we have few fences or hedges, and, alas, no
+stone walls. Though undoubtedly this lack comes from an insufficient
+regard for privacy, yet this negative factor I am inclined to condone
+for the sake of the positive motive. And this I conceive to be that we
+are wistful of more ample occupation than is commonly contrived by our
+fifty-feet village lots, and so we royally add to our "yards" the
+sidewalk and the planting space and the road and as much of our
+neighbour's lawn as our imagination can annex. There seems to me to be
+in this a certain charming pathos; as it were, a survival in us of the
+time when we had only to name broad lands our own and to stay upon them
+in order to make them ours in very fact. And now it is as if this serene
+pushing back of imaginary borders were in reality an appending, a kind
+of spiritual taking up of a claim.
+
+How to get nearer to June? I admit that it is a question of the veriest
+idler. But what a delightful company of these questions one can
+assemble. As, How to find one's way to a place that _is_ the way it
+seems Away Across a Meadow. How to meet enough people who hear what one
+says in just the way that one means it. How to get back at will those
+fugitive moments when one almost _knows_ ... what it is all about. And
+with this question the field of the idler becomes the field of the wise
+man; and, indeed, if one idles properly--or rather, if the proper person
+idles--the two fields are not always on opposite sides of the road. To
+idle is by no means merely to do nothing. It is an avocation, a calling
+away, nay, one should say, a piping away. To idle is to inhibit the body
+and to let the spirit keep on. Not every one can idle. I know estimable
+people who frequently relax, like chickens in the sun; but I know only a
+few who use relaxation as a threshold and not as a goal, and who idle
+until the hour yields its full blessing.
+
+I wondered if to idle at adventure might not be the way to June, so I
+went out on the six o'clock street in somewhat the spirit in which
+another might ride the greenwood. Almost immediately I had an encounter,
+for I came on my neighbour in her garden. Not my neighbour who lives on
+the other side of me, and who is a big and obvious deacon, with a
+family of a great many Light Gowns; but My Neighbour. She was watering
+her garden. These water rules and regulations of the village are among
+its spells. To look at the members of the water commission one would
+never suspect them of romance. But if they have it not, why have they
+named from five until nine o'clock the only morning hours when one may
+use the city water for one's lawn and garden? I insist that it cannot be
+a mere regard for the municipal resources, and that the commissioners
+must see something of the romance of getting up before five o'clock to
+drench one's garden, and are providing for the special educational value
+of such a custom. Or, if I do not believe this, I wish very much that I
+did, with the proper grounds.
+
+To tell the truth, however, I do not credit even my neighbour with
+feeling the romance of the hour and of her occupation. She is a still
+woman of more than forty, who does not feel a difference between her
+flower and her vegetable gardens, but regards them both as a part of her
+life in the kind of car-window indifference and complacency of certain
+travellers. She raises foxgloves and parsley, and the sun shines over
+all. I must note a strange impression which my neighbour gives me: she
+has always for me an air of personal impermanence. I have the fancy,
+amounting to a sensation, that she is where she is for just a moment,
+and that she must rush back and be at it again. I do not know at what.
+But whether I see her in church or at a festival, I have always all I
+can do to resist saying to her, "How _did_ you get away?" It was so that
+she was watering her flowers; as if she were intending at any moment to
+hurry off to get breakfast or put up the hammock or mend. And yet before
+she did so she told me, who was a willing listener, a motion or two of
+the spirit of the village.
+
+There is, I observe, a nicety of etiquette here, about the
+Not-quite-news, Not-quite-gossip shared with strangers and
+semi-strangers. The rules seem to be:--
+
+Strangers shall be told only the pleasant occurrences and conditions.
+
+Half strangers may discuss the unpleasant matters which they themselves
+have somehow heard, but only pleasant matters may be added by accretion.
+
+The rest of society may say whatever it "has a mind." But this mind, as
+I believe, is not harsh, since nobody ever gossips except to people who
+gossip back.
+
+"Mis' Toplady told me last night that Calliope Marsh is coming home for
+the Java entertainment, next week," my neighbour imparted first. And
+this was the best news that she could have given me.
+
+It has been a great regret to me that this summer Calliope is not in the
+village. She has gone to the city to nurse some distant kinswoman more
+lonely than she, and until ill-health came, long forgetful of Calliope.
+But she is to come back now and again, to this and to that, for the
+village interests are all her own. I have never known any one in whom
+the tribal sense is so persistently alive as in Calliope.
+
+I asked my neighbour what this Java entertainment would be, which was to
+give back Calliope, and she looked her amazement that I did not know. It
+would be, it appeared, one of those great fairs which the missionary
+society is always projecting and carrying magnificently forward.
+
+"It's awful feet-aching work," said my neighbour, reflectively; "but
+honestly, Calliope seems to like it. I donno but I do, too. The Sodality
+meant to have one when they set out to pave Daphne Street, but it turned
+out it wasn't needed. Well, big affairs like that makes it seem as if
+we'd been born into the whole world and not just into Friendship
+Village."
+
+My neighbour told me that a new public library had been opened in a
+corner of the post-office store, and that "a great crowd" was drawing
+books, though for this she herself cannot vouch, since the library is
+only open Saturday evenings, and "Saturday," she says with decision, "is
+a bad night." It is, in fact, I note, very difficult to find a free
+night in the village, save only Tuesday. Monday, because of its obvious
+duties and incident fatigue, is as impossible as Sunday; Wednesday is
+club day; Thursday "is prayer-meeting"; Friday is sacred to church
+suppers and entertainments and the Ladies' Aid Society; and Saturday is
+invariably denominated a bad night and omitted without question. We are
+remote from society, but Tuesday is literally our only free evening.
+
+"Of course it won't be the same with you about books," my neighbour
+admits. "You can send your girl down to get a book for you. But I have
+to be home to get out the clean clothes. How's your girl going to like
+the country?" she asked.
+
+I am to have here in the village, I find, many a rebuke for habits of
+mine which lag behind my theories. For though I try to solve my share of
+a tragic question by giving to my Swedish maid, Elfa, the self-respect
+and the privilege suited to a human being dependent on me, together with
+ways of comfort and some leisure, yet I find the homely customs of the
+place to have accomplished more than my careful system. And though, when
+I took her from town I scrupulously added to the earnings of my little
+maid, I confess that it had not occurred to me to wonder whether or not
+she would like Friendship Village. We seem so weary-far from the
+conditions which we so facilely conceive. Especially, I seem far. I am
+afraid that I engaged Elfa in the first place with less attention to her
+economic fitness than that she is so trim and still and wistful, with
+such a peculiarly winning upward look; and that her name is Elfa. I told
+my neighbour that I did not know yet, whether Elfa would like it here or
+not; and for refuge I found fault with the worms on the rose bushes.
+Also I made a note in my head to ask Elfa how she likes the country. But
+the spirit of a thing is flown when you make a note of it in your head.
+How does Elfa like the town, for that matter? I never have asked her
+this, either.
+
+"She'll be getting married on your hands, anyway," my neighbour
+observed; "the ladies here say that's one trouble with trying to keep a
+hired girl. They _will_ get married. But I say, let 'em."
+
+At least here is a matter in which my theory, like that of my
+neighbour's, outruns those of certain folk of both town and village. For
+I myself have heard women complain of their servants marrying and
+establishing families, and deplore this shortsightedness in not staying
+where there is "a good home, a nice room, plenty to eat, and all the
+flat pieces sent to the laundry."
+
+"Speaking of books," said my neighbour, "have you seen Nicholas Moor?"
+
+"I see almost no new books," I told her guiltily.
+
+"Me either," she said; "I don't mean he's a book. He's a boy. Nicholas
+Moor--that does a little writin' himself? I guess you will see him.
+He'll be bringin' some of his writing up to show you. He took some to
+the new school principal, I heard, and to the invalid that was here from
+the city. He seems to be sort of lonesome, though he _has_ got a good
+position. He's interested in celluloid and he rings the Catholic bell.
+Nicholas must be near thirty, but he hasn't even showed any signs."
+
+"Signs?" I hazarded.
+
+"Of being in love," she says simply. And I have pondered pleasantly on
+this significant ellipsis of hers which takes serenely for granted the
+basic business of the world. Her elision reminds me of the delicate
+animism of the Japanese which says, "When the rice pot speaks with a
+human voice, then the demon's name is Kanjo." One can appraise a race or
+an individual by the class of things which speech takes for granted,
+love or a demon or whatever it be.
+
+And apropos of "showing signs," do I remember Liva Vesey and Timothy
+Toplady, Jr.? I am forced to confess that I remember neither. I recall,
+to be sure, that the Topladys had a son, but I had thought of him as a
+kind of qualifying clause and it is difficult to conceive of him as the
+subject of a new sentence. When I hear of Liva Vesey I get her confused
+with a pink gingham apron and a pail of buttermilk which used sometimes
+to pass my house with Liva combined. Fancy that pink gingham and that
+pail becoming a person! And my neighbour tells me that the Qualifying
+Clause and the Pink Gingham are "keeping company," and perhaps are to
+determine the cut of indeterminate clauses and aprons, world without
+end.
+
+"The young folks _will_ couple off," says my neighbour; "and," she adds,
+in a manner of spontaneous impression, "_I_ think it's nice. And it's
+nice for the whole family, too. I've seen families that wouldn't ever
+have looked at each other come to be real friends and able to see the
+angels in each other just by the young folks pairing off. This whole
+town's married crisscross and kittering, family into family. I like it.
+It kind o' binds the soil."
+
+My neighbour told me of other matters current in the village, pleasant
+commonplaces having for her the living spirit which the commonplace
+holds in hostage. ("I'm breathing," Little Child soberly announced to me
+that first day of our acquaintance. And I wonder why I smiled?) My
+neighbour slowly crossed her garden and I followed on the walk--these
+informal colloquies of no mean length are perfectly usual in the village
+and they do not carry the necessity for an invitation within the house
+or the implication of a call. The relations of hostess and guest seem
+simply to be suspended, and we talk with the freedom of spirits met in
+air. Is this not in its way prophetic of the time when we shall meet,
+burdened of no conventions or upholstery or perhaps even words, and
+there talk with the very freedom of villagers? Meanwhile I am content
+with conventions, and passive amid upholstery. But I do catch myself
+looking forward.
+
+Suddenly my neighbour turned to me with such a startled, inquiring
+manner that I sent my attention out as at an alarm to see what she
+meant. And then I heard what I had not before noted: a thin, wavering
+line of singing, that had begun in the street beyond our houses, and now
+floated inconsequently to us, lifting, dipping, wandering. I could even
+hear the absurd words.
+
+
+     "_My_ Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I _never_ know.
+     You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh--"
+
+
+the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air.
+
+To say something was like interrupting my neighbour's expression; so I
+waited, and,
+
+"It's old Cary," she explained briefly. "When he does that it's like
+something hurts you, ain't it?"
+
+I thought that this would be no one of my acquaintance, and I said so,
+but tentatively, lest I should be forgetting some inherent figure of the
+village.
+
+"He's come here in the year," she explained--and, save about the obvious
+import of old Cary's maudlin song, she maintained that fine, tribal
+reticence of hers. "Except for the drinking," she even said, "he seems
+to be a quiet, nice man. But it's a shame--for Peter's sake. Peter
+Cary," she added, like a challenge, "is the brainiest young man in
+_this_ town, say what you want."
+
+On which she told me something of this young superintendent of the
+canning factory who has "tried it in Nebraska," and could not bear to
+leave his father here, "this way," and has just returned. "He works
+hard, and plays the violin, and is making a man of himself generally,"
+she told me; "Don't miss him." And I have promised that I will try not
+to miss Peter Cary.
+
+"They live out towards the cemetery way," she added, "him and his
+father, all alone. Peter'll be along by here in a minute on his way to
+work--it's most quarter to. I set my husband down to his breakfast and
+got up his lunch before I come out--I don't have my breakfast till the
+men folks get out of the way."
+
+I never cease to marvel at these splendid capabilities which prepare
+breakfasts, put up lunches, turn the attention to the garden, and all,
+so to speak, with the left hand; ready at any moment to enter upon the
+real business of life--to minister to the sick or bury the dead, or
+conduct a town meeting or a church supper or a birth. They have a kind
+of goddess-like competence, these women. At any of these offices they
+arrive, lacking the cloud, it is true, but magnificently equipped to
+settle the occasion. In crises of, say, deafness, they will clap a hot
+pancake on a friend's ear with an Æsculapian _savoir faire_, for their
+efficiencies combine those of lost generations with all that they hear
+of in this, in an open-minded eclecticism. With Puritans and foresters
+and courtiers in our blood, who knows but that we have, too, the
+lingering ichor of gods and goddesses? Oh--"_don't you wish you had_?"
+What a charming peculiarity it would be to be descended from a state of
+immortality as well as to be preparing for it, nay, even now to be
+entered upon it!
+
+In a few moments after that piteous, fuddled song had died away on the
+other street, Peter Cary came by my neighbour's house. He was a
+splendid, muscular figure in a neutral, belted shirt and a hat battered
+quite to college exactions, though I am sure that Peter did not know
+that. I could well believe that he was making a man of himself. I have
+temerity to say that this boy superintendent of a canning factory looked
+as, in another milieu, Shelley might have looked, but so it was. It was
+not the first time that I have seen in such an one the look, the eyes
+with the vision and the shadow. I have seen it in the face of a man who
+stood on a step-ladder, papering a wall; I have seen it in a mason who
+looked up from the foundation that he mortared; I have seen it often
+and often in the faces of men who till the soil. I was not surprised to
+know that Peter Cary "took" on the violin. The violin is a way out (for
+that look in one's eyes), as, for Nicholas Moor, I have no doubt, is the
+ringing of the Catholic bell. And I am not prepared to say that
+celluloid, and wall-paper, and mortar, and meadows, and canneries,--run
+under good conditions,--may not be a way out as well. At all events, the
+look was still in Peter's face.
+
+Peter glanced briefly at my neighbour, running the risk of finding us
+both looking at him, realized the worst, blushed a man's brown blush,
+and nodded and smiled after he had looked away from us.
+
+"You see this grass?" said my neighbour. "Peter keeps it cut, my husband
+don't get home till so late. We're awful fond of Peter."
+
+There is no more tender eulogy. And I would rather have that said of me
+in the village than in any place I know. No grace of manner or dress or
+mind can deceive anybody. They are fond of you or they are not, and I
+would trust their reasons for either.
+
+My neighbour's husband came out the front door at that moment, and he
+and Peter, without greeting, went on together. Her husband did not look
+toward us, because, in the village, it seems not to be a husband and
+wife ceremonial to say good-by in the morning. I often fall wondering
+how it is in other places. Is it possible that men in general go away
+to work without the consciousness of family, of themselves as going
+forth on the common quest? Is it possible that women see them go and are
+so unaware of the wonder of material life that they do not instance it
+in, at least, good-by? One would think that even the female bear in the
+back of the cave must growl out something simple when her lord leaves
+her in the hope of a good kill.
+
+And when the two men had turned down the brick walk, the maple leaves
+making a come-and-go of shadows and sun-patterns on their backs, my
+neighbour looked at me with a smile--or, say, with two-thirds of a
+smile--as if her vote to smile were unanimous, but she were unwilling by
+it to impart too much.
+
+"It's all Miggy with Peter," she said, as if she were mentioning a
+symptom.
+
+"Miggy?" I said with interest--and found myself nodding to this new
+relationship as to a new acquaintance. And I was once more struck with
+the precision with which certain simple people and nearly all great
+people discard the particularities and lay bare their truths. Could any
+amount of elegant phrasing so reach the heart of the thing and show it
+beating as did, "It's all Miggy with Peter"?
+
+"Yes," my neighbour told me, "it's been her with him ever since he come
+here."
+
+Assuredly I thought the better of Miggy for this; and,
+
+"Is it all Peter with Miggy?" I inquired, with some eagerness.
+
+Land knows, my neighbour thought, and handed me the hose to hold while
+she turned off the water at the hydrant. I remember that a young robin
+tried to alight on the curving spray just as the water failed and
+drooped.
+
+"I like to get a joke on a robin that way," said my neighbour, and
+laughed out, in a kind of pleasant fellowship with jokes in general and
+especially with robins. "It made Miggy's little sister laugh so the
+other day when that happened," she added. Then she glanced over at me
+with a look in her face that I have not seen there before.
+
+"Land," she said, "this is the time of day, after my husband goes off in
+the morning, when I wish I had a little young thing, runnin' round.
+_Now_ almost more than at night. Well--I don't know; both times."
+
+I nodded, without saying anything, my eyes on a golden robin prospecting
+vainly among the green mulberries. I wish that I were of those who know
+what to say when a door is opened like this to some shut place.
+
+"Well," said my neighbour, "now I'll bake up the rest of the batter.
+Want a pink?"
+
+Thus tacitly excused--how true her instinct was, courteously to put the
+three fringed pinks in my hand to palliate her leaving!--I have come
+back to my house and my own breakfast.
+
+"Elfa," said I, first thing, "do you think you are going to like the
+country?"
+
+My little maid turned to me with her winning upward look.
+
+"No'm," she shocked me by saying. And there was another door, opened
+into another shut place; and I did not know what to say to that either.
+
+But I am near to my neighbour; and, in a manner to which Elfa's trimness
+and wistfulness never have impressed me, near to Elfa herself, and I am
+near, near to the village. As I left the outdoors just now, all the
+street was alive: with men and girls going to work, women opening
+windows, a wagon or two in from a Caledonia farm, a general, universal,
+not to say cosmic air of activity and coffee. All the little houses, set
+close together up and down the street, were like a friendly porch party,
+on a long, narrow veranda, where folk sit knee to knee with an avenue
+between for the ice-cream to be handed. All the little lawns and gardens
+were disposed like soft green skirts, delicately embroidered, fragrant,
+flowing.... As I looked, it seemed to me that I could hear the faint hum
+of the village talk--in every house the intimate, revealing confidences
+of the Family, quick with hope or anxiety or humour or passion,
+animated by its common need to live. And along the street flooded the
+sun, akin to the morning quickening in many a heart.
+
+The day has become charged for me with something besides daylight,
+something which no less than daylight pervades, illumines, comes to meet
+me at a thousand points. I wonder if it can be that, unaware, I did get
+near to June?
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MIGGY
+
+
+I have never heard the chimes of Westminster cathedral, but when some
+time they do sound for me I shall find in them something all my own. For
+the old rosewood clock which has told time for me these many years is
+possessed of a kind of intelligence because its maker gave to it the
+Westminster chimes. Thus, though the clock must by patient ticking teach
+the rhythm of duration until the secret monotony of rhythm is confessed,
+it has also its high tides of life, rhythmic, too, and at every quarter
+hour fills a kind of general creative office: four notes for the
+quarter, eight for the half, twelve for the three-quarters, sixteen for
+the hour, and then the deep Amen of the strokes. At twelve o'clock it
+swells richly to its zenith of expression and almost says something
+else. Through even the organ fulness of the cathedral bells I shall hear
+the tingling melody of the rosewood clock chimes, for their sweet
+incidence has been to me both matins and lullaby and often trembles
+within my sleep. I have the clock always with me. It is a little
+voice-friend, it is one of those half folk, like flowers and the wind
+and an open fireplace and a piano, which are a frail, semi-born race,
+wistful of complete life, but as yet only partly overlapping our own
+sphere. These fascinate me almost as much as the articulate. That was
+why, when my little maid Elfa had brought me the summons to-day, I stood
+on the threshold and in some satisfaction watched Miggy, rapt before my
+clock in its musical maximum of noon.
+
+Miggy is as thin as a bough, and her rather large head is swept by an
+ungovernable lot of fine brown hair. Her face was turned from me, and
+she was wearing a high-necked gingham apron faded to varying values of
+brown and faint purple and violet of a quite surprising beauty. When the
+last stroke ceased, she turned to me as if I had been there all the
+time.
+
+"I wish I could hear it do that again," she said, standing where she had
+stood, arms folded.
+
+"You will, perhaps, to-morrow," I answered.
+
+Truly, if it was to be Miggy, then she would hear the chimes to-morrow
+and to-morrow; and as she turned, my emotion of finality increased. I
+have never loved the tribe of the Headlongs, though I am very sorry for
+any one who has not had with them an occasional innocent tribal junket;
+but I hold that through our intuitions, we may become a kind of
+apotheosis of the Headlongs. Who of us has not chosen a vase, a chair, a
+rug, by some motive transcending taste, by the bidding of a
+friendly-faithful monitor who, somewhere inside one, nodded a choice
+which we obeyed? And yet a vase is a dead thing with no little seeking
+tentacles that catch and cling, while in choosing the living it is that
+one's friendly-faithful monitor is simply recognizing the monitor of the
+other person. I, for one, am more and more willing to trust these two to
+avow their own. For I think that this monitor is, perhaps, that silent
+Custodian whom, if ever I can win through her elusiveness, I shall know
+to be myself. As the years pass I trust her more and more. I find that
+we like the same people, she and I! And instantly we both liked Miggy.
+
+Miggy stood regarding me intently.
+
+"I saw you go past the Brevy's yesterday, where the crape is on the
+door," she observed; "I thought it was you."
+
+I wonder at the precision with which very little people and very big
+people brush aside the minor conventions and do it in such ways that one
+nature is never mistaken for the other.
+
+"The girl who died there was your friend, then?" I asked.
+
+"No," Miggy said; "I just knew her to speak to. And she didn't always
+bother her head to speak to me. I just went in there yesterday morning
+to get the feeling."
+
+"I beg your pardon. To get--what?" I asked.
+
+"Well," said Miggy, "you know when you look at a corpse you can always
+sense your own breath better--like it was something alive inside you.
+That's why I never miss seeing one if I can help. It's the only time I'm
+real glad I'm living."
+
+As I motioned her to the chair and took my own, I felt a kind of
+weariness. The neurotics, I do believe, are of us all the nearest to the
+truth about things, but as I grow older I find myself getting to take a
+surpassing comfort in the normal. Or rather, I am always willing to have
+the normal thrust upon me, but my neurotics I wish to select for myself.
+
+"My neighbour tells me," I said merely, "that she thinks you should be
+my secretary." (It is a big word for the office, but a little hill is
+still a hill.)
+
+"I think so, too," said Miggy, simply, "I was afraid you wouldn't."
+
+"Have you ever been anybody's secretary?" I continued.
+
+"Never," said Miggy. "I never saw anybody before that had a secretary."
+
+"But something must have made her think you would do," I suggested. "And
+what made you think so?"
+
+"Well," Miggy said, "she thinks so because she wants me to get ahead.
+And I think so because I generally think I can do anything--except
+mathematics. Has Secretary got any mathematics about it?"
+
+"Not my secretary work," I told her, reviewing these extraordinary
+qualifications for duty; "except counting the words on a page. You could
+do that?"
+
+"Oh, that!" said Miggy. "But if you told me to multiply two fractions
+you'd never see me again, no matter how much I wanted to come back.
+Calliope Marsh says she's always expecting to find some folks' heads
+caved in on one side--same as red and blue balloons. If mine caved, it'd
+be on the mathematics corner."
+
+I assured her that I never have a fraction in my house.
+
+"Then I'll come," said Miggy, simply.
+
+But immediately she leaned forward with a look of anxiety, and her face
+was pointed and big-eyed, so that distress became a part of it.
+
+"Oh," she said, "I _forgot_. I meant to tell you first."
+
+"What is it? Can you not come, after all?" I inquired gravely.
+
+"I've got a drawback," said Miggy, soberly. "A man's in love with me."
+
+She linked her arms before her, a hand on either shoulder--arms whose
+slenderness amazes me, though at the wrist they taper and in their
+extreme littleness are yet round. Because of this frailty she has a kind
+of little girl look which at that moment curiously moved me.
+
+"Who told you that?" I asked abruptly.
+
+"About it being a drawback? Everybody 'most," said Miggy. "They all
+laugh about us and act like it was a pity."
+
+For a moment I felt a kind of anger as I felt it once when a woman said
+to me of a wife of many years whose first little child was coming, that
+she was "in trouble." I own that,--save with my neighbour, and Calliope,
+and a few more whom I love--here in the village I miss the simple good
+breeding of the perception that nothing is nobler than the emotions, and
+the simple good taste of taking seriously love among its young. Taking
+it seriously, I say. Not, heaven forbid, taking it for granted, as do
+the cities.
+
+"Other things being equal, I prefer folk who are in love," I told Miggy.
+Though I observe that I instance a commercialization which I deplore by
+not insisting on this secretarial qualification to anything like the
+extent with which I insist on, say, spelling.
+
+Miggy nodded--three little nods which seemed to settle everything.
+
+"Then I'll come," she repeated. "Anyhow, it isn't me that's in love at
+all. It's Peter. But of course I have to have some of the blame."
+
+So! It was, then, not "all Peter with Miggy." Poor Peter. It must be a
+terrific problem to be a Peter to such a Miggy. I must have looked "Poor
+Peter," because the girl's face took on its first smile. Such a smile as
+it was, brilliant, sparkling, occupying her features instead of
+informing them.
+
+"He won't interfere much," she observed. "He's in the cannery all day
+and then he practises violin and tinkers. I only see him one or two
+evenings a week; and I never think of him at all."
+
+"As my secretary," said I, "you may make a mental note for me: remind me
+that I wish sometime to meet Peter."
+
+"He'll be real pleased," said Miggy, "and real scared. Now about my
+being your secretary: do I have to take down everything you do?"
+
+"My dear child!" I exclaimed.
+
+"Don't I?" said Miggy. "Why, the Ladies' Aid has a secretary and she
+takes down every single thing the society does. I thought that was being
+one."
+
+I told her, as well as might be, what I should require of her--not by
+now, I own, with any particularity of idea that I had a secretary, but
+rather that I had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be of use in
+many a little mechanical task. She listened, and, when I had made an
+end, gave her three little nods; but her face fell.
+
+"It's just doing as you're told," she summed it up with a sigh.
+"Everything is, ain't it? I thought maybe Secretary was doing your
+best."
+
+"But it is," I told her.
+
+"No," she said positively, "you can't do your best when you have to do
+just exactly what you're told. Your _best_ tells you how to do itself."
+
+At this naïve putting of the personal equation which should play so
+powerful a part in the economics of toil I was minded to apologize for
+intending to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible duties with
+me. She had the truth, though: that the strong creative instinct is the
+chief endowment, primal as breath; for on it depend both life and the
+expression of life, the life of the race and the ultimate racial
+utterance.
+
+We talked on for a little, Miggy, I observed, having that royal
+indifference to time which, when it does not involve indifference to the
+time of other people, I delightedly commend. For myself, I can never
+understand why I should eat at one or sleep at eleven, if it is, as it
+often is, _my_ one and _my_ eleven and nobody else's. For, as between
+the clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other o'clocks are mine
+and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who
+would interrupt a sunset to go to dine, or wave away the stars in their
+courses to go to sleep, merely because the hour had struck. It must be
+in their blood, poor things, as descendants from the cell, to which time
+and space were the only considerations.
+
+When Miggy was leaving, she paused on the threshold with her first hint
+of shyness, a hint which I welcomed. I think that every one to whom I am
+permanently drawn must have in his nature a phase of shyness, even of
+unconquerable timidity.
+
+"If I shouldn't do things," Miggy said, "like you're used to having them
+done--would you tell me? I know a few nice things to do and I do 'em.
+But I'm always waking up in the night and thinking what a lot there must
+be that I do wrong. So if I do 'em wrong would you mind not just
+squirming and keeping still about 'em--but tell me?"
+
+"I'll tell you, child, if there is need," I promised her. And I caught
+her smile--that faint, swift, solemn minute which sometimes reveals on a
+face the childlike wistfulness of every one of us, under the mask, to
+come as near as may be to the others.
+
+I own that when, just now, I turned from her leave-taking, I had that
+infrequent sense of emptiness-in-the-room which I have had usually only
+with those I love or with some rare being, all fire and spirit and idea,
+who has flamed in my presence and died into departure. I cannot see why
+we do not feel this sense of emptiness whenever we leave one another.
+Would you not think that it would be so with us who live above the abyss
+and below the uttermost spaces? It is not so, and there are those from
+whose presence I long to be gone in a discomfort which is a kind of
+orison of my soul to my body to hurry away. It is so that I long to be
+gone from that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, and of this I am
+sorely ashamed. But I think that all such dissonance is merely a failure
+in method, and that the spirit of this business of being is that we long
+for one another to be near.
+
+Yes, in "this world of visible images" and patterns and schedules and
+o'clocks, it is like stumbling on the true game to come on some one who
+is not on any dial. And I fancy that Miggy is no o'clock. She is not
+Dawn o'clock, because already she has lived so much; nor Noon o'clock,
+because she is far from her high moment; nor is she Dusk o'clock,
+because she is so poignantly alive. Rather, she is like the chimes of a
+clock--which do not tell the time, but which almost say something else.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SPLENDOUR TOWN
+
+
+Last night I went for a walk across the river, and Little Child went
+with me to the other end of the bridge.
+
+I would have expected it to be impossible to come to the fourth chapter
+and to have said nothing of the river. But the reason is quite clear:
+for the setting of the stories of the village as I know them is
+preëminently rambling streets and trim dooryards, and neat interiors
+with tidy centre-tables. Nature is merely the necessary opera-house, not
+the intimate setting. Nature's speech through the trees is most
+curiously taken for granted as being trees alone, and she is, as I have
+shown, sometimes cut off quite rudely in the midst of an elm or linden
+sentence and curtly interrupted by a sidewalk. If a grove of trees is
+allowed to remain in a north dooryard it is almost certainly because the
+trees break the wind. Likewise, Nature's unfoldings in our turf and
+clover we incline to regard as merely lawns, the results of seeds and
+autumn fertilizing. Our vines are for purposes of shade, cheaper and
+prettier than awnings or porch rollers. With our gardens, where our
+"table vegetables" are grown, Nature is, I think, considered to have
+little or nothing to do; and we openly pride ourselves on our early this
+and our prodigious that, quite as when we cut a dress or build a
+lean-to. We admit the rain or the sunny slope into partnership, but what
+we recognize is weather rather than the mighty spirit of motherhood in
+Nature. Indeed, our flower gardens, where are wrought such miracles of
+poppies and pinks, are perhaps the only threshold on which we stand
+abashed, as at the sound of a singing voice, a voice that sings
+believing itself to be alone.
+
+These things being so, it is no wonder that the river has been for so
+long no integral part of village life. The river is accounted a place to
+fish, a place to bathe, a thing to cross to get to the other side, an
+objective point--including the new iron bridge--to which to take guests.
+But of the everyday life it is no proper part. On the contrary, the
+other little river, which strikes out silverly for itself to eastward,
+is quite a personality in the village, for on it is a fine fleet of
+little launches with which folk take delight. But this river of mine to
+the west is a thing of whims and eddies and shifting sand bars, and here
+not many boats adventure. So the river is accepted as a kind of pleasant
+hermit living on the edge of the village. It draws few of us as Nature
+can draw to herself. We know the water as a taste only and not yet as an
+emotion. We say that we should enjoy going there if we had the time. I
+know, I know. You see that we do not yet _live_ the river, as an ancient
+people would live their moor. But in our launches, our camping parties,
+our flights to a little near lake for dinner, in a tent here and a swing
+there, set to face riverward, there lies the thrill of process, and by
+these things Nature is wooing us surely to her heart. Already the Pump
+pasture has for us the quality of individuality, and we have picnics
+there and speak of the pasture almost as of a host. Presently we shall
+be companioned by all our calm stretches of meadow, our brown sand bars,
+our Caledonia hills, our quiet lakes, our unnavigable river, as the
+Northmen were fellowed of the sea.
+
+Little Child has at once a wilder and a tamer instinct. She has this
+fellowship and the fellowship of more.
+
+"Where shall we go to-day?" I ask her, and she always says, "Far away
+for a party"--in a combination, it would seem, of the blood of shepherd
+kings with certain corpuscles of modernity. And when we are in the woods
+she instances the same dual quality by, "Now let's sit down in a _roll_
+and wait for a fairy, and be a society."
+
+We always go along the levee, Little Child and I, and I watch the hour
+have its way with her, and I do not deny that occasionally I try to
+improve on the hour by a tale of magic or by the pastime of teaching her
+a lyric. I love to hear her pretty treble in "Who is Sylvia? What is
+she?" and "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," and "April, April, laugh
+thy girlish laughter," and in Pippa's song. Last night, to be sure, the
+lyrics rather gave way to some talk about the circus to be to-day, an
+unwonted benison on the village. But even the reality of the circus
+could not long keep Little Child from certain sweet vagaries, and I love
+best to hear her in these fancyings.
+
+"Here," she said to me last night, "is her sponge."
+
+I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are always finding the fairy's
+cast-off ornaments and articles of toilet. On occasion we have found her
+crown, her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her plumed fan,
+her parasol--a skirtful of fancies which next day Little Child has
+brought to me in a shoe box for safe keeping so that "They" would not
+throw the things away: that threatening "They" which overhangs
+childhood, casting away its treasures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying
+a ladder straight through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the
+back yard. I can visualize that "They" as I believe it seems to some
+children, something dark and beetling and menacing and imminent, less
+like the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this precious idea of
+the Family, to conserve which is one of our chief hopes, should so often
+be made to appear to its youngest member in the general semblance of a
+phalanx?
+
+We sat down for a little at the south terminal of the bridge, where a
+steep bank and a few desperately clinging trees have arranged a little
+shrine to the sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across the bridge
+I had been watching against the gold the majestic or apathetic or sodden
+profiles of the farmers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face,
+it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it to forecast the
+weather. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky
+and called "The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the
+village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white
+pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital. And
+there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the butcher's cart halted in
+snow while a tawny-jerseyed boy lifts high his yellow light to find a
+parcel. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising
+values and fresco our village libraries with them--yes, and our drug
+stores, too.
+
+The story that I told Little Child while we rested had the symbolism
+which I often choose for her: that of a girl keeping a garden for the
+coming of a child. All her life she has been making ready and nothing
+has been badly done. In one green room of the garden she has put fair
+thoughts, in another fair words, and in the innermost fastnesses of the
+garden fair deeds. Here she has laid colour, there sweet sound, there
+something magic which is a special kind of seeing. When the child comes,
+these things will be first toys, then tools, then weapons. Sometimes the
+old witch of the wood tries to blow into the garden a thistle of discord
+or bubbles of delight to be followed, and these must be warded away. All
+day the spirit of the child to come wanders through the garden, telling
+the girl what to do here or here, keeping her from guile or from
+idleness-without-dreams. She knows its presence and I think that she has
+even named it. If it shall be a little girl, then it is to be Dagmar,
+Mother of Day, or Dawn; but if a little boy, then it shall be called for
+one whom she has not yet seen. Meanwhile, outside the door of the garden
+many would speak with the girl. On these she looks, sometimes she even
+leans from her casement, and once, it may be, she reaches out her hand,
+ever so swiftly, and some one without there touches it. But at that she
+snatches back her hand and bars the garden, and for a time the spirit of
+the little child does not come very near. So she goes serenely on
+toward the day when a far horn sounds and somebody comes down the air
+from heaven, as it has occurred to nobody else to do. And they hear the
+voice of the little child, singing in the garden.
+
+"The girl is me," says little Little Child, as she always says when I
+have finished this story.
+
+"Yes," I tell her.
+
+"I'd like to see that garden," she says thoughtfully.
+
+Then I show her the village in the trees of the other shore, roof upon
+roof pricked by a slim steeple; for that is the garden.
+
+"I don't care about just bein' good," she says, "but I'd like to
+housekeep that garden."
+
+"For a sometime-little-child of your own," I tell her.
+
+"Yes," she assents, "an' make dresses for."
+
+I cannot understand how mothers let them grow up not knowing, these
+little mothers-to-be who so often never guess their vocation. It is a
+reason for everything commonly urged on the ground of conduct, a ground
+so lifeless to youth. But quicken every desert space with "It must be
+done so for the sake of the little child you will have some day," and
+there rises a living spirit. Morals, civics, town and home economics,
+learning--there is the concrete reason for them all; and the abstract
+understanding of these things for their own sakes will follow,
+flower-wise, fruit-wise, for the healing of the times.
+
+I had told to that old Aunt Effie who keeps house for Miggy and Little
+Child something of what I thought to do--breaking in upon the old
+woman's talk of linoleum and beans and other things having, so to say,
+one foot in the universe.
+
+"Goodness," that old woman had answered, with her worried turn of head,
+"I'm real glad you're going to be here. _I dread saying anything._"
+
+Here too we must look to the larger day when the state shall train for
+parenthood and for citizenship, when the schools and the universities
+shall speak for the state the cosmic truths, and when by comparison
+botany and differential calculus shall be regarded as somewhat less
+vital in ushering in the kingdom of God.
+
+The water reservoir rose slim against the woods to the north; to the
+south was a crouching hop house covered with old vines. I said to Little
+Child:--
+
+"Look everywhere and tell me where you think a princess would live if
+she lived here."
+
+She looked everywhere and answered:--
+
+"In the water tower in those woods."
+
+"And where would the old witch live?" I asked her.
+
+"In the Barden's hop house," she answered.
+
+"And where would the spirit of the little child be?" I tested her.
+
+She looked long out across the water.
+
+"I think in the sunset," she said at last. And then of her own will she
+said over the Sunset Spell I have taught her:--
+
+
+     "I love to stand in this great air
+     And see the sun go down.
+     It shows me a bright veil to wear
+     And such a pretty gown.
+     Oh, I can see a playmate there
+     Far up in Splendour Town."
+
+
+I could hardly bear to let her go home, but eight o'clock is very
+properly Little Child's bedtime, and so I sent her across the bridge
+waving her hand every little way in that fashion of children who, I
+think, are hoping thus to save the moment that has just died. I have
+known times when I, too, have wanted to wave my hand at a moment and
+keep it looking at me as long as possible. But presently the moment
+almost always turned away.
+
+Last night I half thought that the sunset itself would like to have
+stayed. It went so delicately about its departure, taking to itself
+first a shawl of soft dyes, then a painted scarf, then frail iris wings.
+It mounted far up the heavens, testing its strength for flight and
+shaking brightness from its garments. And it slipped lingeringly away as
+if the riot of colour were after all the casual part, and the real
+business of the moment were to stay on with everybody. In the tenuity of
+the old anthropomorphisms I marvel that they did not find the sunset a
+living thing, tender of mortals, forever loth to step from out one
+moment into the cherishing arms of the next. Think! The sunset that the
+Greeks knew has been flaming round the world, dying from moment to
+moment and from mile to mile, with no more of pause than the human
+heart, since sunset flamed for Hero and Helen and Ariadne.
+
+If the sunset was made for lovers, and in our midland summers lingers on
+their account, then last night it was lingering partly for Miggy and
+Peter. At the end of the bridge I came on them together.
+
+Miggy did not flush when she saw me, and though I would not have
+expected that she would flush I was yet disappointed. I take an
+old-fashioned delight in women whose high spirit is compatible with a
+sensibility which causes them the little agonizings proper to this
+moment, and to that.
+
+But Miggy introduced Peter with all composure.
+
+"This," she said, "is Peter. His last name is Cary."
+
+"How do you do, Peter?" I said very heartily.
+
+I thought that Peter did something the rationale of which might have
+been envied of courts. He turned to Miggy and said "Thank you."
+Secretly I congratulated him on his embarrassment. In a certain milieu
+social shyness is as authentic a patent of perception as in another
+milieu is taste.
+
+"Come home with me," I besought them. "We can find cake. We can make
+lemonade. We can do some reading aloud." For I will not ask the mere
+cake and lemonade folk to my house. They must be, in addition, good or
+wise or not averse to becoming either.
+
+I conceived Peter's evident agony to rise from his need to reply.
+Instead, it rose from his need to refuse.
+
+"I take my violin lesson," he explained miserably.
+
+"He takes his violin lesson," Miggy added, with a pretty, somewhat
+maternal manner of translating. I took note of this faint manner of
+proprietorship, for it is my belief that when a woman assumes it she
+means more than she knows that she means.
+
+"I'm awful sorry," said Peter, from his heart; "I was just having to go
+back this minute."
+
+"To-morrow's his regular lesson day," Miggy explained, "but to-morrow
+he's going to take me to the circus, so he has his lesson to-night. Go
+on," she added, "you'll be late and you'll have to pay just the same
+anyway." I took note of this frank fashion of protection of interests,
+for it is my belief that matters are advancing when the lady practises
+economics in courtship. But I saw that Miggy was manifesting no
+symptoms of accompanying Peter, and I begged them not to let me spoil
+their walk.
+
+"It's all right," Miggy said; "he'll have to hurry and I don't want to
+go in yet anyway. I'll walk back with you." And of this I took note with
+less satisfaction. It was as if Miggy had not come alive.
+
+Peter smiled at us, caught off his hat, and went away with it in his
+hand, and the moment that he left my presence he became another being. I
+could see by his back that he was himself, free again, under no bondage
+of manner. It is a terrific problem, this enslavement of speech and
+trivial conduct which to some of us provides a pleasant medium and for
+some of us furnishes fetters. When will they manage a wireless society?
+I am tired waiting. For be it a pleasant medium or be it fetters, the
+present communication keeps us all apart. "I hope," I said once at
+dinner, "that I shall be living when they think they get the first sign
+from Mars." "I hope," said my companion, "that I shall be living when I
+think I get the first sign from you--and you--and you, about this
+table." If this young Shelley could really have made some sign, what
+might it not have been?
+
+"Everybody's out walking to-night," Miggy observed. "There's Liva Vesey
+and Timothy Toplady ahead of us."
+
+"They are going to be married, are they not?" I asked.
+
+Miggy looked as if I had said something indelicate.
+
+"Well," she answered, "not out loud yet."
+
+Then, fearing that she had rebuked me, "He's going to take her to the
+circus to-morrow in their new buckboard," she volunteered. And I find in
+Friendship that the circus is accounted a kind of official
+trysting-place for all sweethearts.
+
+We kept a little way back of the lovers, the sun making Liva Vesey's
+pink frock like a vase-shaped lamp of rose. Timothy was looking down at
+her and straightway looking away again when Liva had summoned her
+courage to look up. They were extremely pleasant to watch, but this
+Miggy did not know and she was intent upon me. She had met Little Child
+running home.
+
+"She's nice to take a walk with," Miggy said; "but I like to walk around
+by myself too. Only to-night Peter came."
+
+"Miggy," said I, "I want to congratulate you that Peter is in love with
+you."
+
+She looked up with puzzled eyes.
+
+"Why, that was nothing," she said; "he seemed to do it real easy."
+
+"But it is _not_ easy," I assured her, "to find many such fine young
+fellows as Peter seems to be. I hope you will be very happy together."
+
+"I'm not engaged," said Miggy, earnestly; "I'm only invited."
+
+"Ah, well," I said, "if I may be allowed--I hope you are not sending
+regrets."
+
+Miggy laughed out suddenly.
+
+"Married isn't like a party," she said; "I know that much about society.
+Party you either accept or regret. Married you do both."
+
+I could have been no more amazed if the rosewood clock had said it.
+
+"Who has been talking to you, child?" I asked in distress.
+
+"I got it out of living," said Miggy, solemnly. "You live along and you
+live along and you find out 'most everything."
+
+I looked away across the Pump pasture where the railway tracks cut the
+Plank Road, that comes on and on until it is modified into Daphne
+Street. I remembered a morning of mist and dogwood when I had walked
+that road through the gateway into an earthly paradise. Have I not said
+that since that time we two have been, as it were, set to music and
+sung; so that the silences of separation are difficult to beguile save
+by the companionship of the village--the village that has somehow taught
+Miggy its bourgeoise lesson of doubt?
+
+My silence laid on her some vague burden of proof.
+
+"Besides," she said, "I'm not like the women who marry people. Most of
+'em that's married ain't all married, anyway."
+
+"What do you mean, child?" I demanded.
+
+"They're not," protested Miggy. "They marry like they pick out a way to
+have a dress made when they don't admire any of the styles very much,
+and they've wore out everything else. Women like some things about
+somebody, and that much they marry. Then the rest of him never is
+married at all, and by and by that rest starts to get lonesome."
+
+"But Miggy," I said to all this, "I should think you might like Peter
+entirely."
+
+She surprised me by her seriousness.
+
+"Anyhow, I've got my little sister to bring up," she said; "Aunt Effie
+hasn't anything. And I couldn't put two on him to support."
+
+I wondered why not, but I said nothing.
+
+"And besides," Miggy said after a pause, "there's Peter's father. You
+know about him?"
+
+I did know--who in the village did not know? Since my neighbour had told
+me of him I had myself seen him singing through the village streets,
+shouting out and disturbing the serene evenings, drunken, piteous....
+
+"Peter has him all the time," I suggested.
+
+She must have found a hint of resistance in my voice, for her look
+questioned me.
+
+"I never could stand it to have anybody like that in the house," she
+said defensively. "I've told Peter. I've told him both reasons...."
+Miggy threw out her arms and stood still, facing the sunset. "Anyway, I
+want to keep on feeling all free and liberty-like!" she said.
+
+This intense individualism of youth, passioning only for far spaces,
+taking no account of the common lot nor as yet urgent to share it is,
+like the panther grace in the tread of the cat, a survival of the
+ancient immunity from accountabilities. To note it is to range down the
+evolution of ages. To tame it--there is a task for all the servants of
+the new order.
+
+Miggy was like some little bright creature caught unaware in the net of
+living and still remembering the colonnades of otherwhere, renowned for
+their shining. She was looking within the sunset, where it was a thing
+of wings and doors ajar and fair corridors. I saw the great freedoms of
+sunset in her face--the sunset where Little Child and I had agreed that
+a certain spirit lived.... Perhaps it was that that little vagrant
+spirit signalled to me--and the Custodian understood it. Perhaps it was
+that I saw, beneath the freedoms, the woman-tenderness in the girl's
+face. In any case I spoke abruptly and half without intention.
+
+"But you don't want to be free from Little Child. It is almost as if
+she were your little girl, is it not?" I said.
+
+Miggy's eyes did not leave the sunset. It was rather as if she saw some
+answer there.
+
+"Well, I like to pretend she is," she said simply.
+
+"That," I said quietly, "is pleasant to pretend."
+
+And now her mood had changed as if some one had come to take her place.
+
+"But if she _was_--that," she said, "her name, then, would most likely
+be Margaret, like mine, wouldn't it?"
+
+"It would be very well to have it Margaret," I agreed.
+
+Her step was quickened as by sudden shyness.
+
+"It's funny to think about," she said. "Sometimes I most think of--her,
+till she seems in the room. Not quite my sister. I mean _Margaret_."
+
+It made my heart beat somewhat. I wondered if anything of my story to
+Little Child was left in my mind, and if subconsciously Miggy was
+reading it. This has sometimes happened to me with a definiteness which
+would be surprising if the supernatural were to me less natural. But I
+think that it was merely because Miggy had no idea of the sanctity of
+what she felt that she was speaking of it.
+
+"How does she look?" I asked.
+
+"Like me," said Miggy, readily; "I don't want her to either. I want her
+to be pretty and I'm not. But when I think of her running 'round in the
+house or on the street, I always make her look like me. Only little."
+
+"Running 'round in the house." That was the way my neighbour had put it.
+Perhaps it is the way that every woman puts it.
+
+"Does she seem like you, too?" I tempted her on.
+
+"Oh, better," Miggy said confidently; "learning to play on the piano and
+not much afraid of folks and real happy."
+
+"Don't you ever pretend about a boy?" I asked.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No," she said; "if I do--I never can think him out real plain. Margaret
+I can most see."
+
+And this, too, was like the girl in the garden and the spirit of that
+one to be called by a name of one whom she had not seen.
+
+I think that I have never hoped so much that I might know the right
+thing to say. And when most I wish this I do as I did then: I keep my
+impulse silent and I see if that vague Custodian within, somewhere
+between the seeing and the knowing, will not speak for me. I wonder if
+she did? At all events, what either she or I said was:--
+
+"Miggy! Look everywhere and tell me the most beautiful thing you can
+see."
+
+She was not an instant in deciding.
+
+"Why, sunset," she said.
+
+"Promise me," said I--said we!--"that you will remember _Now_. And that
+after to-night, when you see a sunset--always, always, till she
+comes--you will think about her. About Margaret."
+
+Because this caught her fancy she promised readily enough. And then we
+lingered a little, while the moment gave up its full argosy. I have a
+fancy for these times when I say "I will remember," and I am always
+selecting them and knowing, as if I had tied a knot in them, that I will
+remember. These times become the moments at which I keep waving my hand
+in the hope that they will never turn away. And it was this significance
+which I wished the hour to have for Miggy, so that for her the sunset
+should forever hold, as Little Child had said that it holds, that tiny,
+wandering spirit....
+
+Liva Vesey and Timothy had lingered, too, and we passed them on the
+bridge, he still trying to win her eyes, and his own eyes fleeing
+precipitantly whenever she looked up. The two seemed leaning upon the
+winged light, the calm stretches of the Pump pasture, the brown sand
+bar, the Caledonia hills. And the lovers and the quiet river and the
+village, roof upon roof, in the trees of the other shore, and most of
+all Miggy and her shadowy Margaret seemed to me like the words of some
+mighty cosmic utterance, with the country evening for its tranquil
+voice.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+DIFFERENT
+
+
+Those who had expected the circus procession to arrive from across the
+canal to-day were amazed to observe it filing silently across the tracks
+from the Plank Road. The Eight Big Shows Combined had arrived in the
+gray dawn; and word had not yet gone the rounds that, the Fair Ground
+being too wet, the performance would "show" in the Pump pasture, beyond
+the mill. There was to be no evening amusement. It was a wait between
+trains that conferred the circus on Friendship at all.
+
+Half the country-side, having brought its lunch into town to make a day
+of it, trailed as a matter of course after the clown's cart at the end
+of the parade, and about noon arrived in the pasture with the
+pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to find it transformed
+into unknown ground. Who in the vicinity of the village had not known
+the Pump pasture of old? Haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,
+it had lain expressionless as the hills, for as long as memory. When in
+spring, "Where you goin'? Don't you go far in the hot sun!" from
+Friendship mothers was answered by, "We're just goin' up to the Pump
+pasture for vi'lets" from Friendship young, no more was to be said. The
+pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great, faithful Newfoundland
+dog; and about it was something of the safety of silence and warmth and
+night-in-a-trundle-bed.
+
+And lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture were articulate. The great
+elliptical tent, the strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of
+the hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were doing--these gave
+to the place the aspect of having from the first been secretly familiar
+with more than one had suspected.
+
+"Ain't it the divil?" demanded Timothy Toplady, Jr., ecstatically, as
+the glory of the scene burst upon him.
+
+Liva Vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in the buckboard, looked up
+at his brown Adam's apple--she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as
+her sweetheart's face--and rejoined:--
+
+"Oh, Timmie! ain't it just what you might say _great_?"
+
+"You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly, "that it is that."
+
+He looked down in her face with a lifting of eyebrows and an honest
+fatuity of mouth. Liva Vesey knew the look--without ever having met it
+squarely, she could tell when it was there, and she promptly turned her
+head, displaying to Timothy's ardent eyes tight coils of beautiful blond
+crinkly hair, a little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver
+locket chain. At which Timothy now collapsed with the mien of a man who
+is unwillingly having second thoughts.
+
+"My!" he said.
+
+They drove into the meadow, and when the horse had been loosed and cared
+for, they found a great cottonwood tree, its leaves shimmering and
+moving like little banners, and there they spread their lunch. The sunny
+slope was dotted with other lunchers. The look of it all was very gay,
+partly because the trees were in June green, and among them windmills
+were whirling like gaunt and acrobatic witches, and partly because it
+was the season when the women were brave in new hats, very pink and very
+perishable.
+
+The others observed the two good-humouredly from afar, and once or twice
+a tittering group of girls, unescorted, passed the cottonwood tree,
+making elaborate detours to avoid it. At which Liva flushed, pretending
+not to notice; and Timothy looked wistfully in her face to see if she
+wished that she had not come with him. However, Timothy never dared
+look at her long enough to find out anything at all; for the moment that
+she seemed about to meet his look he always dropped his eyes
+precipitantly to her little round chin and so to the silver chain and
+locket. And then he was miserable.
+
+It was strange that a plain heart-shaped locket, having no initials,
+could make a man so utterly, extravagantly unhappy. Three months
+earlier, Liva, back from a visit in the city, had appeared with her
+locket. Up to that time the only personality in which Timothy had ever
+indulged was to mention to her that her eyes were the colour of his
+sister's eyes, whose eyes were the colour of their mother's eyes and
+their father's eyes, and of Timothy's own, and "Our eyes match, mine and
+yours," he had blurted out, crimson. And yet, even on these terms, he
+had taken the liberty of being wretched because of her. How much more
+now when he was infinitely nearer to her? For with the long spring
+evenings upon them, when he had sat late at the Vesey farm, matters had
+so far advanced with Timothy that, with his own hand, he had picked a
+green measuring-worm from Liva's throat. Every time he looked at her
+throat he thought of that worm with rapture. But also every time he
+looked at her throat he saw the silver chain and locket. And on circus
+day, if the oracles seemed auspicious, he meant to find out whose
+picture was worn in that locket, even though the knowledge made him a
+banished man.
+
+If only she would ever mention the locket! he thought disconsolately
+over lunch. If only she would "bring up the subject," then he could find
+courage. But she never did mention it. And the talk ran now:--
+
+"Would you ever, ever think this was the Pump pasture?" from Liva.
+
+"No, you wouldn't, would you? It don't look the same, does it? You'd
+think you was in a city or somewheres, wouldn't you now? Ain't it
+differ'nt?"
+
+"Did you count the elephants?"
+
+"I bet I did. Didn't you? Ten, wa'n't it? Did you count the cages?
+Neither did I. And they was too many of 'em shut up. I don't know
+whether it's much of a circus or not--" with gloomy superiority--"they
+not bein' any calliope, so."
+
+"A good many cute fellows in the band," observed Liva. For Liva would
+have teased a bit if Timothy would have teased too. But Timothy replied
+in mere misery:--
+
+"You can't tell much about these circus men, Liva. They're apt to be the
+kind that carouse around. I guess they ain't much to 'em but their swell
+way."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Liva.
+
+Then a silence fell, resembling nothing so much as the breath of
+hesitation following a _faux pas_, save that this silence was longer,
+and was terminated by Liva humming a little snatch of song to symbolize
+how wholly delightful everything was.
+
+"My!" said Timothy, finally. "You wouldn't think this was the Pump
+pasture at all, it looks so differ'nt."
+
+"That's so," Liva said. "You wouldn't."
+
+It was almost as if the two were inarticulate, as the pasture had been
+until the strange influences of the day had come to quicken it.
+
+While Liva, with housewifely hands, put away the lunch things in their
+basket, Timothy nibbled along lengths of grass and hugged his knees and
+gloomed at the locket. It was then that Miggy and Peter passed them and
+the four greeted one another with the delicate, sheepish enjoyment of
+lovers who look on and understand other lovers. Then Timothy's look went
+back to Liva. Liva's rose-pink dress was cut distractingly without a
+collar, and the chain seemed to caress her little throat. Moreover, the
+locket had a way of hiding beneath a fold of ruffle, as if it were _her_
+locket and as if Timothy had no share in it.
+
+"Oh," cried Liva, "_Timmie_! That was the lion roared. Did you hear?"
+
+Timothy nodded darkly, as if there were worse than lions.
+
+"Wasn't it the lion?" she insisted.
+
+Timothy nodded again; he thought it might have been the lion.
+
+"What you so glum about, Timmie?" his sweetheart asked, glancing at him
+fleetingly.
+
+Timothy flushed to the line of his hair.
+
+"Gosh," he said, "this here pasture looks so differ'nt I can't get over
+it."
+
+"Yes," said Liva, "it does look differ'nt, don't it?"
+
+Before one o'clock they drifted with the rest toward the animal tent.
+They went incuriously past the snake show, the Eats-'em-alive show, and
+the Eastern vaudeville. But hard by the red wagon where tickets were
+sold Timothy halted spellbound. What he had heard was:--
+
+"Types. Types. Right this way AND in this direction for Types. No,
+Ladies, and no, Gents: Not Tin-types. But Photo-types. Photo_graphs_ put
+up in Tintype style AT Tintype price. Three for a quarter. The fourth of
+a dozen for the fourth of a dollar. Elegant pictures, elegant finish,
+refined, up-to-date. Of yourself, Gents, of yourself. Or of any one you
+see around you. And WHILE you wait."
+
+Timothy said it before he had any idea that he meant to say it:--
+
+"Liva," he begged, "come on. You."
+
+When she understood and when Timothy saw the momentary abashment in her
+eyes, it is certain that he had never loved her more. But the very next
+moment she was far more adorable.
+
+"Not unless you will, Timmie," she said, "and trade."
+
+He followed her into the hot little tent as if the waiting chair were a
+throne of empire. And perhaps it was. For presently Timothy had in his
+pocket a tiny blurry bit of paper at which he had hardly dared so much
+as glance, and he had given another blurry bit into her keeping. But
+that was not all. When she thanked him she had met his eyes. And he
+thought--oh, no matter what he thought. But it was as if there were
+established a throne of empire with Timothy lord of his world.
+
+Then they stepped along the green way of the Pump pasture and they
+entered the animal tent, and Strange Things closed about them. There
+underfoot lay the green of the meadow, verdant grass and not infrequent
+moss, plantain and sorrel and clover, all as yet hardly trampled and
+still sweet with the breath of kine and sheep. And three feet above,
+foregathered from the Antipodes, crouched and snarled the striped and
+spotted things of the wild, with teeth and claws quick to kill, and with
+generations of the jungle in their shifting eyes. The bright wings of
+unknown birds, the scream of some harsh throat of an alien wood, the
+monkeys chattering, the soft stamp and padding of the elephants chained
+in a stately central line along the clover--it was certain, one would
+have said, that these must change the humour of the pasture as the
+companionship of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the
+mind. That the pasture, indeed, would never be the same, and that its
+influence would be breathed on all who entered there. Already Liva and
+Timothy, each with the other's picture in a pocket, moved down that tent
+of the field in another world. Or had that world begun at the door of
+the stuffy little phototype tent?
+
+It was the cage of bright-winged birds that held the two. Timothy stood
+grasping his elbows and looking at that flitting flame and orange. Dare
+he ask her if she would wear his phototype in her locket--dare he--dare
+he----
+
+He turned to look at her. Oh, and the rose-pink cambric was so near his
+elbow! Her face, upturned to the birds, was flushed, her lips were
+parted, her eyes that matched Timothy's were alight; but there was
+always in Timothy's eyes a look, a softness, a kind of speech that
+Liva's could not match. He longed inexpressibly to say to her what was
+in his heart concerning the locket--the phototype--themselves. And Liva
+herself was longing to say something about the sheer glory of the hour.
+So she looked up at his brown Adam's apple, and,
+
+"Think, Timmie," she said, "they're all in the Pump pasture where
+nothin' but cows an' robins an' orioles ever was before!"
+
+"I know it--I know it!" breathed Timothy fervently. "Don't seem like it
+could be the same place, does it?"
+
+Liva barely lifted her eyes.
+
+"It makes us seem differ'nt, too," she said, and flushed a little, and
+turned to hurry on.
+
+"I was thinkin' that too!" he cried ecstatically, overtaking her. But
+all that Timothy could see was tight coils of blond, crinkled hair, and
+a little ear and a curve of white throat, with a silver locket chain.
+
+Down the majestic line of the elephants, towering in the apotheosis of
+mere bulk to preach ineffectually that spirit is apocryphal and mass
+alone is potent; past the panthers that sniffed as if they guessed the
+nearness of the grazing herd in the next pasture; past the cage in which
+the lioness lay snarling and baring her teeth above her cubs, so
+pathetically akin to the meadow in her motherhood; past unknown
+creatures with surprising horns and shaggy necks and lolling tongues--it
+was a wonderful progress. But it was as if Liva had found something more
+wonderful than these when, before the tigers' cage, she stepped
+forward, stooped a little beneath the rope, and stood erect with
+shining eyes.
+
+"Look!" she said. "Look, Timmie."
+
+She was holding a blue violet.
+
+"In front of the tigers; it was _growing_!"
+
+"Why don't you give it to me?" was Timothy's only answer.
+
+She laid it in his hand, laughing a little at her daring.
+
+"It won't ever be the same," she said. "Tigers have walked over it. My,
+ain't everything in the pasture differ'nt?"
+
+"Just as differ'nt as differ'nt can be," Timothy admitted.
+
+"Here we are back to the birds again," Liva said, sighing.
+
+Timothy had put the violet in his coat pocket and he stood staring at
+the orange and flame in the cage: Her phototype and a violet--her
+phototype and a violet.
+
+But all he said, not daring to look at her at all, was:--
+
+"I can't make it seem like the Pump pasture to save me."
+
+There is something, as they have said of a bugle, "winged and warlike"
+about a circus--the confusions, the tramplings, the shapes, the keen
+flavour of the Impending, and above all the sense of the Untoward,
+which is eternal and which survives glamour as his grave survives a man.
+Liva and Timothy sat on the top row of seats and felt it all, and
+believed it to be merely honest mirth. Occasionally Liva turned and
+peered out through the crack in the canvas where the side met the roof,
+for the pure joy of feeling herself alien to the long green fields with
+their grazing herds and their orioles, and at one with the colour and
+music and life within. And she was glad of it all, glad to be there with
+Timothy. But all she said was:--
+
+"Oh, Timmie, I hope it ain't half over yet. Do you s'pose it is? When I
+look outside it makes me feel as if it was over."
+
+And Timothy, his heart beating, a great hope living in his breast,
+answered only:--
+
+"No, I guess it'll be quite some time yet. It's a nice show. Nice
+performance for the money, right through. Ain't it?"
+
+When at length it really was over and they left the tent, the wagons
+from town and country-side and the "depot busses" had made such a place
+of dust and confusion that he took her back to the cottonwood on the
+slope to wait until he brought the buckboard round. He left her leaning
+against the tree, the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly on
+the smooth silver locket. And when he drove back, and reached down a
+hand to draw her up to the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment,
+as she mounted, with all the panorama of the field behind her, he
+perceived instantly that the locket was gone. Oh, and at that his heart
+leaped up! What more natural than to dream that she had taken it off to
+slip his phototype inside and that he had come back too soon? What more
+natural than to divine the reality of dreams?
+
+His trembling hope held him silent until they reached the highway. Then
+he looked at the field, elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming
+crowds, and he observed as well as he could for the thumping of his
+heart:--
+
+"I kind o' hate to go off an' leave it. To-morrow when I go to town with
+the pie-plant, it'll look just like nothin' but a pasture again."
+
+Liva glanced up at him and dropped her eyes.
+
+"I ain't sure," she said.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked her, wondering.
+
+But Liva shook her head.
+
+"I ain't sure," she said evasively, "but I don't think somehow the Pump
+pasture'll _ever_ be the same again."
+
+Timothy mulled that for a moment. Oh, could she _possibly_ mean
+because....
+
+Yet what he said was, "Well, the old pasture looks differ'nt enough now,
+all right."
+
+"Yes," assented Liva, "don't it?"
+
+Timothy had supper at the Vesey farm. It was eight o'clock and the
+elder Veseys had been gone to prayer-meeting for an hour when Liva
+discovered that she had lost her locket.
+
+"Lost your locket!" Timothy repeated. It was the first time, for all his
+striving, that he had been able to mention the locket in her presence.
+He had tried, all the way home that afternoon, to call her attention
+innocently to its absence, but the thing that he hoped held fast his
+intention. "Why," he cried now, in the crash of that hope, "you had it
+on when I left you under the cottonwood."
+
+"You sure?" Liva demanded.
+
+"Sure," Timothy said earnestly; "didn't--didn't you have it off while I
+was gone?" he asked wistfully.
+
+"No," Liva replied blankly; she had not taken it off.
+
+When they had looked in the buckboard and had found nothing, Timothy
+spoke tentatively.
+
+"Tell you what," he said. "We'll light a lantern and hitch up and drive
+back to the Pump pasture and look."
+
+"Could we?" Liva hesitated.
+
+It was gloriously starlight when the buckboard rattled out on the Plank
+Road. Timothy, wretched as he was at her concern over the locket, was
+yet recklessly, magnificently happy in being alone by her side in the
+warm dusk, and on her ministry. She was silent, and, for almost the
+first time since he had known her, Timothy was silent too--as if he were
+giving his inarticulateness honest expression instead of forcing it
+continually to antics of speech.
+
+From the top of the hill they looked down on the Pump pasture. It lay
+there, silent and dark, but no longer expressionless; for instantly
+their imagination quickened it with all the music and colour and life of
+the afternoon. Just as Timothy's silence was now of the pattern of
+dreams.
+
+He tied the horse, and together they entered the field by the great open
+place where the fence had not yet been replaced. The turf was still soft
+and yielding, in spite of all the treading feet. The pasture was girdled
+by trees--locusts and box-alders outlined dimly upon the sky,
+nest-places for orioles; and here and there a great oak or a cottonwood
+made a mysterious figure on the stars. One would have said that
+underfoot would certainly be violets. A far light pricked out an answer
+to their lantern, and a nearer firefly joined the signalling.
+
+"I keep thinkin' the way it looked here this afternoon," said Liva once.
+
+"That's funny, so do I," he cried.
+
+Under the cottonwood on the slope, its leaves stirring like little
+banners, Timothy flashed his light, first on tufted grass, then on
+red-tasselled sorrel, then--lying there as simply as if it belonged
+there--on Liva's silver locket. She caught it from him with a little
+cry.
+
+"Oh," she said, "I'm so glad. Oh, thank you ever so much, Timmie."
+
+He faced her for a moment.
+
+"Why are you so almighty glad?" he burst out.
+
+"Why, it's the first locket I ever had!" she said in surprise. "So of
+course I'm glad. Oh, Timmie--thank you!"
+
+"You're welcome, I'm sure," he returned stiffly.
+
+She gave a little skipping step beside him.
+
+"Timmie," she said, "let's circle round a little ways and come by where
+the big tent was. I want to see how it'll seem."
+
+His ill-humour was gone in a moment.
+
+"That's what we _will_ do!" he cried joyously.
+
+He walked beside her, his lantern swinging a little rug of brightness
+about their feet. So they passed the site of the big red ticket wagon,
+of the Eastern vaudeville, of the phototype tent; so they traversed the
+length where had stretched the great elliptical tent that had prisoned
+for them colour and music and life, as in a cup. And so at last they
+stepped along that green way of the pasture where underfoot lay the
+grass and the not infrequent moss and clover, not yet wholly trampled to
+dust; and this was where there had been assembled bright-winged birds
+of orange and flame and creatures of the wild from the Antipodes, and
+where Strange Things had closed them round.
+
+The influence of what the pasture had seen must have been breathed on
+all who entered there that night: something of the immemorial freedom of
+bright birds in alien woods, of the ancestral kinship of the wild. For
+that tranquil meadow, long haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,
+expressionless as the hills, dependable as a nurse, had that day known
+strange breath, strange tramplings, cries and trumpetings, music and
+colour and life and the beating of wild hearts--and was it not certain
+that these must change the humour of the place as the coming of the
+grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind? The field bore the
+semblance of a place exquisitely of the country and, here in the dark,
+it was inarticulate once more. But something was stirring there,
+something that swept away what had always been as a wind sweeps,
+something that caught up the heart of the boy as ancient voices stir in
+the blood.
+
+Timothy cast down his lantern and gathered Liva Vesey in his arms. Her
+cheek lay against his shoulder and he lifted her face and kissed her,
+three times or four, with all the love that he bore her.
+
+"Liva," he said, "all the time--every day--I've meant this. Did you
+mean it, too?"
+
+She struggled a little from him, but when he would have let her go she
+stood still in his arms. And then he would have her words and "Did you?"
+he begged again. He could not hear what she said without bending close,
+close, and it was the sweeter for that.
+
+"Oh, Timmie," she answered, "I don't know. I don't know if I _did_. But
+I do--now."
+
+Timothy's courage came upon him like a mantle.
+
+"An' be my wife?" he asked.
+
+"An' be ..." Liva assented, and the words faltered away. But they were
+not greatly missed.
+
+Timothy looked over the pasture, and over the world. And lo, it was
+suddenly as if, with these, he were become articulate, and they were all
+three saying something together.
+
+When they turned, there was the lantern glimmering alight on the trodden
+turf. And in its little circle of brightness they saw something coloured
+and soft. It was a gay feather, and Timothy took it curiously in his
+hand.
+
+"See, it's from one of the circus birds," he said.
+
+"No!" Liva cried. "It's an oriole feather. One of the pasture orioles,
+Timmie!"
+
+"So it is," he assented, and without knowing why, he was glad that it
+was so. He folded it away with the violet Liva had gathered that
+afternoon. After all the strangeness, what he treasured most had
+belonged to the pasture all the time.
+
+"Liva!" he begged. "Will you wear the picture--my picture--in that
+locket?"
+
+"Oh," she said, "Timmie, I'm so sorry. The locket's one I bought cheap
+in the city, and it don't open."
+
+She wondered why that seemed to make him love her more. She wondered a
+little, too, when on the edge of the pasture Timothy stood still,
+looking back.
+
+"Liva!" he said, "don't the Pump pasture seem differ'nt? Don't it seem
+like another place?"
+
+"Yes," Liva said, "it don't seem the same."
+
+"Liva!" Timothy said again, "it ain't the pasture that's so differ'nt.
+It's _us_."
+
+She laughed a little--softly, and very near his coat sleeve.
+
+"I 'most knew that this afternoon," she answered.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE FOND FORENOON
+
+
+This morning Miggy came by appointment to do a little work for me, and
+she appeared in some "best" frock to honour the occasion. It was a blue
+silk muslin, cut in an antiquated style and trimmed with tarnished
+silver passementerie. In it the child was hardly less distinguished than
+she had been in her faded violet apron. It was impossible for her to
+seem to be unconscious of her dress, and she spoke of it at once with
+her fine directness.
+
+"I didn't have anything good enough to wear," she said. "I haven't got
+any good dress this summer till I get it made myself. I got this out of
+the trunk. It was my mother's."
+
+"It suits you very well, Miggy," I told her.
+
+"I thought maybe she'd like my wearing it--here," said Miggy, shyly.
+"You've got things the way she always wanted 'em."
+
+We went in my workroom and sat among my books and strewn papers. A
+lighted theatre with raised curtain and breathless audience, a room
+which one wakens to find flooded by a gibbous moon, these have for me
+no greater sorcery than morning in a little book-filled room, with the
+day before me. Perhaps it is that I ought to be doing so many things
+that I take an idler's delight in merely attending to my own occupation.
+
+While I wondered at what I should set Miggy, I looked for the spirit of
+the minute and tried not to see its skeleton. The skeleton was that I
+had here an inexperienced little girl who was of almost no use to me.
+The spirit was that whatever I chose to do, my work was delightful to
+me, and that to bring Miggy in contact with these things was a kind of
+adventure. It is, I find, seldom sufficient to think even of the body of
+one's work, which to-day proved to be in my case a search in certain old
+books and manuscripts for fond allusions. If one can, so to say, think
+in and out till one comes to the spirit of a task, then there will be
+evident an indeterminate sense of wings. Without these wings there can
+be no expression and no creation. And in the true democracy no work will
+be wingless. It will still be, please God, laborious, arduous, even
+heart-breaking, but never body-fettered, never with its birdlike spirit
+quenched. And in myself I would bring to pass, even now, this fair order
+of sweet and willing toil by taking to my hand no task without looking
+deep within for its essential life.
+
+So it was with a sense not only of pleasure but of leisure that I
+established Miggy by the window with a manuscript of ancient romances
+and told her what to do: to look through them for a certain story,
+barely more than a reference, to the love of an Indian woman of this
+Middle West for her Indian husband, sold into slavery by the French
+Canadians. It is a simple story--you will find small mention made of
+it--but having once heard it the romance had haunted me, and I was fain
+to come on it again: the story of the wife of Kiala, fit to stand niched
+with the great loves of the world.
+
+The morning sun--it was hardly more than eight o'clock--slanted across
+the carpet; some roses that Little Child had brought me before her
+breakfast were fresh on my table; and the whole time was like a quiet
+cup. In that still hour experience seemed drained of all but fellowship,
+the fellowship of Miggy and my books and the darling insistence of the
+near outdoors. Do you not think how much of life is so made up, free of
+rapture or anxiety, dedicated, in task or in pastime, to serene
+companionship?
+
+I have said that for me there are few greater sorceries than morning,
+with the day before me, in a small book-filled room. I wonder if this is
+not partly because of my anticipations of the parentheses I shall take?
+Not recesses, but parentheses, which can flavour a whole day. I
+remember a beloved house in which breakfast and luncheon were daily
+observations looked forward to not so much for themselves, as that they
+were occasions for the most delightful interruptions. Dinner was a
+ceremony which was allowed to proceed; but a breakfast or a luncheon was
+seldom got through without one or two of us leaving the table to look up
+a stanza, or to settle if two words had the same derivation, or to find
+if some obsolete fashion in meanings could not yet be worn with
+impunity. It grieved the dear housewife, I remember, and we tried to
+tell her how much more important these things were than that our new
+potatoes should be buttered while they were hot. But she never could see
+it, and potatoes made us think of Ireland, and in no time we were deep
+in the Celtic revival and racing off to find "The Love Talker." I
+remember but one dinner interruption, and that was when we all left in
+the midst of the fish to go in the study and determine if moonlight
+shining through stained glass does cast a coloured shadow, as it did on
+St. Agnes' eve.... I suppose, in those days, we must have eaten
+something, though, save a certain deep-dish cherry pie I cannot remember
+what we ate; but those interruptions are with me like so many gifts, and
+I maintain that these were the realities. Those days--and especially the
+morning when we read through the "Ancient Mariner" between pasting in
+two book plates!--taught me the precious lesson that the interruption
+and not the task may hold the angel. It was so that I felt that morning
+with Miggy; and I know that what we did with that forenoon will persist
+somewhere when all my envelopes of clippings are gone to dust.
+
+After a time I became conscious that the faint rustling of the papers
+through which I was looking was absorbed by another sound, rhythmic,
+stedfast. I looked out on my neighbour's lawn, and at that moment,
+crossing my line of vision through the window before which Miggy was
+seated, I saw Peter, cutting my neighbour's grass. I understood at once
+that he had chosen this morning for his service in order to be near
+Miggy. It all made a charming sight,--Peter, bareheaded, in an
+open-throated, neutral shirt, cutting the grass there beyond Miggy in
+her quaint dress, reading a romance. I forgot my work for a little, and
+watched for those moments of his passing. Miggy read on, absorbed. Then,
+for a little, I watched her, pleased at her absorption.
+
+Sometimes, from my window, I have looked down on the river and the long
+yellow sand bar and the mystery of the opposite shore where I have never
+been, and I have felt a great pity that these things cannot know that
+they are these things. Sometimes, in the middle of a summer night, when
+the moon is so bright that one can see well within one's own soul, I
+have fancied that I have detected an aroma of consciousness, of definite
+self-wonder, in the Out-of-doors. Fleetingly I have divined it in the
+surprise of Dawn, the laughter of a blue Forenoon, the girlish shyness
+of Twilight. And this morning I wanted self-wonder for Miggy and Peter.
+What a pity that they could not see it all as I saw it: the Shelley-like
+boy cutting the grass and loving this girl, in her mother's gown. But
+you must not suppose, either, that I do not know how that vast
+unconsciousness of Nature and Love flows with a sovereign essence almost
+more precious than awareness.
+
+"Miggy," I said presently, "Peter is not at work to-day. That is he
+cutting grass."
+
+She looked out briefly.
+
+"He's got two days off coming to him," she answered. "It's for overtime.
+This must be one of 'em. Have _you_ read these stories?"
+
+"Yes," I said, "I have. Miggy, don't you want to go and ask Peter to
+have lunch with us at twelve?"
+
+"Oh, no, thank you," she dismissed this. "This isn't the day I see him."
+
+"But wouldn't you like it?" I pressed the matter curiously. "Just we
+three at luncheon alone?"
+
+She was turning the leaves of the manuscript and she looked up to set
+me right.
+
+"Oh, you know," she said, "I don't know Peter _that_ way at all. I just
+know him to have him walk home with me, or call, or go walking. Peter
+never eats with me."
+
+Poor Peter, indeed, to be denied the simple intimacy of sometimes
+breaking bread with Miggy. I understood that to invite a man to "noon
+lunch" in the village was almost unheard of, but,
+
+"I think he would eat this noon if he never ate before," said I. To
+which Miggy made answer:--
+
+"If you have read all these stories will you--wouldn't you--tell me
+some, please? I can't bear to think of having to wait to read 'em before
+I know 'em!"
+
+She shut the book and leaned her chin in her hand and looked at me. And
+the idea of having Peter with us for lunch drifted out of the room,
+unattended.
+
+I maintain that one who loves the craft of letters for its own sake, one
+who loves both those who have followed it and the records that they have
+left, and one who is striving to make letters his way of service, must
+all have acted in the same way; and that was the way that I took. In
+these days when Helen and Juliet are read aloud to children while they
+work buttonholes in domestic science class, think of the pure
+self-indulgence of coming on a living spirit--I say a _living_
+spirit--who had never heard of the beloved women of the world. I wonder
+if we could not find such spirits oftener if we looked with care? When I
+see certain women shopping, marketing, jolting about in busses, I am
+sometimes moved to wonder if they know anything about Nicolete and, if
+they were to be told, whether it would not rest them.
+
+I love it, I love this going back into old time and bringing out its
+sweet elements. I have said that there is a certain conservatism in
+which, if I let my taste have its way with me, I would luxuriate, as I
+might then indulge my love of the semi-precious stones, or of old
+tiling, or of lilies-of-the-valley, all day long. And it is so that my
+self-indulgence would lead me to spend my days idling over these shadowy
+figures in the old romances and the old biographies. The joy of it never
+leaves me. Always from these books drifts out to me the smoke of some
+hidden incense that makes the world other. Not that I want the world to
+be that way, but I like to pretend. I know now that in a world where one
+must give of one's utmost, spend and be spent if one is even to pay for
+one's keep, these incense hours must be occasional, not to say stolen.
+So that to find a Miggy to whom to play preceptor of romance was like
+digging a moonstone out of the river bank.
+
+What did I tell her? Not of Helen or Cleopatra or Isolde or Heloise or
+Guinevere, because--why, I think that you would not have told her of
+these, either. Of Beatrice and Brunhilde and Elaine and Enid I told her,
+for, though these are so sad, there beat the mighty motives, seeds of
+the living heart. Last I told her, of Nicolete and of Griselda and of
+Psyche and of the great sun of these loves that broke from cloud. She
+listened, wrapt as I was wrapt in the telling. Was it strange that the
+room, which had been like a quiet cup for serene companionship, should
+abruptly be throbbing with the potent principles of the human heart? I
+think that it was not strange, for assuredly these are nearer to us than
+breathing, instant to leap from us, the lightning of the soul, electric
+with life or with death. We are never very far from strong emotion. Even
+while I recounted these things to Miggy, there, without my window, was
+Peter, cutting the grass.
+
+When I had done, "Is there more like that in books?" asked Miggy.
+
+Oh, yes; thank heaven and the people who wrote them down, there are in
+books many more like these.
+
+"I s'pose lots didn't get into the books at all," said Miggy,
+thoughtfully.
+
+It is seldom that one finds and mourns a bird that is dead. But think of
+the choir of little bright breasts whose raptures nobody hears, nobody
+misses, nobody remembers. How like them we are, we of the loving
+hearts.
+
+"I wouldn't wonder if there's lots of folks being that way right, right
+now," concluded Miggy.
+
+Who am I that I should doubt this?
+
+"A tournament," said Miggy, dreamily; "I s'pose that was something like
+the Java entertainment is going to be."
+
+She slipped to one side of the big chair and laid both hands on its arm.
+
+"Listen," she said. "Would this be one? You know Delly Watson that's
+crazy? She was in love with Jem Pitlaw, a school teacher that used to be
+here, an' that died, an' that wasn't in love with her even if he had
+stayed living, and it did that to her. You know ... she talks about
+things that nobody ever heard of, and listens, and laughs at what she
+thinks she hears. Ain't that like Elaine?"
+
+Yes, if poor Delly Watson of the village had had a barge and a dwarf and
+a river winding from towered city to towered city, she would not have
+been unlike Elaine.
+
+"And Jerry, that sets up folks's stoves and is so in love with the music
+teacher that he joined the chorus and paid his dues and set in the bass
+corner all winter to watch her and he can't sing a note. And she don't
+even see him when she passes him. Ain't that like Beatrice and the Pale
+Man?"
+
+Jerry is so true and patient, and our young music teacher is so fair,
+that no one could find it sacrilege to note this sad likeness.
+
+"And Mis' Uppers that her husband went out West and she didn't get any
+word, and he don't come, and he don't come, and she's selling tickets on
+the parlour clock, and she cries when anybody even whistles his
+tunes--isn't that some like Brunhilde, that you said about, waiting all
+alone on top of the mountain? I guess Brunhilde had money, but I don't
+think Mis' Uppers' principal trouble is that she ain't. With both of 'em
+the worst of it must 'a' been the waiting."
+
+And I am in no wise sure that that slow-walking woman in the pointed
+gray shawl may not have a heart which aches and burns and passions like
+a valkyr's.
+
+"And Mame Wallace, that her beau died and all she's got is to keep house
+for the family, and keep house, and _keep_ house. It seems as if she's
+sort of like Psyche, that had such an awful lot of things to do--and her
+life all mussed up."
+
+Perhaps it is so that in that gaunt Mame Wallace, whose homing passion
+has turned into the colourless, tidy keeping of her house, there is
+something shining, like the spirit of Psyche, that would win back her
+own by the tasks of her hand.
+
+"And then there's Threat Hubbelthwait," said Miggy, "that gets drunk
+and sets in his hotel bar fiddling, and Mis' Hubbelthwait shoves him his
+meals in on to the cigar show-case and runs before he throws his bow at
+her--she's just exactly like those two----"
+
+"Enid or Griselda?" I recognized them, and Miggy nodded. Poor Mis'
+Hubbelthwait! Was she not indeed an Enid, lacking her beauty, and a
+Griselda, with no hope of a sweet surprise of a love that but tested
+her? Truly, it was as Miggy said: in some form they were all there in
+the village, minus the bower and the silken kirtle, but with the same
+living hearts.
+
+And these were not all.
+
+"Miggy," I said, "what about Liva Vesey and Timothy? Did you count
+them?" For Aucassin and Nicolete were happy and so are Liva and Timothy,
+and I think that they have all understood meadows.
+
+Miggy looked startled. One's own generation never seems so typical of
+anything as did a generation or two past.
+
+"Could they be?" she asked. "They got engaged the night of the circus
+Liva told me--everybody knows. Could they be counted in?"
+
+Oh, yes, I assured her. They might be counted. So, I fancy, might all
+love-in-the-village, if we knew its authentic essence.
+
+"Goodness," said Miggy, meditatively, "then there's Christopha and
+Allen last winter, that I was their bridesmaid, and that rode off in the
+hills that way on their wedding night. I s'pose that was like something,
+if we only knew?"
+
+I could well believe that that first adventure of the young husband and
+wife, of whom I shall tell you, was like something sweet and bright and
+long ago.
+
+"And what," I said to Miggy abruptly, "about Peter?"
+
+"_Peter?_" repeated Miggy.
+
+Why not Peter?
+
+She looked out the window at him.
+
+"Why," she said, "but he's _now_. Peter's now. And he wears black
+clothes. And he's cutting grass...."
+
+True for Peter, to all these impeachments. I told her that, in his day,
+Aucassin was _now_, too; and that he wore the clothes of his times, and
+that if he did not do the tasks nearest his hand, then Nicolete should
+not have loved him.
+
+"And," said I, "unless I'm very much mistaken, in the same way that all
+the ancient lovers loved their ladies, Peter loves you."
+
+"_That_ way?" said Miggy, laying her hand on the manuscript.
+
+"That way," said I. And a very good way it was, too.
+
+Miggy put up both hands with a manner of pointing at herself.
+
+"Oh, no," she said, "not me." Then her little shoulders went up and she
+caught her breath like a child. "_Honest?_" she said.
+
+I said no more, but sat silent for a little, watching her across the
+fallen manuscript of ancient romances. Presently I picked up the sheets,
+and by chance my look fell on the very thing for which we had been
+searching: the story of the wife of Kiala, a Wisconsin Indian chief who
+was sold into slavery and carried to Martinique. And alone, across those
+hundreds of miles of pathless snow and sea, the wife of Kiala somehow
+followed him to the door of his West Indian owner. And to him she gave
+herself into slavery so that she might be with her husband.
+
+I read the story to Miggy. And because the story is true, and because it
+happened so near and because of this universe in general, I was not able
+to read it quite so tranquilly as I should have wished.
+
+"Oh," Miggy said, "is it like _that_?"
+
+Yes, please God; if the heart is big enough to hold it, it is like that.
+
+Miggy put her hand down quickly on the blue muslin dress she wore.
+
+"My mother knew!" she said.
+
+And that is the most wonderful thing of all: one's mother knew.
+
+Miggy turned once more and looked out the window at Peter. Bless Peter!
+I think that he must have been over that grass with the mower quite
+twice--perhaps twice and a half. Almost immediately Miggy looked away
+from Peter, and I thought--though perhaps after all it was merely the
+faint colour that often hovers in her cheek. I felt, however, that if I
+had again suggested to Miggy that we ask Peter to lunch, Peter might
+possibly have lunched with us. But now I did not suggest it. No, if ever
+it gets to be "all Peter with Miggy," it must be so by divine
+non-interference.
+
+My little voice-friend up there on the shelf, the Westminster chimes,
+struck twelve, in its manner of sweet apology for being to blame for
+things ending. In the village we lunch at twelve, and so my forenoon was
+done and even the simple tasks I had set were not all finished. I
+wonder, though, if deep within this fond forenoon we have not found
+something--wings, or a light, or a singing--that was of the spirit of
+the tasks? I wish that I thought so with reasons which I could give to a
+scientist.
+
+At all events I am richly content. And over our luncheon Miggy has just
+flattered me unconscionably.
+
+"My!" she said, "I should think everybody would want to be Secretary."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+AFRAID
+
+
+I must turn aside to tell of Allen and Christopha, that young husband
+and wife whose first adventure, Miggy thought, was like something sweet
+and bright and long ago. It happened this last winter, but I cannot
+perceive any grave difference between that winter night and this June.
+Believe me, the seasons and the silences and we ourselves are not so
+different as we are alike.
+
+On the night of her wedding, Christopha threw her bouquet from the
+dining-room doorway, because there were no front stairs from which to
+throw it, but instead only a stairway between walls and to be reached
+from the dining room: a mere clerk of a stair instead of a
+proprietor-like hall staircase. In the confusion which followed--the
+carnations had narrowly missed the blazing white gas burner high in the
+room--the bride ran away above stairs, her two bridesmaids following.
+Her mother was already there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As Miggy
+had told me, she herself was one of Christopha's bridesmaids, and it is
+from Miggy that I have heard something of the outcome of the story.
+
+Almost as soon as the door was closed there was a rap at it, a rap
+peremptory, confident.
+
+"Let me in," said Allen; "I'm the groom!" Chris herself opened the door.
+Her muslin-wedding gown and the little bells of lilies unfaded in her
+blond hair became her wholly, and all her simple prettiness still wore
+the mystery and authority of the hour.
+
+"Allen," she said, "you oughtn't to of."
+
+"Yes, sir, I ought!" he protested gayly, his voice pleasant with mirth
+and with its new, deep note. "I'll never see you a bride again--a real,
+weddin'-dress bride. I had to come."
+
+Christopha's mother looked up from her vague, bright fabrics.
+
+"I thought you started to take the minister the kodak album," she said
+to Allen plaintively. "Has he got anybody to show him any attention? I
+should think you might--"
+
+But the two bridesmaids edged their way into the next room, and on some
+pretext of fabrics, took Christopha's mother with them,--as if there
+were abroad some secret Word of which they knew the meaning. For Miggy
+is sufficiently dramatic to know the Word for another, though she is not
+sufficiently simple to know it for herself.
+
+Allen sat beside his bride on the cretonne-covered skirt box. And after
+all, he did not look at her, but only at her warm left hand in his.
+
+"It is the funniest thing," he said, "when I see you comin' in the
+parlour lookin' so differ'nt, I'm blessed if I wasn't afraid of you.
+What do you think of that?"
+
+"You's afraid of my dress," Chris told him, laughing, "not me. You use'
+to be afraid of me when we's first engaged, but you ain't now. It's
+_me_. I feel afraid of you--Allen. You're--differ'nt."
+
+He laughed tenderly, confidently.
+
+"_Boo!_" he said. "Now are you?"
+
+"Yes," she answered seriously; "now."
+
+"Chris!" he cried boyishly, "we're married! We're goin' to keep house."
+
+"Oh," she said, "Allen! Think of the fun of puttin' the presents in the
+house--the dishes, and the glass, and the ornaments. There won't be
+another dinin' room in town like ours. Sideboard an' plate rail, an' the
+rug not tacked down."
+
+Their thoughts flew to the little house, furnished and waiting, down the
+snowy street by the Triangle park: their house.
+
+"Dinners, and suppers, and breakfas's--just us two by ourselves," Allen
+said. "_And_ the presents. My!"
+
+"Well, and company," she reminded him, "that's what I want. The girls
+in to tea in our own house."
+
+"Yes," he assented. "Right away?" he wanted to know.
+
+"No," she said, "not right away, Silly! We've got to buy curtains and
+things. I never thought I'd have so many presents," she went on happily.
+"They's two water pitchers alike. Bess says I can change hers. We'll
+take it to the City"--she gave a little bounce on the skirt box--"and
+see a show, a really, truly show."
+
+"Sure we will," said he, magnificently. "And I'll take you to the place
+I told you about--where I got picked up."
+
+The little bride nodded, her eyes softening almost maternally. It was as
+if that story were her own, the story of Allen, the little stray child
+picked up on the streets of the City by that good woman whom Chris had
+never seen. But the name of Sarah Ernestine was like a charm to Chris,
+for the woman had been to Allen father and mother both.
+
+Chris bent down swiftly to his hands, closed over her own, and kissed
+them.
+
+"Oh, Allen," she said, with a curious wistfulness, "will you _always_,
+always be just like you are now?"
+
+"Well, I should say I would," he answered gently. "They's nobody like
+you anywheres, Chris. Mis' Chris, Mis' Allen Martin."
+
+"Don't it scare you to say it?" she demanded.
+
+"Yes, sir, it does," he confessed. "It's like sayin' your own name over
+the telephone. What about you? Will _you_ always, too?"
+
+"Yes," she said, "always. Only--"
+
+"Only what?" he repeated anxiously.
+
+"Oh," she said, "don't let's let any outside things come between us,
+Allen--like they do, like with Bess and Opie,--business and
+sewin',--that's what I'm afraid of," she ended vaguely.
+
+"Well," he said, "I guess we ain't much afraid of each other, honey. I
+guess we're just afraid of what could come between us."
+
+A voice, unconvincing, unimportant, a part of the inessential aspect of
+alien things, detached itself from the accompaniment in the next room,
+saying something responsible and plaintive about only an hour till train
+time.
+
+"An hour," Allen said over, and put his arms about her, with boyish
+awkwardness for the sake of the crisp muslin gown that had so terrified
+him. She rose and stood beside him, and he waited for a moment looking
+up in her face. "Chris," he said, "I'm scared of this one hour even.
+Till train time."
+
+"I'll hurry up and get the hour done as quick as I can," she promised
+him gayly.
+
+"Honestly, now--" said Chris's mother from the vague and indeterminate
+region where she moved.
+
+"Right off, Mis' Mother!" Allen said, and knew that she was in the
+doorway, with the bridesmaids laughing beside her. And then he went down
+the stairway, his first radiant moment gone by.
+
+In the dining room the messenger was waiting. The messenger had arrived,
+in the clear cold of the night, from a drive across the Caledonia hills,
+and some one had sent him to that deserted room to warm himself. But
+Allen found him breathing on his fingers and staring out the frosty
+window into the dark. It was Jacob Ernestine, brother to the woman who
+had brought up Allen and had been kind to him when nobody else in the
+world was kind. For years Sarah Ernestine had been "West"--and with that
+awful inarticulacy of her class, mere distance had become an impassable
+gulf and the Silence had taken her. Allen had not even known that she
+meant to return. And now, Jacob told him, she was here, at his own home
+back in the hills--Sarah and a child, a little stray boy, whom she had
+found and befriended as she had once befriended Allen. And she was
+dying.
+
+"She didn't get your letter, I guess," the old man said, "'bout gettin'
+married. She come to-day, so sick she couldn't hold her head up. I see
+she didn't know nothin' 'bout your doin's. I didn't let her know. I jus'
+drove in, like split, to tell you, when the doctor went. He says she
+can't--she won't ... till mornin'. I thought," he apologized wistfully,
+"ye'd want to know, anyways, so I jus' drove in."
+
+"That was all right," Allen said. "You done right, Jacob."
+
+Then he stood still for a moment, looking down at the bright figures of
+the carpet. Jacob lived twelve miles back in the hills.
+
+"How'd you come?" Allen asked him briefly.
+
+"I've got the new cutter," the old man answered, with a touch of eager
+pride. "I'll drive ye."
+
+Then some one in the parlour caught sight of the bridegroom, and they
+all called to him and came where he was, besieging him with
+good-natured, trivial talk. The old man waited, looking out the window
+into the dark. He had known them all since they were children, and their
+merrymaking did not impress him as wholly real. Neither, for that
+matter, did Allen's wedding. Besides, his own sister was dying--somehow
+putting an end to the time when he and she had been at home together.
+That was all he had thought of during his drive to town, and hardly at
+all of Allen and his wedding. He waited patiently now while Allen got
+the wedding guests back to the parlour, and then slipped away from them,
+and came through the dining room to the stair door.
+
+"Stay there a minute," Allen bade him shortly, and went back to the
+upper floor and to Chris's door again.
+
+It was her mother who answered his summons this time, and Allen's manner
+and face checked her words. Before he had done telling her what had
+happened, Chris herself was on the threshold, already in sober brown, as
+one who has put aside rainbows and entered on life. She had a little
+brown hat in one hand, and for the other hand he groped out and held it
+while he told her, as well as he could.
+
+"I guess I've got to go, Chrissie," he ended miserably.
+
+She met his eyes, her own soft with sympathy for the plight of the other
+woman.
+
+"Well, yes," she said quietly, "of course we've got to go."
+
+He looked at her breathlessly. That possibility had not crossed his
+mind.
+
+"You!" he cried. "You couldn't go, dear. Twelve miles out in Caledonia,
+cold as it is to-night. You--"
+
+In spite of her sympathy, she laughed at him then.
+
+"Did you honestly think I wouldn't?" she asked, in a kind of wonder.
+
+"Well, I'm sure--" began her mother. But the two bridesmaids manifestly
+heard the Word again, for they talked with her both at once.
+
+"Not with Jacob, though," Chris was saying decisively. "You help father
+and the boys get out our cutter, Allen."
+
+Allen strode past the mother and lifted his wife's face in his hands.
+
+"Do you mean it?" he demanded. "Will you go--in the cold--all that long
+way--"
+
+"You Silly!" she answered, and drew away from him and set the little
+brown hat on her head.
+
+
+The road lay white before them, twelve miles of snow and stars to
+Jacob's cottage among the Caledonia hills. Jacob had gone on--from the
+crest of the rise by the Corner church they saw him and heard the faint
+signalling of his bells. It was a place, that rise by the Corner church
+on the edge of the village, where two others in such case might have
+drawn rein to look at Everything, stretching before, rhythmic crest and
+shallow, and all silent and waiting. But not these two, incurious as the
+gods, naïve as the first lovers. Only, though of this they were
+unconscious, they saw things a little differently that night.
+
+"Look!" said the girl, with a sign to the lowlands, expressive with
+lights. "So many folks's houses--homes, all started. I s'pose it was
+just as big a thing for them. But _theirs_ don't seem like anything,
+side of ours!"
+
+"That's so, too," assented Allen. "And theirs _ain't_ anything side of
+ours!" he maintained stoutly.
+
+"No, sir," she agreed, laughing.
+
+Then she grew suddenly grave, and fell silent for a little, her eyes
+here and there on the valley lights, while Allen calculated aloud the
+time of the arrival at Jacob's house.
+
+"Allen!" she said at last.
+
+"Here!" he answered. "I'm here, you bet."
+
+"Just look at the lights," she said seriously, "and then _think_.
+There's Bess and Opie--not speakin' to each other. Over there's the
+Hubbelthwait farm that they've left for the hotel--an' Threat
+Hubbelthwait drunk all the time. An' Howells's, poor and can't pay, and
+don't care if they can't, and quarrels so folks can hear 'em from the
+road. And the Moneys', that's so ugly to the children, and her findin'
+fault, and him can't speak without an oath. That only leaves the
+Topladys' over there that's real, regular people. And she kind o' bosses
+him."
+
+"Well, now, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, looking at the lights with
+a difference.
+
+Chris's right hand was warm in his great-coat pocket, and she suddenly
+snuggled close to him, her chin on his shoulder.
+
+"Oh, Allen," she said, "I'm _afraid_!"
+
+"What? On the Plank Road?" he wanted to know, missing her meaning.
+
+"All them folks started out with presents, and a house, like us," she
+said, "and with their minds all made up to bein' happy. But just look at
+'em."
+
+"Well," said Allen, reasonably, "we _ain't_ them."
+
+"We might get like 'em," she insisted. "How can you tell? Folks just do
+get that way or they just don't. How can you _tell_?"
+
+"I s'pose that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, thoughtfully.
+
+"Mother's got a picture of the Hubbelthwaits when they was married,"
+Chris pursued. "Her in white an' slippers and bracelets, and him slick
+as a kitten's foot. Think of her now, Allen, with _bracelets_. And him
+drunk all the time, 'most. How can you tell how things'll turn out? Oh,
+Allen, I _am_! I'm afraid."
+
+He bent to her face and laid his own against hers, glowing and cold and
+with fresh, warm lips.
+
+"Let's just try to be happy and keep ourselves happy," he said.
+
+The troubled woman was still in her face, but at his touch the fears
+went a little away, and the valley lights being already left behind
+among the echoes of the bells, they forgot both the lights and their
+shadows and drifted back to talk about the new house and the presents,
+and the dinners and suppers and breakfasts together. For these were the
+stuff of which the time was made. As it was made, too, of that shadowy,
+hovering fear for the future, and the tragic pity of their errand, and
+of sad conjecture about the little stray child whom Sarah Ernestine had
+brought.
+
+"That ain't it a'ready, is it?" Christopha exclaimed when they saw
+Jacob's cottage.
+
+"It just is--it's 'leven o'clock now," Allen answered, and gave the
+horse to the old man; and they two went within.
+
+The light in the room, like the lights back in the valley, was as if
+some great outside influence here and there should part the darkness to
+win a little stage for a scene of the tragedy: in the valley, for the
+drunkenness at the Hubbelthwaits', the poverty at the Howells', the ill
+nature at the Moneys'; and here, in Jacob's cottage, for death. There
+was no doubt of the quality of the hour in the cottage. The room was
+instinct with the outside touch. Already it was laid upon the woman in
+the bed, and with a mystery and authority not unlike that which had come
+upon Christopha in her marriage hour and was upon her still.
+
+The woman knew Allen, smiled at him, made him understand her
+thankfulness that he had come. At Christopha she looked kindly and quite
+without curiosity. Some way, that absence of curiosity at what was so
+vital to him gripped Allen's heart, and without his knowing the process,
+showed him the nature of death. The neighbour who had been with the
+sick woman slipped outside, and as she went she patted Chris's shoulder;
+and Allen felt that she understood, and he was dumbly grateful to her.
+
+Allen sat by the bed and held the hand of his foster-mother; and Chris
+moved about the room, heating water for a little pot of tea. And so it
+was Chris who first saw the child. He was sitting at the end of the wood
+box, on the floor before the oven--that little stray boy whom Sarah
+Ernestine had picked up as she had once picked up Allen. He looked up at
+Christopha with big, soft eyes, naïve as the first bird. Almost before
+she knew that she meant to do so, Chris stooped, with a wondering word,
+and took him in her arms. He clung to her and she sat in the rocking
+chair near the window where stood Jacob's carnation plant. And she tried
+both to look at the child and to love him, at the same time.
+
+"See, Allen," she said, "this little boy!"
+
+The child looked over his shoulder at Allen, his little arms leaning on
+Christopha's breast. And very likely because he had felt strange and
+lonely and now was taken some account of, he suddenly and beautifully
+smiled, and you would have loved him the more for the way he did that.
+
+The woman, lying with closed eyes, understood and remembered.
+
+"Allen," she said, "that's little John. You find him--a home
+somewheres. If you can...."
+
+"Why, yes, mother, we'll do that. We can do that, I guess. Don't you
+worry any about _him_," said Allen.
+
+"He's all alone. I donno his name, even.... But you be good to him,
+Allen, will you?" she said restlessly. "I found him somewheres."
+
+"Like me," Allen said.
+
+She shook her head feebly.
+
+"Worse," she said, "worse. I knew I couldn't--do much. I just--thought I
+could keep him from bein' wicked--mebbe."
+
+"Like you did me, mother, I guess," the boy said.
+
+Then she opened her eyes.
+
+"Allen!" she said clearly. "Oh, if I did! When I think how mebbe I done
+that--_I ain't afraid to die_."
+
+Jacob Ernestine came in the room and stood rubbing one hand on the back
+of the other. He saw the kettle's high column of steam and looked
+inquiringly at Chris. But she sat mothering the little silent boy, who
+looked at her gravely, or smiled, or pulled at her collar, responsive to
+her touch as she was thrillingly responsive to his nearness. So Jacob
+lifted the kettle to the back of the stove, moved his carnation plant a
+little away from the frost of the pane, and settled himself at the
+bed's foot to watch. And when, after a long time, the child fell
+asleep, Chris would not lay him down. Allen would have taken him, and
+Jacob came and tried to do so, but she shook her head and they let her
+be. She sat so still, hour after hour, that at last she herself dozed;
+and it seemed to her, in a manner of dreaming, that the carnation plant
+on the window-sill had lifted and multiplied until something white and
+like fragrance filled the room; and this, then, she dreamed, was what
+death is, death in the room for the woman. Or might it not be the
+perfume of her own bridal bouquet, the carnations which she had carried
+that night? But then the child stirred, and Christopha roused a little,
+and after all, the sense of flowers in the room was the sense of the
+little one in her arms. As if many things mean one thing.
+
+It was toward dawn that the end came, quite simply and with no manner of
+finality, as if one were to pass into another chamber. And after that,
+as quickly as might be, Christopha and Allen made ready to drive back to
+the village for the last bitter business of all.
+
+Allen, in the barn with Jacob, wondered what he must do. Allen was
+sore-hearted at his loss, grateful for the charge that he had been
+given; but what was he to do? The child ought not to stay in Jacob's
+cottage. If Chris's mother would take him for a little,--but Allen
+knew, without at all being able to define it, her plaintive, burdened
+manner, the burdened manner of the irresponsible. Still puzzling over
+this, he brought the cutter to the side door; and the side door opened,
+and Chris came out in the pale light, leading the little boy--awake,
+warmly wrapped, ready for the ride.
+
+"Where you goin' to take him to, Chrissie?" Allen asked breathlessly.
+
+"Some of the neighbours, I guess, ain't we?" she answered. "I donno. I
+thought we could see. He mustn't be left here--now."
+
+"No, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen only. "He mustn't."
+
+The three drove out together into the land lying about the gate of dawn.
+A fragment of moon was in the east. There was about the hour something
+primitive, as if, in this loneliest of all the hours, the world reverted
+to type, remembered ancient savage differences, and fell in the primal
+lines.
+
+"Allen," Chris said, "you'll miss her. I mean miss knowin' she's alive."
+
+"Yes," the boy said, "I'll miss knowin' she's alive."
+
+"Well, we must try to settle what to do with the little boy," she
+suggested hastily.
+
+"Yes," he assented, "that's right. We've got to settle that," and at
+this they fell silent.
+
+"There's Hopkins's," Chris said presently, nodding toward the home of
+the neighbour who had waited their coming to Jacob's cottage. "But
+she'll hev to be over there lots to-day and to-morrow. And she was kep'
+up so late it don't hardly seem as if we'd ought to stop and ask her."
+
+"No," Allen said, "I donno as it does, really."
+
+"There's Cripps's," she suggested a little farther on, "but they ain't
+up yet. I donno's 'twould do to roust 'em up."
+
+"No," Allen agreed, "best not do that, I guess." Christopha looked over
+the great fields.
+
+"My!" she said, "you'll miss her--miss thinkin' of her bein' somewheres.
+Allen! Where do you s'pose she is?"
+
+"I thought o' that," said Allen, soberly.
+
+"Goodness!" said Christopha, and shivered, and suddenly drew the child
+close to her. He was sleeping again. And it was so, with his little body
+between them, that she could no longer keep her hand warm in Allen's
+greatcoat pocket. But above the child's head her eyes and Allen's would
+meet, and in that hour the two had never been so near. Nearer they were
+than in the talk about the new house, and the presents, and the dinners
+and suppers and breakfasts together.
+
+They passed the farmhouses that looked asleep, and the farmhouses that
+looked watchfully awake while their owners slept. It would not be well
+to knock at these, still and sombre-windowed. And though there were
+lights at the Moneys' and at the Howells' and at the Hubbelthwait farm,
+and even at Bess and Opie's, their gates, by common consent, were also
+passed. Nor did they stop at the Topladys'.
+
+"They're real, regular people with a grown son," Chris said of them
+vaguely, "and it don't seem hardly fair to give 'em little John, too!"
+
+"Little John," Allen said over wonderingly. When they called him that
+the child seemed suddenly a person, like themselves. Their eyes met
+above his head.
+
+"Allen!" Chris said.
+
+"What? What is it?" he asked eagerly.
+
+"Could--do you think--could _we_?" she demanded.
+
+"My!" he answered, "I been a-wishin'--"
+
+Involuntarily he drew rein. They were on the rise by the Corner church
+at the edge of the village. The village, rhythmic crest of wall and
+shallow of lawn, lay below them, and near the little Triangle park would
+be their waiting house.
+
+"Did you mean have him live with us?" Allen made sure.
+
+"Yes, I did," Chris said, "if we had the money."
+
+"Well!" said the boy, "well, I guess _that'll_ be all right!"
+
+"How much _she'd_ of liked it," said Chris.
+
+"Wouldn't she, though," Allen assented; "wouldn't she? And you heard
+what she said--that about keepin' him from bein'--wicked?
+Chrissie--_could_ we, you and me? This little fellow?"
+
+Chris lifted her face and nodded.
+
+"I ain't afraid," she said simply.
+
+"I ain't either," her husband said.
+
+As if, in this new future, there were less need of fear than in the
+future which had sought to "try to be happy and keep ourselves happy."
+
+They looked down where their house would be, near the gate of the coming
+dawn. And--as two others in such case might have seen--it was as if they
+were the genii of their own mysterious future, a future whose solution
+trembled very near. For with the charge of the child had come a courage,
+even as the dead woman had known, when she thought of her charge of
+Allen, that she was not afraid to die.
+
+"Allen," said Chris, stumblingly, "it don't seem as if we could get like
+the Howells' an' the Hubbelthwaits and them. Somehow it don't seem as if
+we _could_!"
+
+"No," said Allen, "we couldn't. That's so, ain't it?"
+
+Above little John's head their eyes met in a kind of new betrothal, new
+marriage, new birth. But when he would have driven on, Allen pulled at
+the reins again, and,
+
+"Chrissie," he said suddenly, "if afterwards--there should be
+anybody--else. I mean for us. Would--would you keep on lovin' this
+little kiddie, too?"
+
+She met his eyes bravely, sweetly.
+
+"Well, you Silly," she said, "of course I would!"
+
+At which Allen laughed joyously, confidently.
+
+"Why, Chris," he cried, "we're married! For always an' always. An'
+here's this little old man to see to. Who's afraid?"
+
+Then they kissed each other above the head of the sleeping child, and
+drove on toward the village, and toward their waiting house.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT
+
+
+When I opened my door this morning, the Outdoors was like a thing coming
+to meet me. I mean that it was like a person coming to meet me--no, it
+was like many persons, hand in hand and, so to speak, mind in mind; a
+great company of whom straightway I became one. I felt that swift, good
+gladness that _now_ was _now_,--that delicate, fleeting Now, that very
+coquette of time, given and withdrawn. I remember that I could not soon
+go to sleep on the night of the day on which I learned that the Hebrew
+tongue has no present tense. They could not catch at that needle-point
+of experience, and we can do so. I like to glory in it by myself when no
+one else is thinking of it; to think aside, as if _to_ Something, that
+now is being now.... And I long for the time when we shall all know it
+together, all the time, and understand its potentialities and let it be
+breath and pulse to keep the Spirit Future alive and pure.
+
+It would have been no great wonder if I had been rejoicing past all
+reason in the moment. For at that very instant came Calliope Marsh, home
+for the Java entertainment which was set for to-night, and driving to my
+gate the Sykes's white horse in the post-office store delivery wagon.
+And as I saw her, so precisely did she look like herself, that I could
+have believed that Now was not Now, but Then, when first I knew her.
+
+Calliope brought the buckled lines informally over the horse's head and
+let them fall about the tie post, and ran to me. I am afraid that I am
+not going to tell what we said. But it was full of being once more in
+the presence of those whom you love. Do you not think that such being
+together is a means of actual life transcending both breath and
+perception?
+
+When our greeting was done, Calliope sat down on the stair in my hall,
+and,
+
+"Hev you got any spare candle-shades an' sherbet glasses, an' pretty
+doilies an' lunch cloths an' rugs an' willow chairs an' a statue of
+almost anybody an' a meat-chopper with a peanut-butter attachment an' a
+cap an' gown like colleges?" she demanded.
+
+And when I told her that I thought I might have some of these things,
+
+"Well," Calliope said, "she wants 'em all. Who do I mean by She? Mis'
+Oliver Wheeler Johnson, the personal queen of things."
+
+She leaned forward, hugging her thin little arms, and she looked up at
+me from under the brim of her round straw hat.
+
+"I'm in need of grace," she said shortly. "I never felt like this toward
+any human being. But I tell you, when that little Mis' Johnson comes
+dilly-nippin' around where I am, noddin' her blue ostrich tip, seems my
+spine just stiffens out in me like it was going to strike at her, same
+as a stick. Do you know the feelin'?"
+
+I answered reluctantly, and not as I should wish to answer; for it is
+certain that I, too, have seldom seen Mrs. Johnson without an urgency to
+be gone from her little fluttering presence. But Calliope! I could not
+imagine Calliope shrinking from any one, or knowing herself alien to
+another.
+
+"For sixty years," she answered my thought of her, "I've never known
+what it was to couldn't bear anybody, not without I had a reason. They
+ain't much of anybody I what you might say don't like, without they're
+malicious or ugly a-purpose. Ugly by nature, ugly an' can't help it,
+ugly an' don't know it--I can forgive all them. An' Mis' Johnson ain't
+ugly at all--she's just a real sweet little slip of a thing, doin' her
+hard-workin' best. But when I first see her in church that day, I says
+to myself: 'I'll give that little piece two months to carry the sail
+she's carryin' here to-day; four months to hev folks tired of her, an'
+six months to get herself the cold shoulder all 'round.' An' I hold to
+what I said. An' when her baby-blue nineteen-inch feather swings in an'
+'round, an' when she tells how things ought to be, I kind o' bristle all
+over me. I'm ashamed of it--an' yet, do you know, I like to give in to
+it?" Calliope said solemnly. "I donno what's come over me. Hev you heard
+where the Java entertainment's put to be?"
+
+I had not heard, nor was I sure just why it was of Java, save that
+Friendship is continually giving entertainments with foreign names and
+practising a wild imperialism to carry out an effect of foreign parts.
+And since, at the missionary meeting which had projected the affair,
+Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had told about _their_ Java entertainment in
+_their_ church at home, that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady, who
+was president of the society, had appointed her chairman of the Java
+entertainment committee.
+
+"And," Calliope informed me, "she's picked out the engine-house for it.
+Yes, sir,--the fire-engine house. No other place was _quaint_ enough. No
+other place lent itself to decoration probabilities--or somethin' like
+that. She turned her back flat on the church an' went round to empty
+stores, lookin' for _quaint-ity_. One while I thought she'd hev us in
+the Chinese laundry, she seemed that took with the tomato-coloured
+signs on the walls. But, finally, she lit on the engine-house; an' when
+she see the big, bare engine-room, with the big, shinin' engine in it,
+an' harnesses hangin' from them rough board beams in a kind of avenoo,
+an' the board walls all streaked down, she spatted her hands an' 'lowed
+we'd hev our Java there. 'What a dear, quaint place,' s's she,--'so
+_flexible_!' She held out about the harnesses bein' so quaintly
+picturesque an' the fire-engine a piece o' resistance--or somethin' like
+that. An' she rents the room, without ay, yes, no, nor boo. My way of
+thinkin', a chairman ought to hev boo for a background, even if she _is_
+chairman. That's where she wants the statue an' the nut butter an' the
+cap an' gown. Can we borrow 'em of you?"
+
+"The engine-house!" I repeated incredulously. "You cannot mean the
+fire-engine house, Calliope?"
+
+"I do," Calliope said firmly, "the quaint, flexible fire-engine house.
+They ain't been a fire in Friendship in over two years, so Mis' Johnson
+says we ain't got that to think of--an' I donno as we hev. An' they
+never use the engine any more, now they've got city water, excep' for
+fires in the country, and then nobody ever gets in to give the alarm
+till the house is burned down an' no need to bother goin'. Even if they
+do get in in some sort of season, the department has to go to the mayor
+to get a permit to go outside the city limits. It was so when the
+Topladys' barn burned. Timothy told 'em, when they come gallopin' up
+after it was most done smokin', that if they had held off a little
+longer they could have been a sight of help to him in shinglin' the new
+one. Oh, no, they ain't much of any danger of our being disturbed by a
+fire in them two hours to-night. Anyhow, they can't be a fire. Mis'
+Oliver Wheeler Johnson said so."
+
+We laughed like children as we loaded my "Java" stuffs on the wagon.
+Calliope was a valiant helper to Mrs. Johnson, and so I told her. She
+was standing in the wagon box, one arm about my palm, the other free for
+driving.
+
+"I'm the chairman o' the refreshments, too," she confessed. "Oh, well.
+Yourself you can boss round, you know," she threw back, smiling;
+"anybody can do that. But your feelin's you're some cramped about
+runnin'."
+
+It is certain that Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson was signally unfitted for
+a future in Friendship Village. She was a woman of some little world in
+which she had moved before she came to us, and in the two worlds she
+perceived no difference. Or, where she saw a difference, she sought to
+modify it by a touch when a breath would have been too much, and the
+only factor of potency would have been a kind of potency of spirit,
+which she did not possess.
+
+The Oliver Wheeler Johnsons had moved to Friendship only three months
+before, and nobody had looked for them at church on their first Sunday.
+"Movin' so, you want your Sabbath to take some rest in, an' you ain't
+expected to dress yourself up an' get out to Sunday service an' face
+strangers," the village said--and when the two walked into church while
+the responses were being made nearly everybody lost the place.
+
+They were very young, and they were extremely well dressed.
+
+"He's got on one o' the long coats," comment ran after church, "an' he's
+got a real soft-speakin' voice. But he seems to know how to act."
+
+And, "I declare, nice white gloves an' a nineteen-inch baby-blue ostrich
+feather durin' movin' seems some like puttin' on."
+
+And, "The back of her dress fits her just like the front, an' I must say
+she knows it. No pullin' down the jacket or hitchin' the strings forward
+for _her_, when she stands up!"
+
+As Miggy, who first told me about that day, had said, "That Sunday
+morning, Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson was the belle of the congregation."
+
+After service that day, instead of going directly home or waiting to be
+addressed, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had spoken to the woman with
+whom she had been seated. It was Mis' Postmaster Sykes.
+
+"Thank you so much," Mrs. Johnson said, "for letting us share your pew.
+May I present my husband? We have come to Friendship to live, and we
+shall be coming here to church. And I shall want to join your Ladies'
+Aid Society and your Missionary Circle and, perhaps, be in the
+Sunday-school right away. I--I think I'll be less homesick--"
+
+"Actually," Mis' Sykes said afterward, "she took my breath clear away
+from me. I never heard of such a thing. Of course, we're real glad to
+hev our newcomers Christian people, but we want quiet Christians. An'
+did you notice how she was when I give her an introduction around? Why,
+she up an' out with somethin' to say to everybody. Just a neat little
+'How d' do' wouldn't do for her to remark. I always suspicion them
+talkative-at-first kind. It's like they'd been on the stage or brought
+up in a hotel."
+
+When she first came to the Ladies' Aid and the missionary meetings, Mrs.
+Johnson "said something." She was "up to her feet" three or four times
+at each session with suggestion, information, or description of how they
+did in her home church. And some way I think that what chiefly separated
+her from the village was the way that inevitable nineteen-inch blue
+ostrich plume on the little woman's hat bobbed and won attention and was
+everywhere at once. Or, perhaps--such creatures of wax we are to our
+impressions--it may have been little Mrs. Johnson's mere way of lifting
+her small, pointed chin when she talked, and of frowning and
+over-emphasizing. Or it may have been that she stood with her hands
+clasped behind her in what seemed to Friendship exaggerated ease, or
+that she smiled arbitrarily and ingratiatingly as she talked when there
+was absolutely nothing at which to smile. I think that these made her
+seem as alien to us as, in varied measure, certain moral defects might
+have done.
+
+Moreover, she mentioned with familiarity objects and usages of which
+Friendship Village knew nothing: Carriage shoes, a new cake of soap for
+each guest, some kind of ice served, it was incredulously repeated, "in
+the middle o' the meal!" She innocently let fall that she sent to the
+city for her letter-paper. She had travelled in a state-room on a train,
+and she said so. She knew a noted woman. She used, we saw from the
+street, shaded candles on the table when she and her husband were at
+supper alone. She thought nothing of ordering Jimmy Sturgis and the bus
+to take her down town to her marketing on a rainy day. She had inclined
+to blame the village that Daphne Street was not paved, instead of
+joining with the village to blame somebody else. Above all, she tried
+to buy our old furniture. I do not know that another might not have done
+all these quite without giving offence, and, indeed, rather have left us
+impressed with her superior familiarity with an envied world. But by the
+time of the Java entertainment Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had
+innocently alienated half Friendship Village. And this morning Calliope
+merely voiced what I knew to be the sentiment of most of Mrs. Johnson's
+neighbours and acquaintances. For these people are the kindly of earth;
+but they are of earth, where reign both the centrifugal and centripetal
+forces,--and the control is not always so swift as science and the human
+heart could wish.
+
+At five o'clock to-day--the day set for the Java evening
+entertainment--I made my way to the engine-house. This was partly
+because I wished to be as much as possible with Calliope during her few
+days in the village, and partly it was because the affair would belong
+to the class of festivity which I am loath to miss, and I think that,
+for Friendship's sake, I will never willingly pass by a "hall" in which
+is to be found a like diversion. Already on the great room, receiving
+its final preparation, had descended something of the excited spirit of
+the evening: the heat, the insufficient light, the committee members'
+shrill, rollicking children sliding on the floor, the booths which in
+all bazaars contain with a precision fairly bewildering the same class
+of objects; and the inevitable sense of hurry and silk waists and aching
+feet and mustn't-take-your-change-back. But to all these things the Java
+engine-house affair would add an element of novelty, almost a flavour of
+romance. Certainly the room lent itself to "decoration probabilities,"
+as Calliope had vaguely quoted; it had been a roller-skating rink,
+utilized by the fire-department on the decline of the pastime, and there
+was, as Mrs. Johnson's _pièce de résistance_, the fire-engine.
+
+I had never before been in the engine-house--you know how there will be
+commonplace enough spots in your own town to which you never go: the
+engine-house, the church belfry, the wood yard, upstairs over this store
+and that, and grocery cellars whose sloping trap-doors, open now and
+then to the walk, are as alien as the inside of the trunks of your
+trees. When I stepped in the engine-house, it seemed insistently a place
+in which I had never been before. And this may have been partly because
+the whole idea of a village fire-department is to me singular: the
+waiting horses and ladders and hose, whose sole reason for being is
+merely ameliorative, and never human and preventive; that pealing of the
+sharp, peculiar, terrifying alarm and summons first imprinting something
+on the very air, stabbing us with _Halt_ while we count the bell
+strokes for the ward, and then clanging the wild fury of the
+quick-stroke command to help.
+
+To-day the great glittering fire-engine, flanked by hose-cart and
+hook-and-ladder wagon, occupied almost wonderingly the head of the room
+which had been invaded, and an inspired committee had garlanded the
+engine with paper roses and American flags. The flag of the Netherlands,
+copied from a dictionary and wrought in red-white-and-blue cambric with
+a silver crown, drooped meditatively from the smoke-stack; a scarlet fez
+and a peacock-feather fan hung on the supply hose; and on the
+tongue-bracer was fixed a pink sofa cushion from Mis' Amanda Toplady's
+parlour, with an olive Indian gentleman in a tinsel zouave jacket
+stamped on the cover. On the two big sliding doors, back of which stood
+the fire company's horses, were tacked innumerable Javanese trifles more
+picturesque than authentic; and on outlying booths and tables there were
+others. Directly before the engine was to be the tea-table, where Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes was to serve Java tea from a Java canister, loaned by
+the Post-office store.
+
+As soon as I entered I sought out Calliope's booth, a huge affair
+constructed of rugs whose red-tongued, couchant dogs and bounding fawns
+somewhat marred the Eastern effect. And within, I found myself in a
+circle of the Friendship women whom I know best--all of them tired with
+that deadly tiredness born of a day's work at a church fair of any
+nation. But at once I saw that it was not merely fatigue which was
+disquieting them.
+
+Calliope was leaning against a bit of Bagelen blue, loaned by the new
+minister's wife. And she said to me as if, I thought, in explanation of
+what I was to hear,--"I guess we're all pretty tired. Most of us look
+like we wanted to pant. I'm all of a shake, myself."
+
+When Mis' Postmaster Sykes spoke unsmilingly, I understood:--
+
+"It ain't the bein' tired," she disclaimed; "tired I can stand an' hev
+stood since my own birth. But it's the bein' commanded 'round--me,
+_commanded_--by that little I'm-the-one-an'-you-do-as-I-say out there!"
+
+"Land-a-livin' an' a-dyin'!" said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "I
+declare if I know whether I'm on foot or on horseback. It's bad enough
+to hev to run a fair, without you've got to be run yourself, too. Ain't
+it enough for Mis' Johnson to be made chairman without her wantin' to
+boss besides? She might as well say to me, 'Mis' Holcomb, you do
+everything the opposite way from the way you've just done it,' an' hev
+it over with."
+
+Mis' Amanda Toplady--even that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda--shook her
+head.
+
+"Mis' Johnson surely acts used to bein' bowed down to," she admitted;
+"she seems fair bent on lordin' it. My land, if she wasn't bound to
+borrow my Tea rose plant that's just nearin' ready to bud."
+
+Calliope laughed, a little ruefully, and wholly in sympathy.
+
+"Honest," she said, "I guess what's the matter with all of us ain't so
+much what she does as the particular way she does it. It's so with some
+folks. They just seem to sort of _set_ you all over, when you come near
+'em--same as the cold does to gravy. We'd all ought to wrostle with the
+feelin', I expect."
+
+"I expect we had," said Mis' Holcomb, "but you could wrostle all your
+days with vinegar an' it'd pucker your mouth same way."
+
+"Funny part," Calliope observed, "everybody feels just alike about her.
+When she skips around so sort o' momentous, we all want to dodge. I felt
+sorry for her, first, because I thought she was in for nervous
+prostration. But after a while I see it wasn't disease--it was just her
+feelin' so up an' down significant, you might say."
+
+"I donno," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "but it's part the way
+she says her _a_'s. That real _a_-soundin' _a_ kind," she explained
+vaguely.
+
+"She's so right an' left cuffy--I guess that's the whole thing,"
+Calliope put it in her rich idiom.
+
+"Well," said Mis' Amanda, sadly, "there must be somethin' we could like
+her for, even if it was only her husband."
+
+"He ain't what I'd call much, either," Calliope dismissed Mr. Oliver
+Wheeler Johnson positively; "he's got too soft-speakin' a voice. I like
+a man's voice to rumble up soft from his chest an' not slip down thin
+from his brain."
+
+I remember that I listened in a great wonder to these women whom I had
+seen at many an office of friendliness to strangers and aliens. Yet as I
+looked across the floor at that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson--who,
+in the hat with the blue plume, was everywhere, directing, altering,
+objecting, arranging, commanding and, especially, doing over--I most
+unwillingly felt much as they felt. If only Mrs. Johnson had not
+continually lifted her little pointed chin. If only she had not
+perpetually and ingratiatingly smiled when there was nothing at which to
+smile at all.
+
+Then Abigail Arnold hurried up to us with a tray of cups for the Java
+tea.
+
+"Calliope," she said to the chairman of the refreshments, "Mis' Johnson
+jus' put up her little chin an' says, 'What! ain't we no lemons for the
+tea?'"
+
+Calliope compressed her lips and lifted their thin line tight and high.
+
+"Lemins," she replied, "ain't necessarily found in Java. I've a good big
+mind to go home to bed."
+
+Then we saw little Mrs. Johnson's blue linen dress hurrying toward us
+with the waving line of the blue feather above her, like a last little
+daring flourish by the artist of her. She was really very pretty and
+childish, with a manner of moving in wreaths and lines and never in
+solids. Her little feet twinkled along like the signature to the pretty
+picture of her. But yet she was not appealing. She was like an
+overconfident child whom you long to shut in a closet. Yes, I understand
+that I sound like a barbarian in these days of splendid corrective
+treatment of children who are studied and not stormed at. And in this
+treatment I believe to the uttermost. And yet, overconfidence in a child
+is of all things the most--I will amend what I said: Mrs. Oliver Wheeler
+Johnson was like an overconfident child whom you long to shut in a
+closet because of your ignorance of what else on earth to do. No doubt
+there is a better way, but none of us knew it. And she came toward us
+intent, every one felt, on some radical change in arrangements, though
+the big room was now in the pink of appointment and ready to be left
+while the committee went home to sup on "just sauce and
+bread-and-butter," and to don silk waists.
+
+We saw little Mrs. Johnson hurrying toward us, upon a background of the
+great, patient room, all-tolerant of its petty bedizening. And then Mrs.
+Johnson, we in Calliope's booth, the sliding, rollicking children, and
+all the others about stood still, at the sharp, peculiar terrifying
+alarm and summons which seemed to imprint something on the very air,
+stabbing us with _Halt_ that we might count the bell strokes for the
+ward, and clanging a wild fury of the quick-stroke command to help. For
+the first time in two years the Friendship fire alarm was sounding from
+the tower above our heads.
+
+There was a panting sweep and scurry for the edges of the room, as
+instantly a gong on the wall sounded with the alarm, and the two big
+sliding doors went back, scattering like feathers the innumerable
+Javanese trifles that had been tacked there. Forward, down the rug-hung
+vista, plunged the two big horses of the department. We saw the Java
+tea-table borne to earth, the Javanese exhibits adorning outlying
+counters swept away, and all the "decoration probabilities" vanish in
+savage wreck. Then the quaintly picturesque harnesses fell to the
+horses' necks, their hoofs trampled terrifyingly on the loose boards of
+the floor, and forth from the yawning doors the horses pounded, dragging
+the _pièce de résistance_, with garlands on its sides, the pink zouave
+cushion crushed beneath it, and the flag of the Netherlands streaming
+from the stack. Horses rushed thither in competition, came thundering at
+the doors, and galloped to place before the two carts. I think not a
+full minute can have been consumed. But the ruin of the Java
+entertainment committee's work was unbelievably complete. Though there
+had been not a fire in Friendship Village in two years, that night, of
+all nights, Jimmy Sturgis's "hay-barn," for the omnibus horses, "took it
+on itself," it was said, "to go to work an' burn up." And Jimmy's barn
+is outside the city limits, so that the _pièce de résistance_ had to be
+used. And Jimmy is in the fire-department, so that the company galloped
+informally to the rescue without the benefit of the mayor's authority.
+
+As the last of the department disappeared, and the women of the
+committee stood looking at one another--tired with the deadly tiredness
+of a day such as theirs--a little blue linen figure sprang upon a chair
+and clasped her hands behind her, and a blue ostrich feather lifted and
+dipped as she spoke.
+
+"Quickly!" Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson cried. "All hands at work now!
+Mrs. Sykes, will you set up the tea-table? You can get more dishes from
+my house. Mrs. Toplady, this booth, please. You can make it right in no
+time. Mrs. Holcomb, you will have to do your booth entirely over--you
+can get some things from my house. Miss Marsh--ah, Calliope Marsh, you
+must go to my house for my lace curtains--"
+
+She smiled ingratiatingly and surely arbitrarily, for we all knew full
+well that there was absolutely nothing to smile at. And with that
+Calliope's indignation, as she afterward said, "kind of crystallized and
+boiled over." I remember how she stood, hugging her thin little arms and
+speaking her defiance.
+
+"I donno how you feel, Mis' Johnson," she said dryly, "but, _my_ idea,
+Bedlam let loose ain't near quaint enough for a Java entertainment. Nor
+I don't think it's what you might say real Java, either. Things here
+looks to me too flexible. I'm goin' home an' go to bed."
+
+There was no doubt what the rest meant to do. With one impulse they
+turned toward the door as Calliope turned, and silently they took the
+way that the _pièce de résistance_ had taken before them. Little Mrs.
+Johnson stood on her chair making many gestures; but no one went back.
+
+Calliope looked straight before her.
+
+"My feet ache like I done my thinkin' with 'em," she said, "an' my head
+feels like I'd stood on it. An' what's it all for?"
+
+"Regular clock performance," Mis' Postmaster Sykes assented. "We've
+ticked hard all day long an' ain't got a thing out of it. I often think
+it's that way with my housework, but I did think the Ladies' Missionary
+could tick, when it _did_ tick, for eternity. I'm tuckered to the bone."
+
+"Nobody knows," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was Mame-Bliss, "how my poor neck
+aches. It's there I suffer first an' most."
+
+Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was walking behind the rest, took three great
+steps and caught us up and spoke, a little breathlessly:--
+
+"Land, land," she said, "I guess I'll go home an' pop some corn. Seems
+to me it'd smell sort of cosy an' homelike an' soothin' down. It's a
+grand thing to smell when you're feelin' far off from yourself."
+
+Calliope laughed a little then.
+
+"Well," she said, "anyhow I ain't got my silk waist to get into--and I
+didn't hev a nice one to put on anyway. I was wishin' I had, and now my
+wish has come true by bein' took away from me, bodily--like they will.
+But just the same--"
+
+She turned on the walk and faced us, and hugged her thin little arms.
+
+"A while ago," she said, "I give that little woman there six months to
+get herself the cold shoulder all around. Well, the time ain't up
+yet--but both my shoulders feels stone cold!"
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE COLD SHOULDER
+
+
+There is something more about Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson.
+
+Did you ever look through an old school-book of your own and, say, on
+the history picture of Vesuvius in eruption impose your own memory of
+Pompeii, visited in these twenty years since you studied about it; and
+have you not stared hard at the time between and felt yourself some one
+other than that one who once dreamed over the Vesuvius picture? Or,
+years after you read the Letters, you have made a little mark below
+Cicero's cry from exile, "Oh, that I had been less eager for life!" and
+you look at the cry and at the mark, and you and one of these become an
+anachronism--but you are not sure which it is that so becomes. So now,
+in reading over these notes some while after I have set them down, I am
+minded here to give you my look ahead to the end of the summer and to
+slip in some account of what happened as a closing of the tale. And I
+confess that something about me--perhaps it is the Custodian
+herself--likes this way of pretending a freedom from time and of looking
+upon its fruit to say which seeds have grown and which have not.
+
+Friendship Village is not superstitious, but when curious coincidences
+occur we do, as we say, "take down note." And it did seem like a
+judgment upon us that, a little time after the Java fiasco, and while
+indignation was yet at high noon, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson fell ill.
+
+At first I think we affected not to know it. When she did not appear at
+church, none of us mentioned it for a Sunday or two. Then when some one
+casually noted her absence we said, "Oh, wasn't she? Got little cold,
+likely." That we saw her no more down town or "brushing up" about her
+door we facilely laid to chance. When the village heard that her
+maid--who always offended by talking almost in a whisper--had once or
+twice excused her mistress to callers, every one shut lips and hardened
+hearts and said some folk acted _very_ funny about their calling duties.
+But when, at the twelve o'clock breakfast of the new minister's
+wife--("Like enough breakfast at noon was a real Bible custom," the
+puzzled devotees solved that amazing hour), Mrs. Johnson did not appear,
+the village was forced to admit that something must be wrong.
+
+Moreover, against its will the behaviour of young Mr. Johnson was
+gravely alarming Friendship. Mr. Johnson was in real estate and
+insurance in the city, and this did not impress the village as a serious
+business. "Because, what does he _sell_!" as Abigail Arnold said. "We
+know he don't own property. He rents the very house they live in. A
+doctor's a doctor an' he gives pills, an' a store's a store with the
+kind o' thing you need. But it don't seem like that man could make a
+real good livin' for her, dealin' vague in nothin' that way." His
+income, it was felt, was problematical, and the village had settled it
+that what the Oliver Wheeler Johnsons' had was chiefly wedding presents
+"an' high-falutin' tastes." But, in the face of the evidence, every
+afternoon at three o'clock the young husband ordered a phaëton from
+Jimmy Sturgis and came home from the city to take his wife to drive.
+Between shutters the village saw that little Mrs. Johnson's face did
+look betrayingly pale, and the blue ostrich plume lay motionless on her
+bright hair.
+
+"I guess Mis' Johnson's real run down," her acquaintances said to one
+another uneasily. Still we did not go to see her. The weeks went by
+until, one morning, Calliope met the little new Friendship doctor on the
+street and asked him about his patient.
+
+"I up an' ask' him flat out," Calliope confessed afterward; "not that I
+really cared to be told, but I hated to know I was heathenish. You don't
+like the feelin'. To know they ain't heathens is all that keeps some
+folks from _bein_' 'em. Well, so I ask' him. 'Doctor Heron,' s'I, 'is
+that Mis' Johnson real sick, or is she just sickish?' He looks at me
+an'--'Looks pretty sick, don't she?' s'e. 'Well,' s'I, 'I've seen folks
+look real rich that wa'n't it by right-down pocketbook evidence.' 'Been
+to see her?' s'e. 'No,' s'I, short. 'Might drop in,' s'e, an' walks off,
+lookin' cordial. That little Doctor Heron is that close-mouthed I
+declare if I don't respect him same as the minister an' the pipe-organ
+an' the skippin' hills."
+
+So, as midsummer passed and found the little woman still ailing, I
+obeyed an idle impulse and went one evening to see her. I recall that as
+soon as I had crossed her threshold the old influence came upon me, and
+I was minded to run from the place in sheer distaste of the overemphasis
+and the lifted, pointed chin and the fluttering importances of her
+presence. I was ashamed enough that this should be so, but so it was;
+and I held my ground to await her coming to the room only by a measure
+of will.
+
+I sat with Mrs. Johnson for an hour that evening. And it would seem
+that, as is the habit of many, having taken my own way I was straightway
+possessed to draw others after me. There are those who behave similarly
+and who set cunningly to work to gain their own ends, as, for example, I
+did. For one night soon I devised a little feast, which I have always
+held to be a good doorway to any enterprise, and, at the
+Friendship-appointed supper hour of six, I made my table as fair as
+possible, as has been done in like case ever since butter was first
+served "in a lordly dish." And my guests were Calliope, without whom no
+festival is wholly in keeping, and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and
+Mis' Postmaster Sykes, and that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady.
+
+Because they had arrived so unsuspectingly I own myself to have felt
+guilty enough when, in that comfortable half-hour after a new and
+delectable dessert had been pronounced upon, I suggested with what
+casualness I might summon that we five pay a visit that night to Mrs.
+Oliver Wheeler Johnson.
+
+"Land!" said Mis' Holcomb, "I've thought I would an' then I've thought I
+wouldn't till I feel all two-faced about myself. I donno. Sometimes I
+think one way an' sometimes I think the other. Are you ever like that?"
+
+"I s'pose," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, majestically, "that them in our
+position ought to overlook. I donno's 'twould hurt us any to go," she
+added graciously.
+
+Calliope's eyes twinkled.
+
+"That's it," she said; "let them that's got the social position to
+overlook things be Christian an' overlook 'em."
+
+That great Mis' Amanda Toplady folded her hands, dimpled like a baby
+giant's.
+
+"I'd be glad to go," she said simply; "I've got some grape jell that
+looks to me like it wasn't goin' to keep long, an' I'd be thankful to be
+on terms with her so's I could carry it in to her. They ain't a single
+other invalid in Friendship."
+
+Calliope sprang to her feet and crossed her little arms, a hand hugging
+either shoulder.
+
+"Well said!" she cried; "do let's go! I'm sick to death of slidin' off
+the subject whenever it comes up in my mind."
+
+So, in the fair October dusk, we five went down the Plank Road--where
+Summer lingers late. The air was gentle with the soft, impending dark. I
+wonder why the colonnade of sweet influences, down which we stepped, did
+not win us to themselves. But I remember how, instead, our imminent
+visit drew us back to the days of Mrs. Johnson's coming, so that
+presently we were going over the incident of the Java entertainment,
+and, as Calliope would have put it, "crystallizing and boiling over"
+again in the old distaste.
+
+But when we reached the little cottage of the Johnsons, our varied
+motives for the visit were abruptly merged in a common anxiety. For
+Doctor Heron's buggy stood at the gate and the little one-story cottage
+was dark save for a light in what we knew to be a corner bedroom. The
+hallway was open to the night, but though we could distinctly hear the
+bell jingle in the kitchen no one answered the summons. Then, there
+being somewhere about a murmur of voices, Calliope stepped within and
+called softly:--
+
+"Doctor, Doctor Heron--you there? Is they anything we can do?"
+
+The doctor came momentarily to the lighted doorway down the hall.
+
+"That you, Calliope?" he said. "You might come here, will you? Tell the
+rest to sit down somewheres. And you tell Mr. Johnson he can come."
+
+On which, from out the dark living room, some one emerged very swiftly
+and without a word pushed by us all where we were crowded in the passage
+and strode down to the little lighted chamber. Calliope hurried after
+him, and we four shrank back in sudden dread and slipped silently into
+the room which the young husband had left, and stood together in the
+dimness. Was she so sick? In that room he must have heard the door-bell
+as we had heard it, and yet he had not answered. Was it possible that we
+had come too late?
+
+While we waited we said nothing at all, save that great Mis' Amanda
+Toplady, who said three times or four, "Oh, dear, oh, dear, I'm always
+waitin' till somethin's too late--either me or the other thing." It
+seemed very long before we heard some stir, but it can have been only a
+few minutes until the doctor came down the little hall and groped into
+the room. In answer to all that we asked he merely occupied himself in
+lighting a match and setting it deliberately to the candles on the table
+and adjusting their shades. They were, we noted afterward, the same
+candles whose presence we had detected and derided at those long ago
+tête-à-tête suppers in that house. The light glowed on the young
+doctor's pale face as he looked at us, each in turn, before he spoke.
+And when he had done with his slow scrutiny--I think that we cannot
+wholly have fancied its accusation--he said only:--
+
+"Yes, she's pretty sick. I can't tell yet."
+
+Then he turned and closed the outer door and stood leaning against it,
+looking up the hall.
+
+"Miss Marsh!" he called.
+
+But why did the man not tell us something, we wondered; and there
+flashed in my mind Calliope's reference to the pipe-organ and the
+skipping hills. At all events, Calliope would tell us.
+
+And so she did. We heard her step in the hall, coming quickly and yet
+with a manner of exceeding care. I think that with the swift sense which
+wings before intelligence, the others understood before they saw her,
+even as I understood. Calliope stopped in the doorway as if she could
+trust herself to go no farther. And she was holding something in her
+arms.
+
+"Calliope," we said; "Calliope...."
+
+She looked down at that which she held, and then she looked at us. And
+the tears were in her eyes, but her face was brighter than I have ever
+known it.
+
+"It's a baby," she said, "a little bit of a baby. _Her_ baby. An' it
+makes me feel--it makes me feel--oh," she broke off, "don't it make you
+feel that way, too?"
+
+We looked at one another, and avoided one another's look, and then
+looked long at the baby. I do not remember that we said anything at all,
+or if we did so, that it bore a meaning. But an instant after Calliope
+gave the baby to the nurse who appeared in the doorway, we all tiptoed
+down to the kitchen by common consent. And it was plain that Mrs.
+Johnson's baby made us feel that way, too.
+
+In our desire to be of tardy service we did the most absurd things. We
+took possession of the kitchen, rejoicing that we found the supper
+dishes uncared for, and we heated a great kettle of water, and washed
+and wiped and put away, as softly as we could; and then we "brushed up
+around." I think that only the need of silence kept us from cleaning
+windows. When the nurse appeared--who had arrived that day unknown of
+Friendship--we sprang as one to do her bidding. We sent the little maid
+to bed, we tidied the living room, walking tiptoe, and then we went back
+through the kitchen and sat down on the little side "stoop." And all
+this time we had addressed one another only about the tasks which we had
+in hand.
+
+After a little silence,
+
+"The milkman was quite late this morning," observed Mis' Holcomb.
+
+"Well, he's begun to deliver in cans instead o' bottles," Mis' Sykes
+explained; "it takes him some longer to get around. He says bottles
+makes his wife just that much more to do."
+
+Then we fell silent again.
+
+It was Calliope, sitting on the porch step outside, where it was dark,
+who at last had the courage to be articulate.
+
+"I hope--I _hope_," she said, "she's goin' to be all right."
+
+Mis' Sykes shaded her eyes from the bracket lamp within.
+
+"I'll go bail," she said, "that little you-do-as-I-say chin'll carry her
+through. I'm glad she's got it."
+
+Just then we heard the thin crying of the child and we could divine
+Calliope, that on the step where she sat she was hugging her arms and
+rocking somewhat, to and fro.
+
+"Like enough," she said, "oh, like enough--folks ain't so cramped about
+runnin' their own feelin's as they think they are!"
+
+To this we murmured something indefinite in sound but positive enough in
+sense. And we all knew what we all knew.
+
+"Let's go out around the house to the front gate," said that great Mis'
+Amanda Toplady, abruptly. "Have any of you ladies got two
+handkerchiefs?"
+
+"I've got two," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, "an' I ain't used either
+one. Do you want the one with essence or the one without?"
+
+"I ain't partial," said Mis' Amanda.
+
+We rose and stumbled along the grassy path that led round the house. At
+the gate we met Doctor Heron.
+
+"Well," he said slowly, "well." And after a moment, "Will--will any of
+you be here in the morning?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," we all said simply.
+
+"That's good," he commented shortly, "I didn't know."
+
+We five had to separate at the first corner to go our home ways, and we
+stood for a moment under the gas-light. I remember how, just then,
+Peter's father came singing past us, like one of the Friendship family
+who did not understand his kinship. Even as we five had not understood
+ours.
+
+"You haven't got a shawl, hev you?" Mis' Sykes said to me solicitously.
+
+"The nights have been some chilly on a person's shoulders for a day or
+two now," said Mis' Holcomb.
+
+Calliope put her hand up quickly to her throat.
+
+"Quit," she said. "All of you. Thank God. An' shake hands. I tell you,
+after this I bet I'll run my own feelin's about folks or I'll bring down
+the sky an' make new feelin's! Oh," said Calliope, "don't her--an'
+_now_--an' the baby--an'--oh, an' that bright star winkin' over that
+hitchin' post, make things seem--easy? Good night. I can't stand out
+here any longer."
+
+But when we had gone away a few steps, Calliope called us back. And as
+we turned again,
+
+"To bring down the sky," she repeated, "I bet that's the way God meant
+us to do. They ain't any of us got enough _to_ us to piece out without
+it!"
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+EVENING DRESS
+
+
+I have said that Daphne Street has been paved within the past year, but
+I had not heard of the manner in which the miracle had been wrought
+until the day when Calliope's brief stay in the village ended and she
+came to tell me good-by--and, more than incidentally, to show me some
+samples of a dress which she might have, and a dress which she wouldn't
+have, and a dress which she had made up her mind to have.
+
+"We don't dress much here in Friendship Village," she observed. "Not but
+what we'd like to, but we ain't the time nor the means nor the places to
+wear to. But they was one night--"
+
+She looked at me, as always when she means to tell a story, somewhat
+with the manner of asking a permission.
+
+"None of the low-neck' fashion-plates used to seem real to us," she
+said. "We used to look at 'em pinned up in Lyddy Ember's dressmakin'
+windows, ah-ahing in their low pink an' long blue, an' we'd look 'em
+over an' think tolerant enough, like about sea-serpents. But neither the
+one nor the other bit hold rill vital, because the plates was so young
+an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an' we was old an' busy, like you get,
+an' considered past the dressin' age. Still, it made kind of a nice
+thing to do on the way home from the grocery hot forenoons--draw up
+there on the shady side, where the street kitters some into a curve, an'
+look at Lyddy's plates, an' choose, like you was goin' to get one.
+
+"Land knows we needed some oasises on that street from the grocery up
+home. Daphne Street, our main street, didn't always use' to be what it
+is now--neat little wooden blocks an' a stone curb. You know how it use'
+to be--no curb an' the road a sight, over your shoe-tops with mud in the
+wet, an' over your shoe-tops with sand when it come dry. We ladies used
+to talk a good deal about it, but the men knew it meant money to hev it
+fixed, an' so they told us hevin' it fixed meant cuttin' the trees down,
+an' that kept us quiet--all but the Friendship Married Ladies Cemetery
+Improvement Sodality.
+
+"Mis' Postmaster Sykes was president o' the Sodality last year, you
+know,--she's most always president of everything,--an' we'd been
+workin' quite hard all that winter, an' had got things in the cemetery
+rill ship-shape--at least I mean things _on_ the cemetery was. An' at
+one o' the July meetin's last summer Mis' Sykes up an' proposed that we
+give over workin' for the dead an' turn to the livin', an' pave the main
+street of Friendship Village.
+
+"'True,' she says, 'our constitution states that the purpose of our
+Sodality shall be to keep up the graves of our townspeople an' make 'em
+attractive to others. But,' says she, 'when they ain't enough of us dead
+to occupy all the time, the only Christian way to remedy that is to work
+for folks before they die, while we're waitin' for their graves.'
+
+"This seemed reasonable, an' we voted unanimous to pave Daphne Street.
+An' on the way home Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Timothy Toplady an' I see
+Timothy Toplady settin' in the post-office store, an' we went in to tell
+him an' Silas Sykes about it. But before we could start in, Silas says,
+eyebrows all eager, 'Ain't you heard?'
+
+"'Heard what?' says his wife, kind o' cross, bein' he was her wedded
+husband an' she _hadn't_ heard.
+
+"''Bout Threat Hubbelthwait,' says Silas, lookin' at Mis' Toplady an'
+me, bein's Mis' Sykes was his wife. 'Drunk again,' says Silas, 'an'
+fiddlin' for dear life, an' won't let anybody into the hotel. Mis'
+Hubbelthwait has gone over to her mother's, an' the hired girl with
+her; an' Threat's settin' in the bar an' playin' all the hymn tunes he
+knows.'
+
+"It wasn't the first time it had happened, you know. Threat an' his wife
+an' the hired girl keep the only hotel in Friendship Village--when
+Threat is sober. When he isn't, he sometimes closes up the house an'
+turns out whoever happens to be there, an' won't let a soul in--though,
+of course, not much of anybody ever comes to Friendship anyway, excep'
+now an' then an automobile on its way somewheres. An' there Threat will
+set in the bar, sometimes most of one week, sometimes most of two, an'
+scrape away on the only tunes he knows--all hymns, 'Just As I Am,' an'
+'Can A Little Child Like Me?' Threat don't mean to be sacrilegious; he
+shows that by never singin' them two hymns in church, when they're give
+out.
+
+"'Land!' says Mis' Sykes, when Silas got through, 'what men are!'
+
+"'We ain't so much as woman, lemme tell you,' says Silas, right crisp.
+Which wasn't what he meant, an' we all laughed at him, so he was a
+little mad to start with.
+
+"'The Sodality's decided to pave Daphne Street,' Mis' Sykes mentions
+then, simple.
+
+"'Pave _what_?' shouts Silas--Silas always seems to think the more you
+do in sound the more you'll do in sense.
+
+"'Do _what_ to Daphne Street?' says Timothy, whirlin' from the peanut
+roaster.
+
+"'Pave Daphne Street,' says Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' me,
+wonderin'.
+
+"Silas wrapped his arms around his own shoulders.
+
+"'When,' says he, lettin' his head lurch with his own emphasizin', 'did
+the Common Council hear about this?'
+
+"'They ain't heard, about it,' says Mis' Sykes, 'no more'n we ever hear
+anything about them.'
+
+"Silas an' Timothy is both aldermen, an' rill sensitive over it. I guess
+the Common Council always _is_ a delicate subject, ain't it?
+
+"Mebbe it wasn't a rill diplomatic way to begin, but it hadn't entered
+the Sodality's head that the town wouldn't be glad to hev the pavin'
+done if the Sodality was willin' to do it. Ain't it a hard thing to
+learn that it ain't all willingness, nor yet all bein' capable, that
+gets things done in the world? It's part just edgin' round an' edgin'
+round.
+
+"What did the Common Council do that night but call a special meetin'
+an' vote not to order any city pavin' done that present year. Every
+member was there but Threat Hubbelthwait, who was fiddlin', an' every
+vote was switched by Silas an' Timothy to be unanimous, excep' Eppleby
+Holcomb's vote. Eppleby, we heard afterwards, said that when a pack o'
+women made up their minds to pave, they'd pave if it was to pave--some
+place that Eppleby hadn't ought to 'a' mentioned; an' he was goin' to be
+on the pavin' side. But then, Eppleby is the gentlest husband in
+Friendship Village, an' known to be.
+
+"Sodality met special next day, not so much to do anything as to let it
+be known that we'd took action. This we done by votin' to lay low till
+such time as we could order the wooden blocks. We preferred to pave
+peaceable, it bein' hot weather.
+
+"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss an'
+Mis' Mayor Uppers an' I walked home together from that meetin'. It was a
+blisterin' July afternoon--one of them afternoons that melts itself out
+flat, same as a dropped pepp'mint on a brick walk, an' you're left
+stickin' in it helpless as a fly, an' generally buzzin'. I rec'lect we
+was buzzin'--comin' down Daphne Street in that chokin' dust an' no
+pavement.
+
+"'It's a dog's life, livin' in a little town--in some respects,' I
+remember Mis' Sykes says.
+
+"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, tolerant, 'I know. I know it is. But I'd
+rather live in a little town an' dog it out than go up to the city an'
+turn wolf, same as some.'
+
+"An' yet we all felt the same, every one of us. They ain't a woman
+livin' in a little place that don't feel the same, now and again. It's
+quiet an' it's easy housework, an' you get to know folks well. But oh,
+none of it what you might say _glitters_. An' they ain't no woman
+whatever--no matter how good a wife an' mother an' Christian an' even
+housekeeper she is--that don't, 'way down deep in her heart, feel that
+hankerin' after some sort o' _glitter_.
+
+"So it was natural enough that we should draw up at Lyddy's dressmakin'
+window an' rest ourself. An' that afternoon we'd have done so, anyway,
+for she hed been pinnin' up her new summer plates--Lyddy don't believe
+in rushin' the season. An' no sooner had we got a good look at 'em--big
+coloured sheets they was, with full-length pictures--than Mis' Toplady
+leaned 'way forward, her hands on her knees, an' stood lookin' at 'em
+the way you look at the parade.
+
+"'Well, look-a-there,' she says. 'Look at that one.'
+
+"The one she meant was a woman with her hair all plaited an' fringed an'
+cut bias, an' with a little white hat o' lilacs 'bout as big as a cork;
+an' her dress--my land! Her dress was long an' rill light blue, an'
+seemed like it must have been paper, it was so fancy. It didn't seem
+like cloth goods at all, same as we hed on. It was more like we was
+wearin' meat an' vegetable dresses, an' this dress was dessert--all
+whipped cream an' pink sugar an' a flower on the plate.
+
+"'Dear land!' says Mis' Toplady, lookin' 'round at us strange, 'do they
+do it when they get gray hair? I didn't know they done it when their
+hair was gray.'
+
+"We all looked, an' sure enough, the woman's hair was white. 'Afternoon
+Toilette for Elderly Woman,' it said underneath, plain as plain. Always
+before the plates hed all been young an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an'
+we'd thought of all that as past an' done for, with us, along with all
+the other things that didn't come true. But here was a woman grayer than
+any of us, an' yet lookin' as live as if she'd been wearin' a housework
+dress.
+
+"'Why,' says Mis' Sykes, starin', 'that must be a new thing this season.
+I never heard of a woman well along in years wearin' anything but brown
+or navy blue or gray,--besides black.' Mis' Sykes is terribly dressy,
+but even she never yet got anywheres inside the rainbow, except in a bow
+at the chin.
+
+"'My,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, wistful, 'wouldn't it seem
+like heaven to be able to wear colours without bein' talked about?'
+
+"An' Mis' Mayor Uppers--her that her husband grew well off bein' mayor,
+an' never'd been back to Friendship Village since he was put out of
+office, she says low:--
+
+"'You ladies that has husbands to keep thinkin' well of you, I should
+think you'd think about this thing. Men,' she says, 'loves the light
+shades.'
+
+"At that Mis' Toplady turned around on us, an' we see her eyes
+expressin' i-dees.
+
+"'Ladies,' says she, impressive, 'Mis' Uppers is right. We hadn't ought
+to talk back or show mad. We ladies of the Sodality had ought to be able
+to get our own way peaceable, just by takin' it, the way the Lord give
+women the weapons to do.'
+
+"We see that somethin' was seethin' in her mind, but we couldn't work
+our way to what it was.
+
+"'Ladies,' says she, an' stepped up on the wooden step to Lyddy's
+dressmakin' shop, 'has the husbands of any one of us seen us, for twenty
+years, dressed in the light shades?'
+
+"I didn't hev any husband to answer for, but I could truthfully say of
+the rest that you'd think black an' brown an' gray an' navy had
+exhausted the Lord's ingenuity, for all the attention they'd paid to any
+other colour He'd wove with.
+
+"'Let's the Sodality get up an evenin' party, an' hev it in post-office
+hall, an' invite our husbands an' buy new dresses--light shades an' some
+lace,' says Mis' Toplady, lettin' the i-dee drag her along, main
+strength.
+
+"Mis' Sykes was studyin' the fashion-plate hungry, but she stopped an'
+stepped up side o' Mis' Toplady.
+
+"'Well, sir,' she said, 'I donno but 'twould help us to work the pavin'
+of Daphne Street. Why, Silas Sykes, for one, is right down soft-hearted
+about clothes. He always notices which one of their waists the choir's
+got on. I heard him say once he wasn't goin' to church again till they
+bought somethin' new.'
+
+"Mis' Holcomb nodded. 'Five years ago,' she said, 'I went up to the city
+with Eppleby. An' I saw him _turn around_ to look after a woman. I'll
+never forget the sensation it give me--like I was married to a man that
+wasn't my husband. The woman had on a light pink dress. I know I come
+home an' bought a pink collar; I didn't think I could go any farther,
+because she was quite young. Do you s'pose....'
+
+"Mis' Toplady pointed at Lyddy's fashion-plate. 'I should go,' she says,
+'just as far as my money would let me go.'
+
+"Mis' Uppers stood lookin' down to the walk. 'The mayor,' she says--she
+calls him 'the mayor' yet--'was terrible fond o' coloured neckties. He
+was rill partial to green ones. Mebbe I didn't think enough about what
+that meant....'
+
+"Mis' Toplady came down off the step. 'Every man is alike,' says she,
+decided. 'Most of us Friendship ladies thinks if we give 'em a clean
+roller towel we've done enough towards makin' things pretty; an' I
+think it's time, as wives, we took advantage of the styles.'
+
+"'An',' says Mis' Sykes, the president, rill dreamy for her, but firm,
+'I think so, too.'
+
+"I tell you, we all walked home feelin' like we'd hed a present--me too,
+though I knew very well I couldn't hev a light dress, an' I didn't hev
+any husband. You start out thinkin' them are the two principal things,
+but you get a-hold o' some others, if you pay attention. Still, I judged
+the ladies was on the right track, for men is men, say what who will.
+All but Threat Hubbelthwait. We passed the hotel an' heard him settin'
+in there by the bar scrapin' away on 'Can A Little Child Like Me?' We
+took shame to him, an' yet I know we all looked at each other sort of
+motherly, like he _was_ some little shaver, same as he sung, an'
+performin' most fool.
+
+"It don't take us ladies long to do things, when our minds is made.
+Especially it don't when Mis' Timothy Toplady is chairman of the
+Entertainment Committee, or the Doin' Committee of whatever happens,
+like she was that time. First, we found out they was plenty enough nun's
+veilin' in the post-office store, cheap an' wide an' in stock an' all
+the light shades; an' I bought all the dresses, noons, of the clerk, so
+Silas wouldn't suspect--me not hevin' any husband to inquire around,
+like they do. Then we hired the post-office hall, vague, without sayin'
+for what--an' that pleased Silas that gets the rent. An' then we give
+the invitations, spectacular, through the _Friendship Daily_ to the
+Sodality's husbands, for the next Tuesday night. We could do it that
+quick, not bein' dependent on dressmakers same as some. The ladies was
+all goin' to make their dresses themselves, an' the dresses wa'n't much
+to do to make. Nobody bothered a very great deal about how we should
+make 'em, the principal thing bein' the colour; Mis' Toplady's was blue,
+like the fashion-plate; Mis' Holcomb's pink, like the woman in the city;
+Mis' Uppers' green, like the mayor's necktie, an' so on. I made me up a
+dress out o' the spare-room curtains--white, with a little blue flower
+in it, an' a new blue ribbon belt. But Mis' Sykes, she went to work an'
+_rented_ a dress from the city, for that one night. That much she give
+out about it, an' would give out no more. That woman loves a surprise.
+She's got a rill pleasant mind, Mis' Sykes has, but one that does enjoy
+jerkin' other people's minds up, an most anything'll do for the string.
+
+"For all we thought we hed so much time, an' it was so easy to do, the
+afternoon o' the party we went 'most crazy. We'd got up quite a nice
+little cold supper--Mis' Hubbelthwait had helped us, she bein' still at
+large, an' Threat fiddlin'. We planned meat loaf an' salad an' pickles
+an' jelly, an' scalloped potatoes for the hot dish, an' ice cream an'
+cake, enough in all for thirty folks: fifteen husbands an' fifteen
+Sodality, or approximatish. An' we planned to go to the hall in the
+afternoon an' take our dresses there, an' sly em' up and leave 'em, an'
+put 'em on after we'd got there that night, so's nobody's husbands
+should suspect. But when we all came in the afternoon, an' the
+decoratin' with greens an' festoons of cut paper an' all was to do,
+there Mis' Toplady, that was to make scalloped potatoes, hadn't got her
+sleeves in yet, an' she was down to the hall tryin' to do both; an' Mis'
+Holcomb, that was to make the salad dressing, had got so nervous over
+her collar that she couldn't tell which edge she'd cut for the top. But
+the rest of us was ready, an' Mis' Sykes's dress had come from the city,
+an' we all, Mis' Toplady an' Mame too, hed our dresses in boxes in the
+post-office hall kitchen cupboards. An' we done the decoratin', an' it
+looked rill lovely, with the long tables laid ready at each side, an'
+room for bein' a party left in between 'em.
+
+"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb left the hall about five
+o'clock to go home an' lay out Silas's an' Timothy's an' Eppleby's best
+clothes for 'em--the rest hed done it at noon. Mis' Hubbelthwait was
+goin' over to the hotel to get some dishes out, an' I went with her to
+help. The bar was to the back, where Threat set an' slep' an' fiddled,
+an' Mis' Hubbelthwait was goin' to slip in still an' sly the dishes out
+to me. A good many of the hotel dishes was her individual weddin'
+presents, so she didn't think wrong of her conscience.
+
+"We was all five hurryin' along together, rehearsin' all we'd got to do
+before six-thirty, when we heard a funny sound. We listened, an' we
+thought they must be testin' the hose. But when we got to Lyddy's shop,
+where the street kitters off some in a curve, we looked ahead an' we see
+it wasn't that.
+
+"It's an automobile," says Mis' Toplady. 'My land,' she says, 'it ain't
+only one. It's two.'
+
+"An' we see it was. There come the two of 'em, ploughin' along through
+the awful sand of Daphne Street, that was fit for no human locomotive,
+unless ostriches. When the Proudfits are here, that's the only one in
+the village with an automobile, they understand the sand, and they'd put
+on the whole steam and tear right along through it. But strangers would
+go careful, for fear they'd get stuck, an' so they got it, like you do.
+An' them two big red cars was comin' slow, the dust like cloaks an'
+curtains billowin' up behind. They looked quite wild, includin' the
+seven folks in each one that was laughin' an' callin' out. An' by the
+time they'd come up to us, us four ladies of the Sodality an' Mis'
+Hubbelthwait was lined up on the walk watchin' 'em. They stopped an'
+one of 'em hailed us, leanin' past his driver.
+
+"'I beg your pardon,' he says, 'is this the street to the best hotel?'
+
+"It was Mis' Toplady that answered him, rill collected. 'They's only one
+street in town,' says she, 'an' they's only one hotel, an' that they
+ain't now.'
+
+"'Can you tell me how soon there will be one?' says the man. 'By
+dinner-time, I hope.'
+
+"We all felt kind of delicate about answerin' this, an' so Mis'
+Hubbelthwait herself spoke up. 'Threat's drunk an' fiddlin', she says.
+'They's no tellin' when Friendship Village will ever hev a hotel again.'
+
+"Both automobiles was listenin' by then, an' though some of 'em laughed
+out sort o' rueful, not many of 'em see the funny.
+
+"'Gad,' one of the men says, 'how about the bird an' the bottle we were
+to send back to Bonner, sittin' by his tire in the desert, a ways back?
+Don't tell us there's no place,' he says, 'where we can find dinner,
+twenty-one of us and the three chauf--' that word.
+
+"Mis' Toplady shook her head. 'They ain't a place big enough to seat
+twenty-one, even if they was the food to feed 'em--' she begun, an' then
+she stopped an' looked 'round at us, as though she was thinkin'
+somethin'.
+
+"'Oh, come now,' says the man,--he was good-lookin' an' young, an'
+merry-seemin',--'Oh, come now,' he said, 'I am sure that the ladies of
+Friendship could cook things such as never man yet ate. We are
+sta-arving,' he says, humorous. 'Can't you do something for us? We'll
+give you,' he winds up, genial, 'two dollars a plate for a good,
+home-cooking dinner for the twenty-four of us. What do you say?'
+
+"Mis' Toplady whirled toward us sort o' wild. 'Is two dollars times
+twenty-four, forty-eight dollars?' says she, low.
+
+"An' we see it was, though Mis' Holcomb was still figurin' it out in the
+palm of her other hand, while we stood gettin' glances out of each
+other's eyes, an' sendin' 'em, give for take. We see, quick as a flash,
+what Mis' Toplady was thinkin' about. An' it was about that hall, all
+festooned with greens an' cut paper, an' the two long tables laid ready,
+an' the veal loaf an' scalloped potatoes an' ice-cream for thirty. An'
+when Mis' Sykes, that usually speaks, stood still, an' didn't say one
+word, but just nodded a little bit, sort o' sad, Mis' Toplady, that was
+chairman o' the Entertainment Committee, done like she does
+sometimes--she took the whole thing into her own hands an' just settled
+it.
+
+"'Why, yes,' she says to 'em, rill pleasant, 'if you want to come up to
+post-office hall at half-past six,' she says, 'the Friendship Married
+Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality will serve you your supper, nice
+as the nicest, for two dollars a head.'
+
+"'Good!' the men all sings out, an' the women spats their hands soft,
+an' one of 'em says somethin' to the merry-seemin' man.
+
+"'Oh, yes,' he says then, 'couldn't we all break into this hotel an'
+floss up a bit before dinner?'
+
+"Mis' Hubbelthwait stepped out towards 'em.
+
+"'I was thinkin' of that,' says she. 'My husband,' she says, dignified,
+'is settin' in the bar--practisin' his violin. He--he does that
+sometimes, an' we--don't bother him. But the bar is at the back. I can
+let you in, still, the front way to the rooms, if you want. An' I'll be
+there myself to wait on you.'
+
+"An' that was what they done, somebody takin' one o' the cars back for
+the other car, an' the rest of us fair breakin' into a run toward
+post-office hall.
+
+"'My land,' says Mis' Toplady, almost like a groan, 'what _hev_ we
+done?'
+
+"It _was_ a funny thing to do, we see it afterward. But I tell you, you
+can't appreciate the influence o' that forty-eight dollars unless you've
+tried to earn money in a town the size o' Friendship Village. Sodality
+hardly ever made more than five dollars to its ten-cent
+entertainments--an' that for a big turn-out on a dry night. An' here was
+the price of about nine such entertainments give us outright, an' no
+extra work, an' rill feet-achin' weather. I say it was more than flesh
+an' blood _or_ wives could stand. We done it automatic, like you
+contradict when it's necessary.
+
+"But there _was_ the men to reckon with.
+
+"'What'll Timothy--an' Silas--an' Eppleby....' Mis' Toplady says, an'
+stops, some bothered an' some rill pained.
+
+"I judged, not havin' any husband to be doin' the inquirin', it wasn't
+polite for me to laugh. But I couldn't hardly help it, thinkin' o' them
+fifteen hungry men an' the supper et away from 'em, just William Nilly.
+
+"Mis' Sykes, we remembered afterwards, never said a word, but only kep'
+up with us back to the hall.
+
+"Back to the hall, where the rest o' the Sodality was, we told 'em what
+we'd done--beginnin' with the forty-eight dollars, like some kind o'
+weapon. But I tell you, we hadn't reckoned without knowin' our
+hostesses, head an' heart. An' they went in pell mell, pleased an' glad
+as we was, an' plannin' like mad.
+
+"The first need was more food to make up that supper to somewheres near
+two dollars' worth--feedin' your husband is one thing an' gettin' up a
+two-dollar meal is another. But we collected that all in pretty sudden:
+leg o' lamb, left from the Holcombs' dinner an' only cut off of one
+side; the Sykes's roast o' veal, the same; three chickens for soup the
+Libertys hed just dressed for next day company dinner; big platter of
+devilled eggs chipped in from Mis' Toplady; a jar o' doughnuts, a
+steamer o' cookies, a fruit-cake a year old--we just made out our list
+an' scattered to empty out all our pantries.
+
+"By six o'clock we was back in the hall, an' all the food with us. But
+nobody hed met nobody's husband yet, an' nobody wanted to. We didn't
+quite know how we was goin' to do, I guess--but done is done, an' to do
+takes care of itself.
+
+"'Hadn't we ought to 'a' sent word to the men?' says Mis' Holcomb, for
+the third or fourth time. 'I sneaked around so's not to pass Eppleby's
+office, but I declare I feel mean. He'll hev to eat sauce an' plain
+bread-an'-butter for his supper. An' most o' the men-folks the same.
+'Seems though somebody'd ought to send 'em word an' not let 'em come up
+here, all washed an' dressed.'
+
+"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, cuttin' cake with her lips shut tight an'
+talkin' anyway, 'I kind o' thought--leave 'em come up. I bet they'd
+rather be in it than out of it, every one of 'em, an' who knows they
+might be some supper left? An' we can all--'
+
+"An' at that Mis' Toplady faces round from cuttin' the cake: 'My land,
+my land,' she says, sort o' hushed, 'why, doin' this, we can't none of
+us wear our new dresses!'
+
+"An' at that we looked at each other, each one sort of accusin', an' I
+guess all our hearts givin' one o' them sickish thumps. An' Mis' Sykes,
+her that hed been so still, snaps back:--
+
+"'I wondered what you thought I'd rented my dress from the city for at
+_Three Dollars a night_.'
+
+"I tell you, that made a hush in the middle of the plannin'. We'd forgot
+all about our own dresses, an' that was bad enough, with the hall all
+hired an' everything all ready, an' every chance in the world of
+everybody's husband's findin' out about the dresses before we could get
+up another Sodality party, same way. But here was Mis' Sykes, three
+dollars out, an mebbe wouldn't be able to rent her dress again at all.
+
+"'I did want Silas,' Mis' Sykes says then, wistful, 'to see me in that
+dress. Silas an' I have been married so long,' she says, 'that I often
+wonder if I seem like a person to him at all. But in that dress from the
+city, I think I would.'
+
+"We was each an' all ready to cry, an' I dunno but we would hev done
+it--though we was all ready to serve, too: coffee made, potatoes pipin'
+hot, veal an' lamb het up an' smellin' rich, chicken soup steamin', an'
+all. But just that very minute we heard some of 'em comin' in the
+hall--an' the one 'ready' conquered the other 'ready,' like it will, an'
+we all made a rush, part curious an' part nerves, to peek through the
+little servin' window from the kitchen.
+
+"_What_ do you think we saw? It was the automobile folks, hungry an' got
+there first. In they'd come, women laughin', men jokin', all makin' a
+lark out o' the whole thing. An' if the women wasn't, every last one of
+'em, wearin'--not the clothes they hed come in, but light pink an' light
+blue an' white an' flowered things, an' all like that.
+
+"Mis' Hubbelthwait burst in on us while we was lookin'. 'They hed things
+in their trunk at the back o' the automobile,' says she. 'They says they
+wanted to floss up for dinner, an' floss up they hev. They look like
+Lyddy's fashion sheets, one an' all.'
+
+"At that Mis' Sykes, a-ceasin' to peek, she drops her tray on the bare
+floor an' begun untyin' her apron. 'Quick!' she raps out, 'Mis'
+Hubbelthwait, you go an' set 'em down. An' every one o' you--into them
+togs of ours! Here's the chance to wear 'em--here an' _now_,' she says,
+'an' leave them folks see we know how to do things here in Friendship
+Village as good as the best.'
+
+"Well, bein' as she had rented the dress, an' three dollars hed to be
+paid out anyhow, an' bein' as she was president, an' bein' as we was all
+hankerin' in our hearts, we didn't need much urgin'. We slammed the
+servin' window shut an' set chairs against both doors, an' we whisked
+out of our regular dresses like wild.
+
+"'Oh, land--my land, the sleeves--the sleeves ain't in mine!' says Mis'
+Toplady, sort o' glazed, an' speakin' in a wail. But we encouraged her
+up to pin 'em in, which she done, an' it couldn't be told from stitches.
+Poor Mame Holcomb's collar that wasn't on yet we turned in for her
+V-shape, so's her dress was low, like the best. An' Mis' Uppers, that
+was seasonin' the chicken soup like none of us could, her we took turns
+in dressin' in her green. An' I'd got into my spare-room curtains,
+somehow, just as Mis' Hubbelthwait come shoving at that door.
+
+"'The men--the men!' says she, painful. 'They're all out here--Silas an'
+Timothy an' Eppleby an' all. They've all heard about it--the automobiles
+went to the post-office for their mail, an' Silas told 'em enjoyable
+about Threat, an' the automobiles told him where they was goin' to eat.
+An' they've come, thinkin' they's enough for all, an' they're out here
+now.'
+
+"Mis' Toplady groaned a little, agonized an' stifled, but rill firm.
+'Tell 'em, then,' says she, 'to come back up here, like men, an'
+_help_.'
+
+"Then we heard a little rustle, soft an' silky an' kind o'
+pink-soundin', an' we looked around, an' there, from where she had been
+dressin' herself over behind the kitchen boiler all alone, Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes stepped out. My land, if she wasn't in a white dress, a
+little low in the neck, an' elbow sleeves, an' all covered solid as
+crust with glitterin' silver spangles.
+
+"'Let's tell 'em ourselves,' she says, 'come on--all of you. Let's take
+out the first course, an' tell the men what we want 'em to do.'
+
+"We made Mis' Sykes go first, carryin' high the tureen of chicken soup.
+An' on one side of her walked Mis' Timothy Toplady, in blue, with the
+wafers, an' on the other Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, in pink, with
+the radishes. An' neither one of 'em could hardly help lookin' at Mis'
+Sykes's dress all the way out. An' back of 'em went the rest o' the
+ladies, all in pink an' blue an' white an' pale green nun's veilin' that
+they'd made, an' carryin' the water-pitchers an' ice an' celery an' like
+that. An' me, I hung back in the kitchen watchin' an' lovin' 'em every
+one--an' almost lovin' Timothy Toplady an' Silas Sykes an' Eppleby when
+they looked on an' saw.
+
+"Mis' Sykes set the soup down in front o' the merry-seemin' man for him
+to serve it. An' then she crossed over an' spoke to Silas, an' swep' up
+ahead of him in that spangly dress, the other ladies followin' an'
+noddin' bright when they passed the men, an' motionin' 'em toward the
+back o' the hall. An' back the men all come into the kitchen, followin'
+as they was asked to do, an' orderly through bein' dazed. Silas an'
+Timothy an' Eppleby was first, an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' Mame
+went up to 'em together.
+
+"I'll never forget that minute. I thought the men was goin' to burst out
+characteristic an' the whole time be tart, an' I shut both doors an' the
+servin' window careful. An' instead o' that, them three men stood there
+just smilin' a little an lookin' surprised an' agreeable; an' the other
+husbands, either takin' the cue or feelin' the same, done likewise, too.
+An' when Mame Bliss says, sort o' tremblin'--Eppleby bein' the gentlest
+husband in Friendship Village, an' known to be: 'How do you like us,
+Eppleby?' Eppleby just nods an' wrinkles up his eyes an' smiles at her,
+like he meant lots more. An' he says, 'Why didn't you never wear that
+dress before, Mame?'
+
+"An' 'Well, Timothy?' says Mis' Toplady, sort o' masterful, an' fully
+expectin' to hev to master. But Timothy Toplady, he just rubs his hands
+an' looks at her sort o' wonderin', an' he says, 'Blisterin' Benson,
+you look as good as the city folks, Amandy--all light, an' loose made,
+an' stylish--'
+
+"But Silas Sykes, he just stood lookin' at his wife an' lookin'. Of
+course she _did_ hev the advantage, bein' her spangles shone so. An'
+Silas looked at her an' looked, just as if her bein' his wife didn't
+make him admire her any the less. An' Mis' Sykes, she was rill pink an'
+pleased an' breathless, an' I guess she could see she seemed like a
+person to Silas, the way she'd wanted to.
+
+
+"It all went off splendid. The men stayed an' dished in the kitchen an'
+helped carry away from the tables--the forty-eight dollars completin'
+their respect--an' we ladies done the servin'. An' I tell you, we served
+'em with an air, 'count o' bein' well dressed, like they was, an'
+knowin' it. An' we knew the automobile folks appreciated it--we could
+tell by the way they kep' lookin' at us. But of course we all understood
+Mis' Sykes looked the best, an' we let her do all the most prominent
+things--bringin' in the first dish of everything an' like that, so's
+they could hev a good look.
+
+"When it was over, the merry-seemin' man stood up an' made a little
+speech o' thanks, rill courteous an' sweet, an' like he knew how to act.
+An' when he was through we, one an' all, nudged Mis' Sykes to reply, an'
+she done so, the two tables listenin', an' the Sodality standin' in
+between, an' the Sodality's husbands crowdin' in both kitchen doors to
+listen.
+
+"Mis' Sykes says, rill dignified, an' the light catchin' in her
+spangles: 'We're all very much obliged, I'm sure, for our forty-eight
+dollars clear. An' we think perhaps you'd like to know what the money is
+goin' toward. It's goin',' she says, 'towards the pavin' of the main
+street of our little city.'
+
+"Silas Sykes was lookin' out the servin' window like it was a box.
+'What's that?' says he, more of him comin' out of the window, 'what's
+_that_ you say?'
+
+"An' they was a little wave o' moves an' murmurs all around him like
+when somethin' is goin' to happen an' nobody knows what; an' I know the
+Sodality caught its breath, for, as Mis' Toplady always says, the dear
+land knows what men _will_ do.
+
+"With that up springs the merry-seemin' man, his face all beamin', an'
+he says loud an' clear an' drowndin' out everything else: 'Hear, hear!
+Likewise, here an' now. I move that we as one man, an' that man's
+automobile having lately come up the main street of Friendship
+Village--do ourself contribute to this most worthy end. Get to work,'
+says he. 'Think civic thoughts!'
+
+"He slid the last roll off its plate, an' he laid somethin' in paper
+money on it, an' he started it down the table. An' every man of 'em
+done as he done. An' I tell you, when we see Mis' Hubbelthwait's bread
+plate pilin' with bills, an' knew what it was for, we couldn't help--the
+whole Sodality couldn't help--steppin' forwards, close to the table, an'
+standin' there an' holdin' our breaths. An' the men, back there in the
+kitchen, they hushed up when they see the money, an' they kep' hushed.
+Land, land, it was a great minute! I like to think about it.
+
+"An' when the plate come back to the merry-seemin' man, he took it an'
+he come over towards us with it in his hand, an' we nudged Mis' Sykes to
+take the money. An' she just lifted up the glitter part of her skirt an'
+spread it out an' he dropped the whole rustlin' heap on to the spangles.
+An' the rest of us all clapped our hands, hard as we could, an' right
+while we was doin' it we heard somethin' else--deeper an' more manly
+than us. An' there was the men streamin' out o' the kitchen doors, an'
+Silas Sykes high in the servin' window--an' every one of 'em was
+clappin', too.
+
+"I tell you, we was glad an' grateful. An' we was grateful, too, when
+afterwards they was plenty enough supper left for the men-folks. An'
+when we all set down together around that table, Mis' Sykes at the head
+an' the plate o' bills for a centrepiece, Mis' Toplady leaned back, hot
+an' tired, an' seein' if both her sleeves was still pinned in place,
+an' she says what we was all thinkin':--
+
+"'Oh, ladies,' she says, 'we can pave streets an' dress in the light
+shades even if we ain't young, like the run o' the fashion-plates. Ain't
+it like comin' to life again?' she says."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+UNDERN
+
+
+I have a guest who is the best of the three kinds of welcome guests. Of
+these some are like a new rug which, however fine and unobtrusive it be,
+at first changes the character of your room so that when you enter you
+are less conscious of the room than of the rug. Some guests are like
+flowers on the table, leaving the room as it was save for their sweet,
+novel presence. And some guests are like a prized new book, unread, from
+which you simply cannot keep away. Of these last is my guest whom my
+neighbour calls the New Lady.
+
+My neighbour and Elfa and Miggy and Little Child and I have all been
+busy preparing for her. Elfa has an almost pathetic fondness for
+"company,"--I think it is that she leads such a lonely life in the
+little kitchen-prison that she welcomes even the companionship of
+more-voices-in-the-next-room. I have tried to do what I can for Elfa,
+but you never help people very much when you only try to do what you
+can. It must lie nearer the heart than that. And I perfectly understand
+that the magazines and trifles of finery which I give to her, and the
+flowers I set on the kitchen clock shelf, and the talks which, since my
+neighbour's unconscious rebuke, I have contrived with her, are about as
+effectual as any merely ameliorative means of dealing with a social
+malady. For Elfa is suffering from a distinct form of the social malady,
+and not being able to fathom it, she knows merely that she is lonely. So
+she has borrowed fellowship from her anticipation of my guest and of
+those who next week will come down from the town; and I know, though she
+does not know, that her jars of fresh-fried cakes and cookies, her fine
+brown bread and her bowl of salad-dressing, are her utmost expression of
+longing to adjust the social balance and give to herself companionship,
+even a kind of household.
+
+Little Child to-day came, bringing me a few first sweet peas and
+Bless-your-Heart, Bless-your-Heart being her kitten, and as nearly pink
+as a cat can be and be still a cat.
+
+"To lay in the New Lady's room," she remarked, bestowing these things
+impartially upon me.
+
+Later, my neighbour came across the lawns with a plate of currant tarts
+and a quarter of a jelly cake.
+
+"Here," she said, "I don't know whether you like tarts or not. They're
+more for children, I always think. I always bake 'em, and the little
+round child fried cakes, too, and I put frosting faces on the cookies,
+and such things. It makes my husband and I seem more like a family," she
+explained, "and that's why I always set the dining-room table. As long
+as we ain't any little folks running around, I always tell him that him
+and I would be eating meat and potatoes on the kitchen drop-leaf like
+savages if I didn't pretend there was more of us, and bake up for 'em."
+
+Miggy alone does not take wholly kindly to the New Lady idea, though I
+assure her that our mornings are to remain undisturbed.
+
+"Of course," she observed, while in the New Lady's honour she gathered
+up strewn papers, "I know I'll like her because she's your friend. But I
+don't know what folks want to visit for. Don't you s'pose that's why the
+angels don't come back--because they know everything, and they know what
+a lot of extra work they'd make us?"
+
+In Miggy the tribal sense seems to have run itself out. Of the sanctity
+of the individual she discerns much; but of the wider sanctities she has
+no clear knowledge. Most relationships she seems to regard, like the
+love of Peter, as "drawbacks," save only her indefinite consciousness of
+that one who is "not quite her sister"--the little vague Margaret. And
+this, I think, will be the leaven. Perhaps it is the universal leaven,
+this consciousness.
+
+I was glad that the New Lady was to arrive in the afternoon. Sometimes
+I think that the village afternoon is the best time of all. It is no
+wonder that they used to call that time "undern." If they had not done
+so, the word must have grown of its own will--perhaps it did come to
+life with no past, an immaculate thing, so like its meaning that it
+could not help being here among us. I know very well that Sir John
+Mandeville and others used "undern" to mean the third hour, or about
+nine in the morning, but that may have been because at first not every
+one recognized the word. Many a fairy thing wanders for a long time on
+earth, patiently putting up with other connotations than its own.
+Opportunism, the subconscious mind, personality, evolution itself,--all
+these are still seeking their full incarnations in idea. No wonder
+"undern" was forced for a long while to mean morning. But nine o'clock
+in the morning! How, after all, was that possible? You have only to say
+it over--undern, undern, undern,--to be heavenly drowsy with summer
+afternoon. The north of England recognized this at last and put the word
+where it belongs; and I have, too, the authority of the lady of Golden
+Wing:--
+
+
+     "Undern cometh after noon,
+     Golden Wings will be here soon...."
+
+
+One can hardly stop saying that, once one is started. I should like to
+go on with it all down the page.
+
+I was thinking of these things as I drove to the station alone to meet
+the New Lady. The time had taken on for me that pleasant, unlike-itself
+aspect which time bears in any mild excitement, so that if in the moment
+of reading a particularly charming letter one can remember to glance up
+and look the room in the face, one may catch its _other_ expression, the
+expression which it has when one is not looking. So now I caught this
+look in the village and an air of
+Something-different-is-going-to-happen, such as we experience on
+holidays. Next week, when the New Lady's friends come down to us for two
+days, I dare say, if I can remember to look for it, that the village
+will have another expression still. Yet there will be the same quiet
+undern--though for me it is never a commonplace time. Indeed, usually I
+am in the most delighted embarrassment how to spend it. In the mornings
+now--Miggy being willing--I work, morning in the true democracy being
+the work time; afternoon the time for recreation and the more
+specialized forms of service _and_ a little rest; the evening for
+delight, including the delight of others. Not every one in the village
+accepts my afternoon and evening classifications. I am constantly coming
+on people making preserves after mid-day, and if I see a light in a
+kitchen window after nine at night I know that somebody is ironing in
+the cool of the day. But usually my division of time is the general
+division, save that--as in the true democracy--service is not always
+recognized as service. Our afternoons may be spent in cutting carpet
+rags, or in hemming linen, or sewing articles for an imminent bazaar,
+and this is likely to be denominated "gettin' through little odd jobs,"
+and accounted in a measure a self-indulgence. And if evening delight
+takes the form of gardening and later a flame of nasturtiums or dahlias
+is carried to a friend, nobody dreams that this is not a pleasant
+self-indulgence too, and it is so regarded. With these things true is it
+not as if a certain hope abroad in the world gave news of itself?
+
+Near the Pump pasture I came on Nicholas Moor--who rings the Catholic
+bell and is interested in celluloid--and who my neighbour had told me
+would doubtless come to me, bringing his little sheaf of "writin's." I
+had not yet met him, though I had seen in the daily paper a vagrant poem
+or two over his name--I remember a helpless lyric which made me think of
+a gorgeous green and gold beetle lying on its back, unable to recover
+its legs, but for all that flashing certain isolated iridescent colours.
+My heart ached for Nicholas, and when I saw him now going across the
+pasture his loneliness was like a gap in things, one of the places where
+two world-edges do not quite meet. There are so many pleasant ways to do
+and the boy seemed to know how to do none of them. How can he be lonely
+in the village? For myself, if I decide of an afternoon to take my work
+and pay a visit, I am in a pleasant quandary as to which way to turn. If
+I go to the west end of Daphne Street, there are at least five families
+among whom to choose, the other four of whom will wonder why I did not
+come to them. Think of knowing five families in two blocks who would
+welcome one's coming and even feel a little flattering bitterness if one
+chose the other four! If I take a cross street, I am in the same
+difficulty. And if I wish to go to the house of one of my neighbours, my
+motives clash so seriously that I often sit on my porch and call to
+whoever chances to be in sight to come to me. Do you wonder that, in
+town, the moment I open my address book I feel smothered? I recover and
+enjoy town as much as anybody, but sometimes in a stuffy coupé, hurrying
+to get a half-dozen of the pleasantest calls "done," I surprise a
+companion by saying: would now that it were undern on Daphne Street!
+
+I told this to the New Lady as we drove from the station. The New Lady
+is an exquisite little Someone, so little that it is as if she had been
+drawn quickly, in a single delicate curving line, and then left, lest
+another stroke should change her. She understands the things that I say
+in the way that I mean them; she is the way that you always think the
+people whom you meet are going to be, though they so seldom are; like
+May, she is expectation come alive. What she says fits in all the
+crannies of what you did not say and have always known, or else have
+never thought of before and now never can forget. She laughs when she
+should laugh, and never, never when somebody else should laugh alone.
+When you tell her that you have walked eight miles and back, she says
+"_And back!_" with just the proper intonation of homage. She never tells
+a story upon the heels of your own little jest so swiftly that it cannot
+triumphantly escape. When you try to tell her something that you have
+not quite worked out, she nods a little and you see that she meant it
+before you did. She enters every moment by its gate and not over its
+wall, though she frequently wings her way in instead of walking. Also,
+she is good to look at and her gowns are as meet as the clouds to the
+sky--and no less distracting than the clouds are at their very best.
+There is no possible excuse for my saying so much about her, but I like
+to talk of her. And I like to talk to her as I did when we left the
+station and I was rambling on about undern.
+
+The New Lady looked about with a breath of content.
+
+"No wonder," she said, "you like to pretend Birthday, in New York."
+
+It is true that when I am there where, next to the village, I like best
+to live, I am fond of this pretence. It is like the children's game of
+"Choosing" before shop windows, only it is extensive and not, as cream
+puffs and dolls and crumpets in the windows dictate to the children,
+purely intensive. Seeing this man and that woman in the subway or the
+tea-room or the café or the car, I find myself wondering if it is by any
+chance their birthdays; and if it is, I am always wishing to deal out
+poor little gifts at which I fancy they would hardly look. To the lithe
+idle blond woman, elbows on table; to the heavy-lidded,
+engagement-burdened gentlewoman; to the busy, high-eyebrowed man in a
+cab; to the tired, slow-winking gentleman in his motor; to the
+thick-handed labourer hanging to his strap, I find myself longing to
+distribute these gifts: a breakfast on our screened-in porch in the
+village, with morning-glories on the table; a full-throated call of my
+oriole--a June call, not the isolated reminiscent call of August; an
+hour of watering the lawn while robins try to bathe in the spray; a
+morning of pouring melted paraffin on the crimson tops of moulds of
+currant jelly; a yellow afternoon of going with me to "take my work and
+stay for supper." I dare say that none of my chosen beneficiaries would
+accept; but if I could pop from a magic purse a crop of caps and fit
+folk, willy nilly, I wonder if afterward, even if they remembered
+nothing of what had occurred, they might not find life a little
+different.
+
+"If it was my birthday," said the New Lady, "I would choose to be driven
+straight away through that meadow, as if I had on wings."
+
+That is the way she is, the New Lady. Lacking wings of her own she gives
+them to many a situation. Straightway I drove down into the Pump pasture
+and across it, springy soil and circus-trodden turf and mullein stalks
+and ten-inch high oak trees.
+
+"Let's let down the bars," said the New Lady, "and drive into that next
+meadow. If it _is_ a sea, as it looks, it will be glad of your company."
+
+It was not a sea, for as we drove through the lush grass the yellow and
+purple people of the meadow came marching to meet us, as dignified as
+garden flowers, save that you knew, all the time, that wild hearts were
+beating beneath the rainbow tassels. It was a meadow with things to say,
+but with finger on lip--as a meadow should be and as a spirit must be.
+The meadow seemed to wish to say: "It is all very pleasant for you there
+in the village to admire one another's wings, but the real romance is in
+the flight." I wondered if it were not so that it had happened--that one
+day a part of the village had got tired waiting, and had broken off and
+become something free, of which the meadow was the body and its secret
+was the spirit. But then the presence of the New Lady always sets me
+wondering things like this.
+
+"Why," I said to her suddenly, "spring has gone! I wonder how that
+happened. I have been waiting really to get hold of spring, and here it
+is June."
+
+"June-and-a-half," assented the New Lady, and touched the lines so that
+we came to a standstill in the shade of a cottonwood.
+
+"This way," she said--and added softly, as one who would not revive a
+sadness, her own idea of the matter.
+
+
+     "Where did Spring die? I did not hear her go
+     Down the soft lane she painted. All flower still
+     She moved among her emblems on the hill
+     Touching away their burden of old snow.
+     Was it on some great down where long winds flow
+     That the wild spirit of Spring went out to fill
+     The eyes of Summer? Did a daffodil
+     Lift the pale urn remote where she lies low?
+
+     "Oh, not as other moments did she die,
+     That woman-season, outlined like a rose.
+     Before the banner of Autumn's scarlet bough
+     The Summer fell; and Winter, with a cry,
+     Wed with March wind. Spring did not die like those;
+     But vaguely, as if Love had prompted, 'Now.'"
+
+
+The New Lady's theory does not agree with that of Little Child. I am in
+doubt which to accept. But I like to think about both.
+
+And when the New Lady had said the faint requiem, we drove on again and
+the next moment had almost run down Nicholas Moor, lying face downward
+in the lush grass.
+
+I recognized him at once, but of course the New Lady did not do so, and
+she leaned from the cart, thoroughly alarmed at the boy's posture and,
+as he looked up, at his pallor.
+
+"Oh, what is the matter?" she cried, and her voice was so heavenly
+pitying that one would have been willing to have most things the matter
+only to hear her.
+
+Nicholas Moor scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and stood abashed,
+looking as strangely detached from the moment as if he had fallen from a
+frame and left the rest of the picture behind.
+
+"Nothing. I just like to be here," he was surprised into saying.
+
+The New Lady sat down and smiled. And her smile was even more
+captivating than had been her late alarm.
+
+"So do I," she told him heartily. "So do I. What do you like about it,
+_best_?"
+
+I do not think that any one had ever before spoken to Nicholas so
+simply, and he answered, chord for chord.
+
+"I guess--I guess I like it just on account of its being the way it is,"
+he said.
+
+"That is a very, very nice reason," the New Lady commented. "Again, so
+do I."
+
+We left him, I remember, looking about as if he were seeing it all for
+the first time.
+
+As we drove away I told my New Lady about Nicholas, and she looked along
+her own thought and shook her head.
+
+"There must be hundreds of them," she said, "and some are poets. But
+most of them are only lonesome. I wonder which Nicholas is?"
+
+We lingered out-of-doors as long as we might, because the touch of the
+outdoors was so companioning that to go indoors was a distinct good-by.
+Is it so with you that some Days, be they never so sunny, yet walk with
+you in a definite reserve and seem to be looking somewhere else; while
+other Days come to you like another way of being yourself and will not
+let you go? I know that some will put it down to mood and not to the Day
+at all; but, do what I will, I cannot credit this.
+
+It was after five o'clock when we drove into the village, and all Daphne
+Street was watering its lawns. Of those who were watering some pretended
+not to see us, but I understood that this they accounted the etiquette
+due to a new arrival. Some bowed with an excess of cordiality, and this
+I understood to be the pleasant thought that they would show my guest
+how friendly we all are. And some laid down the hose and came to the
+sidewalk's edge to meet the New Lady then and there.
+
+Of these were Mis' Postmaster Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss
+and my neighbour.
+
+"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," Mis' Postmaster Sykes said graciously
+to the New Lady. "I must say it seems good to see a strange face now an'
+then. I s'pose you feel all travel dust an' mussed up?"
+
+And at Mis' Holcomb's hitching post:--
+
+"Pleased to meet you," said Mis' Holcomb. "I was saying to Eppleby that
+I wondered if you'd come. Eppleby says, 'I donno, but like enough
+they've went for a ride somewheres.' Lovely day, ain't it? Been to the
+cemetery?"
+
+I said that we had not been there yet, and,
+
+"Since it's kept up it makes a real nice thing to show folks," Mis'
+Holcomb said. "I s'pose you wouldn't come inside for a bite of supper,
+would you?"
+
+My neighbour--bless her!--had on a black wool dress to do honour to my
+guest.
+
+"It's nice for the neighbours to see company comin' and goin'," she said
+cordially, "though of course we don't have any of the extra work. But I
+guess everybody likes extra work of _this_ kind."
+
+And as we drove away:--
+
+"Good-by," she cried, "I hope you'll have a good night's rest and a
+good breakfast."
+
+When I looked at the New Lady I saw her eyes ever so slightly misted.
+
+"Spring didn't die," she said--as Little Child had said. "Spring knew
+how to keep alive. It got down in these people's hearts."
+
+Yes, the New Lady is a wholly satisfactory guest. She even pretended not
+to notice Peter's father who, as we alighted, came singing by, and bowed
+to us, his barren old face lighted with a smile, as a vacant room is
+lighted, revealing the waste. If I had some one staying with me who had
+smiled at Peter's father or--at any one, or who did not see the village
+as it is, I think I should be tempted to do as my neighbour did to me
+that morning: pick three carnation pinks for her and watch her go away.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE WAY THE WORLD IS
+
+
+Was it not inevitable that poor, lonely Nicholas Moor should have sought
+out my New Lady? A night or two after her arrival he saw her again, at a
+supper in the church "lecture-room." He was bringing in a great freezer
+of ice-cream and when she greeted him he had all but dropped the
+freezer. Then a certain, big obvious deacon whose garden adjoined my own
+had come importantly and snatched the burden away, and the boy had
+stood, shamefast, trying to say something; but his face was lighted as
+at a summons. So the New Lady had divined his tragedy, the loneliness
+which his shyness masked as some constant plight of confusion.
+
+"Come and see me sometime," she had impulsively bidden him. "Do you know
+where I am staying?"
+
+Did he know that! Since he had seen her in the meadow had he known
+anything else? And after some days of hard trying he came one night,
+arriving within the dusk as behind a wall. Even in the twilight, when he
+was once under the poplars, he did not know what way to look. To seem
+to look straight along the road was unnatural. To seem to look out
+across the opposite fields was hypocrisy. To look at the house which
+held the New Lady was unthinkable. So, as he went in at the gate and up
+the fern-bordered walk, he examined the back of his hand--near, and then
+a little farther away. As he reached the steps he was absorbedly
+studying his thumb.
+
+From a place of soft light, shed through a pink box shade on the table,
+and of scattered willow chairs and the big leaves of plants, the New
+Lady came toward him.
+
+"You did come!" she said. "I thought you wouldn't, really."
+
+With the utmost effort Nicholas detached one hand from his hat brim and
+gave it her. From head to foot he was conscious, not of the touch of her
+hand, little and soft, but of the bigness and coarseness of his own
+hand.
+
+"I hated to come like everything," he said.
+
+At this of course she laughed, and she went back to her willow chair and
+motioned him to his. He got upon it, crimson and wretched.
+
+"As much as that!" she observed.
+
+"You know I wanted to come awfully, too," he modified it, "but I dreaded
+it--like sixty. I--I can't explain...." he stumbled.
+
+"Don't," said the New Lady, lightly, and took pity on him and rang a
+little bell.
+
+She thought again how fine and distinguished he was, as he had seemed to
+her on the day when she had first spoken to him. He sat staring at her,
+trying to realize that he was on the veranda with her, hearing the sound
+of the little bell she had rung. He had wanted something like this,
+wistfully, passionately. Miserable as he was, he rested in the moment as
+within arms. And the time seemed distilled in that little silver
+bell-sound and the intimacy of waiting with her for some one to come.
+
+He knew that some one with a light footfall did come to the veranda. He
+heard the New Lady call her Elfa. But he saw only her hands, plump and
+capable and shaped like his own, moving among the glasses. After which
+his whole being became absorbed in creditably receiving the tall, cool
+tumbler on the tray which the capable hands held out to him. A period of
+suspended intelligence ensued, until he set the empty glass on the
+table. Then the little maid had gone, and the New Lady, sipping her own
+glass, was talking to him.
+
+"You were lying on the grass that day," she said, "as if you understood
+grass. Not many do understand about grass, and almost nobody understands
+the country. People say, 'Come, let us go into the country,' and when
+they get there is it the country they want at all? No, it is the
+country sports, the country home,--everything but the real country. They
+play match games. They make expeditions, climb things in a stated time,
+put in a day at a stated place. I often think that they must go home
+leaving the country aghast that they could have come and gone and paid
+so little heed to it. Presently we are going to have some charming
+people out here who will do the same thing."
+
+So she talked, asking him nothing, even her eyes leaving him free. It
+seemed to him, tense and alert and ill at ease as he listened, that he,
+too, was talking to her. From the pressing practicalities, the
+self-important deacon, the people who did not trouble to talk to him,
+his world abruptly escaped, and in that world he walked, an escaped
+thing too, forgetful even of the little roll of verses which he had
+dared to bring.
+
+Yet when she paused, he looked out at her shrinkingly from under his
+need to reply. He did not look at her face, but he looked at her hands,
+so little that each time he saw them they were a new surprise and alien
+to him. He looked away from them to the friendliness of her smile. And
+when he heard himself saying detached, irrelevant things, he again fell
+to studying one of his own hands, big and coarse and brown. Oh, he
+thought, the difference between her and him was so hopelessly the
+difference in their hands.
+
+In an absurdly short time the need to be gone was upon him; but of this
+he could not speak, and he sat half unconscious of what she was saying,
+because of his groping for the means to get away. Clearly, he must not
+interrupt her to say that he must go. Neither could he reply to what she
+said by announcing his intention. And yet when he answered what she
+said, straightway her exquisite voice went on with its speech to him.
+How, he wondered, does anybody ever get away from anywhere? If only
+something would happen, so that he could slip within it as within doors,
+and take his leave.
+
+Something did happen. By way of the garden, and so to a side door, there
+arrived those whose garden adjoined,--the big, obvious, self-important
+deacon, and behind him Three Light Gowns. The little maid Elfa came
+showing them through the house, in the pleasant custom of the village.
+And when the New Lady, with pretty, expected murmurings, rose to meet
+them, Nicholas got to his feet confronting the crisis of saying good-by,
+and the moment closed upon him like a vise. He heard his voice falter
+among the other voices, he saw himself under the necessity to take her
+hand and the deacon's hand, and the hands, so to speak, of the Three
+Light Gowns; and this he did as in a kind of unpractised bewildering
+minuet.
+
+And then he found his eyes on a level with eyes that he had not seen
+before--blue eyes, gentle, watching, wide--and a fresh, friendly little
+face under soft hair. It was Elfa, taking away the empty glasses. And
+the boy, in his dire need to ease the instant, abruptly and inexplicably
+held out his hand to her too. She blushed, sent a frightened look to the
+New Lady, and took the hand in hers that was plump and capable, with its
+strong, round wrist. And the little maid, being now in an embarrassment
+like his own, the two hands clung for a moment, as if they had each the
+need.
+
+"Good night," she said, trembling.
+
+"Good night," said the New Lady, very gently.
+
+"Oh, _good night_!" burst from the boy as he fled away.
+
+
+It was Elfa who admitted him at his next coming. The screened porch was
+once more in soft light from the square rose shade, and the place had
+the usual pleasant, haunted air of the settings of potentialities. As if
+potentiality were a gift of enchantment to human folk.
+
+The New Lady was not at home, Elfa told him, in her motherly little
+heart pitying him. And at the news he sat down, quite simply, in the
+chair in which he had sat before. He must see her. It was unthinkable
+that she should be away. To-night he had meant to have the courage to
+leave with her his verses.
+
+On the willow table lay her needlework. It was soft and white beyond the
+texture of most clouds, and she had wrought on it a pattern like the
+lines on a river. As his eyes rested on it, Nicholas could fancy it
+lying against her white gown and upon it her incomparable hands. Some
+way, she seemed nearer to him when he was not with her than when, with
+her incomparable hands and her fluent speech, she was in his presence.
+When she was not with him, he could think what to say to her. When he
+stood before her--the thought of his leave-taking on that veranda seized
+upon him, so that he caught his breath in the sharp thrust of mortified
+recollection, and looked away and up.
+
+His eyes met those of Elfa, who was quietly sitting opposite.
+
+"How they must all have laughed at me. You too!" he said.
+
+"Why?" she asked.
+
+"That last time I was here. Shaking hands that way," he explained.
+
+"I didn't laugh," she unexpectedly protested; "I cried."
+
+He looked at her. And this was as if he were seeing her for the first
+time.
+
+"_Cried?_" he repeated.
+
+"Nobody ever shakes hands with me," Elfa told him.
+
+He stared at her as she sat on the edge of her chair, her plump hands
+idle on her apron.
+
+"No," he admitted, "no, I don't suppose they do. I didn't think--"
+
+But he had not thought of her at all.
+
+"By the door all day I let in hand-shakes," she said, "an' then I let
+'em out again. But I don't get any of 'em for me."
+
+That, Nicholas saw, was true enough. Even he had been mortified because
+he had taken her hand.
+
+"Once," Elfa said, "I fed a woman at the back door. An' when she went
+she took hold o' my hand, thankful. An' then you done it too--like it
+was a mistake. That's all, since I worked out. I don't know folks
+outside much, only some that don't shake hands, 'count of seemin'
+ashamed to."
+
+"I know," said Nicholas.
+
+"Sometimes," she went on, "folks come here an' walk in to see _her_ an'
+they don't shake. Ain't it funny--when folks can an' don't? When they
+come from the city to-morrow, the whole house'll shake hands, but me.
+Once I went to prayer-meetin' an' I hung around waitin' to see if
+somebody wouldn't. But they didn't--any of 'em. It was rainin' outside
+an' I guess they thought I come with somebody's rubbers."
+
+Nicholas looked at her a little fearfully. It had seemed to him that in
+a great world of light he had always moved in a little hollow of
+darkness and detachment. Were there, then, other hollows like that?
+Places to which outstretched hands never penetrate? A great
+understanding possessed him, and he burst out in an effort to express
+it.
+
+"You're a funny girl," he said.
+
+She flushed, and suddenly lifted one hand and looked at it. Nicholas
+watched her now intently. She studied the back of her hand, turned it,
+and sat absorbedly examining her little thumb. And Nicholas felt a
+sudden sense of understanding, of gladness that he understood. As he
+felt when he was afraid and wretched, so Elfa was feeling now.
+
+He leaned toward her.
+
+"Don't feel afraid," he said gently.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I don't," she said; "I don't, truly. I guess that's why I stayed here
+now. She won't be back till ten--I ought to have said so before.
+You--you won't want to wait so long."
+
+He rose at once. And now, being at his ease, his head was erect, his
+arms naturally fallen, his face as confident and as occupied by his
+spirit as when he lay alone in the meadows.
+
+"Well, sir," he said, "let's shake hands again!"
+
+She gave him her hand and, in their peculiarly winning upward look, her
+eyes--blue, wide, watchful, with that brooding mother watchfulness of
+some women, even in youth. And her hand met his in the clasp which is
+born of the simple, human longing of kind for kind.
+
+"Good-by," she answered his good-by, and they both laughed a little in a
+shyness which was a way of delight.
+
+In the days to follow there flowed in the boy's veins a tide of novel
+sweetness. And now his thoughts eluded one another and made no chain, so
+that when he tried to remember what, on that first evening, the New Lady
+and he had talked about, there came only a kind of pleasure, but it had
+no name. Everything that he had to do pressed upon him, and when he
+could get time he was away to the meadow, looking down on the chimneys
+of that house, and swept by a current that was like a singing. And
+always, always it was as if some one were with him.
+
+There came a night when he could no longer bear it, when his wish took
+him to itself and carried him with it. Those summer dusks, warm yellow
+with their moon and still odorous of spring, were hard to endure alone.
+Since the evening with her, Nicholas had not seen the New Lady save
+when, not seeing him, she had driven past in a phaëton. At the sight of
+her, and once at the sight of Elfa from that house, a faintness had
+seized him, so that he had wondered at himself for some one else, and
+then with a poignancy that was new pain, new joy, the new life, had
+rejoiced that he was himself. So, when he could no longer bear it, he
+took his evening way toward the row of poplars, regretting the moonlight
+lest by it they should see him coming. And to-night he had with him no
+verses, but only his longing heart.
+
+He had no intimation of the guests, for the windows at that house were
+always brightly lighted, and until he was within the screened veranda
+the sound of voices did not reach him. Then from the rooms there came a
+babel of soft speech and laughter, and a touch of chords; and when he
+would have incontinently retreated, the New Lady crossed the hall and
+saw him.
+
+She came to the doorway and greeted him, and Nicholas looked up in the
+choking discomfort of sudden fear. She was in a gown that was like her
+needlework, mysteriously fashioned and intricate with shining things
+which made her infinitely remote. The incomparable little hands were
+quite covered with jewels. It was as if he had come to see a spirit and
+had met a woman.
+
+"How good of you to come again," she said. "Come, I want my friends to
+meet you."
+
+Her friends! That quick crossing of words within there, then, meant the
+presence of her friends from the city.
+
+"I couldn't! I came for a book--I'll get it some other time. I've got to
+go now!" Nicholas said.
+
+Then, "Bettina--Bettina!" some one called from within, and a man
+appeared in the hallway, smiled at sight of the New Lady, dropped his
+glass at sight of Nicholas, bowed, turned away--oh, how should he know
+that her name was Bettina when Nicholas had not known!
+
+This time he did not say good night at all. This time he did not look at
+his great hand, which was trembling, but he got away, mumbling
+something, his retreat graciously covered by the New Lady's light words.
+And, the sooner to be gone and out of the moonlight that would let them
+see him go, he struck blindly into the path that led to the side gate of
+the garden. The mortification that chains spirit to flesh and tortures
+both held him and tortured him. For a breath he imagined himself up
+there among them all, his hands holding his hat, imagined having to
+shake hands with them: and somehow this way of fellowship, this meeting
+of hands outstretched for hands, seemed, with them, the supreme ordeal,
+the true symbol of his alien state from them and from the New Lady. No
+doubt she understood him, but for the first time Nicholas saw that this
+is not enough. For the first time he saw that she was as far away from
+him as were the others. How easy, Nicholas thought piteously, those
+people in her house all found it to act the way they wanted to! Their
+hands must be like her hands....
+
+He got through the garden and to the side gate. And now the old
+loneliness was twofold upon him because he had known what it is to reach
+from the dark toward the light; yet when he saw that at the gate some
+one was standing, he halted in his old impulse to be on guard, hunted by
+the fear that this would be somebody alien to him. Then he saw that it
+was no one from another star, but Elfa.
+
+"Oh...." he said, and that, too, was what she said, but he did not hear.
+Not from another star she came, but from the deep of the world where
+Nicholas felt himself alone.
+
+"I--was just going away," he explained.
+
+For assent she stepped a little back, saying nothing. But when Nicholas
+would have passed her it was as if the immemorial loneliness and the
+seeking of forgotten men innumerable stirred within him in the ache of
+his heart, in the mere desperate wish to go to somebody, to be with
+somebody, to have somebody by the hand.
+
+He turned upon Elfa almost savagely.
+
+"Shake hands!" he said.
+
+Obediently she put out her hand, which of itself stayed ever so briefly,
+within his. He held it, feeling himself crushing it, clinging to it,
+being possessed by it. Her hand was, like his, rough from its work, and
+it was something alive, something human, something that answered. And
+instantly it was not Elfa alone who was there companioning him, but the
+dark was quick with presences, besieging him, letting him know that no
+one alive is alone, that he was somehow one of a comrade company,
+within, without, encompassing. And the boy was caught up by the sweet
+will outside his own will and he never knew how it was that he had Elfa
+in his arms.
+
+"Come here. Come here...." he said.
+
+To Elfa, in her loneliness threaded by its own dream, the moment,
+exquisite and welcome as it was, was yet as natural as her own single
+being. But to the boy it was not yet the old miracle of one world built
+from another. It was only the answer to the groping of hands for hands,
+the mere human call to be companioned. And the need to reassure her came
+upon him like the mantle of an elder time.
+
+"Don't feel afraid," he said.
+
+Her eyes gave him their winning upward look, and it was as if their
+mother watchfulness answered him gravely:--
+
+"I don't. I don't, truly."
+
+And at this she laughed a little, so that he joined her; and their
+laughter together was a new delight.
+
+Across the adjoining lawn Nicholas could see in the moonlight the moving
+figure of the big deacon, a Light Gown or two attending. A sudden
+surprising sense of safety from them overswept the boy. What if they did
+come that way! What, he even thought, if those people in the house were
+to come by? Somehow, the little hollow of dark in which he had always
+walked in the midst of light was as light as the rest of the world, and
+he was not afraid. And all this because Elfa did not stir in his arms,
+but was still, as if they were her harbour. And then Nicholas knew what
+they both meant.
+
+"Elfa!" he cried, "do you...?"
+
+"I guess I must...." she said, and knew no way to finish that.
+
+"Love me?" said Nicholas, bold as a lion.
+
+"I meant that too," Elfa said.
+
+Between the New Lady's house and the big, obvious deacon's lawn the boy
+stood, silent, his arms about the girl. So this was the way the world
+is, people bound together, needing one another, wanting one another,
+stretching out their hands....
+
+"Why, it was _you_ I wanted!" Nicholas said wonderingly.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+HOUSEHOLDRY
+
+
+"After supper" in the village is like another room of the day. On these
+summer nights we all come out to our porches to read the daily paper, or
+we go to sit on the porch of a neighbour, or we walk about our lawns in
+excesses of leisure, giving little twitches to this green and to that.
+"In our yards" we usually say. Of these some are so tiny that the
+hammocks or the red swinging-chairs find room on the planting spaces
+outside the walks, and there men smoke and children frolic and call
+across the street to one another. And this evening, as I went down
+Daphne Street to post my letters, I saw in process the occasional
+evening tasks which I have noted, performed out-of-doors: at the
+Sykeses' cucumbers in preparation for to-morrow's pickles; a bushel of
+over-ripe cherries arrived unexpectedly at the Herons' and being pitted
+by hand; a belated needle-task of Mis' Holcomb's finishing itself in the
+tenuous after-light. This fashion of taking various employments into the
+open delights me. If we have peas to shell or beans to string or corn to
+husk, straightway we take them to the porch or into the yard. This
+seems to me to hold something of the grace of the days in the Joyous
+Garde, or on the grounds of old châteaux where they embroidered or wound
+worsted in woodland glades, or of colonial America, where we had out our
+spinning wheels under the oaks. When I see a great shining boiler of
+gasoline carried to the side yard for the washing of delicate fabrics, I
+like to think of it as done out-of-doors for the charm of it as much as
+for the safety. So Nausicaa would have cleansed with gasoline!
+
+It was sight of the old Aunt Effie sewing a seam in Mis' Holcomb's
+dooryard which decided me to go to see Miggy. For I would not willingly
+be where Aunt Effie is, who has always some tragedy of gravy-scorching
+or dish-breaking to tell me. I have been for some time promising to go
+to see Miggy in her home, and this was the night to do so, for the New
+Lady went home to-day and I have been missing her sorely. There is a
+kind of minus-New Lady feeling about the universe.
+
+At the same moment that I decided for Miggy, Peter rose out of the
+ground. I wonder if he can have risen a very little first? But that is
+one of those puzzles much dwelt upon by the theologians, and I will not
+decide. Perhaps the thought of Miggy is a mighty motive on which Peter's
+very being is conditioned. Anyway, there he was, suddenly beside me,
+and telling me some everyday affair of how little use in the cannery
+were Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade, whose houses we were
+passing. And to his talk of shop I responded by inviting him to go with
+me to see Miggy. Would he go? He smiled his slow smile, with that little
+twist of mouth and lifting of brow.
+
+"This is like finding an evening where there wasn't one before," he
+said.
+
+The little house where Miggy lives has a copper beech in the
+dooryard--these red-leaved trees seem to be always in a kind of hush at
+their own difference. The house is no-colour, with trimmings of another
+no-colour for contrast, and the little front porch looks like something
+that has started to run out the front door and is being sternly snatched
+backward. The door stood ajar--no doubt for the completion of this
+transaction--and no one was about. We rapped, for above the bell push
+was a legend of Aunt Effie's inscribing, saying: "Bell don't ring." For
+a moment our summons was unanswered. Then Miggy called from upstairs.
+
+"I'll be down in a minute," she said. "Go right in, both of you, and
+wait for me--will you?"
+
+To take the cards of one's visitors from a butler of detached
+expression or from a maid with inquisitive eyelashes is to know nothing
+of the charm of this custom of ours of peeping from behind an upper
+curtain where we happen to be dressing, and alone in the house, at the
+ringing of the doorbell, and of calling down to a back which we
+recognize an informal "Oh, go right in and wait for me a minute, will
+you?" In this habit there is survival of old tribal loyalties and
+hospitalities; for let the back divined below be the back of a stranger,
+that is to say, of a barbarian, and we stay behind our curtains, silent,
+till it goes away.
+
+In the sitting room at Miggy's house a little hand lamp was burning, the
+fine yellow light making near disclosures of colour and form, and
+farther away formulating presences of shadow. Aunt Effie had been at her
+sewing, and there were yards of blue muslin billowing over a sunken
+arm-chair and a foam of white lining on the Brussels-covered couch. The
+long blue cotton spread made the big table look like a fat Delft sugar
+bowl, and the red curtains were robbed of crude colour and given an
+obscure rosy glow. A partly finished waist disguised the gingerbread of
+the what-not, one forgot the carpet, the pictures became to the neutral
+wall what words which nobody understands are to ministering music. And
+on the floor before the lounge lay Little Child and Bless-your-Heart,
+asleep.
+
+At first I did not see the child. It was Peter who saw her. He stooped
+and lifted her, the kitten still in her arms, and instead of saying any
+of the things a woman might have said, Peter said _"Well...._" with a
+tenderness in his voice such as women can give and more. For a man's
+voice-to-a-child gets down deeper than happiness. I suppose it is that
+the woman has always stayed with the child in the cave or the tent or
+the house, while the man has gone out to kill or to conquer or to trade;
+and the ancient crooning safety is still in the woman's voice, and the
+ancient fear that he may not come back to them both is in the voice of
+the man. When Peter lifted Little Child in his arms, I wished that Miggy
+had been there to hear.
+
+"What's it dreaming about?" Peter said.
+
+"'Bout Miggy," said Little Child sleepily, and she snuggled in Peter's
+coat collar.
+
+"Dream about Peter too!" Peter commanded.
+
+"Well, _I_ will," promised Little Child o' Dreams, and drifted off.
+
+Peter sank awkwardly down to the floor and held her so, and he sat there
+stroking Bless-your-Heart and looking as if he had forgotten me, save
+that, "Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade that I was telling
+you about," he remarked once irrelevantly, "_they've_ each got a kiddie
+or so."
+
+Miggy came downstairs and, "I'm a surprise," she said in the doorway,
+and stood there in a sheer white frock--a frock which said nothing to
+make you look, but would not let you look away; and it had a little
+rhyme of lace on this end and on that. It was the frock that she had
+made herself--she told me so afterward, but she did not mention it
+before Peter, and I liked her the better for that. When I hear women
+boast of these things I always wonder why, then and there, I should not
+begin to recite a sonnet I have turned, so as to have a hand in things.
+To write an indifferent sonnet is much less than to make a frock which
+can be worn, but yet I should dislike infinitely to volunteer even so
+little as a sonnet or a quatrain. In any case, it would be amazing taste
+for me to do so; while "I made it myself" I hear everywhere in the
+village, especially in the presence of the Eligible. But I dare say that
+this criticism of mine is conditioned by the fact that my needle-craft
+cell got caught in the primal protozoan ooze and did not follow me.
+
+"Miggy! Oh, Miggery!" said Peter, softly. He had made this name for a
+sort of superlative of her.
+
+"Like me?" inquired Miggy. I wonder if even the female atom does not
+coquette when the sun strikes her to shining in the presence of her atom
+lord?
+
+You know that low, emphatic, unspellable thing which may be said by the
+throat when a thing is liked very much? When one makes it, it feels like
+a vocal dash in vocal italics. Peter did that, very softly.
+
+"Well," said Miggy, "I feel that dressed-up that I might be cut out of
+paper. What _are_ you doing down there, Peter?"
+
+He glanced down mutely, and Miggy went round the table and saw what he
+held.
+
+"Why," she said, "that great heavy girl, Peter. Give her to me."
+
+Miggy bent over Peter, with her arms outstretched for the child. And
+Peter looked up at her and enjoyed the moment.
+
+"She's too heavy for you to lift," he said, with his occasional quiet
+authority. "I'll put her where you want her."
+
+"Well, it's so hot upstairs," Miggy hesitated. "It's past her bedtime,
+but I hate to take her up there."
+
+"Undress her down here," said I. "The Delft sugar bowl shuts you off a
+fine dressing-room. And let her sleep for a while on the couch."
+
+So Miggy went for the little nightgown, and Peter, with infinite pains,
+got to his feet, and detached Bless-your-Heart and deposited her on the
+table, where she yawned and humped her back and lay down on an
+unfinished sleeve and went to sleep again. And when Miggy came down,
+she threw a light quilt and a pillow near the couch and sat behind the
+table and held out her arms.
+
+"Now!" she said to Peter, and to me she said, "I thought maybe you'd
+spread her up a bed there on the couch."
+
+"Let Peter," said I. "I've another letter I ought to have written. If I
+may, I'll write that here while you undress her."
+
+"Well," said Miggy, "there's some sheets of letter-paper under the cover
+of the big Bible. And the ink--I guess there's some in the bottle--is on
+top of the organ. And the pen is there behind the clock. And you'd ought
+to find a clean envelope in that pile of newspapers. I think I saw one
+there the other day. You spread up her bed then, Peter."
+
+I wrote my letter, and Peter went at the making up of the lounge, and
+Miggy sat behind the table to undress Little Child. And Little Child
+began waking up. It touched me infinitely that she who in matters of
+fairies and visionings is so wise and old should now, in her sleepyhood,
+be just a baby again.
+
+"I--_won't_--go--bed," she said.
+
+"Oh," said Miggy, "yes. Don't you feel all the little wingies on your
+face? They're little dream wings, and the dreams are getting in a hurry
+to be dreamed."
+
+"I do' know those dreams," said Little Child, "I do' _want_ those
+dreams. Where's Bless-your-Heart?"
+
+"Dreaming," said Miggy, "all alone. Goodness, I believe you've got a
+little fever."
+
+Peter stopped flopping the quilt aimlessly over the lounge and turned,
+and Miggy laid the back of her hand on Little Child's cheek and beneath
+her chin. The man watched her anxiously as, since the world began,
+millions of men have looked down at this mysterious pronouncement of the
+woman.
+
+"She has?" he said. "She'd ought not to have any milk, then, had she?"
+he added vaguely. It seemed to me that Miggy must have paused for a
+moment to like Peter for this wholly youthful, masculine eagerness to
+show that he knew about such things.
+
+"I'll fix her something to take," said Miggy, capably. "No, dear. The
+other arm. Straighten elbow."
+
+"I want my shoes an' stockin's on in bed," Little Child observed. She
+was sitting up, her head drooping, her curls fastened high with a
+hairpin of Miggy's. "An' I want my shirtie on. An' _all_ my clothes. I
+won't go bed if you don't."
+
+Miggy laughed. "Bless-your-Heart hasn't got her clothes on," she
+parried.
+
+"Ain't she got her furs on any more?" demanded Little Child, opening
+her eyes. "She has, too. She has not, too, took a bath. An' I won't have
+no bath," she went on. "I'm too old for 'em."
+
+At that she would have Bless-your-Heart in her arms, and there was some
+argument arising from her intention to take the kitten in one hand all
+the way through her nightgown sleeve. And by this time sleepyhood tears
+were near.
+
+"_Don't_ curl your toes under so," said Miggy, struggling with a shoe.
+"Peter, do go on. You'll never have it done."
+
+Whereat Peter flapped the quilt again; and--
+
+"I will curl my toes up. That's what I want to do. I _want_ to curl 'em
+up!" said Little Child. And now the sleepyhood tears were very near.
+
+"Goodness," said Miggy, suddenly, "to-morrow is Sunday. I'll have to do
+her hair up for curls. Peter!" she cried, "stop waving that quilt, and
+tear me off a strip of that white lining there."
+
+"Yes, _I'll_ have curls," said Little Child, unexpectedly, "because that
+is so becunning to me."
+
+But she was very sleepy, and when Peter had been sent for the brush from
+the kitchen shelf, her head was on Miggy's shoulder, and Miggy looked at
+Peter helplessly.
+
+"Give her to me," said Peter, and took the child and laid the kitten at
+large upon the floor; and then, holding Little Child's head in the
+hollow of his arm, he sat down before Miggy, leaning toward her, and
+all the child's soft brown hair lay on his sleeve.
+
+I should have liked to watch them then. And I should have liked Calliope
+and Mis' Toplady and my neighbour to see them--those three who of all
+the village best understood mystery. I know that Peter did not take his
+eyes from Miggy's face as she brushed and wound the curls. How could
+he?--and Miggy, "sweet as boughs of May" in that white frock, her look
+all motherly intent upon her task. She was very deft, and she had that
+fine mother-manner of caring for the child with her whole hand instead
+of tipsifingers. I would see a woman infinitely delicate in the touching
+of flowers or tea-cups or needlework, but when she is near a child, I
+want her to have more than delicacy. I was amazed at Miggy's gentleness
+and her pretty air of accustomedness. And when Little Child stirred,
+Miggy went off into some improvised song about a little black dog that
+got struck with a wagon and went Ki--yi--ki--yi--_ad infinitum_, and
+Miggy seemed to me to have quite the technical mother-air of tender
+abstraction.
+
+"How dark her hair is growing," she said.
+
+"It's just the colour of yours," said Peter, "and the little curls on
+the edges. They're like yours, too."
+
+"My hair!" Miggy said deprecatingly. "You've got rather nice hair,
+Peter, if _only_ it wouldn't stick up that way at the back."
+
+"I know it sticks up," Peter said contritely. "I do every way to make it
+stay down. But it won't."
+
+"It makes you look funny," observed Miggy, frankly.
+
+"Well," he told her, "if you wouldn't ever make me go 'way from you, you
+wouldn't ever need to see the back of my head."
+
+"That would be just what would turn your head," she put it positively.
+"Peter, doesn't your arm ache, holding her so?"
+
+He looked down at his arm to see, and, "I wouldn't care if it did," he
+replied, in some surprise. "No. It feels good. Oh, Miggy--do you do this
+every night?"
+
+"I don't always curl her hair," said Miggy, "but I always put her to
+bed. If ever Aunt Effie undresses her, she tells her she _may_ die
+before morning, so she'd better say her prayer, pretty. Goodness, she
+hasn't said her prayer yet, either."
+
+"Isn't she too sleepy?" asked Peter.
+
+"Yes," Miggy answered; "but she feels bad in the morning if she doesn't
+say it. You know she thinks she says her prayer to mother, and that
+mother waits to hear her...."
+
+Miggy looked up fleetingly at her mother's picture on the wall--one of
+those pale enlargements of a photograph which tell you definitely that
+the subject is dead.
+
+"I do' want any other curls on me," announced Little Child, suddenly.
+
+"Just one more, dear," Miggy told her, "and then we're through. Turn her
+head a little, Peter."
+
+"No," said Little Child. "Now I'm all curly."
+
+And, "Yes, Precious. Be still on Peter's arm just a minute more," said
+Miggy at the same time.
+
+And, "If you say anything more, I'll kiss you," said Peter, to whom it
+might concern.
+
+"Kiss _me_?" said Little Child. "I won't be."
+
+"Somebody's got to be," said Peter, with decision.
+
+"Now, our prayer," ruled Miggy suddenly, and rose. "Come, dear."
+
+Peter looked up in Miggy's face.
+
+"Let her be here," he said. "Let her be here."
+
+He lifted Little Child so that she knelt, and her head drooped on his
+shoulder. He had one arm about her and the other hand on the pink,
+upturned soles of her feet. The child put out one hand blindly for
+Miggy's hand. So Miggy came and stood beside Peter, and together they
+waited for the little sleepy voice.
+
+It came with disconcerting promptness.
+
+"Now--I--lay--me--down--to--sleep--for--Jesus'--sake--Amen," prayed
+Little Child in one breath.
+
+"No, sweetheart," Miggy remonstrated, with her alluring emphasis on
+"sweet." "Say it right, dear."
+
+"Now I lay me--is Bless-your-Heart sayin' hers?" demanded Little Child.
+
+"Couldn't you get along without her, when you're so sleepy?" Miggy
+coaxed.
+
+"Mustn't skip nights," Little Child told her. "Bless-your-Heart might
+die before morning."
+
+So Miggy found Bless-your-Heart under the couch, and haled her forth,
+and laid her in Little Child's arms. And Peter put his face close, close
+to Little Child's, and shut his eyes.
+
+"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I
+should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take who'll I bless
+to-night?" said Little Child.
+
+"Aunt Effie," Miggy prompted.
+
+"Bless Aunt Effie," said Little Child, "and Miggy and Bless-your-Heart
+and New Auntie" (she meant me. Think of her meaning me!) "and the man
+that gave me the peanuts, and bless Stella's party and make 'em have
+ice-cream, and bless my new shoes and my sore finger. For Jesus' sake,
+Amen."
+
+Little Child drew a long breath and stirred to get down, but Peter did
+not move.
+
+"And bless Peter," Miggy said.
+
+"No," said Little Child, "He needn't. Peter's nice 'nuff."
+
+Peter got to his feet with Little Child in his arms, and his face was
+glowing, and he looked at Miggy as if she were what he meant whenever he
+said "universe." But Miggy had gone to the couch, and was smoothing the
+quilt that Peter had wrinkled in all directions, and patting the pillow
+that Peter had kneaded into a hard ball.
+
+"You lay her down," she said.
+
+Peter did so, setting the kitten on the floor, and then bending low over
+the couch, looking in the upturned face as the little dark head touched
+the pillow and sought its ease, and her hand fell from where it had
+rested on his shoulder. And he stooped and kissed her cheek more gently
+than he had ever done anything.
+
+"I want my drink o' water," said Little Child, and opened her eyes; and
+now from the couch she could see me. "Tell me a story," she commanded
+me, drowsily.
+
+I did not go to her, for who am I that I should have broken that trio?
+But when Miggy and Peter took the lamp and went away to the kitchen for
+the drink of water and for some simple remedy for the fever which Miggy
+had noted or fancied, I sat beside Little Child and said over something
+that had been persistently in my mind as I had watched Miggy with her:--
+
+
+     "I like to stand in this great air
+     And see the sun go down;
+     It shows me a bright veil to wear
+     And such a pretty gown.
+     Oh, I can see a playmate there
+     Far up in Splendour Town!"
+
+
+Little Child began it with me, but her voice trailed away. I thought
+that in the darkness were many gentle presences--Little Child's tender
+breathing, the brushing wings of hurrying dreams, and perhaps that
+other--"not quite my sister," but a shadowy little Margaret.
+
+Afterward, Miggy and Peter and I sat together for a little while, but
+Peter had fallen in a silence. And presently Aunt Effie came home, and
+on the porch--which seemed not yet to have escaped--she told us about
+having broken her needle and left her shears at her neighbour's. While
+Peter ran over to Mis' Holcomb's for the shears, I had a word with
+Miggy.
+
+"Miggy!" I said, "don't you see?"
+
+"See what?" she wanted to know, perversely.
+
+"How Peter would love to have Little Child, too?" I said.
+
+She laughed a little, and was silent; and laughed again.
+
+"He was funny and nice," she admitted; "and wasn't Little Child funny
+not to bless him?"
+
+"Because he is nice enough," I reminded her.
+
+Miggy laughed once more--I had never seen her in so tender and feminine
+a mood. And this may have been partly due to the new frock, though I
+cannot think that it was entirely this. But abruptly she shook her head.
+
+"Peter's father went by just before you came in," she said.
+"He--couldn't hardly walk. What if I was there to get supper for him
+when he got home? I never could--I never could...."
+
+By the time Peter and I were out alone on Daphne Street again, the
+sitting rooms in all the houses were dark, with a look of locked front
+doors--as if each house had set its lips together with, "We are a home
+and you are not."
+
+Peter looked out on all this palpable householdry.
+
+"See the lights upstairs," he said; "everybody's up there, hearing their
+prayers and giving 'em fever medicine. Yes, sir, Great Scott! Shorty
+Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade--they ain't good for a thing in
+the cannery. And yet they know...."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+POSTMARKS
+
+
+Between church service and Sunday School we of the First church have so
+many things to attend to that no one can spare a moment.
+
+"Reverent things, not secular," Calliope explains, "plannin' for church
+chicken-pie suppers an' Christmas bazaars and like that; but not a word
+about a picnic, not even if they was to be one o' Monday sunrise."
+
+To be sure, this habit of ours occasionally causes a contretemps. As
+when one morning Mis' Toplady arrived late and, in a flurry, essayed to
+send up to the pulpit by the sexton a Missionary meeting notice to be
+read. Into this notice the minister plunged without the precaution of
+first examining it, and so delivered aloud:--
+
+
+     "See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags.
+     "See Abigail about enough forks for her table.
+     "Look around for my rubbers.
+     "Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."
+
+
+Not until he reached the fourth item was the minister stopped by the
+agonized rustle in a congregation that had easily recognized Mis'
+Toplady's "between services" list of reminder, the notice of the
+forthcoming meeting being safe in her hymn book.
+
+Still we persist in our Sabbath conferences when "everybody is there
+where you want 'em an' everybody can see everybody an' no time lost an'
+no party line listening"; and it is then that those who have been for
+some time away from the village receive their warmest welcome. I am not
+certain that the "I must get down to church and see everybody" of a
+returned neighbour does not hold in fair measure the principles of
+familyhood and of Christ's persuadings to this deep comradeship.
+
+It was in this time after church that we welcomed Calliope one August
+Sunday when she had unexpectedly come down from town on the Saturday
+night. And later, when the Sunday-school bell had rung, I waited with
+her in the church while she looked up her Bible, left somewhere in the
+pews. When she had found it, she opened it in a manner of eager haste,
+and I inadvertently saw pasted to the inside cover a sealed letter,
+superscription down, for whose safety she had been concerned. I had
+asked her to dine with me, and as we walked home together she told me
+about the letter and what its sealed presence in her Bible meant.
+
+"I ain't ever read it," Calliope explained to me wistfully. "Every one
+o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle has got one, an' none of us has
+ever read 'em. It ain't my letter, so to say. It's one o' the Jem Pitlaw
+collection. The postmark," she imparted, looking up at me proudly, "is
+Bombay, India."
+
+At my question about the Jem Pitlaw collection she laughed
+deprecatingly, and then she sighed. ("Ain't it nice," she had once said
+to me, "your laughs hev a sigh for a linin', an' sighs can hev laughin'
+for trimmin'. Only trouble is, most folks want to line with trimmin's,
+an' they ain't rill durable, used that way.")
+
+"Jem Pitlaw," Calliope told me now, "used to be schoolmaster here--the
+kind that comes from Away an' is terrible looked up to on that account,
+but Jem deserved it. He knew all there was _to_ know, an' yet he thought
+we knew some little things, too. We was all rill fond of him, though he
+kept to himself, an' never seemed to want to fall in love, an' not many
+of us knew him well enough to talk to at all familiar. But when he went
+off West on a vacation, an' didn't come back, an' never come back, an'
+then died, Friendship Village mourned for him,--sincere, though no
+crape,--an' missed him enormous.
+
+"He'd had a room at Postmaster Sykes's--that was when he was postmaster
+first an' they was still humble an' not above the honest penny. An' Jem
+Pitlaw left two trunks an' a sealed box to their house. An' when he
+didn't come back in two years, Silas Sykes moved the things out of the
+spare room over to the post-office store loft. An' there they set, three
+years on end, till we got word Jem was dead--the very week o' the
+Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle's Ten Cent Tropical Fête. Though,
+rilly, the Tropical Fête wasn't what you might say 'tropical.' It was
+held on the seventeenth of January, an' that night the thermometer was
+twenty-four degrees below on the bank corner. Nor it wasn't rilly what
+you might say a Fête, either. But none o' the Circle regretted them
+lacks. A lack is as good as a gift, sometimes.
+
+"We'd started the Foreign Missionary Circle through Mis' Postmaster
+Sykes gettin' her palm. I donno what there is about palms, but you know
+the very name makes some folks think thoughts 'way outside their heads,
+an' not just stuffy-up inside their own brains. When I hear 'palm,' I
+sort o' feel like my i-dees got kind o' wordy wings an' just went it
+without me. An' that was the way with more than me, I found out. Nobody
+in Friendship Village hed a palm, but we'd all seen pictures an'
+hankered--like you do. An' all of a sudden Mis' Sykes got one, like she
+gets her new hat, sometimes, without a soul knowin' she's thinkin'
+'hat' till she flams out in it. Givin' surprise is breath an' bread to
+that woman. She unpacked the palm in the kitchen, an' telephoned around,
+an' we all went over just as we was an' set down there an' looked at it
+an' thought 'Palm'! You can't realize how we felt, all of us, if you
+ain't lived all your life with nothin' but begonias an' fuchsias from
+November to April, an' sometimes into May. But we was all mixed up about
+'em, now we see one. Some hed heard dates grew on palms. Others would
+have it it was cocoanuts. Still more said they was natives of the
+equator, an' give nothin' but shade. So it went. But after a while Mis'
+Timothy Toplady spoke up with that way o' comin' downstairs on her words
+an' rilly gettin' to a landin':--
+
+"'They's quite a number o' things,' she says, 'that I want to do so much
+it seems like I can't die without doin' 'em. But I guess prob'ly I will
+die without. Folks seems to drop off leavin' lots of doin's undone. An'
+one o' my worst is, I want to see palm trees growin' in hot lands--big
+spiky leaves pointin' into the blue sky _like fury_. 'Seems if I could
+do that,' s'she, 'I'd take in one long breath that'd make me all lungs
+an' float me up an' off.'
+
+"We all laughed, but we knew what she meant well enough, because we all
+felt the same way. I think most North folks do--like they was cocoanuts
+an' dates in our actions, 'way back. An' so we was all ready for Mis'
+Toplady's idee when it come--which is the most any idee can expect:--
+
+"'I tell you what,' s'she, 'le's hev a Ladies' Foreign Missionary
+Circle, an' get read up on them tropical countries. The only thing I
+really know about the tropics is what comes to me unbeknownst when I
+smell my tea rose. I've always been meanin' to take an interest in
+missions,' says she.
+
+"So we started it, then an' there, an' she an' I was the committee to
+draw out a constitution an' decide what officers should be elected an'
+do the general creatin'. We made it up that Mis' Sykes should be the
+president--that woman is a born leader, and, as a leader, you can depend
+on the very back of her head. An' at last we went off to the minister
+that then was to ask him what to take up.
+
+"'Most laudable,' s'he, when he'd heard. 'Well, now, what country is it
+you're most interested in?' he says. 'Some island of the sea, I s'pose?'
+he asks, bright.
+
+"'We're interested in palms,' Mis' Timothy Toplady explained it to him
+frank, 'an' we want to study about the missionaries in some country
+where they's dates an' cocoanuts an' oaseses.'
+
+"He smiled at that, sweet an' deep--I know it seemed to me as if he knew
+more about what we wanted than we knew ourselves. Because they's some
+ministers that understands that Christianity ain't all in the bottle
+labelled with it. Some of it is labelled 'ointment,' an' some 'perfume,'
+an' some just plain kitchen flavourin'. An' a good deal of it ain't
+labelled at all.
+
+"I forget what country it was we did study. But they was nine to ten of
+us, an' we met every week, an' I tell you the time wa'n't wasted. We
+took things in lavish. I know Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said that
+after belongin' to the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle she could never
+feel the same absent-minded sensation again when she dusted her parlour
+shells. An' Mis' Toplady said when she opened her kitchen cabinet an'
+smelt the cinnamon an' allspice out o' the perforated tops, 'most
+always, no matter how mad she was, she broke out in a hymn, like 'When
+All Thy Mercies,' sheer through knowin' how allspice was born of God an'
+not made of man. An' Mis' Sykes said when she read her Bible, an' it
+talked about India's coral strand, it seemed like, through knowin' what
+a reef was, she was right there on one, with her Lord. I felt the same
+way, too--though I'd always felt the same way, for that matter--I always
+did tip vanilla on my handkerchief an' pretend it was flowers an' that
+I'd gone down South for the cold months. An' it got so that when the
+minister give out a text that had geography in it, like the Red Sea, or
+Beer-elim, or 'a place called The Fair Haven,' the Ladies Foreign
+Missionary Circle would look round in our seats an' nod to each other,
+without it showin', because we knew that we knew, extra special, just
+what God was talkin' about. I tell you, knowledge makes you alive at
+places where you didn't know there was such a place.
+
+"In five months' time we felt we owed so much to the Ladies' Foreign
+Missionary Circle that it was Mis' Sykes suggested we give the Ten Cent
+Tropical Fête, an' earn five dollars or so for missions.
+
+"'We know a great deal about the tropics now,' she says, 'an' I propose
+we earn a missionary thank-offering. Coral an' cocoanuts an' dates an'
+spices isn't all the Lord is interested in, by any means,' s'she. 'An'
+the winter is the time to give a tropic fête, when folks are thinkin'
+about warm things natural.'
+
+"We voted to hev the fête to Mis' Sykes's because it was too cold to
+carry the palm out. We went into it quite extensive--figs an' dates an'
+bananas an' ginger for refreshments, an' little nigger dolls for
+souvenirs, an' like that. It was quite a novel thing for Friendship, an'
+everybody was takin' an interest an' offerin' to lend Japanese umbrellas
+an' Indian baskets an' books on the South Sea, an' a bamboo chair with
+an elephant crocheted in the tidy. An' then, bein' as happenin's always
+crowd along in flocks, what come that very week o' the fête but a letter
+from an old aunt of Jem Pitlaw's, out West. An' if Jem hadn't been dead
+almost ever since he left Friendship! an' the aunt wrote that we should
+sell his things to pay for keepin' 'em, as she was too poor to send for
+'em an' hadn't any room if she wasn't.
+
+"I donno whether you know what rill excitement is, but if you don't,
+you'd ought to drop two locked trunks an' a sealed box into a town the
+size o' Friendship Village, an' leave 'em there goin' on five years, an'
+then die an' let 'em be sold. That'll show you what a pitch true
+interest can get het up to. All of a sudden the Tropical Fête was no
+more account than the telephone ringin' when a circus procession is
+going by. Some o' the Ladies' Missionary was rill indignant, an' said
+we'd ought to sue for repairin' rights, same as when you're interfered
+with in business. Mis' Sykes, she done her able best, too, but nothin'
+would do Silas but he must offer them things for sale on the instant.
+'The time,' s'he, firm, 'to do a thing is now, while the interest is up.
+An' in this country,' s'he, '"now" don't stay "now" more'n two minutes
+at a time.'
+
+"So he offered for sale the contents of them three things--the two
+trunks an' the sealed box--unsight, unseen, on the day before the Fête
+was to be. Only one thing interfered with the 'unsight, unseen'
+business: the sealed box had got damp an' broke open, an' what was
+inside was all showin'.
+
+"Mis' Sykes an' I saw it on the day o' the sale. Most o' the Circle was
+to her house finishin' up the decorations for the Fête so's to leave the
+last day clear for seein' to the refreshments, an' her an' I run over to
+the post-office store for some odds an' ends. Silas had brought the two
+trunks an' the box down from the loft so to give 'em some advertisin'.
+An' lookin' in the corner o' the broke box we could see, just as plain
+as plain, was _letters_. Letters in bunches, all tied up, an' letters
+laid in loose--they must 'a' been full a hundred of 'em, all lookin'
+mysterious an' ready to tell you somethin', like letters will. I know
+the looks o' the letters sort o' went to my head, like the news of Far
+Off. An' I hated seein' Jem's trunks there, with his initials on,
+appearin' all trustin' an' as if they thought he was still alive.
+
+"But that wasn't the worst. They was three strangers there in the
+store--travellin' men that had just come in on the Through, an' they was
+hangin' round the things lookin' at 'em, as if they had the right to.
+This town ain't very much on the buy, an' we don't hev many strangers
+here, an' we ain't rill used to 'em. An' it did seem too bad, I know we
+thought, that them three should hev happened in on the day of a private
+Friendship Village sale that didn't concern nobody else but one, an'
+him dead. An' we felt this special when one o' the men took a-hold of a
+bunch o' the letters, an' we could see the address of the top one, to
+Jem Pitlaw, wrote thin an' tiny-fine, like a woman. An' at that Mis'
+Sykes says sharp to her husband:--
+
+"'Silas Sykes, you ain't goin' to sell them letters?'
+
+"'Yes, ma'am, I am,' Silas snaps, like he hed a right to all the letters
+on earth, bein' he was postmaster of Friendship Village. 'Letters,'
+Silas give out, 'is just precisely the same as books, only they ain't
+been through the expense of printin'. No differ'nce. No
+differ'nce!'--Silas always seems to think repeatin' a thing over'll get
+him somewheres, like a clock retickin' itself. 'An',' he says, 'I'm
+goin' to sell 'em for what they'll bring, same as the rest o' the
+things, an' you needn't to say one word.' An' bein' as Silas was
+snappin', not only as a postmaster but as a husband, Mis' Sykes, she
+kep' her silence. Matrimony an' politics both in one man is too much for
+any woman to face.
+
+"Well, we two went back to Mis' Sykes's all het up an' sad, an' told the
+Circle about Jem Pitlaw's letters. An' we all stopped decoratin' an' set
+down just where we was an talked about what an awful thing it seemed. I
+donno as you'll sense it as strong as we did. It was more a feelin' than
+a wordin'. _Letters_--bein' sold an' read out loud an' gettin' known
+about. It seemed like lookin' in somebody's purse before they're dead.
+
+"'I should of thought,' Mis' Sykes says, 'that Silas regardin' bein'
+postmaster as a sacred office would have made him do differ'nt. An' I
+know he talked that right along before he got his appointment. "Free
+Private Secretary to the People," an' "Trusted Curator of Public
+Communication," he put it when he was goin' around with his petition,'
+says she, grievin'.
+
+"'Well,' says Mis' Amanda Toplady--I rec'lect she hed been puttin' up a
+big Japanese umbrella, an' she looked out from under it sort o' sweet
+an' sincere an' dreamy--'you've got to be a woman an' you've got to live
+in a little town before you know what a letter really is. I don't think
+these folks that hev lots o' mail left in the front hall in the
+mornin'--an' sometimes get one that same afternoon--_knows_ about
+letters at all. An' I don't believe any man ever knows, sole except when
+he's in love. To sense what a letter is you've got to be a woman without
+what-you-may-say much to enjoy; you've got to hear the train whistle
+that might bring you one; you've got to calculate how long it'll take
+'em to distribute the mail, an' mebbe hurry to get your bread mixed, or
+your fried-cakes out o' the lard, or your cannin' where you can leave
+it--an' then go change your shoes an' slip on another skirt, an' poke
+your hair up under your hat so's it won't show, an' go down to the
+post-office in the hot sun, an' see the letter through the glass, there
+in your own box, waitin' for you. That minute, when your heart comes up
+in your throat, I tell you, is gettin' a letter.'
+
+"We all knew this is so--every one of us.
+
+"'It's just like that when you write 'em, only felt differ'nt,' says
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I do mine to my sister a little at a
+time--I keep it back o' the clock in the kitchen an' hide the pencil
+inside the clock door, so's it won't walk off, the way pencils do at our
+house. An' then, right in the midst of things, be it flour or be it
+suds, I can scratch down what comes in my head, till I declare sometimes
+I can hardly mail it for readin' it over an' thinkin' how she'll like to
+get it.'
+
+"'My, my!' says Mis' Sykes, reminiscent, ''specially since Silas has
+been postmaster an' we've had so much to do with other people's letters,
+I've been so hungry for letters of my own that I've wrote for samples. I
+can do that with a level conscience because, after all, you do get a new
+dress now an' then. But I couldn't answer advertisements, same as some,
+when I didn't mean true--just to get the letters back. That don't seem
+to me rill honest.'
+
+"An' then I owned up.
+
+"'Last week, when I paid my taxes,' I says, 'I whipped out o' the
+clerk's office quick, sole so's he'd hev to mail me my tax receipt. But
+he didn't do it. He sent it over by their hired girl that noon. I love
+letters like I do my telephone bell an' my friends,' I know I says.
+
+"An' there was all that hundred letters or so--letters that somebody had
+put love in for Jem Pitlaw, an' that he'd read love out of an' saved
+'em--there they was goin' to be sold for all Friendship Village to read,
+includin' some that hadn't even known him, mebbe more than to speak to.
+
+"We wasn't quite through decoratin' when supper time come, so we stayed
+on to Mis' Sykes's for a pick-up lunch, et in the kitchen, an' finished
+up afterwards. Most of 'em could do that better than they could leave
+their work an' come down again next mornin'--men-folks can always get
+along for supper, bein' it's not a hot meal.
+
+"'Ain't it wonderful,' says Mis' Toplady, thoughtful, 'here we are,
+settin' 'round the kitchen table at Mis' Postmaster Sykes's in
+Friendship Village. An' away off in Arabia or Asia or somewhere that I
+ain't sure they is any such place, is somebody settin' that never heard
+of us nor we of him, an' he's goin' to hev our five dollars from the
+Tropical Fête to-morrow night, an' put it to work doin' good.'
+
+"'It makes sort of a connection, don't it?' says Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'There they are an' here we are. Ain't it
+strange? 'Seems like our doin' this makes us feel nearer to them places.
+I donno but that,' says she, noddin', 'is the start of what it means
+about the lion and the lamb layin' down together.'
+
+"'Oh!'says Mis' Toplady, 'I tell you the Foreign Missionary Circle has
+been next best to _goin'_. 'Seems sometimes as if I've 'most been
+somewheres an' seen palms a-growin' an' a-wavin' an' a red sky back.
+Don't it to you? I've dreamed o' them places all my life, an' I ain't
+never had anything but Friendship Village, an' I don't know now that
+Arabia an' Asia an' India is rilly fitted in, the way they look on the
+map. An' so with some more. But if so be they are, then,' she says, 'we
+owe it to the Foreign Missionary Circle that we've got that far towards
+seein' 'em.'
+
+"An' we all agreed, warm, excep' Mis' Sykes, who was the hostess an' too
+busy to talk much; but we knew how she felt. An' we said some more about
+how wonderful things are, there in Mis' Sykes's kitchen while we et.
+
+"Well, when we got done decoratin' after supper, we all walked over to
+the post-office store to the sale--the whole Circle of us. Because, of
+course, if the letters was to be sold there wasn't any harm in seein'
+who got 'em, an' in knowin' just how mean who was. Then, too, we was
+interested in what was in the two trunks. We was quite early--early
+enough to set along on the front rows of breakfast-food boxes that was
+fixed ready. An' in the very frontmost one was Mis' Sykes an' Mis'
+Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, an' me.
+
+"But we see, first thing when we got into the store, that they was
+strangers present. The three travellin' men that Mis' Sykes an' I had
+noticed that afternoon was still in town, of course, an' there they was
+to the sale, loungin' along on the counter each side o' the cheese. We
+couldn't bear their bein' there. It was our sale, an' they wasn't rill
+sure to understand. To us Mr. Pitlaw hed been Mr. Pitlaw. To them he was
+just somebody that hed been somebody. I didn't like it, nor they didn't
+none o' the Ladies' Missionary like it. We all looked at each other an'
+nodded without it showin', like we do, an' we could see we all felt the
+same.
+
+"Silas was goin' to officiate himself--that man has got the idee it's
+the whistle that runs the boat. They had persuaded him to open the
+trunks an' sell the things off piecemeal, an' he see that was rilly the
+only way to do it. So when the time come he broke open the two trunks
+an' he wouldn't let anybody touch hasp or strap or hammer but himself.
+It made me sort of sick to see even the trunk things of Mr. Pitlaw's
+come out--a pepper an' salt suit, a pair of new suspenders, a collar
+an' cuff case--the kind that you'd recognize was a Christmas present; a
+nice brush an' comb he'd kept for best an' never used, a cake of
+pretty-paper soap he'd never opened, a bunch o' keys, an' like that. You
+know how it makes you feel to unpack even your own things that have been
+put away a good while; it's like thinkin' over forgot thoughts. Well,
+an' this was worse. Jem Pitlaw, that none of us had known well enough to
+mention familiar things to, was dead--he was _dead_; an' here we were,
+lookin' on an' seein' the things that was never out of his room before,
+an' that he'd put in there, neat an' nice, five years back, to be took
+out, he thought, in a few weeks. Quite a lot of us felt delicate, but
+some got behind the delicate idee an' made it an excuse for not buyin'
+much. They's all kinds to a sale--did you ever notice? Timothy Toplady,
+for instance--I donno but he's all kinds in his single self. 'Seems he
+couldn't bring himself to bid on a thing but Jem Pitlaw's keys.
+
+"'Of course nobody knows what they'll fit,' says he, disparagin', 'so to
+buy 'em don't seem like bein' too familiar with Mr. Pitlaw,' s'he, rill
+pleased with himself.
+
+"But Mis' Sykes whispers to me:--
+
+"'Them keys'll go dirt cheap, an' Timothy knows it, an' a strange key
+may come in handy any minute. Timothy's reasons never whip to a froth,'
+s'she, cold.
+
+"But I guess she was over-critical because of gettin' more fidgety, like
+we all did, the nearer Silas got to the letters. He hed left the letters
+till the last. An' what with folks peekin' in the box since he'd brought
+it down, an' what with handlin' what was ready to spill out, most of 'em
+by then was in plain sight. An' there I see more o' them same
+ones--little thin writin', like a woman's. We 'most all noticed it. An'
+I couldn't keep my eyes off of 'em. 'Seemed like she might be somebody
+with soft ways that ought to be there, savin' the letters, wardin' off
+the heartache for Mr. Pitlaw an' mebbe one for herself.
+
+"An' right while I was lookin' Silas turned to the box and cleared his
+throat, important as if he was the whistle for New York City, an' he
+lifted up the bunch of the letters that had the little fine writin' on
+top, just the way Mr. Pitlaw had tied 'em up with common string.
+
+"'Oh!' says Mis' Toplady and Mis' Sykes, each side of me, the one 'oh!'
+strong an' the other low, but both 'oh's' meanin' the same thing.
+
+"'Now, what,' says Silas, brisk, 'am I bid for this package of nice
+letters here? Good clear writin', all in strong condition, an' no holes
+in, just as firm an' fresh,' s'he, 'as the day they was dropped into
+the mail. What am I bid for 'em?' he asks, his eyebrows rill expectant.
+
+"Not one of the travellin' men had bid a thing. They had sat still, just
+merely loungin' each side the cheese, laughin' some, like men will,
+among each other, but not carin' to take any part, an' we ladies felt
+rill glad o' that. But all of a sudden, when Silas put up the bunch o'
+letters, them three men woke up, an' we see like lightnin' that this was
+what they hed been waitin' for.
+
+"'Twenty-five cents!' bids one of 'em, decisive.
+
+"There was a movement of horror spread around the Missionary Circle at
+the words. Sometimes it's bad enough to hev one thing happen, but often
+it's worse to hev another occur. Even Silas looked a little doubtful,
+but to Silas the main chance is always the main thing, an' instantly he
+see that these men, if they got in the spirit of it, would run them
+letters up rill high just for the fun of it. An' Silas was like some
+are: he felt that money is money.
+
+"So what did he do but begin cryin' the goods up higher--holdin' the
+letters in his hands, that little, thin writin' lookin' like it was
+askin' somethin'.
+
+"'Here we hev letters,' says Silas, 'letters from Away. Not just
+business letters, to judge by the envelopes--an' I allow, gentlemen,'
+says Silas, facetious, 'that, bein' postmaster of Friendship Village,
+I'm as good a judge of letters as there is a-goin'. Here we hev some
+intimate personal letters offered for sale legitimate by their heiress.
+What am I bid?' asks he.
+
+"'Thirty-five cents!'
+
+"'Fifty cents!' says the other two travellin' gentlemen, quick an' in
+turn.
+
+"'Seventy-five cents!' cries out the first, gettin' in earnest--though
+they was all laughin' at hevin' somethin' inspirin' to do.
+
+"But Silas merely caught a-hold of the mood they was in, crafty, as if
+he'd been gettin' the signers to his petition while they was feelin'
+good.
+
+"'One moment, gentlemen!' s'he. 'Do you know what you're biddin' on? I
+ain't told you the half yet,' s'he. 'I ain't told you,' s'he, 'where
+these letters come from.'
+
+"With that he hitches his glasses an' looked at the postmarks. An' he
+read 'em off. Oh, an' what do you guess them postmarks was? I'll never
+forget the feelin' that come over me when I heard what he was sayin',
+turnin' back in under the string to see. For the stamps on the letters
+was foreign stamps. The postmarks was foreign postmarks. An' what Silas
+read off was: Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Singapore--oh, I can't begin to
+remember all the names nor to pronounce 'em, but I think they was all in
+India, or leastwise in Asia. Think of it! in Asia, that none of the
+Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle hed been sure there was such a place.
+
+"I know how we all looked around at each other sudden, with the same
+little jump in the chest as when we remember we've got bread in the oven
+past the three-quarters, or when we've left the preserves on the blaze
+while we've done somethin' else an' think it's burnin', or when we've
+cut out both sleeves for one arm an' ain't got any more cloth. I mean it
+was that intimate, personal jump, like when awful, first-person things
+have happened. An' I tell you what, when the Ladies' Missionary feels a
+thing, they feel it strong an' they act it sudden. It's our way, as a
+Circle. An' in that look that went round among us there was hid the nod
+that knows what each other means.
+
+"'One dollar!' shouts one o' the travellin' men.
+
+"An' with that we all turned, like one solid human being, straight
+towards Mis' Postmaster Sykes, that was our president an' a born leader
+besides, an' the way we looked at her resembled a vote.
+
+"Mis' Sykes stood up, grave an' scairt, though not to show. An' we was
+sure she'd do the right thing, though we didn't know what the right
+thing was; but we felt confidence, I know, in the very pattern on the
+back of her shawl. An' she says, clear:--
+
+"'I'd like to be understood to bid for the whole box o' Mr. Pitlaw's
+letters, includin' the bunch that's up. An' I bid five dollars.'
+
+"Of course we all knew in a minute what that meant: Mis' Sykes was
+biddin' with the proceeds of the Ten Cent Tropical Fête that was to be.
+But we see, too, that this was a missionary cause if there ever was one,
+an' they wa'n't one of us that thought it irregular, or grudged it, or
+looked behind.
+
+"I don't know whether you know how much five dollars rilly is--like you
+sense it when you've spoke it to a sale, or put it on a subscription
+paper in Friendship. There wasn't a sound in that store, everybody was
+so dumfounded. But none was so much as Silas Sykes. Silas was so
+surprised that he forgot that he was in public.
+
+"'My King!' says he, unexpected to himself. 'What you sayin', Huldy? You
+ain't biddin' that out o' your allowance, be you?' says he. Silas likes
+big words in the home.
+
+"'No, sir,' says she, crisp, back, 'I ain't. I can't do miracles out of
+nothin'. But I bid, an' you'll get your money, Silas. An' I may as well
+take the letters now.'
+
+"With that she rose up an' spread out her shawl almost broodin', an'
+gathered that box o' Jem Pitlaw's into her two arms. An' with one motion
+all the rest o' the Ladies' Missionary got up behind her an' stalked out
+of the store, like a big bid is sole all there is to an auction. An'
+they let us go. Why, there wasn't another thing for Silas Sykes to do
+but let be as was. Them three men over by the cheese just laughed, an'
+said out somethin' about no gentleman outbiddin' a lady, an' shut up,
+beat, but pretendin' to give in, like some will.
+
+"Just before we all got to the door we heard somebody's feet come down
+off'n a cracker-barrel or somethin', an' Timothy Toplady's voice after
+us, shrill-high an' nervous:--
+
+"'Amanda,' s'he, 'you ain't calculatin' to help back up this
+tomfoolishness, I hope?'
+
+"An' Mis' Amanda says at him, over her shoulder:
+
+"'If I was, that'd be between my hens an' me, Timothy Toplady,' says
+she.
+
+"An' the store door shut behind us--not mad, I remember, but gentle,
+like 'Amen.'
+
+"We took the letters straight to Mis' Sykes's an' through the house to
+the kitchen, where there was a good hot fire in the range. It was bitter
+cold outdoors, an' we set down around the stove just as we was, with the
+letters on the floor in front o' the hearth. An' when Mis' Sykes hed got
+the bracket lamp lit, she turned round, her bonnet all crooked but her
+face triumphant, an' took off a griddle of the stove an' stirred up the
+coals. An' we see what was in her mind.
+
+"'We can take turns puttin' 'em in,' she says.
+
+"But I guess it was in all our minds what Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss says, wistful:--
+
+"'Don't you think,' she says, 'or _do_ you think, it'd be wrongin' Mr.
+Pitlaw if we read over the postmarks out loud first?'
+
+"We divided up the bunches an' we set down around an' untied the
+strings, an', turn in an' turn out, we read the postmarks off. 'Most
+every one of 'em was foreign--oh, I can't begin to tell you where. It
+was all mixed up an' shinin' of names we'd never heard of before, an'
+names we had heard in sermons an' in the Bible--Egypt an' Greece an'
+Rome an' isles o' the sea. Mis' Toplady stopped right in the middle o'
+hers.
+
+"'Oh, I can't be sure I'm pronouncin' 'em right,' she says, huntin' for
+her handkerchief, 'but I guess you ladies get the _feel_ o' the places,
+don't you?'
+
+"An' that was just it: we did. We got the feel of them far places that
+night like we never could hev hed it any other way. An' when we got all
+through, Mis' Toplady spoke up again--but this time it was like she flew
+up a little way an' lit on somethin'.
+
+"'It ain't likely,' she says, 'that we'll ever, any of us, hev a letter
+of our own from places like these. We don't get many letters, an' what
+we do get come from the same old towns, over an' over again, an' quite
+near by. Do you know,' she says, 'I believe this Writin' here'--she held
+out the tiny fine writing that was like a woman with soft ways--'would
+understand if we each took one of her letters an' glued it together here
+an' now an' carried it home an' pasted it in our Bibles. _She_ went
+travellin' off to them places, an' she must have wanted to; an' she
+would know what it is to want to go an' yet never get there.'
+
+"I think Mis' Amanda was right--we all thought so. An' we done what she
+mentioned, an' made our choice o' postmarks. I know Mis' Amanda took
+Cairo.
+
+"''Count of the name sort o' picturin' out a palm tree a-growin' an'
+a-wavin' against a red sky,' she says, when she was pinnin' her shawl
+clear up over her hat to go out in the cold. 'Think of it,' she says;
+'she might 'a' passed a palm the day she wrote it. Ain't it like seein'
+'em grow yourself?'
+
+... "Mebbe it all wasn't quite regular," Calliope added, "though we made
+over five dollars at the Ten Cent Fête. But the minister, when we told
+him, he seemed to think it was all right, an' he kep' smilin', sweet an'
+deep, like we'd done more'n we _had_ done. An' I think he knew what we
+meant when we said we was all feelin' nearer, lion an' lamb, to them
+strange missionary countries. Because--oh, well, sometimes, you know,"
+Calliope said, "they's things that makes you feel nearer to faraway
+places that couldn't hev any postmark at all."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+PETER
+
+
+Last night in my room there was no sleeping, because the moon was there.
+It is a south room, and when the moon shines on the maple floor with its
+white cotton rugs and is reflected from the smooth white walls, to step
+within is like entering an open flower. Who could sleep in an open
+flower? I might sleep in a vast white petunia, because petunias do not
+have as much to say to me as do some other flowers. But in the bell of a
+lily, as in the bell of the sky or in my moonlit room, I should wish my
+thought to stay awake and be somebody. Be Somebody. On these nights, it
+is as if one had a friend in one's head conferring with one. And I think
+of this comrade as Her, the Custodian of me, who lives deep within and
+nearly comes outside to this white porch of the moon.
+
+I like to light my candle and watch its warm rays mix with the
+blue-white beams from without. There would have been a proper employment
+for a wizard: to diffuse varying insubstantialities, such as these, and
+to look within them, as within a pool--a pool free of its basin and
+enjoying the air. Yes, they were an unimaginative race, wizards. When
+will the era of white art come, with æsthetic witches and wizards who
+know our modern magics of colour and form and perception as a mere basis
+for their sorceries? Instead of pottering with thick, slab gruel and
+mediæval newts' eyes, think what witches they will be! Sometimes I think
+that they are already arriving. The New Lady told me the most delightful
+thing about a Thought of hers that she saw ... but it was such an
+elusive thing to tell and so much of it I had to guess, because words
+have not yet caught up with fancies, that it is hard to write down.
+Besides, perhaps you know. And if you did not know, you would skip this
+part anyway. So I merely mention that _she_ mentioned the coming alive
+of a thought of hers which helped her spirit to grow, quite without her
+will. Very likely you understand other wizardries. An excellent place to
+think them out must be the line where candle rays meet moonbeams, but
+there is no such discoverable line, just as there is no discoverable
+line between the seeing and the knowing, where the Custodian dwells....
+By all of which I am merely showing you what the moon can do to one's
+head and that it is no great wonder that one cannot sleep.
+
+"Ain't the moon kind of like a big, shinin' brain," Calliope said once,
+"an' moonlight nights it gets in your head and thinks for you."
+
+So last night when I went in my room I did not try to sleep; nor did I
+even light my candle. I went straight to a window and opened it--the one
+without a screen. I would not live in a house that did not have certain
+windows which one could open to let in the moon, or the night, or the
+living out-of-doors, with no screens to thwart their impulse. Suppose
+that sometime Diana--well, suppose what you will that is sensible, no
+moon can shine through a screen. Really, it cannot do its best through
+even an open window. And this was why I gave up trying to make it do so
+and went downstairs again--which is the earthly and rational of floating
+out into that utter beauty as I wanted to float.
+
+Of going out into such a night I would like to write for a long time, as
+I would like to keep on breathing lilies-of-the-valley and never have
+done. I think, though, that "into" such a night is not the word; to go
+out _upon_ the night is the essential experience. For, like a June day,
+a moonlit night of itself will not let us inside. We must know some
+other way of entrance. And I suspect that some of us never quite find
+the way--I wonder if we are missed?
+
+I stepped round the house to the open ocean of light that broke on soft
+shores of leaf and line, solemnizing, magnifying. It was like a glimpse
+into something which, afterward and afterward, is going to be. The
+definiteness of its premonitory message was startling. As when on seeing
+once that something had happened on my birthday, 1500, I felt as if I
+had heard from a kind of twin-time, so now I understood that this night
+was the birthday of far-off, immortal moments of my own, yet to be lived
+... so friendly near we are to the immeasurable kindred.
+
+And there, from the shadow of the flowering currant bush, which just now
+is out of flower and fallen in meditative quiet--a man arose. My sharp
+fear, as savage a thing as if the world were ten thousand years younger,
+or as if I were a ptarmigan and he a cougar--was only momentary. For the
+cougar began to apologize and I recognized him.
+
+"Why," I said, "Peter."
+
+"Yes'm," said he, "I couldn't help being here--for a little while."
+
+"Neither could I, Peter," I told him.
+
+These were remarkable admissions of ours, for a large part of evening in
+the village is an uninhabitable part of day and, no matter in what
+splendour of sky it comes, is a thing to be shut outside experience. If
+we relate being wakened by something that goes bang, we begin it, "In
+the middle of the night, about twelve o'clock;" and, "They have a light
+in their house 'most every night till midnight," is a bit of sharp
+criticism not lightly to be lived down. But now it was as if Peter were
+a part of the time itself, and outlaw too, if the evening was outlaw.
+"I'm glad I saw you," Peter said--as if we were here met by chance in
+the usual manner. "I wanted to see you and tell you: I'm going away--to
+be gone right along."
+
+"Why," I said again, "Peter!"
+
+"You'd go too," he said simply.
+
+"I should want to go," I told him, "but I doubt if I would go. Where are
+you going?"
+
+"They want to put in a cannery at Marl. It'd be a branch. I'd run it
+myself."
+
+I did not miss the implication of the conditional mood. And _Marl_. What
+wonderful names they give to some of the towns of this world. That word
+makes a picture all of white cornices and white wings of buildings and
+bright façades. I dare say from the railroad track the real town of Marl
+shows an unpainted livery barn and a blue barber shop, but the name
+sounds like the name of a chapter of travel, beginning: To-day we drove
+to Marl to see the queen. Or the cataract. Or the porch of the morning.
+
+"Why are you going, Peter?" I drove in the peg for him.
+
+"I guess you know," he said. "It's all Miggy with me."
+
+I knew that he wanted before all else to tell somebody, to talk to
+somebody, to have somebody know.
+
+"Tell me, Peter," I said.
+
+And now Peter told me how things were with him. If I should repeat what
+he said you would be scornful, for it was so little. It was broken and
+commonplace and set with repetition. It was halting and unfinished, like
+the unformed writing of a boy. But in his words I felt the movings of
+life and destiny and death more than I feel them when I think about the
+rushing of the stars. He loved her, and for him the world became a
+transparent plane wherein his soul moved as simply as his body. Here was
+not only a boy longing for a girl. Here was not only a man, instinct
+with the eager hope of establishing a home. Here was something not
+unlike this very moon-washed area won from the illimitable void, this
+area where we stood and spoke together, this little spot which alone was
+to us articulate with form and line and night sounds. So Peter,
+stumbling over his confession of love for Miggy, was like the word
+uttered by destiny to explicate its principle. It mattered not at all
+what the night said or what Peter said. Both were celestial.
+
+These moments when the soul presses close to its windows are to be
+understood as many another hint at the cosmic--Dawn, May, the firmament,
+radio-activity, theistic evolution, a thousand manifestations of the
+supernal. In this cry of enduring spirit it was as if Peter had some
+intimacy with all that has no boundaries. I hardly heard his stumbling
+words. I listened to him down some long avenue of hearths whose
+twinkling lights were like a corridor of stars.
+
+And all this bright business was to be set at naught because Miggy would
+have none of it.
+
+"She seems to like me," Peter said miserably, "but I guess she'd like me
+just as well if I wasn't me. And if I was right down somebody else, I
+guess she'd like me a good deal better. She--don't like my hands--nor
+the way my hair sticks up at the back. She thinks of all such things. I
+wouldn't care if she said all her words crooked. I'd know what she
+meant."
+
+I knew the difference. To him she was Miggy. To her he was an
+individual. He had never in her eyes graduated from being a person to
+being himself.
+
+"Calliope says," I told him, "that she likes almond extract better than
+any other kind, but that she hardly ever gets a bottle of almond with
+which she does not find fault. She says it's the same way with people
+one loves."
+
+Peter smiled--he is devoted to Calliope, who alone in the village has
+been friendly with his father. _Friendly._ The rest of the village has
+only been kind.
+
+"Well," he tried to put it, "but Miggy never seems to be thinking of me
+as _me_, only when she's finding fault with me. If she'd only think
+about me, even a little, the way I think about her. If she'd only miss
+me or want me or wonder how the house would seem if we were married. But
+she don't care--she don't care."
+
+"She says, you know," I ventured, "that she can't ask you to support
+Little Child too."
+
+"Can't she see," he cried, "that the little thing only makes me love her
+more? Don't she know how I felt the other night--when she let me help
+her that way? She must know. It's just an excuse--"
+
+He broke off and his hands dropped.
+
+"Then there's her other reason," he said, "I guess you know that. I
+can't blame her for it. But even with that, it kind of seems as if,--if
+she loved me--"
+
+"Yes," I said, "Peter, it does seem so."
+
+And yet in my heart I am certain that the reason is not at all that
+Miggy cannot love him--I remember the woman-softening of her face that
+forenoon when she found the spirit of the old romances in the village. I
+am not even certain that the reason is that she does not love Peter
+now--I remember how tender and feminine she was the other night with
+Peter and Little Child. I think it is only that the cheap cynicism of
+the village--which nobody means even when it is said!--has taught her
+badly; and that Life has not yet touched her hand, has not commanded
+"Look at me," has not bidden her follow with us all.
+
+I looked into the bright bowl of the night which is alternately with one
+and against one in one's mood of emprise; the bright bowl of the night
+inverted as if some mighty genii were shaking the stars about like
+tea-leaves to fortune the future. What a pastime _that_ for a wizard!
+
+"Oh, Peter," I said, "_if_ one were a wizard!"
+
+"I didn't understand," said Peter.
+
+"How pleasant it would be to make folk love folk," I put it.
+
+He understood that. "Wouldn't it, though?" he assented wistfully. So
+does everybody understand. Wouldn't it, though! Oh, _don't you wish you
+could_?
+
+In the silence which fell I kept on looking at those starry tea-leaves
+until I protest that a thought awoke in my mind as if it wanted to be
+somebody. Be Somebody. It was as if it came alive, quite without my
+will, so that almost I could see it. It was a friend conferring in my
+head. Perhaps it was the Custodian herself, come outside to that white
+porch of the moon.
+
+"Peter," I said, "I think I'm going to tell you a story."
+
+For I longed to make him patient with Miggy, as men, who understand
+these things first, are not always patient with women, who often and
+often understand too late.
+
+He listened to the story as I am setting it down here--the story of the
+New Village. But in it I could say nothing of how, besides by these
+things celestial, cosmic, I was touched by the simple, human entreaty of
+the big, baffled man and that about his hands and the way his hair
+sticks up at the back.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+THE NEW VILLAGE
+
+
+Once upon a time there was a village which might have been called
+The-Way-Certain-Folk-Want-It-Now. That, however, was not its name--it
+had a proper, map-sounding name. And there every one went to and fro
+with a fervour and nimbleness which proved him to be skilfully intent
+upon his own welfare.
+
+The village had simple buildings and white walls, lanes and flowering
+things and the flow of pure air. But the strange thing about the town
+was that there each inhabitant lived alone. Every house had but one
+inmate and he well content. He liked everything that he owned and his
+taste was all-sufficient and he took his pleasure in his own walls and
+loved best his own ways. The day was spent in lonely selling or lonely
+buying, each man pitted against all others, and advantage and
+disadvantage were never equal, but yet the transactions were dreary,
+lacking the picturesqueness of unlicensed spoliation. The only greeting
+which folk exchanged in passing was, "Sir, what do you do for
+yourself?" There were no assemblings of the people. The town kept itself
+alive by accretion from without. When one died another appeared and took
+his place gladly, and also others arrived, like precept added to precept
+and not like a true flowering. There were no children. And the village
+common was overgrown and breast-high with weeds. When the day was done
+every one retired to his own garden and saw his flowers blossoming for
+him and answering to the stars which came and stood over his head. There
+was in the town an epidemic of the intensive, only the people thought of
+it as the normal, for frequently epidemics are so regarded.
+
+In one soul the contagion did not prevail. The soul was the lad Matthew,
+whose body lived on the town's only hill. When others sat at night in
+their gardens Matthew was wont to go up an airy path which he had made
+to the upper spaces and there wander conjecturing about being alive. For
+this was a detail which he never could take wholly for granted, in the
+manner in which he had become wonted to door-mats, napkin-rings,
+oatmeal, and mirrors. Therefore he took his thought some way nearer to
+the stars, and there he found so much beauty that he longed to fashion
+it to something, to create of it anew. And as he opened his heart he
+began to understand that there is some one of whom he was the
+offspring. As he was companioned by this idea, more and more he longed
+for things to come nearer. Once, in his walking a hurrying bird brushed
+his face, grew confused, fluttered at his breast, and as he would have
+closed it in his hands he found that the bird was gone and his hands
+were empty, but beneath them his own heart fluttered and throbbed like a
+thing apart.
+
+One night, so great was the abstraction of the boy, that instead of
+taking the upper path he fared down into the town. It was a curious way
+to do--to go walking in the town as if the thing were common property,
+but then the walls were very high and the gates were fast closed and
+bound round with creeping things, which grow very quickly. Matthew
+longed to enter these gardens, and he wondered who lived in the houses
+and what might be in their hearts.
+
+Amazingly, at the turn of a white wall, a gate was opened and she who
+had opened it leaned into the night as if she were looking for
+something. There was a fluttering in the breast of Matthew so that he
+looked down to see if the bird had come back. But no bird was there. And
+it smote him that the lady's beauty, and surely her goodness, were great
+enough so that of them something might be created, as he would fain have
+created marvels from the sky.
+
+"I would like to make your beauty into something other," he said to
+her. "I cannot think whether this would be a song or a picture or a
+vision."
+
+She looked at him with as much pleasure as if he had been an idea of her
+own.
+
+"Tell me about my beauty," she bade him. "What thing is that?"
+
+"Nay, that will take some while," Matthew said. "If I do that, I must
+come in your garden."
+
+Now, such a thing had never happened in the town. And as this seemed why
+it never happened, it seemed likely to go on never happening
+indefinitely. But loneliness and the longing to create and the
+conjecture about life have always been as potent as battles; and beauty
+and boredom and curiosity have had something to do with history as well.
+
+"Just this once, then," said the lady, and the gate closed upon the two.
+
+Here was a garden like Matthew's own, but indefinitely atmosphered
+other. It spoke strangely of a wonted presence, other than his own. In
+his own garden he fitted as if the space for him were niched in the air,
+and he went as a man accustomed will go without thinking. But here he
+moved free, making new niches. And whereas on his own walks and plots he
+looked with lack-lustre eye as a man looks on his own gas-jet or rain
+pipe, now Matthew looked on all that he saw as on strange flame and
+sweet waters. And it was not the shrubs and flowers which most
+delighted him, but it was rather on a garden bench the lady's hat and
+gloves and scissors.
+
+"How pleasing!" said he, and stopped before them.
+
+"Do you find them so?" asked the lady.
+
+And when he told her about her beauty, which was more difficult to do
+than he had imagined and took a longer time, she said:--
+
+"There can be no other man in the world who would speak as you speak."
+
+On which he swore that there was no man who would not speak so, and
+likewise that no man could mean one-half what he himself meant. And he
+looked long at her house.
+
+"In those rooms," he said, "you go about. I wish that I could go about
+there."
+
+But that frightened her a little.
+
+"In there," he said, "are the lamps you light, the plates you use, the
+brush that smooths your hair. How strange that is."
+
+"Does it seem strange?" she asked.
+
+"Sometime I will go there," said he, and with that he thought that the
+bird once more was fluttering at his breast. And again there was no
+bird.
+
+When the time was come that he must leave her, this seemed the most
+valiant thing to do that ever he had done. It was inconceivable to
+accept that though now she was with him, breathing, sentient, yet in
+another moment he would be out alone in the empty night. Alone. For the
+first time the word became a sinister thing. It meant to be where she
+was not.
+
+"How is this to go on," he said, "I living where you do not live?"
+
+But she said, "Such things have never been any other way," and closed
+the gate upon him.
+
+It is a mighty thing when one who has always lived alone abruptly finds
+himself to have a double sense. Here is his little box of ideas, neatly
+classified, ready for reference, which have always methodically bobbed
+out of their own will the moment they were mentioned. Here are his own
+varieties of impression ready to be laid like a pattern upon whatever
+presents itself to be cut out. Here are his tastes, his sentiments, his
+beliefs, his longings, all selected and labelled and established. And
+abruptly ideas and impressions and tastes are thrown into rapt disorder
+while he wonders what this other being would think, and his sentiment
+glows like a lamp, his belief embraces the world, his longing becomes
+only that the other being's longing be cast in counterpart. When he
+walks abroad, the other's step accompanies him, a little back, and
+invisible, but as authentic as his own. When he thinks, his thought,
+without his will, would share itself. All this is a new way of
+consciousness. All this makes two universes where one universe had
+previously been competent to support life.
+
+Back on his hill Matthew went through his house as if he were seeing it
+for the first time. There was the garden that he had planted, and she
+was not walking there. There was his window, and she was not looking
+from it; his table, and she was not sitting beside it; his book which he
+could not read for wondering if she had read. All the tools of his home,
+what could they not become if she touched them? The homely tasks of the
+cupboard, what joy if she shared them? But what to do? He thought that
+it might be something if they exchanged houses, so that he could be
+where she had been, could use what she had used, could think of her in
+her setting. But yet this did not wholly delight him, either.
+
+And now his house stifled him, so that he rushed out upon that airy path
+of his that he had made to reach the upper spaces, and he fled along,
+learning about being alive. Into the night he went, farther than ever he
+had gone before, till the stars looked nearer to him than houses
+commonly look, and things to think about seemed there waiting for him.
+
+So it adventured that he came abruptly upon the New Village. It lay upon
+the air as lightly as if strong, fair hands were uniting to bear it up,
+and it was not far from the stars and the clear places. Before he
+understood its nearness, the night was, so to say, endued with this
+village, and he entered upon its lanes as upon light.
+
+This was a town no larger than his own and no more fortuned of Nature.
+Here were buildings not too unlike, and white walls and flowering things
+and the flow of pure air. But here was also the touch of bells. And he
+saw that every one went to and fro in a manner of quiet purpose that was
+like a garment.
+
+"Sir, what do you do for yourself?" he asked courteously of one who was
+passing.
+
+The citizen gave him greeting.
+
+"I make bread for my family," said he, "and, it may be, a dream or two."
+
+Matthew tried hard to perceive, and could make nothing of this.
+
+"Your family," he said, "what thing is that?"
+
+The citizen looked at him narrowly.
+
+"I see that you rebuke me," said he, gently; "but I, too, labor for the
+community, so that the day shall become a better day."
+
+"Community," said Matthew. "Now I know not at all what that may be,
+either."
+
+Then the man understood that here was one who would learn about these
+things, and in the New Village such a task is sacred and to be assumed
+on the moment by any to whom the opportunity presents. So the man took
+Matthew with him.
+
+"Come," he said, "this is the day when we meet together."
+
+"Together," said Matthew, and without knowing why he liked what he felt
+when he said that.
+
+They went first to the market-place, trodden of many feet, and about it
+a fair green common planted in gracious lines. Here Matthew found men in
+shops that were built simply and like one another in fashion, but with
+pleasant devices of difference, and he found many selling together and
+many buying, and no one was being robbed.
+
+"How can these things be?" he asked. "Here every man stands with the
+others."
+
+"Inside of all things," the citizen answered, "you will find that it is
+so written."
+
+On the common many were assembled to name certain projects and purposes:
+the following of paths to still clearer spaces, the nurturing of certain
+people, ways of cleanliness, purity of water, of milk, wide places for
+play, the fashioning of labour so that the shrines within be not
+foregone, the freeing of fountains, the planting of green things.
+
+"Why will all this be?" asked Matthew. "For these things a man does in
+his own garden or for his own house, and no other interferes."
+
+"Nay, but look deep within all things, Friend," the citizen said, "and
+you will never find it written so."
+
+"Friend," repeated Matthew, "_friend_...."
+
+Then the citizen went to his own house, and Matthew with him. The wall
+was no wall, but a hedge, and the garden was very beautiful. And lo,
+when they went in, there came tumbling along the path little beings made
+in the image of the citizen himself. And with them a woman of exceeding
+beauty and power, which the little ones also bore. As if the citizen had
+chosen her beauty and power to make them into something other.
+
+It was as it had been when the bird was fluttering and beating at the
+boy's breast, but he did not even heed.
+
+"Tell me!" he cried. "These--do they live here with you? Are they
+yours?"
+
+"We are one another's," said the citizen.
+
+Matthew sat among them, and to pleasure him they did many sweet tasks.
+They brought him to eat and drink in the garden. The woman gave quiet
+answers that had in them something living, and alive, too, some while
+after she had spoken. ("So _she_ could answer," Matthew thought, "and
+better, too, than that.") And the children brought him a shell, a pretty
+stone, a broken watch, and a little woolly lamb on three wheels, and the
+fourth wheel missing. The lamb had a sound to make by squeezing, and
+this sound Matthew made a great many times, and every time the children
+laughed. And when they did that Matthew could think of nothing to say
+that seemed a thing to be said, but he was inscrutably elated, and did
+the trick again.
+
+And when he rose to take his leave:--
+
+"Is it for them that you make bread and a dream or two?" he asked.
+
+He knew that he should always like to remember the citizen's smile as he
+answered.
+
+They stood at the opening of the hedge and folk were going by.
+
+"Are they not jealous of you?" Matthew asked.
+
+"They have families and bread and dreams of their own," said the
+citizen. "Every house is filled with them."
+
+Matthew looked breathlessly along the street of the New Village, and he
+saw men, as they went, giving one another greeting: "Friend, is much
+accomplished?" or, "Peace to you, Friend." And they talked together, and
+entered gardens where were those who came to meet them or who waited
+within. They were a fine company, moving as to some secret way of being,
+and as if they had all looked deep within to see how it is written. And
+as he watched, something in Matthew would have cried out that he, too,
+was offspring of their Father, that for all this had he too been
+created, and that for this would he live, joying and passioning and
+toiling in the common destiny. But when he spoke, all that he could say
+was:--
+
+"Every man, then, may sit down now with a lamb with three wheels and the
+fourth wheel missing...."
+
+On which he ceased for very shame. But the citizen understood and smiled
+once more, and said to him: "Come you here again, Brother."
+
+With that word Matthew was off, down from the clear upper spaces, to
+where, lonely on its hill, his own house stood among its lonely
+neighbours. And Matthew strode shouting down the deserted streets and
+calling at every gate; and, it being now day, every one came forth to
+his lonely toil.
+
+Matthew went and stood on the common where the weeds were high, and so
+amazed were the folk that they came about him, each suspecting the other
+of secret connivance in this strange business. For nothing had ever been
+done so.
+
+"Men and brothers," cried Matthew, "it is not so that it was meant. I
+pray you look deep within, and see how the meaning was written. Is it
+that you should live, each pitted against another, wounding the other,
+advantaging himself? Join now each his hand with that of a neighbour.
+_His neighbour._ Make the thing of which, it seems, the world is made;
+a family. Let the thing come alive which is greater than the family: the
+community. Oh, my comrades, let us work together for the coming of the
+kingdom of God."
+
+In the murmur that rose were the words which have been spoken since time
+began:--
+
+"It is not so that it was done in the old time...."
+
+"It is not seemly that we change...."
+
+"If every one did this ... but we cannot do it alone."
+
+"Have you thought what will become of our business?"
+
+And again and yet again: "It is not so that it was done in the old
+time."
+
+And when the most would have none of it, Matthew made his way sadly
+through the throng--of whom were many who smiled (kindly!)--to the edge
+of the common, where stood a woman, trembling.
+
+"Come," he said.
+
+She went with him, and she with many little frightened breaths, but he
+had no pity, for he read deep within and saw that it was written that
+she wanted none. When they reached her own house, she would have
+entered.
+
+"Go we in here," she besought him, "I will show you the rooms where I go
+about and the lamps that I light."
+
+"We are past all that now," said Matthew, gently, "I will not go on
+living where you do not live."
+
+He took her to his own house, through the garden that he had planted. He
+made her look from his window, sit by his table, open his books; and he
+bade her to a little task at the cupboard and laughed for joy that she
+performed it.
+
+"Oh, come away," he cried. "And now we will go quickly to the New
+Village, that one which I have found or another, where men know all this
+happiness and more."
+
+But she stood there by Matthew's cupboard and shook her head.
+
+"No," she said gravely, "here we will stay, you and I, in your house.
+Here we will live--and it may be there is a handful of others who
+understand. And here we will do what we can."
+
+"But I must show you," Matthew cried, "the way the others live--the
+things they strive for: the following of paths to clearer spaces, the
+freeing of shrines."
+
+"All that," she said, "we will do here."
+
+"But," he urged, "you must see how else they do--the shell, the pretty
+stone, the watch, the woolly lamb on three wheels and one wheel
+missing...."
+
+"All that," she said, "is in my heart."
+
+Matthew looked in her face and marvelled, for he saw that beside her
+beauty there was her power, and to that he bowed himself as to a far
+voice. And again it was as when the bird was at his breast, but now he
+knew what this would be.
+
+So they live there in Matthew's house. And a handful besides understand
+and toil for the fairer order. And this will come; and then that New
+Village, in the clear upper spaces, will hang just above every
+village--nay, will come down to clothe it like a garment.
+
+
+When I had done,
+
+"Peter," I said--I nearly called him Matthew!--"these are the things
+that Miggy does not understand. And that she will understand."
+
+He knew. He said nothing; but he knew how it is written.
+
+"Peter," I said, "I suppose Miggy will never have been to your house?"
+
+I knew that she could not have been there.
+
+"Some day soon," I said--"before you go away--ask us to come there. I
+should like her to sit by your table and look from your window."
+
+For how can one be sure that divine non-interference is always divine?
+
+Peter drew his breath long.
+
+"Would you?" he said; "would you? So many times I've thought maybe that
+would make her think of me as if I _was_ me."
+
+Yes, that might help. If only Miggy knew how to shake hands as Elfa
+shook hands with Nicholas Moor, that might help, too. How did it begin,
+this pride of individualism in a race which does not know its own
+destiny save as the great relationships, human and divine, can reveal
+that destiny? But Peter knows! And the hope of the world is that so many
+do know.
+
+Since he said his grateful good night and rushed away, I have been
+trying to readjust my impression of Peter. For I can no longer think of
+him in connection with Miggy and the cannery and my neighbour's lawn and
+the village. Now he is a figure ranging the ample intervals of a field
+fraternal to the night and to the day. Fraternal, too, to any little
+moon-washed area, won from the void, where it is easy to be in
+conference with the spirit without and within. Truly, it is as if the
+meaning of the universe were passioning for the comradeship of hearts
+that can understand.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+ADOPTION
+
+
+The big window of my sitting room is an isle of sirens on whose shore
+many of my bird neighbours are continually coming to grief. For, from
+without, the window makes a place of soft skies and seductive leaves
+where any bird might think to wing a way. And in that mirrored deep
+there is that curious atmosphere which makes In-a-looking-glass a better
+thing than the room which it reflects--an elusive sense which Little
+Child might call Isn't-any-such-placeness. I think that I might call it
+so too. And so, evidently, the birds would call it, for they are always
+trying to find there some path of flight.
+
+A morning or two ago, when I heard against the pane the soft thud of an
+eager little body, I hurried out to see lying under the window an
+oriole. It was too terrible that it should have been an oriole. For days
+I had seen him hanging here and there, back downward, on this limb and
+that, and heard his full-throated note ringing from the innermost air,
+so that the deeps of air could never again be wholly alien to me. And
+now he lay, his wings outstretched, his eyes dim, his breast hardly
+moving. I watched him, hoping for the breath to begin to flutter and
+labour. But though the great Nature was with him, herself passioning in
+all the little fibres to keep life pulsing on, yet her passion was not
+enough; and while I looked the little life went out.
+
+... I held the tiny body in my hand, and it was almost as if the
+difference between living and not living slipped through my fingers and
+was gone. If only that one within me, who watches between the seeing and
+the knowing, had been a little quicker, I might almost have
+understood....
+
+"Them little things go out like a match," said my neighbour.
+
+She was standing on the other side of the box hedge, and I caught a look
+on her face that I had seen there once or twice before, so that my heart
+had warmed to her; and now, because of that look, she fitted within the
+moment like the right word.
+
+"It don't seem like anybody could _mean_ 'em to die before their time,"
+she said. "Ain't it almost as if it happened when Everything somehow
+couldn't help it?"
+
+It was this, the tragedy of the Unfulfilled Intention, that was in my
+mind while I hollowed the little grave under the hedge. And when we had
+finished, my neighbour, who had stepped informally over the box to help
+me, looked up with a return of that fleeting expression which I had
+noted.
+
+"I guess we've found one now for sure," she said.
+
+"Found one?" I puzzled.
+
+"I thought you knew," she told me. "I thought everybody knew--we've been
+looking for one so long. For a baby."
+
+She never had told me and no one had told me, but I loved her for
+thinking that all the world knew. There are abroad a multitude of these
+sweet suspicions as well as the sad misgivings of the hunted. She had
+simply let me know, that early morning in the garden, her sorrow that
+there was "no little thing runnin' round." And now she told me for how
+long they had been trying to find one to adopt, consciously serving no
+social need, but simply hungering for a child whom they could "take to."
+It was a story of fruitless visits to the homes in the city, the news
+sent of this little waif or that, all proving too old or of too sad an
+inheritance. To me it would seem that the more tragic the inheritance
+the more poignantly sounds the cry for foster-folk. And this may be
+extreme, I know, but virtue, I find, does not lie exclusively in the
+mean, either. It lies partly in one's taste in extremes. However, this
+special extreme I find not generally believed in as I believe in it; and
+my neighbour, not sharing it, had waited on with empty arms.
+
+And now, after all the long hoping, she had found a baby--a baby who
+filled all the requirements and more. First of all, he was a boy;
+second, he was of healthful Scotch parentage; third, he was six weeks
+old; and, fondest I could see in my neighbour's heart, he was good to
+look at. When she told me this she produced, from beneath her apron, a
+broken picture post-card. The baby was lying on a white blanket spread
+on the grass, and he was looking up with the intentness of some little
+soul not yet embodied; or as if, having been born, some shadow-thing,
+left over from his source of shadows, yet detained his attention.
+"William," it said beneath the picture.
+
+"But I shall call him Kenneth," my neighbour said; "I've always meant
+to. I don't want he should be called after his father, being he isn't
+ours, you might say. But he is ours," she added in a kind of challenge.
+"_He's_ going after him to-morrow to the city"--and now "he" meant her
+husband, in that fine habit of use by these husbands and wives of the
+two third persons singular to mean only each other, in a splendid,
+ultimate, inevitable sense, authentic as the "we" of a sovereign, no
+more to be mistaken. "I'd go too," she added, "but we're adopting the
+baby with the egg money--we've saved it for years for when the time
+come. And one fare to the city and back is a lot of eggs. I thought I'd
+rather wait for him here and have the ticket money to spend on the
+clothes."
+
+She was on her way, I thought I guessed, to carry her good news to our
+friends in the village, for she bore that same air which I have noted,
+of being impermanent and subject to flight. And as she left me she
+turned to give me one of those rare compliments which are priceless.
+
+"You come over this afternoon," she said, "and I'll show you what little
+things I've made."
+
+I remember another compliment. It was when, in town, a charming little
+woman, a woman all of physical curves and mental tangents, had been
+telling a group of us about a gay day in a four-in-hand. She had not
+looked at me because for that sort of woman, as well as for others, I
+lack all that which would make them take account of my presence; but
+when in the four-in-hand she came to some mention of the road where the
+accident had nearly occurred ("Oh, it was a beautiful road," she said,
+"the river on one side, and the highlands, and a whole _mob_ of trees,")
+she turned straight upon me through her description as consistently as
+she had neglected me when she described the elbow-bits of the leaders
+and the boots of the woman on the box-seat. It may have been a chance,
+but I have always hugged it to me.
+
+My neighbour's house is small, and her little upstairs rooms are the
+half-story with sloping ceilings and windows which extend from the floor
+to the top of one's head. It gives me a curious sense of
+over-familiarity with a window to be as tall as it is. I feel that I
+have it at advantage and that I am using it with undue intimacy. When I
+was a little girl I used to creep under the dining-room table and sit
+there, looking up, transfixed at the difference. A new angle of material
+vision, the sight of the other side of the shield, always gives me this
+pause. But whereas this other aspect of things used to be a delight,
+now, in life, I shrink a little from availing myself of certain
+revelations. I have a great wish to know things, but I would know them
+otherwise than by looking at their linings. I think that even a window
+should be sanctioned in its reticences.
+
+Before a black walnut commode my neighbour knelt that afternoon, and I
+found that it was filled with the things which she had made for the
+baby, when they should find him. These she showed to me--they were
+simple and none too fine, and she had made them on her sewing-machine in
+the intervals of her busy life. For three years she had wrought at them,
+buying them from the egg money. I wondered if this secret pastime of
+garment-making might not account for my impression of her that she must
+always be off to engage in something other. Perhaps it was this
+occupation, always calling her, which would not let her appear fixed at
+garden-watering or festival. I think that it may be so of any who are
+"pressed in the spirit" to serve, to witness to any truth: that is their
+vocation and every other is an avocation, a calling away from the real
+business of life. For this reason it is my habit to think of the social
+workers in any division of the service, family or town or state or
+church, as Vocationists. It is they who are following the one great
+occupation. The rest of us are avocationists. In my neighbour I
+perceived one of the great comrade company of the Vocationists,
+unconscious of her banner, but because of some sweet, secret piping,
+following, following....
+
+"I've always thought I'd get to do a little embroidering on a yoke or
+two," she said, "but so far I couldn't. Anyway I thought I could do the
+plain part and running the machine before he came. The other I could sit
+by the crib and do. Embroidery seems sort o' baby-watchin' work, don't
+it?"
+
+When I left her I walked across the lawns to my home in a sense of
+security and peace. With increasing thousands consciously striving and
+passioning to help, and thousands helping because of the unconscious
+spirit within them, are there not many windows in the walls?
+
+"He" was to go by the Accommodation early next morning to bring home the
+baby. Therefore when, just before seven o'clock, I observed my
+neighbour's husband leave his home and join Peter at his gate as usual,
+I went at once to see if something was amiss.
+
+My neighbour was having breakfast as her custom was "after the men-folks
+were out of the way." At all events she was pretending to eat. I saw in
+her eyes that something was troubling her, but she greeted me
+cheerfully. I sat by the sewing-machine while she went on with her
+pretence at breakfast.
+
+"The little thing's sick," she said. "Last night we got the despatch.
+'Baby in hospital for day or two. Will advise often,' it had in it. I'm
+glad they put that in. I'll feel better to know they'll get good
+advice."
+
+I sat with her for a long time, regardless of my work or that Miggy was
+waiting for me. I was struck by the charm of matter-of-fact hopefulness
+in my neighbour, not the deliberate forcing of hope, but the simple
+expectation that nothing tragic would occur. But for all that she ate no
+breakfast, and I knew well the faint, quite physical sickness that she
+must have endured since the message came.
+
+"I'm going to get his basket ready to-day," she said. "I never did that,
+two reasons. One was, it seemed sort of taking too much for granted,
+like heating your spider before the meat wagon drives up. The other
+reason was I needed the basket for the clothes."
+
+I stayed with her while she made ready the clothes-basket, lining it
+with an old muslin curtain, filling it with pillows, covering it with
+the afghan from the parlour couch. Then, in a shoe box edged with the
+curtain's broad ruffle, she put an array of little things: the brush
+from the spare-room bureau, the pincushion from her own work-basket, a
+sachet bag that had come with a last year's Christmas gift, a cake of
+"nice soap" which she had kept for years and never unwrapped because it
+was so expensive. And then she added a little glass-stoppered bottle of
+white pills.
+
+"I don't know what they're for," she said. "I found them when I
+housecleaned, and there was so many of 'em I hated to throw 'em away. Of
+course I'll never use 'em, but they look sort of nice in there--so white
+and a glass cork--don't you think so?"
+
+She walked with me across the lawn and stood brooding, one hand across
+her mouth, looking down at the disturbance--so slight!--in the grass
+where we had laid the bird. And on her face was the look which, each
+time that I saw it there, drew me nearer to her.
+
+"'Seems as if I'd ought to be there to the hospital," she said, "doing
+what I can. Do you s'pose they'll take good care of him? I guess they
+know more about it than I do. But if I could get hold of him in my arms
+it seems as if I could help 'em."
+
+I said what I could, and she went away to her house. And for the first
+time since I had known her she did not seem put upon to be back at some
+employment. These times of unwonted idleness are terrible to witness. I
+remember a farmer whom I once saw in the afternoon, dressed in his best,
+waiting in the kitchen for the hour of his daughter's wedding, and I
+wondered that the great hands did not work of their own will. The lost
+aspect of certain men on holidays, the awful inactivity of the day of a
+funeral, the sad idleness of old age, all these are very near to the
+tragedy of negation. Work, the positive, the normal, the joyous, is like
+an added way of being. I thought that I would never again marvel at my
+neighbour for being always on the edge of flight to some pressing
+occupation. Why should she not be so?--with all that there is to be
+done. Whether we rush about, or conceal the need and rush secretly, is a
+detail of our breeding; the need is to get things done, to become by
+doing. And while for myself I would prefer the accomplishment of not
+seeming to hurry, as another is accomplished at the harp, yet I own that
+I would cheerfully forego the pretty grace rather than find myself
+without some slight degree of the robust proficiency of getting things
+done.
+
+"If you're born a picture in a book," Calliope once said, "it's all very
+well to set still on the page an' hold your hands. But if you're born
+anyways human at all, stick up your head an' start out for somewhere."
+
+My neighbour rarely comes to my house. And therefore, though she is to
+me so familiar a figure in her garden, when next morning I found her
+awaiting me in my sitting room, she seemed strange to me. Perhaps, too,
+she was really strange to me that day.
+
+"My baby died," she said.
+
+She stood there looking at me, and I knew that what she said was true,
+but it seemed to me for a moment that I could not have it so.
+
+"He died yesterday in the evening," she told me. "I just heard this
+morning, when the telegraph office opened. I dressed myself to go after
+him, but _he's_ gone."
+
+"To go after him?" I repeated.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"He was in the charity part. I was afraid they'd bury him in the
+potter's field and they wouldn't mark--it, and that I couldn't never
+tell which one it was. So I want to get him and have him buried here.
+_He_ didn't want I should go--he thought it'd be too much for me. But I
+was bound to, so he says he'd go. They'd ought to get here on the Five
+o'Clock this afternoon. Oh, if I'd went yesterday, do you think it would
+'a' been any different?"
+
+There I could comfort her. I did not think it would have been different.
+But when I tried to tell her how much better it was this way than that
+the baby should first have come to her and then have sickened, she would
+have none of it.
+
+"I've never held him once," she said. "Do you s'pose anything could be
+worse than that? I'd rather have got hold of him once, no matter what."
+
+It touched me unutterably, the grief of this mother who was no mother. I
+had no knowledge what to say to her. But I think that what she wanted
+most was companionship. She went to one and another and another of our
+neighbours to whom she had shown so happily the broken post-card
+picture, and to them in the same way she took the news:--
+
+"My baby died."
+
+And I was amazed to find how in this little time, the tentacles of her
+heart having fastened and clung, she had made for herself, without ever
+having seen the child, little things to tell about him: His eyes were so
+bright; the sun was shining and the picture was made out-of-doors, yet
+the eyes were opened wide. They were blue eyes--had she told us? Had we
+noticed the hands in the picture? And the head was a beautiful shape....
+All this seemed to me marvellous. For I saw that no woman ever mourns
+for any child dumbly, as a bird mourns a fledgling, but even if she
+never sees it, she will yet contrive some little tender ways to give it
+personality and to cherish it.
+
+They did their best to comfort her, the women of the village. But many
+of them had lost little children of their own, and these women could not
+regard her loss as at all akin to theirs. I think that this my neighbour
+felt; and perhaps she dimly felt that to me her grief, hardly less than
+theirs, brimmed with the tragic disaster of the unfulfilled and bore,
+besides, its own peculiar bitterness. In any case I was of those who,
+that afternoon, went out to the cemetery to await the coming of my
+neighbour and "him" and their little burden. Calliope was there, and
+Mis' Amanda Toplady and Miggy; and when it was time to go Little Child
+was with me, so she went too. For I am not of those who keep from
+children familiarity with death. Familiarity with the ways of death I
+would spare them, but not the basic things, primal as day.
+
+"I don't want to give a real funeral," my neighbour had said. "I just
+want the few that I tell to happen out there to the cemetery, along
+about five. And then we'll come with him. It seems as if it'll hurt
+less that way. I couldn't bear to see a whole line driving along, and
+me look back and know who it was for."
+
+The cemetery had the dignity and serenity of a meadow, a meadow still
+somewhat amazed that it had been for a while distracted from its ancient
+uses, but, after all, perceiving no permanent difference in its
+function. I am never weary of walking down these grassy streets and of
+recounting their strangenesses. As that of the headstone of David
+Bibber's wives, one stone extending across the heads of the two graves
+and at either end of the stone two Gothic peaks from whose inner slopes
+reach two marble hands, clasped midway, and,
+
+
+     SACRED TO THE WIVES OF DAVID BIBBER
+
+
+inscribed below, the wifely names not appearing in the epitaph. And that
+of Mark Sturgis who, the village said, had had the good luck to marry
+two women named Dora; so he had erected a low monument to "Dora, Beloved
+Wife of Mark Sturgis, Jr." ("But how mixin' it must be to the ghosts!"
+Calliope said.) And of the young girl of a former Friendship family of
+wealth, a girl who sleeps beneath a monument on which stands a great
+figure of a young woman in a white marble dress made with three
+flounces. ("Honest," Calliope had put it, "you can't hardly tell
+whether it's a tomb or a valentine.")
+
+But these have for me an interest less of the bizarre than of the human,
+and nothing that is human was alien to that hour.
+
+We waited for them by the new little grave, the disturbance--so
+slight!--in the earth where we would lay the stranger baby. Our hands
+were filled with garden flowers--Calliope had drawn a little hand cart
+laden with ferns and sweet-brier, and my dear Mis' Amanda Toplady had
+cut all the half-blown buds from her loved tea rose.
+
+"It seems like a little baby wasn't real dead that I hadn't helped lay
+out," said that great Mis' Amanda, trying to find her handkerchief. "Oh,
+I wish't it was alive. It seems like such a little bit of comin' alive
+to ask the Lord!"
+
+And as the afternoon shadows drew about us with fostering arms,
+
+"Out-Here knows we feel bad more than Down Town, don't it?" said Little
+Child.
+
+I have always thought very beautiful that village custom of which I have
+before spoken, which provides that the father and mother of a little
+baby who dies may take it with them in a closed carriage to the grave.
+It was so that my neighbour and her husband brought their baby to the
+cemetery from the station, with the little coffin on their knees.
+
+On the box beside the driver Peter was riding. We learned afterward
+that he had appeared at the station and had himself taken that little
+coffin from the car. "So then it didn't have to be on the truck at all,"
+my neighbour noted thankfully when she told me. I think that it must be
+this living with only a street or two between folk and the open country
+which gives these unconscious sharpenings of sensibility often,
+otherwhere, bred only by old niceties of habit.
+
+So little Kenneth was buried, who never had the name save in unreality;
+whom my neighbour had never tended; who lived for her only in dream and
+on that broken post-card and here in the hidden dust. It made her grief
+so sad a thing that her arms did not miss him; nor had he slipped from
+any usage of the day; nor was any link broken with the past; only the
+plans that had hung in air had gone out, like flames which had kindled
+nothing. Because of this she sorrowed from within some closed place at
+which her husband could only guess, who stood patiently without in his
+embarrassed concern, his clumsy anxiety to do what there was to be done,
+his wondering distress at his wife's drooping grief. But her sorrow was
+rooted in the love of women for the "little young thing, runnin' round,"
+for which she had long passioned.
+
+"Oh, God, who lived in the spirit of the little Lord Jesus, live Thou
+in this child's spirit, and it in Thee, world without end," Doctor June
+prayed. And Little Child whispered to me and then went to let fall a
+pink in the grave. "So if the flower gets to be an angel flower, then
+they can go round together," she explained.
+
+When I looked up there were in the west the first faint heraldings of
+rose. And against it stood Miggy and Peter, side by side, looking down
+this new way of each other's lives which took account of sorrow. He said
+something to her, and she nodded, and gave him her white hollyhocks to
+lay with the rest. And as they turned away together Little Child
+whispered to me, pulling herself, by my arm, to high tiptoe:--
+
+"That little child we put in the sunset," she said, nodding to the west,
+"it's there now. It's there now!"
+
+Perhaps it was that my heart was filled with the tragedy of the
+unfulfilled intention, perhaps it was that I thought that Little Child's
+whispering was true. In any case I hastened my steps, and as we passed
+out on the road I overtook Miggy and Peter.
+
+"Peter," said I, "may Miggy and I come to pay you that visit now, on the
+way back?"
+
+Miggy looked startled.
+
+"It's supper time," she objected.
+
+Who are we that we should interrupt a sunset, or a situation, or the
+stars in their courses, merely to sup? Neither Miggy nor I belong to
+those who do so. Besides, we had to pass Peter's very door. I said so,
+and all the time Peter's face was glowing.
+
+"Hurry on ahead," I bade him, "and Miggy and Little Child and I will
+come in your house to call."
+
+He looked at me gratefully, and waited for good night to my neighbour,
+and went swiftly away down the road toward the sunset.
+
+"Oh, goody grand, goody grand," Little Child went on softly, in an
+invocation of her own to some secret divinity of her pleasure. "Oh, that
+little child we put there, it's talkin' to the sky, an' I guess that
+makes sunset be!"
+
+My neighbour was looking back across the tranquil meadow which might
+have been deep with summer hay instead of mounded to its sad harvest.
+
+"I wish," she said, "I could have had his little grave in my garden,
+same as you would a bird. Still I s'pose a cemet'ry is a cemet'ry and
+had ought to be buried in. But oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to
+have him here in Friendship Village. It's better to think about, ain't
+it?"
+
+But the thing that gripped my heart was to see her, beside her husband,
+go down the road and not hurry. All that bustling impermanence was
+fallen from her. I think that now I am becoming thankful for every one
+who goes busily quickening the day with a multitude, yes, even with a
+confusion, of homely, cheerful tasks.
+
+Miggy slipped her hand within my arm.
+
+"Did you think of it?" she said. "I've been, all the time. It's most the
+same with her as it would be to me if I'd lost _her_. You know ... that
+little Margaret. I mean, if she should never be."
+
+As when one hears the note of an oriole ringing from the innermost air,
+so now it seems to me that after these things the deeps of air can never
+again be wholly alien to me.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+AT PETER'S HOUSE
+
+
+I wondered somewhat that Peter did not come out of his house to fetch
+us. He was not even about the little yard when we went up the walk,
+though he knew that we must arrive but a few moments after he did.
+Little Child ran away to pick Bouncing Bet and Sweet Clover in the long,
+rank grass of the unkept garden. And Miggy and I went and stood on the
+porch before Peter's door, and I knew what I intended.
+
+"Rap!" I said to Miggy.
+
+She looked at me in surprise--I have not often commanded her like that.
+But I wanted to see her stand at Peter's door asking for admission. And
+I think that Peter had wanted it too and that this was why he had not
+come to the gate to fetch us. I guessed it by the light on his face
+when, in the middle of Miggy's knock, he caught open the door. I like to
+remember his face as it looked at that moment, with the little twist of
+mouth and lifting of brow which gave him a peculiar sweetness and
+naïveté, curiously contradicted by the way his eyes were when they met
+Miggy's.
+
+"How long it took you," he said. "Come in. _Come in._"
+
+We went in, and I looked at Miggy. For I did not want her to step in
+that house as she would have stepped in a house that was just a house.
+Is it not wonderful how some front doors are Front Doors Plus? I do not
+know plus what--that is one of those good little in-between things which
+we know without always naming. But there are some front doors which are
+to me boards and glass and a tinkling cymbal bell; while other doors of
+no better architecture let me within dear depths of homes which are to
+houses what friends are to inhabitants. It was so that I would have had
+Miggy go within Peter's house,--not as within doors, but as within arms.
+
+We entered directly from the porch into the small parlour--the kind of
+man's parlour that makes a woman long to take it on her lap and tend it.
+There were no curtains. Between the windows was a big table filled with
+neat piles of newspapers and weeklies till there should be time to look
+them over. The shelf had a lamp, not filled, a clock, not going, and a
+pile of seed catalogues. On two walls were three calendars with big
+hollyhocks and puppies and ladies in sunbonnets. The entire inner wall
+was occupied by a map of the state--why does a man so cherish a map of
+something, hung up somewhere? On the organ was a row of blue books--what
+is it that men are always looking for in blue books? In a corner, on the
+floor, stood a shotgun. The wood stove had been "left up" all summer to
+save putting it up in the fall--this business of getting a stove on
+rollers and jacking it up and remembering where it stood so that the
+pipe will fit means, in the village, a day of annual masculine sacrifice
+to the feminine foolishness of wanting stoves down in summer. There was
+nothing disorderly about the room; but it was dressed with no sash or
+hair ribbon or coral beads, as a man dresses his little girl.
+
+"We don't use this room much," Peter said. "We sit in here sometimes in
+summer, but I think when a man sits in his parlour he always feels like
+he was being buried from it, same as they're used for."
+
+"Why--" said Miggy, and stopped. What she was going to say it was not
+important to know, but I was glad that she had been going to say it.
+Something, perhaps, about this being a very pretty room if there were
+somebody to give it a touch or two.
+
+Peter was obviously eager to be in the next room, and that, he
+explained, would have been the dining room, only he had taken it for
+his own, and they ate in the kitchen. I think that I had never heard him
+mention his father at all, and this "we" of his now was a lonelier thing
+than any lonely "I."
+
+"This is my room," he said as we entered it. "It's where I live when I'm
+not at the works. Come and let me show you."
+
+So Peter showed Miggy his room, and he showed it to me, too, though I do
+not think that he was conscious of that. It was a big room, bare of
+floor and, save for the inescapable flowery calendar, bare of walls.
+There was a shelf of books--not many, but according to Peter's nature
+sufficiently well-selected to plead for him: "Look at us. Who could love
+us and not be worth while?"--bad enough logic, in all conscience, to
+please any lover. Miggy hardly looked at the books. She so
+exasperatingly took it for granted that a man must be everything in
+general that it left hardly anything for him to be in particular. But
+Peter made her look, and he let me look too, and I supplied the comments
+and Miggy occasionally did her three little nods. The writing table
+Peter had made from a box, and by this Miggy was equally untouched. All
+men, it appeared, should be able to make writing tables from boxes. With
+the linen table cover it was a little different--this Peter's mother had
+once worked in cross-stitch for his room, and Miggy lifted an end and
+looked at it.
+
+"She took all those stitches for you!" she said. "There's one broken,"
+she showed him.
+
+"I can mend that," Peter said proudly, "I'll show you my needle kit."
+
+At this she laughed out suddenly with, "_Needle kit!_ What a real
+regular old bachelor you are, aren't you?"
+
+"I can't help that," said Peter, with "and the same cannot be said for
+you" sticking from the sentence.
+
+On the table lay the cannery account books, and one was open at a full
+page of weary little figures.
+
+"Is this where you sit nights and do your work and read?" Miggy
+demanded.
+
+"Right here," Peter told her, "every night of the year, 'most. Except
+when I come to see you."
+
+Miggy stood looking at the table and the wooden chair.
+
+"That's funny," she remarked finally, with an air of meditative
+surprise; "they know you so much better than I do, don't they?"
+
+"Well," Peter said gravely, "they haven't been thought about as much as
+you have, Miggy--that's one thing."
+
+"Thinking's nothing," said Miggy, merrily; "sometimes you get a tune in
+your head and you can't get it out."
+
+"Sit down at the table," said Peter, abruptly. "Sit down!" he repeated,
+when her look questioned him. "I want to see you there."
+
+She obeyed him, laughing a little, and quite in the woman's way of
+pretending that obedience is a choice. Peter looked at her. It is true
+that he had been doing nothing else all the while, but now that she sat
+at the table--his table--he looked more than before.
+
+"Well," he said, "well, well." As a man says when he has a present and
+has no idea what to say about it.
+
+Peter's photographs were on the wall above the table, and Peter suddenly
+leaned past Miggy and took down the picture of his mother and put it in
+her hand, without saying anything. For the first time Miggy met his
+eyes.
+
+"Your mother," she said, "why, Peter. She looked--oh, Peter, she looked
+like you!"
+
+Peter nodded. "Yes, I do look like she did," he said; "I'm always so
+glad."
+
+"She knew you when you were a little bit of a baby, Peter," Miggy
+advanced suddenly.
+
+Peter admitted it gravely. She had.
+
+"Well," said Miggy, as Peter had said it. "Well."
+
+There was a picture of Peter's father as a young man,--black,
+curly-haired, black-moustached, the cheeks slightly tinted in the
+picture, his hands laid trimly along his knees. The face was weak,
+empty, but it held that mere confidence of youth which always gives a
+special sting to the grief of unfulfilment. Over this they passed,
+saying nothing. It struck me that in the delicacy of that silence it was
+almost as if Miggy shared something with Peter. Also, it struck me
+pleasantly that Miggy's indifference to the personalities of divers
+aunts in straight bangs and long basques was slightly exaggerated,
+especially when, "I never thought about your having any aunts," she
+observed.
+
+And then Peter took down a tiny picture of the sort we call in the
+village "card size," and gave it to her.
+
+"Guess who," he said.
+
+It was a little boy of not more than five, in a straight black coat
+dress, buttoned in the front and trimmed with broad black velvet strips,
+and having a white scalloped collar and white cuffs. One hand was
+resting on the back of a camp-chair and the other held a black helmet
+cap. The shoes had double rows of buttons, and for some secret reason
+the photographer had had the child laboriously cross one foot
+negligently over the other. The fine head, light-curled, was resting in
+the horns of that ex-device that steadied one out of all semblance to
+self. But in spite of the man who had made the picture, the little boy
+was so wholly adorable that you wanted to say so.
+
+"Peter!" Miggy said, "It's _you_."
+
+I do not know how she knew. I think that I would not have known. But
+Miggy knew, and her knowing made me understand something which evidently
+she herself did not understand. For she looked at the picture and looked
+at it, a strange, surprised smile on her face. And,
+
+"Well, well, _well_," she said again. "I never thought about that
+before. I mean about you. _Then._"
+
+"Would--would you want that picture, Miggy?" Peter asked; "you can have
+it if you do."
+
+"Can I really?" said Miggy. "Well, I do want it. Goodness...."
+
+"I always kind of thought," Peter said slowly, "that when I have a son
+he'll look something like that. He might, you know."
+
+Peter was leaning beside her, elbows on the table, and Miggy looked up
+at him over the picture of the child, and made her three little nods.
+
+"Yes," she said, "you would want your little boy to look like you."
+
+"And I'd want him named Peter. It's a homely old name, but I'd want him
+to have it."
+
+"Peter isn't a homely name," said Miggy, in a manner of surprise. "Yes,
+of course you'd want him--"
+
+The sentence fell between them unfinished. And I thought that Miggy's
+face, still somewhat saddened by the little Kenneth and now tender with
+its look for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing of colour.
+But then I saw that this would be the light of the sunset on her cheeks,
+for now the West was become a glory of rose and yellow, so that it held
+captive her eyes. It is too frail a thing for me to have grasped by
+sense, but the Moment seemed to say--and could give no reason--that our
+sunset compact Miggy kept then without remembering the compact.
+
+It almost startled me when out in the unkept garden Little Child began
+to sing. We had nearly forgotten her and we could not see her, so that
+she might have been any other little child wandering in the sweet
+clover, or merely a little voice coming in with the western light:--
+
+
+     "I like to stand in this great air
+     And see the sun go down.
+     It shows me a bright veil to wear
+     And such a pretty gown.
+     Oh, I can see a playmate there
+     Far up in Splendour Town!"
+
+
+"Look here," said Peter to Miggy; and I went over to the sunset window
+and let them go on alone.
+
+He led her about the room, and she still had the little picture in her
+hand. From the bureau, with its small array of cheap brushes and boxes,
+she turned abruptly away. I think that she may have felt as I felt
+about the splash of rose on the rose-breasted grosbeak's throat--that I
+ought not to have been looking. Beyond was a little old dry-goods box
+for odds and ends, a box which must have known, with a kind of feminine
+intelligence, that it ought to be covered with cretonne. On this box
+Miggy knelt to read Peter's high school diploma, and she stopped before
+a picture of the house where he was born. "Was it there?" she asked.
+"Doesn't that seem funny?" Which manifestly it did not seem. "Is _that_
+where your violin lives?" she asked, when they came to its
+corner--surely a way of betrayal that she had thought of it as living
+somewhere else. And all the while she carried the picture in her hand,
+and the sunset glorified the room, and Little Child was singing in the
+garden.
+
+"Peter," said Miggy, "I don't believe a man who can play the violin can
+sew. Give me the needle kit. I'm going to mend the table cover--may I?"
+
+Might she! Peter, his face shining, brought out his red flannel
+needle-book--he kept it on the shelf with his shaving things!--and, his
+face shining more, sat on a creaking camp-chair and watched her.
+
+"Miggy," he said, as she caught the threads skilfully together, "I don't
+believe I've ever seen you sew. I know I never have."
+
+"This isn't sewing," Miggy said.
+
+"It's near enough like it to suit me," said Peter.
+
+He drew a breath long, and looked about him. I knew how he was seeing
+the bare room, lamp-lighted, and himself trying to work in spite of the
+longing that teased and possessed him and bade him give it up and lean
+back and think of her; or of tossing on the hard couch in the tyranny of
+living his last hour with her and of living, too, the hours that might
+never be. And here she was in this room--his room. Peter dropped his
+head on his hand and his eyes did not leave her face save to venture an
+occasional swift, ecstatic excursion to her fingers.
+
+Simply and all quietly, as Nature sends her gifts, miracles moved toward
+completion while Miggy sewed. The impulse to do for him this trifling
+service was like a signal, and when she took up the needle for him I
+think that women whose hands had long lain quiet stirred within her
+blood. As for Peter--but these little housewifely things which enlighten
+a woman merely tease a man, who already knows their import and longs for
+all sweet fragments of time to be merged in the long possession.
+
+Miggy gave the needle back to Peter and he took it--needle, red book,
+and hand.
+
+"Miggy!" he said, and the name on his lips was like another name. And it
+was as if she were in some place remote and he were calling her.
+
+She looked at him as if she knew the call. Since the world began, only
+for one reason does a man call a woman like that.
+
+"What is it you want?" she said--and her voice was very sweet and very
+tired.
+
+"I want more of _you_!" said Peter Cary.
+
+She may have tried to say something, but her voice trembled away.
+
+"I thought it would be everything--your coming here to-day," Peter said.
+"I've wanted it and wanted it. And what does it amount to? Nothing,
+except to make me wild with wanting you never to go away. I dread to
+think of your leaving me here--shutting the door and being gone. If it
+was just plain wanting you I could meet that, and beat it, like I do the
+things down to the works. But it isn't that. It's like it was something
+big--bigger than me, and outside of me, and it gets hold of me, and it's
+like it asked for you without my knowing. I can't do anything that you
+aren't some of it. It isn't fair, Miggy. I want more of you--all of
+you--all the time, Miggy, all the time...."
+
+I should have liked to see Miggy's face when she looked at Peter, whose
+eyes were giving her everything and were asking everything of her; but I
+was studying the sunset, glory upon glory, to match the glory here. And
+the singing of Little Child began again, like that of a little voice
+vagrant in the red west....
+
+
+     "Oh, I can see a playmate there,
+     Far up in Splendour Town!"
+
+
+Miggy heard her, and remembered.
+
+"Peter, Peter!" she cried, "I couldn't--I never could bring us two on
+you to support."
+
+Peter gave her hands a little shake, as if he would have shaken her. I
+think that he would have shaken her if it had been two or three thousand
+years earlier in the world's history.
+
+"You two!" he cried; "why, Miggy, when we marry do I want--or do you
+want--that it should stay just you and me? We want children. I want you
+for their mother as much as I want you for my wife."
+
+It was the voice of the paramount, compelling spirit, the sovereign
+voice of the Family, calling through the wilderness. Peter knew,--this
+fine, vital boy seeking his own happiness; he gropingly understood this
+mighty thing, and he was trying his best to serve it. And, without
+knowing that she knew, Miggy knew too ... and the seal that she knew was
+in what was in the sunset. And as far removed from these things as the
+sunset itself was all Miggy's cheap cynicism about love and all the
+triviality of her criticism of Peter.
+
+Miggy stood motionless, looking at Peter. And then, like an evil spell
+which began to work, another presence was in the room....
+
+Somewhile before I had begun to hear the sound, as a faint undercurrent
+to consciousness; an unimportant, unpleasant, insisting sound that
+somehow interfered. Gradually it had come nearer and had interfered more
+and had mingled harshly with the tender treble of Little Child. Now,
+from Peter's gate the sound besieged my ears and entered the room and
+explained itself to us all--
+
+
+     "My Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I _never_ know,
+     You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh--"
+
+
+the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air....
+
+I knew what it was, and they knew. At the sound of his father's voice,
+drunken, piteous, Peter dropped Miggy's hands and his head went down and
+he stood silent, like a smitten thing. My own heart sank, for I knew
+what Miggy had felt, and I thought I knew what she would feel now. So
+here was another unfulfilled intention, another plan gone astray in an
+unperfected order.
+
+Peter had turned somewhat away before he spoke.
+
+"I'll have to go now," he said quietly, "I guess you'll excuse me."
+
+He went toward the kitchen door ashamed, miserable, all the brightness
+and vitality gone from him. I am sorry that he did not see Miggy's face
+when she lifted it. I saw it, and I could have sung as I looked. Not for
+Peter or for Miggy, but for the sake of something greater than they,
+something that touched her hand, commanded "Look at me," bade her follow
+with us all.
+
+Before Peter reached the door she overtook him, stood before him, put
+her hands together for a moment, and then laid one swiftly on his cheek.
+
+"Peter," she said, "that don't make any difference. That don't make any
+difference."
+
+No doubt he understood her words, but I think what he understood best
+was her hand on his cheek. He caught her shoulders and looked and
+looked....
+
+"Honest--honest, don't it?" he searched her.
+
+You would not have said that her answer to that was wholly direct. She
+only let fall her hand from his cheek to his shoulder, and,
+
+"Peter," she said, "_is it like this_?"
+
+"Yes," he said simply, "it's like this."
+
+And then what she said was ever so slightly muffled, as if at last she
+had dropped her head in that sweet confusion which she had never seemed
+to know; as if at last she was looking at Peter as if he _was_ Peter.
+
+"Then I don't ever want to be any place where you aren't," she told him.
+
+"Miggy!" Peter cried, "take care what you say. Remember--he'd live with
+us."
+
+She made her three little nods.
+
+"So he will," she answered, "so he will. He--and my little sister--and
+all of us."
+
+Peter's answer was a shout.
+
+"Say it out!" he cried, "say you will. Miggy! I've _got_ to hear you say
+it out!"
+
+"Peter, Peter," she said, "I want to marry you."
+
+He took her in his arms and in the room was the glory upon glory of the
+west, a thing of wings and doors ajar. And strong as the light, there
+prevailed about them the soul of the Family, that distributes burdens,
+shares responsibilities, accepts what is and what is to come. Its voice
+was in the voice of Little Child singing in the garden, and of old Cary
+babbling at the gate. Its heart was the need of Peter and Miggy, each
+for the other. I saw in their faces the fine freedoms of the sunset,
+that sunset where Miggy and Little Child and I had agreed that a certain
+spirit lives. And it did but tally with the momentous utterance of these
+things and of the evening when Miggy spoke again.
+
+"Go now--you go to him," she said, "we'll wait. And--Peter--when you
+come back, I want to see everything in the room again."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+THE CUSTODIAN
+
+
+When the river is low, a broad, flat stone lying a little way from shore
+at the foot of our lawn becomes an instrument of music. In the day it
+plays now a rhapsody of sun, now a nocturne of cloud, now the last
+concerto, Opus Eternal. In the night it becomes a little friendly
+murmur, a cradle song, slumber spell, neighbour to the Dark, the alien
+Dark who very likely grows lonely, being the silent sister, whereas the
+Light goes on blithely companioned of us all. But if I were the Dark and
+owned the stars, and the potion which quickens conscience, and the sense
+of the great Spirit brooding, brooding, I do not know that I would
+exchange and be the Light. Still, the Light has rainbows and toil and
+the sun and laughter.... After all, it is best to be a human being and
+to have both Light and Darkness for one's own. And it is concerning this
+conclusion that the river plays on its instrument of music, this shallow
+river
+
+
+              "--to whose falls
+     Melodious birds sing madrigals."
+
+
+I have heard our bank cat-birds in the willows sing madrigals to the
+stone-music until I wanted to be one of them--cat-bird, madrigal,
+shallows, or anything similar. But the human is perhaps what all these
+are striving to express, and so I have been granted wish within wish,
+and life is very good.
+
+Life was very good this summer afternoon when half the village gathered
+on our lawn above the singing stone, at Miggy's and Peter's
+"Announcement Supper." To be sure, all Friendship Village had for
+several days had the news and could even tell you when the betrothal
+took place and where; but the two were not yet engaged, as Miggy would
+have said, "out loud."
+
+"What _is_ engaged?" asked Little Child, who was the first of my guests
+to arrive, and came bringing an offering of infinitesimal flowers which
+she finds in the grass where I think that they bloom for no one else.
+
+"It means that people love each other very much--" I began, and got no
+further.
+
+"Oh, goody grand," cried Little Child. "Then I'm engaged, aren't I? To
+everybody."
+
+Whenever she leads me in deep water, I am accustomed to invite her to a
+dolphin's back by bidding her say over some song or spell which I have
+taught her. This afternoon while we waited on the lawn and her little
+voice went among the charmed words, something happened which surely
+must have been due to a prank of the dolphin. For when she had taken an
+accurate way to the last stanza of "Lucy," Little Child soberly
+concluded:--
+
+
+     "'She lived unknown, and few could know
+       When Lucy ceased to be;
+     But she is in her grave, and what's
+       The difference to me!'"
+
+
+But, even so, it was charming to have had the quiet metre present.
+
+I hope that there is no one who has not sometime been in a company on
+which he has looked and looked with something living in his eyes; on a
+company all of whom he holds in some degree of tenderness. It was so
+that I looked this afternoon on those who came across the lawn in the
+pleasant five o'clock sun, and I looked with a difference from my manner
+of looking on that evening of my visit to the village, when I first saw
+these, my neighbours. Then I saw them with delight; now I see them with
+delight-and-that-difference; and though that difference is, so to say,
+partly in my throat, yet it is chiefly deep in my understanding. There
+came my Mis' Amanda Toplady, with her great green umbrella, which she
+carries summer and winter; Mis' Postmaster Sykes, with the full-blooming
+stalk of her tuberose pinned on her left shoulder; Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss in the pink nun's veiling of the Post-office
+hall supper; and my neighbour, who had consented to come, with: "I
+donno as that little thing would want I should stay home. Oh, but do you
+know, that's the worst--knowin' that the little thing never saw me and
+can't think about me at all!" And there came also those of whom it
+chances that this summer I have seen less than I should have wished: the
+Liberty sisters, in checked print. "It don't seem so much of a jump out
+of mournin' into wash goods as it does into real dress-up cloth," gentle
+Miss Lucy says. And Abigail Arnold, of the Home Bakery, who sent a great
+sugared cake for to-day's occasion. "Birthday cakes is correct," she
+observed, "an' weddin' cake is correct. Why ain't engagement cakes
+correct--especially when folks get along without the ring? I donno. I
+always think doin' for folks is correct, whether it's the style or
+whether it ain't." And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, with a new and
+upbraiding baby; Mis' Fire Chief Merriman in "new black, but not true
+mournin' now, an' anyway lit up by pearl buttons an' a lace handkerchief
+an' plenty o' scent." And Mis' "Mayor" Uppers who, the "mayor" not
+returning to his home and the tickets for the parlour clock having all
+been sold, to-day began offering for sale tickets on the "parlour
+'suit,' brocade' silk, each o' the four pieces a differ'nt colour and
+all as bright as new-in-the-store." And though we all understood what
+she was doing and she knew that we all knew, she yet drew us aside, one
+after another, to offer the tickets for sale privately, and we slipped
+the money to her beneath our handkerchiefs or our fans or our sewing.
+
+We all had our sewing--even I have become pleasantly contaminated and
+have once or twice essayed eyelets. Though there was but an hour to
+elapse before supper-time and the arrival of the "men-folks," we settled
+ourselves about the green, making scallops on towels, or tatting for
+sheet hems, or crocheted strips for the hems of pillow-slips. Mis' Sykes
+had, as she almost always does have, new work which no one had ever seen
+before, and new work is accounted of almost as much interest as a new
+waist and is kept for a surprise, as a new waist should be kept. Little
+Child, too, had her sewing; she was buttonhole-stitching a wash-cloth
+and talking like a little old woman. I think that the little elf
+children like best to pretend in this way, as regular, arrant witches
+feign old womanhood.
+
+"Aunt Effie is sick," Little Child was telling Mis' Toplady; "she is
+sick from her hair to her slippers."
+
+I had a plan for Little Child and for us all; that after supper she
+should have leaves in her hair and on her shoulders and should dance on
+the singing stone in the river. And Miggy, whose shy independence is now
+become all shyness, was in the house, weaving the leaves, and had not
+yet appeared at her party at all.
+
+Then one of those charming things happened which surely have a kind of
+life of their own and wake the hour to singing, as if an event were a
+river stone, and more, round which all manner of faint music may be set
+stirring.
+
+"Havin' a party when I ain't lookin'!" cried somebody. "My, my. I don't
+b'lieve a word of what's name--this evolution business. I bet you
+anything heaven is just _gettin' back_."
+
+And there was Calliope, in her round straw hat and tan ulster, who in
+response to my card had hastened her imminent return.
+
+"Yes," she said, when we had greeted her and put her in a chair under
+the mulberry tree, "my relation got well. At least, she ain't sick
+enough to be cross, so 'most anybody could take care of her now."
+
+Calliope laughed and leaned back and shut her eyes.
+
+"Land, land," she said, "I got so much to tell you about I don't know
+where to begin. It's all about one thing, too--somethin' I've found
+out."
+
+Mis' Amanda Toplady drew a great breath and let fall her work and looked
+round at us all.
+
+"Goodness," she said, "ain't it comfortable--us all settin' here
+together, nobody's leg broke, nobody's house on fire, nor none of us
+dead?"
+
+"'Us all settin' here together,'" Calliope repeated, suddenly grave
+amid our laughter, "that's part of what I'm comin' to. I wonder," she
+said to us, "how you folks have always thought of the City? Up till I
+went there to stay this while I always thought of it as--well, as the
+City an' not so much as folks at all. The City always meant to me big
+crowds on the streets--hurryin', hurryin', eatin', eatin', and not
+payin' much attention to anything. One whole batch of 'em I knew was
+poor an' lookin' in bakery windows. One whole batch of 'em I knew was
+rich an' sayin' there has to be these distinctions. And some more I knew
+was good--I always see 'em, like a pretty lady, stoopin' over, givin'.
+And some more I knew was wicked an' I always thought of them climbin' in
+windows. And then there was the little bit o' batch that knows the
+things I want to know an' talks like I'd like to talk an' that I'd
+wanted an' wanted to go up to the City an' get with.
+
+"Well, then I went. An' the first thing, I see my relative wa'n't rich
+nor poor nor bad nor good nor--the way I mean. Nor her friends that come
+to see her, they wan't either. The ones I took for rich talked economy,
+an' the ones I thought was poor spent money, an' the good ones gossiped,
+an' they all jabbered about music and pictures that I thought you
+couldn't talk about unless you knew the 'way-inside-o'-things, like
+they didn't know. The kinds seemed all mixed up, and all of 'em far away
+an' formal, like--oh, like the books in a library when you can't think
+up one to draw out. I couldn't seem to get near to anything.
+
+"Then one night I done what I'd always wanted to do. I took two dollars
+an' went to the theatre alone an' got me a seat. I put on the best I
+had, an' still I didn't feel like I was one of 'em, nor one of much of
+anybody. The folks on the car wasn't the way I meant, an' I felt mad at
+'em for bein' differ'nt. There was a smilin' young fellow, all dressed
+black an' expensive, an' I thought: 'Put you side of Peter Cary an'
+there wouldn't be anybody there but Peter.' And when I got inside the
+theatre, it was just the same: one awful collection of dressed-up hair
+an' dressed-down backs an' everybody smilin' at somebody that wasn't me
+and all seemin' so sure of themselves. Specially the woman in front of
+me, but I guess it always is specially the woman in front of you. She
+was flammed out abundant. She had trimmin's in unexpected places, an' a
+good many colours took to do it, an' a cute little chatter to match. It
+come to me that she was more than different from me: she was the
+_otherest_ a person can be. An' I felt glad when the curtain went up.
+
+"Well, sir," Calliope said, "it was a silly little play--all about
+nothin' that you could lay much speech to. But oh, they was somethin'
+in it that made you get down on your hands and knees in your own heart
+and look around in it, and _look_. They was an old lady and a young
+mother and a child and a man and a girl--well, that don't sound like
+much special, does it? And that's just it: it wasn't much special, but
+yet it was all of everything. It made 'em laugh, it made 'em cry, it
+made _me_ laugh and cry till I was ashamed and glad and grateful. And
+when the lights come up at the end, I felt like I was kind of the mother
+to everything, an' I wanted to pick it up an' carry it off an' keep care
+of it. And it come over me all of a sudden how the old lady and the
+young mother an' man an' girl, man an' girl, _man an' girl_ was right
+there in the theatre, near me, over an' over again; an' there I'd been
+feelin' mad at 'em for seemin' far off. But they wasn't far off. They'd
+been laughin' and cryin', too, an' they knew, just like I knew, what was
+what in the world. My, my. If it'd been Friendship I'd have gone from
+house to house all the way home, shakin' hands. An' as it was, I just
+_had_ to speak to somebody. An' just then I see the flammed-out woman in
+front of me, that her collar had come open a little wee bit up top--not
+to notice even, but it give me an excuse. And I leaned right over to her
+and I says with all the sympathy in me:--
+
+"'Ma'am, your neck is peepin'."
+
+"She looked around su'prised and then she smiled--smiled 'most into
+laughin'. And she thanked me sweet as a friend an' nodded with it, an' I
+thought: 'Why, my land, you may have a baby home.' I never had thought
+of that. An' then I begun lookin' at folks an' lookin'. An' movin' up
+the aisles, there wasn't just a theatre-lettin'-out. They was _folks_.
+And all over each one was the good little things they'd begun
+rememberin' now that the play was over, or the hurt things that had come
+back onto 'em again.... An' out on the street it was the same. The folks
+had all got alive and was waitin' for me to feel friendly to 'em.
+_Friendly._ The young fellows in the cars was lovers, just like Peter.
+An' everybody was just like me, or anyhow more alike than differ'nt; and
+just like Friendship, only mebbe pronouncin' their words some differ'nt
+an' knowin' more kinds of things to eat. It seems to me now I could go
+anywhere an' find folks to be nice to. I don't love Friendship Village
+any the less, but I love more things the same way. Everything, 'most.
+An' I tell you I'm glad I didn't die before I found it out--that we're
+all one batch. _Do_ you see what I mean--deep down inside what I say?"
+Calliope cried. "Does it sound like anything to you?"
+
+To whom should it sound like "anything" if not to us of Friendship
+Village? We know.
+
+"Honestly," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady, trying to wipe her
+eyes on her crochet work, "Whoever God is, I don't believe He wants to
+keep it a secret. He's always 'most lettin' us know. I 'most knew Who He
+is right then, while Calliope was talkin'."
+
+"I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope was talkin'." ... I
+said the words over while the men crossed the lawn, all arriving
+together in order to lighten the trial of guesthood: Dear Doctor June,
+little Timothy Toplady, Eppleby Holcomb, Postmaster Sykes, Photographer
+Jimmie Sturgis, Peter, and Timothy, Jr., and the others. Liva Vesey was
+already in the kitchen with Miggy and Elfa, and I knew that, somewhere
+invisible, Nicholas Moor was hovering, waiting to help dish the
+ice-cream. When the little tables, each with its bright, strewn
+nasturtiums, were set about the lawn, Miggy reluctantly appeared from
+the kitchen. She was in the white frock which she herself had made, and
+she was, as I have said, a new Miggy, not less merry or less elfin, but
+infinitely more human. It was charming, I thought, to see how she and
+Peter, far from tensely avoiding each other, went straight to each
+other's side. With them at table were Liva and Timothy, Jr., now meeting
+each other's eyes as simply as if eyes were for this purpose.
+
+"I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope was talkin'" ... I
+thought again as we stood in our places and Doctor June lifted his hands
+to the summer sky as if He were there, too.
+
+"Father," he said, "bless these young people who are going to belong to
+each other--Thou knowest their names and so do we. Bless our being
+together now in their honour, and be Thou in our midst. And bless our
+being together always. Amen."
+
+And that was the announcement of Miggy's and Peter's betrothal, at their
+Engagement Party.
+
+Little Child, who was sitting beside Calliope, leaned toward her.
+
+"How long will it take for God to know," she asked, "after Doctor June
+sent it up?"
+
+Calliope put her arm about her and told her.
+
+"Then did He get here since Doctor June invited Him?" Little Child
+asked.
+
+"You think, 'way deep inside your head, an' see if He isn't here," I
+heard Calliope say.
+
+Little Child shut her eyes tightly, and though she did open them briefly
+to see what was on the plate which they set before her, I think that she
+found the truth.
+
+"I 'most know," she said presently. "Pretty near I know He is. I guess
+I'm too little to be sure nor certain. When I'm big will I know sure?"
+
+"Yes," Calliope answered, "then you'll know sure."
+
+"I 'most knew Who He is while Calliope was talkin'" ... I said over once
+more. And suddenly in the words and in the homely talk and in the happy
+comradeship I think that I slipped between the seeing and the knowing,
+and for a moment stood very near to the Custodian--Himself. The
+Custodian Who is in us all, Who speaks, now as you, now as I, most
+clearly in our human fellowship, in our widest kinship, in the universal
+_togetherness_. Truly, it is not as my neighbour once said, for I think
+that God has many and many to "neighbour with," if only we would be
+neighbours.
+
+Presently, as if it knew that it belonged there, the sunset came, a
+thing of wings and doors ajar. Then Miggy fastened the leaves in Little
+Child's hair and led her down to dance on the broad, flat stone which is
+an instrument of music. Above the friendly murmur of the shallows the
+little elf child seemed beckoning to us others of the human voices on
+the shore. And in that fair light it was as if the river were some clear
+highway, leading from Friendship Village to Splendour Town, where
+together we might all find our way.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Friendship Village Love Stories, by Zona Gale
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 54676 ***
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Friendship Village Love Stories, by Zona Gale

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

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-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

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-Title: Friendship Village Love Stories

-

-Author: Zona Gale

-

-Release Date: May 7, 2017 [EBook #54676]

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-Language: English

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-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES ***

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-

-

-<div class="center"><a name="cover.jpg" id="cover.jpg"></a><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="cover" /></div>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</a></span></p>

-

-<h1>FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE<br />LOVE STORIES</h1>

-

-<p class="bold space-above">BY</p>

-

-<p class="bold2">ZONA GALE</p>

-

-<p class="bold">AUTHOR OF "FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," "THE LOVES<br />OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE," ETC.</p>

-

-<p class="bold space-above">NEW YORK<br />GROSSET &amp; DUNLAP<br />PUBLISHERS</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span></p>

-

-<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1909,<br />

-<span class="smcap">By</span> THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.<br />&mdash;&mdash;<br />

-Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909. Reprinted<br />November, 1909; April, 1912.</p>

-

-<p class="center space-above"><i>Norwood Press<br />

-J. S. Cushing Co.&mdash;Berwick &amp; Smith Co.<br />Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.</i></p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>

-

-<p class="center">To<br />MY FRIENDS IN PORTAGE<br />WISCONSIN</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<blockquote><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p><p>Certain of the following chapters have appeared in <i>Everybody's</i>, <i>The

-American Magazine</i>, <i>The Outlook</i>, <i>The Woman's Home Companion</i>, and

-<i>The Delineator</i>. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous

-permission to reprint these chapters, and to Messrs. Harper Brothers for

-permission to reprint the sonnet in Chapter XI.</p></blockquote>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2>CONTENTS</h2>

-

-<table summary="CONTENTS">

-  <tr>

-    <td colspan="2" class="left"><span class="smaller">CHAPTER</span></td>

-    <td><span class="smaller">PAGE</span></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>I.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Open Arms</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>II.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Inside June</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_15">15</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>III.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Miggy</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>IV.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Splendour Town</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_43">43</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>V.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Different</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_62">62</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>VI.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Fond Forenoon</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>VII.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Afraid</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_96">96</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>VIII.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Java Entertainment</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_116">116</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>IX.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Cold Shoulder</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>X.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Evening Dress</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_148">148</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>XI.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Undern</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_176">176</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>XII.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Way the World Is</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>XIII.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Householdry</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>XIV.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Postmarks</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_223">223</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>XV.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Peter</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_248">248</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>XVI.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The New Village</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_258">258</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>XVII.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Adoption</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_274">274</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>XVIII.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">At Peter's House</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_293">293</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>XIX.</td>

-    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Custodian</span></td>

-    <td><a href="#Page_309">309</a></td>

-  </tr>

-</table>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>

-

-<p class="bold2">Friendship Village Love Stories</p>

-

-<h2><span>I</span> <span class="smaller">OPEN ARMS</span></h2>

-

-<p>Although it is June, the Little Child about whom I shall sometimes write

-in these pages this morning brought me a few violets. June violets. They

-sound unconvincing and even sentimental. However, here they are in their

-vase; and they are all white but one.</p>

-

-<p>"Only one blue one," said Little Child, regretfully; "May must be 'most

-dead by mistake."</p>

-

-<p>"Don't the months die as soon as they go away?" I asked her, and a

-little shocked line troubled her forehead.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, no," she said; "they never die at all. They wait and show the next

-months how."</p>

-

-<p>So this year's May is showing June how. As if one should have a kind of

-pre-self, who kept on, after one's birth, and told one what to live and

-what not to live. I wish that I had had a pre-self and that it had kept

-on with me to show me how. It is what one's mother is, only one is so

-occupied in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> being one's born self that one thinks of her worshipfully

-as one's mother instead. But this young June seems to be chiefly May,

-and I am glad: for of all the months, May is to me most nearly the

-essence of time to be. In May I have always an impulse to date my

-letters "To-morrow," for all the enchantment of the usual future seems

-come upon me. The other months are richly themselves, but May is all the

-great premonitory zest come true; it is expectation come alive; it is

-the Then made Now. Conservatively, however, I date my May letters merely

-"To-morrow," and it is pleasant to find a conservative estimate which no

-one is likely to exceed. For I own that though there is a conservatism

-which is now wholly forbidden to me, yet I continue to take in it a

-sensuous, stolen pleasure, such as I take in certain ceremonies; and I

-know that if I were wholly pagan, extreme conservatism would be my chief

-indulgence.</p>

-

-<p>This yet-May morning, then, I have been down in the village, gardening

-about the streets. My sort of gardening. As in spring another looks

-along the wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the

-upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence I peered round this

-wall and that for faces and things in the renascence of recognition, or

-in the pleasant importance of having just been born. Many a gate and

-fa&ccedil;ade and well-house, of which in my absence I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> have not thought even

-once, has not changed a whit in consequence. And when changes have come,

-they have done so with the prettiest preening air of accomplishment: "We

-too," they say, "have not been idle."</p>

-

-<p>Thus the streets came unrolling to meet me and to show me their

-treasures: my neighbour's new screened-in porch "with a round extension

-so to see folks pass on the cross street"; in the house in which I am to

-live a former blank parlour wall gravely regarding me with a magnificent

-new plate glass eye; Daphne Street, hitherto a way of sand, now become a

-thing of proud macadam; the corner catalpas old enough to bloom; a white

-frame cottage rising like a domestic Venus from a once vacant lot of

-foam-green "Timothy"; a veranda window-box acquired, like a bright

-bow-knot at its house's throat; and, farther on, the Herons' freshly

-laid cement sidewalk, a flying heron stamped on every block. I fancy

-they will have done that with the wooden heron knocker which in the

-kitchen their grandfather Heron himself carved on sleepless nights.

-("Six hundred and twenty hours of Grandpa Heron's life hanging on our

-front door," his son's wife said; "I declare I feel like that bird could

-just about lay.") To see all these venturesome innovations, these

-obscure and pleasant substitutions, is to be greeted by the very annuals

-of this little garden as a real <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>gardener in green lore might be

-signalled, here by a trembling of new purple and there by a yellow

-marching line of little volunteers.</p>

-

-<p>I do not miss from their places many friends. In this house and that I

-find a new family domiciled and to be divined by the subtle changes

-which no old tenant would ever have made: the woodpile in an

-unaccustomed place, the side shed door disused and strung for vines, a

-wagon now kept by a north and south space once sacred to the sweet-pea

-trench. Here a building partly ruined by fire shows grim, returned to

-the inarticulate, not evidently to be rebuilt, but to be accepted, like

-any death. But these variations are the exception, and only one

-variation is the rule, and against that one I have in me some special

-heritage of burning. I mean the felling of the village trees. We have

-been used wantonly to sacrifice to the base and the trivial, trees

-already stored with years of symmetry when we of these Midlands were the

-intruders and not they&mdash;and I own that for me the time has never wholly

-passed. They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel our lawns

-with twigs, they rot the shingles on our barns. It has seemed to occur

-to almost nobody to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too, are

-beginning to discern, so that when in the laying of a sidewalk we meet a

-tree who was there before we were anywhere at all, though we may not

-yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our love of a

-straight line, and our votive offering is to give the tree the

-walk&mdash;such a slight swerving is all the deference she asks!&mdash;and in

-return she blesses us with balms and odours.... For me these signs of

-our mellowing are more delightful to experience than might be the

-already-made quietudes of a nation of effected and distinguished

-standards. I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves an

-elemental gesture, though I personally would prefer not to be the one to

-have made the gesture. And this is my solace when with some

-inquisitioner I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine&mdash;an

-isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hemlock: verily, I say,

-it was so that we did here in the old days when there were forests to

-conquer, and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his blood as he

-has his genius for toil. And I try not to remember that if in America we

-had had plane trees, we should almost certainly have cut them into

-cabins.... But this morning even the trees that I missed could not make

-me sad. No, nor even the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers

-hanging on a street door which I passed. All these were as if something

-elementary had happened, needless wounds, it might be, on the plan of

-things, contortions which science has not yet bred away, but, as truly

-as the natural death from age, eloquent of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> the cosmic persuading to

-shape in which the nations of quietude and we of strivings are all in

-fellowship.</p>

-

-<p>In fellowship! I think that in this simple basic emotion lies my joy in

-living in this, my village. Here, this year long, folk have been

-adventuring together, knowing the details of one another's lives,

-striving a little but companioning far more than striving, kindling to

-one another's interests instead of practising the faint morality of mere

-civility; and I love them all&mdash;unless it be only that little Mrs. Oliver

-Wheeler Johnson, newly come to Friendship; and perhaps my faint liking

-for her arises from the fact that she has not yet lived here long enough

-to be understood, as Friendship Village understands. The ways of these

-primal tribal bonds are in my blood, for from my heart I felt what my

-neighbour felt when she told me of the donation party which the whole

-village has just given to Lyddy Ember:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"I declare," she said, "it wasn't so much the stuff they brought in,

-though that was all elegant, but it was the <i>Togetherness</i> of it. I

-couldn't get to sleep that night for thinkin' about God not havin'

-anybody to neighbour with."</p>

-

-<p>It was no wonder, therefore, that when in the middle of Daphne Street my

-neighbour met me this morning, for the first time since my return, and

-held out her arms, I walked straight into them. Here is the secret, as

-more of us know than have the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> wisdom to acknowledge: fellowship,

-comradeship, kinship&mdash;call it what you will. My neighbour and I will

-understand.</p>

-

-<p>"I heard you was here," my neighbour said&mdash;bless her, her voice

-trembled. I suppose there never was such a compliment as that tremor of

-her voice.</p>

-

-<p>I am afraid that I am not going to tell what else she said. But it was

-all about our coming to Friendship Village to live; and that is a thing

-which, as I feel about it, should be set to music and sung in the

-wind&mdash;where Thoreau said that some apples are to be eaten. As for me, I

-nodded at my neighbour, and could do no more than that&mdash;as is the custom

-of mortals when they are face to face with these sorceries of Return and

-Meeting and Being Together.</p>

-

-<p>I am not yet wonted to the sweetness of our coming to Friendship Village

-to live, the Stranger and I. Here they still call him the Stranger; and

-this summer, because of the busts and tablets which he must fashion in

-many far places, so do I. Have I said that that Stranger of mine is a

-sculptor? He is. But if anyone expects me to write about him, I tell you

-that it is impossible. Save this: That since he came out of the mist one

-morning on the Plank Road here in Friendship Village, we two have kept

-house in the world, shared in the common welfare,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> toiled as we might

-for the common good, observed the stars, and thanked God. And this: that

-since that morning, it is as if Someone had picked us up and set us to

-music and sung us to the universal piping. And we remember that once we

-were only words, and that sometime we shall be whatever music is when it

-is free of its body of sound, and for that time we strive. But I repeat

-that these vagrant notes are not about this great Stranger, absent on

-his quests of holy soul prisoned in this stone and that marble, nor yet

-about our life together. Rather, I write about our Family, which is this

-loved town of ours. For we have bought Oldmoxon House, and here, save

-for what flights may be about and over-seas, we hope that we may tell

-our days to their end.</p>

-

-<p>My neighbour had both my hands, there in the middle of Daphne Street,

-and the white horse of the post-office store delivery wagon turned out

-for us as if he knew.</p>

-

-<p>"If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd have put on my other

-hat," my neighbour said, "but I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down

-for some rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't what they

-used to be, are they? One season an' they lay down life. I could jounce

-up an' down I'm so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed

-gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> I heard the girl that

-was comin' to help you ain't comin' near."</p>

-

-<p>My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and she has done the

-disappointing by telegraph. I had almost said, publicly by telegraph.

-But I protest that I would rather an entire village should read my

-telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole city should care

-almost nothing for me or my telegrams either. And if you please, I would

-rather not have that telegram-reading criticised.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity, "I've got you one. She'll be

-up to talk to you in a day or two&mdash;I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can

-spell like the minister."</p>

-

-<p>I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her name with something of

-that sense of the inescapable to which the finality of my neighbour

-impressed me. As if I were to have said, "So, then, it is to be Miggy!"

-Or was it something more than that? Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and

-mine had struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have come to

-call the emotion of finality. I suppose that other people have it: that

-occasional prophetic sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses

-this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness of&mdash;shall I

-say?&mdash;brightness; a mental area of clearness; a quite definite physical

-emotion of yes-ness. But if the thing will not happen this says<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> itself

-by a complementary apprehension of dim, down-sloping, vacant negation. I

-have seldom known this divination to fail me&mdash;though I am chary of using

-it lest I use it up! And then I do not always wish to know. But this

-morning my emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware: I <i>knew</i> that

-it would be Miggy.</p>

-

-<p>"What a curious name," I said, in a manner of feebly fending off the

-imminent; "<i>why</i> Miggy?" For it seemed to me one of those names instead

-of which any other name would have done as well and perhaps better.</p>

-

-<p>"Her name is Margaret," my neighbour explained, "and her mother was a

-real lady that come here from Off and that hard work killed her because

-she <i>was</i> a lady. The father was bound there shouldn't be any lady about

-Miggy, but he couldn't seem to help himself. Margaret was her mother's

-name and so he shaved it and shrunk it and strained it down to Miggy.

-'No frills for nobody,' was his motto, up to his death. Miggy and her

-little sister lives with her old Aunt Effie that dress-makes real French

-but not enough to keep 'em alive on. Miggy does odd jobs around. So when

-I heard about your needin' somebody, I says to myself, 'Miggy!'&mdash;just

-like I've said it to you."</p>

-

-<p>It was not the name, as a name, which I would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> have said could be

-uppermost in my mind as I walked on that street of June&mdash;that May was

-helping to make fair. And I was annoyed to have the peace of my return

-so soon invaded. I fell wondering if I could not get on, as I usually

-do, with no one to bother. I have never wanted a helper at all if I

-could avoid it, and I have never, never wanted a helper with a

-personality. A personality among my strewn papers puts me in a fever of

-embarrassment and misery. Once such an one said to me in the midst of a

-chapter: "Madame, I'd like to ask you a question. What do <i>you</i> think of

-your hero?" In an utter rout of confusion I owned that I thought very

-badly of him, indeed; but I did not add the truth, that she had

-effectually drugged him and disabled me for at least that day. My taste

-in helpers is for one colourless, noiseless, above all intonationless,

-usually speechless, and always without curiosity&mdash;some one, save for the

-tips of her trained fingers, negligible. As all this does sad violence

-to my democratic passions, I usually prefer my negligible self. So the

-idea of a Miggy terrified me, and I said to myself that I would not have

-one about. As I knew the village, she was not of it. She was not a part

-of my gardening. She was no proper annual. She was no doubt merely a

-showy little seedling, chance sown in the village.... But all the time,

-moving within me, was that serene area of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> brightness, that clear

-certainty that, do what I could, it would still be Miggy.</p>

-

-<p>... It is through this faint soothsaying, this conception which is

-partly of sight and partly of feeling, that some understanding may be

-won of the orchestration of the senses. I am always telling myself that

-if I could touch at that fluent line where the senses merge, I should

-occasionally find there that silent Custodian who is myself. I think,

-because emotion is so noble, that the Custodian must sometimes visit

-this line where the barrier between her and me is so frail. Her presence

-seems possible to me only for a moment, only, it may be, for the

-fraction of a second in which I catch the romance, the <i>idea</i> of

-something old and long familiar. And when this happens, I say: She has

-just been there, between the seeing and the feeling, or between the

-seeing and the knowing. Often I am sure that I have barely missed her.

-But I am never quick enough to let her know....</p>

-

-<p>When I finished my walk and stepped under the poplars before my gate, I

-caught a faint exclamation. It was that Little Child, who had been

-waiting for me on my doorstep and came running to meet me and bring me

-the violets. When she saw me, she said, "Oh!" quickly and sweetly in her

-throat, and, as I stood still to taste the delight of having her run

-toward me, I felt very sorry for every one who has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> not heard that

-involuntary "Oh!" of a child at one's coming. Little Child and I have

-met only once before, and that early this morning, at large, on the

-village street, as spirits met in air, with no background of names nor

-auxiliary of exchange of names; but we had some talk which for me

-touched on eternal truth and for her savoured of story-telling; and we

-are friends. So now when she gave me the violets and explained to me Who

-was showing June how, I accepted this fair perception of the motherhood

-of May, this childish discernment of the familyhood of things, and,</p>

-

-<p>"Will you come some day soon to have another story?" I asked her.</p>

-

-<p>"Prob'ly I can," said Little Child. "I'll ask Miggy."</p>

-

-<p>"Miggy! But is it your Miggy, too?" I demanded.</p>

-

-<p>"It's my sister," said Little Child, nodding.</p>

-

-<p>I thought that the concreteness of her reply to my ill-defined query was

-almost as if she remembered how to understand without words. You would

-think that children would need to have things said out, but they are

-evidently closer to a more excellent way.</p>

-

-<p>So when I entered the house just now, I brought in with me a kind of

-premonitory Miggy, one of those ghostly, anticipatory births which we

-are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>constantly giving to those whom we have not met. As if every one

-had for us a way of life without the formality of being seen. As if we

-are a big, near family whether we want to be so or not. Verily, it is

-not only May and June, or Little Child and Miggy, who are found

-unexpectedly to be related; it is the whole world, it seems, and he is

-wise who quickens to many kinships. I like to think of the comrade

-company that already I have found here: June and Little Child and

-Miggy-to-be and my neighbour and Daphne Street and the remembered faces

-of the village and the hamadryads. I think that I include the very

-herons in the cement sidewalk. Like a kind of perpetual gift it is, this

-which my neighbour called <i>Togetherness</i>.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>II</span> <span class="smaller">INSIDE JUNE</span></h2>

-

-<p><i>The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough to

-it. This month comes within few houses, and if you want it you must go

-out to it. When you are within doors, knowing that out-of-doors it is

-June, the urge to be out there with it is resistless. But though you

-wade in green, steep in sun, breast wind, and glory in them all, still

-the day itself eludes you. It would seem, in June, that there should be

-a specific for the malady of being oneself, so that one might get to be

-a June day outright. However, if one were oneself more and more, might

-not one finally become a June day?...</i></p>

-

-<p>Or something of this sort. I am quoting, as nearly as may be, from the

-Book of Our Youth, your youth and mine. Always the Book of Youth will

-open at a page like this. And occasionally it is as if we turned back

-and read there and made a path right away through the page.</p>

-

-<p>This morning a rose-breasted grosbeak wakened me, singing on a bough of

-box-elder so close to my window<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> that the splash of rose on his throat

-almost startled me. It was as if I ought not to have been looking. And

-to turn away from out-of-doors was like leaving some one who was saying

-something. But as soon as I stepped into the day I perceived my old

-problem: <i>The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near

-enough</i>.</p>

-

-<p>I stood for a little at the front gate trying soberly to solve the

-matter&mdash;or I stood where the front gate should have been; for in our

-midland American villages we have few fences or hedges, and, alas, no

-stone walls. Though undoubtedly this lack comes from an insufficient

-regard for privacy, yet this negative factor I am inclined to condone

-for the sake of the positive motive. And this I conceive to be that we

-are wistful of more ample occupation than is commonly contrived by our

-fifty-feet village lots, and so we royally add to our "yards" the

-sidewalk and the planting space and the road and as much of our

-neighbour's lawn as our imagination can annex. There seems to me to be

-in this a certain charming pathos; as it were, a survival in us of the

-time when we had only to name broad lands our own and to stay upon them

-in order to make them ours in very fact. And now it is as if this serene

-pushing back of imaginary borders were in reality an appending, a kind

-of spiritual taking up of a claim.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p><p>How to get nearer to June? I admit that it is a question of the veriest

-idler. But what a delightful company of these questions one can

-assemble. As, How to find one's way to a place that <i>is</i> the way it

-seems Away Across a Meadow. How to meet enough people who hear what one

-says in just the way that one means it. How to get back at will those

-fugitive moments when one almost <i>knows</i> ... what it is all about. And

-with this question the field of the idler becomes the field of the wise

-man; and, indeed, if one idles properly&mdash;or rather, if the proper person

-idles&mdash;the two fields are not always on opposite sides of the road. To

-idle is by no means merely to do nothing. It is an avocation, a calling

-away, nay, one should say, a piping away. To idle is to inhibit the body

-and to let the spirit keep on. Not every one can idle. I know estimable

-people who frequently relax, like chickens in the sun; but I know only a

-few who use relaxation as a threshold and not as a goal, and who idle

-until the hour yields its full blessing.</p>

-

-<p>I wondered if to idle at adventure might not be the way to June, so I

-went out on the six o'clock street in somewhat the spirit in which

-another might ride the greenwood. Almost immediately I had an encounter,

-for I came on my neighbour in her garden. Not my neighbour who lives on

-the other side of me, and who is a big and obvious deacon,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> with a

-family of a great many Light Gowns; but My Neighbour. She was watering

-her garden. These water rules and regulations of the village are among

-its spells. To look at the members of the water commission one would

-never suspect them of romance. But if they have it not, why have they

-named from five until nine o'clock the only morning hours when one may

-use the city water for one's lawn and garden? I insist that it cannot be

-a mere regard for the municipal resources, and that the commissioners

-must see something of the romance of getting up before five o'clock to

-drench one's garden, and are providing for the special educational value

-of such a custom. Or, if I do not believe this, I wish very much that I

-did, with the proper grounds.</p>

-

-<p>To tell the truth, however, I do not credit even my neighbour with

-feeling the romance of the hour and of her occupation. She is a still

-woman of more than forty, who does not feel a difference between her

-flower and her vegetable gardens, but regards them both as a part of her

-life in the kind of car-window indifference and complacency of certain

-travellers. She raises foxgloves and parsley, and the sun shines over

-all. I must note a strange impression which my neighbour gives me: she

-has always for me an air of personal impermanence. I have the fancy,

-amounting to a sensation, that she is where she is for just a moment,

-and that she must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> rush back and be at it again. I do not know at what.

-But whether I see her in church or at a festival, I have always all I

-can do to resist saying to her, "How <i>did</i> you get away?" It was so that

-she was watering her flowers; as if she were intending at any moment to

-hurry off to get breakfast or put up the hammock or mend. And yet before

-she did so she told me, who was a willing listener, a motion or two of

-the spirit of the village.</p>

-

-<p>There is, I observe, a nicety of etiquette here, about the

-Not-quite-news, Not-quite-gossip shared with strangers and

-semi-strangers. The rules seem to be:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>Strangers shall be told only the pleasant occurrences and conditions.</p>

-

-<p>Half strangers may discuss the unpleasant matters which they themselves

-have somehow heard, but only pleasant matters may be added by accretion.</p>

-

-<p>The rest of society may say whatever it "has a mind." But this mind, as

-I believe, is not harsh, since nobody ever gossips except to people who

-gossip back.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Toplady told me last night that Calliope Marsh is coming home for

-the Java entertainment, next week," my neighbour imparted first. And

-this was the best news that she could have given me.</p>

-

-<p>It has been a great regret to me that this summer Calliope is not in the

-village. She has gone to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> city to nurse some distant kinswoman more

-lonely than she, and until ill-health came, long forgetful of Calliope.

-But she is to come back now and again, to this and to that, for the

-village interests are all her own. I have never known any one in whom

-the tribal sense is so persistently alive as in Calliope.</p>

-

-<p>I asked my neighbour what this Java entertainment would be, which was to

-give back Calliope, and she looked her amazement that I did not know. It

-would be, it appeared, one of those great fairs which the missionary

-society is always projecting and carrying magnificently forward.</p>

-

-<p>"It's awful feet-aching work," said my neighbour, reflectively; "but

-honestly, Calliope seems to like it. I donno but I do, too. The Sodality

-meant to have one when they set out to pave Daphne Street, but it turned

-out it wasn't needed. Well, big affairs like that makes it seem as if

-we'd been born into the whole world and not just into Friendship

-Village."</p>

-

-<p>My neighbour told me that a new public library had been opened in a

-corner of the post-office store, and that "a great crowd" was drawing

-books, though for this she herself cannot vouch, since the library is

-only open Saturday evenings, and "Saturday," she says with decision, "is

-a bad night." It is, in fact, I note, very difficult to find a free

-night in the village, save only Tuesday. Monday, because of its obvious

-duties and incident fatigue, is as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>impossible as Sunday; Wednesday is

-club day; Thursday "is prayer-meeting"; Friday is sacred to church

-suppers and entertainments and the Ladies' Aid Society; and Saturday is

-invariably denominated a bad night and omitted without question. We are

-remote from society, but Tuesday is literally our only free evening.</p>

-

-<p>"Of course it won't be the same with you about books," my neighbour

-admits. "You can send your girl down to get a book for you. But I have

-to be home to get out the clean clothes. How's your girl going to like

-the country?" she asked.</p>

-

-<p>I am to have here in the village, I find, many a rebuke for habits of

-mine which lag behind my theories. For though I try to solve my share of

-a tragic question by giving to my Swedish maid, Elfa, the self-respect

-and the privilege suited to a human being dependent on me, together with

-ways of comfort and some leisure, yet I find the homely customs of the

-place to have accomplished more than my careful system. And though, when

-I took her from town I scrupulously added to the earnings of my little

-maid, I confess that it had not occurred to me to wonder whether or not

-she would like Friendship Village. We seem so weary-far from the

-conditions which we so facilely conceive. Especially, I seem far. I am

-afraid that I engaged Elfa in the first place with less attention to her

-economic fitness than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> that she is so trim and still and wistful, with

-such a peculiarly winning upward look; and that her name is Elfa. I told

-my neighbour that I did not know yet, whether Elfa would like it here or

-not; and for refuge I found fault with the worms on the rose bushes.

-Also I made a note in my head to ask Elfa how she likes the country. But

-the spirit of a thing is flown when you make a note of it in your head.

-How does Elfa like the town, for that matter? I never have asked her

-this, either.</p>

-

-<p>"She'll be getting married on your hands, anyway," my neighbour

-observed; "the ladies here say that's one trouble with trying to keep a

-hired girl. They <i>will</i> get married. But I say, let 'em."</p>

-

-<p>At least here is a matter in which my theory, like that of my

-neighbour's, outruns those of certain folk of both town and village. For

-I myself have heard women complain of their servants marrying and

-establishing families, and deplore this shortsightedness in not staying

-where there is "a good home, a nice room, plenty to eat, and all the

-flat pieces sent to the laundry."</p>

-

-<p>"Speaking of books," said my neighbour, "have you seen Nicholas Moor?"</p>

-

-<p>"I see almost no new books," I told her guiltily.</p>

-

-<p>"Me either," she said; "I don't mean he's a book. He's a boy. Nicholas

-Moor&mdash;that does a little writin' himself? I guess you will see him.

-He'll<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> be bringin' some of his writing up to show you. He took some to

-the new school principal, I heard, and to the invalid that was here from

-the city. He seems to be sort of lonesome, though he <i>has</i> got a good

-position. He's interested in celluloid and he rings the Catholic bell.

-Nicholas must be near thirty, but he hasn't even showed any signs."</p>

-

-<p>"Signs?" I hazarded.</p>

-

-<p>"Of being in love," she says simply. And I have pondered pleasantly on

-this significant ellipsis of hers which takes serenely for granted the

-basic business of the world. Her elision reminds me of the delicate

-animism of the Japanese which says, "When the rice pot speaks with a

-human voice, then the demon's name is Kanjo." One can appraise a race or

-an individual by the class of things which speech takes for granted,

-love or a demon or whatever it be.</p>

-

-<p>And apropos of "showing signs," do I remember Liva Vesey and Timothy

-Toplady, Jr.? I am forced to confess that I remember neither. I recall,

-to be sure, that the Topladys had a son, but I had thought of him as a

-kind of qualifying clause and it is difficult to conceive of him as the

-subject of a new sentence. When I hear of Liva Vesey I get her confused

-with a pink gingham apron and a pail of buttermilk which used sometimes

-to pass my house with Liva combined. Fancy that pink gingham and that

-pail becoming a person! And my <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>neighbour tells me that the Qualifying

-Clause and the Pink Gingham are "keeping company," and perhaps are to

-determine the cut of indeterminate clauses and aprons, world without

-end.</p>

-

-<p>"The young folks <i>will</i> couple off," says my neighbour; "and," she adds,

-in a manner of spontaneous impression, "<i>I</i> think it's nice. And it's

-nice for the whole family, too. I've seen families that wouldn't ever

-have looked at each other come to be real friends and able to see the

-angels in each other just by the young folks pairing off. This whole

-town's married crisscross and kittering, family into family. I like it.

-It kind o' binds the soil."</p>

-

-<p>My neighbour told me of other matters current in the village, pleasant

-commonplaces having for her the living spirit which the commonplace

-holds in hostage. ("I'm breathing," Little Child soberly announced to me

-that first day of our acquaintance. And I wonder why I smiled?) My

-neighbour slowly crossed her garden and I followed on the walk&mdash;these

-informal colloquies of no mean length are perfectly usual in the village

-and they do not carry the necessity for an invitation within the house

-or the implication of a call. The relations of hostess and guest seem

-simply to be suspended, and we talk with the freedom of spirits met in

-air. Is this not in its way prophetic of the time when we shall meet,

-burdened of no conventions or upholstery or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> perhaps even words, and

-there talk with the very freedom of villagers? Meanwhile I am content

-with conventions, and passive amid upholstery. But I do catch myself

-looking forward.</p>

-

-<p>Suddenly my neighbour turned to me with such a startled, inquiring

-manner that I sent my attention out as at an alarm to see what she

-meant. And then I heard what I had not before noted: a thin, wavering

-line of singing, that had begun in the street beyond our houses, and now

-floated inconsequently to us, lifting, dipping, wandering. I could even

-hear the absurd words.</p>

-

-<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<div>"<i>My</i> Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I <i>never</i> know.</div>

-<div>You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh&mdash;"</div>

-</div></div></div>

-

-<p>the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air.</p>

-

-<p>To say something was like interrupting my neighbour's expression; so I

-waited, and,</p>

-

-<p>"It's old Cary," she explained briefly. "When he does that it's like

-something hurts you, ain't it?"</p>

-

-<p>I thought that this would be no one of my acquaintance, and I said so,

-but tentatively, lest I should be forgetting some inherent figure of the

-village.</p>

-

-<p>"He's come here in the year," she explained&mdash;and, save about the obvious

-import of old Cary's maudlin song, she maintained that fine, tribal

-reticence of hers. "Except for the drinking," she even said,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> "he seems

-to be a quiet, nice man. But it's a shame&mdash;for Peter's sake. Peter

-Cary," she added, like a challenge, "is the brainiest young man in

-<i>this</i> town, say what you want."</p>

-

-<p>On which she told me something of this young superintendent of the

-canning factory who has "tried it in Nebraska," and could not bear to

-leave his father here, "this way," and has just returned. "He works

-hard, and plays the violin, and is making a man of himself generally,"

-she told me; "Don't miss him." And I have promised that I will try not

-to miss Peter Cary.</p>

-

-<p>"They live out towards the cemetery way," she added, "him and his

-father, all alone. Peter'll be along by here in a minute on his way to

-work&mdash;it's most quarter to. I set my husband down to his breakfast and

-got up his lunch before I come out&mdash;I don't have my breakfast till the

-men folks get out of the way."</p>

-

-<p>I never cease to marvel at these splendid capabilities which prepare

-breakfasts, put up lunches, turn the attention to the garden, and all,

-so to speak, with the left hand; ready at any moment to enter upon the

-real business of life&mdash;to minister to the sick or bury the dead, or

-conduct a town meeting or a church supper or a birth. They have a kind

-of goddess-like competence, these women. At any of these offices they

-arrive, lacking the cloud, it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> true, but magnificently equipped to

-settle the occasion. In crises of, say, deafness, they will clap a hot

-pancake on a friend's ear with an &AElig;sculapian <i>savoir faire</i>, for their

-efficiencies combine those of lost generations with all that they hear

-of in this, in an open-minded eclecticism. With Puritans and foresters

-and courtiers in our blood, who knows but that we have, too, the

-lingering ichor of gods and goddesses? Oh&mdash;"<i>don't you wish you had</i>?"

-What a charming peculiarity it would be to be descended from a state of

-immortality as well as to be preparing for it, nay, even now to be

-entered upon it!</p>

-

-<p>In a few moments after that piteous, fuddled song had died away on the

-other street, Peter Cary came by my neighbour's house. He was a

-splendid, muscular figure in a neutral, belted shirt and a hat battered

-quite to college exactions, though I am sure that Peter did not know

-that. I could well believe that he was making a man of himself. I have

-temerity to say that this boy superintendent of a canning factory looked

-as, in another milieu, Shelley might have looked, but so it was. It was

-not the first time that I have seen in such an one the look, the eyes

-with the vision and the shadow. I have seen it in the face of a man who

-stood on a step-ladder, papering a wall; I have seen it in a mason who

-looked up from the foundation that he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>mortared; I have seen it often

-and often in the faces of men who till the soil. I was not surprised to

-know that Peter Cary "took" on the violin. The violin is a way out (for

-that look in one's eyes), as, for Nicholas Moor, I have no doubt, is the

-ringing of the Catholic bell. And I am not prepared to say that

-celluloid, and wall-paper, and mortar, and meadows, and canneries,&mdash;run

-under good conditions,&mdash;may not be a way out as well. At all events, the

-look was still in Peter's face.</p>

-

-<p>Peter glanced briefly at my neighbour, running the risk of finding us

-both looking at him, realized the worst, blushed a man's brown blush,

-and nodded and smiled after he had looked away from us.</p>

-

-<p>"You see this grass?" said my neighbour. "Peter keeps it cut, my husband

-don't get home till so late. We're awful fond of Peter."</p>

-

-<p>There is no more tender eulogy. And I would rather have that said of me

-in the village than in any place I know. No grace of manner or dress or

-mind can deceive anybody. They are fond of you or they are not, and I

-would trust their reasons for either.</p>

-

-<p>My neighbour's husband came out the front door at that moment, and he

-and Peter, without greeting, went on together. Her husband did not look

-toward us, because, in the village, it seems not to be a husband and

-wife ceremonial to say good-by in the morning. I often fall wondering

-how it is in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> other places. Is it possible that men in general go away

-to work without the consciousness of family, of themselves as going

-forth on the common quest? Is it possible that women see them go and are

-so unaware of the wonder of material life that they do not instance it

-in, at least, good-by? One would think that even the female bear in the

-back of the cave must growl out something simple when her lord leaves

-her in the hope of a good kill.</p>

-

-<p>And when the two men had turned down the brick walk, the maple leaves

-making a come-and-go of shadows and sun-patterns on their backs, my

-neighbour looked at me with a smile&mdash;or, say, with two-thirds of a

-smile&mdash;as if her vote to smile were unanimous, but she were unwilling by

-it to impart too much.</p>

-

-<p>"It's all Miggy with Peter," she said, as if she were mentioning a

-symptom.</p>

-

-<p>"Miggy?" I said with interest&mdash;and found myself nodding to this new

-relationship as to a new acquaintance. And I was once more struck with

-the precision with which certain simple people and nearly all great

-people discard the particularities and lay bare their truths. Could any

-amount of elegant phrasing so reach the heart of the thing and show it

-beating as did, "It's all Miggy with Peter"?</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," my neighbour told me, "it's been her with him ever since he come

-here."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p><p>Assuredly I thought the better of Miggy for this; and,</p>

-

-<p>"Is it all Peter with Miggy?" I inquired, with some eagerness.</p>

-

-<p>Land knows, my neighbour thought, and handed me the hose to hold while

-she turned off the water at the hydrant. I remember that a young robin

-tried to alight on the curving spray just as the water failed and

-drooped.</p>

-

-<p>"I like to get a joke on a robin that way," said my neighbour, and

-laughed out, in a kind of pleasant fellowship with jokes in general and

-especially with robins. "It made Miggy's little sister laugh so the

-other day when that happened," she added. Then she glanced over at me

-with a look in her face that I have not seen there before.</p>

-

-<p>"Land," she said, "this is the time of day, after my husband goes off in

-the morning, when I wish I had a little young thing, runnin' round.

-<i>Now</i> almost more than at night. Well&mdash;I don't know; both times."</p>

-

-<p>I nodded, without saying anything, my eyes on a golden robin prospecting

-vainly among the green mulberries. I wish that I were of those who know

-what to say when a door is opened like this to some shut place.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," said my neighbour, "now I'll bake up the rest of the batter.

-Want a pink?"</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p><p>Thus tacitly excused&mdash;how true her instinct was, courteously to put the

-three fringed pinks in my hand to palliate her leaving!&mdash;I have come

-back to my house and my own breakfast.</p>

-

-<p>"Elfa," said I, first thing, "do you think you are going to like the

-country?"</p>

-

-<p>My little maid turned to me with her winning upward look.</p>

-

-<p>"No'm," she shocked me by saying. And there was another door, opened

-into another shut place; and I did not know what to say to that either.</p>

-

-<p>But I am near to my neighbour; and, in a manner to which Elfa's trimness

-and wistfulness never have impressed me, near to Elfa herself, and I am

-near, near to the village. As I left the outdoors just now, all the

-street was alive: with men and girls going to work, women opening

-windows, a wagon or two in from a Caledonia farm, a general, universal,

-not to say cosmic air of activity and coffee. All the little houses, set

-close together up and down the street, were like a friendly porch party,

-on a long, narrow veranda, where folk sit knee to knee with an avenue

-between for the ice-cream to be handed. All the little lawns and gardens

-were disposed like soft green skirts, delicately embroidered, fragrant,

-flowing.... As I looked, it seemed to me that I could hear the faint hum

-of the village talk&mdash;in every house the intimate, revealing confidences

-of the Family, quick<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> with hope or anxiety or humour or passion,

-animated by its common need to live. And along the street flooded the

-sun, akin to the morning quickening in many a heart.</p>

-

-<p>The day has become charged for me with something besides daylight,

-something which no less than daylight pervades, illumines, comes to meet

-me at a thousand points. I wonder if it can be that, unaware, I did get

-near to June?</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>III</span> <span class="smaller">MIGGY</span></h2>

-

-<p>I have never heard the chimes of Westminster cathedral, but when some

-time they do sound for me I shall find in them something all my own. For

-the old rosewood clock which has told time for me these many years is

-possessed of a kind of intelligence because its maker gave to it the

-Westminster chimes. Thus, though the clock must by patient ticking teach

-the rhythm of duration until the secret monotony of rhythm is confessed,

-it has also its high tides of life, rhythmic, too, and at every quarter

-hour fills a kind of general creative office: four notes for the

-quarter, eight for the half, twelve for the three-quarters, sixteen for

-the hour, and then the deep Amen of the strokes. At twelve o'clock it

-swells richly to its zenith of expression and almost says something

-else. Through even the organ fulness of the cathedral bells I shall hear

-the tingling melody of the rosewood clock chimes, for their sweet

-incidence has been to me both matins and lullaby and often trembles

-within my sleep. I have the clock always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> with me. It is a little

-voice-friend, it is one of those half folk, like flowers and the wind

-and an open fireplace and a piano, which are a frail, semi-born race,

-wistful of complete life, but as yet only partly overlapping our own

-sphere. These fascinate me almost as much as the articulate. That was

-why, when my little maid Elfa had brought me the summons to-day, I stood

-on the threshold and in some satisfaction watched Miggy, rapt before my

-clock in its musical maximum of noon.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy is as thin as a bough, and her rather large head is swept by an

-ungovernable lot of fine brown hair. Her face was turned from me, and

-she was wearing a high-necked gingham apron faded to varying values of

-brown and faint purple and violet of a quite surprising beauty. When the

-last stroke ceased, she turned to me as if I had been there all the

-time.</p>

-

-<p>"I wish I could hear it do that again," she said, standing where she had

-stood, arms folded.</p>

-

-<p>"You will, perhaps, to-morrow," I answered.</p>

-

-<p>Truly, if it was to be Miggy, then she would hear the chimes to-morrow

-and to-morrow; and as she turned, my emotion of finality increased. I

-have never loved the tribe of the Headlongs, though I am very sorry for

-any one who has not had with them an occasional innocent tribal junket;

-but I hold that through our intuitions, we may become<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> a kind of

-apotheosis of the Headlongs. Who of us has not chosen a vase, a chair, a

-rug, by some motive transcending taste, by the bidding of a

-friendly-faithful monitor who, somewhere inside one, nodded a choice

-which we obeyed? And yet a vase is a dead thing with no little seeking

-tentacles that catch and cling, while in choosing the living it is that

-one's friendly-faithful monitor is simply recognizing the monitor of the

-other person. I, for one, am more and more willing to trust these two to

-avow their own. For I think that this monitor is, perhaps, that silent

-Custodian whom, if ever I can win through her elusiveness, I shall know

-to be myself. As the years pass I trust her more and more. I find that

-we like the same people, she and I! And instantly we both liked Miggy.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy stood regarding me intently.</p>

-

-<p>"I saw you go past the Brevy's yesterday, where the crape is on the

-door," she observed; "I thought it was you."</p>

-

-<p>I wonder at the precision with which very little people and very big

-people brush aside the minor conventions and do it in such ways that one

-nature is never mistaken for the other.</p>

-

-<p>"The girl who died there was your friend, then?" I asked.</p>

-

-<p>"No," Miggy said; "I just knew her to speak to. And she didn't always

-bother her head to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> speak to me. I just went in there yesterday morning

-to get the feeling."</p>

-

-<p>"I beg your pardon. To get&mdash;what?" I asked.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," said Miggy, "you know when you look at a corpse you can always

-sense your own breath better&mdash;like it was something alive inside you.

-That's why I never miss seeing one if I can help. It's the only time I'm

-real glad I'm living."</p>

-

-<p>As I motioned her to the chair and took my own, I felt a kind of

-weariness. The neurotics, I do believe, are of us all the nearest to the

-truth about things, but as I grow older I find myself getting to take a

-surpassing comfort in the normal. Or rather, I am always willing to have

-the normal thrust upon me, but my neurotics I wish to select for myself.</p>

-

-<p>"My neighbour tells me," I said merely, "that she thinks you should be

-my secretary." (It is a big word for the office, but a little hill is

-still a hill.)</p>

-

-<p>"I think so, too," said Miggy, simply, "I was afraid you wouldn't."</p>

-

-<p>"Have you ever been anybody's secretary?" I continued.</p>

-

-<p>"Never," said Miggy. "I never saw anybody before that had a secretary."</p>

-

-<p>"But something must have made her think you would do," I suggested. "And

-what made you think so?"</p>

-

-<p>"Well," Miggy said, "she thinks so because she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> wants me to get ahead.

-And I think so because I generally think I can do anything&mdash;except

-mathematics. Has Secretary got any mathematics about it?"</p>

-

-<p>"Not my secretary work," I told her, reviewing these extraordinary

-qualifications for duty; "except counting the words on a page. You could

-do that?"</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, that!" said Miggy. "But if you told me to multiply two fractions

-you'd never see me again, no matter how much I wanted to come back.

-Calliope Marsh says she's always expecting to find some folks' heads

-caved in on one side&mdash;same as red and blue balloons. If mine caved, it'd

-be on the mathematics corner."</p>

-

-<p>I assured her that I never have a fraction in my house.</p>

-

-<p>"Then I'll come," said Miggy, simply.</p>

-

-<p>But immediately she leaned forward with a look of anxiety, and her face

-was pointed and big-eyed, so that distress became a part of it.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh," she said, "I <i>forgot</i>. I meant to tell you first."</p>

-

-<p>"What is it? Can you not come, after all?" I inquired gravely.</p>

-

-<p>"I've got a drawback," said Miggy, soberly. "A man's in love with me."</p>

-

-<p>She linked her arms before her, a hand on either<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> shoulder&mdash;arms whose

-slenderness amazes me, though at the wrist they taper and in their

-extreme littleness are yet round. Because of this frailty she has a kind

-of little girl look which at that moment curiously moved me.</p>

-

-<p>"Who told you that?" I asked abruptly.</p>

-

-<p>"About it being a drawback? Everybody 'most," said Miggy. "They all

-laugh about us and act like it was a pity."</p>

-

-<p>For a moment I felt a kind of anger as I felt it once when a woman said

-to me of a wife of many years whose first little child was coming, that

-she was "in trouble." I own that,&mdash;save with my neighbour, and Calliope,

-and a few more whom I love&mdash;here in the village I miss the simple good

-breeding of the perception that nothing is nobler than the emotions, and

-the simple good taste of taking seriously love among its young. Taking

-it seriously, I say. Not, heaven forbid, taking it for granted, as do

-the cities.</p>

-

-<p>"Other things being equal, I prefer folk who are in love," I told Miggy.

-Though I observe that I instance a commercialization which I deplore by

-not insisting on this secretarial qualification to anything like the

-extent with which I insist on, say, spelling.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy nodded&mdash;three little nods which seemed to settle everything.</p>

-

-<p>"Then I'll come," she repeated. "Anyhow, it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> isn't me that's in love at

-all. It's Peter. But of course I have to have some of the blame."</p>

-

-<p>So! It was, then, not "all Peter with Miggy." Poor Peter. It must be a

-terrific problem to be a Peter to such a Miggy. I must have looked "Poor

-Peter," because the girl's face took on its first smile. Such a smile as

-it was, brilliant, sparkling, occupying her features instead of

-informing them.</p>

-

-<p>"He won't interfere much," she observed. "He's in the cannery all day

-and then he practises violin and tinkers. I only see him one or two

-evenings a week; and I never think of him at all."</p>

-

-<p>"As my secretary," said I, "you may make a mental note for me: remind me

-that I wish sometime to meet Peter."</p>

-

-<p>"He'll be real pleased," said Miggy, "and real scared. Now about my

-being your secretary: do I have to take down everything you do?"</p>

-

-<p>"My dear child!" I exclaimed.</p>

-

-<p>"Don't I?" said Miggy. "Why, the Ladies' Aid has a secretary and she

-takes down every single thing the society does. I thought that was being

-one."</p>

-

-<p>I told her, as well as might be, what I should require of her&mdash;not by

-now, I own, with any particularity of idea that I had a secretary, but

-rather that I had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be of use in

-many a little mechanical task. She listened,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> and, when I had made an

-end, gave her three little nods; but her face fell.</p>

-

-<p>"It's just doing as you're told," she summed it up with a sigh.

-"Everything is, ain't it? I thought maybe Secretary was doing your

-best."</p>

-

-<p>"But it is," I told her.</p>

-

-<p>"No," she said positively, "you can't do your best when you have to do

-just exactly what you're told. Your <i>best</i> tells you how to do itself."</p>

-

-<p>At this na&iuml;ve putting of the personal equation which should play so

-powerful a part in the economics of toil I was minded to apologize for

-intending to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible duties with

-me. She had the truth, though: that the strong creative instinct is the

-chief endowment, primal as breath; for on it depend both life and the

-expression of life, the life of the race and the ultimate racial

-utterance.</p>

-

-<p>We talked on for a little, Miggy, I observed, having that royal

-indifference to time which, when it does not involve indifference to the

-time of other people, I delightedly commend. For myself, I can never

-understand why I should eat at one or sleep at eleven, if it is, as it

-often is, <i>my</i> one and <i>my</i> eleven and nobody else's. For, as between

-the clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other o'clocks are mine

-and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who

-would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> interrupt a sunset to go to dine, or wave away the stars in their

-courses to go to sleep, merely because the hour had struck. It must be

-in their blood, poor things, as descendants from the cell, to which time

-and space were the only considerations.</p>

-

-<p>When Miggy was leaving, she paused on the threshold with her first hint

-of shyness, a hint which I welcomed. I think that every one to whom I am

-permanently drawn must have in his nature a phase of shyness, even of

-unconquerable timidity.</p>

-

-<p>"If I shouldn't do things," Miggy said, "like you're used to having them

-done&mdash;would you tell me? I know a few nice things to do and I do 'em.

-But I'm always waking up in the night and thinking what a lot there must

-be that I do wrong. So if I do 'em wrong would you mind not just

-squirming and keeping still about 'em&mdash;but tell me?"</p>

-

-<p>"I'll tell you, child, if there is need," I promised her. And I caught

-her smile&mdash;that faint, swift, solemn minute which sometimes reveals on a

-face the childlike wistfulness of every one of us, under the mask, to

-come as near as may be to the others.</p>

-

-<p>I own that when, just now, I turned from her leave-taking, I had that

-infrequent sense of emptiness-in-the-room which I have had usually only

-with those I love or with some rare being, all fire and spirit and idea,

-who has flamed in my presence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> and died into departure. I cannot see why

-we do not feel this sense of emptiness whenever we leave one another.

-Would you not think that it would be so with us who live above the abyss

-and below the uttermost spaces? It is not so, and there are those from

-whose presence I long to be gone in a discomfort which is a kind of

-orison of my soul to my body to hurry away. It is so that I long to be

-gone from that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, and of this I am

-sorely ashamed. But I think that all such dissonance is merely a failure

-in method, and that the spirit of this business of being is that we long

-for one another to be near.</p>

-

-<p>Yes, in "this world of visible images" and patterns and schedules and

-o'clocks, it is like stumbling on the true game to come on some one who

-is not on any dial. And I fancy that Miggy is no o'clock. She is not

-Dawn o'clock, because already she has lived so much; nor Noon o'clock,

-because she is far from her high moment; nor is she Dusk o'clock,

-because she is so poignantly alive. Rather, she is like the chimes of a

-clock&mdash;which do not tell the time, but which almost say something else.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>IV</span> <span class="smaller">SPLENDOUR TOWN</span></h2>

-

-<p>Last night I went for a walk across the river, and Little Child went

-with me to the other end of the bridge.</p>

-

-<p>I would have expected it to be impossible to come to the fourth chapter

-and to have said nothing of the river. But the reason is quite clear:

-for the setting of the stories of the village as I know them is

-pre&euml;minently rambling streets and trim dooryards, and neat interiors

-with tidy centre-tables. Nature is merely the necessary opera-house, not

-the intimate setting. Nature's speech through the trees is most

-curiously taken for granted as being trees alone, and she is, as I have

-shown, sometimes cut off quite rudely in the midst of an elm or linden

-sentence and curtly interrupted by a sidewalk. If a grove of trees is

-allowed to remain in a north dooryard it is almost certainly because the

-trees break the wind. Likewise, Nature's unfoldings in our turf and

-clover we incline to regard as merely lawns, the results of seeds and

-autumn fertilizing. Our vines<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> are for purposes of shade, cheaper and

-prettier than awnings or porch rollers. With our gardens, where our

-"table vegetables" are grown, Nature is, I think, considered to have

-little or nothing to do; and we openly pride ourselves on our early this

-and our prodigious that, quite as when we cut a dress or build a

-lean-to. We admit the rain or the sunny slope into partnership, but what

-we recognize is weather rather than the mighty spirit of motherhood in

-Nature. Indeed, our flower gardens, where are wrought such miracles of

-poppies and pinks, are perhaps the only threshold on which we stand

-abashed, as at the sound of a singing voice, a voice that sings

-believing itself to be alone.</p>

-

-<p>These things being so, it is no wonder that the river has been for so

-long no integral part of village life. The river is accounted a place to

-fish, a place to bathe, a thing to cross to get to the other side, an

-objective point&mdash;including the new iron bridge&mdash;to which to take guests.

-But of the everyday life it is no proper part. On the contrary, the

-other little river, which strikes out silverly for itself to eastward,

-is quite a personality in the village, for on it is a fine fleet of

-little launches with which folk take delight. But this river of mine to

-the west is a thing of whims and eddies and shifting sand bars, and here

-not many boats adventure. So the river is accepted as a kind of pleasant

-hermit living on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> edge of the village. It draws few of us as Nature

-can draw to herself. We know the water as a taste only and not yet as an

-emotion. We say that we should enjoy going there if we had the time. I

-know, I know. You see that we do not yet <i>live</i> the river, as an ancient

-people would live their moor. But in our launches, our camping parties,

-our flights to a little near lake for dinner, in a tent here and a swing

-there, set to face riverward, there lies the thrill of process, and by

-these things Nature is wooing us surely to her heart. Already the Pump

-pasture has for us the quality of individuality, and we have picnics

-there and speak of the pasture almost as of a host. Presently we shall

-be companioned by all our calm stretches of meadow, our brown sand bars,

-our Caledonia hills, our quiet lakes, our unnavigable river, as the

-Northmen were fellowed of the sea.</p>

-

-<p>Little Child has at once a wilder and a tamer instinct. She has this

-fellowship and the fellowship of more.</p>

-

-<p>"Where shall we go to-day?" I ask her, and she always says, "Far away

-for a party"&mdash;in a combination, it would seem, of the blood of shepherd

-kings with certain corpuscles of modernity. And when we are in the woods

-she instances the same dual quality by, "Now let's sit down in a <i>roll</i>

-and wait for a fairy, and be a society."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p><p>We always go along the levee, Little Child and I, and I watch the hour

-have its way with her, and I do not deny that occasionally I try to

-improve on the hour by a tale of magic or by the pastime of teaching her

-a lyric. I love to hear her pretty treble in "Who is Sylvia? What is

-she?" and "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," and "April, April, laugh

-thy girlish laughter," and in Pippa's song. Last night, to be sure, the

-lyrics rather gave way to some talk about the circus to be to-day, an

-unwonted benison on the village. But even the reality of the circus

-could not long keep Little Child from certain sweet vagaries, and I love

-best to hear her in these fancyings.</p>

-

-<p>"Here," she said to me last night, "is her sponge."</p>

-

-<p>I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are always finding the fairy's

-cast-off ornaments and articles of toilet. On occasion we have found her

-crown, her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her plumed fan,

-her parasol&mdash;a skirtful of fancies which next day Little Child has

-brought to me in a shoe box for safe keeping so that "They" would not

-throw the things away: that threatening "They" which overhangs

-childhood, casting away its treasures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying

-a ladder straight through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the

-back yard. I can visualize that "They" as I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> believe it seems to some

-children, something dark and beetling and menacing and imminent, less

-like the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this precious idea of

-the Family, to conserve which is one of our chief hopes, should so often

-be made to appear to its youngest member in the general semblance of a

-phalanx?</p>

-

-<p>We sat down for a little at the south terminal of the bridge, where a

-steep bank and a few desperately clinging trees have arranged a little

-shrine to the sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across the bridge

-I had been watching against the gold the majestic or apathetic or sodden

-profiles of the farmers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face,

-it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it to forecast the

-weather. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky

-and called "The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the

-village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white

-pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital. And

-there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the butcher's cart halted in

-snow while a tawny-jerseyed boy lifts high his yellow light to find a

-parcel. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising

-values and fresco our village libraries with them&mdash;yes, and our drug

-stores, too.</p>

-

-<p>The story that I told Little Child while we rested<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> had the symbolism

-which I often choose for her: that of a girl keeping a garden for the

-coming of a child. All her life she has been making ready and nothing

-has been badly done. In one green room of the garden she has put fair

-thoughts, in another fair words, and in the innermost fastnesses of the

-garden fair deeds. Here she has laid colour, there sweet sound, there

-something magic which is a special kind of seeing. When the child comes,

-these things will be first toys, then tools, then weapons. Sometimes the

-old witch of the wood tries to blow into the garden a thistle of discord

-or bubbles of delight to be followed, and these must be warded away. All

-day the spirit of the child to come wanders through the garden, telling

-the girl what to do here or here, keeping her from guile or from

-idleness-without-dreams. She knows its presence and I think that she has

-even named it. If it shall be a little girl, then it is to be Dagmar,

-Mother of Day, or Dawn; but if a little boy, then it shall be called for

-one whom she has not yet seen. Meanwhile, outside the door of the garden

-many would speak with the girl. On these she looks, sometimes she even

-leans from her casement, and once, it may be, she reaches out her hand,

-ever so swiftly, and some one without there touches it. But at that she

-snatches back her hand and bars the garden, and for a time the spirit of

-the little child does not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> come very near. So she goes serenely on

-toward the day when a far horn sounds and somebody comes down the air

-from heaven, as it has occurred to nobody else to do. And they hear the

-voice of the little child, singing in the garden.</p>

-

-<p>"The girl is me," says little Little Child, as she always says when I

-have finished this story.</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," I tell her.</p>

-

-<p>"I'd like to see that garden," she says thoughtfully.</p>

-

-<p>Then I show her the village in the trees of the other shore, roof upon

-roof pricked by a slim steeple; for that is the garden.</p>

-

-<p>"I don't care about just bein' good," she says, "but I'd like to

-housekeep that garden."</p>

-

-<p>"For a sometime-little-child of your own," I tell her.</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," she assents, "an' make dresses for."</p>

-

-<p>I cannot understand how mothers let them grow up not knowing, these

-little mothers-to-be who so often never guess their vocation. It is a

-reason for everything commonly urged on the ground of conduct, a ground

-so lifeless to youth. But quicken every desert space with "It must be

-done so for the sake of the little child you will have some day," and

-there rises a living spirit. Morals, civics, town and home economics,

-learning&mdash;there is the concrete reason for them all; and the abstract

-understanding<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> of these things for their own sakes will follow,

-flower-wise, fruit-wise, for the healing of the times.</p>

-

-<p>I had told to that old Aunt Effie who keeps house for Miggy and Little

-Child something of what I thought to do&mdash;breaking in upon the old

-woman's talk of linoleum and beans and other things having, so to say,

-one foot in the universe.</p>

-

-<p>"Goodness," that old woman had answered, with her worried turn of head,

-"I'm real glad you're going to be here. <i>I dread saying anything.</i>"</p>

-

-<p>Here too we must look to the larger day when the state shall train for

-parenthood and for citizenship, when the schools and the universities

-shall speak for the state the cosmic truths, and when by comparison

-botany and differential calculus shall be regarded as somewhat less

-vital in ushering in the kingdom of God.</p>

-

-<p>The water reservoir rose slim against the woods to the north; to the

-south was a crouching hop house covered with old vines. I said to Little

-Child:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Look everywhere and tell me where you think a princess would live if

-she lived here."</p>

-

-<p>She looked everywhere and answered:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"In the water tower in those woods."</p>

-

-<p>"And where would the old witch live?" I asked her.</p>

-

-<p>"In the Barden's hop house," she answered.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p><p>"And where would the spirit of the little child be?" I tested her.</p>

-

-<p>She looked long out across the water.</p>

-

-<p>"I think in the sunset," she said at last. And then of her own will she

-said over the Sunset Spell I have taught her:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<div>"I love to stand in this great air</div>

-<div>And see the sun go down.</div>

-<div>It shows me a bright veil to wear</div>

-<div>And such a pretty gown.</div>

-<div>Oh, I can see a playmate there</div>

-<div>Far up in Splendour Town."</div>

-</div></div></div>

-

-<p>I could hardly bear to let her go home, but eight o'clock is very

-properly Little Child's bedtime, and so I sent her across the bridge

-waving her hand every little way in that fashion of children who, I

-think, are hoping thus to save the moment that has just died. I have

-known times when I, too, have wanted to wave my hand at a moment and

-keep it looking at me as long as possible. But presently the moment

-almost always turned away.</p>

-

-<p>Last night I half thought that the sunset itself would like to have

-stayed. It went so delicately about its departure, taking to itself

-first a shawl of soft dyes, then a painted scarf, then frail iris wings.

-It mounted far up the heavens, testing its strength for flight and

-shaking brightness from its garments. And it slipped lingeringly away as

-if the riot of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> colour were after all the casual part, and the real

-business of the moment were to stay on with everybody. In the tenuity of

-the old anthropomorphisms I marvel that they did not find the sunset a

-living thing, tender of mortals, forever loth to step from out one

-moment into the cherishing arms of the next. Think! The sunset that the

-Greeks knew has been flaming round the world, dying from moment to

-moment and from mile to mile, with no more of pause than the human

-heart, since sunset flamed for Hero and Helen and Ariadne.</p>

-

-<p>If the sunset was made for lovers, and in our midland summers lingers on

-their account, then last night it was lingering partly for Miggy and

-Peter. At the end of the bridge I came on them together.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy did not flush when she saw me, and though I would not have

-expected that she would flush I was yet disappointed. I take an

-old-fashioned delight in women whose high spirit is compatible with a

-sensibility which causes them the little agonizings proper to this

-moment, and to that.</p>

-

-<p>But Miggy introduced Peter with all composure.</p>

-

-<p>"This," she said, "is Peter. His last name is Cary."</p>

-

-<p>"How do you do, Peter?" I said very heartily.</p>

-

-<p>I thought that Peter did something the rationale of which might have

-been envied of courts. He turned to Miggy and said "Thank you."

-Secretly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> I congratulated him on his embarrassment. In a certain milieu

-social shyness is as authentic a patent of perception as in another

-milieu is taste.</p>

-

-<p>"Come home with me," I besought them. "We can find cake. We can make

-lemonade. We can do some reading aloud." For I will not ask the mere

-cake and lemonade folk to my house. They must be, in addition, good or

-wise or not averse to becoming either.</p>

-

-<p>I conceived Peter's evident agony to rise from his need to reply.

-Instead, it rose from his need to refuse.</p>

-

-<p>"I take my violin lesson," he explained miserably.</p>

-

-<p>"He takes his violin lesson," Miggy added, with a pretty, somewhat

-maternal manner of translating. I took note of this faint manner of

-proprietorship, for it is my belief that when a woman assumes it she

-means more than she knows that she means.</p>

-

-<p>"I'm awful sorry," said Peter, from his heart; "I was just having to go

-back this minute."</p>

-

-<p>"To-morrow's his regular lesson day," Miggy explained, "but to-morrow

-he's going to take me to the circus, so he has his lesson to-night. Go

-on," she added, "you'll be late and you'll have to pay just the same

-anyway." I took note of this frank fashion of protection of interests,

-for it is my belief that matters are advancing when the lady practises

-economics in courtship. But I saw that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> Miggy was manifesting no

-symptoms of accompanying Peter, and I begged them not to let me spoil

-their walk.</p>

-

-<p>"It's all right," Miggy said; "he'll have to hurry and I don't want to

-go in yet anyway. I'll walk back with you." And of this I took note with

-less satisfaction. It was as if Miggy had not come alive.</p>

-

-<p>Peter smiled at us, caught off his hat, and went away with it in his

-hand, and the moment that he left my presence he became another being. I

-could see by his back that he was himself, free again, under no bondage

-of manner. It is a terrific problem, this enslavement of speech and

-trivial conduct which to some of us provides a pleasant medium and for

-some of us furnishes fetters. When will they manage a wireless society?

-I am tired waiting. For be it a pleasant medium or be it fetters, the

-present communication keeps us all apart. "I hope," I said once at

-dinner, "that I shall be living when they think they get the first sign

-from Mars." "I hope," said my companion, "that I shall be living when I

-think I get the first sign from you&mdash;and you&mdash;and you, about this

-table." If this young Shelley could really have made some sign, what

-might it not have been?</p>

-

-<p>"Everybody's out walking to-night," Miggy observed. "There's Liva Vesey

-and Timothy Toplady ahead of us."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p><p>"They are going to be married, are they not?" I asked.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy looked as if I had said something indelicate.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," she answered, "not out loud yet."</p>

-

-<p>Then, fearing that she had rebuked me, "He's going to take her to the

-circus to-morrow in their new buckboard," she volunteered. And I find in

-Friendship that the circus is accounted a kind of official

-trysting-place for all sweethearts.</p>

-

-<p>We kept a little way back of the lovers, the sun making Liva Vesey's

-pink frock like a vase-shaped lamp of rose. Timothy was looking down at

-her and straightway looking away again when Liva had summoned her

-courage to look up. They were extremely pleasant to watch, but this

-Miggy did not know and she was intent upon me. She had met Little Child

-running home.</p>

-

-<p>"She's nice to take a walk with," Miggy said; "but I like to walk around

-by myself too. Only to-night Peter came."</p>

-

-<p>"Miggy," said I, "I want to congratulate you that Peter is in love with

-you."</p>

-

-<p>She looked up with puzzled eyes.</p>

-

-<p>"Why, that was nothing," she said; "he seemed to do it real easy."</p>

-

-<p>"But it is <i>not</i> easy," I assured her, "to find many such fine young

-fellows as Peter seems to be. I hope you will be very happy together."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p><p>"I'm not engaged," said Miggy, earnestly; "I'm only invited."</p>

-

-<p>"Ah, well," I said, "if I may be allowed&mdash;I hope you are not sending

-regrets."</p>

-

-<p>Miggy laughed out suddenly.</p>

-

-<p>"Married isn't like a party," she said; "I know that much about society.

-Party you either accept or regret. Married you do both."</p>

-

-<p>I could have been no more amazed if the rosewood clock had said it.</p>

-

-<p>"Who has been talking to you, child?" I asked in distress.</p>

-

-<p>"I got it out of living," said Miggy, solemnly. "You live along and you

-live along and you find out 'most everything."</p>

-

-<p>I looked away across the Pump pasture where the railway tracks cut the

-Plank Road, that comes on and on until it is modified into Daphne

-Street. I remembered a morning of mist and dogwood when I had walked

-that road through the gateway into an earthly paradise. Have I not said

-that since that time we two have been, as it were, set to music and

-sung; so that the silences of separation are difficult to beguile save

-by the companionship of the village&mdash;the village that has somehow taught

-Miggy its bourgeoise lesson of doubt?</p>

-

-<p>My silence laid on her some vague burden of proof.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p><p>"Besides," she said, "I'm not like the women who marry people. Most of

-'em that's married ain't all married, anyway."</p>

-

-<p>"What do you mean, child?" I demanded.</p>

-

-<p>"They're not," protested Miggy. "They marry like they pick out a way to

-have a dress made when they don't admire any of the styles very much,

-and they've wore out everything else. Women like some things about

-somebody, and that much they marry. Then the rest of him never is

-married at all, and by and by that rest starts to get lonesome."</p>

-

-<p>"But Miggy," I said to all this, "I should think you might like Peter

-entirely."</p>

-

-<p>She surprised me by her seriousness.</p>

-

-<p>"Anyhow, I've got my little sister to bring up," she said; "Aunt Effie

-hasn't anything. And I couldn't put two on him to support."</p>

-

-<p>I wondered why not, but I said nothing.</p>

-

-<p>"And besides," Miggy said after a pause, "there's Peter's father. You

-know about him?"</p>

-

-<p>I did know&mdash;who in the village did not know? Since my neighbour had told

-me of him I had myself seen him singing through the village streets,

-shouting out and disturbing the serene evenings, drunken, piteous....</p>

-

-<p>"Peter has him all the time," I suggested.</p>

-

-<p>She must have found a hint of resistance in my voice, for her look

-questioned me.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p><p>"I never could stand it to have anybody like that in the house," she

-said defensively. "I've told Peter. I've told him both reasons...."

-Miggy threw out her arms and stood still, facing the sunset. "Anyway, I

-want to keep on feeling all free and liberty-like!" she said.</p>

-

-<p>This intense individualism of youth, passioning only for far spaces,

-taking no account of the common lot nor as yet urgent to share it is,

-like the panther grace in the tread of the cat, a survival of the

-ancient immunity from accountabilities. To note it is to range down the

-evolution of ages. To tame it&mdash;there is a task for all the servants of

-the new order.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy was like some little bright creature caught unaware in the net of

-living and still remembering the colonnades of otherwhere, renowned for

-their shining. She was looking within the sunset, where it was a thing

-of wings and doors ajar and fair corridors. I saw the great freedoms of

-sunset in her face&mdash;the sunset where Little Child and I had agreed that

-a certain spirit lived.... Perhaps it was that that little vagrant

-spirit signalled to me&mdash;and the Custodian understood it. Perhaps it was

-that I saw, beneath the freedoms, the woman-tenderness in the girl's

-face. In any case I spoke abruptly and half without intention.</p>

-

-<p>"But you don't want to be free from Little Child.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> It is almost as if

-she were your little girl, is it not?" I said.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy's eyes did not leave the sunset. It was rather as if she saw some

-answer there.</p>

-

-<p>"Well, I like to pretend she is," she said simply.</p>

-

-<p>"That," I said quietly, "is pleasant to pretend."</p>

-

-<p>And now her mood had changed as if some one had come to take her place.</p>

-

-<p>"But if she <i>was</i>&mdash;that," she said, "her name, then, would most likely

-be Margaret, like mine, wouldn't it?"</p>

-

-<p>"It would be very well to have it Margaret," I agreed.</p>

-

-<p>Her step was quickened as by sudden shyness.</p>

-

-<p>"It's funny to think about," she said. "Sometimes I most think of&mdash;her,

-till she seems in the room. Not quite my sister. I mean <i>Margaret</i>."</p>

-

-<p>It made my heart beat somewhat. I wondered if anything of my story to

-Little Child was left in my mind, and if subconsciously Miggy was

-reading it. This has sometimes happened to me with a definiteness which

-would be surprising if the supernatural were to me less natural. But I

-think that it was merely because Miggy had no idea of the sanctity of

-what she felt that she was speaking of it.</p>

-

-<p>"How does she look?" I asked.</p>

-

-<p>"Like me," said Miggy, readily; "I don't want her to either. I want her

-to be pretty and I'm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> not. But when I think of her running 'round in the

-house or on the street, I always make her look like me. Only little."</p>

-

-<p>"Running 'round in the house." That was the way my neighbour had put it.

-Perhaps it is the way that every woman puts it.</p>

-

-<p>"Does she seem like you, too?" I tempted her on.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, better," Miggy said confidently; "learning to play on the piano and

-not much afraid of folks and real happy."</p>

-

-<p>"Don't you ever pretend about a boy?" I asked.</p>

-

-<p>She shook her head.</p>

-

-<p>"No," she said; "if I do&mdash;I never can think him out real plain. Margaret

-I can most see."</p>

-

-<p>And this, too, was like the girl in the garden and the spirit of that

-one to be called by a name of one whom she had not seen.</p>

-

-<p>I think that I have never hoped so much that I might know the right

-thing to say. And when most I wish this I do as I did then: I keep my

-impulse silent and I see if that vague Custodian within, somewhere

-between the seeing and the knowing, will not speak for me. I wonder if

-she did? At all events, what either she or I said was:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Miggy! Look everywhere and tell me the most beautiful thing you can

-see."</p>

-

-<p>She was not an instant in deciding.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p><p>"Why, sunset," she said.</p>

-

-<p>"Promise me," said I&mdash;said we!&mdash;"that you will remember <i>Now</i>. And that

-after to-night, when you see a sunset&mdash;always, always, till she

-comes&mdash;you will think about her. About Margaret."</p>

-

-<p>Because this caught her fancy she promised readily enough. And then we

-lingered a little, while the moment gave up its full argosy. I have a

-fancy for these times when I say "I will remember," and I am always

-selecting them and knowing, as if I had tied a knot in them, that I will

-remember. These times become the moments at which I keep waving my hand

-in the hope that they will never turn away. And it was this significance

-which I wished the hour to have for Miggy, so that for her the sunset

-should forever hold, as Little Child had said that it holds, that tiny,

-wandering spirit....</p>

-

-<p>Liva Vesey and Timothy had lingered, too, and we passed them on the

-bridge, he still trying to win her eyes, and his own eyes fleeing

-precipitantly whenever she looked up. The two seemed leaning upon the

-winged light, the calm stretches of the Pump pasture, the brown sand

-bar, the Caledonia hills. And the lovers and the quiet river and the

-village, roof upon roof, in the trees of the other shore, and most of

-all Miggy and her shadowy Margaret seemed to me like the words of some

-mighty cosmic utterance, with the country evening for its tranquil voice.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>V</span> <span class="smaller">DIFFERENT</span></h2>

-

-<p>Those who had expected the circus procession to arrive from across the

-canal to-day were amazed to observe it filing silently across the tracks

-from the Plank Road. The Eight Big Shows Combined had arrived in the

-gray dawn; and word had not yet gone the rounds that, the Fair Ground

-being too wet, the performance would "show" in the Pump pasture, beyond

-the mill. There was to be no evening amusement. It was a wait between

-trains that conferred the circus on Friendship at all.</p>

-

-<p>Half the country-side, having brought its lunch into town to make a day

-of it, trailed as a matter of course after the clown's cart at the end

-of the parade, and about noon arrived in the pasture with the

-pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to find it transformed

-into unknown ground. Who in the vicinity of the village had not known

-the Pump pasture of old? Haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,

-it had lain expressionless as the hills,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> for as long as memory. When in

-spring, "Where you goin'? Don't you go far in the hot sun!" from

-Friendship mothers was answered by, "We're just goin' up to the Pump

-pasture for vi'lets" from Friendship young, no more was to be said. The

-pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great, faithful Newfoundland

-dog; and about it was something of the safety of silence and warmth and

-night-in-a-trundle-bed.</p>

-

-<p>And lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture were articulate. The great

-elliptical tent, the strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of

-the hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were doing&mdash;these gave

-to the place the aspect of having from the first been secretly familiar

-with more than one had suspected.</p>

-

-<p>"Ain't it the divil?" demanded Timothy Toplady, Jr., ecstatically, as

-the glory of the scene burst upon him.</p>

-

-<p>Liva Vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in the buckboard, looked up

-at his brown Adam's apple&mdash;she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as

-her sweetheart's face&mdash;and rejoined:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, Timmie! ain't it just what you might say <i>great</i>?"</p>

-

-<p>"You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly, "that it is that."</p>

-

-<p>He looked down in her face with a lifting of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>eyebrows and an honest

-fatuity of mouth. Liva Vesey knew the look&mdash;without ever having met it

-squarely, she could tell when it was there, and she promptly turned her

-head, displaying to Timothy's ardent eyes tight coils of beautiful blond

-crinkly hair, a little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver

-locket chain. At which Timothy now collapsed with the mien of a man who

-is unwillingly having second thoughts.</p>

-

-<p>"My!" he said.</p>

-

-<p>They drove into the meadow, and when the horse had been loosed and cared

-for, they found a great cottonwood tree, its leaves shimmering and

-moving like little banners, and there they spread their lunch. The sunny

-slope was dotted with other lunchers. The look of it all was very gay,

-partly because the trees were in June green, and among them windmills

-were whirling like gaunt and acrobatic witches, and partly because it

-was the season when the women were brave in new hats, very pink and very

-perishable.</p>

-

-<p>The others observed the two good-humouredly from afar, and once or twice

-a tittering group of girls, unescorted, passed the cottonwood tree,

-making elaborate detours to avoid it. At which Liva flushed, pretending

-not to notice; and Timothy looked wistfully in her face to see if she

-wished that she had not come with him. However, Timothy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> never dared

-look at her long enough to find out anything at all; for the moment that

-she seemed about to meet his look he always dropped his eyes

-precipitantly to her little round chin and so to the silver chain and

-locket. And then he was miserable.</p>

-

-<p>It was strange that a plain heart-shaped locket, having no initials,

-could make a man so utterly, extravagantly unhappy. Three months

-earlier, Liva, back from a visit in the city, had appeared with her

-locket. Up to that time the only personality in which Timothy had ever

-indulged was to mention to her that her eyes were the colour of his

-sister's eyes, whose eyes were the colour of their mother's eyes and

-their father's eyes, and of Timothy's own, and "Our eyes match, mine and

-yours," he had blurted out, crimson. And yet, even on these terms, he

-had taken the liberty of being wretched because of her. How much more

-now when he was infinitely nearer to her? For with the long spring

-evenings upon them, when he had sat late at the Vesey farm, matters had

-so far advanced with Timothy that, with his own hand, he had picked a

-green measuring-worm from Liva's throat. Every time he looked at her

-throat he thought of that worm with rapture. But also every time he

-looked at her throat he saw the silver chain and locket. And on circus

-day, if the oracles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> seemed auspicious, he meant to find out whose

-picture was worn in that locket, even though the knowledge made him a

-banished man.</p>

-

-<p>If only she would ever mention the locket! he thought disconsolately

-over lunch. If only she would "bring up the subject," then he could find

-courage. But she never did mention it. And the talk ran now:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Would you ever, ever think this was the Pump pasture?" from Liva.</p>

-

-<p>"No, you wouldn't, would you? It don't look the same, does it? You'd

-think you was in a city or somewheres, wouldn't you now? Ain't it

-differ'nt?"</p>

-

-<p>"Did you count the elephants?"</p>

-

-<p>"I bet I did. Didn't you? Ten, wa'n't it? Did you count the cages?

-Neither did I. And they was too many of 'em shut up. I don't know

-whether it's much of a circus or not&mdash;" with gloomy superiority&mdash;"they

-not bein' any calliope, so."</p>

-

-<p>"A good many cute fellows in the band," observed Liva. For Liva would

-have teased a bit if Timothy would have teased too. But Timothy replied

-in mere misery:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"You can't tell much about these circus men, Liva. They're apt to be the

-kind that carouse around. I guess they ain't much to 'em but their swell

-way."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p><p>"Oh, I don't know," said Liva.</p>

-

-<p>Then a silence fell, resembling nothing so much as the breath of

-hesitation following a <i>faux pas</i>, save that this silence was longer,

-and was terminated by Liva humming a little snatch of song to symbolize

-how wholly delightful everything was.</p>

-

-<p>"My!" said Timothy, finally. "You wouldn't think this was the Pump

-pasture at all, it looks so differ'nt."</p>

-

-<p>"That's so," Liva said. "You wouldn't."</p>

-

-<p>It was almost as if the two were inarticulate, as the pasture had been

-until the strange influences of the day had come to quicken it.</p>

-

-<p>While Liva, with housewifely hands, put away the lunch things in their

-basket, Timothy nibbled along lengths of grass and hugged his knees and

-gloomed at the locket. It was then that Miggy and Peter passed them and

-the four greeted one another with the delicate, sheepish enjoyment of

-lovers who look on and understand other lovers. Then Timothy's look went

-back to Liva. Liva's rose-pink dress was cut distractingly without a

-collar, and the chain seemed to caress her little throat. Moreover, the

-locket had a way of hiding beneath a fold of ruffle, as if it were <i>her</i>

-locket and as if Timothy had no share in it.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh," cried Liva, "<i>Timmie</i>! That was the lion roared. Did you hear?"</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p><p>Timothy nodded darkly, as if there were worse than lions.</p>

-

-<p>"Wasn't it the lion?" she insisted.</p>

-

-<p>Timothy nodded again; he thought it might have been the lion.</p>

-

-<p>"What you so glum about, Timmie?" his sweetheart asked, glancing at him

-fleetingly.</p>

-

-<p>Timothy flushed to the line of his hair.</p>

-

-<p>"Gosh," he said, "this here pasture looks so differ'nt I can't get over

-it."</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," said Liva, "it does look differ'nt, don't it?"</p>

-

-<p>Before one o'clock they drifted with the rest toward the animal tent.

-They went incuriously past the snake show, the Eats-'em-alive show, and

-the Eastern vaudeville. But hard by the red wagon where tickets were

-sold Timothy halted spellbound. What he had heard was:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Types. Types. Right this way AND in this direction for Types. No,

-Ladies, and no, Gents: Not Tin-types. But Photo-types. Photo<i>graphs</i> put

-up in Tintype style AT Tintype price. Three for a quarter. The fourth of

-a dozen for the fourth of a dollar. Elegant pictures, elegant finish,

-refined, up-to-date. Of yourself, Gents, of yourself. Or of any one you

-see around you. And WHILE you wait."</p>

-

-<p>Timothy said it before he had any idea that he meant to say it:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span></p><p>"Liva," he begged, "come on. You."</p>

-

-<p>When she understood and when Timothy saw the momentary abashment in her

-eyes, it is certain that he had never loved her more. But the very next

-moment she was far more adorable.</p>

-

-<p>"Not unless you will, Timmie," she said, "and trade."</p>

-

-<p>He followed her into the hot little tent as if the waiting chair were a

-throne of empire. And perhaps it was. For presently Timothy had in his

-pocket a tiny blurry bit of paper at which he had hardly dared so much

-as glance, and he had given another blurry bit into her keeping. But

-that was not all. When she thanked him she had met his eyes. And he

-thought&mdash;oh, no matter what he thought. But it was as if there were

-established a throne of empire with Timothy lord of his world.</p>

-

-<p>Then they stepped along the green way of the Pump pasture and they

-entered the animal tent, and Strange Things closed about them. There

-underfoot lay the green of the meadow, verdant grass and not infrequent

-moss, plantain and sorrel and clover, all as yet hardly trampled and

-still sweet with the breath of kine and sheep. And three feet above,

-foregathered from the Antipodes, crouched and snarled the striped and

-spotted things of the wild, with teeth and claws quick to kill, and with

-generations of the jungle in their shifting eyes. The bright<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> wings of

-unknown birds, the scream of some harsh throat of an alien wood, the

-monkeys chattering, the soft stamp and padding of the elephants chained

-in a stately central line along the clover&mdash;it was certain, one would

-have said, that these must change the humour of the pasture as the

-companionship of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the

-mind. That the pasture, indeed, would never be the same, and that its

-influence would be breathed on all who entered there. Already Liva and

-Timothy, each with the other's picture in a pocket, moved down that tent

-of the field in another world. Or had that world begun at the door of

-the stuffy little phototype tent?</p>

-

-<p>It was the cage of bright-winged birds that held the two. Timothy stood

-grasping his elbows and looking at that flitting flame and orange. Dare

-he ask her if she would wear his phototype in her locket&mdash;dare he&mdash;dare

-he&mdash;&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>He turned to look at her. Oh, and the rose-pink cambric was so near his

-elbow! Her face, upturned to the birds, was flushed, her lips were

-parted, her eyes that matched Timothy's were alight; but there was

-always in Timothy's eyes a look, a softness, a kind of speech that

-Liva's could not match. He longed inexpressibly to say to her what was

-in his heart concerning the locket&mdash;the phototype&mdash;themselves. And Liva

-herself was longing to say<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> something about the sheer glory of the hour.

-So she looked up at his brown Adam's apple, and,</p>

-

-<p>"Think, Timmie," she said, "they're all in the Pump pasture where

-nothin' but cows an' robins an' orioles ever was before!"</p>

-

-<p>"I know it&mdash;I know it!" breathed Timothy fervently. "Don't seem like it

-could be the same place, does it?"</p>

-

-<p>Liva barely lifted her eyes.</p>

-

-<p>"It makes us seem differ'nt, too," she said, and flushed a little, and

-turned to hurry on.</p>

-

-<p>"I was thinkin' that too!" he cried ecstatically, overtaking her. But

-all that Timothy could see was tight coils of blond, crinkled hair, and

-a little ear and a curve of white throat, with a silver locket chain.</p>

-

-<p>Down the majestic line of the elephants, towering in the apotheosis of

-mere bulk to preach ineffectually that spirit is apocryphal and mass

-alone is potent; past the panthers that sniffed as if they guessed the

-nearness of the grazing herd in the next pasture; past the cage in which

-the lioness lay snarling and baring her teeth above her cubs, so

-pathetically akin to the meadow in her motherhood; past unknown

-creatures with surprising horns and shaggy necks and lolling tongues&mdash;it

-was a wonderful progress. But it was as if Liva had found something more

-wonderful than these when, before the tigers' cage, she stepped

-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>forward, stooped a little beneath the rope, and stood erect with

-shining eyes.</p>

-

-<p>"Look!" she said. "Look, Timmie."</p>

-

-<p>She was holding a blue violet.</p>

-

-<p>"In front of the tigers; it was <i>growing</i>!"</p>

-

-<p>"Why don't you give it to me?" was Timothy's only answer.</p>

-

-<p>She laid it in his hand, laughing a little at her daring.</p>

-

-<p>"It won't ever be the same," she said. "Tigers have walked over it. My,

-ain't everything in the pasture differ'nt?"</p>

-

-<p>"Just as differ'nt as differ'nt can be," Timothy admitted.</p>

-

-<p>"Here we are back to the birds again," Liva said, sighing.</p>

-

-<p>Timothy had put the violet in his coat pocket and he stood staring at

-the orange and flame in the cage: Her phototype and a violet&mdash;her

-phototype and a violet.</p>

-

-<p>But all he said, not daring to look at her at all, was:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"I can't make it seem like the Pump pasture to save me."</p>

-

-<p>There is something, as they have said of a bugle, "winged and warlike"

-about a circus&mdash;the confusions, the tramplings, the shapes, the keen

-flavour of the Impending, and above all the sense of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>Untoward,

-which is eternal and which survives glamour as his grave survives a man.

-Liva and Timothy sat on the top row of seats and felt it all, and

-believed it to be merely honest mirth. Occasionally Liva turned and

-peered out through the crack in the canvas where the side met the roof,

-for the pure joy of feeling herself alien to the long green fields with

-their grazing herds and their orioles, and at one with the colour and

-music and life within. And she was glad of it all, glad to be there with

-Timothy. But all she said was:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, Timmie, I hope it ain't half over yet. Do you s'pose it is? When I

-look outside it makes me feel as if it was over."</p>

-

-<p>And Timothy, his heart beating, a great hope living in his breast,

-answered only:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"No, I guess it'll be quite some time yet. It's a nice show. Nice

-performance for the money, right through. Ain't it?"</p>

-

-<p>When at length it really was over and they left the tent, the wagons

-from town and country-side and the "depot busses" had made such a place

-of dust and confusion that he took her back to the cottonwood on the

-slope to wait until he brought the buckboard round. He left her leaning

-against the tree, the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly on

-the smooth silver locket. And when he drove back, and reached down a

-hand to draw her up to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment,

-as she mounted, with all the panorama of the field behind her, he

-perceived instantly that the locket was gone. Oh, and at that his heart

-leaped up! What more natural than to dream that she had taken it off to

-slip his phototype inside and that he had come back too soon? What more

-natural than to divine the reality of dreams?</p>

-

-<p>His trembling hope held him silent until they reached the highway. Then

-he looked at the field, elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming

-crowds, and he observed as well as he could for the thumping of his

-heart:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"I kind o' hate to go off an' leave it. To-morrow when I go to town with

-the pie-plant, it'll look just like nothin' but a pasture again."</p>

-

-<p>Liva glanced up at him and dropped her eyes.</p>

-

-<p>"I ain't sure," she said.</p>

-

-<p>"What do you mean?" he asked her, wondering.</p>

-

-<p>But Liva shook her head.</p>

-

-<p>"I ain't sure," she said evasively, "but I don't think somehow the Pump

-pasture'll <i>ever</i> be the same again."</p>

-

-<p>Timothy mulled that for a moment. Oh, could she <i>possibly</i> mean

-because....</p>

-

-<p>Yet what he said was, "Well, the old pasture looks differ'nt enough now,

-all right."</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," assented Liva, "don't it?"</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p><p>Timothy had supper at the Vesey farm. It was eight o'clock and the

-elder Veseys had been gone to prayer-meeting for an hour when Liva

-discovered that she had lost her locket.</p>

-

-<p>"Lost your locket!" Timothy repeated. It was the first time, for all his

-striving, that he had been able to mention the locket in her presence.

-He had tried, all the way home that afternoon, to call her attention

-innocently to its absence, but the thing that he hoped held fast his

-intention. "Why," he cried now, in the crash of that hope, "you had it

-on when I left you under the cottonwood."</p>

-

-<p>"You sure?" Liva demanded.</p>

-

-<p>"Sure," Timothy said earnestly; "didn't&mdash;didn't you have it off while I

-was gone?" he asked wistfully.</p>

-

-<p>"No," Liva replied blankly; she had not taken it off.</p>

-

-<p>When they had looked in the buckboard and had found nothing, Timothy

-spoke tentatively.</p>

-

-<p>"Tell you what," he said. "We'll light a lantern and hitch up and drive

-back to the Pump pasture and look."</p>

-

-<p>"Could we?" Liva hesitated.</p>

-

-<p>It was gloriously starlight when the buckboard rattled out on the Plank

-Road. Timothy, wretched as he was at her concern over the locket, was

-yet recklessly, magnificently happy in being alone by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> her side in the

-warm dusk, and on her ministry. She was silent, and, for almost the

-first time since he had known her, Timothy was silent too&mdash;as if he were

-giving his inarticulateness honest expression instead of forcing it

-continually to antics of speech.</p>

-

-<p>From the top of the hill they looked down on the Pump pasture. It lay

-there, silent and dark, but no longer expressionless; for instantly

-their imagination quickened it with all the music and colour and life of

-the afternoon. Just as Timothy's silence was now of the pattern of

-dreams.</p>

-

-<p>He tied the horse, and together they entered the field by the great open

-place where the fence had not yet been replaced. The turf was still soft

-and yielding, in spite of all the treading feet. The pasture was girdled

-by trees&mdash;locusts and box-alders outlined dimly upon the sky,

-nest-places for orioles; and here and there a great oak or a cottonwood

-made a mysterious figure on the stars. One would have said that

-underfoot would certainly be violets. A far light pricked out an answer

-to their lantern, and a nearer firefly joined the signalling.</p>

-

-<p>"I keep thinkin' the way it looked here this afternoon," said Liva once.</p>

-

-<p>"That's funny, so do I," he cried.</p>

-

-<p>Under the cottonwood on the slope, its leaves stirring like little

-banners, Timothy flashed his light,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> first on tufted grass, then on

-red-tasselled sorrel, then&mdash;lying there as simply as if it belonged

-there&mdash;on Liva's silver locket. She caught it from him with a little

-cry.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh," she said, "I'm so glad. Oh, thank you ever so much, Timmie."</p>

-

-<p>He faced her for a moment.</p>

-

-<p>"Why are you so almighty glad?" he burst out.</p>

-

-<p>"Why, it's the first locket I ever had!" she said in surprise. "So of

-course I'm glad. Oh, Timmie&mdash;thank you!"</p>

-

-<p>"You're welcome, I'm sure," he returned stiffly.</p>

-

-<p>She gave a little skipping step beside him.</p>

-

-<p>"Timmie," she said, "let's circle round a little ways and come by where

-the big tent was. I want to see how it'll seem."</p>

-

-<p>His ill-humour was gone in a moment.</p>

-

-<p>"That's what we <i>will</i> do!" he cried joyously.</p>

-

-<p>He walked beside her, his lantern swinging a little rug of brightness

-about their feet. So they passed the site of the big red ticket wagon,

-of the Eastern vaudeville, of the phototype tent; so they traversed the

-length where had stretched the great elliptical tent that had prisoned

-for them colour and music and life, as in a cup. And so at last they

-stepped along that green way of the pasture where underfoot lay the

-grass and the not infrequent moss and clover, not yet wholly trampled to

-dust; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> this was where there had been assembled bright-winged birds

-of orange and flame and creatures of the wild from the Antipodes, and

-where Strange Things had closed them round.</p>

-

-<p>The influence of what the pasture had seen must have been breathed on

-all who entered there that night: something of the immemorial freedom of

-bright birds in alien woods, of the ancestral kinship of the wild. For

-that tranquil meadow, long haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,

-expressionless as the hills, dependable as a nurse, had that day known

-strange breath, strange tramplings, cries and trumpetings, music and

-colour and life and the beating of wild hearts&mdash;and was it not certain

-that these must change the humour of the place as the coming of the

-grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind? The field bore the

-semblance of a place exquisitely of the country and, here in the dark,

-it was inarticulate once more. But something was stirring there,

-something that swept away what had always been as a wind sweeps,

-something that caught up the heart of the boy as ancient voices stir in

-the blood.</p>

-

-<p>Timothy cast down his lantern and gathered Liva Vesey in his arms. Her

-cheek lay against his shoulder and he lifted her face and kissed her,

-three times or four, with all the love that he bore her.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p><p>"Liva," he said, "all the time&mdash;every day&mdash;I've meant this. Did you

-mean it, too?"</p>

-

-<p>She struggled a little from him, but when he would have let her go she

-stood still in his arms. And then he would have her words and "Did you?"

-he begged again. He could not hear what she said without bending close,

-close, and it was the sweeter for that.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, Timmie," she answered, "I don't know. I don't know if I <i>did</i>. But

-I do&mdash;now."</p>

-

-<p>Timothy's courage came upon him like a mantle.</p>

-

-<p>"An' be my wife?" he asked.</p>

-

-<p>"An' be ..." Liva assented, and the words faltered away. But they were

-not greatly missed.</p>

-

-<p>Timothy looked over the pasture, and over the world. And lo, it was

-suddenly as if, with these, he were become articulate, and they were all

-three saying something together.</p>

-

-<p>When they turned, there was the lantern glimmering alight on the trodden

-turf. And in its little circle of brightness they saw something coloured

-and soft. It was a gay feather, and Timothy took it curiously in his

-hand.</p>

-

-<p>"See, it's from one of the circus birds," he said.</p>

-

-<p>"No!" Liva cried. "It's an oriole feather. One of the pasture orioles,

-Timmie!"</p>

-

-<p>"So it is," he assented, and without knowing why, he was glad that it

-was so. He folded it away with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> the violet Liva had gathered that

-afternoon. After all the strangeness, what he treasured most had

-belonged to the pasture all the time.</p>

-

-<p>"Liva!" he begged. "Will you wear the picture&mdash;my picture&mdash;in that

-locket?"</p>

-

-<p>"Oh," she said, "Timmie, I'm so sorry. The locket's one I bought cheap

-in the city, and it don't open."</p>

-

-<p>She wondered why that seemed to make him love her more. She wondered a

-little, too, when on the edge of the pasture Timothy stood still,

-looking back.</p>

-

-<p>"Liva!" he said, "don't the Pump pasture seem differ'nt? Don't it seem

-like another place?"</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," Liva said, "it don't seem the same."</p>

-

-<p>"Liva!" Timothy said again, "it ain't the pasture that's so differ'nt.

-It's <i>us</i>."</p>

-

-<p>She laughed a little&mdash;softly, and very near his coat sleeve.</p>

-

-<p>"I 'most knew that this afternoon," she answered.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>VI</span> <span class="smaller">THE FOND FORENOON</span></h2>

-

-<p>This morning Miggy came by appointment to do a little work for me, and

-she appeared in some "best" frock to honour the occasion. It was a blue

-silk muslin, cut in an antiquated style and trimmed with tarnished

-silver passementerie. In it the child was hardly less distinguished than

-she had been in her faded violet apron. It was impossible for her to

-seem to be unconscious of her dress, and she spoke of it at once with

-her fine directness.</p>

-

-<p>"I didn't have anything good enough to wear," she said. "I haven't got

-any good dress this summer till I get it made myself. I got this out of

-the trunk. It was my mother's."</p>

-

-<p>"It suits you very well, Miggy," I told her.</p>

-

-<p>"I thought maybe she'd like my wearing it&mdash;here," said Miggy, shyly.

-"You've got things the way she always wanted 'em."</p>

-

-<p>We went in my workroom and sat among my books and strewn papers. A

-lighted theatre with raised curtain and breathless audience, a room

-which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> one wakens to find flooded by a gibbous moon, these have for me

-no greater sorcery than morning in a little book-filled room, with the

-day before me. Perhaps it is that I ought to be doing so many things

-that I take an idler's delight in merely attending to my own occupation.</p>

-

-<p>While I wondered at what I should set Miggy, I looked for the spirit of

-the minute and tried not to see its skeleton. The skeleton was that I

-had here an inexperienced little girl who was of almost no use to me.

-The spirit was that whatever I chose to do, my work was delightful to

-me, and that to bring Miggy in contact with these things was a kind of

-adventure. It is, I find, seldom sufficient to think even of the body of

-one's work, which to-day proved to be in my case a search in certain old

-books and manuscripts for fond allusions. If one can, so to say, think

-in and out till one comes to the spirit of a task, then there will be

-evident an indeterminate sense of wings. Without these wings there can

-be no expression and no creation. And in the true democracy no work will

-be wingless. It will still be, please God, laborious, arduous, even

-heart-breaking, but never body-fettered, never with its birdlike spirit

-quenched. And in myself I would bring to pass, even now, this fair order

-of sweet and willing toil by taking to my hand no task without looking

-deep within for its essential life.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p><p>So it was with a sense not only of pleasure but of leisure that I

-established Miggy by the window with a manuscript of ancient romances

-and told her what to do: to look through them for a certain story,

-barely more than a reference, to the love of an Indian woman of this

-Middle West for her Indian husband, sold into slavery by the French

-Canadians. It is a simple story&mdash;you will find small mention made of

-it&mdash;but having once heard it the romance had haunted me, and I was fain

-to come on it again: the story of the wife of Kiala, fit to stand niched

-with the great loves of the world.</p>

-

-<p>The morning sun&mdash;it was hardly more than eight o'clock&mdash;slanted across

-the carpet; some roses that Little Child had brought me before her

-breakfast were fresh on my table; and the whole time was like a quiet

-cup. In that still hour experience seemed drained of all but fellowship,

-the fellowship of Miggy and my books and the darling insistence of the

-near outdoors. Do you not think how much of life is so made up, free of

-rapture or anxiety, dedicated, in task or in pastime, to serene

-companionship?</p>

-

-<p>I have said that for me there are few greater sorceries than morning,

-with the day before me, in a small book-filled room. I wonder if this is

-not partly because of my anticipations of the parentheses I shall take?

-Not recesses, but parentheses, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> can flavour a whole day. I

-remember a beloved house in which breakfast and luncheon were daily

-observations looked forward to not so much for themselves, as that they

-were occasions for the most delightful interruptions. Dinner was a

-ceremony which was allowed to proceed; but a breakfast or a luncheon was

-seldom got through without one or two of us leaving the table to look up

-a stanza, or to settle if two words had the same derivation, or to find

-if some obsolete fashion in meanings could not yet be worn with

-impunity. It grieved the dear housewife, I remember, and we tried to

-tell her how much more important these things were than that our new

-potatoes should be buttered while they were hot. But she never could see

-it, and potatoes made us think of Ireland, and in no time we were deep

-in the Celtic revival and racing off to find "The Love Talker." I

-remember but one dinner interruption, and that was when we all left in

-the midst of the fish to go in the study and determine if moonlight

-shining through stained glass does cast a coloured shadow, as it did on

-St. Agnes' eve.... I suppose, in those days, we must have eaten

-something, though, save a certain deep-dish cherry pie I cannot remember

-what we ate; but those interruptions are with me like so many gifts, and

-I maintain that these were the realities. Those days&mdash;and especially the

-morning when we read through the "Ancient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> Mariner" between pasting in

-two book plates!&mdash;taught me the precious lesson that the interruption

-and not the task may hold the angel. It was so that I felt that morning

-with Miggy; and I know that what we did with that forenoon will persist

-somewhere when all my envelopes of clippings are gone to dust.</p>

-

-<p>After a time I became conscious that the faint rustling of the papers

-through which I was looking was absorbed by another sound, rhythmic,

-stedfast. I looked out on my neighbour's lawn, and at that moment,

-crossing my line of vision through the window before which Miggy was

-seated, I saw Peter, cutting my neighbour's grass. I understood at once

-that he had chosen this morning for his service in order to be near

-Miggy. It all made a charming sight,&mdash;Peter, bareheaded, in an

-open-throated, neutral shirt, cutting the grass there beyond Miggy in

-her quaint dress, reading a romance. I forgot my work for a little, and

-watched for those moments of his passing. Miggy read on, absorbed. Then,

-for a little, I watched her, pleased at her absorption.</p>

-

-<p>Sometimes, from my window, I have looked down on the river and the long

-yellow sand bar and the mystery of the opposite shore where I have never

-been, and I have felt a great pity that these things cannot know that

-they are these things. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>Sometimes, in the middle of a summer night, when

-the moon is so bright that one can see well within one's own soul, I

-have fancied that I have detected an aroma of consciousness, of definite

-self-wonder, in the Out-of-doors. Fleetingly I have divined it in the

-surprise of Dawn, the laughter of a blue Forenoon, the girlish shyness

-of Twilight. And this morning I wanted self-wonder for Miggy and Peter.

-What a pity that they could not see it all as I saw it: the Shelley-like

-boy cutting the grass and loving this girl, in her mother's gown. But

-you must not suppose, either, that I do not know how that vast

-unconsciousness of Nature and Love flows with a sovereign essence almost

-more precious than awareness.</p>

-

-<p>"Miggy," I said presently, "Peter is not at work to-day. That is he

-cutting grass."</p>

-

-<p>She looked out briefly.</p>

-

-<p>"He's got two days off coming to him," she answered. "It's for overtime.

-This must be one of 'em. Have <i>you</i> read these stories?"</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," I said, "I have. Miggy, don't you want to go and ask Peter to

-have lunch with us at twelve?"</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, no, thank you," she dismissed this. "This isn't the day I see him."</p>

-

-<p>"But wouldn't you like it?" I pressed the matter curiously. "Just we

-three at luncheon alone?"</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p><p>She was turning the leaves of the manuscript and she looked up to set

-me right.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, you know," she said, "I don't know Peter <i>that</i> way at all. I just

-know him to have him walk home with me, or call, or go walking. Peter

-never eats with me."</p>

-

-<p>Poor Peter, indeed, to be denied the simple intimacy of sometimes

-breaking bread with Miggy. I understood that to invite a man to "noon

-lunch" in the village was almost unheard of, but,</p>

-

-<p>"I think he would eat this noon if he never ate before," said I. To

-which Miggy made answer:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"If you have read all these stories will you&mdash;wouldn't you&mdash;tell me

-some, please? I can't bear to think of having to wait to read 'em before

-I know 'em!"</p>

-

-<p>She shut the book and leaned her chin in her hand and looked at me. And

-the idea of having Peter with us for lunch drifted out of the room,

-unattended.</p>

-

-<p>I maintain that one who loves the craft of letters for its own sake, one

-who loves both those who have followed it and the records that they have

-left, and one who is striving to make letters his way of service, must

-all have acted in the same way; and that was the way that I took. In

-these days when Helen and Juliet are read aloud to children while they

-work buttonholes in domestic science class, think of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> pure

-self-indulgence of coming on a living spirit&mdash;I say a <i>living</i>

-spirit&mdash;who had never heard of the beloved women of the world. I wonder

-if we could not find such spirits oftener if we looked with care? When I

-see certain women shopping, marketing, jolting about in busses, I am

-sometimes moved to wonder if they know anything about Nicolete and, if

-they were to be told, whether it would not rest them.</p>

-

-<p>I love it, I love this going back into old time and bringing out its

-sweet elements. I have said that there is a certain conservatism in

-which, if I let my taste have its way with me, I would luxuriate, as I

-might then indulge my love of the semi-precious stones, or of old

-tiling, or of lilies-of-the-valley, all day long. And it is so that my

-self-indulgence would lead me to spend my days idling over these shadowy

-figures in the old romances and the old biographies. The joy of it never

-leaves me. Always from these books drifts out to me the smoke of some

-hidden incense that makes the world other. Not that I want the world to

-be that way, but I like to pretend. I know now that in a world where one

-must give of one's utmost, spend and be spent if one is even to pay for

-one's keep, these incense hours must be occasional, not to say stolen.

-So that to find a Miggy to whom to play preceptor of romance was like

-digging a moonstone out of the river bank.</p>

-

-<p>What did I tell her? Not of Helen or Cleopatra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> or Isolde or Heloise or

-Guinevere, because&mdash;why, I think that you would not have told her of

-these, either. Of Beatrice and Brunhilde and Elaine and Enid I told her,

-for, though these are so sad, there beat the mighty motives, seeds of

-the living heart. Last I told her, of Nicolete and of Griselda and of

-Psyche and of the great sun of these loves that broke from cloud. She

-listened, wrapt as I was wrapt in the telling. Was it strange that the

-room, which had been like a quiet cup for serene companionship, should

-abruptly be throbbing with the potent principles of the human heart? I

-think that it was not strange, for assuredly these are nearer to us than

-breathing, instant to leap from us, the lightning of the soul, electric

-with life or with death. We are never very far from strong emotion. Even

-while I recounted these things to Miggy, there, without my window, was

-Peter, cutting the grass.</p>

-

-<p>When I had done, "Is there more like that in books?" asked Miggy.</p>

-

-<p>Oh, yes; thank heaven and the people who wrote them down, there are in

-books many more like these.</p>

-

-<p>"I s'pose lots didn't get into the books at all," said Miggy,

-thoughtfully.</p>

-

-<p>It is seldom that one finds and mourns a bird that is dead. But think of

-the choir of little bright breasts whose raptures nobody hears, nobody

-misses,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> nobody remembers. How like them we are, we of the loving

-hearts.</p>

-

-<p>"I wouldn't wonder if there's lots of folks being that way right, right

-now," concluded Miggy.</p>

-

-<p>Who am I that I should doubt this?</p>

-

-<p>"A tournament," said Miggy, dreamily; "I s'pose that was something like

-the Java entertainment is going to be."</p>

-

-<p>She slipped to one side of the big chair and laid both hands on its arm.</p>

-

-<p>"Listen," she said. "Would this be one? You know Delly Watson that's

-crazy? She was in love with Jem Pitlaw, a school teacher that used to be

-here, an' that died, an' that wasn't in love with her even if he had

-stayed living, and it did that to her. You know ... she talks about

-things that nobody ever heard of, and listens, and laughs at what she

-thinks she hears. Ain't that like Elaine?"</p>

-

-<p>Yes, if poor Delly Watson of the village had had a barge and a dwarf and

-a river winding from towered city to towered city, she would not have

-been unlike Elaine.</p>

-

-<p>"And Jerry, that sets up folks's stoves and is so in love with the music

-teacher that he joined the chorus and paid his dues and set in the bass

-corner all winter to watch her and he can't sing a note. And she don't

-even see him when she passes him. Ain't that like Beatrice and the Pale

-Man?"</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p><p>Jerry is so true and patient, and our young music teacher is so fair,

-that no one could find it sacrilege to note this sad likeness.</p>

-

-<p>"And Mis' Uppers that her husband went out West and she didn't get any

-word, and he don't come, and he don't come, and she's selling tickets on

-the parlour clock, and she cries when anybody even whistles his

-tunes&mdash;isn't that some like Brunhilde, that you said about, waiting all

-alone on top of the mountain? I guess Brunhilde had money, but I don't

-think Mis' Uppers' principal trouble is that she ain't. With both of 'em

-the worst of it must 'a' been the waiting."</p>

-

-<p>And I am in no wise sure that that slow-walking woman in the pointed

-gray shawl may not have a heart which aches and burns and passions like

-a valkyr's.</p>

-

-<p>"And Mame Wallace, that her beau died and all she's got is to keep house

-for the family, and keep house, and <i>keep</i> house. It seems as if she's

-sort of like Psyche, that had such an awful lot of things to do&mdash;and her

-life all mussed up."</p>

-

-<p>Perhaps it is so that in that gaunt Mame Wallace, whose homing passion

-has turned into the colourless, tidy keeping of her house, there is

-something shining, like the spirit of Psyche, that would win back her

-own by the tasks of her hand.</p>

-

-<p>"And then there's Threat Hubbelthwait," said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> Miggy, "that gets drunk

-and sets in his hotel bar fiddling, and Mis' Hubbelthwait shoves him his

-meals in on to the cigar show-case and runs before he throws his bow at

-her&mdash;she's just exactly like those two&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>"Enid or Griselda?" I recognized them, and Miggy nodded. Poor Mis'

-Hubbelthwait! Was she not indeed an Enid, lacking her beauty, and a

-Griselda, with no hope of a sweet surprise of a love that but tested

-her? Truly, it was as Miggy said: in some form they were all there in

-the village, minus the bower and the silken kirtle, but with the same

-living hearts.</p>

-

-<p>And these were not all.</p>

-

-<p>"Miggy," I said, "what about Liva Vesey and Timothy? Did you count

-them?" For Aucassin and Nicolete were happy and so are Liva and Timothy,

-and I think that they have all understood meadows.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy looked startled. One's own generation never seems so typical of

-anything as did a generation or two past.</p>

-

-<p>"Could they be?" she asked. "They got engaged the night of the circus

-Liva told me&mdash;everybody knows. Could they be counted in?"</p>

-

-<p>Oh, yes, I assured her. They might be counted. So, I fancy, might all

-love-in-the-village, if we knew its authentic essence.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p><p>"Goodness," said Miggy, meditatively, "then there's Christopha and

-Allen last winter, that I was their bridesmaid, and that rode off in the

-hills that way on their wedding night. I s'pose that was like something,

-if we only knew?"</p>

-

-<p>I could well believe that that first adventure of the young husband and

-wife, of whom I shall tell you, was like something sweet and bright and

-long ago.</p>

-

-<p>"And what," I said to Miggy abruptly, "about Peter?"</p>

-

-<p>"<i>Peter?</i>" repeated Miggy.</p>

-

-<p>Why not Peter?</p>

-

-<p>She looked out the window at him.</p>

-

-<p>"Why," she said, "but he's <i>now</i>. Peter's now. And he wears black

-clothes. And he's cutting grass...."</p>

-

-<p>True for Peter, to all these impeachments. I told her that, in his day,

-Aucassin was <i>now</i>, too; and that he wore the clothes of his times, and

-that if he did not do the tasks nearest his hand, then Nicolete should

-not have loved him.</p>

-

-<p>"And," said I, "unless I'm very much mistaken, in the same way that all

-the ancient lovers loved their ladies, Peter loves you."</p>

-

-<p>"<i>That</i> way?" said Miggy, laying her hand on the manuscript.</p>

-

-<p>"That way," said I. And a very good way it was, too.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p><p>Miggy put up both hands with a manner of pointing at herself.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, no," she said, "not me." Then her little shoulders went up and she

-caught her breath like a child. "<i>Honest?</i>" she said.</p>

-

-<p>I said no more, but sat silent for a little, watching her across the

-fallen manuscript of ancient romances. Presently I picked up the sheets,

-and by chance my look fell on the very thing for which we had been

-searching: the story of the wife of Kiala, a Wisconsin Indian chief who

-was sold into slavery and carried to Martinique. And alone, across those

-hundreds of miles of pathless snow and sea, the wife of Kiala somehow

-followed him to the door of his West Indian owner. And to him she gave

-herself into slavery so that she might be with her husband.</p>

-

-<p>I read the story to Miggy. And because the story is true, and because it

-happened so near and because of this universe in general, I was not able

-to read it quite so tranquilly as I should have wished.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh," Miggy said, "is it like <i>that</i>?"</p>

-

-<p>Yes, please God; if the heart is big enough to hold it, it is like that.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy put her hand down quickly on the blue muslin dress she wore.</p>

-

-<p>"My mother knew!" she said.</p>

-

-<p>And that is the most wonderful thing of all: one's mother knew.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p><p>Miggy turned once more and looked out the window at Peter. Bless Peter!

-I think that he must have been over that grass with the mower quite

-twice&mdash;perhaps twice and a half. Almost immediately Miggy looked away

-from Peter, and I thought&mdash;though perhaps after all it was merely the

-faint colour that often hovers in her cheek. I felt, however, that if I

-had again suggested to Miggy that we ask Peter to lunch, Peter might

-possibly have lunched with us. But now I did not suggest it. No, if ever

-it gets to be "all Peter with Miggy," it must be so by divine

-non-interference.</p>

-

-<p>My little voice-friend up there on the shelf, the Westminster chimes,

-struck twelve, in its manner of sweet apology for being to blame for

-things ending. In the village we lunch at twelve, and so my forenoon was

-done and even the simple tasks I had set were not all finished. I

-wonder, though, if deep within this fond forenoon we have not found

-something&mdash;wings, or a light, or a singing&mdash;that was of the spirit of

-the tasks? I wish that I thought so with reasons which I could give to a

-scientist.</p>

-

-<p>At all events I am richly content. And over our luncheon Miggy has just

-flattered me unconscionably.</p>

-

-<p>"My!" she said, "I should think everybody would want to be Secretary."</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>VII</span> <span class="smaller">AFRAID</span></h2>

-

-<p>I must turn aside to tell of Allen and Christopha, that young husband

-and wife whose first adventure, Miggy thought, was like something sweet

-and bright and long ago. It happened this last winter, but I cannot

-perceive any grave difference between that winter night and this June.

-Believe me, the seasons and the silences and we ourselves are not so

-different as we are alike.</p>

-

-<p>On the night of her wedding, Christopha threw her bouquet from the

-dining-room doorway, because there were no front stairs from which to

-throw it, but instead only a stairway between walls and to be reached

-from the dining room: a mere clerk of a stair instead of a

-proprietor-like hall staircase. In the confusion which followed&mdash;the

-carnations had narrowly missed the blazing white gas burner high in the

-room&mdash;the bride ran away above stairs, her two bridesmaids following.

-Her mother was already there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As Miggy

-had told me, she herself was one of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>Christopha's bridesmaids, and it is

-from Miggy that I have heard something of the outcome of the story.</p>

-

-<p>Almost as soon as the door was closed there was a rap at it, a rap

-peremptory, confident.</p>

-

-<p>"Let me in," said Allen; "I'm the groom!" Chris herself opened the door.

-Her muslin-wedding gown and the little bells of lilies unfaded in her

-blond hair became her wholly, and all her simple prettiness still wore

-the mystery and authority of the hour.</p>

-

-<p>"Allen," she said, "you oughtn't to of."</p>

-

-<p>"Yes, sir, I ought!" he protested gayly, his voice pleasant with mirth

-and with its new, deep note. "I'll never see you a bride again&mdash;a real,

-weddin'-dress bride. I had to come."</p>

-

-<p>Christopha's mother looked up from her vague, bright fabrics.</p>

-

-<p>"I thought you started to take the minister the kodak album," she said

-to Allen plaintively. "Has he got anybody to show him any attention? I

-should think you might&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>But the two bridesmaids edged their way into the next room, and on some

-pretext of fabrics, took Christopha's mother with them,&mdash;as if there

-were abroad some secret Word of which they knew the meaning. For Miggy

-is sufficiently dramatic to know the Word for another, though she is not

-sufficiently simple to know it for herself.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p><p>Allen sat beside his bride on the cretonne-covered skirt box. And after

-all, he did not look at her, but only at her warm left hand in his.</p>

-

-<p>"It is the funniest thing," he said, "when I see you comin' in the

-parlour lookin' so differ'nt, I'm blessed if I wasn't afraid of you.

-What do you think of that?"</p>

-

-<p>"You's afraid of my dress," Chris told him, laughing, "not me. You use'

-to be afraid of me when we's first engaged, but you ain't now. It's

-<i>me</i>. I feel afraid of you&mdash;Allen. You're&mdash;differ'nt."</p>

-

-<p>He laughed tenderly, confidently.</p>

-

-<p>"<i>Boo!</i>" he said. "Now are you?"</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," she answered seriously; "now."</p>

-

-<p>"Chris!" he cried boyishly, "we're married! We're goin' to keep house."</p>

-

-<p>"Oh," she said, "Allen! Think of the fun of puttin' the presents in the

-house&mdash;the dishes, and the glass, and the ornaments. There won't be

-another dinin' room in town like ours. Sideboard an' plate rail, an' the

-rug not tacked down."</p>

-

-<p>Their thoughts flew to the little house, furnished and waiting, down the

-snowy street by the Triangle park: their house.</p>

-

-<p>"Dinners, and suppers, and breakfas's&mdash;just us two by ourselves," Allen

-said. "<i>And</i> the presents. My!"</p>

-

-<p>"Well, and company," she reminded him,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> "that's what I want. The girls

-in to tea in our own house."</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," he assented. "Right away?" he wanted to know.</p>

-

-<p>"No," she said, "not right away, Silly! We've got to buy curtains and

-things. I never thought I'd have so many presents," she went on happily.

-"They's two water pitchers alike. Bess says I can change hers. We'll

-take it to the City"&mdash;she gave a little bounce on the skirt box&mdash;"and

-see a show, a really, truly show."</p>

-

-<p>"Sure we will," said he, magnificently. "And I'll take you to the place

-I told you about&mdash;where I got picked up."</p>

-

-<p>The little bride nodded, her eyes softening almost maternally. It was as

-if that story were her own, the story of Allen, the little stray child

-picked up on the streets of the City by that good woman whom Chris had

-never seen. But the name of Sarah Ernestine was like a charm to Chris,

-for the woman had been to Allen father and mother both.</p>

-

-<p>Chris bent down swiftly to his hands, closed over her own, and kissed

-them.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, Allen," she said, with a curious wistfulness, "will you <i>always</i>,

-always be just like you are now?"</p>

-

-<p>"Well, I should say I would," he answered gently. "They's nobody like

-you anywheres, Chris. Mis' Chris, Mis' Allen Martin."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p><p>"Don't it scare you to say it?" she demanded.</p>

-

-<p>"Yes, sir, it does," he confessed. "It's like sayin' your own name over

-the telephone. What about you? Will <i>you</i> always, too?"</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," she said, "always. Only&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>"Only what?" he repeated anxiously.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh," she said, "don't let's let any outside things come between us,

-Allen&mdash;like they do, like with Bess and Opie,&mdash;business and

-sewin',&mdash;that's what I'm afraid of," she ended vaguely.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," he said, "I guess we ain't much afraid of each other, honey. I

-guess we're just afraid of what could come between us."</p>

-

-<p>A voice, unconvincing, unimportant, a part of the inessential aspect of

-alien things, detached itself from the accompaniment in the next room,

-saying something responsible and plaintive about only an hour till train

-time.</p>

-

-<p>"An hour," Allen said over, and put his arms about her, with boyish

-awkwardness for the sake of the crisp muslin gown that had so terrified

-him. She rose and stood beside him, and he waited for a moment looking

-up in her face. "Chris," he said, "I'm scared of this one hour even.

-Till train time."</p>

-

-<p>"I'll hurry up and get the hour done as quick as I can," she promised

-him gayly.</p>

-

-<p>"Honestly, now&mdash;" said Chris's mother from the vague and indeterminate

-region where she moved.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span></p><p>"Right off, Mis' Mother!" Allen said, and knew that she was in the

-doorway, with the bridesmaids laughing beside her. And then he went down

-the stairway, his first radiant moment gone by.</p>

-

-<p>In the dining room the messenger was waiting. The messenger had arrived,

-in the clear cold of the night, from a drive across the Caledonia hills,

-and some one had sent him to that deserted room to warm himself. But

-Allen found him breathing on his fingers and staring out the frosty

-window into the dark. It was Jacob Ernestine, brother to the woman who

-had brought up Allen and had been kind to him when nobody else in the

-world was kind. For years Sarah Ernestine had been "West"&mdash;and with that

-awful inarticulacy of her class, mere distance had become an impassable

-gulf and the Silence had taken her. Allen had not even known that she

-meant to return. And now, Jacob told him, she was here, at his own home

-back in the hills&mdash;Sarah and a child, a little stray boy, whom she had

-found and befriended as she had once befriended Allen. And she was

-dying.</p>

-

-<p>"She didn't get your letter, I guess," the old man said, "'bout gettin'

-married. She come to-day, so sick she couldn't hold her head up. I see

-she didn't know nothin' 'bout your doin's. I didn't let her know. I jus'

-drove in, like split, to tell you, when the doctor went. He says she

-can't&mdash;she won't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> ... till mornin'. I thought," he apologized wistfully,

-"ye'd want to know, anyways, so I jus' drove in."</p>

-

-<p>"That was all right," Allen said. "You done right, Jacob."</p>

-

-<p>Then he stood still for a moment, looking down at the bright figures of

-the carpet. Jacob lived twelve miles back in the hills.</p>

-

-<p>"How'd you come?" Allen asked him briefly.</p>

-

-<p>"I've got the new cutter," the old man answered, with a touch of eager

-pride. "I'll drive ye."</p>

-

-<p>Then some one in the parlour caught sight of the bridegroom, and they

-all called to him and came where he was, besieging him with

-good-natured, trivial talk. The old man waited, looking out the window

-into the dark. He had known them all since they were children, and their

-merrymaking did not impress him as wholly real. Neither, for that

-matter, did Allen's wedding. Besides, his own sister was dying&mdash;somehow

-putting an end to the time when he and she had been at home together.

-That was all he had thought of during his drive to town, and hardly at

-all of Allen and his wedding. He waited patiently now while Allen got

-the wedding guests back to the parlour, and then slipped away from them,

-and came through the dining room to the stair door.</p>

-

-<p>"Stay there a minute," Allen bade him shortly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> and went back to the

-upper floor and to Chris's door again.</p>

-

-<p>It was her mother who answered his summons this time, and Allen's manner

-and face checked her words. Before he had done telling her what had

-happened, Chris herself was on the threshold, already in sober brown, as

-one who has put aside rainbows and entered on life. She had a little

-brown hat in one hand, and for the other hand he groped out and held it

-while he told her, as well as he could.</p>

-

-<p>"I guess I've got to go, Chrissie," he ended miserably.</p>

-

-<p>She met his eyes, her own soft with sympathy for the plight of the other

-woman.</p>

-

-<p>"Well, yes," she said quietly, "of course we've got to go."</p>

-

-<p>He looked at her breathlessly. That possibility had not crossed his

-mind.</p>

-

-<p>"You!" he cried. "You couldn't go, dear. Twelve miles out in Caledonia,

-cold as it is to-night. You&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>In spite of her sympathy, she laughed at him then.</p>

-

-<p>"Did you honestly think I wouldn't?" she asked, in a kind of wonder.</p>

-

-<p>"Well, I'm sure&mdash;" began her mother. But the two bridesmaids manifestly

-heard the Word again, for they talked with her both at once.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p><p>"Not with Jacob, though," Chris was saying decisively. "You help father

-and the boys get out our cutter, Allen."</p>

-

-<p>Allen strode past the mother and lifted his wife's face in his hands.</p>

-

-<p>"Do you mean it?" he demanded. "Will you go&mdash;in the cold&mdash;all that long

-way&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>"You Silly!" she answered, and drew away from him and set the little

-brown hat on her head.</p>

-

-<p class="space-above">The road lay white before them, twelve miles of snow and stars to

-Jacob's cottage among the Caledonia hills. Jacob had gone on&mdash;from the

-crest of the rise by the Corner church they saw him and heard the faint

-signalling of his bells. It was a place, that rise by the Corner church

-on the edge of the village, where two others in such case might have

-drawn rein to look at Everything, stretching before, rhythmic crest and

-shallow, and all silent and waiting. But not these two, incurious as the

-gods, na&iuml;ve as the first lovers. Only, though of this they were

-unconscious, they saw things a little differently that night.</p>

-

-<p>"Look!" said the girl, with a sign to the lowlands, expressive with

-lights. "So many folks's houses&mdash;homes, all started. I s'pose it was

-just as big a thing for them. But <i>theirs</i> don't seem like anything,

-side of ours!"</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p><p>"That's so, too," assented Allen. "And theirs <i>ain't</i> anything side of

-ours!" he maintained stoutly.</p>

-

-<p>"No, sir," she agreed, laughing.</p>

-

-<p>Then she grew suddenly grave, and fell silent for a little, her eyes

-here and there on the valley lights, while Allen calculated aloud the

-time of the arrival at Jacob's house.</p>

-

-<p>"Allen!" she said at last.</p>

-

-<p>"Here!" he answered. "I'm here, you bet."</p>

-

-<p>"Just look at the lights," she said seriously, "and then <i>think</i>.

-There's Bess and Opie&mdash;not speakin' to each other. Over there's the

-Hubbelthwait farm that they've left for the hotel&mdash;an' Threat

-Hubbelthwait drunk all the time. An' Howells's, poor and can't pay, and

-don't care if they can't, and quarrels so folks can hear 'em from the

-road. And the Moneys', that's so ugly to the children, and her findin'

-fault, and him can't speak without an oath. That only leaves the

-Topladys' over there that's real, regular people. And she kind o' bosses

-him."</p>

-

-<p>"Well, now, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, looking at the lights with

-a difference.</p>

-

-<p>Chris's right hand was warm in his great-coat pocket, and she suddenly

-snuggled close to him, her chin on his shoulder.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, Allen," she said, "I'm <i>afraid</i>!"</p>

-

-<p>"What? On the Plank Road?" he wanted to know, missing her meaning.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p><p>"All them folks started out with presents, and a house, like us," she

-said, "and with their minds all made up to bein' happy. But just look at

-'em."</p>

-

-<p>"Well," said Allen, reasonably, "we <i>ain't</i> them."</p>

-

-<p>"We might get like 'em," she insisted. "How can you tell? Folks just do

-get that way or they just don't. How can you <i>tell</i>?"</p>

-

-<p>"I s'pose that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, thoughtfully.</p>

-

-<p>"Mother's got a picture of the Hubbelthwaits when they was married,"

-Chris pursued. "Her in white an' slippers and bracelets, and him slick

-as a kitten's foot. Think of her now, Allen, with <i>bracelets</i>. And him

-drunk all the time, 'most. How can you tell how things'll turn out? Oh,

-Allen, I <i>am</i>! I'm afraid."</p>

-

-<p>He bent to her face and laid his own against hers, glowing and cold and

-with fresh, warm lips.</p>

-

-<p>"Let's just try to be happy and keep ourselves happy," he said.</p>

-

-<p>The troubled woman was still in her face, but at his touch the fears

-went a little away, and the valley lights being already left behind

-among the echoes of the bells, they forgot both the lights and their

-shadows and drifted back to talk about the new house and the presents,

-and the dinners and suppers and breakfasts together. For these were the

-stuff of which the time was made. As it was made, too,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> of that shadowy,

-hovering fear for the future, and the tragic pity of their errand, and

-of sad conjecture about the little stray child whom Sarah Ernestine had

-brought.</p>

-

-<p>"That ain't it a'ready, is it?" Christopha exclaimed when they saw

-Jacob's cottage.</p>

-

-<p>"It just is&mdash;it's 'leven o'clock now," Allen answered, and gave the

-horse to the old man; and they two went within.</p>

-

-<p>The light in the room, like the lights back in the valley, was as if

-some great outside influence here and there should part the darkness to

-win a little stage for a scene of the tragedy: in the valley, for the

-drunkenness at the Hubbelthwaits', the poverty at the Howells', the ill

-nature at the Moneys'; and here, in Jacob's cottage, for death. There

-was no doubt of the quality of the hour in the cottage. The room was

-instinct with the outside touch. Already it was laid upon the woman in

-the bed, and with a mystery and authority not unlike that which had come

-upon Christopha in her marriage hour and was upon her still.</p>

-

-<p>The woman knew Allen, smiled at him, made him understand her

-thankfulness that he had come. At Christopha she looked kindly and quite

-without curiosity. Some way, that absence of curiosity at what was so

-vital to him gripped Allen's heart, and without his knowing the process,

-showed him the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> nature of death. The neighbour who had been with the

-sick woman slipped outside, and as she went she patted Chris's shoulder;

-and Allen felt that she understood, and he was dumbly grateful to her.</p>

-

-<p>Allen sat by the bed and held the hand of his foster-mother; and Chris

-moved about the room, heating water for a little pot of tea. And so it

-was Chris who first saw the child. He was sitting at the end of the wood

-box, on the floor before the oven&mdash;that little stray boy whom Sarah

-Ernestine had picked up as she had once picked up Allen. He looked up at

-Christopha with big, soft eyes, na&iuml;ve as the first bird. Almost before

-she knew that she meant to do so, Chris stooped, with a wondering word,

-and took him in her arms. He clung to her and she sat in the rocking

-chair near the window where stood Jacob's carnation plant. And she tried

-both to look at the child and to love him, at the same time.</p>

-

-<p>"See, Allen," she said, "this little boy!"</p>

-

-<p>The child looked over his shoulder at Allen, his little arms leaning on

-Christopha's breast. And very likely because he had felt strange and

-lonely and now was taken some account of, he suddenly and beautifully

-smiled, and you would have loved him the more for the way he did that.</p>

-

-<p>The woman, lying with closed eyes, understood and remembered.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p><p>"Allen," she said, "that's little John. You find him&mdash;a home

-somewheres. If you can...."</p>

-

-<p>"Why, yes, mother, we'll do that. We can do that, I guess. Don't you

-worry any about <i>him</i>," said Allen.</p>

-

-<p>"He's all alone. I donno his name, even.... But you be good to him,

-Allen, will you?" she said restlessly. "I found him somewheres."</p>

-

-<p>"Like me," Allen said.</p>

-

-<p>She shook her head feebly.</p>

-

-<p>"Worse," she said, "worse. I knew I couldn't&mdash;do much. I just&mdash;thought I

-could keep him from bein' wicked&mdash;mebbe."</p>

-

-<p>"Like you did me, mother, I guess," the boy said.</p>

-

-<p>Then she opened her eyes.</p>

-

-<p>"Allen!" she said clearly. "Oh, if I did! When I think how mebbe I done

-that&mdash;<i>I ain't afraid to die</i>."</p>

-

-<p>Jacob Ernestine came in the room and stood rubbing one hand on the back

-of the other. He saw the kettle's high column of steam and looked

-inquiringly at Chris. But she sat mothering the little silent boy, who

-looked at her gravely, or smiled, or pulled at her collar, responsive to

-her touch as she was thrillingly responsive to his nearness. So Jacob

-lifted the kettle to the back of the stove, moved his carnation plant a

-little away from the frost of the pane, and settled himself at the

-bed's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> foot to watch. And when, after a long time, the child fell

-asleep, Chris would not lay him down. Allen would have taken him, and

-Jacob came and tried to do so, but she shook her head and they let her

-be. She sat so still, hour after hour, that at last she herself dozed;

-and it seemed to her, in a manner of dreaming, that the carnation plant

-on the window-sill had lifted and multiplied until something white and

-like fragrance filled the room; and this, then, she dreamed, was what

-death is, death in the room for the woman. Or might it not be the

-perfume of her own bridal bouquet, the carnations which she had carried

-that night? But then the child stirred, and Christopha roused a little,

-and after all, the sense of flowers in the room was the sense of the

-little one in her arms. As if many things mean one thing.</p>

-

-<p>It was toward dawn that the end came, quite simply and with no manner of

-finality, as if one were to pass into another chamber. And after that,

-as quickly as might be, Christopha and Allen made ready to drive back to

-the village for the last bitter business of all.</p>

-

-<p>Allen, in the barn with Jacob, wondered what he must do. Allen was

-sore-hearted at his loss, grateful for the charge that he had been

-given; but what was he to do? The child ought not to stay in Jacob's

-cottage. If Chris's mother would take him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> for a little,&mdash;but Allen

-knew, without at all being able to define it, her plaintive, burdened

-manner, the burdened manner of the irresponsible. Still puzzling over

-this, he brought the cutter to the side door; and the side door opened,

-and Chris came out in the pale light, leading the little boy&mdash;awake,

-warmly wrapped, ready for the ride.</p>

-

-<p>"Where you goin' to take him to, Chrissie?" Allen asked breathlessly.</p>

-

-<p>"Some of the neighbours, I guess, ain't we?" she answered. "I donno. I

-thought we could see. He mustn't be left here&mdash;now."</p>

-

-<p>"No, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen only. "He mustn't."</p>

-

-<p>The three drove out together into the land lying about the gate of dawn.

-A fragment of moon was in the east. There was about the hour something

-primitive, as if, in this loneliest of all the hours, the world reverted

-to type, remembered ancient savage differences, and fell in the primal

-lines.</p>

-

-<p>"Allen," Chris said, "you'll miss her. I mean miss knowin' she's alive."</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," the boy said, "I'll miss knowin' she's alive."</p>

-

-<p>"Well, we must try to settle what to do with the little boy," she

-suggested hastily.</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," he assented, "that's right. We've got to settle that," and at

-this they fell silent.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p><p>"There's Hopkins's," Chris said presently, nodding toward the home of

-the neighbour who had waited their coming to Jacob's cottage. "But

-she'll hev to be over there lots to-day and to-morrow. And she was kep'

-up so late it don't hardly seem as if we'd ought to stop and ask her."</p>

-

-<p>"No," Allen said, "I donno as it does, really."</p>

-

-<p>"There's Cripps's," she suggested a little farther on, "but they ain't

-up yet. I donno's 'twould do to roust 'em up."</p>

-

-<p>"No," Allen agreed, "best not do that, I guess." Christopha looked over

-the great fields.</p>

-

-<p>"My!" she said, "you'll miss her&mdash;miss thinkin' of her bein' somewheres.

-Allen! Where do you s'pose she is?"</p>

-

-<p>"I thought o' that," said Allen, soberly.</p>

-

-<p>"Goodness!" said Christopha, and shivered, and suddenly drew the child

-close to her. He was sleeping again. And it was so, with his little body

-between them, that she could no longer keep her hand warm in Allen's

-greatcoat pocket. But above the child's head her eyes and Allen's would

-meet, and in that hour the two had never been so near. Nearer they were

-than in the talk about the new house, and the presents, and the dinners

-and suppers and breakfasts together.</p>

-

-<p>They passed the farmhouses that looked asleep, and the farmhouses that

-looked watchfully awake<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> while their owners slept. It would not be well

-to knock at these, still and sombre-windowed. And though there were

-lights at the Moneys' and at the Howells' and at the Hubbelthwait farm,

-and even at Bess and Opie's, their gates, by common consent, were also

-passed. Nor did they stop at the Topladys'.</p>

-

-<p>"They're real, regular people with a grown son," Chris said of them

-vaguely, "and it don't seem hardly fair to give 'em little John, too!"</p>

-

-<p>"Little John," Allen said over wonderingly. When they called him that

-the child seemed suddenly a person, like themselves. Their eyes met

-above his head.</p>

-

-<p>"Allen!" Chris said.</p>

-

-<p>"What? What is it?" he asked eagerly.</p>

-

-<p>"Could&mdash;do you think&mdash;could <i>we</i>?" she demanded.</p>

-

-<p>"My!" he answered, "I been a-wishin'&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>Involuntarily he drew rein. They were on the rise by the Corner church

-at the edge of the village. The village, rhythmic crest of wall and

-shallow of lawn, lay below them, and near the little Triangle park would

-be their waiting house.</p>

-

-<p>"Did you mean have him live with us?" Allen made sure.</p>

-

-<p>"Yes, I did," Chris said, "if we had the money."</p>

-

-<p>"Well!" said the boy, "well, I guess <i>that'll</i> be all right!"</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p><p>"How much <i>she'd</i> of liked it," said Chris.</p>

-

-<p>"Wouldn't she, though," Allen assented; "wouldn't she? And you heard

-what she said&mdash;that about keepin' him from bein'&mdash;wicked?

-Chrissie&mdash;<i>could</i> we, you and me? This little fellow?"</p>

-

-<p>Chris lifted her face and nodded.</p>

-

-<p>"I ain't afraid," she said simply.</p>

-

-<p>"I ain't either," her husband said.</p>

-

-<p>As if, in this new future, there were less need of fear than in the

-future which had sought to "try to be happy and keep ourselves happy."</p>

-

-<p>They looked down where their house would be, near the gate of the coming

-dawn. And&mdash;as two others in such case might have seen&mdash;it was as if they

-were the genii of their own mysterious future, a future whose solution

-trembled very near. For with the charge of the child had come a courage,

-even as the dead woman had known, when she thought of her charge of

-Allen, that she was not afraid to die.</p>

-

-<p>"Allen," said Chris, stumblingly, "it don't seem as if we could get like

-the Howells' an' the Hubbelthwaits and them. Somehow it don't seem as if

-we <i>could</i>!"</p>

-

-<p>"No," said Allen, "we couldn't. That's so, ain't it?"</p>

-

-<p>Above little John's head their eyes met in a kind of new betrothal, new

-marriage, new birth. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> when he would have driven on, Allen pulled at

-the reins again, and,</p>

-

-<p>"Chrissie," he said suddenly, "if afterwards&mdash;there should be

-anybody&mdash;else. I mean for us. Would&mdash;would you keep on lovin' this

-little kiddie, too?"</p>

-

-<p>She met his eyes bravely, sweetly.</p>

-

-<p>"Well, you Silly," she said, "of course I would!"</p>

-

-<p>At which Allen laughed joyously, confidently.</p>

-

-<p>"Why, Chris," he cried, "we're married! For always an' always. An'

-here's this little old man to see to. Who's afraid?"</p>

-

-<p>Then they kissed each other above the head of the sleeping child, and

-drove on toward the village, and toward their waiting house.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>VIII</span> <span class="smaller">THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT</span></h2>

-

-<p>When I opened my door this morning, the Outdoors was like a thing coming

-to meet me. I mean that it was like a person coming to meet me&mdash;no, it

-was like many persons, hand in hand and, so to speak, mind in mind; a

-great company of whom straightway I became one. I felt that swift, good

-gladness that <i>now</i> was <i>now</i>,&mdash;that delicate, fleeting Now, that very

-coquette of time, given and withdrawn. I remember that I could not soon

-go to sleep on the night of the day on which I learned that the Hebrew

-tongue has no present tense. They could not catch at that needle-point

-of experience, and we can do so. I like to glory in it by myself when no

-one else is thinking of it; to think aside, as if <i>to</i> Something, that

-now is being now.... And I long for the time when we shall all know it

-together, all the time, and understand its potentialities and let it be

-breath and pulse to keep the Spirit Future alive and pure.</p>

-

-<p>It would have been no great wonder if I had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> rejoicing past all

-reason in the moment. For at that very instant came Calliope Marsh, home

-for the Java entertainment which was set for to-night, and driving to my

-gate the Sykes's white horse in the post-office store delivery wagon.

-And as I saw her, so precisely did she look like herself, that I could

-have believed that Now was not Now, but Then, when first I knew her.</p>

-

-<p>Calliope brought the buckled lines informally over the horse's head and

-let them fall about the tie post, and ran to me. I am afraid that I am

-not going to tell what we said. But it was full of being once more in

-the presence of those whom you love. Do you not think that such being

-together is a means of actual life transcending both breath and

-perception?</p>

-

-<p>When our greeting was done, Calliope sat down on the stair in my hall,

-and,</p>

-

-<p>"Hev you got any spare candle-shades an' sherbet glasses, an' pretty

-doilies an' lunch cloths an' rugs an' willow chairs an' a statue of

-almost anybody an' a meat-chopper with a peanut-butter attachment an' a

-cap an' gown like colleges?" she demanded.</p>

-

-<p>And when I told her that I thought I might have some of these things,</p>

-

-<p>"Well," Calliope said, "she wants 'em all. Who do I mean by She? Mis'

-Oliver Wheeler Johnson, the personal queen of things."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p><p>She leaned forward, hugging her thin little arms, and she looked up at

-me from under the brim of her round straw hat.</p>

-

-<p>"I'm in need of grace," she said shortly. "I never felt like this toward

-any human being. But I tell you, when that little Mis' Johnson comes

-dilly-nippin' around where I am, noddin' her blue ostrich tip, seems my

-spine just stiffens out in me like it was going to strike at her, same

-as a stick. Do you know the feelin'?"</p>

-

-<p>I answered reluctantly, and not as I should wish to answer; for it is

-certain that I, too, have seldom seen Mrs. Johnson without an urgency to

-be gone from her little fluttering presence. But Calliope! I could not

-imagine Calliope shrinking from any one, or knowing herself alien to

-another.</p>

-

-<p>"For sixty years," she answered my thought of her, "I've never known

-what it was to couldn't bear anybody, not without I had a reason. They

-ain't much of anybody I what you might say don't like, without they're

-malicious or ugly a-purpose. Ugly by nature, ugly an' can't help it,

-ugly an' don't know it&mdash;I can forgive all them. An' Mis' Johnson ain't

-ugly at all&mdash;she's just a real sweet little slip of a thing, doin' her

-hard-workin' best. But when I first see her in church that day, I says

-to myself: 'I'll give that little piece two months to carry the sail

-she's carryin' here to-day; four months<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> to hev folks tired of her, an'

-six months to get herself the cold shoulder all 'round.' An' I hold to

-what I said. An' when her baby-blue nineteen-inch feather swings in an'

-'round, an' when she tells how things ought to be, I kind o' bristle all

-over me. I'm ashamed of it&mdash;an' yet, do you know, I like to give in to

-it?" Calliope said solemnly. "I donno what's come over me. Hev you heard

-where the Java entertainment's put to be?"</p>

-

-<p>I had not heard, nor was I sure just why it was of Java, save that

-Friendship is continually giving entertainments with foreign names and

-practising a wild imperialism to carry out an effect of foreign parts.

-And since, at the missionary meeting which had projected the affair,

-Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had told about <i>their</i> Java entertainment in

-<i>their</i> church at home, that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady, who

-was president of the society, had appointed her chairman of the Java

-entertainment committee.</p>

-

-<p>"And," Calliope informed me, "she's picked out the engine-house for it.

-Yes, sir,&mdash;the fire-engine house. No other place was <i>quaint</i> enough. No

-other place lent itself to decoration probabilities&mdash;or somethin' like

-that. She turned her back flat on the church an' went round to empty

-stores, lookin' for <i>quaint-ity</i>. One while I thought she'd hev us in

-the Chinese laundry, she seemed that took with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> the tomato-coloured

-signs on the walls. But, finally, she lit on the engine-house; an' when

-she see the big, bare engine-room, with the big, shinin' engine in it,

-an' harnesses hangin' from them rough board beams in a kind of avenoo,

-an' the board walls all streaked down, she spatted her hands an' 'lowed

-we'd hev our Java there. 'What a dear, quaint place,' s's she,&mdash;'so

-<i>flexible</i>!' She held out about the harnesses bein' so quaintly

-picturesque an' the fire-engine a piece o' resistance&mdash;or somethin' like

-that. An' she rents the room, without ay, yes, no, nor boo. My way of

-thinkin', a chairman ought to hev boo for a background, even if she <i>is</i>

-chairman. That's where she wants the statue an' the nut butter an' the

-cap an' gown. Can we borrow 'em of you?"</p>

-

-<p>"The engine-house!" I repeated incredulously. "You cannot mean the

-fire-engine house, Calliope?"</p>

-

-<p>"I do," Calliope said firmly, "the quaint, flexible fire-engine house.

-They ain't been a fire in Friendship in over two years, so Mis' Johnson

-says we ain't got that to think of&mdash;an' I donno as we hev. An' they

-never use the engine any more, now they've got city water, excep' for

-fires in the country, and then nobody ever gets in to give the alarm

-till the house is burned down an' no need to bother goin'. Even if they

-do get in in some sort of season, the department has to go to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> mayor

-to get a permit to go outside the city limits. It was so when the

-Topladys' barn burned. Timothy told 'em, when they come gallopin' up

-after it was most done smokin', that if they had held off a little

-longer they could have been a sight of help to him in shinglin' the new

-one. Oh, no, they ain't much of any danger of our being disturbed by a

-fire in them two hours to-night. Anyhow, they can't be a fire. Mis'

-Oliver Wheeler Johnson said so."</p>

-

-<p>We laughed like children as we loaded my "Java" stuffs on the wagon.

-Calliope was a valiant helper to Mrs. Johnson, and so I told her. She

-was standing in the wagon box, one arm about my palm, the other free for

-driving.</p>

-

-<p>"I'm the chairman o' the refreshments, too," she confessed. "Oh, well.

-Yourself you can boss round, you know," she threw back, smiling;

-"anybody can do that. But your feelin's you're some cramped about

-runnin'."</p>

-

-<p>It is certain that Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson was signally unfitted for

-a future in Friendship Village. She was a woman of some little world in

-which she had moved before she came to us, and in the two worlds she

-perceived no difference. Or, where she saw a difference, she sought to

-modify it by a touch when a breath would have been too much, and the

-only factor of potency would have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> been a kind of potency of spirit,

-which she did not possess.</p>

-

-<p>The Oliver Wheeler Johnsons had moved to Friendship only three months

-before, and nobody had looked for them at church on their first Sunday.

-"Movin' so, you want your Sabbath to take some rest in, an' you ain't

-expected to dress yourself up an' get out to Sunday service an' face

-strangers," the village said&mdash;and when the two walked into church while

-the responses were being made nearly everybody lost the place.</p>

-

-<p>They were very young, and they were extremely well dressed.</p>

-

-<p>"He's got on one o' the long coats," comment ran after church, "an' he's

-got a real soft-speakin' voice. But he seems to know how to act."</p>

-

-<p>And, "I declare, nice white gloves an' a nineteen-inch baby-blue ostrich

-feather durin' movin' seems some like puttin' on."</p>

-

-<p>And, "The back of her dress fits her just like the front, an' I must say

-she knows it. No pullin' down the jacket or hitchin' the strings forward

-for <i>her</i>, when she stands up!"</p>

-

-<p>As Miggy, who first told me about that day, had said, "That Sunday

-morning, Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson was the belle of the congregation."</p>

-

-<p>After service that day, instead of going directly home or waiting to be

-addressed, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> Johnson had spoken to the woman with

-whom she had been seated. It was Mis' Postmaster Sykes.</p>

-

-<p>"Thank you so much," Mrs. Johnson said, "for letting us share your pew.

-May I present my husband? We have come to Friendship to live, and we

-shall be coming here to church. And I shall want to join your Ladies'

-Aid Society and your Missionary Circle and, perhaps, be in the

-Sunday-school right away. I&mdash;I think I'll be less homesick&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>"Actually," Mis' Sykes said afterward, "she took my breath clear away

-from me. I never heard of such a thing. Of course, we're real glad to

-hev our newcomers Christian people, but we want quiet Christians. An'

-did you notice how she was when I give her an introduction around? Why,

-she up an' out with somethin' to say to everybody. Just a neat little

-'How d' do' wouldn't do for her to remark. I always suspicion them

-talkative-at-first kind. It's like they'd been on the stage or brought

-up in a hotel."</p>

-

-<p>When she first came to the Ladies' Aid and the missionary meetings, Mrs.

-Johnson "said something." She was "up to her feet" three or four times

-at each session with suggestion, information, or description of how they

-did in her home church. And some way I think that what chiefly separated

-her from the village was the way that inevitable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> nineteen-inch blue

-ostrich plume on the little woman's hat bobbed and won attention and was

-everywhere at once. Or, perhaps&mdash;such creatures of wax we are to our

-impressions&mdash;it may have been little Mrs. Johnson's mere way of lifting

-her small, pointed chin when she talked, and of frowning and

-over-emphasizing. Or it may have been that she stood with her hands

-clasped behind her in what seemed to Friendship exaggerated ease, or

-that she smiled arbitrarily and ingratiatingly as she talked when there

-was absolutely nothing at which to smile. I think that these made her

-seem as alien to us as, in varied measure, certain moral defects might

-have done.</p>

-

-<p>Moreover, she mentioned with familiarity objects and usages of which

-Friendship Village knew nothing: Carriage shoes, a new cake of soap for

-each guest, some kind of ice served, it was incredulously repeated, "in

-the middle o' the meal!" She innocently let fall that she sent to the

-city for her letter-paper. She had travelled in a state-room on a train,

-and she said so. She knew a noted woman. She used, we saw from the

-street, shaded candles on the table when she and her husband were at

-supper alone. She thought nothing of ordering Jimmy Sturgis and the bus

-to take her down town to her marketing on a rainy day. She had inclined

-to blame the village that Daphne Street was not paved, instead of

-joining<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> with the village to blame somebody else. Above all, she tried

-to buy our old furniture. I do not know that another might not have done

-all these quite without giving offence, and, indeed, rather have left us

-impressed with her superior familiarity with an envied world. But by the

-time of the Java entertainment Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had

-innocently alienated half Friendship Village. And this morning Calliope

-merely voiced what I knew to be the sentiment of most of Mrs. Johnson's

-neighbours and acquaintances. For these people are the kindly of earth;

-but they are of earth, where reign both the centrifugal and centripetal

-forces,&mdash;and the control is not always so swift as science and the human

-heart could wish.</p>

-

-<p>At five o'clock to-day&mdash;the day set for the Java evening

-entertainment&mdash;I made my way to the engine-house. This was partly

-because I wished to be as much as possible with Calliope during her few

-days in the village, and partly it was because the affair would belong

-to the class of festivity which I am loath to miss, and I think that,

-for Friendship's sake, I will never willingly pass by a "hall" in which

-is to be found a like diversion. Already on the great room, receiving

-its final preparation, had descended something of the excited spirit of

-the evening: the heat, the insufficient light, the committee members'

-shrill, rollicking children sliding on the floor, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> booths which in

-all bazaars contain with a precision fairly bewildering the same class

-of objects; and the inevitable sense of hurry and silk waists and aching

-feet and mustn't-take-your-change-back. But to all these things the Java

-engine-house affair would add an element of novelty, almost a flavour of

-romance. Certainly the room lent itself to "decoration probabilities,"

-as Calliope had vaguely quoted; it had been a roller-skating rink,

-utilized by the fire-department on the decline of the pastime, and there

-was, as Mrs. Johnson's <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i>, the fire-engine.</p>

-

-<p>I had never before been in the engine-house&mdash;you know how there will be

-commonplace enough spots in your own town to which you never go: the

-engine-house, the church belfry, the wood yard, upstairs over this store

-and that, and grocery cellars whose sloping trap-doors, open now and

-then to the walk, are as alien as the inside of the trunks of your

-trees. When I stepped in the engine-house, it seemed insistently a place

-in which I had never been before. And this may have been partly because

-the whole idea of a village fire-department is to me singular: the

-waiting horses and ladders and hose, whose sole reason for being is

-merely ameliorative, and never human and preventive; that pealing of the

-sharp, peculiar, terrifying alarm and summons first imprinting something

-on the very air, stabbing us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> with <i>Halt</i> while we count the bell

-strokes for the ward, and then clanging the wild fury of the

-quick-stroke command to help.</p>

-

-<p>To-day the great glittering fire-engine, flanked by hose-cart and

-hook-and-ladder wagon, occupied almost wonderingly the head of the room

-which had been invaded, and an inspired committee had garlanded the

-engine with paper roses and American flags. The flag of the Netherlands,

-copied from a dictionary and wrought in red-white-and-blue cambric with

-a silver crown, drooped meditatively from the smoke-stack; a scarlet fez

-and a peacock-feather fan hung on the supply hose; and on the

-tongue-bracer was fixed a pink sofa cushion from Mis' Amanda Toplady's

-parlour, with an olive Indian gentleman in a tinsel zouave jacket

-stamped on the cover. On the two big sliding doors, back of which stood

-the fire company's horses, were tacked innumerable Javanese trifles more

-picturesque than authentic; and on outlying booths and tables there were

-others. Directly before the engine was to be the tea-table, where Mis'

-Postmaster Sykes was to serve Java tea from a Java canister, loaned by

-the Post-office store.</p>

-

-<p>As soon as I entered I sought out Calliope's booth, a huge affair

-constructed of rugs whose red-tongued, couchant dogs and bounding fawns

-somewhat marred the Eastern effect. And within, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> found myself in a

-circle of the Friendship women whom I know best&mdash;all of them tired with

-that deadly tiredness born of a day's work at a church fair of any

-nation. But at once I saw that it was not merely fatigue which was

-disquieting them.</p>

-

-<p>Calliope was leaning against a bit of Bagelen blue, loaned by the new

-minister's wife. And she said to me as if, I thought, in explanation of

-what I was to hear,&mdash;"I guess we're all pretty tired. Most of us look

-like we wanted to pant. I'm all of a shake, myself."</p>

-

-<p>When Mis' Postmaster Sykes spoke unsmilingly, I understood:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"It ain't the bein' tired," she disclaimed; "tired I can stand an' hev

-stood since my own birth. But it's the bein' commanded 'round&mdash;me,

-<i>commanded</i>&mdash;by that little I'm-the-one-an'-you-do-as-I-say out there!"</p>

-

-<p>"Land-a-livin' an' a-dyin'!" said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "I

-declare if I know whether I'm on foot or on horseback. It's bad enough

-to hev to run a fair, without you've got to be run yourself, too. Ain't

-it enough for Mis' Johnson to be made chairman without her wantin' to

-boss besides? She might as well say to me, 'Mis' Holcomb, you do

-everything the opposite way from the way you've just done it,' an' hev

-it over with."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p><p>Mis' Amanda Toplady&mdash;even that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda&mdash;shook her

-head.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Johnson surely acts used to bein' bowed down to," she admitted;

-"she seems fair bent on lordin' it. My land, if she wasn't bound to

-borrow my Tea rose plant that's just nearin' ready to bud."</p>

-

-<p>Calliope laughed, a little ruefully, and wholly in sympathy.</p>

-

-<p>"Honest," she said, "I guess what's the matter with all of us ain't so

-much what she does as the particular way she does it. It's so with some

-folks. They just seem to sort of <i>set</i> you all over, when you come near

-'em&mdash;same as the cold does to gravy. We'd all ought to wrostle with the

-feelin', I expect."</p>

-

-<p>"I expect we had," said Mis' Holcomb, "but you could wrostle all your

-days with vinegar an' it'd pucker your mouth same way."</p>

-

-<p>"Funny part," Calliope observed, "everybody feels just alike about her.

-When she skips around so sort o' momentous, we all want to dodge. I felt

-sorry for her, first, because I thought she was in for nervous

-prostration. But after a while I see it wasn't disease&mdash;it was just her

-feelin' so up an' down significant, you might say."</p>

-

-<p>"I donno," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "but it's part the way

-she says her <i>a</i>'s. That real <i>a</i>-soundin' <i>a</i> kind," she explained

-vaguely.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p><p>"She's so right an' left cuffy&mdash;I guess that's the whole thing,"

-Calliope put it in her rich idiom.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," said Mis' Amanda, sadly, "there must be somethin' we could like

-her for, even if it was only her husband."</p>

-

-<p>"He ain't what I'd call much, either," Calliope dismissed Mr. Oliver

-Wheeler Johnson positively; "he's got too soft-speakin' a voice. I like

-a man's voice to rumble up soft from his chest an' not slip down thin

-from his brain."</p>

-

-<p>I remember that I listened in a great wonder to these women whom I had

-seen at many an office of friendliness to strangers and aliens. Yet as I

-looked across the floor at that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson&mdash;who,

-in the hat with the blue plume, was everywhere, directing, altering,

-objecting, arranging, commanding and, especially, doing over&mdash;I most

-unwillingly felt much as they felt. If only Mrs. Johnson had not

-continually lifted her little pointed chin. If only she had not

-perpetually and ingratiatingly smiled when there was nothing at which to

-smile at all.</p>

-

-<p>Then Abigail Arnold hurried up to us with a tray of cups for the Java

-tea.</p>

-

-<p>"Calliope," she said to the chairman of the refreshments, "Mis' Johnson

-jus' put up her little chin an' says, 'What! ain't we no lemons for the

-tea?'"</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p><p>Calliope compressed her lips and lifted their thin line tight and high.</p>

-

-<p>"Lemins," she replied, "ain't necessarily found in Java. I've a good big

-mind to go home to bed."</p>

-

-<p>Then we saw little Mrs. Johnson's blue linen dress hurrying toward us

-with the waving line of the blue feather above her, like a last little

-daring flourish by the artist of her. She was really very pretty and

-childish, with a manner of moving in wreaths and lines and never in

-solids. Her little feet twinkled along like the signature to the pretty

-picture of her. But yet she was not appealing. She was like an

-overconfident child whom you long to shut in a closet. Yes, I understand

-that I sound like a barbarian in these days of splendid corrective

-treatment of children who are studied and not stormed at. And in this

-treatment I believe to the uttermost. And yet, overconfidence in a child

-is of all things the most&mdash;I will amend what I said: Mrs. Oliver Wheeler

-Johnson was like an overconfident child whom you long to shut in a

-closet because of your ignorance of what else on earth to do. No doubt

-there is a better way, but none of us knew it. And she came toward us

-intent, every one felt, on some radical change in arrangements, though

-the big room was now in the pink of appointment and ready to be left

-while the committee went home to sup on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> "just sauce and

-bread-and-butter," and to don silk waists.</p>

-

-<p>We saw little Mrs. Johnson hurrying toward us, upon a background of the

-great, patient room, all-tolerant of its petty bedizening. And then Mrs.

-Johnson, we in Calliope's booth, the sliding, rollicking children, and

-all the others about stood still, at the sharp, peculiar terrifying

-alarm and summons which seemed to imprint something on the very air,

-stabbing us with <i>Halt</i> that we might count the bell strokes for the

-ward, and clanging a wild fury of the quick-stroke command to help. For

-the first time in two years the Friendship fire alarm was sounding from

-the tower above our heads.</p>

-

-<p>There was a panting sweep and scurry for the edges of the room, as

-instantly a gong on the wall sounded with the alarm, and the two big

-sliding doors went back, scattering like feathers the innumerable

-Javanese trifles that had been tacked there. Forward, down the rug-hung

-vista, plunged the two big horses of the department. We saw the Java

-tea-table borne to earth, the Javanese exhibits adorning outlying

-counters swept away, and all the "decoration probabilities" vanish in

-savage wreck. Then the quaintly picturesque harnesses fell to the

-horses' necks, their hoofs trampled terrifyingly on the loose boards of

-the floor, and forth from the yawning doors the horses pounded, dragging

-the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i>, with garlands on its sides, the pink zouave

-cushion crushed beneath it, and the flag of the Netherlands streaming

-from the stack. Horses rushed thither in competition, came thundering at

-the doors, and galloped to place before the two carts. I think not a

-full minute can have been consumed. But the ruin of the Java

-entertainment committee's work was unbelievably complete. Though there

-had been not a fire in Friendship Village in two years, that night, of

-all nights, Jimmy Sturgis's "hay-barn," for the omnibus horses, "took it

-on itself," it was said, "to go to work an' burn up." And Jimmy's barn

-is outside the city limits, so that the <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i> had to be

-used. And Jimmy is in the fire-department, so that the company galloped

-informally to the rescue without the benefit of the mayor's authority.</p>

-

-<p>As the last of the department disappeared, and the women of the

-committee stood looking at one another&mdash;tired with the deadly tiredness

-of a day such as theirs&mdash;a little blue linen figure sprang upon a chair

-and clasped her hands behind her, and a blue ostrich feather lifted and

-dipped as she spoke.</p>

-

-<p>"Quickly!" Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson cried. "All hands at work now!

-Mrs. Sykes, will you set up the tea-table? You can get more dishes from

-my house. Mrs. Toplady, this booth, please. You can make it right in no

-time. Mrs. Holcomb, you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> will have to do your booth entirely over&mdash;you

-can get some things from my house. Miss Marsh&mdash;ah, Calliope Marsh, you

-must go to my house for my lace curtains&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>She smiled ingratiatingly and surely arbitrarily, for we all knew full

-well that there was absolutely nothing to smile at. And with that

-Calliope's indignation, as she afterward said, "kind of crystallized and

-boiled over." I remember how she stood, hugging her thin little arms and

-speaking her defiance.</p>

-

-<p>"I donno how you feel, Mis' Johnson," she said dryly, "but, <i>my</i> idea,

-Bedlam let loose ain't near quaint enough for a Java entertainment. Nor

-I don't think it's what you might say real Java, either. Things here

-looks to me too flexible. I'm goin' home an' go to bed."</p>

-

-<p>There was no doubt what the rest meant to do. With one impulse they

-turned toward the door as Calliope turned, and silently they took the

-way that the <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i> had taken before them. Little Mrs.

-Johnson stood on her chair making many gestures; but no one went back.</p>

-

-<p>Calliope looked straight before her.</p>

-

-<p>"My feet ache like I done my thinkin' with 'em," she said, "an' my head

-feels like I'd stood on it. An' what's it all for?"</p>

-

-<p>"Regular clock performance," Mis' Postmaster<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> Sykes assented. "We've

-ticked hard all day long an' ain't got a thing out of it. I often think

-it's that way with my housework, but I did think the Ladies' Missionary

-could tick, when it <i>did</i> tick, for eternity. I'm tuckered to the bone."</p>

-

-<p>"Nobody knows," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was Mame-Bliss, "how my poor neck

-aches. It's there I suffer first an' most."</p>

-

-<p>Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was walking behind the rest, took three great

-steps and caught us up and spoke, a little breathlessly:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Land, land," she said, "I guess I'll go home an' pop some corn. Seems

-to me it'd smell sort of cosy an' homelike an' soothin' down. It's a

-grand thing to smell when you're feelin' far off from yourself."</p>

-

-<p>Calliope laughed a little then.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," she said, "anyhow I ain't got my silk waist to get into&mdash;and I

-didn't hev a nice one to put on anyway. I was wishin' I had, and now my

-wish has come true by bein' took away from me, bodily&mdash;like they will.

-But just the same&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>She turned on the walk and faced us, and hugged her thin little arms.</p>

-

-<p>"A while ago," she said, "I give that little woman there six months to

-get herself the cold shoulder all around. Well, the time ain't up

-yet&mdash;but both my shoulders feels stone cold!"</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>IX</span> <span class="smaller">THE COLD SHOULDER</span></h2>

-

-<p>There is something more about Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson.</p>

-

-<p>Did you ever look through an old school-book of your own and, say, on

-the history picture of Vesuvius in eruption impose your own memory of

-Pompeii, visited in these twenty years since you studied about it; and

-have you not stared hard at the time between and felt yourself some one

-other than that one who once dreamed over the Vesuvius picture? Or,

-years after you read the Letters, you have made a little mark below

-Cicero's cry from exile, "Oh, that I had been less eager for life!" and

-you look at the cry and at the mark, and you and one of these become an

-anachronism&mdash;but you are not sure which it is that so becomes. So now,

-in reading over these notes some while after I have set them down, I am

-minded here to give you my look ahead to the end of the summer and to

-slip in some account of what happened as a closing of the tale. And I

-confess that something about me&mdash;perhaps it is the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>Custodian

-herself&mdash;likes this way of pretending a freedom from time and of looking

-upon its fruit to say which seeds have grown and which have not.</p>

-

-<p>Friendship Village is not superstitious, but when curious coincidences

-occur we do, as we say, "take down note." And it did seem like a

-judgment upon us that, a little time after the Java fiasco, and while

-indignation was yet at high noon, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson fell ill.</p>

-

-<p>At first I think we affected not to know it. When she did not appear at

-church, none of us mentioned it for a Sunday or two. Then when some one

-casually noted her absence we said, "Oh, wasn't she? Got little cold,

-likely." That we saw her no more down town or "brushing up" about her

-door we facilely laid to chance. When the village heard that her

-maid&mdash;who always offended by talking almost in a whisper&mdash;had once or

-twice excused her mistress to callers, every one shut lips and hardened

-hearts and said some folk acted <i>very</i> funny about their calling duties.

-But when, at the twelve o'clock breakfast of the new minister's

-wife&mdash;("Like enough breakfast at noon was a real Bible custom," the

-puzzled devotees solved that amazing hour), Mrs. Johnson did not appear,

-the village was forced to admit that something must be wrong.</p>

-

-<p>Moreover, against its will the behaviour of young Mr. Johnson was

-gravely alarming Friendship.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> Mr. Johnson was in real estate and

-insurance in the city, and this did not impress the village as a serious

-business. "Because, what does he <i>sell</i>!" as Abigail Arnold said. "We

-know he don't own property. He rents the very house they live in. A

-doctor's a doctor an' he gives pills, an' a store's a store with the

-kind o' thing you need. But it don't seem like that man could make a

-real good livin' for her, dealin' vague in nothin' that way." His

-income, it was felt, was problematical, and the village had settled it

-that what the Oliver Wheeler Johnsons' had was chiefly wedding presents

-"an' high-falutin' tastes." But, in the face of the evidence, every

-afternoon at three o'clock the young husband ordered a pha&euml;ton from

-Jimmy Sturgis and came home from the city to take his wife to drive.

-Between shutters the village saw that little Mrs. Johnson's face did

-look betrayingly pale, and the blue ostrich plume lay motionless on her

-bright hair.</p>

-

-<p>"I guess Mis' Johnson's real run down," her acquaintances said to one

-another uneasily. Still we did not go to see her. The weeks went by

-until, one morning, Calliope met the little new Friendship doctor on the

-street and asked him about his patient.</p>

-

-<p>"I up an' ask' him flat out," Calliope confessed afterward; "not that I

-really cared to be told, but I hated to know I was heathenish. You don't

-like the feelin'. To know they ain't heathens is all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> that keeps some

-folks from <i>bein</i>' 'em. Well, so I ask' him. 'Doctor Heron,' s'I, 'is

-that Mis' Johnson real sick, or is she just sickish?' He looks at me

-an'&mdash;'Looks pretty sick, don't she?' s'e. 'Well,' s'I, 'I've seen folks

-look real rich that wa'n't it by right-down pocketbook evidence.' 'Been

-to see her?' s'e. 'No,' s'I, short. 'Might drop in,' s'e, an' walks off,

-lookin' cordial. That little Doctor Heron is that close-mouthed I

-declare if I don't respect him same as the minister an' the pipe-organ

-an' the skippin' hills."</p>

-

-<p>So, as midsummer passed and found the little woman still ailing, I

-obeyed an idle impulse and went one evening to see her. I recall that as

-soon as I had crossed her threshold the old influence came upon me, and

-I was minded to run from the place in sheer distaste of the overemphasis

-and the lifted, pointed chin and the fluttering importances of her

-presence. I was ashamed enough that this should be so, but so it was;

-and I held my ground to await her coming to the room only by a measure

-of will.</p>

-

-<p>I sat with Mrs. Johnson for an hour that evening. And it would seem

-that, as is the habit of many, having taken my own way I was straightway

-possessed to draw others after me. There are those who behave similarly

-and who set cunningly to work to gain their own ends, as, for example, I

-did.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> For one night soon I devised a little feast, which I have always

-held to be a good doorway to any enterprise, and, at the

-Friendship-appointed supper hour of six, I made my table as fair as

-possible, as has been done in like case ever since butter was first

-served "in a lordly dish." And my guests were Calliope, without whom no

-festival is wholly in keeping, and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and

-Mis' Postmaster Sykes, and that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady.</p>

-

-<p>Because they had arrived so unsuspectingly I own myself to have felt

-guilty enough when, in that comfortable half-hour after a new and

-delectable dessert had been pronounced upon, I suggested with what

-casualness I might summon that we five pay a visit that night to Mrs.

-Oliver Wheeler Johnson.</p>

-

-<p>"Land!" said Mis' Holcomb, "I've thought I would an' then I've thought I

-wouldn't till I feel all two-faced about myself. I donno. Sometimes I

-think one way an' sometimes I think the other. Are you ever like that?"</p>

-

-<p>"I s'pose," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, majestically, "that them in our

-position ought to overlook. I donno's 'twould hurt us any to go," she

-added graciously.</p>

-

-<p>Calliope's eyes twinkled.</p>

-

-<p>"That's it," she said; "let them that's got the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> social position to

-overlook things be Christian an' overlook 'em."</p>

-

-<p>That great Mis' Amanda Toplady folded her hands, dimpled like a baby

-giant's.</p>

-

-<p>"I'd be glad to go," she said simply; "I've got some grape jell that

-looks to me like it wasn't goin' to keep long, an' I'd be thankful to be

-on terms with her so's I could carry it in to her. They ain't a single

-other invalid in Friendship."</p>

-

-<p>Calliope sprang to her feet and crossed her little arms, a hand hugging

-either shoulder.</p>

-

-<p>"Well said!" she cried; "do let's go! I'm sick to death of slidin' off

-the subject whenever it comes up in my mind."</p>

-

-<p>So, in the fair October dusk, we five went down the Plank Road&mdash;where

-Summer lingers late. The air was gentle with the soft, impending dark. I

-wonder why the colonnade of sweet influences, down which we stepped, did

-not win us to themselves. But I remember how, instead, our imminent

-visit drew us back to the days of Mrs. Johnson's coming, so that

-presently we were going over the incident of the Java entertainment,

-and, as Calliope would have put it, "crystallizing and boiling over"

-again in the old distaste.</p>

-

-<p>But when we reached the little cottage of the Johnsons, our varied

-motives for the visit were abruptly merged in a common anxiety. For

-Doctor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> Heron's buggy stood at the gate and the little one-story cottage

-was dark save for a light in what we knew to be a corner bedroom. The

-hallway was open to the night, but though we could distinctly hear the

-bell jingle in the kitchen no one answered the summons. Then, there

-being somewhere about a murmur of voices, Calliope stepped within and

-called softly:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Doctor, Doctor Heron&mdash;you there? Is they anything we can do?"</p>

-

-<p>The doctor came momentarily to the lighted doorway down the hall.</p>

-

-<p>"That you, Calliope?" he said. "You might come here, will you? Tell the

-rest to sit down somewheres. And you tell Mr. Johnson he can come."</p>

-

-<p>On which, from out the dark living room, some one emerged very swiftly

-and without a word pushed by us all where we were crowded in the passage

-and strode down to the little lighted chamber. Calliope hurried after

-him, and we four shrank back in sudden dread and slipped silently into

-the room which the young husband had left, and stood together in the

-dimness. Was she so sick? In that room he must have heard the door-bell

-as we had heard it, and yet he had not answered. Was it possible that we

-had come too late?</p>

-

-<p>While we waited we said nothing at all, save that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> great Mis' Amanda

-Toplady, who said three times or four, "Oh, dear, oh, dear, I'm always

-waitin' till somethin's too late&mdash;either me or the other thing." It

-seemed very long before we heard some stir, but it can have been only a

-few minutes until the doctor came down the little hall and groped into

-the room. In answer to all that we asked he merely occupied himself in

-lighting a match and setting it deliberately to the candles on the table

-and adjusting their shades. They were, we noted afterward, the same

-candles whose presence we had detected and derided at those long ago

-t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te suppers in that house. The light glowed on the young

-doctor's pale face as he looked at us, each in turn, before he spoke.

-And when he had done with his slow scrutiny&mdash;I think that we cannot

-wholly have fancied its accusation&mdash;he said only:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Yes, she's pretty sick. I can't tell yet."</p>

-

-<p>Then he turned and closed the outer door and stood leaning against it,

-looking up the hall.</p>

-

-<p>"Miss Marsh!" he called.</p>

-

-<p>But why did the man not tell us something, we wondered; and there

-flashed in my mind Calliope's reference to the pipe-organ and the

-skipping hills. At all events, Calliope would tell us.</p>

-

-<p>And so she did. We heard her step in the hall, coming quickly and yet

-with a manner of exceeding care. I think that with the swift sense which

-wings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> before intelligence, the others understood before they saw her,

-even as I understood. Calliope stopped in the doorway as if she could

-trust herself to go no farther. And she was holding something in her

-arms.</p>

-

-<p>"Calliope," we said; "Calliope...."</p>

-

-<p>She looked down at that which she held, and then she looked at us. And

-the tears were in her eyes, but her face was brighter than I have ever

-known it.</p>

-

-<p>"It's a baby," she said, "a little bit of a baby. <i>Her</i> baby. An' it

-makes me feel&mdash;it makes me feel&mdash;oh," she broke off, "don't it make you

-feel that way, too?"</p>

-

-<p>We looked at one another, and avoided one another's look, and then

-looked long at the baby. I do not remember that we said anything at all,

-or if we did so, that it bore a meaning. But an instant after Calliope

-gave the baby to the nurse who appeared in the doorway, we all tiptoed

-down to the kitchen by common consent. And it was plain that Mrs.

-Johnson's baby made us feel that way, too.</p>

-

-<p>In our desire to be of tardy service we did the most absurd things. We

-took possession of the kitchen, rejoicing that we found the supper

-dishes uncared for, and we heated a great kettle of water, and washed

-and wiped and put away, as softly as we could; and then we "brushed up

-around." I think that only the need of silence kept us from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> cleaning

-windows. When the nurse appeared&mdash;who had arrived that day unknown of

-Friendship&mdash;we sprang as one to do her bidding. We sent the little maid

-to bed, we tidied the living room, walking tiptoe, and then we went back

-through the kitchen and sat down on the little side "stoop." And all

-this time we had addressed one another only about the tasks which we had

-in hand.</p>

-

-<p>After a little silence,</p>

-

-<p>"The milkman was quite late this morning," observed Mis' Holcomb.</p>

-

-<p>"Well, he's begun to deliver in cans instead o' bottles," Mis' Sykes

-explained; "it takes him some longer to get around. He says bottles

-makes his wife just that much more to do."</p>

-

-<p>Then we fell silent again.</p>

-

-<p>It was Calliope, sitting on the porch step outside, where it was dark,

-who at last had the courage to be articulate.</p>

-

-<p>"I hope&mdash;I <i>hope</i>," she said, "she's goin' to be all right."</p>

-

-<p>Mis' Sykes shaded her eyes from the bracket lamp within.</p>

-

-<p>"I'll go bail," she said, "that little you-do-as-I-say chin'll carry her

-through. I'm glad she's got it."</p>

-

-<p>Just then we heard the thin crying of the child and we could divine

-Calliope, that on the step where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> she sat she was hugging her arms and

-rocking somewhat, to and fro.</p>

-

-<p>"Like enough," she said, "oh, like enough&mdash;folks ain't so cramped about

-runnin' their own feelin's as they think they are!"</p>

-

-<p>To this we murmured something indefinite in sound but positive enough in

-sense. And we all knew what we all knew.</p>

-

-<p>"Let's go out around the house to the front gate," said that great Mis'

-Amanda Toplady, abruptly. "Have any of you ladies got two

-handkerchiefs?"</p>

-

-<p>"I've got two," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, "an' I ain't used either

-one. Do you want the one with essence or the one without?"</p>

-

-<p>"I ain't partial," said Mis' Amanda.</p>

-

-<p>We rose and stumbled along the grassy path that led round the house. At

-the gate we met Doctor Heron.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," he said slowly, "well." And after a moment, "Will&mdash;will any of

-you be here in the morning?" he asked.</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," we all said simply.</p>

-

-<p>"That's good," he commented shortly, "I didn't know."</p>

-

-<p>We five had to separate at the first corner to go our home ways, and we

-stood for a moment under the gas-light. I remember how, just then,

-Peter's father came singing past us, like one of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>Friendship family

-who did not understand his kinship. Even as we five had not understood

-ours.</p>

-

-<p>"You haven't got a shawl, hev you?" Mis' Sykes said to me solicitously.</p>

-

-<p>"The nights have been some chilly on a person's shoulders for a day or

-two now," said Mis' Holcomb.</p>

-

-<p>Calliope put her hand up quickly to her throat.</p>

-

-<p>"Quit," she said. "All of you. Thank God. An' shake hands. I tell you,

-after this I bet I'll run my own feelin's about folks or I'll bring down

-the sky an' make new feelin's! Oh," said Calliope, "don't her&mdash;an'

-<i>now</i>&mdash;an' the baby&mdash;an'&mdash;oh, an' that bright star winkin' over that

-hitchin' post, make things seem&mdash;easy? Good night. I can't stand out

-here any longer."</p>

-

-<p>But when we had gone away a few steps, Calliope called us back. And as

-we turned again,</p>

-

-<p>"To bring down the sky," she repeated, "I bet that's the way God meant

-us to do. They ain't any of us got enough <i>to</i> us to piece out without it!"</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>X</span> <span class="smaller">EVENING DRESS</span></h2>

-

-<p>I have said that Daphne Street has been paved within the past year, but

-I had not heard of the manner in which the miracle had been wrought

-until the day when Calliope's brief stay in the village ended and she

-came to tell me good-by&mdash;and, more than incidentally, to show me some

-samples of a dress which she might have, and a dress which she wouldn't

-have, and a dress which she had made up her mind to have.</p>

-

-<p>"We don't dress much here in Friendship Village," she observed. "Not but

-what we'd like to, but we ain't the time nor the means nor the places to

-wear to. But they was one night&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>She looked at me, as always when she means to tell a story, somewhat

-with the manner of asking a permission.</p>

-

-<p>"None of the low-neck' fashion-plates used to seem real to us," she

-said. "We used to look at 'em pinned up in Lyddy Ember's dressmakin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>

-windows, ah-ahing in their low pink an' long blue, an' we'd look 'em

-over an' think tolerant enough, like about sea-serpents. But neither the

-one nor the other bit hold rill vital, because the plates was so young

-an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an' we was old an' busy, like you get,

-an' considered past the dressin' age. Still, it made kind of a nice

-thing to do on the way home from the grocery hot forenoons&mdash;draw up

-there on the shady side, where the street kitters some into a curve, an'

-look at Lyddy's plates, an' choose, like you was goin' to get one.</p>

-

-<p>"Land knows we needed some oasises on that street from the grocery up

-home. Daphne Street, our main street, didn't always use' to be what it

-is now&mdash;neat little wooden blocks an' a stone curb. You know how it use'

-to be&mdash;no curb an' the road a sight, over your shoe-tops with mud in the

-wet, an' over your shoe-tops with sand when it come dry. We ladies used

-to talk a good deal about it, but the men knew it meant money to hev it

-fixed, an' so they told us hevin' it fixed meant cuttin' the trees down,

-an' that kept us quiet&mdash;all but the Friendship Married Ladies Cemetery

-Improvement Sodality.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Postmaster Sykes was president o' the Sodality last year, you

-know,&mdash;she's most always president of everything,&mdash;an' we'd been

-workin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> quite hard all that winter, an' had got things in the cemetery

-rill ship-shape&mdash;at least I mean things <i>on</i> the cemetery was. An' at

-one o' the July meetin's last summer Mis' Sykes up an' proposed that we

-give over workin' for the dead an' turn to the livin', an' pave the main

-street of Friendship Village.</p>

-

-<p>"'True,' she says, 'our constitution states that the purpose of our

-Sodality shall be to keep up the graves of our townspeople an' make 'em

-attractive to others. But,' says she, 'when they ain't enough of us dead

-to occupy all the time, the only Christian way to remedy that is to work

-for folks before they die, while we're waitin' for their graves.'</p>

-

-<p>"This seemed reasonable, an' we voted unanimous to pave Daphne Street.

-An' on the way home Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Timothy Toplady an' I see

-Timothy Toplady settin' in the post-office store, an' we went in to tell

-him an' Silas Sykes about it. But before we could start in, Silas says,

-eyebrows all eager, 'Ain't you heard?'</p>

-

-<p>"'Heard what?' says his wife, kind o' cross, bein' he was her wedded

-husband an' she <i>hadn't</i> heard.</p>

-

-<p>"''Bout Threat Hubbelthwait,' says Silas, lookin' at Mis' Toplady an'

-me, bein's Mis' Sykes was his wife. 'Drunk again,' says Silas, 'an'

-fiddlin' for dear life, an' won't let anybody into the hotel. Mis'

-Hubbelthwait has gone over to her mother's,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> an' the hired girl with

-her; an' Threat's settin' in the bar an' playin' all the hymn tunes he

-knows.'</p>

-

-<p>"It wasn't the first time it had happened, you know. Threat an' his wife

-an' the hired girl keep the only hotel in Friendship Village&mdash;when

-Threat is sober. When he isn't, he sometimes closes up the house an'

-turns out whoever happens to be there, an' won't let a soul in&mdash;though,

-of course, not much of anybody ever comes to Friendship anyway, excep'

-now an' then an automobile on its way somewheres. An' there Threat will

-set in the bar, sometimes most of one week, sometimes most of two, an'

-scrape away on the only tunes he knows&mdash;all hymns, 'Just As I Am,' an'

-'Can A Little Child Like Me?' Threat don't mean to be sacrilegious; he

-shows that by never singin' them two hymns in church, when they're give

-out.</p>

-

-<p>"'Land!' says Mis' Sykes, when Silas got through, 'what men are!'</p>

-

-<p>"'We ain't so much as woman, lemme tell you,' says Silas, right crisp.

-Which wasn't what he meant, an' we all laughed at him, so he was a

-little mad to start with.</p>

-

-<p>"'The Sodality's decided to pave Daphne Street,' Mis' Sykes mentions

-then, simple.</p>

-

-<p>"'Pave <i>what</i>?' shouts Silas&mdash;Silas always seems to think the more you

-do in sound the more you'll do in sense.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p><p>"'Do <i>what</i> to Daphne Street?' says Timothy, whirlin' from the peanut

-roaster.</p>

-

-<p>"'Pave Daphne Street,' says Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' me,

-wonderin'.</p>

-

-<p>"Silas wrapped his arms around his own shoulders.</p>

-

-<p>"'When,' says he, lettin' his head lurch with his own emphasizin', 'did

-the Common Council hear about this?'</p>

-

-<p>"'They ain't heard, about it,' says Mis' Sykes, 'no more'n we ever hear

-anything about them.'</p>

-

-<p>"Silas an' Timothy is both aldermen, an' rill sensitive over it. I guess

-the Common Council always <i>is</i> a delicate subject, ain't it?</p>

-

-<p>"Mebbe it wasn't a rill diplomatic way to begin, but it hadn't entered

-the Sodality's head that the town wouldn't be glad to hev the pavin'

-done if the Sodality was willin' to do it. Ain't it a hard thing to

-learn that it ain't all willingness, nor yet all bein' capable, that

-gets things done in the world? It's part just edgin' round an' edgin'

-round.</p>

-

-<p>"What did the Common Council do that night but call a special meetin'

-an' vote not to order any city pavin' done that present year. Every

-member was there but Threat Hubbelthwait, who was fiddlin', an' every

-vote was switched by Silas an' Timothy to be unanimous, excep' Eppleby

-Holcomb's vote. Eppleby, we heard afterwards, said that when a pack o'

-women made up their minds to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> pave, they'd pave if it was to pave&mdash;some

-place that Eppleby hadn't ought to 'a' mentioned; an' he was goin' to be

-on the pavin' side. But then, Eppleby is the gentlest husband in

-Friendship Village, an' known to be.</p>

-

-<p>"Sodality met special next day, not so much to do anything as to let it

-be known that we'd took action. This we done by votin' to lay low till

-such time as we could order the wooden blocks. We preferred to pave

-peaceable, it bein' hot weather.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss an'

-Mis' Mayor Uppers an' I walked home together from that meetin'. It was a

-blisterin' July afternoon&mdash;one of them afternoons that melts itself out

-flat, same as a dropped pepp'mint on a brick walk, an' you're left

-stickin' in it helpless as a fly, an' generally buzzin'. I rec'lect we

-was buzzin'&mdash;comin' down Daphne Street in that chokin' dust an' no

-pavement.</p>

-

-<p>"'It's a dog's life, livin' in a little town&mdash;in some respects,' I

-remember Mis' Sykes says.</p>

-

-<p>"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, tolerant, 'I know. I know it is. But I'd

-rather live in a little town an' dog it out than go up to the city an'

-turn wolf, same as some.'</p>

-

-<p>"An' yet we all felt the same, every one of us. They ain't a woman

-livin' in a little place that don't feel the same, now and again. It's

-quiet an' it's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> easy housework, an' you get to know folks well. But oh,

-none of it what you might say <i>glitters</i>. An' they ain't no woman

-whatever&mdash;no matter how good a wife an' mother an' Christian an' even

-housekeeper she is&mdash;that don't, 'way down deep in her heart, feel that

-hankerin' after some sort o' <i>glitter</i>.</p>

-

-<p>"So it was natural enough that we should draw up at Lyddy's dressmakin'

-window an' rest ourself. An' that afternoon we'd have done so, anyway,

-for she hed been pinnin' up her new summer plates&mdash;Lyddy don't believe

-in rushin' the season. An' no sooner had we got a good look at 'em&mdash;big

-coloured sheets they was, with full-length pictures&mdash;than Mis' Toplady

-leaned 'way forward, her hands on her knees, an' stood lookin' at 'em

-the way you look at the parade.</p>

-

-<p>"'Well, look-a-there,' she says. 'Look at that one.'</p>

-

-<p>"The one she meant was a woman with her hair all plaited an' fringed an'

-cut bias, an' with a little white hat o' lilacs 'bout as big as a cork;

-an' her dress&mdash;my land! Her dress was long an' rill light blue, an'

-seemed like it must have been paper, it was so fancy. It didn't seem

-like cloth goods at all, same as we hed on. It was more like we was

-wearin' meat an' vegetable dresses, an' this dress was dessert&mdash;all

-whipped cream an' pink sugar an' a flower on the plate.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p><p>"'Dear land!' says Mis' Toplady, lookin' 'round at us strange, 'do they

-do it when they get gray hair? I didn't know they done it when their

-hair was gray.'</p>

-

-<p>"We all looked, an' sure enough, the woman's hair was white. 'Afternoon

-Toilette for Elderly Woman,' it said underneath, plain as plain. Always

-before the plates hed all been young an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an'

-we'd thought of all that as past an' done for, with us, along with all

-the other things that didn't come true. But here was a woman grayer than

-any of us, an' yet lookin' as live as if she'd been wearin' a housework

-dress.</p>

-

-<p>"'Why,' says Mis' Sykes, starin', 'that must be a new thing this season.

-I never heard of a woman well along in years wearin' anything but brown

-or navy blue or gray,&mdash;besides black.' Mis' Sykes is terribly dressy,

-but even she never yet got anywheres inside the rainbow, except in a bow

-at the chin.</p>

-

-<p>"'My,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, wistful, 'wouldn't it seem

-like heaven to be able to wear colours without bein' talked about?'</p>

-

-<p>"An' Mis' Mayor Uppers&mdash;her that her husband grew well off bein' mayor,

-an' never'd been back to Friendship Village since he was put out of

-office, she says low:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"'You ladies that has husbands to keep thinkin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> well of you, I should

-think you'd think about this thing. Men,' she says, 'loves the light

-shades.'</p>

-

-<p>"At that Mis' Toplady turned around on us, an' we see her eyes

-expressin' i-dees.</p>

-

-<p>"'Ladies,' says she, impressive, 'Mis' Uppers is right. We hadn't ought

-to talk back or show mad. We ladies of the Sodality had ought to be able

-to get our own way peaceable, just by takin' it, the way the Lord give

-women the weapons to do.'</p>

-

-<p>"We see that somethin' was seethin' in her mind, but we couldn't work

-our way to what it was.</p>

-

-<p>"'Ladies,' says she, an' stepped up on the wooden step to Lyddy's

-dressmakin' shop, 'has the husbands of any one of us seen us, for twenty

-years, dressed in the light shades?'</p>

-

-<p>"I didn't hev any husband to answer for, but I could truthfully say of

-the rest that you'd think black an' brown an' gray an' navy had

-exhausted the Lord's ingenuity, for all the attention they'd paid to any

-other colour He'd wove with.</p>

-

-<p>"'Let's the Sodality get up an evenin' party, an' hev it in post-office

-hall, an' invite our husbands an' buy new dresses&mdash;light shades an' some

-lace,' says Mis' Toplady, lettin' the i-dee drag her along, main

-strength.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Sykes was studyin' the fashion-plate hungry, but she stopped an'

-stepped up side o' Mis' Toplady.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p><p>"'Well, sir,' she said, 'I donno but 'twould help us to work the pavin'

-of Daphne Street. Why, Silas Sykes, for one, is right down soft-hearted

-about clothes. He always notices which one of their waists the choir's

-got on. I heard him say once he wasn't goin' to church again till they

-bought somethin' new.'</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Holcomb nodded. 'Five years ago,' she said, 'I went up to the city

-with Eppleby. An' I saw him <i>turn around</i> to look after a woman. I'll

-never forget the sensation it give me&mdash;like I was married to a man that

-wasn't my husband. The woman had on a light pink dress. I know I come

-home an' bought a pink collar; I didn't think I could go any farther,

-because she was quite young. Do you s'pose....'</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Toplady pointed at Lyddy's fashion-plate. 'I should go,' she says,

-'just as far as my money would let me go.'</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Uppers stood lookin' down to the walk. 'The mayor,' she says&mdash;she

-calls him 'the mayor' yet&mdash;'was terrible fond o' coloured neckties. He

-was rill partial to green ones. Mebbe I didn't think enough about what

-that meant....'</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Toplady came down off the step. 'Every man is alike,' says she,

-decided. 'Most of us Friendship ladies thinks if we give 'em a clean

-roller towel we've done enough towards makin' things pretty;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> an' I

-think it's time, as wives, we took advantage of the styles.'</p>

-

-<p>"'An',' says Mis' Sykes, the president, rill dreamy for her, but firm,

-'I think so, too.'</p>

-

-<p>"I tell you, we all walked home feelin' like we'd hed a present&mdash;me too,

-though I knew very well I couldn't hev a light dress, an' I didn't hev

-any husband. You start out thinkin' them are the two principal things,

-but you get a-hold o' some others, if you pay attention. Still, I judged

-the ladies was on the right track, for men is men, say what who will.

-All but Threat Hubbelthwait. We passed the hotel an' heard him settin'

-in there by the bar scrapin' away on 'Can A Little Child Like Me?' We

-took shame to him, an' yet I know we all looked at each other sort of

-motherly, like he <i>was</i> some little shaver, same as he sung, an'

-performin' most fool.</p>

-

-<p>"It don't take us ladies long to do things, when our minds is made.

-Especially it don't when Mis' Timothy Toplady is chairman of the

-Entertainment Committee, or the Doin' Committee of whatever happens,

-like she was that time. First, we found out they was plenty enough nun's

-veilin' in the post-office store, cheap an' wide an' in stock an' all

-the light shades; an' I bought all the dresses, noons, of the clerk, so

-Silas wouldn't suspect&mdash;me not hevin' any husband to inquire around,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>

-like they do. Then we hired the post-office hall, vague, without sayin'

-for what&mdash;an' that pleased Silas that gets the rent. An' then we give

-the invitations, spectacular, through the <i>Friendship Daily</i> to the

-Sodality's husbands, for the next Tuesday night. We could do it that

-quick, not bein' dependent on dressmakers same as some. The ladies was

-all goin' to make their dresses themselves, an' the dresses wa'n't much

-to do to make. Nobody bothered a very great deal about how we should

-make 'em, the principal thing bein' the colour; Mis' Toplady's was blue,

-like the fashion-plate; Mis' Holcomb's pink, like the woman in the city;

-Mis' Uppers' green, like the mayor's necktie, an' so on. I made me up a

-dress out o' the spare-room curtains&mdash;white, with a little blue flower

-in it, an' a new blue ribbon belt. But Mis' Sykes, she went to work an'

-<i>rented</i> a dress from the city, for that one night. That much she give

-out about it, an' would give out no more. That woman loves a surprise.

-She's got a rill pleasant mind, Mis' Sykes has, but one that does enjoy

-jerkin' other people's minds up, an most anything'll do for the string.</p>

-

-<p>"For all we thought we hed so much time, an' it was so easy to do, the

-afternoon o' the party we went 'most crazy. We'd got up quite a nice

-little cold supper&mdash;Mis' Hubbelthwait had helped us, she bein' still at

-large, an' Threat fiddlin'. We planned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> meat loaf an' salad an' pickles

-an' jelly, an' scalloped potatoes for the hot dish, an' ice cream an'

-cake, enough in all for thirty folks: fifteen husbands an' fifteen

-Sodality, or approximatish. An' we planned to go to the hall in the

-afternoon an' take our dresses there, an' sly em' up and leave 'em, an'

-put 'em on after we'd got there that night, so's nobody's husbands

-should suspect. But when we all came in the afternoon, an' the

-decoratin' with greens an' festoons of cut paper an' all was to do,

-there Mis' Toplady, that was to make scalloped potatoes, hadn't got her

-sleeves in yet, an' she was down to the hall tryin' to do both; an' Mis'

-Holcomb, that was to make the salad dressing, had got so nervous over

-her collar that she couldn't tell which edge she'd cut for the top. But

-the rest of us was ready, an' Mis' Sykes's dress had come from the city,

-an' we all, Mis' Toplady an' Mame too, hed our dresses in boxes in the

-post-office hall kitchen cupboards. An' we done the decoratin', an' it

-looked rill lovely, with the long tables laid ready at each side, an'

-room for bein' a party left in between 'em.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb left the hall about five

-o'clock to go home an' lay out Silas's an' Timothy's an' Eppleby's best

-clothes for 'em&mdash;the rest hed done it at noon. Mis' Hubbelthwait was

-goin' over to the hotel to get some dishes out, an' I went with her to

-help. The bar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> was to the back, where Threat set an' slep' an' fiddled,

-an' Mis' Hubbelthwait was goin' to slip in still an' sly the dishes out

-to me. A good many of the hotel dishes was her individual weddin'

-presents, so she didn't think wrong of her conscience.</p>

-

-<p>"We was all five hurryin' along together, rehearsin' all we'd got to do

-before six-thirty, when we heard a funny sound. We listened, an' we

-thought they must be testin' the hose. But when we got to Lyddy's shop,

-where the street kitters off some in a curve, we looked ahead an' we see

-it wasn't that.</p>

-

-<p>"It's an automobile," says Mis' Toplady. 'My land,' she says, 'it ain't

-only one. It's two.'</p>

-

-<p>"An' we see it was. There come the two of 'em, ploughin' along through

-the awful sand of Daphne Street, that was fit for no human locomotive,

-unless ostriches. When the Proudfits are here, that's the only one in

-the village with an automobile, they understand the sand, and they'd put

-on the whole steam and tear right along through it. But strangers would

-go careful, for fear they'd get stuck, an' so they got it, like you do.

-An' them two big red cars was comin' slow, the dust like cloaks an'

-curtains billowin' up behind. They looked quite wild, includin' the

-seven folks in each one that was laughin' an' callin' out. An' by the

-time they'd come up to us, us four ladies of the Sodality an' Mis'

-Hubbelthwait was lined up on the walk watchin' 'em. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> stopped an'

-one of 'em hailed us, leanin' past his driver.</p>

-

-<p>"'I beg your pardon,' he says, 'is this the street to the best hotel?'</p>

-

-<p>"It was Mis' Toplady that answered him, rill collected. 'They's only one

-street in town,' says she, 'an' they's only one hotel, an' that they

-ain't now.'</p>

-

-<p>"'Can you tell me how soon there will be one?' says the man. 'By

-dinner-time, I hope.'</p>

-

-<p>"We all felt kind of delicate about answerin' this, an' so Mis'

-Hubbelthwait herself spoke up. 'Threat's drunk an' fiddlin', she says.

-'They's no tellin' when Friendship Village will ever hev a hotel again.'</p>

-

-<p>"Both automobiles was listenin' by then, an' though some of 'em laughed

-out sort o' rueful, not many of 'em see the funny.</p>

-

-<p>"'Gad,' one of the men says, 'how about the bird an' the bottle we were

-to send back to Bonner, sittin' by his tire in the desert, a ways back?

-Don't tell us there's no place,' he says, 'where we can find dinner,

-twenty-one of us and the three chauf&mdash;' that word.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Toplady shook her head. 'They ain't a place big enough to seat

-twenty-one, even if they was the food to feed 'em&mdash;' she begun, an' then

-she stopped an' looked 'round at us, as though she was thinkin'

-somethin'.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p><p>"'Oh, come now,' says the man,&mdash;he was good-lookin' an' young, an'

-merry-seemin',&mdash;'Oh, come now,' he said, 'I am sure that the ladies of

-Friendship could cook things such as never man yet ate. We are

-sta-arving,' he says, humorous. 'Can't you do something for us? We'll

-give you,' he winds up, genial, 'two dollars a plate for a good,

-home-cooking dinner for the twenty-four of us. What do you say?'</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Toplady whirled toward us sort o' wild. 'Is two dollars times

-twenty-four, forty-eight dollars?' says she, low.</p>

-

-<p>"An' we see it was, though Mis' Holcomb was still figurin' it out in the

-palm of her other hand, while we stood gettin' glances out of each

-other's eyes, an' sendin' 'em, give for take. We see, quick as a flash,

-what Mis' Toplady was thinkin' about. An' it was about that hall, all

-festooned with greens an' cut paper, an' the two long tables laid ready,

-an' the veal loaf an' scalloped potatoes an' ice-cream for thirty. An'

-when Mis' Sykes, that usually speaks, stood still, an' didn't say one

-word, but just nodded a little bit, sort o' sad, Mis' Toplady, that was

-chairman o' the Entertainment Committee, done like she does

-sometimes&mdash;she took the whole thing into her own hands an' just settled

-it.</p>

-

-<p>"'Why, yes,' she says to 'em, rill pleasant, 'if you want to come up to

-post-office hall at half-past<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> six,' she says, 'the Friendship Married

-Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality will serve you your supper, nice

-as the nicest, for two dollars a head.'</p>

-

-<p>"'Good!' the men all sings out, an' the women spats their hands soft,

-an' one of 'em says somethin' to the merry-seemin' man.</p>

-

-<p>"'Oh, yes,' he says then, 'couldn't we all break into this hotel an'

-floss up a bit before dinner?'</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Hubbelthwait stepped out towards 'em.</p>

-

-<p>"'I was thinkin' of that,' says she. 'My husband,' she says, dignified,

-'is settin' in the bar&mdash;practisin' his violin. He&mdash;he does that

-sometimes, an' we&mdash;don't bother him. But the bar is at the back. I can

-let you in, still, the front way to the rooms, if you want. An' I'll be

-there myself to wait on you.'</p>

-

-<p>"An' that was what they done, somebody takin' one o' the cars back for

-the other car, an' the rest of us fair breakin' into a run toward

-post-office hall.</p>

-

-<p>"'My land,' says Mis' Toplady, almost like a groan, 'what <i>hev</i> we

-done?'</p>

-

-<p>"It <i>was</i> a funny thing to do, we see it afterward. But I tell you, you

-can't appreciate the influence o' that forty-eight dollars unless you've

-tried to earn money in a town the size o' Friendship Village. Sodality

-hardly ever made more than five dollars to its ten-cent

-entertainments&mdash;an' that for a big turn-out on a dry night. An' here was

-the price<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> of about nine such entertainments give us outright, an' no

-extra work, an' rill feet-achin' weather. I say it was more than flesh

-an' blood <i>or</i> wives could stand. We done it automatic, like you

-contradict when it's necessary.</p>

-

-<p>"But there <i>was</i> the men to reckon with.</p>

-

-<p>"'What'll Timothy&mdash;an' Silas&mdash;an' Eppleby....' Mis' Toplady says, an'

-stops, some bothered an' some rill pained.</p>

-

-<p>"I judged, not havin' any husband to be doin' the inquirin', it wasn't

-polite for me to laugh. But I couldn't hardly help it, thinkin' o' them

-fifteen hungry men an' the supper et away from 'em, just William Nilly.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Sykes, we remembered afterwards, never said a word, but only kep'

-up with us back to the hall.</p>

-

-<p>"Back to the hall, where the rest o' the Sodality was, we told 'em what

-we'd done&mdash;beginnin' with the forty-eight dollars, like some kind o'

-weapon. But I tell you, we hadn't reckoned without knowin' our

-hostesses, head an' heart. An' they went in pell mell, pleased an' glad

-as we was, an' plannin' like mad.</p>

-

-<p>"The first need was more food to make up that supper to somewheres near

-two dollars' worth&mdash;feedin' your husband is one thing an' gettin' up a

-two-dollar meal is another. But we collected that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> all in pretty sudden:

-leg o' lamb, left from the Holcombs' dinner an' only cut off of one

-side; the Sykes's roast o' veal, the same; three chickens for soup the

-Libertys hed just dressed for next day company dinner; big platter of

-devilled eggs chipped in from Mis' Toplady; a jar o' doughnuts, a

-steamer o' cookies, a fruit-cake a year old&mdash;we just made out our list

-an' scattered to empty out all our pantries.</p>

-

-<p>"By six o'clock we was back in the hall, an' all the food with us. But

-nobody hed met nobody's husband yet, an' nobody wanted to. We didn't

-quite know how we was goin' to do, I guess&mdash;but done is done, an' to do

-takes care of itself.</p>

-

-<p>"'Hadn't we ought to 'a' sent word to the men?' says Mis' Holcomb, for

-the third or fourth time. 'I sneaked around so's not to pass Eppleby's

-office, but I declare I feel mean. He'll hev to eat sauce an' plain

-bread-an'-butter for his supper. An' most o' the men-folks the same.

-'Seems though somebody'd ought to send 'em word an' not let 'em come up

-here, all washed an' dressed.'</p>

-

-<p>"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, cuttin' cake with her lips shut tight an'

-talkin' anyway, 'I kind o' thought&mdash;leave 'em come up. I bet they'd

-rather be in it than out of it, every one of 'em, an' who knows they

-might be some supper left? An' we can all&mdash;'</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p><p>"An' at that Mis' Toplady faces round from cuttin' the cake: 'My land,

-my land,' she says, sort o' hushed, 'why, doin' this, we can't none of

-us wear our new dresses!'</p>

-

-<p>"An' at that we looked at each other, each one sort of accusin', an' I

-guess all our hearts givin' one o' them sickish thumps. An' Mis' Sykes,

-her that hed been so still, snaps back:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"'I wondered what you thought I'd rented my dress from the city for at

-<i>Three Dollars a night</i>.'</p>

-

-<p>"I tell you, that made a hush in the middle of the plannin'. We'd forgot

-all about our own dresses, an' that was bad enough, with the hall all

-hired an' everything all ready, an' every chance in the world of

-everybody's husband's findin' out about the dresses before we could get

-up another Sodality party, same way. But here was Mis' Sykes, three

-dollars out, an mebbe wouldn't be able to rent her dress again at all.</p>

-

-<p>"'I did want Silas,' Mis' Sykes says then, wistful, 'to see me in that

-dress. Silas an' I have been married so long,' she says, 'that I often

-wonder if I seem like a person to him at all. But in that dress from the

-city, I think I would.'</p>

-

-<p>"We was each an' all ready to cry, an' I dunno but we would hev done

-it&mdash;though we was all ready to serve, too: coffee made, potatoes pipin'

-hot, veal an' lamb het up an' smellin' rich, chicken<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> soup steamin', an'

-all. But just that very minute we heard some of 'em comin' in the

-hall&mdash;an' the one 'ready' conquered the other 'ready,' like it will, an'

-we all made a rush, part curious an' part nerves, to peek through the

-little servin' window from the kitchen.</p>

-

-<p>"<i>What</i> do you think we saw? It was the automobile folks, hungry an' got

-there first. In they'd come, women laughin', men jokin', all makin' a

-lark out o' the whole thing. An' if the women wasn't, every last one of

-'em, wearin'&mdash;not the clothes they hed come in, but light pink an' light

-blue an' white an' flowered things, an' all like that.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Hubbelthwait burst in on us while we was lookin'. 'They hed things

-in their trunk at the back o' the automobile,' says she. 'They says they

-wanted to floss up for dinner, an' floss up they hev. They look like

-Lyddy's fashion sheets, one an' all.'</p>

-

-<p>"At that Mis' Sykes, a-ceasin' to peek, she drops her tray on the bare

-floor an' begun untyin' her apron. 'Quick!' she raps out, 'Mis'

-Hubbelthwait, you go an' set 'em down. An' every one o' you&mdash;into them

-togs of ours! Here's the chance to wear 'em&mdash;here an' <i>now</i>,' she says,

-'an' leave them folks see we know how to do things here in Friendship

-Village as good as the best.'</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p><p>"Well, bein' as she had rented the dress, an' three dollars hed to be

-paid out anyhow, an' bein' as she was president, an' bein' as we was all

-hankerin' in our hearts, we didn't need much urgin'. We slammed the

-servin' window shut an' set chairs against both doors, an' we whisked

-out of our regular dresses like wild.</p>

-

-<p>"'Oh, land&mdash;my land, the sleeves&mdash;the sleeves ain't in mine!' says Mis'

-Toplady, sort o' glazed, an' speakin' in a wail. But we encouraged her

-up to pin 'em in, which she done, an' it couldn't be told from stitches.

-Poor Mame Holcomb's collar that wasn't on yet we turned in for her

-V-shape, so's her dress was low, like the best. An' Mis' Uppers, that

-was seasonin' the chicken soup like none of us could, her we took turns

-in dressin' in her green. An' I'd got into my spare-room curtains,

-somehow, just as Mis' Hubbelthwait come shoving at that door.</p>

-

-<p>"'The men&mdash;the men!' says she, painful. 'They're all out here&mdash;Silas an'

-Timothy an' Eppleby an' all. They've all heard about it&mdash;the automobiles

-went to the post-office for their mail, an' Silas told 'em enjoyable

-about Threat, an' the automobiles told him where they was goin' to eat.

-An' they've come, thinkin' they's enough for all, an' they're out here

-now.'</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Toplady groaned a little, agonized an'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> stifled, but rill firm.

-'Tell 'em, then,' says she, 'to come back up here, like men, an'

-<i>help</i>.'</p>

-

-<p>"Then we heard a little rustle, soft an' silky an' kind o'

-pink-soundin', an' we looked around, an' there, from where she had been

-dressin' herself over behind the kitchen boiler all alone, Mis'

-Postmaster Sykes stepped out. My land, if she wasn't in a white dress, a

-little low in the neck, an' elbow sleeves, an' all covered solid as

-crust with glitterin' silver spangles.</p>

-

-<p>"'Let's tell 'em ourselves,' she says, 'come on&mdash;all of you. Let's take

-out the first course, an' tell the men what we want 'em to do.'</p>

-

-<p>"We made Mis' Sykes go first, carryin' high the tureen of chicken soup.

-An' on one side of her walked Mis' Timothy Toplady, in blue, with the

-wafers, an' on the other Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, in pink, with

-the radishes. An' neither one of 'em could hardly help lookin' at Mis'

-Sykes's dress all the way out. An' back of 'em went the rest o' the

-ladies, all in pink an' blue an' white an' pale green nun's veilin' that

-they'd made, an' carryin' the water-pitchers an' ice an' celery an' like

-that. An' me, I hung back in the kitchen watchin' an' lovin' 'em every

-one&mdash;an' almost lovin' Timothy Toplady an' Silas Sykes an' Eppleby when

-they looked on an' saw.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Sykes set the soup down in front o' the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> merry-seemin' man for him

-to serve it. An' then she crossed over an' spoke to Silas, an' swep' up

-ahead of him in that spangly dress, the other ladies followin' an'

-noddin' bright when they passed the men, an' motionin' 'em toward the

-back o' the hall. An' back the men all come into the kitchen, followin'

-as they was asked to do, an' orderly through bein' dazed. Silas an'

-Timothy an' Eppleby was first, an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' Mame

-went up to 'em together.</p>

-

-<p>"I'll never forget that minute. I thought the men was goin' to burst out

-characteristic an' the whole time be tart, an' I shut both doors an' the

-servin' window careful. An' instead o' that, them three men stood there

-just smilin' a little an lookin' surprised an' agreeable; an' the other

-husbands, either takin' the cue or feelin' the same, done likewise, too.

-An' when Mame Bliss says, sort o' tremblin'&mdash;Eppleby bein' the gentlest

-husband in Friendship Village, an' known to be: 'How do you like us,

-Eppleby?' Eppleby just nods an' wrinkles up his eyes an' smiles at her,

-like he meant lots more. An' he says, 'Why didn't you never wear that

-dress before, Mame?'</p>

-

-<p>"An' 'Well, Timothy?' says Mis' Toplady, sort o' masterful, an' fully

-expectin' to hev to master. But Timothy Toplady, he just rubs his hands

-an' looks at her sort o' wonderin', an' he says, 'Blisterin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> Benson,

-you look as good as the city folks, Amandy&mdash;all light, an' loose made,

-an' stylish&mdash;'</p>

-

-<p>"But Silas Sykes, he just stood lookin' at his wife an' lookin'. Of

-course she <i>did</i> hev the advantage, bein' her spangles shone so. An'

-Silas looked at her an' looked, just as if her bein' his wife didn't

-make him admire her any the less. An' Mis' Sykes, she was rill pink an'

-pleased an' breathless, an' I guess she could see she seemed like a

-person to Silas, the way she'd wanted to.</p>

-

-<p class="space-above">"It all went off splendid. The men stayed an' dished in the kitchen an'

-helped carry away from the tables&mdash;the forty-eight dollars completin'

-their respect&mdash;an' we ladies done the servin'. An' I tell you, we served

-'em with an air, 'count o' bein' well dressed, like they was, an'

-knowin' it. An' we knew the automobile folks appreciated it&mdash;we could

-tell by the way they kep' lookin' at us. But of course we all understood

-Mis' Sykes looked the best, an' we let her do all the most prominent

-things&mdash;bringin' in the first dish of everything an' like that, so's

-they could hev a good look.</p>

-

-<p>"When it was over, the merry-seemin' man stood up an' made a little

-speech o' thanks, rill courteous an' sweet, an' like he knew how to act.

-An' when he was through we, one an' all, nudged Mis' Sykes to reply, an'

-she done so, the two tables<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> listenin', an' the Sodality standin' in

-between, an' the Sodality's husbands crowdin' in both kitchen doors to

-listen.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Sykes says, rill dignified, an' the light catchin' in her

-spangles: 'We're all very much obliged, I'm sure, for our forty-eight

-dollars clear. An' we think perhaps you'd like to know what the money is

-goin' toward. It's goin',' she says, 'towards the pavin' of the main

-street of our little city.'</p>

-

-<p>"Silas Sykes was lookin' out the servin' window like it was a box.

-'What's that?' says he, more of him comin' out of the window, 'what's

-<i>that</i> you say?'</p>

-

-<p>"An' they was a little wave o' moves an' murmurs all around him like

-when somethin' is goin' to happen an' nobody knows what; an' I know the

-Sodality caught its breath, for, as Mis' Toplady always says, the dear

-land knows what men <i>will</i> do.</p>

-

-<p>"With that up springs the merry-seemin' man, his face all beamin', an'

-he says loud an' clear an' drowndin' out everything else: 'Hear, hear!

-Likewise, here an' now. I move that we as one man, an' that man's

-automobile having lately come up the main street of Friendship

-Village&mdash;do ourself contribute to this most worthy end. Get to work,'

-says he. 'Think civic thoughts!'</p>

-

-<p>"He slid the last roll off its plate, an' he laid somethin' in paper

-money on it, an' he started it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> down the table. An' every man of 'em

-done as he done. An' I tell you, when we see Mis' Hubbelthwait's bread

-plate pilin' with bills, an' knew what it was for, we couldn't help&mdash;the

-whole Sodality couldn't help&mdash;steppin' forwards, close to the table, an'

-standin' there an' holdin' our breaths. An' the men, back there in the

-kitchen, they hushed up when they see the money, an' they kep' hushed.

-Land, land, it was a great minute! I like to think about it.</p>

-

-<p>"An' when the plate come back to the merry-seemin' man, he took it an'

-he come over towards us with it in his hand, an' we nudged Mis' Sykes to

-take the money. An' she just lifted up the glitter part of her skirt an'

-spread it out an' he dropped the whole rustlin' heap on to the spangles.

-An' the rest of us all clapped our hands, hard as we could, an' right

-while we was doin' it we heard somethin' else&mdash;deeper an' more manly

-than us. An' there was the men streamin' out o' the kitchen doors, an'

-Silas Sykes high in the servin' window&mdash;an' every one of 'em was

-clappin', too.</p>

-

-<p>"I tell you, we was glad an' grateful. An' we was grateful, too, when

-afterwards they was plenty enough supper left for the men-folks. An'

-when we all set down together around that table, Mis' Sykes at the head

-an' the plate o' bills for a centrepiece, Mis' Toplady leaned back, hot

-an' tired, an' seein'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> if both her sleeves was still pinned in place,

-an' she says what we was all thinkin':&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"'Oh, ladies,' she says, 'we can pave streets an' dress in the light

-shades even if we ain't young, like the run o' the fashion-plates. Ain't

-it like comin' to life again?' she says."</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>XI</span> <span class="smaller">UNDERN</span></h2>

-

-<p>I have a guest who is the best of the three kinds of welcome guests. Of

-these some are like a new rug which, however fine and unobtrusive it be,

-at first changes the character of your room so that when you enter you

-are less conscious of the room than of the rug. Some guests are like

-flowers on the table, leaving the room as it was save for their sweet,

-novel presence. And some guests are like a prized new book, unread, from

-which you simply cannot keep away. Of these last is my guest whom my

-neighbour calls the New Lady.</p>

-

-<p>My neighbour and Elfa and Miggy and Little Child and I have all been

-busy preparing for her. Elfa has an almost pathetic fondness for

-"company,"&mdash;I think it is that she leads such a lonely life in the

-little kitchen-prison that she welcomes even the companionship of

-more-voices-in-the-next-room. I have tried to do what I can for Elfa,

-but you never help people very much when you only try to do what you

-can. It must lie nearer the heart than that. And I perfectly understand

-that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> magazines and trifles of finery which I give to her, and the

-flowers I set on the kitchen clock shelf, and the talks which, since my

-neighbour's unconscious rebuke, I have contrived with her, are about as

-effectual as any merely ameliorative means of dealing with a social

-malady. For Elfa is suffering from a distinct form of the social malady,

-and not being able to fathom it, she knows merely that she is lonely. So

-she has borrowed fellowship from her anticipation of my guest and of

-those who next week will come down from the town; and I know, though she

-does not know, that her jars of fresh-fried cakes and cookies, her fine

-brown bread and her bowl of salad-dressing, are her utmost expression of

-longing to adjust the social balance and give to herself companionship,

-even a kind of household.</p>

-

-<p>Little Child to-day came, bringing me a few first sweet peas and

-Bless-your-Heart, Bless-your-Heart being her kitten, and as nearly pink

-as a cat can be and be still a cat.</p>

-

-<p>"To lay in the New Lady's room," she remarked, bestowing these things

-impartially upon me.</p>

-

-<p>Later, my neighbour came across the lawns with a plate of currant tarts

-and a quarter of a jelly cake.</p>

-

-<p>"Here," she said, "I don't know whether you like tarts or not. They're

-more for children, I always think. I always bake 'em, and the little

-round child fried cakes, too, and I put frosting faces<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> on the cookies,

-and such things. It makes my husband and I seem more like a family," she

-explained, "and that's why I always set the dining-room table. As long

-as we ain't any little folks running around, I always tell him that him

-and I would be eating meat and potatoes on the kitchen drop-leaf like

-savages if I didn't pretend there was more of us, and bake up for 'em."</p>

-

-<p>Miggy alone does not take wholly kindly to the New Lady idea, though I

-assure her that our mornings are to remain undisturbed.</p>

-

-<p>"Of course," she observed, while in the New Lady's honour she gathered

-up strewn papers, "I know I'll like her because she's your friend. But I

-don't know what folks want to visit for. Don't you s'pose that's why the

-angels don't come back&mdash;because they know everything, and they know what

-a lot of extra work they'd make us?"</p>

-

-<p>In Miggy the tribal sense seems to have run itself out. Of the sanctity

-of the individual she discerns much; but of the wider sanctities she has

-no clear knowledge. Most relationships she seems to regard, like the

-love of Peter, as "drawbacks," save only her indefinite consciousness of

-that one who is "not quite her sister"&mdash;the little vague Margaret. And

-this, I think, will be the leaven. Perhaps it is the universal leaven,

-this consciousness.</p>

-

-<p>I was glad that the New Lady was to arrive in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> the afternoon. Sometimes

-I think that the village afternoon is the best time of all. It is no

-wonder that they used to call that time "undern." If they had not done

-so, the word must have grown of its own will&mdash;perhaps it did come to

-life with no past, an immaculate thing, so like its meaning that it

-could not help being here among us. I know very well that Sir John

-Mandeville and others used "undern" to mean the third hour, or about

-nine in the morning, but that may have been because at first not every

-one recognized the word. Many a fairy thing wanders for a long time on

-earth, patiently putting up with other connotations than its own.

-Opportunism, the subconscious mind, personality, evolution itself,&mdash;all

-these are still seeking their full incarnations in idea. No wonder

-"undern" was forced for a long while to mean morning. But nine o'clock

-in the morning! How, after all, was that possible? You have only to say

-it over&mdash;undern, undern, undern,&mdash;to be heavenly drowsy with summer

-afternoon. The north of England recognized this at last and put the word

-where it belongs; and I have, too, the authority of the lady of Golden

-Wing:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<div>"Undern cometh after noon,</div>

-<div>Golden Wings will be here soon...."</div>

-</div></div></div>

-

-<p>One can hardly stop saying that, once one is started. I should like to

-go on with it all down the page.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p><p>I was thinking of these things as I drove to the station alone to meet

-the New Lady. The time had taken on for me that pleasant, unlike-itself

-aspect which time bears in any mild excitement, so that if in the moment

-of reading a particularly charming letter one can remember to glance up

-and look the room in the face, one may catch its <i>other</i> expression, the

-expression which it has when one is not looking. So now I caught this

-look in the village and an air of

-Something-different-is-going-to-happen, such as we experience on

-holidays. Next week, when the New Lady's friends come down to us for two

-days, I dare say, if I can remember to look for it, that the village

-will have another expression still. Yet there will be the same quiet

-undern&mdash;though for me it is never a commonplace time. Indeed, usually I

-am in the most delighted embarrassment how to spend it. In the mornings

-now&mdash;Miggy being willing&mdash;I work, morning in the true democracy being

-the work time; afternoon the time for recreation and the more

-specialized forms of service <i>and</i> a little rest; the evening for

-delight, including the delight of others. Not every one in the village

-accepts my afternoon and evening classifications. I am constantly coming

-on people making preserves after mid-day, and if I see a light in a

-kitchen window after nine at night I know that somebody is ironing in

-the cool of the day. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> usually my division of time is the general

-division, save that&mdash;as in the true democracy&mdash;service is not always

-recognized as service. Our afternoons may be spent in cutting carpet

-rags, or in hemming linen, or sewing articles for an imminent bazaar,

-and this is likely to be denominated "gettin' through little odd jobs,"

-and accounted in a measure a self-indulgence. And if evening delight

-takes the form of gardening and later a flame of nasturtiums or dahlias

-is carried to a friend, nobody dreams that this is not a pleasant

-self-indulgence too, and it is so regarded. With these things true is it

-not as if a certain hope abroad in the world gave news of itself?</p>

-

-<p>Near the Pump pasture I came on Nicholas Moor&mdash;who rings the Catholic

-bell and is interested in celluloid&mdash;and who my neighbour had told me

-would doubtless come to me, bringing his little sheaf of "writin's." I

-had not yet met him, though I had seen in the daily paper a vagrant poem

-or two over his name&mdash;I remember a helpless lyric which made me think of

-a gorgeous green and gold beetle lying on its back, unable to recover

-its legs, but for all that flashing certain isolated iridescent colours.

-My heart ached for Nicholas, and when I saw him now going across the

-pasture his loneliness was like a gap in things, one of the places where

-two world-edges do not quite meet. There are so many pleasant ways to do

-and the boy seemed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> to know how to do none of them. How can he be lonely

-in the village? For myself, if I decide of an afternoon to take my work

-and pay a visit, I am in a pleasant quandary as to which way to turn. If

-I go to the west end of Daphne Street, there are at least five families

-among whom to choose, the other four of whom will wonder why I did not

-come to them. Think of knowing five families in two blocks who would

-welcome one's coming and even feel a little flattering bitterness if one

-chose the other four! If I take a cross street, I am in the same

-difficulty. And if I wish to go to the house of one of my neighbours, my

-motives clash so seriously that I often sit on my porch and call to

-whoever chances to be in sight to come to me. Do you wonder that, in

-town, the moment I open my address book I feel smothered? I recover and

-enjoy town as much as anybody, but sometimes in a stuffy coup&eacute;, hurrying

-to get a half-dozen of the pleasantest calls "done," I surprise a

-companion by saying: would now that it were undern on Daphne Street!</p>

-

-<p>I told this to the New Lady as we drove from the station. The New Lady

-is an exquisite little Someone, so little that it is as if she had been

-drawn quickly, in a single delicate curving line, and then left, lest

-another stroke should change her. She understands the things that I say

-in the way that I mean them; she is the way that you always think<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> the

-people whom you meet are going to be, though they so seldom are; like

-May, she is expectation come alive. What she says fits in all the

-crannies of what you did not say and have always known, or else have

-never thought of before and now never can forget. She laughs when she

-should laugh, and never, never when somebody else should laugh alone.

-When you tell her that you have walked eight miles and back, she says

-"<i>And back!</i>" with just the proper intonation of homage. She never tells

-a story upon the heels of your own little jest so swiftly that it cannot

-triumphantly escape. When you try to tell her something that you have

-not quite worked out, she nods a little and you see that she meant it

-before you did. She enters every moment by its gate and not over its

-wall, though she frequently wings her way in instead of walking. Also,

-she is good to look at and her gowns are as meet as the clouds to the

-sky&mdash;and no less distracting than the clouds are at their very best.

-There is no possible excuse for my saying so much about her, but I like

-to talk of her. And I like to talk to her as I did when we left the

-station and I was rambling on about undern.</p>

-

-<p>The New Lady looked about with a breath of content.</p>

-

-<p>"No wonder," she said, "you like to pretend Birthday, in New York."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span></p><p>It is true that when I am there where, next to the village, I like best

-to live, I am fond of this pretence. It is like the children's game of

-"Choosing" before shop windows, only it is extensive and not, as cream

-puffs and dolls and crumpets in the windows dictate to the children,

-purely intensive. Seeing this man and that woman in the subway or the

-tea-room or the caf&eacute; or the car, I find myself wondering if it is by any

-chance their birthdays; and if it is, I am always wishing to deal out

-poor little gifts at which I fancy they would hardly look. To the lithe

-idle blond woman, elbows on table; to the heavy-lidded,

-engagement-burdened gentlewoman; to the busy, high-eyebrowed man in a

-cab; to the tired, slow-winking gentleman in his motor; to the

-thick-handed labourer hanging to his strap, I find myself longing to

-distribute these gifts: a breakfast on our screened-in porch in the

-village, with morning-glories on the table; a full-throated call of my

-oriole&mdash;a June call, not the isolated reminiscent call of August; an

-hour of watering the lawn while robins try to bathe in the spray; a

-morning of pouring melted paraffin on the crimson tops of moulds of

-currant jelly; a yellow afternoon of going with me to "take my work and

-stay for supper." I dare say that none of my chosen beneficiaries would

-accept; but if I could pop from a magic purse a crop of caps and fit

-folk, willy nilly, I wonder if afterward, even if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> they remembered

-nothing of what had occurred, they might not find life a little

-different.</p>

-

-<p>"If it was my birthday," said the New Lady, "I would choose to be driven

-straight away through that meadow, as if I had on wings."</p>

-

-<p>That is the way she is, the New Lady. Lacking wings of her own she gives

-them to many a situation. Straightway I drove down into the Pump pasture

-and across it, springy soil and circus-trodden turf and mullein stalks

-and ten-inch high oak trees.</p>

-

-<p>"Let's let down the bars," said the New Lady, "and drive into that next

-meadow. If it <i>is</i> a sea, as it looks, it will be glad of your company."</p>

-

-<p>It was not a sea, for as we drove through the lush grass the yellow and

-purple people of the meadow came marching to meet us, as dignified as

-garden flowers, save that you knew, all the time, that wild hearts were

-beating beneath the rainbow tassels. It was a meadow with things to say,

-but with finger on lip&mdash;as a meadow should be and as a spirit must be.

-The meadow seemed to wish to say: "It is all very pleasant for you there

-in the village to admire one another's wings, but the real romance is in

-the flight." I wondered if it were not so that it had happened&mdash;that one

-day a part of the village had got tired waiting, and had broken off and

-become something free, of which the meadow was the body and its secret

-was the spirit. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> then the presence of the New Lady always sets me

-wondering things like this.</p>

-

-<p>"Why," I said to her suddenly, "spring has gone! I wonder how that

-happened. I have been waiting really to get hold of spring, and here it

-is June."</p>

-

-<p>"June-and-a-half," assented the New Lady, and touched the lines so that

-we came to a standstill in the shade of a cottonwood.</p>

-

-<p>"This way," she said&mdash;and added softly, as one who would not revive a

-sadness, her own idea of the matter.</p>

-

-<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<div>"Where did Spring die? I did not hear her go</div>

-<div>Down the soft lane she painted. All flower still</div>

-<div>She moved among her emblems on the hill</div>

-<div>Touching away their burden of old snow.</div>

-<div>Was it on some great down where long winds flow</div>

-<div>That the wild spirit of Spring went out to fill</div>

-<div>The eyes of Summer? Did a daffodil</div>

-<div>Lift the pale urn remote where she lies low?</div>

-</div><div class="stanza">

-<div>"Oh, not as other moments did she die,</div>

-<div>That woman-season, outlined like a rose.</div>

-<div>Before the banner of Autumn's scarlet bough</div>

-<div>The Summer fell; and Winter, with a cry,</div>

-<div>Wed with March wind. Spring did not die like those;</div>

-<div>But vaguely, as if Love had prompted, 'Now.'"</div>

-</div></div></div>

-

-<p>The New Lady's theory does not agree with that of Little Child. I am in

-doubt which to accept. But I like to think about both.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p><p>And when the New Lady had said the faint requiem, we drove on again and

-the next moment had almost run down Nicholas Moor, lying face downward

-in the lush grass.</p>

-

-<p>I recognized him at once, but of course the New Lady did not do so, and

-she leaned from the cart, thoroughly alarmed at the boy's posture and,

-as he looked up, at his pallor.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, what is the matter?" she cried, and her voice was so heavenly

-pitying that one would have been willing to have most things the matter

-only to hear her.</p>

-

-<p>Nicholas Moor scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and stood abashed,

-looking as strangely detached from the moment as if he had fallen from a

-frame and left the rest of the picture behind.</p>

-

-<p>"Nothing. I just like to be here," he was surprised into saying.</p>

-

-<p>The New Lady sat down and smiled. And her smile was even more

-captivating than had been her late alarm.</p>

-

-<p>"So do I," she told him heartily. "So do I. What do you like about it,

-<i>best</i>?"</p>

-

-<p>I do not think that any one had ever before spoken to Nicholas so

-simply, and he answered, chord for chord.</p>

-

-<p>"I guess&mdash;I guess I like it just on account of its being the way it is,"

-he said.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p><p>"That is a very, very nice reason," the New Lady commented. "Again, so

-do I."</p>

-

-<p>We left him, I remember, looking about as if he were seeing it all for

-the first time.</p>

-

-<p>As we drove away I told my New Lady about Nicholas, and she looked along

-her own thought and shook her head.</p>

-

-<p>"There must be hundreds of them," she said, "and some are poets. But

-most of them are only lonesome. I wonder which Nicholas is?"</p>

-

-<p>We lingered out-of-doors as long as we might, because the touch of the

-outdoors was so companioning that to go indoors was a distinct good-by.

-Is it so with you that some Days, be they never so sunny, yet walk with

-you in a definite reserve and seem to be looking somewhere else; while

-other Days come to you like another way of being yourself and will not

-let you go? I know that some will put it down to mood and not to the Day

-at all; but, do what I will, I cannot credit this.</p>

-

-<p>It was after five o'clock when we drove into the village, and all Daphne

-Street was watering its lawns. Of those who were watering some pretended

-not to see us, but I understood that this they accounted the etiquette

-due to a new arrival. Some bowed with an excess of cordiality, and this

-I understood to be the pleasant thought that they would show my guest

-how friendly we all are. And some laid down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> the hose and came to the

-sidewalk's edge to meet the New Lady then and there.</p>

-

-<p>Of these were Mis' Postmaster Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss

-and my neighbour.</p>

-

-<p>"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," Mis' Postmaster Sykes said graciously

-to the New Lady. "I must say it seems good to see a strange face now an'

-then. I s'pose you feel all travel dust an' mussed up?"</p>

-

-<p>And at Mis' Holcomb's hitching post:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Pleased to meet you," said Mis' Holcomb. "I was saying to Eppleby that

-I wondered if you'd come. Eppleby says, 'I donno, but like enough

-they've went for a ride somewheres.' Lovely day, ain't it? Been to the

-cemetery?"</p>

-

-<p>I said that we had not been there yet, and,</p>

-

-<p>"Since it's kept up it makes a real nice thing to show folks," Mis'

-Holcomb said. "I s'pose you wouldn't come inside for a bite of supper,

-would you?"</p>

-

-<p>My neighbour&mdash;bless her!&mdash;had on a black wool dress to do honour to my

-guest.</p>

-

-<p>"It's nice for the neighbours to see company comin' and goin'," she said

-cordially, "though of course we don't have any of the extra work. But I

-guess everybody likes extra work of <i>this</i> kind."</p>

-

-<p>And as we drove away:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span></p><p>"Good-by," she cried, "I hope you'll have a good night's rest and a

-good breakfast."</p>

-

-<p>When I looked at the New Lady I saw her eyes ever so slightly misted.</p>

-

-<p>"Spring didn't die," she said&mdash;as Little Child had said. "Spring knew

-how to keep alive. It got down in these people's hearts."</p>

-

-<p>Yes, the New Lady is a wholly satisfactory guest. She even pretended not

-to notice Peter's father who, as we alighted, came singing by, and bowed

-to us, his barren old face lighted with a smile, as a vacant room is

-lighted, revealing the waste. If I had some one staying with me who had

-smiled at Peter's father or&mdash;at any one, or who did not see the village

-as it is, I think I should be tempted to do as my neighbour did to me

-that morning: pick three carnation pinks for her and watch her go away.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>XII</span> <span class="smaller">THE WAY THE WORLD IS</span></h2>

-

-<p>Was it not inevitable that poor, lonely Nicholas Moor should have sought

-out my New Lady? A night or two after her arrival he saw her again, at a

-supper in the church "lecture-room." He was bringing in a great freezer

-of ice-cream and when she greeted him he had all but dropped the

-freezer. Then a certain, big obvious deacon whose garden adjoined my own

-had come importantly and snatched the burden away, and the boy had

-stood, shamefast, trying to say something; but his face was lighted as

-at a summons. So the New Lady had divined his tragedy, the loneliness

-which his shyness masked as some constant plight of confusion.</p>

-

-<p>"Come and see me sometime," she had impulsively bidden him. "Do you know

-where I am staying?"</p>

-

-<p>Did he know that! Since he had seen her in the meadow had he known

-anything else? And after some days of hard trying he came one night,

-arriving within the dusk as behind a wall. Even in the twilight, when he

-was once under the poplars, he did<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> not know what way to look. To seem

-to look straight along the road was unnatural. To seem to look out

-across the opposite fields was hypocrisy. To look at the house which

-held the New Lady was unthinkable. So, as he went in at the gate and up

-the fern-bordered walk, he examined the back of his hand&mdash;near, and then

-a little farther away. As he reached the steps he was absorbedly

-studying his thumb.</p>

-

-<p>From a place of soft light, shed through a pink box shade on the table,

-and of scattered willow chairs and the big leaves of plants, the New

-Lady came toward him.</p>

-

-<p>"You did come!" she said. "I thought you wouldn't, really."</p>

-

-<p>With the utmost effort Nicholas detached one hand from his hat brim and

-gave it her. From head to foot he was conscious, not of the touch of her

-hand, little and soft, but of the bigness and coarseness of his own

-hand.</p>

-

-<p>"I hated to come like everything," he said.</p>

-

-<p>At this of course she laughed, and she went back to her willow chair and

-motioned him to his. He got upon it, crimson and wretched.</p>

-

-<p>"As much as that!" she observed.</p>

-

-<p>"You know I wanted to come awfully, too," he modified it, "but I dreaded

-it&mdash;like sixty. I&mdash;I can't explain...." he stumbled.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p><p>"Don't," said the New Lady, lightly, and took pity on him and rang a

-little bell.</p>

-

-<p>She thought again how fine and distinguished he was, as he had seemed to

-her on the day when she had first spoken to him. He sat staring at her,

-trying to realize that he was on the veranda with her, hearing the sound

-of the little bell she had rung. He had wanted something like this,

-wistfully, passionately. Miserable as he was, he rested in the moment as

-within arms. And the time seemed distilled in that little silver

-bell-sound and the intimacy of waiting with her for some one to come.</p>

-

-<p>He knew that some one with a light footfall did come to the veranda. He

-heard the New Lady call her Elfa. But he saw only her hands, plump and

-capable and shaped like his own, moving among the glasses. After which

-his whole being became absorbed in creditably receiving the tall, cool

-tumbler on the tray which the capable hands held out to him. A period of

-suspended intelligence ensued, until he set the empty glass on the

-table. Then the little maid had gone, and the New Lady, sipping her own

-glass, was talking to him.</p>

-

-<p>"You were lying on the grass that day," she said, "as if you understood

-grass. Not many do understand about grass, and almost nobody understands

-the country. People say, 'Come, let us go into the country,' and when

-they get there is it the country<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> they want at all? No, it is the

-country sports, the country home,&mdash;everything but the real country. They

-play match games. They make expeditions, climb things in a stated time,

-put in a day at a stated place. I often think that they must go home

-leaving the country aghast that they could have come and gone and paid

-so little heed to it. Presently we are going to have some charming

-people out here who will do the same thing."</p>

-

-<p>So she talked, asking him nothing, even her eyes leaving him free. It

-seemed to him, tense and alert and ill at ease as he listened, that he,

-too, was talking to her. From the pressing practicalities, the

-self-important deacon, the people who did not trouble to talk to him,

-his world abruptly escaped, and in that world he walked, an escaped

-thing too, forgetful even of the little roll of verses which he had

-dared to bring.</p>

-

-<p>Yet when she paused, he looked out at her shrinkingly from under his

-need to reply. He did not look at her face, but he looked at her hands,

-so little that each time he saw them they were a new surprise and alien

-to him. He looked away from them to the friendliness of her smile. And

-when he heard himself saying detached, irrelevant things, he again fell

-to studying one of his own hands, big and coarse and brown. Oh, he

-thought, the difference between her and him was so hopelessly the

-difference in their hands.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span></p><p>In an absurdly short time the need to be gone was upon him; but of this

-he could not speak, and he sat half unconscious of what she was saying,

-because of his groping for the means to get away. Clearly, he must not

-interrupt her to say that he must go. Neither could he reply to what she

-said by announcing his intention. And yet when he answered what she

-said, straightway her exquisite voice went on with its speech to him.

-How, he wondered, does anybody ever get away from anywhere? If only

-something would happen, so that he could slip within it as within doors,

-and take his leave.</p>

-

-<p>Something did happen. By way of the garden, and so to a side door, there

-arrived those whose garden adjoined,&mdash;the big, obvious, self-important

-deacon, and behind him Three Light Gowns. The little maid Elfa came

-showing them through the house, in the pleasant custom of the village.

-And when the New Lady, with pretty, expected murmurings, rose to meet

-them, Nicholas got to his feet confronting the crisis of saying good-by,

-and the moment closed upon him like a vise. He heard his voice falter

-among the other voices, he saw himself under the necessity to take her

-hand and the deacon's hand, and the hands, so to speak, of the Three

-Light Gowns; and this he did as in a kind of unpractised bewildering

-minuet.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p><p>And then he found his eyes on a level with eyes that he had not seen

-before&mdash;blue eyes, gentle, watching, wide&mdash;and a fresh, friendly little

-face under soft hair. It was Elfa, taking away the empty glasses. And

-the boy, in his dire need to ease the instant, abruptly and inexplicably

-held out his hand to her too. She blushed, sent a frightened look to the

-New Lady, and took the hand in hers that was plump and capable, with its

-strong, round wrist. And the little maid, being now in an embarrassment

-like his own, the two hands clung for a moment, as if they had each the

-need.</p>

-

-<p>"Good night," she said, trembling.</p>

-

-<p>"Good night," said the New Lady, very gently.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, <i>good night</i>!" burst from the boy as he fled away.</p>

-

-<p class="space-above">It was Elfa who admitted him at his next coming. The screened porch was

-once more in soft light from the square rose shade, and the place had

-the usual pleasant, haunted air of the settings of potentialities. As if

-potentiality were a gift of enchantment to human folk.</p>

-

-<p>The New Lady was not at home, Elfa told him, in her motherly little

-heart pitying him. And at the news he sat down, quite simply, in the

-chair in which he had sat before. He must see her. It was unthinkable

-that she should be away. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>To-night he had meant to have the courage to

-leave with her his verses.</p>

-

-<p>On the willow table lay her needlework. It was soft and white beyond the

-texture of most clouds, and she had wrought on it a pattern like the

-lines on a river. As his eyes rested on it, Nicholas could fancy it

-lying against her white gown and upon it her incomparable hands. Some

-way, she seemed nearer to him when he was not with her than when, with

-her incomparable hands and her fluent speech, she was in his presence.

-When she was not with him, he could think what to say to her. When he

-stood before her&mdash;the thought of his leave-taking on that veranda seized

-upon him, so that he caught his breath in the sharp thrust of mortified

-recollection, and looked away and up.</p>

-

-<p>His eyes met those of Elfa, who was quietly sitting opposite.</p>

-

-<p>"How they must all have laughed at me. You too!" he said.</p>

-

-<p>"Why?" she asked.</p>

-

-<p>"That last time I was here. Shaking hands that way," he explained.</p>

-

-<p>"I didn't laugh," she unexpectedly protested; "I cried."</p>

-

-<p>He looked at her. And this was as if he were seeing her for the first

-time.</p>

-

-<p>"<i>Cried?</i>" he repeated.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p><p>"Nobody ever shakes hands with me," Elfa told him.</p>

-

-<p>He stared at her as she sat on the edge of her chair, her plump hands

-idle on her apron.</p>

-

-<p>"No," he admitted, "no, I don't suppose they do. I didn't think&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>But he had not thought of her at all.</p>

-

-<p>"By the door all day I let in hand-shakes," she said, "an' then I let

-'em out again. But I don't get any of 'em for me."</p>

-

-<p>That, Nicholas saw, was true enough. Even he had been mortified because

-he had taken her hand.</p>

-

-<p>"Once," Elfa said, "I fed a woman at the back door. An' when she went

-she took hold o' my hand, thankful. An' then you done it too&mdash;like it

-was a mistake. That's all, since I worked out. I don't know folks

-outside much, only some that don't shake hands, 'count of seemin'

-ashamed to."</p>

-

-<p>"I know," said Nicholas.</p>

-

-<p>"Sometimes," she went on, "folks come here an' walk in to see <i>her</i> an'

-they don't shake. Ain't it funny&mdash;when folks can an' don't? When they

-come from the city to-morrow, the whole house'll shake hands, but me.

-Once I went to prayer-meetin' an' I hung around waitin' to see if

-somebody wouldn't. But they didn't&mdash;any of 'em. It was rainin' outside

-an' I guess they thought I come with somebody's rubbers."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p><p>Nicholas looked at her a little fearfully. It had seemed to him that in

-a great world of light he had always moved in a little hollow of

-darkness and detachment. Were there, then, other hollows like that?

-Places to which outstretched hands never penetrate? A great

-understanding possessed him, and he burst out in an effort to express

-it.</p>

-

-<p>"You're a funny girl," he said.</p>

-

-<p>She flushed, and suddenly lifted one hand and looked at it. Nicholas

-watched her now intently. She studied the back of her hand, turned it,

-and sat absorbedly examining her little thumb. And Nicholas felt a

-sudden sense of understanding, of gladness that he understood. As he

-felt when he was afraid and wretched, so Elfa was feeling now.</p>

-

-<p>He leaned toward her.</p>

-

-<p>"Don't feel afraid," he said gently.</p>

-

-<p>She shook her head.</p>

-

-<p>"I don't," she said; "I don't, truly. I guess that's why I stayed here

-now. She won't be back till ten&mdash;I ought to have said so before.

-You&mdash;you won't want to wait so long."</p>

-

-<p>He rose at once. And now, being at his ease, his head was erect, his

-arms naturally fallen, his face as confident and as occupied by his

-spirit as when he lay alone in the meadows.</p>

-

-<p>"Well, sir," he said, "let's shake hands again!"</p>

-

-<p>She gave him her hand and, in their peculiarly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> winning upward look, her

-eyes&mdash;blue, wide, watchful, with that brooding mother watchfulness of

-some women, even in youth. And her hand met his in the clasp which is

-born of the simple, human longing of kind for kind.</p>

-

-<p>"Good-by," she answered his good-by, and they both laughed a little in a

-shyness which was a way of delight.</p>

-

-<p>In the days to follow there flowed in the boy's veins a tide of novel

-sweetness. And now his thoughts eluded one another and made no chain, so

-that when he tried to remember what, on that first evening, the New Lady

-and he had talked about, there came only a kind of pleasure, but it had

-no name. Everything that he had to do pressed upon him, and when he

-could get time he was away to the meadow, looking down on the chimneys

-of that house, and swept by a current that was like a singing. And

-always, always it was as if some one were with him.</p>

-

-<p>There came a night when he could no longer bear it, when his wish took

-him to itself and carried him with it. Those summer dusks, warm yellow

-with their moon and still odorous of spring, were hard to endure alone.

-Since the evening with her, Nicholas had not seen the New Lady save

-when, not seeing him, she had driven past in a pha&euml;ton. At the sight of

-her, and once at the sight of Elfa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> from that house, a faintness had

-seized him, so that he had wondered at himself for some one else, and

-then with a poignancy that was new pain, new joy, the new life, had

-rejoiced that he was himself. So, when he could no longer bear it, he

-took his evening way toward the row of poplars, regretting the moonlight

-lest by it they should see him coming. And to-night he had with him no

-verses, but only his longing heart.</p>

-

-<p>He had no intimation of the guests, for the windows at that house were

-always brightly lighted, and until he was within the screened veranda

-the sound of voices did not reach him. Then from the rooms there came a

-babel of soft speech and laughter, and a touch of chords; and when he

-would have incontinently retreated, the New Lady crossed the hall and

-saw him.</p>

-

-<p>She came to the doorway and greeted him, and Nicholas looked up in the

-choking discomfort of sudden fear. She was in a gown that was like her

-needlework, mysteriously fashioned and intricate with shining things

-which made her infinitely remote. The incomparable little hands were

-quite covered with jewels. It was as if he had come to see a spirit and

-had met a woman.</p>

-

-<p>"How good of you to come again," she said. "Come, I want my friends to

-meet you."</p>

-

-<p>Her friends! That quick crossing of words within<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> there, then, meant the

-presence of her friends from the city.</p>

-

-<p>"I couldn't! I came for a book&mdash;I'll get it some other time. I've got to

-go now!" Nicholas said.</p>

-

-<p>Then, "Bettina&mdash;Bettina!" some one called from within, and a man

-appeared in the hallway, smiled at sight of the New Lady, dropped his

-glass at sight of Nicholas, bowed, turned away&mdash;oh, how should he know

-that her name was Bettina when Nicholas had not known!</p>

-

-<p>This time he did not say good night at all. This time he did not look at

-his great hand, which was trembling, but he got away, mumbling

-something, his retreat graciously covered by the New Lady's light words.

-And, the sooner to be gone and out of the moonlight that would let them

-see him go, he struck blindly into the path that led to the side gate of

-the garden. The mortification that chains spirit to flesh and tortures

-both held him and tortured him. For a breath he imagined himself up

-there among them all, his hands holding his hat, imagined having to

-shake hands with them: and somehow this way of fellowship, this meeting

-of hands outstretched for hands, seemed, with them, the supreme ordeal,

-the true symbol of his alien state from them and from the New Lady. No

-doubt she understood him, but for the first time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> Nicholas saw that this

-is not enough. For the first time he saw that she was as far away from

-him as were the others. How easy, Nicholas thought piteously, those

-people in her house all found it to act the way they wanted to! Their

-hands must be like her hands....</p>

-

-<p>He got through the garden and to the side gate. And now the old

-loneliness was twofold upon him because he had known what it is to reach

-from the dark toward the light; yet when he saw that at the gate some

-one was standing, he halted in his old impulse to be on guard, hunted by

-the fear that this would be somebody alien to him. Then he saw that it

-was no one from another star, but Elfa.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh...." he said, and that, too, was what she said, but he did not hear.

-Not from another star she came, but from the deep of the world where

-Nicholas felt himself alone.</p>

-

-<p>"I&mdash;was just going away," he explained.</p>

-

-<p>For assent she stepped a little back, saying nothing. But when Nicholas

-would have passed her it was as if the immemorial loneliness and the

-seeking of forgotten men innumerable stirred within him in the ache of

-his heart, in the mere desperate wish to go to somebody, to be with

-somebody, to have somebody by the hand.</p>

-

-<p>He turned upon Elfa almost savagely.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span></p><p>"Shake hands!" he said.</p>

-

-<p>Obediently she put out her hand, which of itself stayed ever so briefly,

-within his. He held it, feeling himself crushing it, clinging to it,

-being possessed by it. Her hand was, like his, rough from its work, and

-it was something alive, something human, something that answered. And

-instantly it was not Elfa alone who was there companioning him, but the

-dark was quick with presences, besieging him, letting him know that no

-one alive is alone, that he was somehow one of a comrade company,

-within, without, encompassing. And the boy was caught up by the sweet

-will outside his own will and he never knew how it was that he had Elfa

-in his arms.</p>

-

-<p>"Come here. Come here...." he said.</p>

-

-<p>To Elfa, in her loneliness threaded by its own dream, the moment,

-exquisite and welcome as it was, was yet as natural as her own single

-being. But to the boy it was not yet the old miracle of one world built

-from another. It was only the answer to the groping of hands for hands,

-the mere human call to be companioned. And the need to reassure her came

-upon him like the mantle of an elder time.</p>

-

-<p>"Don't feel afraid," he said.</p>

-

-<p>Her eyes gave him their winning upward look, and it was as if their

-mother watchfulness answered him gravely:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"I don't. I don't, truly."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p><p>And at this she laughed a little, so that he joined her; and their

-laughter together was a new delight.</p>

-

-<p>Across the adjoining lawn Nicholas could see in the moonlight the moving

-figure of the big deacon, a Light Gown or two attending. A sudden

-surprising sense of safety from them overswept the boy. What if they did

-come that way! What, he even thought, if those people in the house were

-to come by? Somehow, the little hollow of dark in which he had always

-walked in the midst of light was as light as the rest of the world, and

-he was not afraid. And all this because Elfa did not stir in his arms,

-but was still, as if they were her harbour. And then Nicholas knew what

-they both meant.</p>

-

-<p>"Elfa!" he cried, "do you...?"</p>

-

-<p>"I guess I must...." she said, and knew no way to finish that.</p>

-

-<p>"Love me?" said Nicholas, bold as a lion.</p>

-

-<p>"I meant that too," Elfa said.</p>

-

-<p>Between the New Lady's house and the big, obvious deacon's lawn the boy

-stood, silent, his arms about the girl. So this was the way the world

-is, people bound together, needing one another, wanting one another,

-stretching out their hands....</p>

-

-<p>"Why, it was <i>you</i> I wanted!" Nicholas said wonderingly.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>XIII</span> <span class="smaller">HOUSEHOLDRY</span></h2>

-

-<p>"After supper" in the village is like another room of the day. On these

-summer nights we all come out to our porches to read the daily paper, or

-we go to sit on the porch of a neighbour, or we walk about our lawns in

-excesses of leisure, giving little twitches to this green and to that.

-"In our yards" we usually say. Of these some are so tiny that the

-hammocks or the red swinging-chairs find room on the planting spaces

-outside the walks, and there men smoke and children frolic and call

-across the street to one another. And this evening, as I went down

-Daphne Street to post my letters, I saw in process the occasional

-evening tasks which I have noted, performed out-of-doors: at the

-Sykeses' cucumbers in preparation for to-morrow's pickles; a bushel of

-over-ripe cherries arrived unexpectedly at the Herons' and being pitted

-by hand; a belated needle-task of Mis' Holcomb's finishing itself in the

-tenuous after-light. This fashion of taking various employments into the

-open delights me. If we have peas to shell or beans to string or corn to

-husk,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> straightway we take them to the porch or into the yard. This

-seems to me to hold something of the grace of the days in the Joyous

-Garde, or on the grounds of old ch&acirc;teaux where they embroidered or wound

-worsted in woodland glades, or of colonial America, where we had out our

-spinning wheels under the oaks. When I see a great shining boiler of

-gasoline carried to the side yard for the washing of delicate fabrics, I

-like to think of it as done out-of-doors for the charm of it as much as

-for the safety. So Nausicaa would have cleansed with gasoline!</p>

-

-<p>It was sight of the old Aunt Effie sewing a seam in Mis' Holcomb's

-dooryard which decided me to go to see Miggy. For I would not willingly

-be where Aunt Effie is, who has always some tragedy of gravy-scorching

-or dish-breaking to tell me. I have been for some time promising to go

-to see Miggy in her home, and this was the night to do so, for the New

-Lady went home to-day and I have been missing her sorely. There is a

-kind of minus-New Lady feeling about the universe.</p>

-

-<p>At the same moment that I decided for Miggy, Peter rose out of the

-ground. I wonder if he can have risen a very little first? But that is

-one of those puzzles much dwelt upon by the theologians, and I will not

-decide. Perhaps the thought of Miggy is a mighty motive on which Peter's

-very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> being is conditioned. Anyway, there he was, suddenly beside me,

-and telling me some everyday affair of how little use in the cannery

-were Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade, whose houses we were

-passing. And to his talk of shop I responded by inviting him to go with

-me to see Miggy. Would he go? He smiled his slow smile, with that little

-twist of mouth and lifting of brow.</p>

-

-<p>"This is like finding an evening where there wasn't one before," he

-said.</p>

-

-<p>The little house where Miggy lives has a copper beech in the

-dooryard&mdash;these red-leaved trees seem to be always in a kind of hush at

-their own difference. The house is no-colour, with trimmings of another

-no-colour for contrast, and the little front porch looks like something

-that has started to run out the front door and is being sternly snatched

-backward. The door stood ajar&mdash;no doubt for the completion of this

-transaction&mdash;and no one was about. We rapped, for above the bell push

-was a legend of Aunt Effie's inscribing, saying: "Bell don't ring." For

-a moment our summons was unanswered. Then Miggy called from upstairs.</p>

-

-<p>"I'll be down in a minute," she said. "Go right in, both of you, and

-wait for me&mdash;will you?"</p>

-

-<p>To take the cards of one's visitors from a butler<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> of detached

-expression or from a maid with inquisitive eyelashes is to know nothing

-of the charm of this custom of ours of peeping from behind an upper

-curtain where we happen to be dressing, and alone in the house, at the

-ringing of the doorbell, and of calling down to a back which we

-recognize an informal "Oh, go right in and wait for me a minute, will

-you?" In this habit there is survival of old tribal loyalties and

-hospitalities; for let the back divined below be the back of a stranger,

-that is to say, of a barbarian, and we stay behind our curtains, silent,

-till it goes away.</p>

-

-<p>In the sitting room at Miggy's house a little hand lamp was burning, the

-fine yellow light making near disclosures of colour and form, and

-farther away formulating presences of shadow. Aunt Effie had been at her

-sewing, and there were yards of blue muslin billowing over a sunken

-arm-chair and a foam of white lining on the Brussels-covered couch. The

-long blue cotton spread made the big table look like a fat Delft sugar

-bowl, and the red curtains were robbed of crude colour and given an

-obscure rosy glow. A partly finished waist disguised the gingerbread of

-the what-not, one forgot the carpet, the pictures became to the neutral

-wall what words which nobody understands are to ministering music. And

-on the floor before the lounge lay Little Child and Bless-your-Heart,

-asleep.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p><p>At first I did not see the child. It was Peter who saw her. He stooped

-and lifted her, the kitten still in her arms, and instead of saying any

-of the things a woman might have said, Peter said <i>"Well....</i>" with a

-tenderness in his voice such as women can give and more. For a man's

-voice-to-a-child gets down deeper than happiness. I suppose it is that

-the woman has always stayed with the child in the cave or the tent or

-the house, while the man has gone out to kill or to conquer or to trade;

-and the ancient crooning safety is still in the woman's voice, and the

-ancient fear that he may not come back to them both is in the voice of

-the man. When Peter lifted Little Child in his arms, I wished that Miggy

-had been there to hear.</p>

-

-<p>"What's it dreaming about?" Peter said.</p>

-

-<p>"'Bout Miggy," said Little Child sleepily, and she snuggled in Peter's

-coat collar.</p>

-

-<p>"Dream about Peter too!" Peter commanded.</p>

-

-<p>"Well, <i>I</i> will," promised Little Child o' Dreams, and drifted off.</p>

-

-<p>Peter sank awkwardly down to the floor and held her so, and he sat there

-stroking Bless-your-Heart and looking as if he had forgotten me, save

-that, "Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade that I was telling

-you about," he remarked once irrelevantly, "<i>they've</i> each got a kiddie

-or so."</p>

-

-<p>Miggy came downstairs and, "I'm a surprise,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> she said in the doorway,

-and stood there in a sheer white frock&mdash;a frock which said nothing to

-make you look, but would not let you look away; and it had a little

-rhyme of lace on this end and on that. It was the frock that she had

-made herself&mdash;she told me so afterward, but she did not mention it

-before Peter, and I liked her the better for that. When I hear women

-boast of these things I always wonder why, then and there, I should not

-begin to recite a sonnet I have turned, so as to have a hand in things.

-To write an indifferent sonnet is much less than to make a frock which

-can be worn, but yet I should dislike infinitely to volunteer even so

-little as a sonnet or a quatrain. In any case, it would be amazing taste

-for me to do so; while "I made it myself" I hear everywhere in the

-village, especially in the presence of the Eligible. But I dare say that

-this criticism of mine is conditioned by the fact that my needle-craft

-cell got caught in the primal protozoan ooze and did not follow me.</p>

-

-<p>"Miggy! Oh, Miggery!" said Peter, softly. He had made this name for a

-sort of superlative of her.</p>

-

-<p>"Like me?" inquired Miggy. I wonder if even the female atom does not

-coquette when the sun strikes her to shining in the presence of her atom

-lord?</p>

-

-<p>You know that low, emphatic, unspellable thing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> which may be said by the

-throat when a thing is liked very much? When one makes it, it feels like

-a vocal dash in vocal italics. Peter did that, very softly.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," said Miggy, "I feel that dressed-up that I might be cut out of

-paper. What <i>are</i> you doing down there, Peter?"</p>

-

-<p>He glanced down mutely, and Miggy went round the table and saw what he

-held.</p>

-

-<p>"Why," she said, "that great heavy girl, Peter. Give her to me."</p>

-

-<p>Miggy bent over Peter, with her arms outstretched for the child. And

-Peter looked up at her and enjoyed the moment.</p>

-

-<p>"She's too heavy for you to lift," he said, with his occasional quiet

-authority. "I'll put her where you want her."</p>

-

-<p>"Well, it's so hot upstairs," Miggy hesitated. "It's past her bedtime,

-but I hate to take her up there."</p>

-

-<p>"Undress her down here," said I. "The Delft sugar bowl shuts you off a

-fine dressing-room. And let her sleep for a while on the couch."</p>

-

-<p>So Miggy went for the little nightgown, and Peter, with infinite pains,

-got to his feet, and detached Bless-your-Heart and deposited her on the

-table, where she yawned and humped her back and lay down on an

-unfinished sleeve and went to sleep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> again. And when Miggy came down,

-she threw a light quilt and a pillow near the couch and sat behind the

-table and held out her arms.</p>

-

-<p>"Now!" she said to Peter, and to me she said, "I thought maybe you'd

-spread her up a bed there on the couch."</p>

-

-<p>"Let Peter," said I. "I've another letter I ought to have written. If I

-may, I'll write that here while you undress her."</p>

-

-<p>"Well," said Miggy, "there's some sheets of letter-paper under the cover

-of the big Bible. And the ink&mdash;I guess there's some in the bottle&mdash;is on

-top of the organ. And the pen is there behind the clock. And you'd ought

-to find a clean envelope in that pile of newspapers. I think I saw one

-there the other day. You spread up her bed then, Peter."</p>

-

-<p>I wrote my letter, and Peter went at the making up of the lounge, and

-Miggy sat behind the table to undress Little Child. And Little Child

-began waking up. It touched me infinitely that she who in matters of

-fairies and visionings is so wise and old should now, in her sleepyhood,

-be just a baby again.</p>

-

-<p>"I&mdash;<i>won't</i>&mdash;go&mdash;bed," she said.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh," said Miggy, "yes. Don't you feel all the little wingies on your

-face? They're little dream wings, and the dreams are getting in a hurry

-to be dreamed."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p><p>"I do' know those dreams," said Little Child, "I do' <i>want</i> those

-dreams. Where's Bless-your-Heart?"</p>

-

-<p>"Dreaming," said Miggy, "all alone. Goodness, I believe you've got a

-little fever."</p>

-

-<p>Peter stopped flopping the quilt aimlessly over the lounge and turned,

-and Miggy laid the back of her hand on Little Child's cheek and beneath

-her chin. The man watched her anxiously as, since the world began,

-millions of men have looked down at this mysterious pronouncement of the

-woman.</p>

-

-<p>"She has?" he said. "She'd ought not to have any milk, then, had she?"

-he added vaguely. It seemed to me that Miggy must have paused for a

-moment to like Peter for this wholly youthful, masculine eagerness to

-show that he knew about such things.</p>

-

-<p>"I'll fix her something to take," said Miggy, capably. "No, dear. The

-other arm. Straighten elbow."</p>

-

-<p>"I want my shoes an' stockin's on in bed," Little Child observed. She

-was sitting up, her head drooping, her curls fastened high with a

-hairpin of Miggy's. "An' I want my shirtie on. An' <i>all</i> my clothes. I

-won't go bed if you don't."</p>

-

-<p>Miggy laughed. "Bless-your-Heart hasn't got her clothes on," she

-parried.</p>

-

-<p>"Ain't she got her furs on any more?" demanded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> Little Child, opening

-her eyes. "She has, too. She has not, too, took a bath. An' I won't have

-no bath," she went on. "I'm too old for 'em."</p>

-

-<p>At that she would have Bless-your-Heart in her arms, and there was some

-argument arising from her intention to take the kitten in one hand all

-the way through her nightgown sleeve. And by this time sleepyhood tears

-were near.</p>

-

-<p>"<i>Don't</i> curl your toes under so," said Miggy, struggling with a shoe.

-"Peter, do go on. You'll never have it done."</p>

-

-<p>Whereat Peter flapped the quilt again; and&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"I will curl my toes up. That's what I want to do. I <i>want</i> to curl 'em

-up!" said Little Child. And now the sleepyhood tears were very near.</p>

-

-<p>"Goodness," said Miggy, suddenly, "to-morrow is Sunday. I'll have to do

-her hair up for curls. Peter!" she cried, "stop waving that quilt, and

-tear me off a strip of that white lining there."</p>

-

-<p>"Yes, <i>I'll</i> have curls," said Little Child, unexpectedly, "because that

-is so becunning to me."</p>

-

-<p>But she was very sleepy, and when Peter had been sent for the brush from

-the kitchen shelf, her head was on Miggy's shoulder, and Miggy looked at

-Peter helplessly.</p>

-

-<p>"Give her to me," said Peter, and took the child and laid the kitten at

-large upon the floor; and then, holding Little Child's head in the

-hollow of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> his arm, he sat down before Miggy, leaning toward her, and

-all the child's soft brown hair lay on his sleeve.</p>

-

-<p>I should have liked to watch them then. And I should have liked Calliope

-and Mis' Toplady and my neighbour to see them&mdash;those three who of all

-the village best understood mystery. I know that Peter did not take his

-eyes from Miggy's face as she brushed and wound the curls. How could

-he?&mdash;and Miggy, "sweet as boughs of May" in that white frock, her look

-all motherly intent upon her task. She was very deft, and she had that

-fine mother-manner of caring for the child with her whole hand instead

-of tipsifingers. I would see a woman infinitely delicate in the touching

-of flowers or tea-cups or needlework, but when she is near a child, I

-want her to have more than delicacy. I was amazed at Miggy's gentleness

-and her pretty air of accustomedness. And when Little Child stirred,

-Miggy went off into some improvised song about a little black dog that

-got struck with a wagon and went Ki&mdash;yi&mdash;ki&mdash;yi&mdash;<i>ad infinitum</i>, and

-Miggy seemed to me to have quite the technical mother-air of tender

-abstraction.</p>

-

-<p>"How dark her hair is growing," she said.</p>

-

-<p>"It's just the colour of yours," said Peter, "and the little curls on

-the edges. They're like yours, too."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p><p>"My hair!" Miggy said deprecatingly. "You've got rather nice hair,

-Peter, if <i>only</i> it wouldn't stick up that way at the back."</p>

-

-<p>"I know it sticks up," Peter said contritely. "I do every way to make it

-stay down. But it won't."</p>

-

-<p>"It makes you look funny," observed Miggy, frankly.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," he told her, "if you wouldn't ever make me go 'way from you, you

-wouldn't ever need to see the back of my head."</p>

-

-<p>"That would be just what would turn your head," she put it positively.

-"Peter, doesn't your arm ache, holding her so?"</p>

-

-<p>He looked down at his arm to see, and, "I wouldn't care if it did," he

-replied, in some surprise. "No. It feels good. Oh, Miggy&mdash;do you do this

-every night?"</p>

-

-<p>"I don't always curl her hair," said Miggy, "but I always put her to

-bed. If ever Aunt Effie undresses her, she tells her she <i>may</i> die

-before morning, so she'd better say her prayer, pretty. Goodness, she

-hasn't said her prayer yet, either."</p>

-

-<p>"Isn't she too sleepy?" asked Peter.</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," Miggy answered; "but she feels bad in the morning if she doesn't

-say it. You know she thinks she says her prayer to mother, and that

-mother waits to hear her...."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p><p>Miggy looked up fleetingly at her mother's picture on the wall&mdash;one of

-those pale enlargements of a photograph which tell you definitely that

-the subject is dead.</p>

-

-<p>"I do' want any other curls on me," announced Little Child, suddenly.</p>

-

-<p>"Just one more, dear," Miggy told her, "and then we're through. Turn her

-head a little, Peter."</p>

-

-<p>"No," said Little Child. "Now I'm all curly."</p>

-

-<p>And, "Yes, Precious. Be still on Peter's arm just a minute more," said

-Miggy at the same time.</p>

-

-<p>And, "If you say anything more, I'll kiss you," said Peter, to whom it

-might concern.</p>

-

-<p>"Kiss <i>me</i>?" said Little Child. "I won't be."</p>

-

-<p>"Somebody's got to be," said Peter, with decision.</p>

-

-<p>"Now, our prayer," ruled Miggy suddenly, and rose. "Come, dear."</p>

-

-<p>Peter looked up in Miggy's face.</p>

-

-<p>"Let her be here," he said. "Let her be here."</p>

-

-<p>He lifted Little Child so that she knelt, and her head drooped on his

-shoulder. He had one arm about her and the other hand on the pink,

-upturned soles of her feet. The child put out one hand blindly for

-Miggy's hand. So Miggy came and stood beside Peter, and together they

-waited for the little sleepy voice.</p>

-

-<p>It came with disconcerting promptness.</p>

-

-<p>"Now&mdash;I&mdash;lay&mdash;me&mdash;down&mdash;to&mdash;sleep&mdash;for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>&mdash;Jesus'&mdash;sake&mdash;Amen," prayed

-Little Child in one breath.</p>

-

-<p>"No, sweetheart," Miggy remonstrated, with her alluring emphasis on

-"sweet." "Say it right, dear."</p>

-

-<p>"Now I lay me&mdash;is Bless-your-Heart sayin' hers?" demanded Little Child.</p>

-

-<p>"Couldn't you get along without her, when you're so sleepy?" Miggy

-coaxed.</p>

-

-<p>"Mustn't skip nights," Little Child told her. "Bless-your-Heart might

-die before morning."</p>

-

-<p>So Miggy found Bless-your-Heart under the couch, and haled her forth,

-and laid her in Little Child's arms. And Peter put his face close, close

-to Little Child's, and shut his eyes.</p>

-

-<p>"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I

-should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take who'll I bless

-to-night?" said Little Child.</p>

-

-<p>"Aunt Effie," Miggy prompted.</p>

-

-<p>"Bless Aunt Effie," said Little Child, "and Miggy and Bless-your-Heart

-and New Auntie" (she meant me. Think of her meaning me!) "and the man

-that gave me the peanuts, and bless Stella's party and make 'em have

-ice-cream, and bless my new shoes and my sore finger. For Jesus' sake,

-Amen."</p>

-

-<p>Little Child drew a long breath and stirred to get down, but Peter did

-not move.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p><p>"And bless Peter," Miggy said.</p>

-

-<p>"No," said Little Child, "He needn't. Peter's nice 'nuff."</p>

-

-<p>Peter got to his feet with Little Child in his arms, and his face was

-glowing, and he looked at Miggy as if she were what he meant whenever he

-said "universe." But Miggy had gone to the couch, and was smoothing the

-quilt that Peter had wrinkled in all directions, and patting the pillow

-that Peter had kneaded into a hard ball.</p>

-

-<p>"You lay her down," she said.</p>

-

-<p>Peter did so, setting the kitten on the floor, and then bending low over

-the couch, looking in the upturned face as the little dark head touched

-the pillow and sought its ease, and her hand fell from where it had

-rested on his shoulder. And he stooped and kissed her cheek more gently

-than he had ever done anything.</p>

-

-<p>"I want my drink o' water," said Little Child, and opened her eyes; and

-now from the couch she could see me. "Tell me a story," she commanded

-me, drowsily.</p>

-

-<p>I did not go to her, for who am I that I should have broken that trio?

-But when Miggy and Peter took the lamp and went away to the kitchen for

-the drink of water and for some simple remedy for the fever which Miggy

-had noted or fancied, I sat beside Little Child and said over something<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>

-that had been persistently in my mind as I had watched Miggy with her:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<div>"I like to stand in this great air</div>

-<div>And see the sun go down;</div>

-<div>It shows me a bright veil to wear</div>

-<div>And such a pretty gown.</div>

-<div>Oh, I can see a playmate there</div>

-<div>Far up in Splendour Town!"</div>

-</div></div></div>

-

-<p>Little Child began it with me, but her voice trailed away. I thought

-that in the darkness were many gentle presences&mdash;Little Child's tender

-breathing, the brushing wings of hurrying dreams, and perhaps that

-other&mdash;"not quite my sister," but a shadowy little Margaret.</p>

-

-<p>Afterward, Miggy and Peter and I sat together for a little while, but

-Peter had fallen in a silence. And presently Aunt Effie came home, and

-on the porch&mdash;which seemed not yet to have escaped&mdash;she told us about

-having broken her needle and left her shears at her neighbour's. While

-Peter ran over to Mis' Holcomb's for the shears, I had a word with

-Miggy.</p>

-

-<p>"Miggy!" I said, "don't you see?"</p>

-

-<p>"See what?" she wanted to know, perversely.</p>

-

-<p>"How Peter would love to have Little Child, too?" I said.</p>

-

-<p>She laughed a little, and was silent; and laughed again.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span></p><p>"He was funny and nice," she admitted; "and wasn't Little Child funny

-not to bless him?"</p>

-

-<p>"Because he is nice enough," I reminded her.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy laughed once more&mdash;I had never seen her in so tender and feminine

-a mood. And this may have been partly due to the new frock, though I

-cannot think that it was entirely this. But abruptly she shook her head.</p>

-

-<p>"Peter's father went by just before you came in," she said.

-"He&mdash;couldn't hardly walk. What if I was there to get supper for him

-when he got home? I never could&mdash;I never could...."</p>

-

-<p>By the time Peter and I were out alone on Daphne Street again, the

-sitting rooms in all the houses were dark, with a look of locked front

-doors&mdash;as if each house had set its lips together with, "We are a home

-and you are not."</p>

-

-<p>Peter looked out on all this palpable householdry.</p>

-

-<p>"See the lights upstairs," he said; "everybody's up there, hearing their

-prayers and giving 'em fever medicine. Yes, sir, Great Scott! Shorty

-Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade&mdash;they ain't good for a thing in

-the cannery. And yet they know...."</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>XIV</span> <span class="smaller">POSTMARKS</span></h2>

-

-<p>Between church service and Sunday School we of the First church have so

-many things to attend to that no one can spare a moment.</p>

-

-<p>"Reverent things, not secular," Calliope explains, "plannin' for church

-chicken-pie suppers an' Christmas bazaars and like that; but not a word

-about a picnic, not even if they was to be one o' Monday sunrise."</p>

-

-<p>To be sure, this habit of ours occasionally causes a contretemps. As

-when one morning Mis' Toplady arrived late and, in a flurry, essayed to

-send up to the pulpit by the sexton a Missionary meeting notice to be

-read. Into this notice the minister plunged without the precaution of

-first examining it, and so delivered aloud:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<div>"See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags.</div>

-<div>"See Abigail about enough forks for her table.</div>

-<div>"Look around for my rubbers.</div>

-<div>"Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."</div>

-</div></div></div>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span></p><p>Not until he reached the fourth item was the minister stopped by the

-agonized rustle in a congregation that had easily recognized Mis'

-Toplady's "between services" list of reminder, the notice of the

-forthcoming meeting being safe in her hymn book.</p>

-

-<p>Still we persist in our Sabbath conferences when "everybody is there

-where you want 'em an' everybody can see everybody an' no time lost an'

-no party line listening"; and it is then that those who have been for

-some time away from the village receive their warmest welcome. I am not

-certain that the "I must get down to church and see everybody" of a

-returned neighbour does not hold in fair measure the principles of

-familyhood and of Christ's persuadings to this deep comradeship.</p>

-

-<p>It was in this time after church that we welcomed Calliope one August

-Sunday when she had unexpectedly come down from town on the Saturday

-night. And later, when the Sunday-school bell had rung, I waited with

-her in the church while she looked up her Bible, left somewhere in the

-pews. When she had found it, she opened it in a manner of eager haste,

-and I inadvertently saw pasted to the inside cover a sealed letter,

-superscription down, for whose safety she had been concerned. I had

-asked her to dine with me, and as we walked home together she told me

-about the letter and what its sealed presence in her Bible meant.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p><p>"I ain't ever read it," Calliope explained to me wistfully. "Every one

-o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle has got one, an' none of us has

-ever read 'em. It ain't my letter, so to say. It's one o' the Jem Pitlaw

-collection. The postmark," she imparted, looking up at me proudly, "is

-Bombay, India."</p>

-

-<p>At my question about the Jem Pitlaw collection she laughed

-deprecatingly, and then she sighed. ("Ain't it nice," she had once said

-to me, "your laughs hev a sigh for a linin', an' sighs can hev laughin'

-for trimmin'. Only trouble is, most folks want to line with trimmin's,

-an' they ain't rill durable, used that way.")</p>

-

-<p>"Jem Pitlaw," Calliope told me now, "used to be schoolmaster here&mdash;the

-kind that comes from Away an' is terrible looked up to on that account,

-but Jem deserved it. He knew all there was <i>to</i> know, an' yet he thought

-we knew some little things, too. We was all rill fond of him, though he

-kept to himself, an' never seemed to want to fall in love, an' not many

-of us knew him well enough to talk to at all familiar. But when he went

-off West on a vacation, an' didn't come back, an' never come back, an'

-then died, Friendship Village mourned for him,&mdash;sincere, though no

-crape,&mdash;an' missed him enormous.</p>

-

-<p>"He'd had a room at Postmaster Sykes's&mdash;that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> was when he was postmaster

-first an' they was still humble an' not above the honest penny. An' Jem

-Pitlaw left two trunks an' a sealed box to their house. An' when he

-didn't come back in two years, Silas Sykes moved the things out of the

-spare room over to the post-office store loft. An' there they set, three

-years on end, till we got word Jem was dead&mdash;the very week o' the

-Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle's Ten Cent Tropical F&ecirc;te. Though,

-rilly, the Tropical F&ecirc;te wasn't what you might say 'tropical.' It was

-held on the seventeenth of January, an' that night the thermometer was

-twenty-four degrees below on the bank corner. Nor it wasn't rilly what

-you might say a F&ecirc;te, either. But none o' the Circle regretted them

-lacks. A lack is as good as a gift, sometimes.</p>

-

-<p>"We'd started the Foreign Missionary Circle through Mis' Postmaster

-Sykes gettin' her palm. I donno what there is about palms, but you know

-the very name makes some folks think thoughts 'way outside their heads,

-an' not just stuffy-up inside their own brains. When I hear 'palm,' I

-sort o' feel like my i-dees got kind o' wordy wings an' just went it

-without me. An' that was the way with more than me, I found out. Nobody

-in Friendship Village hed a palm, but we'd all seen pictures an'

-hankered&mdash;like you do. An' all of a sudden Mis' Sykes got one, like she

-gets her new hat, sometimes,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> without a soul knowin' she's thinkin'

-'hat' till she flams out in it. Givin' surprise is breath an' bread to

-that woman. She unpacked the palm in the kitchen, an' telephoned around,

-an' we all went over just as we was an' set down there an' looked at it

-an' thought 'Palm'! You can't realize how we felt, all of us, if you

-ain't lived all your life with nothin' but begonias an' fuchsias from

-November to April, an' sometimes into May. But we was all mixed up about

-'em, now we see one. Some hed heard dates grew on palms. Others would

-have it it was cocoanuts. Still more said they was natives of the

-equator, an' give nothin' but shade. So it went. But after a while Mis'

-Timothy Toplady spoke up with that way o' comin' downstairs on her words

-an' rilly gettin' to a landin':&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"'They's quite a number o' things,' she says, 'that I want to do so much

-it seems like I can't die without doin' 'em. But I guess prob'ly I will

-die without. Folks seems to drop off leavin' lots of doin's undone. An'

-one o' my worst is, I want to see palm trees growin' in hot lands&mdash;big

-spiky leaves pointin' into the blue sky <i>like fury</i>. 'Seems if I could

-do that,' s'she, 'I'd take in one long breath that'd make me all lungs

-an' float me up an' off.'</p>

-

-<p>"We all laughed, but we knew what she meant well enough, because we all

-felt the same way. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> think most North folks do&mdash;like they was cocoanuts

-an' dates in our actions, 'way back. An' so we was all ready for Mis'

-Toplady's idee when it come&mdash;which is the most any idee can expect:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"'I tell you what,' s'she, 'le's hev a Ladies' Foreign Missionary

-Circle, an' get read up on them tropical countries. The only thing I

-really know about the tropics is what comes to me unbeknownst when I

-smell my tea rose. I've always been meanin' to take an interest in

-missions,' says she.</p>

-

-<p>"So we started it, then an' there, an' she an' I was the committee to

-draw out a constitution an' decide what officers should be elected an'

-do the general creatin'. We made it up that Mis' Sykes should be the

-president&mdash;that woman is a born leader, and, as a leader, you can depend

-on the very back of her head. An' at last we went off to the minister

-that then was to ask him what to take up.</p>

-

-<p>"'Most laudable,' s'he, when he'd heard. 'Well, now, what country is it

-you're most interested in?' he says. 'Some island of the sea, I s'pose?'

-he asks, bright.</p>

-

-<p>"'We're interested in palms,' Mis' Timothy Toplady explained it to him

-frank, 'an' we want to study about the missionaries in some country

-where they's dates an' cocoanuts an' oaseses.'</p>

-

-<p>"He smiled at that, sweet an' deep&mdash;I know it seemed to me as if he knew

-more about what we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> wanted than we knew ourselves. Because they's some

-ministers that understands that Christianity ain't all in the bottle

-labelled with it. Some of it is labelled 'ointment,' an' some 'perfume,'

-an' some just plain kitchen flavourin'. An' a good deal of it ain't

-labelled at all.</p>

-

-<p>"I forget what country it was we did study. But they was nine to ten of

-us, an' we met every week, an' I tell you the time wa'n't wasted. We

-took things in lavish. I know Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said that

-after belongin' to the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle she could never

-feel the same absent-minded sensation again when she dusted her parlour

-shells. An' Mis' Toplady said when she opened her kitchen cabinet an'

-smelt the cinnamon an' allspice out o' the perforated tops, 'most

-always, no matter how mad she was, she broke out in a hymn, like 'When

-All Thy Mercies,' sheer through knowin' how allspice was born of God an'

-not made of man. An' Mis' Sykes said when she read her Bible, an' it

-talked about India's coral strand, it seemed like, through knowin' what

-a reef was, she was right there on one, with her Lord. I felt the same

-way, too&mdash;though I'd always felt the same way, for that matter&mdash;I always

-did tip vanilla on my handkerchief an' pretend it was flowers an' that

-I'd gone down South for the cold months. An' it got so that when the

-minister give out a text that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> had geography in it, like the Red Sea, or

-Beer-elim, or 'a place called The Fair Haven,' the Ladies Foreign

-Missionary Circle would look round in our seats an' nod to each other,

-without it showin', because we knew that we knew, extra special, just

-what God was talkin' about. I tell you, knowledge makes you alive at

-places where you didn't know there was such a place.</p>

-

-<p>"In five months' time we felt we owed so much to the Ladies' Foreign

-Missionary Circle that it was Mis' Sykes suggested we give the Ten Cent

-Tropical F&ecirc;te, an' earn five dollars or so for missions.</p>

-

-<p>"'We know a great deal about the tropics now,' she says, 'an' I propose

-we earn a missionary thank-offering. Coral an' cocoanuts an' dates an'

-spices isn't all the Lord is interested in, by any means,' s'she. 'An'

-the winter is the time to give a tropic f&ecirc;te, when folks are thinkin'

-about warm things natural.'</p>

-

-<p>"We voted to hev the f&ecirc;te to Mis' Sykes's because it was too cold to

-carry the palm out. We went into it quite extensive&mdash;figs an' dates an'

-bananas an' ginger for refreshments, an' little nigger dolls for

-souvenirs, an' like that. It was quite a novel thing for Friendship, an'

-everybody was takin' an interest an' offerin' to lend Japanese umbrellas

-an' Indian baskets an' books on the South Sea, an' a bamboo chair with

-an elephant crocheted in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> tidy. An' then, bein' as happenin's always

-crowd along in flocks, what come that very week o' the f&ecirc;te but a letter

-from an old aunt of Jem Pitlaw's, out West. An' if Jem hadn't been dead

-almost ever since he left Friendship! an' the aunt wrote that we should

-sell his things to pay for keepin' 'em, as she was too poor to send for

-'em an' hadn't any room if she wasn't.</p>

-

-<p>"I donno whether you know what rill excitement is, but if you don't,

-you'd ought to drop two locked trunks an' a sealed box into a town the

-size o' Friendship Village, an' leave 'em there goin' on five years, an'

-then die an' let 'em be sold. That'll show you what a pitch true

-interest can get het up to. All of a sudden the Tropical F&ecirc;te was no

-more account than the telephone ringin' when a circus procession is

-going by. Some o' the Ladies' Missionary was rill indignant, an' said

-we'd ought to sue for repairin' rights, same as when you're interfered

-with in business. Mis' Sykes, she done her able best, too, but nothin'

-would do Silas but he must offer them things for sale on the instant.

-'The time,' s'he, firm, 'to do a thing is now, while the interest is up.

-An' in this country,' s'he, '"now" don't stay "now" more'n two minutes

-at a time.'</p>

-

-<p>"So he offered for sale the contents of them three things&mdash;the two

-trunks an' the sealed box&mdash;unsight, unseen, on the day before the F&ecirc;te

-was to be. Only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> one thing interfered with the 'unsight, unseen'

-business: the sealed box had got damp an' broke open, an' what was

-inside was all showin'.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Sykes an' I saw it on the day o' the sale. Most o' the Circle was

-to her house finishin' up the decorations for the F&ecirc;te so's to leave the

-last day clear for seein' to the refreshments, an' her an' I run over to

-the post-office store for some odds an' ends. Silas had brought the two

-trunks an' the box down from the loft so to give 'em some advertisin'.

-An' lookin' in the corner o' the broke box we could see, just as plain

-as plain, was <i>letters</i>. Letters in bunches, all tied up, an' letters

-laid in loose&mdash;they must 'a' been full a hundred of 'em, all lookin'

-mysterious an' ready to tell you somethin', like letters will. I know

-the looks o' the letters sort o' went to my head, like the news of Far

-Off. An' I hated seein' Jem's trunks there, with his initials on,

-appearin' all trustin' an' as if they thought he was still alive.</p>

-

-<p>"But that wasn't the worst. They was three strangers there in the

-store&mdash;travellin' men that had just come in on the Through, an' they was

-hangin' round the things lookin' at 'em, as if they had the right to.

-This town ain't very much on the buy, an' we don't hev many strangers

-here, an' we ain't rill used to 'em. An' it did seem too bad, I know we

-thought, that them three should hev happened in on the day of a private

-Friendship Village sale that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> didn't concern nobody else but one, an'

-him dead. An' we felt this special when one o' the men took a-hold of a

-bunch o' the letters, an' we could see the address of the top one, to

-Jem Pitlaw, wrote thin an' tiny-fine, like a woman. An' at that Mis'

-Sykes says sharp to her husband:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"'Silas Sykes, you ain't goin' to sell them letters?'</p>

-

-<p>"'Yes, ma'am, I am,' Silas snaps, like he hed a right to all the letters

-on earth, bein' he was postmaster of Friendship Village. 'Letters,'

-Silas give out, 'is just precisely the same as books, only they ain't

-been through the expense of printin'. No differ'nce. No

-differ'nce!'&mdash;Silas always seems to think repeatin' a thing over'll get

-him somewheres, like a clock retickin' itself. 'An',' he says, 'I'm

-goin' to sell 'em for what they'll bring, same as the rest o' the

-things, an' you needn't to say one word.' An' bein' as Silas was

-snappin', not only as a postmaster but as a husband, Mis' Sykes, she

-kep' her silence. Matrimony an' politics both in one man is too much for

-any woman to face.</p>

-

-<p>"Well, we two went back to Mis' Sykes's all het up an' sad, an' told the

-Circle about Jem Pitlaw's letters. An' we all stopped decoratin' an' set

-down just where we was an talked about what an awful thing it seemed. I

-donno as you'll sense it as strong as we did. It was more a feelin' than

-a wordin'. <i>Letters</i>&mdash;bein' sold an' read out loud an' gettin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> known

-about. It seemed like lookin' in somebody's purse before they're dead.</p>

-

-<p>"'I should of thought,' Mis' Sykes says, 'that Silas regardin' bein'

-postmaster as a sacred office would have made him do differ'nt. An' I

-know he talked that right along before he got his appointment. "Free

-Private Secretary to the People," an' "Trusted Curator of Public

-Communication," he put it when he was goin' around with his petition,'

-says she, grievin'.</p>

-

-<p>"'Well,' says Mis' Amanda Toplady&mdash;I rec'lect she hed been puttin' up a

-big Japanese umbrella, an' she looked out from under it sort o' sweet

-an' sincere an' dreamy&mdash;'you've got to be a woman an' you've got to live

-in a little town before you know what a letter really is. I don't think

-these folks that hev lots o' mail left in the front hall in the

-mornin'&mdash;an' sometimes get one that same afternoon&mdash;<i>knows</i> about

-letters at all. An' I don't believe any man ever knows, sole except when

-he's in love. To sense what a letter is you've got to be a woman without

-what-you-may-say much to enjoy; you've got to hear the train whistle

-that might bring you one; you've got to calculate how long it'll take

-'em to distribute the mail, an' mebbe hurry to get your bread mixed, or

-your fried-cakes out o' the lard, or your cannin' where you can leave

-it&mdash;an' then go change your shoes an' slip on another skirt,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> an' poke

-your hair up under your hat so's it won't show, an' go down to the

-post-office in the hot sun, an' see the letter through the glass, there

-in your own box, waitin' for you. That minute, when your heart comes up

-in your throat, I tell you, is gettin' a letter.'</p>

-

-<p>"We all knew this is so&mdash;every one of us.</p>

-

-<p>"'It's just like that when you write 'em, only felt differ'nt,' says

-Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I do mine to my sister a little at a

-time&mdash;I keep it back o' the clock in the kitchen an' hide the pencil

-inside the clock door, so's it won't walk off, the way pencils do at our

-house. An' then, right in the midst of things, be it flour or be it

-suds, I can scratch down what comes in my head, till I declare sometimes

-I can hardly mail it for readin' it over an' thinkin' how she'll like to

-get it.'</p>

-

-<p>"'My, my!' says Mis' Sykes, reminiscent, ''specially since Silas has

-been postmaster an' we've had so much to do with other people's letters,

-I've been so hungry for letters of my own that I've wrote for samples. I

-can do that with a level conscience because, after all, you do get a new

-dress now an' then. But I couldn't answer advertisements, same as some,

-when I didn't mean true&mdash;just to get the letters back. That don't seem

-to me rill honest.'</p>

-

-<p>"An' then I owned up.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p><p>"'Last week, when I paid my taxes,' I says, 'I whipped out o' the

-clerk's office quick, sole so's he'd hev to mail me my tax receipt. But

-he didn't do it. He sent it over by their hired girl that noon. I love

-letters like I do my telephone bell an' my friends,' I know I says.</p>

-

-<p>"An' there was all that hundred letters or so&mdash;letters that somebody had

-put love in for Jem Pitlaw, an' that he'd read love out of an' saved

-'em&mdash;there they was goin' to be sold for all Friendship Village to read,

-includin' some that hadn't even known him, mebbe more than to speak to.</p>

-

-<p>"We wasn't quite through decoratin' when supper time come, so we stayed

-on to Mis' Sykes's for a pick-up lunch, et in the kitchen, an' finished

-up afterwards. Most of 'em could do that better than they could leave

-their work an' come down again next mornin'&mdash;men-folks can always get

-along for supper, bein' it's not a hot meal.</p>

-

-<p>"'Ain't it wonderful,' says Mis' Toplady, thoughtful, 'here we are,

-settin' 'round the kitchen table at Mis' Postmaster Sykes's in

-Friendship Village. An' away off in Arabia or Asia or somewhere that I

-ain't sure they is any such place, is somebody settin' that never heard

-of us nor we of him, an' he's goin' to hev our five dollars from the

-Tropical F&ecirc;te to-morrow night, an' put it to work doin' good.'</p>

-

-<p>"'It makes sort of a connection, don't it?' says<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> Mis'

-Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'There they are an' here we are. Ain't it

-strange? 'Seems like our doin' this makes us feel nearer to them places.

-I donno but that,' says she, noddin', 'is the start of what it means

-about the lion and the lamb layin' down together.'</p>

-

-<p>"'Oh!'says Mis' Toplady, 'I tell you the Foreign Missionary Circle has

-been next best to <i>goin'</i>. 'Seems sometimes as if I've 'most been

-somewheres an' seen palms a-growin' an' a-wavin' an' a red sky back.

-Don't it to you? I've dreamed o' them places all my life, an' I ain't

-never had anything but Friendship Village, an' I don't know now that

-Arabia an' Asia an' India is rilly fitted in, the way they look on the

-map. An' so with some more. But if so be they are, then,' she says, 'we

-owe it to the Foreign Missionary Circle that we've got that far towards

-seein' 'em.'</p>

-

-<p>"An' we all agreed, warm, excep' Mis' Sykes, who was the hostess an' too

-busy to talk much; but we knew how she felt. An' we said some more about

-how wonderful things are, there in Mis' Sykes's kitchen while we et.</p>

-

-<p>"Well, when we got done decoratin' after supper, we all walked over to

-the post-office store to the sale&mdash;the whole Circle of us. Because, of

-course, if the letters was to be sold there wasn't any harm in seein'

-who got 'em, an' in knowin' just how mean<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> who was. Then, too, we was

-interested in what was in the two trunks. We was quite early&mdash;early

-enough to set along on the front rows of breakfast-food boxes that was

-fixed ready. An' in the very frontmost one was Mis' Sykes an' Mis'

-Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, an' me.</p>

-

-<p>"But we see, first thing when we got into the store, that they was

-strangers present. The three travellin' men that Mis' Sykes an' I had

-noticed that afternoon was still in town, of course, an' there they was

-to the sale, loungin' along on the counter each side o' the cheese. We

-couldn't bear their bein' there. It was our sale, an' they wasn't rill

-sure to understand. To us Mr. Pitlaw hed been Mr. Pitlaw. To them he was

-just somebody that hed been somebody. I didn't like it, nor they didn't

-none o' the Ladies' Missionary like it. We all looked at each other an'

-nodded without it showin', like we do, an' we could see we all felt the

-same.</p>

-

-<p>"Silas was goin' to officiate himself&mdash;that man has got the idee it's

-the whistle that runs the boat. They had persuaded him to open the

-trunks an' sell the things off piecemeal, an' he see that was rilly the

-only way to do it. So when the time come he broke open the two trunks

-an' he wouldn't let anybody touch hasp or strap or hammer but himself.

-It made me sort of sick to see even the trunk things of Mr. Pitlaw's

-come out&mdash;a pepper an' salt suit, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> pair of new suspenders, a collar

-an' cuff case&mdash;the kind that you'd recognize was a Christmas present; a

-nice brush an' comb he'd kept for best an' never used, a cake of

-pretty-paper soap he'd never opened, a bunch o' keys, an' like that. You

-know how it makes you feel to unpack even your own things that have been

-put away a good while; it's like thinkin' over forgot thoughts. Well,

-an' this was worse. Jem Pitlaw, that none of us had known well enough to

-mention familiar things to, was dead&mdash;he was <i>dead</i>; an' here we were,

-lookin' on an' seein' the things that was never out of his room before,

-an' that he'd put in there, neat an' nice, five years back, to be took

-out, he thought, in a few weeks. Quite a lot of us felt delicate, but

-some got behind the delicate idee an' made it an excuse for not buyin'

-much. They's all kinds to a sale&mdash;did you ever notice? Timothy Toplady,

-for instance&mdash;I donno but he's all kinds in his single self. 'Seems he

-couldn't bring himself to bid on a thing but Jem Pitlaw's keys.</p>

-

-<p>"'Of course nobody knows what they'll fit,' says he, disparagin', 'so to

-buy 'em don't seem like bein' too familiar with Mr. Pitlaw,' s'he, rill

-pleased with himself.</p>

-

-<p>"But Mis' Sykes whispers to me:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"'Them keys'll go dirt cheap, an' Timothy knows it, an' a strange key

-may come in handy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> any minute. Timothy's reasons never whip to a froth,'

-s'she, cold.</p>

-

-<p>"But I guess she was over-critical because of gettin' more fidgety, like

-we all did, the nearer Silas got to the letters. He hed left the letters

-till the last. An' what with folks peekin' in the box since he'd brought

-it down, an' what with handlin' what was ready to spill out, most of 'em

-by then was in plain sight. An' there I see more o' them same

-ones&mdash;little thin writin', like a woman's. We 'most all noticed it. An'

-I couldn't keep my eyes off of 'em. 'Seemed like she might be somebody

-with soft ways that ought to be there, savin' the letters, wardin' off

-the heartache for Mr. Pitlaw an' mebbe one for herself.</p>

-

-<p>"An' right while I was lookin' Silas turned to the box and cleared his

-throat, important as if he was the whistle for New York City, an' he

-lifted up the bunch of the letters that had the little fine writin' on

-top, just the way Mr. Pitlaw had tied 'em up with common string.</p>

-

-<p>"'Oh!' says Mis' Toplady and Mis' Sykes, each side of me, the one 'oh!'

-strong an' the other low, but both 'oh's' meanin' the same thing.</p>

-

-<p>"'Now, what,' says Silas, brisk, 'am I bid for this package of nice

-letters here? Good clear writin', all in strong condition, an' no holes

-in, just as firm an' fresh,' s'he, 'as the day they was dropped into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>

-the mail. What am I bid for 'em?' he asks, his eyebrows rill expectant.</p>

-

-<p>"Not one of the travellin' men had bid a thing. They had sat still, just

-merely loungin' each side the cheese, laughin' some, like men will,

-among each other, but not carin' to take any part, an' we ladies felt

-rill glad o' that. But all of a sudden, when Silas put up the bunch o'

-letters, them three men woke up, an' we see like lightnin' that this was

-what they hed been waitin' for.</p>

-

-<p>"'Twenty-five cents!' bids one of 'em, decisive.</p>

-

-<p>"There was a movement of horror spread around the Missionary Circle at

-the words. Sometimes it's bad enough to hev one thing happen, but often

-it's worse to hev another occur. Even Silas looked a little doubtful,

-but to Silas the main chance is always the main thing, an' instantly he

-see that these men, if they got in the spirit of it, would run them

-letters up rill high just for the fun of it. An' Silas was like some

-are: he felt that money is money.</p>

-

-<p>"So what did he do but begin cryin' the goods up higher&mdash;holdin' the

-letters in his hands, that little, thin writin' lookin' like it was

-askin' somethin'.</p>

-

-<p>"'Here we hev letters,' says Silas, 'letters from Away. Not just

-business letters, to judge by the envelopes&mdash;an' I allow, gentlemen,'

-says Silas, facetious, 'that, bein' postmaster of Friendship Village,

-I'm as good a judge of letters as there is a-goin'.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> Here we hev some

-intimate personal letters offered for sale legitimate by their heiress.

-What am I bid?' asks he.</p>

-

-<p>"'Thirty-five cents!'</p>

-

-<p>"'Fifty cents!' says the other two travellin' gentlemen, quick an' in

-turn.</p>

-

-<p>"'Seventy-five cents!' cries out the first, gettin' in earnest&mdash;though

-they was all laughin' at hevin' somethin' inspirin' to do.</p>

-

-<p>"But Silas merely caught a-hold of the mood they was in, crafty, as if

-he'd been gettin' the signers to his petition while they was feelin'

-good.</p>

-

-<p>"'One moment, gentlemen!' s'he. 'Do you know what you're biddin' on? I

-ain't told you the half yet,' s'he. 'I ain't told you,' s'he, 'where

-these letters come from.'</p>

-

-<p>"With that he hitches his glasses an' looked at the postmarks. An' he

-read 'em off. Oh, an' what do you guess them postmarks was? I'll never

-forget the feelin' that come over me when I heard what he was sayin',

-turnin' back in under the string to see. For the stamps on the letters

-was foreign stamps. The postmarks was foreign postmarks. An' what Silas

-read off was: Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Singapore&mdash;oh, I can't begin to

-remember all the names nor to pronounce 'em, but I think they was all in

-India, or leastwise in Asia. Think of it! in Asia, that none of the

-Ladies' Foreign<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> Missionary Circle hed been sure there was such a place.</p>

-

-<p>"I know how we all looked around at each other sudden, with the same

-little jump in the chest as when we remember we've got bread in the oven

-past the three-quarters, or when we've left the preserves on the blaze

-while we've done somethin' else an' think it's burnin', or when we've

-cut out both sleeves for one arm an' ain't got any more cloth. I mean it

-was that intimate, personal jump, like when awful, first-person things

-have happened. An' I tell you what, when the Ladies' Missionary feels a

-thing, they feel it strong an' they act it sudden. It's our way, as a

-Circle. An' in that look that went round among us there was hid the nod

-that knows what each other means.</p>

-

-<p>"'One dollar!' shouts one o' the travellin' men.</p>

-

-<p>"An' with that we all turned, like one solid human being, straight

-towards Mis' Postmaster Sykes, that was our president an' a born leader

-besides, an' the way we looked at her resembled a vote.</p>

-

-<p>"Mis' Sykes stood up, grave an' scairt, though not to show. An' we was

-sure she'd do the right thing, though we didn't know what the right

-thing was; but we felt confidence, I know, in the very pattern on the

-back of her shawl. An' she says, clear:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"'I'd like to be understood to bid for the whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> box o' Mr. Pitlaw's

-letters, includin' the bunch that's up. An' I bid five dollars.'</p>

-

-<p>"Of course we all knew in a minute what that meant: Mis' Sykes was

-biddin' with the proceeds of the Ten Cent Tropical F&ecirc;te that was to be.

-But we see, too, that this was a missionary cause if there ever was one,

-an' they wa'n't one of us that thought it irregular, or grudged it, or

-looked behind.</p>

-

-<p>"I don't know whether you know how much five dollars rilly is&mdash;like you

-sense it when you've spoke it to a sale, or put it on a subscription

-paper in Friendship. There wasn't a sound in that store, everybody was

-so dumfounded. But none was so much as Silas Sykes. Silas was so

-surprised that he forgot that he was in public.</p>

-

-<p>"'My King!' says he, unexpected to himself. 'What you sayin', Huldy? You

-ain't biddin' that out o' your allowance, be you?' says he. Silas likes

-big words in the home.</p>

-

-<p>"'No, sir,' says she, crisp, back, 'I ain't. I can't do miracles out of

-nothin'. But I bid, an' you'll get your money, Silas. An' I may as well

-take the letters now.'</p>

-

-<p>"With that she rose up an' spread out her shawl almost broodin', an'

-gathered that box o' Jem Pitlaw's into her two arms. An' with one motion

-all the rest o' the Ladies' Missionary got up behind her an' stalked out

-of the store, like a big bid is sole all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> there is to an auction. An'

-they let us go. Why, there wasn't another thing for Silas Sykes to do

-but let be as was. Them three men over by the cheese just laughed, an'

-said out somethin' about no gentleman outbiddin' a lady, an' shut up,

-beat, but pretendin' to give in, like some will.</p>

-

-<p>"Just before we all got to the door we heard somebody's feet come down

-off'n a cracker-barrel or somethin', an' Timothy Toplady's voice after

-us, shrill-high an' nervous:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"'Amanda,' s'he, 'you ain't calculatin' to help back up this

-tomfoolishness, I hope?'</p>

-

-<p>"An' Mis' Amanda says at him, over her shoulder:</p>

-

-<p>"'If I was, that'd be between my hens an' me, Timothy Toplady,' says

-she.</p>

-

-<p>"An' the store door shut behind us&mdash;not mad, I remember, but gentle,

-like 'Amen.'</p>

-

-<p>"We took the letters straight to Mis' Sykes's an' through the house to

-the kitchen, where there was a good hot fire in the range. It was bitter

-cold outdoors, an' we set down around the stove just as we was, with the

-letters on the floor in front o' the hearth. An' when Mis' Sykes hed got

-the bracket lamp lit, she turned round, her bonnet all crooked but her

-face triumphant, an' took off a griddle of the stove an' stirred up the

-coals. An' we see what was in her mind.</p>

-

-<p>"'We can take turns puttin' 'em in,' she says.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p><p>"But I guess it was in all our minds what Mis'

-Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss says, wistful:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"'Don't you think,' she says, 'or <i>do</i> you think, it'd be wrongin' Mr.

-Pitlaw if we read over the postmarks out loud first?'</p>

-

-<p>"We divided up the bunches an' we set down around an' untied the

-strings, an', turn in an' turn out, we read the postmarks off. 'Most

-every one of 'em was foreign&mdash;oh, I can't begin to tell you where. It

-was all mixed up an' shinin' of names we'd never heard of before, an'

-names we had heard in sermons an' in the Bible&mdash;Egypt an' Greece an'

-Rome an' isles o' the sea. Mis' Toplady stopped right in the middle o'

-hers.</p>

-

-<p>"'Oh, I can't be sure I'm pronouncin' 'em right,' she says, huntin' for

-her handkerchief, 'but I guess you ladies get the <i>feel</i> o' the places,

-don't you?'</p>

-

-<p>"An' that was just it: we did. We got the feel of them far places that

-night like we never could hev hed it any other way. An' when we got all

-through, Mis' Toplady spoke up again&mdash;but this time it was like she flew

-up a little way an' lit on somethin'.</p>

-

-<p>"'It ain't likely,' she says, 'that we'll ever, any of us, hev a letter

-of our own from places like these. We don't get many letters, an' what

-we do get come from the same old towns, over an' over again, an' quite

-near by. Do you know,' she says, 'I believe this Writin' here'&mdash;she held

-out the tiny fine <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>writing that was like a woman with soft ways&mdash;'would

-understand if we each took one of her letters an' glued it together here

-an' now an' carried it home an' pasted it in our Bibles. <i>She</i> went

-travellin' off to them places, an' she must have wanted to; an' she

-would know what it is to want to go an' yet never get there.'</p>

-

-<p>"I think Mis' Amanda was right&mdash;we all thought so. An' we done what she

-mentioned, an' made our choice o' postmarks. I know Mis' Amanda took

-Cairo.</p>

-

-<p>"''Count of the name sort o' picturin' out a palm tree a-growin' an'

-a-wavin' against a red sky,' she says, when she was pinnin' her shawl

-clear up over her hat to go out in the cold. 'Think of it,' she says;

-'she might 'a' passed a palm the day she wrote it. Ain't it like seein'

-'em grow yourself?'</p>

-

-<p>... "Mebbe it all wasn't quite regular," Calliope added, "though we made

-over five dollars at the Ten Cent F&ecirc;te. But the minister, when we told

-him, he seemed to think it was all right, an' he kep' smilin', sweet an'

-deep, like we'd done more'n we <i>had</i> done. An' I think he knew what we

-meant when we said we was all feelin' nearer, lion an' lamb, to them

-strange missionary countries. Because&mdash;oh, well, sometimes, you know,"

-Calliope said, "they's things that makes you feel nearer to faraway

-places that couldn't hev any postmark at all."</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>XV</span> <span class="smaller">PETER</span></h2>

-

-<p>Last night in my room there was no sleeping, because the moon was there.

-It is a south room, and when the moon shines on the maple floor with its

-white cotton rugs and is reflected from the smooth white walls, to step

-within is like entering an open flower. Who could sleep in an open

-flower? I might sleep in a vast white petunia, because petunias do not

-have as much to say to me as do some other flowers. But in the bell of a

-lily, as in the bell of the sky or in my moonlit room, I should wish my

-thought to stay awake and be somebody. Be Somebody. On these nights, it

-is as if one had a friend in one's head conferring with one. And I think

-of this comrade as Her, the Custodian of me, who lives deep within and

-nearly comes outside to this white porch of the moon.</p>

-

-<p>I like to light my candle and watch its warm rays mix with the

-blue-white beams from without. There would have been a proper employment

-for a wizard:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> to diffuse varying insubstantialities, such as these, and

-to look within them, as within a pool&mdash;a pool free of its basin and

-enjoying the air. Yes, they were an unimaginative race, wizards. When

-will the era of white art come, with &aelig;sthetic witches and wizards who

-know our modern magics of colour and form and perception as a mere basis

-for their sorceries? Instead of pottering with thick, slab gruel and

-medi&aelig;val newts' eyes, think what witches they will be! Sometimes I think

-that they are already arriving. The New Lady told me the most delightful

-thing about a Thought of hers that she saw ... but it was such an

-elusive thing to tell and so much of it I had to guess, because words

-have not yet caught up with fancies, that it is hard to write down.

-Besides, perhaps you know. And if you did not know, you would skip this

-part anyway. So I merely mention that <i>she</i> mentioned the coming alive

-of a thought of hers which helped her spirit to grow, quite without her

-will. Very likely you understand other wizardries. An excellent place to

-think them out must be the line where candle rays meet moonbeams, but

-there is no such discoverable line, just as there is no discoverable

-line between the seeing and the knowing, where the Custodian dwells....

-By all of which I am merely showing you what the moon can do to one's

-head and that it is no great wonder that one cannot sleep.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span></p><p>"Ain't the moon kind of like a big, shinin' brain," Calliope said once,

-"an' moonlight nights it gets in your head and thinks for you."</p>

-

-<p>So last night when I went in my room I did not try to sleep; nor did I

-even light my candle. I went straight to a window and opened it&mdash;the one

-without a screen. I would not live in a house that did not have certain

-windows which one could open to let in the moon, or the night, or the

-living out-of-doors, with no screens to thwart their impulse. Suppose

-that sometime Diana&mdash;well, suppose what you will that is sensible, no

-moon can shine through a screen. Really, it cannot do its best through

-even an open window. And this was why I gave up trying to make it do so

-and went downstairs again&mdash;which is the earthly and rational of floating

-out into that utter beauty as I wanted to float.</p>

-

-<p>Of going out into such a night I would like to write for a long time, as

-I would like to keep on breathing lilies-of-the-valley and never have

-done. I think, though, that "into" such a night is not the word; to go

-out <i>upon</i> the night is the essential experience. For, like a June day,

-a moonlit night of itself will not let us inside. We must know some

-other way of entrance. And I suspect that some of us never quite find

-the way&mdash;I wonder if we are missed?</p>

-

-<p>I stepped round the house to the open ocean of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> light that broke on soft

-shores of leaf and line, solemnizing, magnifying. It was like a glimpse

-into something which, afterward and afterward, is going to be. The

-definiteness of its premonitory message was startling. As when on seeing

-once that something had happened on my birthday, 1500, I felt as if I

-had heard from a kind of twin-time, so now I understood that this night

-was the birthday of far-off, immortal moments of my own, yet to be lived

-... so friendly near we are to the immeasurable kindred.</p>

-

-<p>And there, from the shadow of the flowering currant bush, which just now

-is out of flower and fallen in meditative quiet&mdash;a man arose. My sharp

-fear, as savage a thing as if the world were ten thousand years younger,

-or as if I were a ptarmigan and he a cougar&mdash;was only momentary. For the

-cougar began to apologize and I recognized him.</p>

-

-<p>"Why," I said, "Peter."</p>

-

-<p>"Yes'm," said he, "I couldn't help being here&mdash;for a little while."</p>

-

-<p>"Neither could I, Peter," I told him.</p>

-

-<p>These were remarkable admissions of ours, for a large part of evening in

-the village is an uninhabitable part of day and, no matter in what

-splendour of sky it comes, is a thing to be shut outside experience. If

-we relate being wakened by something that goes bang, we begin it, "In

-the middle of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> night, about twelve o'clock;" and, "They have a light

-in their house 'most every night till midnight," is a bit of sharp

-criticism not lightly to be lived down. But now it was as if Peter were

-a part of the time itself, and outlaw too, if the evening was outlaw.

-"I'm glad I saw you," Peter said&mdash;as if we were here met by chance in

-the usual manner. "I wanted to see you and tell you: I'm going away&mdash;to

-be gone right along."</p>

-

-<p>"Why," I said again, "Peter!"</p>

-

-<p>"You'd go too," he said simply.</p>

-

-<p>"I should want to go," I told him, "but I doubt if I would go. Where are

-you going?"</p>

-

-<p>"They want to put in a cannery at Marl. It'd be a branch. I'd run it

-myself."</p>

-

-<p>I did not miss the implication of the conditional mood. And <i>Marl</i>. What

-wonderful names they give to some of the towns of this world. That word

-makes a picture all of white cornices and white wings of buildings and

-bright fa&ccedil;ades. I dare say from the railroad track the real town of Marl

-shows an unpainted livery barn and a blue barber shop, but the name

-sounds like the name of a chapter of travel, beginning: To-day we drove

-to Marl to see the queen. Or the cataract. Or the porch of the morning.</p>

-

-<p>"Why are you going, Peter?" I drove in the peg for him.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p><p>"I guess you know," he said. "It's all Miggy with me."</p>

-

-<p>I knew that he wanted before all else to tell somebody, to talk to

-somebody, to have somebody know.</p>

-

-<p>"Tell me, Peter," I said.</p>

-

-<p>And now Peter told me how things were with him. If I should repeat what

-he said you would be scornful, for it was so little. It was broken and

-commonplace and set with repetition. It was halting and unfinished, like

-the unformed writing of a boy. But in his words I felt the movings of

-life and destiny and death more than I feel them when I think about the

-rushing of the stars. He loved her, and for him the world became a

-transparent plane wherein his soul moved as simply as his body. Here was

-not only a boy longing for a girl. Here was not only a man, instinct

-with the eager hope of establishing a home. Here was something not

-unlike this very moon-washed area won from the illimitable void, this

-area where we stood and spoke together, this little spot which alone was

-to us articulate with form and line and night sounds. So Peter,

-stumbling over his confession of love for Miggy, was like the word

-uttered by destiny to explicate its principle. It mattered not at all

-what the night said or what Peter said. Both were celestial.</p>

-

-<p>These moments when the soul presses close to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> its windows are to be

-understood as many another hint at the cosmic&mdash;Dawn, May, the firmament,

-radio-activity, theistic evolution, a thousand manifestations of the

-supernal. In this cry of enduring spirit it was as if Peter had some

-intimacy with all that has no boundaries. I hardly heard his stumbling

-words. I listened to him down some long avenue of hearths whose

-twinkling lights were like a corridor of stars.</p>

-

-<p>And all this bright business was to be set at naught because Miggy would

-have none of it.</p>

-

-<p>"She seems to like me," Peter said miserably, "but I guess she'd like me

-just as well if I wasn't me. And if I was right down somebody else, I

-guess she'd like me a good deal better. She&mdash;don't like my hands&mdash;nor

-the way my hair sticks up at the back. She thinks of all such things. I

-wouldn't care if she said all her words crooked. I'd know what she

-meant."</p>

-

-<p>I knew the difference. To him she was Miggy. To her he was an

-individual. He had never in her eyes graduated from being a person to

-being himself.</p>

-

-<p>"Calliope says," I told him, "that she likes almond extract better than

-any other kind, but that she hardly ever gets a bottle of almond with

-which she does not find fault. She says it's the same way with people

-one loves."</p>

-

-<p>Peter smiled&mdash;he is devoted to Calliope, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> alone in the village has

-been friendly with his father. <i>Friendly.</i> The rest of the village has

-only been kind.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," he tried to put it, "but Miggy never seems to be thinking of me

-as <i>me</i>, only when she's finding fault with me. If she'd only think

-about me, even a little, the way I think about her. If she'd only miss

-me or want me or wonder how the house would seem if we were married. But

-she don't care&mdash;she don't care."</p>

-

-<p>"She says, you know," I ventured, "that she can't ask you to support

-Little Child too."</p>

-

-<p>"Can't she see," he cried, "that the little thing only makes me love her

-more? Don't she know how I felt the other night&mdash;when she let me help

-her that way? She must know. It's just an excuse&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>He broke off and his hands dropped.</p>

-

-<p>"Then there's her other reason," he said, "I guess you know that. I

-can't blame her for it. But even with that, it kind of seems as if,&mdash;if

-she loved me&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," I said, "Peter, it does seem so."</p>

-

-<p>And yet in my heart I am certain that the reason is not at all that

-Miggy cannot love him&mdash;I remember the woman-softening of her face that

-forenoon when she found the spirit of the old romances in the village. I

-am not even certain that the reason<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> is that she does not love Peter

-now&mdash;I remember how tender and feminine she was the other night with

-Peter and Little Child. I think it is only that the cheap cynicism of

-the village&mdash;which nobody means even when it is said!&mdash;has taught her

-badly; and that Life has not yet touched her hand, has not commanded

-"Look at me," has not bidden her follow with us all.</p>

-

-<p>I looked into the bright bowl of the night which is alternately with one

-and against one in one's mood of emprise; the bright bowl of the night

-inverted as if some mighty genii were shaking the stars about like

-tea-leaves to fortune the future. What a pastime <i>that</i> for a wizard!</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, Peter," I said, "<i>if</i> one were a wizard!"</p>

-

-<p>"I didn't understand," said Peter.</p>

-

-<p>"How pleasant it would be to make folk love folk," I put it.</p>

-

-<p>He understood that. "Wouldn't it, though?" he assented wistfully. So

-does everybody understand. Wouldn't it, though! Oh, <i>don't you wish you

-could</i>?</p>

-

-<p>In the silence which fell I kept on looking at those starry tea-leaves

-until I protest that a thought awoke in my mind as if it wanted to be

-somebody. Be Somebody. It was as if it came alive, quite without my

-will, so that almost I could see it. It was a friend conferring in my

-head. Perhaps it was the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> Custodian herself, come outside to that white

-porch of the moon.</p>

-

-<p>"Peter," I said, "I think I'm going to tell you a story."</p>

-

-<p>For I longed to make him patient with Miggy, as men, who understand

-these things first, are not always patient with women, who often and

-often understand too late.</p>

-

-<p>He listened to the story as I am setting it down here&mdash;the story of the

-New Village. But in it I could say nothing of how, besides by these

-things celestial, cosmic, I was touched by the simple, human entreaty of

-the big, baffled man and that about his hands and the way his hair

-sticks up at the back.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>XVI</span> <span class="smaller">THE NEW VILLAGE</span></h2>

-

-<p>Once upon a time there was a village which might have been called

-The-Way-Certain-Folk-Want-It-Now. That, however, was not its name&mdash;it

-had a proper, map-sounding name. And there every one went to and fro

-with a fervour and nimbleness which proved him to be skilfully intent

-upon his own welfare.</p>

-

-<p>The village had simple buildings and white walls, lanes and flowering

-things and the flow of pure air. But the strange thing about the town

-was that there each inhabitant lived alone. Every house had but one

-inmate and he well content. He liked everything that he owned and his

-taste was all-sufficient and he took his pleasure in his own walls and

-loved best his own ways. The day was spent in lonely selling or lonely

-buying, each man pitted against all others, and advantage and

-disadvantage were never equal, but yet the transactions were dreary,

-lacking the picturesqueness of unlicensed spoliation. The only greeting

-which folk exchanged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> in passing was, "Sir, what do you do for

-yourself?" There were no assemblings of the people. The town kept itself

-alive by accretion from without. When one died another appeared and took

-his place gladly, and also others arrived, like precept added to precept

-and not like a true flowering. There were no children. And the village

-common was overgrown and breast-high with weeds. When the day was done

-every one retired to his own garden and saw his flowers blossoming for

-him and answering to the stars which came and stood over his head. There

-was in the town an epidemic of the intensive, only the people thought of

-it as the normal, for frequently epidemics are so regarded.</p>

-

-<p>In one soul the contagion did not prevail. The soul was the lad Matthew,

-whose body lived on the town's only hill. When others sat at night in

-their gardens Matthew was wont to go up an airy path which he had made

-to the upper spaces and there wander conjecturing about being alive. For

-this was a detail which he never could take wholly for granted, in the

-manner in which he had become wonted to door-mats, napkin-rings,

-oatmeal, and mirrors. Therefore he took his thought some way nearer to

-the stars, and there he found so much beauty that he longed to fashion

-it to something, to create of it anew. And as he opened his heart he

-began to understand that there is some one of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> whom he was the

-offspring. As he was companioned by this idea, more and more he longed

-for things to come nearer. Once, in his walking a hurrying bird brushed

-his face, grew confused, fluttered at his breast, and as he would have

-closed it in his hands he found that the bird was gone and his hands

-were empty, but beneath them his own heart fluttered and throbbed like a

-thing apart.</p>

-

-<p>One night, so great was the abstraction of the boy, that instead of

-taking the upper path he fared down into the town. It was a curious way

-to do&mdash;to go walking in the town as if the thing were common property,

-but then the walls were very high and the gates were fast closed and

-bound round with creeping things, which grow very quickly. Matthew

-longed to enter these gardens, and he wondered who lived in the houses

-and what might be in their hearts.</p>

-

-<p>Amazingly, at the turn of a white wall, a gate was opened and she who

-had opened it leaned into the night as if she were looking for

-something. There was a fluttering in the breast of Matthew so that he

-looked down to see if the bird had come back. But no bird was there. And

-it smote him that the lady's beauty, and surely her goodness, were great

-enough so that of them something might be created, as he would fain have

-created marvels from the sky.</p>

-

-<p>"I would like to make your beauty into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>something other," he said to

-her. "I cannot think whether this would be a song or a picture or a

-vision."</p>

-

-<p>She looked at him with as much pleasure as if he had been an idea of her

-own.</p>

-

-<p>"Tell me about my beauty," she bade him. "What thing is that?"</p>

-

-<p>"Nay, that will take some while," Matthew said. "If I do that, I must

-come in your garden."</p>

-

-<p>Now, such a thing had never happened in the town. And as this seemed why

-it never happened, it seemed likely to go on never happening

-indefinitely. But loneliness and the longing to create and the

-conjecture about life have always been as potent as battles; and beauty

-and boredom and curiosity have had something to do with history as well.</p>

-

-<p>"Just this once, then," said the lady, and the gate closed upon the two.</p>

-

-<p>Here was a garden like Matthew's own, but indefinitely atmosphered

-other. It spoke strangely of a wonted presence, other than his own. In

-his own garden he fitted as if the space for him were niched in the air,

-and he went as a man accustomed will go without thinking. But here he

-moved free, making new niches. And whereas on his own walks and plots he

-looked with lack-lustre eye as a man looks on his own gas-jet or rain

-pipe, now Matthew looked on all that he saw as on strange flame and

-sweet waters. And it was not the shrubs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> and flowers which most

-delighted him, but it was rather on a garden bench the lady's hat and

-gloves and scissors.</p>

-

-<p>"How pleasing!" said he, and stopped before them.</p>

-

-<p>"Do you find them so?" asked the lady.</p>

-

-<p>And when he told her about her beauty, which was more difficult to do

-than he had imagined and took a longer time, she said:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"There can be no other man in the world who would speak as you speak."</p>

-

-<p>On which he swore that there was no man who would not speak so, and

-likewise that no man could mean one-half what he himself meant. And he

-looked long at her house.</p>

-

-<p>"In those rooms," he said, "you go about. I wish that I could go about

-there."</p>

-

-<p>But that frightened her a little.</p>

-

-<p>"In there," he said, "are the lamps you light, the plates you use, the

-brush that smooths your hair. How strange that is."</p>

-

-<p>"Does it seem strange?" she asked.</p>

-

-<p>"Sometime I will go there," said he, and with that he thought that the

-bird once more was fluttering at his breast. And again there was no

-bird.</p>

-

-<p>When the time was come that he must leave her, this seemed the most

-valiant thing to do that ever he had done. It was inconceivable to

-accept that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> though now she was with him, breathing, sentient, yet in

-another moment he would be out alone in the empty night. Alone. For the

-first time the word became a sinister thing. It meant to be where she

-was not.</p>

-

-<p>"How is this to go on," he said, "I living where you do not live?"</p>

-

-<p>But she said, "Such things have never been any other way," and closed

-the gate upon him.</p>

-

-<p>It is a mighty thing when one who has always lived alone abruptly finds

-himself to have a double sense. Here is his little box of ideas, neatly

-classified, ready for reference, which have always methodically bobbed

-out of their own will the moment they were mentioned. Here are his own

-varieties of impression ready to be laid like a pattern upon whatever

-presents itself to be cut out. Here are his tastes, his sentiments, his

-beliefs, his longings, all selected and labelled and established. And

-abruptly ideas and impressions and tastes are thrown into rapt disorder

-while he wonders what this other being would think, and his sentiment

-glows like a lamp, his belief embraces the world, his longing becomes

-only that the other being's longing be cast in counterpart. When he

-walks abroad, the other's step accompanies him, a little back, and

-invisible, but as authentic as his own. When he thinks, his thought,

-without his will, would share itself. All this is a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> new way of

-consciousness. All this makes two universes where one universe had

-previously been competent to support life.</p>

-

-<p>Back on his hill Matthew went through his house as if he were seeing it

-for the first time. There was the garden that he had planted, and she

-was not walking there. There was his window, and she was not looking

-from it; his table, and she was not sitting beside it; his book which he

-could not read for wondering if she had read. All the tools of his home,

-what could they not become if she touched them? The homely tasks of the

-cupboard, what joy if she shared them? But what to do? He thought that

-it might be something if they exchanged houses, so that he could be

-where she had been, could use what she had used, could think of her in

-her setting. But yet this did not wholly delight him, either.</p>

-

-<p>And now his house stifled him, so that he rushed out upon that airy path

-of his that he had made to reach the upper spaces, and he fled along,

-learning about being alive. Into the night he went, farther than ever he

-had gone before, till the stars looked nearer to him than houses

-commonly look, and things to think about seemed there waiting for him.</p>

-

-<p>So it adventured that he came abruptly upon the New Village. It lay upon

-the air as lightly as if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> strong, fair hands were uniting to bear it up,

-and it was not far from the stars and the clear places. Before he

-understood its nearness, the night was, so to say, endued with this

-village, and he entered upon its lanes as upon light.</p>

-

-<p>This was a town no larger than his own and no more fortuned of Nature.

-Here were buildings not too unlike, and white walls and flowering things

-and the flow of pure air. But here was also the touch of bells. And he

-saw that every one went to and fro in a manner of quiet purpose that was

-like a garment.</p>

-

-<p>"Sir, what do you do for yourself?" he asked courteously of one who was

-passing.</p>

-

-<p>The citizen gave him greeting.</p>

-

-<p>"I make bread for my family," said he, "and, it may be, a dream or two."</p>

-

-<p>Matthew tried hard to perceive, and could make nothing of this.</p>

-

-<p>"Your family," he said, "what thing is that?"</p>

-

-<p>The citizen looked at him narrowly.</p>

-

-<p>"I see that you rebuke me," said he, gently; "but I, too, labor for the

-community, so that the day shall become a better day."</p>

-

-<p>"Community," said Matthew. "Now I know not at all what that may be,

-either."</p>

-

-<p>Then the man understood that here was one who would learn about these

-things, and in the New<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> Village such a task is sacred and to be assumed

-on the moment by any to whom the opportunity presents. So the man took

-Matthew with him.</p>

-

-<p>"Come," he said, "this is the day when we meet together."</p>

-

-<p>"Together," said Matthew, and without knowing why he liked what he felt

-when he said that.</p>

-

-<p>They went first to the market-place, trodden of many feet, and about it

-a fair green common planted in gracious lines. Here Matthew found men in

-shops that were built simply and like one another in fashion, but with

-pleasant devices of difference, and he found many selling together and

-many buying, and no one was being robbed.</p>

-

-<p>"How can these things be?" he asked. "Here every man stands with the

-others."</p>

-

-<p>"Inside of all things," the citizen answered, "you will find that it is

-so written."</p>

-

-<p>On the common many were assembled to name certain projects and purposes:

-the following of paths to still clearer spaces, the nurturing of certain

-people, ways of cleanliness, purity of water, of milk, wide places for

-play, the fashioning of labour so that the shrines within be not

-foregone, the freeing of fountains, the planting of green things.</p>

-

-<p>"Why will all this be?" asked Matthew. "For these things a man does in

-his own garden or for his own house, and no other interferes."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p><p>"Nay, but look deep within all things, Friend," the citizen said, "and

-you will never find it written so."</p>

-

-<p>"Friend," repeated Matthew, "<i>friend</i>...."</p>

-

-<p>Then the citizen went to his own house, and Matthew with him. The wall

-was no wall, but a hedge, and the garden was very beautiful. And lo,

-when they went in, there came tumbling along the path little beings made

-in the image of the citizen himself. And with them a woman of exceeding

-beauty and power, which the little ones also bore. As if the citizen had

-chosen her beauty and power to make them into something other.</p>

-

-<p>It was as it had been when the bird was fluttering and beating at the

-boy's breast, but he did not even heed.</p>

-

-<p>"Tell me!" he cried. "These&mdash;do they live here with you? Are they

-yours?"</p>

-

-<p>"We are one another's," said the citizen.</p>

-

-<p>Matthew sat among them, and to pleasure him they did many sweet tasks.

-They brought him to eat and drink in the garden. The woman gave quiet

-answers that had in them something living, and alive, too, some while

-after she had spoken. ("So <i>she</i> could answer," Matthew thought, "and

-better, too, than that.") And the children brought him a shell, a pretty

-stone, a broken watch, and a little woolly lamb on three wheels, and the

-fourth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> wheel missing. The lamb had a sound to make by squeezing, and

-this sound Matthew made a great many times, and every time the children

-laughed. And when they did that Matthew could think of nothing to say

-that seemed a thing to be said, but he was inscrutably elated, and did

-the trick again.</p>

-

-<p>And when he rose to take his leave:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Is it for them that you make bread and a dream or two?" he asked.</p>

-

-<p>He knew that he should always like to remember the citizen's smile as he

-answered.</p>

-

-<p>They stood at the opening of the hedge and folk were going by.</p>

-

-<p>"Are they not jealous of you?" Matthew asked.</p>

-

-<p>"They have families and bread and dreams of their own," said the

-citizen. "Every house is filled with them."</p>

-

-<p>Matthew looked breathlessly along the street of the New Village, and he

-saw men, as they went, giving one another greeting: "Friend, is much

-accomplished?" or, "Peace to you, Friend." And they talked together, and

-entered gardens where were those who came to meet them or who waited

-within. They were a fine company, moving as to some secret way of being,

-and as if they had all looked deep within to see how it is written. And

-as he watched, something in Matthew would have cried out that he, too,

-was offspring of their Father, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> for all this had he too been

-created, and that for this would he live, joying and passioning and

-toiling in the common destiny. But when he spoke, all that he could say

-was:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Every man, then, may sit down now with a lamb with three wheels and the

-fourth wheel missing...."</p>

-

-<p>On which he ceased for very shame. But the citizen understood and smiled

-once more, and said to him: "Come you here again, Brother."</p>

-

-<p>With that word Matthew was off, down from the clear upper spaces, to

-where, lonely on its hill, his own house stood among its lonely

-neighbours. And Matthew strode shouting down the deserted streets and

-calling at every gate; and, it being now day, every one came forth to

-his lonely toil.</p>

-

-<p>Matthew went and stood on the common where the weeds were high, and so

-amazed were the folk that they came about him, each suspecting the other

-of secret connivance in this strange business. For nothing had ever been

-done so.</p>

-

-<p>"Men and brothers," cried Matthew, "it is not so that it was meant. I

-pray you look deep within, and see how the meaning was written. Is it

-that you should live, each pitted against another, wounding the other,

-advantaging himself? Join now each his hand with that of a neighbour.

-<i>His neighbour.</i> Make the thing of which, it seems, the world is made;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>

-a family. Let the thing come alive which is greater than the family: the

-community. Oh, my comrades, let us work together for the coming of the

-kingdom of God."</p>

-

-<p>In the murmur that rose were the words which have been spoken since time

-began:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"It is not so that it was done in the old time...."</p>

-

-<p>"It is not seemly that we change...."</p>

-

-<p>"If every one did this ... but we cannot do it alone."</p>

-

-<p>"Have you thought what will become of our business?"</p>

-

-<p>And again and yet again: "It is not so that it was done in the old

-time."</p>

-

-<p>And when the most would have none of it, Matthew made his way sadly

-through the throng&mdash;of whom were many who smiled (kindly!)&mdash;to the edge

-of the common, where stood a woman, trembling.</p>

-

-<p>"Come," he said.</p>

-

-<p>She went with him, and she with many little frightened breaths, but he

-had no pity, for he read deep within and saw that it was written that

-she wanted none. When they reached her own house, she would have

-entered.</p>

-

-<p>"Go we in here," she besought him, "I will show you the rooms where I go

-about and the lamps that I light."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p><p>"We are past all that now," said Matthew, gently, "I will not go on

-living where you do not live."</p>

-

-<p>He took her to his own house, through the garden that he had planted. He

-made her look from his window, sit by his table, open his books; and he

-bade her to a little task at the cupboard and laughed for joy that she

-performed it.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, come away," he cried. "And now we will go quickly to the New

-Village, that one which I have found or another, where men know all this

-happiness and more."</p>

-

-<p>But she stood there by Matthew's cupboard and shook her head.</p>

-

-<p>"No," she said gravely, "here we will stay, you and I, in your house.

-Here we will live&mdash;and it may be there is a handful of others who

-understand. And here we will do what we can."</p>

-

-<p>"But I must show you," Matthew cried, "the way the others live&mdash;the

-things they strive for: the following of paths to clearer spaces, the

-freeing of shrines."</p>

-

-<p>"All that," she said, "we will do here."</p>

-

-<p>"But," he urged, "you must see how else they do&mdash;the shell, the pretty

-stone, the watch, the woolly lamb on three wheels and one wheel

-missing...."</p>

-

-<p>"All that," she said, "is in my heart."</p>

-

-<p>Matthew looked in her face and marvelled, for he saw that beside her

-beauty there was her power, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> to that he bowed himself as to a far

-voice. And again it was as when the bird was at his breast, but now he

-knew what this would be.</p>

-

-<p>So they live there in Matthew's house. And a handful besides understand

-and toil for the fairer order. And this will come; and then that New

-Village, in the clear upper spaces, will hang just above every

-village&mdash;nay, will come down to clothe it like a garment.</p>

-

-<p class="space-above">When I had done,</p>

-

-<p>"Peter," I said&mdash;I nearly called him Matthew!&mdash;"these are the things

-that Miggy does not understand. And that she will understand."</p>

-

-<p>He knew. He said nothing; but he knew how it is written.</p>

-

-<p>"Peter," I said, "I suppose Miggy will never have been to your house?"</p>

-

-<p>I knew that she could not have been there.</p>

-

-<p>"Some day soon," I said&mdash;"before you go away&mdash;ask us to come there. I

-should like her to sit by your table and look from your window."</p>

-

-<p>For how can one be sure that divine non-interference is always divine?</p>

-

-<p>Peter drew his breath long.</p>

-

-<p>"Would you?" he said; "would you? So many times I've thought maybe that

-would make her think of me as if I <i>was</i> me."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p><p>Yes, that might help. If only Miggy knew how to shake hands as Elfa

-shook hands with Nicholas Moor, that might help, too. How did it begin,

-this pride of individualism in a race which does not know its own

-destiny save as the great relationships, human and divine, can reveal

-that destiny? But Peter knows! And the hope of the world is that so many

-do know.</p>

-

-<p>Since he said his grateful good night and rushed away, I have been

-trying to readjust my impression of Peter. For I can no longer think of

-him in connection with Miggy and the cannery and my neighbour's lawn and

-the village. Now he is a figure ranging the ample intervals of a field

-fraternal to the night and to the day. Fraternal, too, to any little

-moon-washed area, won from the void, where it is easy to be in

-conference with the spirit without and within. Truly, it is as if the

-meaning of the universe were passioning for the comradeship of hearts

-that can understand.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>XVII</span> <span class="smaller">ADOPTION</span></h2>

-

-<p>The big window of my sitting room is an isle of sirens on whose shore

-many of my bird neighbours are continually coming to grief. For, from

-without, the window makes a place of soft skies and seductive leaves

-where any bird might think to wing a way. And in that mirrored deep

-there is that curious atmosphere which makes In-a-looking-glass a better

-thing than the room which it reflects&mdash;an elusive sense which Little

-Child might call Isn't-any-such-placeness. I think that I might call it

-so too. And so, evidently, the birds would call it, for they are always

-trying to find there some path of flight.</p>

-

-<p>A morning or two ago, when I heard against the pane the soft thud of an

-eager little body, I hurried out to see lying under the window an

-oriole. It was too terrible that it should have been an oriole. For days

-I had seen him hanging here and there, back downward, on this limb and

-that, and heard his full-throated note ringing from the innermost air,

-so that the deeps of air could never again be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> wholly alien to me. And

-now he lay, his wings outstretched, his eyes dim, his breast hardly

-moving. I watched him, hoping for the breath to begin to flutter and

-labour. But though the great Nature was with him, herself passioning in

-all the little fibres to keep life pulsing on, yet her passion was not

-enough; and while I looked the little life went out.</p>

-

-<p>... I held the tiny body in my hand, and it was almost as if the

-difference between living and not living slipped through my fingers and

-was gone. If only that one within me, who watches between the seeing and

-the knowing, had been a little quicker, I might almost have

-understood....</p>

-

-<p>"Them little things go out like a match," said my neighbour.</p>

-

-<p>She was standing on the other side of the box hedge, and I caught a look

-on her face that I had seen there once or twice before, so that my heart

-had warmed to her; and now, because of that look, she fitted within the

-moment like the right word.</p>

-

-<p>"It don't seem like anybody could <i>mean</i> 'em to die before their time,"

-she said. "Ain't it almost as if it happened when Everything somehow

-couldn't help it?"</p>

-

-<p>It was this, the tragedy of the Unfulfilled Intention, that was in my

-mind while I hollowed the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> little grave under the hedge. And when we had

-finished, my neighbour, who had stepped informally over the box to help

-me, looked up with a return of that fleeting expression which I had

-noted.</p>

-

-<p>"I guess we've found one now for sure," she said.</p>

-

-<p>"Found one?" I puzzled.</p>

-

-<p>"I thought you knew," she told me. "I thought everybody knew&mdash;we've been

-looking for one so long. For a baby."</p>

-

-<p>She never had told me and no one had told me, but I loved her for

-thinking that all the world knew. There are abroad a multitude of these

-sweet suspicions as well as the sad misgivings of the hunted. She had

-simply let me know, that early morning in the garden, her sorrow that

-there was "no little thing runnin' round." And now she told me for how

-long they had been trying to find one to adopt, consciously serving no

-social need, but simply hungering for a child whom they could "take to."

-It was a story of fruitless visits to the homes in the city, the news

-sent of this little waif or that, all proving too old or of too sad an

-inheritance. To me it would seem that the more tragic the inheritance

-the more poignantly sounds the cry for foster-folk. And this may be

-extreme, I know, but virtue, I find, does not lie exclusively in the

-mean, either. It lies partly in one's taste in extremes. However,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> this

-special extreme I find not generally believed in as I believe in it; and

-my neighbour, not sharing it, had waited on with empty arms.</p>

-

-<p>And now, after all the long hoping, she had found a baby&mdash;a baby who

-filled all the requirements and more. First of all, he was a boy;

-second, he was of healthful Scotch parentage; third, he was six weeks

-old; and, fondest I could see in my neighbour's heart, he was good to

-look at. When she told me this she produced, from beneath her apron, a

-broken picture post-card. The baby was lying on a white blanket spread

-on the grass, and he was looking up with the intentness of some little

-soul not yet embodied; or as if, having been born, some shadow-thing,

-left over from his source of shadows, yet detained his attention.

-"William," it said beneath the picture.</p>

-

-<p>"But I shall call him Kenneth," my neighbour said; "I've always meant

-to. I don't want he should be called after his father, being he isn't

-ours, you might say. But he is ours," she added in a kind of challenge.

-"<i>He's</i> going after him to-morrow to the city"&mdash;and now "he" meant her

-husband, in that fine habit of use by these husbands and wives of the

-two third persons singular to mean only each other, in a splendid,

-ultimate, inevitable sense, authentic as the "we" of a sovereign, no

-more to be mistaken. "I'd go too," she added, "but we're adopting the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>

-baby with the egg money&mdash;we've saved it for years for when the time

-come. And one fare to the city and back is a lot of eggs. I thought I'd

-rather wait for him here and have the ticket money to spend on the

-clothes."</p>

-

-<p>She was on her way, I thought I guessed, to carry her good news to our

-friends in the village, for she bore that same air which I have noted,

-of being impermanent and subject to flight. And as she left me she

-turned to give me one of those rare compliments which are priceless.</p>

-

-<p>"You come over this afternoon," she said, "and I'll show you what little

-things I've made."</p>

-

-<p>I remember another compliment. It was when, in town, a charming little

-woman, a woman all of physical curves and mental tangents, had been

-telling a group of us about a gay day in a four-in-hand. She had not

-looked at me because for that sort of woman, as well as for others, I

-lack all that which would make them take account of my presence; but

-when in the four-in-hand she came to some mention of the road where the

-accident had nearly occurred ("Oh, it was a beautiful road," she said,

-"the river on one side, and the highlands, and a whole <i>mob</i> of trees,")

-she turned straight upon me through her description as consistently as

-she had neglected me when she described the elbow-bits of the leaders

-and the boots of the woman on the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>box-seat. It may have been a chance,

-but I have always hugged it to me.</p>

-

-<p>My neighbour's house is small, and her little upstairs rooms are the

-half-story with sloping ceilings and windows which extend from the floor

-to the top of one's head. It gives me a curious sense of

-over-familiarity with a window to be as tall as it is. I feel that I

-have it at advantage and that I am using it with undue intimacy. When I

-was a little girl I used to creep under the dining-room table and sit

-there, looking up, transfixed at the difference. A new angle of material

-vision, the sight of the other side of the shield, always gives me this

-pause. But whereas this other aspect of things used to be a delight,

-now, in life, I shrink a little from availing myself of certain

-revelations. I have a great wish to know things, but I would know them

-otherwise than by looking at their linings. I think that even a window

-should be sanctioned in its reticences.</p>

-

-<p>Before a black walnut commode my neighbour knelt that afternoon, and I

-found that it was filled with the things which she had made for the

-baby, when they should find him. These she showed to me&mdash;they were

-simple and none too fine, and she had made them on her sewing-machine in

-the intervals of her busy life. For three years she had wrought at them,

-buying them from the egg money.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> I wondered if this secret pastime of

-garment-making might not account for my impression of her that she must

-always be off to engage in something other. Perhaps it was this

-occupation, always calling her, which would not let her appear fixed at

-garden-watering or festival. I think that it may be so of any who are

-"pressed in the spirit" to serve, to witness to any truth: that is their

-vocation and every other is an avocation, a calling away from the real

-business of life. For this reason it is my habit to think of the social

-workers in any division of the service, family or town or state or

-church, as Vocationists. It is they who are following the one great

-occupation. The rest of us are avocationists. In my neighbour I

-perceived one of the great comrade company of the Vocationists,

-unconscious of her banner, but because of some sweet, secret piping,

-following, following....</p>

-

-<p>"I've always thought I'd get to do a little embroidering on a yoke or

-two," she said, "but so far I couldn't. Anyway I thought I could do the

-plain part and running the machine before he came. The other I could sit

-by the crib and do. Embroidery seems sort o' baby-watchin' work, don't

-it?"</p>

-

-<p>When I left her I walked across the lawns to my home in a sense of

-security and peace. With increasing thousands consciously striving and

-passioning to help, and thousands helping because of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> the unconscious

-spirit within them, are there not many windows in the walls?</p>

-

-<p>"He" was to go by the Accommodation early next morning to bring home the

-baby. Therefore when, just before seven o'clock, I observed my

-neighbour's husband leave his home and join Peter at his gate as usual,

-I went at once to see if something was amiss.</p>

-

-<p>My neighbour was having breakfast as her custom was "after the men-folks

-were out of the way." At all events she was pretending to eat. I saw in

-her eyes that something was troubling her, but she greeted me

-cheerfully. I sat by the sewing-machine while she went on with her

-pretence at breakfast.</p>

-

-<p>"The little thing's sick," she said. "Last night we got the despatch.

-'Baby in hospital for day or two. Will advise often,' it had in it. I'm

-glad they put that in. I'll feel better to know they'll get good

-advice."</p>

-

-<p>I sat with her for a long time, regardless of my work or that Miggy was

-waiting for me. I was struck by the charm of matter-of-fact hopefulness

-in my neighbour, not the deliberate forcing of hope, but the simple

-expectation that nothing tragic would occur. But for all that she ate no

-breakfast, and I knew well the faint, quite physical sickness that she

-must have endured since the message came.</p>

-

-<p>"I'm going to get his basket ready to-day," she said. "I never did that,

-two reasons. One was, it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> seemed sort of taking too much for granted,

-like heating your spider before the meat wagon drives up. The other

-reason was I needed the basket for the clothes."</p>

-

-<p>I stayed with her while she made ready the clothes-basket, lining it

-with an old muslin curtain, filling it with pillows, covering it with

-the afghan from the parlour couch. Then, in a shoe box edged with the

-curtain's broad ruffle, she put an array of little things: the brush

-from the spare-room bureau, the pincushion from her own work-basket, a

-sachet bag that had come with a last year's Christmas gift, a cake of

-"nice soap" which she had kept for years and never unwrapped because it

-was so expensive. And then she added a little glass-stoppered bottle of

-white pills.</p>

-

-<p>"I don't know what they're for," she said. "I found them when I

-housecleaned, and there was so many of 'em I hated to throw 'em away. Of

-course I'll never use 'em, but they look sort of nice in there&mdash;so white

-and a glass cork&mdash;don't you think so?"</p>

-

-<p>She walked with me across the lawn and stood brooding, one hand across

-her mouth, looking down at the disturbance&mdash;so slight!&mdash;in the grass

-where we had laid the bird. And on her face was the look which, each

-time that I saw it there, drew me nearer to her.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p><p>"'Seems as if I'd ought to be there to the hospital," she said, "doing

-what I can. Do you s'pose they'll take good care of him? I guess they

-know more about it than I do. But if I could get hold of him in my arms

-it seems as if I could help 'em."</p>

-

-<p>I said what I could, and she went away to her house. And for the first

-time since I had known her she did not seem put upon to be back at some

-employment. These times of unwonted idleness are terrible to witness. I

-remember a farmer whom I once saw in the afternoon, dressed in his best,

-waiting in the kitchen for the hour of his daughter's wedding, and I

-wondered that the great hands did not work of their own will. The lost

-aspect of certain men on holidays, the awful inactivity of the day of a

-funeral, the sad idleness of old age, all these are very near to the

-tragedy of negation. Work, the positive, the normal, the joyous, is like

-an added way of being. I thought that I would never again marvel at my

-neighbour for being always on the edge of flight to some pressing

-occupation. Why should she not be so?&mdash;with all that there is to be

-done. Whether we rush about, or conceal the need and rush secretly, is a

-detail of our breeding; the need is to get things done, to become by

-doing. And while for myself I would prefer the accomplishment of not

-seeming to hurry, as another is accomplished at the harp, yet I own that

-I would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> cheerfully forego the pretty grace rather than find myself

-without some slight degree of the robust proficiency of getting things

-done.</p>

-

-<p>"If you're born a picture in a book," Calliope once said, "it's all very

-well to set still on the page an' hold your hands. But if you're born

-anyways human at all, stick up your head an' start out for somewhere."</p>

-

-<p>My neighbour rarely comes to my house. And therefore, though she is to

-me so familiar a figure in her garden, when next morning I found her

-awaiting me in my sitting room, she seemed strange to me. Perhaps, too,

-she was really strange to me that day.</p>

-

-<p>"My baby died," she said.</p>

-

-<p>She stood there looking at me, and I knew that what she said was true,

-but it seemed to me for a moment that I could not have it so.</p>

-

-<p>"He died yesterday in the evening," she told me. "I just heard this

-morning, when the telegraph office opened. I dressed myself to go after

-him, but <i>he's</i> gone."</p>

-

-<p>"To go after him?" I repeated.</p>

-

-<p>She nodded.</p>

-

-<p>"He was in the charity part. I was afraid they'd bury him in the

-potter's field and they wouldn't mark&mdash;it, and that I couldn't never

-tell which one it was. So I want to get him and have him buried here.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>

-<i>He</i> didn't want I should go&mdash;he thought it'd be too much for me. But I

-was bound to, so he says he'd go. They'd ought to get here on the Five

-o'Clock this afternoon. Oh, if I'd went yesterday, do you think it would

-'a' been any different?"</p>

-

-<p>There I could comfort her. I did not think it would have been different.

-But when I tried to tell her how much better it was this way than that

-the baby should first have come to her and then have sickened, she would

-have none of it.</p>

-

-<p>"I've never held him once," she said. "Do you s'pose anything could be

-worse than that? I'd rather have got hold of him once, no matter what."</p>

-

-<p>It touched me unutterably, the grief of this mother who was no mother. I

-had no knowledge what to say to her. But I think that what she wanted

-most was companionship. She went to one and another and another of our

-neighbours to whom she had shown so happily the broken post-card

-picture, and to them in the same way she took the news:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"My baby died."</p>

-

-<p>And I was amazed to find how in this little time, the tentacles of her

-heart having fastened and clung, she had made for herself, without ever

-having seen the child, little things to tell about him: His eyes were so

-bright; the sun was shining and the picture was made out-of-doors, yet

-the eyes were opened wide. They were blue eyes&mdash;had she told us?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> Had we

-noticed the hands in the picture? And the head was a beautiful shape....

-All this seemed to me marvellous. For I saw that no woman ever mourns

-for any child dumbly, as a bird mourns a fledgling, but even if she

-never sees it, she will yet contrive some little tender ways to give it

-personality and to cherish it.</p>

-

-<p>They did their best to comfort her, the women of the village. But many

-of them had lost little children of their own, and these women could not

-regard her loss as at all akin to theirs. I think that this my neighbour

-felt; and perhaps she dimly felt that to me her grief, hardly less than

-theirs, brimmed with the tragic disaster of the unfulfilled and bore,

-besides, its own peculiar bitterness. In any case I was of those who,

-that afternoon, went out to the cemetery to await the coming of my

-neighbour and "him" and their little burden. Calliope was there, and

-Mis' Amanda Toplady and Miggy; and when it was time to go Little Child

-was with me, so she went too. For I am not of those who keep from

-children familiarity with death. Familiarity with the ways of death I

-would spare them, but not the basic things, primal as day.</p>

-

-<p>"I don't want to give a real funeral," my neighbour had said. "I just

-want the few that I tell to happen out there to the cemetery, along

-about five. And then we'll come with him. It seems as if it'll hurt

-less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> that way. I couldn't bear to see a whole line driving along, and

-me look back and know who it was for."</p>

-

-<p>The cemetery had the dignity and serenity of a meadow, a meadow still

-somewhat amazed that it had been for a while distracted from its ancient

-uses, but, after all, perceiving no permanent difference in its

-function. I am never weary of walking down these grassy streets and of

-recounting their strangenesses. As that of the headstone of David

-Bibber's wives, one stone extending across the heads of the two graves

-and at either end of the stone two Gothic peaks from whose inner slopes

-reach two marble hands, clasped midway, and,</p>

-

-<p class="center">SACRED TO THE WIVES OF DAVID BIBBER</p>

-

-<p>inscribed below, the wifely names not appearing in the epitaph. And that

-of Mark Sturgis who, the village said, had had the good luck to marry

-two women named Dora; so he had erected a low monument to "Dora, Beloved

-Wife of Mark Sturgis, Jr." ("But how mixin' it must be to the ghosts!"

-Calliope said.) And of the young girl of a former Friendship family of

-wealth, a girl who sleeps beneath a monument on which stands a great

-figure of a young woman in a white marble dress made with three

-flounces. ("Honest," Calliope had put it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> "you can't hardly tell

-whether it's a tomb or a valentine.")</p>

-

-<p>But these have for me an interest less of the bizarre than of the human,

-and nothing that is human was alien to that hour.</p>

-

-<p>We waited for them by the new little grave, the disturbance&mdash;so

-slight!&mdash;in the earth where we would lay the stranger baby. Our hands

-were filled with garden flowers&mdash;Calliope had drawn a little hand cart

-laden with ferns and sweet-brier, and my dear Mis' Amanda Toplady had

-cut all the half-blown buds from her loved tea rose.</p>

-

-<p>"It seems like a little baby wasn't real dead that I hadn't helped lay

-out," said that great Mis' Amanda, trying to find her handkerchief. "Oh,

-I wish't it was alive. It seems like such a little bit of comin' alive

-to ask the Lord!"</p>

-

-<p>And as the afternoon shadows drew about us with fostering arms,</p>

-

-<p>"Out-Here knows we feel bad more than Down Town, don't it?" said Little

-Child.</p>

-

-<p>I have always thought very beautiful that village custom of which I have

-before spoken, which provides that the father and mother of a little

-baby who dies may take it with them in a closed carriage to the grave.

-It was so that my neighbour and her husband brought their baby to the

-cemetery from the station, with the little coffin on their knees.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span></p><p>On the box beside the driver Peter was riding. We learned afterward

-that he had appeared at the station and had himself taken that little

-coffin from the car. "So then it didn't have to be on the truck at all,"

-my neighbour noted thankfully when she told me. I think that it must be

-this living with only a street or two between folk and the open country

-which gives these unconscious sharpenings of sensibility often,

-otherwhere, bred only by old niceties of habit.</p>

-

-<p>So little Kenneth was buried, who never had the name save in unreality;

-whom my neighbour had never tended; who lived for her only in dream and

-on that broken post-card and here in the hidden dust. It made her grief

-so sad a thing that her arms did not miss him; nor had he slipped from

-any usage of the day; nor was any link broken with the past; only the

-plans that had hung in air had gone out, like flames which had kindled

-nothing. Because of this she sorrowed from within some closed place at

-which her husband could only guess, who stood patiently without in his

-embarrassed concern, his clumsy anxiety to do what there was to be done,

-his wondering distress at his wife's drooping grief. But her sorrow was

-rooted in the love of women for the "little young thing, runnin' round,"

-for which she had long passioned.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, God, who lived in the spirit of the little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> Lord Jesus, live Thou

-in this child's spirit, and it in Thee, world without end," Doctor June

-prayed. And Little Child whispered to me and then went to let fall a

-pink in the grave. "So if the flower gets to be an angel flower, then

-they can go round together," she explained.</p>

-

-<p>When I looked up there were in the west the first faint heraldings of

-rose. And against it stood Miggy and Peter, side by side, looking down

-this new way of each other's lives which took account of sorrow. He said

-something to her, and she nodded, and gave him her white hollyhocks to

-lay with the rest. And as they turned away together Little Child

-whispered to me, pulling herself, by my arm, to high tiptoe:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"That little child we put in the sunset," she said, nodding to the west,

-"it's there now. It's there now!"</p>

-

-<p>Perhaps it was that my heart was filled with the tragedy of the

-unfulfilled intention, perhaps it was that I thought that Little Child's

-whispering was true. In any case I hastened my steps, and as we passed

-out on the road I overtook Miggy and Peter.</p>

-

-<p>"Peter," said I, "may Miggy and I come to pay you that visit now, on the

-way back?"</p>

-

-<p>Miggy looked startled.</p>

-

-<p>"It's supper time," she objected.</p>

-

-<p>Who are we that we should interrupt a sunset, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> a situation, or the

-stars in their courses, merely to sup? Neither Miggy nor I belong to

-those who do so. Besides, we had to pass Peter's very door. I said so,

-and all the time Peter's face was glowing.</p>

-

-<p>"Hurry on ahead," I bade him, "and Miggy and Little Child and I will

-come in your house to call."</p>

-

-<p>He looked at me gratefully, and waited for good night to my neighbour,

-and went swiftly away down the road toward the sunset.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, goody grand, goody grand," Little Child went on softly, in an

-invocation of her own to some secret divinity of her pleasure. "Oh, that

-little child we put there, it's talkin' to the sky, an' I guess that

-makes sunset be!"</p>

-

-<p>My neighbour was looking back across the tranquil meadow which might

-have been deep with summer hay instead of mounded to its sad harvest.</p>

-

-<p>"I wish," she said, "I could have had his little grave in my garden,

-same as you would a bird. Still I s'pose a cemet'ry is a cemet'ry and

-had ought to be buried in. But oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to

-have him here in Friendship Village. It's better to think about, ain't

-it?"</p>

-

-<p>But the thing that gripped my heart was to see her, beside her husband,

-go down the road and not hurry. All that bustling impermanence was

-fallen from her. I think that now I am becoming thankful for every one

-who goes busily quickening the day<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> with a multitude, yes, even with a

-confusion, of homely, cheerful tasks.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy slipped her hand within my arm.</p>

-

-<p>"Did you think of it?" she said. "I've been, all the time. It's most the

-same with her as it would be to me if I'd lost <i>her</i>. You know ... that

-little Margaret. I mean, if she should never be."</p>

-

-<p>As when one hears the note of an oriole ringing from the innermost air,

-so now it seems to me that after these things the deeps of air can never

-again be wholly alien to me.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>XVIII</span> <span class="smaller">AT PETER'S HOUSE</span></h2>

-

-<p>I wondered somewhat that Peter did not come out of his house to fetch

-us. He was not even about the little yard when we went up the walk,

-though he knew that we must arrive but a few moments after he did.

-Little Child ran away to pick Bouncing Bet and Sweet Clover in the long,

-rank grass of the unkept garden. And Miggy and I went and stood on the

-porch before Peter's door, and I knew what I intended.</p>

-

-<p>"Rap!" I said to Miggy.</p>

-

-<p>She looked at me in surprise&mdash;I have not often commanded her like that.

-But I wanted to see her stand at Peter's door asking for admission. And

-I think that Peter had wanted it too and that this was why he had not

-come to the gate to fetch us. I guessed it by the light on his face

-when, in the middle of Miggy's knock, he caught open the door. I like to

-remember his face as it looked at that moment, with the little twist of

-mouth and lifting of brow which gave him a peculiar sweetness and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>

-na&iuml;vet&eacute;, curiously contradicted by the way his eyes were when they met

-Miggy's.</p>

-

-<p>"How long it took you," he said. "Come in. <i>Come in.</i>"</p>

-

-<p>We went in, and I looked at Miggy. For I did not want her to step in

-that house as she would have stepped in a house that was just a house.

-Is it not wonderful how some front doors are Front Doors Plus? I do not

-know plus what&mdash;that is one of those good little in-between things which

-we know without always naming. But there are some front doors which are

-to me boards and glass and a tinkling cymbal bell; while other doors of

-no better architecture let me within dear depths of homes which are to

-houses what friends are to inhabitants. It was so that I would have had

-Miggy go within Peter's house,&mdash;not as within doors, but as within arms.</p>

-

-<p>We entered directly from the porch into the small parlour&mdash;the kind of

-man's parlour that makes a woman long to take it on her lap and tend it.

-There were no curtains. Between the windows was a big table filled with

-neat piles of newspapers and weeklies till there should be time to look

-them over. The shelf had a lamp, not filled, a clock, not going, and a

-pile of seed catalogues. On two walls were three calendars with big

-hollyhocks and puppies and ladies in sunbonnets. The entire inner<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> wall

-was occupied by a map of the state&mdash;why does a man so cherish a map of

-something, hung up somewhere? On the organ was a row of blue books&mdash;what

-is it that men are always looking for in blue books? In a corner, on the

-floor, stood a shotgun. The wood stove had been "left up" all summer to

-save putting it up in the fall&mdash;this business of getting a stove on

-rollers and jacking it up and remembering where it stood so that the

-pipe will fit means, in the village, a day of annual masculine sacrifice

-to the feminine foolishness of wanting stoves down in summer. There was

-nothing disorderly about the room; but it was dressed with no sash or

-hair ribbon or coral beads, as a man dresses his little girl.</p>

-

-<p>"We don't use this room much," Peter said. "We sit in here sometimes in

-summer, but I think when a man sits in his parlour he always feels like

-he was being buried from it, same as they're used for."</p>

-

-<p>"Why&mdash;" said Miggy, and stopped. What she was going to say it was not

-important to know, but I was glad that she had been going to say it.

-Something, perhaps, about this being a very pretty room if there were

-somebody to give it a touch or two.</p>

-

-<p>Peter was obviously eager to be in the next room, and that, he

-explained, would have been the dining<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> room, only he had taken it for

-his own, and they ate in the kitchen. I think that I had never heard him

-mention his father at all, and this "we" of his now was a lonelier thing

-than any lonely "I."</p>

-

-<p>"This is my room," he said as we entered it. "It's where I live when I'm

-not at the works. Come and let me show you."</p>

-

-<p>So Peter showed Miggy his room, and he showed it to me, too, though I do

-not think that he was conscious of that. It was a big room, bare of

-floor and, save for the inescapable flowery calendar, bare of walls.

-There was a shelf of books&mdash;not many, but according to Peter's nature

-sufficiently well-selected to plead for him: "Look at us. Who could love

-us and not be worth while?"&mdash;bad enough logic, in all conscience, to

-please any lover. Miggy hardly looked at the books. She so

-exasperatingly took it for granted that a man must be everything in

-general that it left hardly anything for him to be in particular. But

-Peter made her look, and he let me look too, and I supplied the comments

-and Miggy occasionally did her three little nods. The writing table

-Peter had made from a box, and by this Miggy was equally untouched. All

-men, it appeared, should be able to make writing tables from boxes. With

-the linen table cover it was a little different&mdash;this Peter's mother had

-once worked in cross-stitch for his room, and Miggy lifted an end and

-looked at it.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span></p><p>"She took all those stitches for you!" she said. "There's one broken,"

-she showed him.</p>

-

-<p>"I can mend that," Peter said proudly, "I'll show you my needle kit."</p>

-

-<p>At this she laughed out suddenly with, "<i>Needle kit!</i> What a real

-regular old bachelor you are, aren't you?"</p>

-

-<p>"I can't help that," said Peter, with "and the same cannot be said for

-you" sticking from the sentence.</p>

-

-<p>On the table lay the cannery account books, and one was open at a full

-page of weary little figures.</p>

-

-<p>"Is this where you sit nights and do your work and read?" Miggy

-demanded.</p>

-

-<p>"Right here," Peter told her, "every night of the year, 'most. Except

-when I come to see you."</p>

-

-<p>Miggy stood looking at the table and the wooden chair.</p>

-

-<p>"That's funny," she remarked finally, with an air of meditative

-surprise; "they know you so much better than I do, don't they?"</p>

-

-<p>"Well," Peter said gravely, "they haven't been thought about as much as

-you have, Miggy&mdash;that's one thing."</p>

-

-<p>"Thinking's nothing," said Miggy, merrily; "sometimes you get a tune in

-your head and you can't get it out."</p>

-

-<p>"Sit down at the table," said Peter, abruptly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> "Sit down!" he repeated,

-when her look questioned him. "I want to see you there."</p>

-

-<p>She obeyed him, laughing a little, and quite in the woman's way of

-pretending that obedience is a choice. Peter looked at her. It is true

-that he had been doing nothing else all the while, but now that she sat

-at the table&mdash;his table&mdash;he looked more than before.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," he said, "well, well." As a man says when he has a present and

-has no idea what to say about it.</p>

-

-<p>Peter's photographs were on the wall above the table, and Peter suddenly

-leaned past Miggy and took down the picture of his mother and put it in

-her hand, without saying anything. For the first time Miggy met his

-eyes.</p>

-

-<p>"Your mother," she said, "why, Peter. She looked&mdash;oh, Peter, she looked

-like you!"</p>

-

-<p>Peter nodded. "Yes, I do look like she did," he said; "I'm always so

-glad."</p>

-

-<p>"She knew you when you were a little bit of a baby, Peter," Miggy

-advanced suddenly.</p>

-

-<p>Peter admitted it gravely. She had.</p>

-

-<p>"Well," said Miggy, as Peter had said it. "Well."</p>

-

-<p>There was a picture of Peter's father as a young man,&mdash;black,

-curly-haired, black-moustached, the cheeks slightly tinted in the

-picture, his hands laid trimly along his knees. The face was weak,

-empty,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> but it held that mere confidence of youth which always gives a

-special sting to the grief of unfulfilment. Over this they passed,

-saying nothing. It struck me that in the delicacy of that silence it was

-almost as if Miggy shared something with Peter. Also, it struck me

-pleasantly that Miggy's indifference to the personalities of divers

-aunts in straight bangs and long basques was slightly exaggerated,

-especially when, "I never thought about your having any aunts," she

-observed.</p>

-

-<p>And then Peter took down a tiny picture of the sort we call in the

-village "card size," and gave it to her.</p>

-

-<p>"Guess who," he said.</p>

-

-<p>It was a little boy of not more than five, in a straight black coat

-dress, buttoned in the front and trimmed with broad black velvet strips,

-and having a white scalloped collar and white cuffs. One hand was

-resting on the back of a camp-chair and the other held a black helmet

-cap. The shoes had double rows of buttons, and for some secret reason

-the photographer had had the child laboriously cross one foot

-negligently over the other. The fine head, light-curled, was resting in

-the horns of that ex-device that steadied one out of all semblance to

-self. But in spite of the man who had made the picture, the little boy

-was so wholly adorable that you wanted to say so.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span></p><p>"Peter!" Miggy said, "It's <i>you</i>."</p>

-

-<p>I do not know how she knew. I think that I would not have known. But

-Miggy knew, and her knowing made me understand something which evidently

-she herself did not understand. For she looked at the picture and looked

-at it, a strange, surprised smile on her face. And,</p>

-

-<p>"Well, well, <i>well</i>," she said again. "I never thought about that

-before. I mean about you. <i>Then.</i>"</p>

-

-<p>"Would&mdash;would you want that picture, Miggy?" Peter asked; "you can have

-it if you do."</p>

-

-<p>"Can I really?" said Miggy. "Well, I do want it. Goodness...."</p>

-

-<p>"I always kind of thought," Peter said slowly, "that when I have a son

-he'll look something like that. He might, you know."</p>

-

-<p>Peter was leaning beside her, elbows on the table, and Miggy looked up

-at him over the picture of the child, and made her three little nods.</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," she said, "you would want your little boy to look like you."</p>

-

-<p>"And I'd want him named Peter. It's a homely old name, but I'd want him

-to have it."</p>

-

-<p>"Peter isn't a homely name," said Miggy, in a manner of surprise. "Yes,

-of course you'd want him&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>The sentence fell between them unfinished. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> I thought that Miggy's

-face, still somewhat saddened by the little Kenneth and now tender with

-its look for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing of colour.

-But then I saw that this would be the light of the sunset on her cheeks,

-for now the West was become a glory of rose and yellow, so that it held

-captive her eyes. It is too frail a thing for me to have grasped by

-sense, but the Moment seemed to say&mdash;and could give no reason&mdash;that our

-sunset compact Miggy kept then without remembering the compact.</p>

-

-<p>It almost startled me when out in the unkept garden Little Child began

-to sing. We had nearly forgotten her and we could not see her, so that

-she might have been any other little child wandering in the sweet

-clover, or merely a little voice coming in with the western light:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<div>"I like to stand in this great air</div>

-<div>And see the sun go down.</div>

-<div>It shows me a bright veil to wear</div>

-<div>And such a pretty gown.</div>

-<div>Oh, I can see a playmate there</div>

-<div>Far up in Splendour Town!"</div>

-</div></div></div>

-

-<p>"Look here," said Peter to Miggy; and I went over to the sunset window

-and let them go on alone.</p>

-

-<p>He led her about the room, and she still had the little picture in her

-hand. From the bureau, with its small array of cheap brushes and boxes,

-she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> turned abruptly away. I think that she may have felt as I felt

-about the splash of rose on the rose-breasted grosbeak's throat&mdash;that I

-ought not to have been looking. Beyond was a little old dry-goods box

-for odds and ends, a box which must have known, with a kind of feminine

-intelligence, that it ought to be covered with cretonne. On this box

-Miggy knelt to read Peter's high school diploma, and she stopped before

-a picture of the house where he was born. "Was it there?" she asked.

-"Doesn't that seem funny?" Which manifestly it did not seem. "Is <i>that</i>

-where your violin lives?" she asked, when they came to its

-corner&mdash;surely a way of betrayal that she had thought of it as living

-somewhere else. And all the while she carried the picture in her hand,

-and the sunset glorified the room, and Little Child was singing in the

-garden.</p>

-

-<p>"Peter," said Miggy, "I don't believe a man who can play the violin can

-sew. Give me the needle kit. I'm going to mend the table cover&mdash;may I?"</p>

-

-<p>Might she! Peter, his face shining, brought out his red flannel

-needle-book&mdash;he kept it on the shelf with his shaving things!&mdash;and, his

-face shining more, sat on a creaking camp-chair and watched her.</p>

-

-<p>"Miggy," he said, as she caught the threads skilfully together, "I don't

-believe I've ever seen you sew. I know I never have."</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p><p>"This isn't sewing," Miggy said.</p>

-

-<p>"It's near enough like it to suit me," said Peter.</p>

-

-<p>He drew a breath long, and looked about him. I knew how he was seeing

-the bare room, lamp-lighted, and himself trying to work in spite of the

-longing that teased and possessed him and bade him give it up and lean

-back and think of her; or of tossing on the hard couch in the tyranny of

-living his last hour with her and of living, too, the hours that might

-never be. And here she was in this room&mdash;his room. Peter dropped his

-head on his hand and his eyes did not leave her face save to venture an

-occasional swift, ecstatic excursion to her fingers.</p>

-

-<p>Simply and all quietly, as Nature sends her gifts, miracles moved toward

-completion while Miggy sewed. The impulse to do for him this trifling

-service was like a signal, and when she took up the needle for him I

-think that women whose hands had long lain quiet stirred within her

-blood. As for Peter&mdash;but these little housewifely things which enlighten

-a woman merely tease a man, who already knows their import and longs for

-all sweet fragments of time to be merged in the long possession.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy gave the needle back to Peter and he took it&mdash;needle, red book,

-and hand.</p>

-

-<p>"Miggy!" he said, and the name on his lips was like another name. And it

-was as if she were in some place remote and he were calling her.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p><p>She looked at him as if she knew the call. Since the world began, only

-for one reason does a man call a woman like that.</p>

-

-<p>"What is it you want?" she said&mdash;and her voice was very sweet and very

-tired.</p>

-

-<p>"I want more of <i>you</i>!" said Peter Cary.</p>

-

-<p>She may have tried to say something, but her voice trembled away.</p>

-

-<p>"I thought it would be everything&mdash;your coming here to-day," Peter said.

-"I've wanted it and wanted it. And what does it amount to? Nothing,

-except to make me wild with wanting you never to go away. I dread to

-think of your leaving me here&mdash;shutting the door and being gone. If it

-was just plain wanting you I could meet that, and beat it, like I do the

-things down to the works. But it isn't that. It's like it was something

-big&mdash;bigger than me, and outside of me, and it gets hold of me, and it's

-like it asked for you without my knowing. I can't do anything that you

-aren't some of it. It isn't fair, Miggy. I want more of you&mdash;all of

-you&mdash;all the time, Miggy, all the time...."</p>

-

-<p>I should have liked to see Miggy's face when she looked at Peter, whose

-eyes were giving her everything and were asking everything of her; but I

-was studying the sunset, glory upon glory, to match the glory here. And

-the singing of Little Child began<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> again, like that of a little voice

-vagrant in the red west....</p>

-

-<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<div>"Oh, I can see a playmate there,</div>

-<div>Far up in Splendour Town!"</div>

-</div></div></div>

-

-<p>Miggy heard her, and remembered.</p>

-

-<p>"Peter, Peter!" she cried, "I couldn't&mdash;I never could bring us two on

-you to support."</p>

-

-<p>Peter gave her hands a little shake, as if he would have shaken her. I

-think that he would have shaken her if it had been two or three thousand

-years earlier in the world's history.</p>

-

-<p>"You two!" he cried; "why, Miggy, when we marry do I want&mdash;or do you

-want&mdash;that it should stay just you and me? We want children. I want you

-for their mother as much as I want you for my wife."</p>

-

-<p>It was the voice of the paramount, compelling spirit, the sovereign

-voice of the Family, calling through the wilderness. Peter knew,&mdash;this

-fine, vital boy seeking his own happiness; he gropingly understood this

-mighty thing, and he was trying his best to serve it. And, without

-knowing that she knew, Miggy knew too ... and the seal that she knew was

-in what was in the sunset. And as far removed from these things as the

-sunset itself was all Miggy's cheap cynicism about love and all the

-triviality of her criticism of Peter.</p>

-

-<p>Miggy stood motionless, looking at Peter. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> then, like an evil spell

-which began to work, another presence was in the room....</p>

-

-<p>Somewhile before I had begun to hear the sound, as a faint undercurrent

-to consciousness; an unimportant, unpleasant, insisting sound that

-somehow interfered. Gradually it had come nearer and had interfered more

-and had mingled harshly with the tender treble of Little Child. Now,

-from Peter's gate the sound besieged my ears and entered the room and

-explained itself to us all&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<div>"My Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I <i>never</i> know,</div>

-<div>You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh&mdash;"</div>

-</div></div></div>

-

-<p>the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air....</p>

-

-<p>I knew what it was, and they knew. At the sound of his father's voice,

-drunken, piteous, Peter dropped Miggy's hands and his head went down and

-he stood silent, like a smitten thing. My own heart sank, for I knew

-what Miggy had felt, and I thought I knew what she would feel now. So

-here was another unfulfilled intention, another plan gone astray in an

-unperfected order.</p>

-

-<p>Peter had turned somewhat away before he spoke.</p>

-

-<p>"I'll have to go now," he said quietly, "I guess you'll excuse me."</p>

-

-<p>He went toward the kitchen door ashamed, miserable, all the brightness

-and vitality gone from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> him. I am sorry that he did not see Miggy's face

-when she lifted it. I saw it, and I could have sung as I looked. Not for

-Peter or for Miggy, but for the sake of something greater than they,

-something that touched her hand, commanded "Look at me," bade her follow

-with us all.</p>

-

-<p>Before Peter reached the door she overtook him, stood before him, put

-her hands together for a moment, and then laid one swiftly on his cheek.</p>

-

-<p>"Peter," she said, "that don't make any difference. That don't make any

-difference."</p>

-

-<p>No doubt he understood her words, but I think what he understood best

-was her hand on his cheek. He caught her shoulders and looked and

-looked....</p>

-

-<p>"Honest&mdash;honest, don't it?" he searched her.</p>

-

-<p>You would not have said that her answer to that was wholly direct. She

-only let fall her hand from his cheek to his shoulder, and,</p>

-

-<p>"Peter," she said, "<i>is it like this</i>?"</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," he said simply, "it's like this."</p>

-

-<p>And then what she said was ever so slightly muffled, as if at last she

-had dropped her head in that sweet confusion which she had never seemed

-to know; as if at last she was looking at Peter as if he <i>was</i> Peter.</p>

-

-<p>"Then I don't ever want to be any place where you aren't," she told him.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span></p><p>"Miggy!" Peter cried, "take care what you say. Remember&mdash;he'd live with

-us."</p>

-

-<p>She made her three little nods.</p>

-

-<p>"So he will," she answered, "so he will. He&mdash;and my little sister&mdash;and

-all of us."</p>

-

-<p>Peter's answer was a shout.</p>

-

-<p>"Say it out!" he cried, "say you will. Miggy! I've <i>got</i> to hear you say

-it out!"</p>

-

-<p>"Peter, Peter," she said, "I want to marry you."</p>

-

-<p>He took her in his arms and in the room was the glory upon glory of the

-west, a thing of wings and doors ajar. And strong as the light, there

-prevailed about them the soul of the Family, that distributes burdens,

-shares responsibilities, accepts what is and what is to come. Its voice

-was in the voice of Little Child singing in the garden, and of old Cary

-babbling at the gate. Its heart was the need of Peter and Miggy, each

-for the other. I saw in their faces the fine freedoms of the sunset,

-that sunset where Miggy and Little Child and I had agreed that a certain

-spirit lives. And it did but tally with the momentous utterance of these

-things and of the evening when Miggy spoke again.</p>

-

-<p>"Go now&mdash;you go to him," she said, "we'll wait. And&mdash;Peter&mdash;when you

-come back, I want to see everything in the room again."</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><span>XIX</span> <span class="smaller">THE CUSTODIAN</span></h2>

-

-<p>When the river is low, a broad, flat stone lying a little way from shore

-at the foot of our lawn becomes an instrument of music. In the day it

-plays now a rhapsody of sun, now a nocturne of cloud, now the last

-concerto, Opus Eternal. In the night it becomes a little friendly

-murmur, a cradle song, slumber spell, neighbour to the Dark, the alien

-Dark who very likely grows lonely, being the silent sister, whereas the

-Light goes on blithely companioned of us all. But if I were the Dark and

-owned the stars, and the potion which quickens conscience, and the sense

-of the great Spirit brooding, brooding, I do not know that I would

-exchange and be the Light. Still, the Light has rainbows and toil and

-the sun and laughter.... After all, it is best to be a human being and

-to have both Light and Darkness for one's own. And it is concerning this

-conclusion that the river plays on its instrument of music, this shallow river</p>

-

-<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<div class="i3">"&mdash;to whose falls</div>

-<div>Melodious birds sing madrigals."</div>

-</div></div></div>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span></p><p>I have heard our bank cat-birds in the willows sing madrigals to the

-stone-music until I wanted to be one of them&mdash;cat-bird, madrigal,

-shallows, or anything similar. But the human is perhaps what all these

-are striving to express, and so I have been granted wish within wish,

-and life is very good.</p>

-

-<p>Life was very good this summer afternoon when half the village gathered

-on our lawn above the singing stone, at Miggy's and Peter's

-"Announcement Supper." To be sure, all Friendship Village had for

-several days had the news and could even tell you when the betrothal

-took place and where; but the two were not yet engaged, as Miggy would

-have said, "out loud."</p>

-

-<p>"What <i>is</i> engaged?" asked Little Child, who was the first of my guests

-to arrive, and came bringing an offering of infinitesimal flowers which

-she finds in the grass where I think that they bloom for no one else.</p>

-

-<p>"It means that people love each other very much&mdash;" I began, and got no

-further.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, goody grand," cried Little Child. "Then I'm engaged, aren't I? To

-everybody."</p>

-

-<p>Whenever she leads me in deep water, I am accustomed to invite her to a

-dolphin's back by bidding her say over some song or spell which I have

-taught her. This afternoon while we waited on the lawn and her little

-voice went among the charmed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> words, something happened which surely

-must have been due to a prank of the dolphin. For when she had taken an

-accurate way to the last stanza of "Lucy," Little Child soberly

-concluded:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<div>"'She lived unknown, and few could know</div>

-<div class="i1">When Lucy ceased to be;</div>

-<div>But she is in her grave, and what's</div>

-<div class="i1">The difference to me!'"</div>

-</div></div></div>

-

-<p>But, even so, it was charming to have had the quiet metre present.</p>

-

-<p>I hope that there is no one who has not sometime been in a company on

-which he has looked and looked with something living in his eyes; on a

-company all of whom he holds in some degree of tenderness. It was so

-that I looked this afternoon on those who came across the lawn in the

-pleasant five o'clock sun, and I looked with a difference from my manner

-of looking on that evening of my visit to the village, when I first saw

-these, my neighbours. Then I saw them with delight; now I see them with

-delight-and-that-difference; and though that difference is, so to say,

-partly in my throat, yet it is chiefly deep in my understanding. There

-came my Mis' Amanda Toplady, with her great green umbrella, which she

-carries summer and winter; Mis' Postmaster Sykes, with the full-blooming

-stalk of her tuberose pinned on her left shoulder; Mis'

-Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss in the pink nun's veiling of the Post-office

-hall<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> supper; and my neighbour, who had consented to come, with: "I

-donno as that little thing would want I should stay home. Oh, but do you

-know, that's the worst&mdash;knowin' that the little thing never saw me and

-can't think about me at all!" And there came also those of whom it

-chances that this summer I have seen less than I should have wished: the

-Liberty sisters, in checked print. "It don't seem so much of a jump out

-of mournin' into wash goods as it does into real dress-up cloth," gentle

-Miss Lucy says. And Abigail Arnold, of the Home Bakery, who sent a great

-sugared cake for to-day's occasion. "Birthday cakes is correct," she

-observed, "an' weddin' cake is correct. Why ain't engagement cakes

-correct&mdash;especially when folks get along without the ring? I donno. I

-always think doin' for folks is correct, whether it's the style or

-whether it ain't." And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, with a new and

-upbraiding baby; Mis' Fire Chief Merriman in "new black, but not true

-mournin' now, an' anyway lit up by pearl buttons an' a lace handkerchief

-an' plenty o' scent." And Mis' "Mayor" Uppers who, the "mayor" not

-returning to his home and the tickets for the parlour clock having all

-been sold, to-day began offering for sale tickets on the "parlour

-'suit,' brocade' silk, each o' the four pieces a differ'nt colour and

-all as bright as new-in-the-store." And though we all understood what

-she was doing and she knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> that we all knew, she yet drew us aside, one

-after another, to offer the tickets for sale privately, and we slipped

-the money to her beneath our handkerchiefs or our fans or our sewing.</p>

-

-<p>We all had our sewing&mdash;even I have become pleasantly contaminated and

-have once or twice essayed eyelets. Though there was but an hour to

-elapse before supper-time and the arrival of the "men-folks," we settled

-ourselves about the green, making scallops on towels, or tatting for

-sheet hems, or crocheted strips for the hems of pillow-slips. Mis' Sykes

-had, as she almost always does have, new work which no one had ever seen

-before, and new work is accounted of almost as much interest as a new

-waist and is kept for a surprise, as a new waist should be kept. Little

-Child, too, had her sewing; she was buttonhole-stitching a wash-cloth

-and talking like a little old woman. I think that the little elf

-children like best to pretend in this way, as regular, arrant witches

-feign old womanhood.</p>

-

-<p>"Aunt Effie is sick," Little Child was telling Mis' Toplady; "she is

-sick from her hair to her slippers."</p>

-

-<p>I had a plan for Little Child and for us all; that after supper she

-should have leaves in her hair and on her shoulders and should dance on

-the singing stone in the river. And Miggy, whose shy independence is now

-become all shyness, was in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> house, weaving the leaves, and had not

-yet appeared at her party at all.</p>

-

-<p>Then one of those charming things happened which surely have a kind of

-life of their own and wake the hour to singing, as if an event were a

-river stone, and more, round which all manner of faint music may be set

-stirring.</p>

-

-<p>"Havin' a party when I ain't lookin'!" cried somebody. "My, my. I don't

-b'lieve a word of what's name&mdash;this evolution business. I bet you

-anything heaven is just <i>gettin' back</i>."</p>

-

-<p>And there was Calliope, in her round straw hat and tan ulster, who in

-response to my card had hastened her imminent return.</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," she said, when we had greeted her and put her in a chair under

-the mulberry tree, "my relation got well. At least, she ain't sick

-enough to be cross, so 'most anybody could take care of her now."</p>

-

-<p>Calliope laughed and leaned back and shut her eyes.</p>

-

-<p>"Land, land," she said, "I got so much to tell you about I don't know

-where to begin. It's all about one thing, too&mdash;somethin' I've found

-out."</p>

-

-<p>Mis' Amanda Toplady drew a great breath and let fall her work and looked

-round at us all.</p>

-

-<p>"Goodness," she said, "ain't it comfortable&mdash;us all settin' here

-together, nobody's leg broke, nobody's house on fire, nor none of us

-dead?"</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span></p><p>"'Us all settin' here together,'" Calliope repeated, suddenly grave

-amid our laughter, "that's part of what I'm comin' to. I wonder," she

-said to us, "how you folks have always thought of the City? Up till I

-went there to stay this while I always thought of it as&mdash;well, as the

-City an' not so much as folks at all. The City always meant to me big

-crowds on the streets&mdash;hurryin', hurryin', eatin', eatin', and not

-payin' much attention to anything. One whole batch of 'em I knew was

-poor an' lookin' in bakery windows. One whole batch of 'em I knew was

-rich an' sayin' there has to be these distinctions. And some more I knew

-was good&mdash;I always see 'em, like a pretty lady, stoopin' over, givin'.

-And some more I knew was wicked an' I always thought of them climbin' in

-windows. And then there was the little bit o' batch that knows the

-things I want to know an' talks like I'd like to talk an' that I'd

-wanted an' wanted to go up to the City an' get with.</p>

-

-<p>"Well, then I went. An' the first thing, I see my relative wa'n't rich

-nor poor nor bad nor good nor&mdash;the way I mean. Nor her friends that come

-to see her, they wan't either. The ones I took for rich talked economy,

-an' the ones I thought was poor spent money, an' the good ones gossiped,

-an' they all jabbered about music and pictures that I thought you

-couldn't talk about unless you knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> the 'way-inside-o'-things, like

-they didn't know. The kinds seemed all mixed up, and all of 'em far away

-an' formal, like&mdash;oh, like the books in a library when you can't think

-up one to draw out. I couldn't seem to get near to anything.</p>

-

-<p>"Then one night I done what I'd always wanted to do. I took two dollars

-an' went to the theatre alone an' got me a seat. I put on the best I

-had, an' still I didn't feel like I was one of 'em, nor one of much of

-anybody. The folks on the car wasn't the way I meant, an' I felt mad at

-'em for bein' differ'nt. There was a smilin' young fellow, all dressed

-black an' expensive, an' I thought: 'Put you side of Peter Cary an'

-there wouldn't be anybody there but Peter.' And when I got inside the

-theatre, it was just the same: one awful collection of dressed-up hair

-an' dressed-down backs an' everybody smilin' at somebody that wasn't me

-and all seemin' so sure of themselves. Specially the woman in front of

-me, but I guess it always is specially the woman in front of you. She

-was flammed out abundant. She had trimmin's in unexpected places, an' a

-good many colours took to do it, an' a cute little chatter to match. It

-come to me that she was more than different from me: she was the

-<i>otherest</i> a person can be. An' I felt glad when the curtain went up.</p>

-

-<p>"Well, sir," Calliope said, "it was a silly little play&mdash;all about

-nothin' that you could lay much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> speech to. But oh, they was somethin'

-in it that made you get down on your hands and knees in your own heart

-and look around in it, and <i>look</i>. They was an old lady and a young

-mother and a child and a man and a girl&mdash;well, that don't sound like

-much special, does it? And that's just it: it wasn't much special, but

-yet it was all of everything. It made 'em laugh, it made 'em cry, it

-made <i>me</i> laugh and cry till I was ashamed and glad and grateful. And

-when the lights come up at the end, I felt like I was kind of the mother

-to everything, an' I wanted to pick it up an' carry it off an' keep care

-of it. And it come over me all of a sudden how the old lady and the

-young mother an' man an' girl, man an' girl, <i>man an' girl</i> was right

-there in the theatre, near me, over an' over again; an' there I'd been

-feelin' mad at 'em for seemin' far off. But they wasn't far off. They'd

-been laughin' and cryin', too, an' they knew, just like I knew, what was

-what in the world. My, my. If it'd been Friendship I'd have gone from

-house to house all the way home, shakin' hands. An' as it was, I just

-<i>had</i> to speak to somebody. An' just then I see the flammed-out woman in

-front of me, that her collar had come open a little wee bit up top&mdash;not

-to notice even, but it give me an excuse. And I leaned right over to her

-and I says with all the sympathy in me:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span></p><p>"'Ma'am, your neck is peepin'."</p>

-

-<p>"She looked around su'prised and then she smiled&mdash;smiled 'most into

-laughin'. And she thanked me sweet as a friend an' nodded with it, an' I

-thought: 'Why, my land, you may have a baby home.' I never had thought

-of that. An' then I begun lookin' at folks an' lookin'. An' movin' up

-the aisles, there wasn't just a theatre-lettin'-out. They was <i>folks</i>.

-And all over each one was the good little things they'd begun

-rememberin' now that the play was over, or the hurt things that had come

-back onto 'em again.... An' out on the street it was the same. The folks

-had all got alive and was waitin' for me to feel friendly to 'em.

-<i>Friendly.</i> The young fellows in the cars was lovers, just like Peter.

-An' everybody was just like me, or anyhow more alike than differ'nt; and

-just like Friendship, only mebbe pronouncin' their words some differ'nt

-an' knowin' more kinds of things to eat. It seems to me now I could go

-anywhere an' find folks to be nice to. I don't love Friendship Village

-any the less, but I love more things the same way. Everything, 'most.

-An' I tell you I'm glad I didn't die before I found it out&mdash;that we're

-all one batch. <i>Do</i> you see what I mean&mdash;deep down inside what I say?"

-Calliope cried. "Does it sound like anything to you?"</p>

-

-<p>To whom should it sound like "anything" if not to us of Friendship

-Village? We know.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p><p>"Honestly," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady, trying to wipe her

-eyes on her crochet work, "Whoever God is, I don't believe He wants to

-keep it a secret. He's always 'most lettin' us know. I 'most knew Who He

-is right then, while Calliope was talkin'."</p>

-

-<p>"I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope was talkin'." ... I

-said the words over while the men crossed the lawn, all arriving

-together in order to lighten the trial of guesthood: Dear Doctor June,

-little Timothy Toplady, Eppleby Holcomb, Postmaster Sykes, Photographer

-Jimmie Sturgis, Peter, and Timothy, Jr., and the others. Liva Vesey was

-already in the kitchen with Miggy and Elfa, and I knew that, somewhere

-invisible, Nicholas Moor was hovering, waiting to help dish the

-ice-cream. When the little tables, each with its bright, strewn

-nasturtiums, were set about the lawn, Miggy reluctantly appeared from

-the kitchen. She was in the white frock which she herself had made, and

-she was, as I have said, a new Miggy, not less merry or less elfin, but

-infinitely more human. It was charming, I thought, to see how she and

-Peter, far from tensely avoiding each other, went straight to each

-other's side. With them at table were Liva and Timothy, Jr., now meeting

-each other's eyes as simply as if eyes were for this purpose.</p>

-

-<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p><p>"I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope was talkin'" ... I

-thought again as we stood in our places and Doctor June lifted his hands

-to the summer sky as if He were there, too.</p>

-

-<p>"Father," he said, "bless these young people who are going to belong to

-each other&mdash;Thou knowest their names and so do we. Bless our being

-together now in their honour, and be Thou in our midst. And bless our

-being together always. Amen."</p>

-

-<p>And that was the announcement of Miggy's and Peter's betrothal, at their

-Engagement Party.</p>

-

-<p>Little Child, who was sitting beside Calliope, leaned toward her.</p>

-

-<p>"How long will it take for God to know," she asked, "after Doctor June

-sent it up?"</p>

-

-<p>Calliope put her arm about her and told her.</p>

-

-<p>"Then did He get here since Doctor June invited Him?" Little Child

-asked.</p>

-

-<p>"You think, 'way deep inside your head, an' see if He isn't here," I

-heard Calliope say.</p>

-

-<p>Little Child shut her eyes tightly, and though she did open them briefly

-to see what was on the plate which they set before her, I think that she

-found the truth.</p>

-

-<p>"I 'most know," she said presently. "Pretty near I know He is. I guess

-I'm too little to be sure nor certain. When I'm big will I know sure?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>"Yes," Calliope answered, "then you'll know sure."</p>

-

-<p>"I 'most knew Who He is while Calliope was talkin'" ... I said over once

-more. And suddenly in the words and in the homely talk and in the happy

-comradeship I think that I slipped between the seeing and the knowing,

-and for a moment stood very near to the Custodian&mdash;Himself. The

-Custodian Who is in us all, Who speaks, now as you, now as I, most

-clearly in our human fellowship, in our widest kinship, in the universal

-<i>togetherness</i>. Truly, it is not as my neighbour once said, for I think

-that God has many and many to "neighbour with," if only we would be

-neighbours.</p>

-

-<p>Presently, as if it knew that it belonged there, the sunset came, a

-thing of wings and doors ajar. Then Miggy fastened the leaves in Little

-Child's hair and led her down to dance on the broad, flat stone which is

-an instrument of music. Above the friendly murmur of the shallows the

-little elf child seemed beckoning to us others of the human voices on

-the shore. And in that fair light it was as if the river were some clear

-highway, leading from Friendship Village to Splendour Town, where

-together we might all find our way.</p>

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-<pre>

-

-

-

-

-

-End of Project Gutenberg's Friendship Village Love Stories, by Zona Gale

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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Friendship Village Love Stories, by Zona Gale.
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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 54676 ***</div>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="cover.jpg" id="cover.jpg"></a><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="cover" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE<br />LOVE STORIES</h1>
+
+<p class="bold space-above">BY</p>
+
+<p class="bold2">ZONA GALE</p>
+
+<p class="bold">AUTHOR OF "FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," "THE LOVES<br />OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE," ETC.</p>
+
+<p class="bold space-above">NEW YORK<br />GROSSET &amp; DUNLAP<br />PUBLISHERS</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1909,<br />
+<span class="smcap">By</span> THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.<br />&mdash;&mdash;<br />
+Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909. Reprinted<br />November, 1909; April, 1912.</p>
+
+<p class="center space-above"><i>Norwood Press<br />
+J. S. Cushing Co.&mdash;Berwick &amp; Smith Co.<br />Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center">To<br />MY FRIENDS IN PORTAGE<br />WISCONSIN</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<blockquote><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p><p>Certain of the following chapters have appeared in <i>Everybody's</i>, <i>The
+American Magazine</i>, <i>The Outlook</i>, <i>The Woman's Home Companion</i>, and
+<i>The Delineator</i>. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous
+permission to reprint these chapters, and to Messrs. Harper Brothers for
+permission to reprint the sonnet in Chapter XI.</p></blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table summary="CONTENTS">
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="left"><span class="smaller">CHAPTER</span></td>
+    <td><span class="smaller">PAGE</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>I.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Open Arms</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>II.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Inside June</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_15">15</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>III.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Miggy</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Splendour Town</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_43">43</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>V.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Different</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_62">62</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Fond Forenoon</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Afraid</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_96">96</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Java Entertainment</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_116">116</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IX.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Cold Shoulder</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>X.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Evening Dress</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_148">148</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Undern</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_176">176</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Way the World Is</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Householdry</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XIV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Postmarks</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_223">223</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Peter</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_248">248</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XVI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The New Village</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_258">258</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XVII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Adoption</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_274">274</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XVIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">At Peter's House</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_293">293</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XIX.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Custodian</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_309">309</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="bold2">Friendship Village Love Stories</p>
+
+<h2><span>I</span> <span class="smaller">OPEN ARMS</span></h2>
+
+<p>Although it is June, the Little Child about whom I shall sometimes write
+in these pages this morning brought me a few violets. June violets. They
+sound unconvincing and even sentimental. However, here they are in their
+vase; and they are all white but one.</p>
+
+<p>"Only one blue one," said Little Child, regretfully; "May must be 'most
+dead by mistake."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't the months die as soon as they go away?" I asked her, and a
+little shocked line troubled her forehead.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," she said; "they never die at all. They wait and show the next
+months how."</p>
+
+<p>So this year's May is showing June how. As if one should have a kind of
+pre-self, who kept on, after one's birth, and told one what to live and
+what not to live. I wish that I had had a pre-self and that it had kept
+on with me to show me how. It is what one's mother is, only one is so
+occupied in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> being one's born self that one thinks of her worshipfully
+as one's mother instead. But this young June seems to be chiefly May,
+and I am glad: for of all the months, May is to me most nearly the
+essence of time to be. In May I have always an impulse to date my
+letters "To-morrow," for all the enchantment of the usual future seems
+come upon me. The other months are richly themselves, but May is all the
+great premonitory zest come true; it is expectation come alive; it is
+the Then made Now. Conservatively, however, I date my May letters merely
+"To-morrow," and it is pleasant to find a conservative estimate which no
+one is likely to exceed. For I own that though there is a conservatism
+which is now wholly forbidden to me, yet I continue to take in it a
+sensuous, stolen pleasure, such as I take in certain ceremonies; and I
+know that if I were wholly pagan, extreme conservatism would be my chief
+indulgence.</p>
+
+<p>This yet-May morning, then, I have been down in the village, gardening
+about the streets. My sort of gardening. As in spring another looks
+along the wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the
+upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence I peered round this
+wall and that for faces and things in the renascence of recognition, or
+in the pleasant importance of having just been born. Many a gate and
+fa&ccedil;ade and well-house, of which in my absence I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> have not thought even
+once, has not changed a whit in consequence. And when changes have come,
+they have done so with the prettiest preening air of accomplishment: "We
+too," they say, "have not been idle."</p>
+
+<p>Thus the streets came unrolling to meet me and to show me their
+treasures: my neighbour's new screened-in porch "with a round extension
+so to see folks pass on the cross street"; in the house in which I am to
+live a former blank parlour wall gravely regarding me with a magnificent
+new plate glass eye; Daphne Street, hitherto a way of sand, now become a
+thing of proud macadam; the corner catalpas old enough to bloom; a white
+frame cottage rising like a domestic Venus from a once vacant lot of
+foam-green "Timothy"; a veranda window-box acquired, like a bright
+bow-knot at its house's throat; and, farther on, the Herons' freshly
+laid cement sidewalk, a flying heron stamped on every block. I fancy
+they will have done that with the wooden heron knocker which in the
+kitchen their grandfather Heron himself carved on sleepless nights.
+("Six hundred and twenty hours of Grandpa Heron's life hanging on our
+front door," his son's wife said; "I declare I feel like that bird could
+just about lay.") To see all these venturesome innovations, these
+obscure and pleasant substitutions, is to be greeted by the very annuals
+of this little garden as a real <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>gardener in green lore might be
+signalled, here by a trembling of new purple and there by a yellow
+marching line of little volunteers.</p>
+
+<p>I do not miss from their places many friends. In this house and that I
+find a new family domiciled and to be divined by the subtle changes
+which no old tenant would ever have made: the woodpile in an
+unaccustomed place, the side shed door disused and strung for vines, a
+wagon now kept by a north and south space once sacred to the sweet-pea
+trench. Here a building partly ruined by fire shows grim, returned to
+the inarticulate, not evidently to be rebuilt, but to be accepted, like
+any death. But these variations are the exception, and only one
+variation is the rule, and against that one I have in me some special
+heritage of burning. I mean the felling of the village trees. We have
+been used wantonly to sacrifice to the base and the trivial, trees
+already stored with years of symmetry when we of these Midlands were the
+intruders and not they&mdash;and I own that for me the time has never wholly
+passed. They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel our lawns
+with twigs, they rot the shingles on our barns. It has seemed to occur
+to almost nobody to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too, are
+beginning to discern, so that when in the laying of a sidewalk we meet a
+tree who was there before we were anywhere at all, though we may not
+yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our love of a
+straight line, and our votive offering is to give the tree the
+walk&mdash;such a slight swerving is all the deference she asks!&mdash;and in
+return she blesses us with balms and odours.... For me these signs of
+our mellowing are more delightful to experience than might be the
+already-made quietudes of a nation of effected and distinguished
+standards. I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves an
+elemental gesture, though I personally would prefer not to be the one to
+have made the gesture. And this is my solace when with some
+inquisitioner I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine&mdash;an
+isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hemlock: verily, I say,
+it was so that we did here in the old days when there were forests to
+conquer, and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his blood as he
+has his genius for toil. And I try not to remember that if in America we
+had had plane trees, we should almost certainly have cut them into
+cabins.... But this morning even the trees that I missed could not make
+me sad. No, nor even the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers
+hanging on a street door which I passed. All these were as if something
+elementary had happened, needless wounds, it might be, on the plan of
+things, contortions which science has not yet bred away, but, as truly
+as the natural death from age, eloquent of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> the cosmic persuading to
+shape in which the nations of quietude and we of strivings are all in
+fellowship.</p>
+
+<p>In fellowship! I think that in this simple basic emotion lies my joy in
+living in this, my village. Here, this year long, folk have been
+adventuring together, knowing the details of one another's lives,
+striving a little but companioning far more than striving, kindling to
+one another's interests instead of practising the faint morality of mere
+civility; and I love them all&mdash;unless it be only that little Mrs. Oliver
+Wheeler Johnson, newly come to Friendship; and perhaps my faint liking
+for her arises from the fact that she has not yet lived here long enough
+to be understood, as Friendship Village understands. The ways of these
+primal tribal bonds are in my blood, for from my heart I felt what my
+neighbour felt when she told me of the donation party which the whole
+village has just given to Lyddy Ember:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I declare," she said, "it wasn't so much the stuff they brought in,
+though that was all elegant, but it was the <i>Togetherness</i> of it. I
+couldn't get to sleep that night for thinkin' about God not havin'
+anybody to neighbour with."</p>
+
+<p>It was no wonder, therefore, that when in the middle of Daphne Street my
+neighbour met me this morning, for the first time since my return, and
+held out her arms, I walked straight into them. Here is the secret, as
+more of us know than have the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> wisdom to acknowledge: fellowship,
+comradeship, kinship&mdash;call it what you will. My neighbour and I will
+understand.</p>
+
+<p>"I heard you was here," my neighbour said&mdash;bless her, her voice
+trembled. I suppose there never was such a compliment as that tremor of
+her voice.</p>
+
+<p>I am afraid that I am not going to tell what else she said. But it was
+all about our coming to Friendship Village to live; and that is a thing
+which, as I feel about it, should be set to music and sung in the
+wind&mdash;where Thoreau said that some apples are to be eaten. As for me, I
+nodded at my neighbour, and could do no more than that&mdash;as is the custom
+of mortals when they are face to face with these sorceries of Return and
+Meeting and Being Together.</p>
+
+<p>I am not yet wonted to the sweetness of our coming to Friendship Village
+to live, the Stranger and I. Here they still call him the Stranger; and
+this summer, because of the busts and tablets which he must fashion in
+many far places, so do I. Have I said that that Stranger of mine is a
+sculptor? He is. But if anyone expects me to write about him, I tell you
+that it is impossible. Save this: That since he came out of the mist one
+morning on the Plank Road here in Friendship Village, we two have kept
+house in the world, shared in the common welfare,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> toiled as we might
+for the common good, observed the stars, and thanked God. And this: that
+since that morning, it is as if Someone had picked us up and set us to
+music and sung us to the universal piping. And we remember that once we
+were only words, and that sometime we shall be whatever music is when it
+is free of its body of sound, and for that time we strive. But I repeat
+that these vagrant notes are not about this great Stranger, absent on
+his quests of holy soul prisoned in this stone and that marble, nor yet
+about our life together. Rather, I write about our Family, which is this
+loved town of ours. For we have bought Oldmoxon House, and here, save
+for what flights may be about and over-seas, we hope that we may tell
+our days to their end.</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour had both my hands, there in the middle of Daphne Street,
+and the white horse of the post-office store delivery wagon turned out
+for us as if he knew.</p>
+
+<p>"If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd have put on my other
+hat," my neighbour said, "but I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down
+for some rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't what they
+used to be, are they? One season an' they lay down life. I could jounce
+up an' down I'm so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed
+gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> I heard the girl that
+was comin' to help you ain't comin' near."</p>
+
+<p>My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and she has done the
+disappointing by telegraph. I had almost said, publicly by telegraph.
+But I protest that I would rather an entire village should read my
+telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole city should care
+almost nothing for me or my telegrams either. And if you please, I would
+rather not have that telegram-reading criticised.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity, "I've got you one. She'll be
+up to talk to you in a day or two&mdash;I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can
+spell like the minister."</p>
+
+<p>I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her name with something of
+that sense of the inescapable to which the finality of my neighbour
+impressed me. As if I were to have said, "So, then, it is to be Miggy!"
+Or was it something more than that? Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and
+mine had struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have come to
+call the emotion of finality. I suppose that other people have it: that
+occasional prophetic sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses
+this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness of&mdash;shall I
+say?&mdash;brightness; a mental area of clearness; a quite definite physical
+emotion of yes-ness. But if the thing will not happen this says<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> itself
+by a complementary apprehension of dim, down-sloping, vacant negation. I
+have seldom known this divination to fail me&mdash;though I am chary of using
+it lest I use it up! And then I do not always wish to know. But this
+morning my emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware: I <i>knew</i> that
+it would be Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>"What a curious name," I said, in a manner of feebly fending off the
+imminent; "<i>why</i> Miggy?" For it seemed to me one of those names instead
+of which any other name would have done as well and perhaps better.</p>
+
+<p>"Her name is Margaret," my neighbour explained, "and her mother was a
+real lady that come here from Off and that hard work killed her because
+she <i>was</i> a lady. The father was bound there shouldn't be any lady about
+Miggy, but he couldn't seem to help himself. Margaret was her mother's
+name and so he shaved it and shrunk it and strained it down to Miggy.
+'No frills for nobody,' was his motto, up to his death. Miggy and her
+little sister lives with her old Aunt Effie that dress-makes real French
+but not enough to keep 'em alive on. Miggy does odd jobs around. So when
+I heard about your needin' somebody, I says to myself, 'Miggy!'&mdash;just
+like I've said it to you."</p>
+
+<p>It was not the name, as a name, which I would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> have said could be
+uppermost in my mind as I walked on that street of June&mdash;that May was
+helping to make fair. And I was annoyed to have the peace of my return
+so soon invaded. I fell wondering if I could not get on, as I usually
+do, with no one to bother. I have never wanted a helper at all if I
+could avoid it, and I have never, never wanted a helper with a
+personality. A personality among my strewn papers puts me in a fever of
+embarrassment and misery. Once such an one said to me in the midst of a
+chapter: "Madame, I'd like to ask you a question. What do <i>you</i> think of
+your hero?" In an utter rout of confusion I owned that I thought very
+badly of him, indeed; but I did not add the truth, that she had
+effectually drugged him and disabled me for at least that day. My taste
+in helpers is for one colourless, noiseless, above all intonationless,
+usually speechless, and always without curiosity&mdash;some one, save for the
+tips of her trained fingers, negligible. As all this does sad violence
+to my democratic passions, I usually prefer my negligible self. So the
+idea of a Miggy terrified me, and I said to myself that I would not have
+one about. As I knew the village, she was not of it. She was not a part
+of my gardening. She was no proper annual. She was no doubt merely a
+showy little seedling, chance sown in the village.... But all the time,
+moving within me, was that serene area of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> brightness, that clear
+certainty that, do what I could, it would still be Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>... It is through this faint soothsaying, this conception which is
+partly of sight and partly of feeling, that some understanding may be
+won of the orchestration of the senses. I am always telling myself that
+if I could touch at that fluent line where the senses merge, I should
+occasionally find there that silent Custodian who is myself. I think,
+because emotion is so noble, that the Custodian must sometimes visit
+this line where the barrier between her and me is so frail. Her presence
+seems possible to me only for a moment, only, it may be, for the
+fraction of a second in which I catch the romance, the <i>idea</i> of
+something old and long familiar. And when this happens, I say: She has
+just been there, between the seeing and the feeling, or between the
+seeing and the knowing. Often I am sure that I have barely missed her.
+But I am never quick enough to let her know....</p>
+
+<p>When I finished my walk and stepped under the poplars before my gate, I
+caught a faint exclamation. It was that Little Child, who had been
+waiting for me on my doorstep and came running to meet me and bring me
+the violets. When she saw me, she said, "Oh!" quickly and sweetly in her
+throat, and, as I stood still to taste the delight of having her run
+toward me, I felt very sorry for every one who has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> not heard that
+involuntary "Oh!" of a child at one's coming. Little Child and I have
+met only once before, and that early this morning, at large, on the
+village street, as spirits met in air, with no background of names nor
+auxiliary of exchange of names; but we had some talk which for me
+touched on eternal truth and for her savoured of story-telling; and we
+are friends. So now when she gave me the violets and explained to me Who
+was showing June how, I accepted this fair perception of the motherhood
+of May, this childish discernment of the familyhood of things, and,</p>
+
+<p>"Will you come some day soon to have another story?" I asked her.</p>
+
+<p>"Prob'ly I can," said Little Child. "I'll ask Miggy."</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy! But is it your Miggy, too?" I demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"It's my sister," said Little Child, nodding.</p>
+
+<p>I thought that the concreteness of her reply to my ill-defined query was
+almost as if she remembered how to understand without words. You would
+think that children would need to have things said out, but they are
+evidently closer to a more excellent way.</p>
+
+<p>So when I entered the house just now, I brought in with me a kind of
+premonitory Miggy, one of those ghostly, anticipatory births which we
+are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>constantly giving to those whom we have not met. As if every one
+had for us a way of life without the formality of being seen. As if we
+are a big, near family whether we want to be so or not. Verily, it is
+not only May and June, or Little Child and Miggy, who are found
+unexpectedly to be related; it is the whole world, it seems, and he is
+wise who quickens to many kinships. I like to think of the comrade
+company that already I have found here: June and Little Child and
+Miggy-to-be and my neighbour and Daphne Street and the remembered faces
+of the village and the hamadryads. I think that I include the very
+herons in the cement sidewalk. Like a kind of perpetual gift it is, this
+which my neighbour called <i>Togetherness</i>.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>II</span> <span class="smaller">INSIDE JUNE</span></h2>
+
+<p><i>The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough to
+it. This month comes within few houses, and if you want it you must go
+out to it. When you are within doors, knowing that out-of-doors it is
+June, the urge to be out there with it is resistless. But though you
+wade in green, steep in sun, breast wind, and glory in them all, still
+the day itself eludes you. It would seem, in June, that there should be
+a specific for the malady of being oneself, so that one might get to be
+a June day outright. However, if one were oneself more and more, might
+not one finally become a June day?...</i></p>
+
+<p>Or something of this sort. I am quoting, as nearly as may be, from the
+Book of Our Youth, your youth and mine. Always the Book of Youth will
+open at a page like this. And occasionally it is as if we turned back
+and read there and made a path right away through the page.</p>
+
+<p>This morning a rose-breasted grosbeak wakened me, singing on a bough of
+box-elder so close to my window<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> that the splash of rose on his throat
+almost startled me. It was as if I ought not to have been looking. And
+to turn away from out-of-doors was like leaving some one who was saying
+something. But as soon as I stepped into the day I perceived my old
+problem: <i>The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near
+enough</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I stood for a little at the front gate trying soberly to solve the
+matter&mdash;or I stood where the front gate should have been; for in our
+midland American villages we have few fences or hedges, and, alas, no
+stone walls. Though undoubtedly this lack comes from an insufficient
+regard for privacy, yet this negative factor I am inclined to condone
+for the sake of the positive motive. And this I conceive to be that we
+are wistful of more ample occupation than is commonly contrived by our
+fifty-feet village lots, and so we royally add to our "yards" the
+sidewalk and the planting space and the road and as much of our
+neighbour's lawn as our imagination can annex. There seems to me to be
+in this a certain charming pathos; as it were, a survival in us of the
+time when we had only to name broad lands our own and to stay upon them
+in order to make them ours in very fact. And now it is as if this serene
+pushing back of imaginary borders were in reality an appending, a kind
+of spiritual taking up of a claim.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p><p>How to get nearer to June? I admit that it is a question of the veriest
+idler. But what a delightful company of these questions one can
+assemble. As, How to find one's way to a place that <i>is</i> the way it
+seems Away Across a Meadow. How to meet enough people who hear what one
+says in just the way that one means it. How to get back at will those
+fugitive moments when one almost <i>knows</i> ... what it is all about. And
+with this question the field of the idler becomes the field of the wise
+man; and, indeed, if one idles properly&mdash;or rather, if the proper person
+idles&mdash;the two fields are not always on opposite sides of the road. To
+idle is by no means merely to do nothing. It is an avocation, a calling
+away, nay, one should say, a piping away. To idle is to inhibit the body
+and to let the spirit keep on. Not every one can idle. I know estimable
+people who frequently relax, like chickens in the sun; but I know only a
+few who use relaxation as a threshold and not as a goal, and who idle
+until the hour yields its full blessing.</p>
+
+<p>I wondered if to idle at adventure might not be the way to June, so I
+went out on the six o'clock street in somewhat the spirit in which
+another might ride the greenwood. Almost immediately I had an encounter,
+for I came on my neighbour in her garden. Not my neighbour who lives on
+the other side of me, and who is a big and obvious deacon,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> with a
+family of a great many Light Gowns; but My Neighbour. She was watering
+her garden. These water rules and regulations of the village are among
+its spells. To look at the members of the water commission one would
+never suspect them of romance. But if they have it not, why have they
+named from five until nine o'clock the only morning hours when one may
+use the city water for one's lawn and garden? I insist that it cannot be
+a mere regard for the municipal resources, and that the commissioners
+must see something of the romance of getting up before five o'clock to
+drench one's garden, and are providing for the special educational value
+of such a custom. Or, if I do not believe this, I wish very much that I
+did, with the proper grounds.</p>
+
+<p>To tell the truth, however, I do not credit even my neighbour with
+feeling the romance of the hour and of her occupation. She is a still
+woman of more than forty, who does not feel a difference between her
+flower and her vegetable gardens, but regards them both as a part of her
+life in the kind of car-window indifference and complacency of certain
+travellers. She raises foxgloves and parsley, and the sun shines over
+all. I must note a strange impression which my neighbour gives me: she
+has always for me an air of personal impermanence. I have the fancy,
+amounting to a sensation, that she is where she is for just a moment,
+and that she must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> rush back and be at it again. I do not know at what.
+But whether I see her in church or at a festival, I have always all I
+can do to resist saying to her, "How <i>did</i> you get away?" It was so that
+she was watering her flowers; as if she were intending at any moment to
+hurry off to get breakfast or put up the hammock or mend. And yet before
+she did so she told me, who was a willing listener, a motion or two of
+the spirit of the village.</p>
+
+<p>There is, I observe, a nicety of etiquette here, about the
+Not-quite-news, Not-quite-gossip shared with strangers and
+semi-strangers. The rules seem to be:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Strangers shall be told only the pleasant occurrences and conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Half strangers may discuss the unpleasant matters which they themselves
+have somehow heard, but only pleasant matters may be added by accretion.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of society may say whatever it "has a mind." But this mind, as
+I believe, is not harsh, since nobody ever gossips except to people who
+gossip back.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady told me last night that Calliope Marsh is coming home for
+the Java entertainment, next week," my neighbour imparted first. And
+this was the best news that she could have given me.</p>
+
+<p>It has been a great regret to me that this summer Calliope is not in the
+village. She has gone to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> city to nurse some distant kinswoman more
+lonely than she, and until ill-health came, long forgetful of Calliope.
+But she is to come back now and again, to this and to that, for the
+village interests are all her own. I have never known any one in whom
+the tribal sense is so persistently alive as in Calliope.</p>
+
+<p>I asked my neighbour what this Java entertainment would be, which was to
+give back Calliope, and she looked her amazement that I did not know. It
+would be, it appeared, one of those great fairs which the missionary
+society is always projecting and carrying magnificently forward.</p>
+
+<p>"It's awful feet-aching work," said my neighbour, reflectively; "but
+honestly, Calliope seems to like it. I donno but I do, too. The Sodality
+meant to have one when they set out to pave Daphne Street, but it turned
+out it wasn't needed. Well, big affairs like that makes it seem as if
+we'd been born into the whole world and not just into Friendship
+Village."</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour told me that a new public library had been opened in a
+corner of the post-office store, and that "a great crowd" was drawing
+books, though for this she herself cannot vouch, since the library is
+only open Saturday evenings, and "Saturday," she says with decision, "is
+a bad night." It is, in fact, I note, very difficult to find a free
+night in the village, save only Tuesday. Monday, because of its obvious
+duties and incident fatigue, is as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>impossible as Sunday; Wednesday is
+club day; Thursday "is prayer-meeting"; Friday is sacred to church
+suppers and entertainments and the Ladies' Aid Society; and Saturday is
+invariably denominated a bad night and omitted without question. We are
+remote from society, but Tuesday is literally our only free evening.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it won't be the same with you about books," my neighbour
+admits. "You can send your girl down to get a book for you. But I have
+to be home to get out the clean clothes. How's your girl going to like
+the country?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>I am to have here in the village, I find, many a rebuke for habits of
+mine which lag behind my theories. For though I try to solve my share of
+a tragic question by giving to my Swedish maid, Elfa, the self-respect
+and the privilege suited to a human being dependent on me, together with
+ways of comfort and some leisure, yet I find the homely customs of the
+place to have accomplished more than my careful system. And though, when
+I took her from town I scrupulously added to the earnings of my little
+maid, I confess that it had not occurred to me to wonder whether or not
+she would like Friendship Village. We seem so weary-far from the
+conditions which we so facilely conceive. Especially, I seem far. I am
+afraid that I engaged Elfa in the first place with less attention to her
+economic fitness than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> that she is so trim and still and wistful, with
+such a peculiarly winning upward look; and that her name is Elfa. I told
+my neighbour that I did not know yet, whether Elfa would like it here or
+not; and for refuge I found fault with the worms on the rose bushes.
+Also I made a note in my head to ask Elfa how she likes the country. But
+the spirit of a thing is flown when you make a note of it in your head.
+How does Elfa like the town, for that matter? I never have asked her
+this, either.</p>
+
+<p>"She'll be getting married on your hands, anyway," my neighbour
+observed; "the ladies here say that's one trouble with trying to keep a
+hired girl. They <i>will</i> get married. But I say, let 'em."</p>
+
+<p>At least here is a matter in which my theory, like that of my
+neighbour's, outruns those of certain folk of both town and village. For
+I myself have heard women complain of their servants marrying and
+establishing families, and deplore this shortsightedness in not staying
+where there is "a good home, a nice room, plenty to eat, and all the
+flat pieces sent to the laundry."</p>
+
+<p>"Speaking of books," said my neighbour, "have you seen Nicholas Moor?"</p>
+
+<p>"I see almost no new books," I told her guiltily.</p>
+
+<p>"Me either," she said; "I don't mean he's a book. He's a boy. Nicholas
+Moor&mdash;that does a little writin' himself? I guess you will see him.
+He'll<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> be bringin' some of his writing up to show you. He took some to
+the new school principal, I heard, and to the invalid that was here from
+the city. He seems to be sort of lonesome, though he <i>has</i> got a good
+position. He's interested in celluloid and he rings the Catholic bell.
+Nicholas must be near thirty, but he hasn't even showed any signs."</p>
+
+<p>"Signs?" I hazarded.</p>
+
+<p>"Of being in love," she says simply. And I have pondered pleasantly on
+this significant ellipsis of hers which takes serenely for granted the
+basic business of the world. Her elision reminds me of the delicate
+animism of the Japanese which says, "When the rice pot speaks with a
+human voice, then the demon's name is Kanjo." One can appraise a race or
+an individual by the class of things which speech takes for granted,
+love or a demon or whatever it be.</p>
+
+<p>And apropos of "showing signs," do I remember Liva Vesey and Timothy
+Toplady, Jr.? I am forced to confess that I remember neither. I recall,
+to be sure, that the Topladys had a son, but I had thought of him as a
+kind of qualifying clause and it is difficult to conceive of him as the
+subject of a new sentence. When I hear of Liva Vesey I get her confused
+with a pink gingham apron and a pail of buttermilk which used sometimes
+to pass my house with Liva combined. Fancy that pink gingham and that
+pail becoming a person! And my <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>neighbour tells me that the Qualifying
+Clause and the Pink Gingham are "keeping company," and perhaps are to
+determine the cut of indeterminate clauses and aprons, world without
+end.</p>
+
+<p>"The young folks <i>will</i> couple off," says my neighbour; "and," she adds,
+in a manner of spontaneous impression, "<i>I</i> think it's nice. And it's
+nice for the whole family, too. I've seen families that wouldn't ever
+have looked at each other come to be real friends and able to see the
+angels in each other just by the young folks pairing off. This whole
+town's married crisscross and kittering, family into family. I like it.
+It kind o' binds the soil."</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour told me of other matters current in the village, pleasant
+commonplaces having for her the living spirit which the commonplace
+holds in hostage. ("I'm breathing," Little Child soberly announced to me
+that first day of our acquaintance. And I wonder why I smiled?) My
+neighbour slowly crossed her garden and I followed on the walk&mdash;these
+informal colloquies of no mean length are perfectly usual in the village
+and they do not carry the necessity for an invitation within the house
+or the implication of a call. The relations of hostess and guest seem
+simply to be suspended, and we talk with the freedom of spirits met in
+air. Is this not in its way prophetic of the time when we shall meet,
+burdened of no conventions or upholstery or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> perhaps even words, and
+there talk with the very freedom of villagers? Meanwhile I am content
+with conventions, and passive amid upholstery. But I do catch myself
+looking forward.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly my neighbour turned to me with such a startled, inquiring
+manner that I sent my attention out as at an alarm to see what she
+meant. And then I heard what I had not before noted: a thin, wavering
+line of singing, that had begun in the street beyond our houses, and now
+floated inconsequently to us, lifting, dipping, wandering. I could even
+hear the absurd words.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"<i>My</i> Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I <i>never</i> know.</div>
+<div>You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh&mdash;"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air.</p>
+
+<p>To say something was like interrupting my neighbour's expression; so I
+waited, and,</p>
+
+<p>"It's old Cary," she explained briefly. "When he does that it's like
+something hurts you, ain't it?"</p>
+
+<p>I thought that this would be no one of my acquaintance, and I said so,
+but tentatively, lest I should be forgetting some inherent figure of the
+village.</p>
+
+<p>"He's come here in the year," she explained&mdash;and, save about the obvious
+import of old Cary's maudlin song, she maintained that fine, tribal
+reticence of hers. "Except for the drinking," she even said,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> "he seems
+to be a quiet, nice man. But it's a shame&mdash;for Peter's sake. Peter
+Cary," she added, like a challenge, "is the brainiest young man in
+<i>this</i> town, say what you want."</p>
+
+<p>On which she told me something of this young superintendent of the
+canning factory who has "tried it in Nebraska," and could not bear to
+leave his father here, "this way," and has just returned. "He works
+hard, and plays the violin, and is making a man of himself generally,"
+she told me; "Don't miss him." And I have promised that I will try not
+to miss Peter Cary.</p>
+
+<p>"They live out towards the cemetery way," she added, "him and his
+father, all alone. Peter'll be along by here in a minute on his way to
+work&mdash;it's most quarter to. I set my husband down to his breakfast and
+got up his lunch before I come out&mdash;I don't have my breakfast till the
+men folks get out of the way."</p>
+
+<p>I never cease to marvel at these splendid capabilities which prepare
+breakfasts, put up lunches, turn the attention to the garden, and all,
+so to speak, with the left hand; ready at any moment to enter upon the
+real business of life&mdash;to minister to the sick or bury the dead, or
+conduct a town meeting or a church supper or a birth. They have a kind
+of goddess-like competence, these women. At any of these offices they
+arrive, lacking the cloud, it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> true, but magnificently equipped to
+settle the occasion. In crises of, say, deafness, they will clap a hot
+pancake on a friend's ear with an &AElig;sculapian <i>savoir faire</i>, for their
+efficiencies combine those of lost generations with all that they hear
+of in this, in an open-minded eclecticism. With Puritans and foresters
+and courtiers in our blood, who knows but that we have, too, the
+lingering ichor of gods and goddesses? Oh&mdash;"<i>don't you wish you had</i>?"
+What a charming peculiarity it would be to be descended from a state of
+immortality as well as to be preparing for it, nay, even now to be
+entered upon it!</p>
+
+<p>In a few moments after that piteous, fuddled song had died away on the
+other street, Peter Cary came by my neighbour's house. He was a
+splendid, muscular figure in a neutral, belted shirt and a hat battered
+quite to college exactions, though I am sure that Peter did not know
+that. I could well believe that he was making a man of himself. I have
+temerity to say that this boy superintendent of a canning factory looked
+as, in another milieu, Shelley might have looked, but so it was. It was
+not the first time that I have seen in such an one the look, the eyes
+with the vision and the shadow. I have seen it in the face of a man who
+stood on a step-ladder, papering a wall; I have seen it in a mason who
+looked up from the foundation that he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>mortared; I have seen it often
+and often in the faces of men who till the soil. I was not surprised to
+know that Peter Cary "took" on the violin. The violin is a way out (for
+that look in one's eyes), as, for Nicholas Moor, I have no doubt, is the
+ringing of the Catholic bell. And I am not prepared to say that
+celluloid, and wall-paper, and mortar, and meadows, and canneries,&mdash;run
+under good conditions,&mdash;may not be a way out as well. At all events, the
+look was still in Peter's face.</p>
+
+<p>Peter glanced briefly at my neighbour, running the risk of finding us
+both looking at him, realized the worst, blushed a man's brown blush,
+and nodded and smiled after he had looked away from us.</p>
+
+<p>"You see this grass?" said my neighbour. "Peter keeps it cut, my husband
+don't get home till so late. We're awful fond of Peter."</p>
+
+<p>There is no more tender eulogy. And I would rather have that said of me
+in the village than in any place I know. No grace of manner or dress or
+mind can deceive anybody. They are fond of you or they are not, and I
+would trust their reasons for either.</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour's husband came out the front door at that moment, and he
+and Peter, without greeting, went on together. Her husband did not look
+toward us, because, in the village, it seems not to be a husband and
+wife ceremonial to say good-by in the morning. I often fall wondering
+how it is in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> other places. Is it possible that men in general go away
+to work without the consciousness of family, of themselves as going
+forth on the common quest? Is it possible that women see them go and are
+so unaware of the wonder of material life that they do not instance it
+in, at least, good-by? One would think that even the female bear in the
+back of the cave must growl out something simple when her lord leaves
+her in the hope of a good kill.</p>
+
+<p>And when the two men had turned down the brick walk, the maple leaves
+making a come-and-go of shadows and sun-patterns on their backs, my
+neighbour looked at me with a smile&mdash;or, say, with two-thirds of a
+smile&mdash;as if her vote to smile were unanimous, but she were unwilling by
+it to impart too much.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all Miggy with Peter," she said, as if she were mentioning a
+symptom.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy?" I said with interest&mdash;and found myself nodding to this new
+relationship as to a new acquaintance. And I was once more struck with
+the precision with which certain simple people and nearly all great
+people discard the particularities and lay bare their truths. Could any
+amount of elegant phrasing so reach the heart of the thing and show it
+beating as did, "It's all Miggy with Peter"?</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," my neighbour told me, "it's been her with him ever since he come
+here."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p><p>Assuredly I thought the better of Miggy for this; and,</p>
+
+<p>"Is it all Peter with Miggy?" I inquired, with some eagerness.</p>
+
+<p>Land knows, my neighbour thought, and handed me the hose to hold while
+she turned off the water at the hydrant. I remember that a young robin
+tried to alight on the curving spray just as the water failed and
+drooped.</p>
+
+<p>"I like to get a joke on a robin that way," said my neighbour, and
+laughed out, in a kind of pleasant fellowship with jokes in general and
+especially with robins. "It made Miggy's little sister laugh so the
+other day when that happened," she added. Then she glanced over at me
+with a look in her face that I have not seen there before.</p>
+
+<p>"Land," she said, "this is the time of day, after my husband goes off in
+the morning, when I wish I had a little young thing, runnin' round.
+<i>Now</i> almost more than at night. Well&mdash;I don't know; both times."</p>
+
+<p>I nodded, without saying anything, my eyes on a golden robin prospecting
+vainly among the green mulberries. I wish that I were of those who know
+what to say when a door is opened like this to some shut place.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said my neighbour, "now I'll bake up the rest of the batter.
+Want a pink?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p><p>Thus tacitly excused&mdash;how true her instinct was, courteously to put the
+three fringed pinks in my hand to palliate her leaving!&mdash;I have come
+back to my house and my own breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>"Elfa," said I, first thing, "do you think you are going to like the
+country?"</p>
+
+<p>My little maid turned to me with her winning upward look.</p>
+
+<p>"No'm," she shocked me by saying. And there was another door, opened
+into another shut place; and I did not know what to say to that either.</p>
+
+<p>But I am near to my neighbour; and, in a manner to which Elfa's trimness
+and wistfulness never have impressed me, near to Elfa herself, and I am
+near, near to the village. As I left the outdoors just now, all the
+street was alive: with men and girls going to work, women opening
+windows, a wagon or two in from a Caledonia farm, a general, universal,
+not to say cosmic air of activity and coffee. All the little houses, set
+close together up and down the street, were like a friendly porch party,
+on a long, narrow veranda, where folk sit knee to knee with an avenue
+between for the ice-cream to be handed. All the little lawns and gardens
+were disposed like soft green skirts, delicately embroidered, fragrant,
+flowing.... As I looked, it seemed to me that I could hear the faint hum
+of the village talk&mdash;in every house the intimate, revealing confidences
+of the Family, quick<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> with hope or anxiety or humour or passion,
+animated by its common need to live. And along the street flooded the
+sun, akin to the morning quickening in many a heart.</p>
+
+<p>The day has become charged for me with something besides daylight,
+something which no less than daylight pervades, illumines, comes to meet
+me at a thousand points. I wonder if it can be that, unaware, I did get
+near to June?</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>III</span> <span class="smaller">MIGGY</span></h2>
+
+<p>I have never heard the chimes of Westminster cathedral, but when some
+time they do sound for me I shall find in them something all my own. For
+the old rosewood clock which has told time for me these many years is
+possessed of a kind of intelligence because its maker gave to it the
+Westminster chimes. Thus, though the clock must by patient ticking teach
+the rhythm of duration until the secret monotony of rhythm is confessed,
+it has also its high tides of life, rhythmic, too, and at every quarter
+hour fills a kind of general creative office: four notes for the
+quarter, eight for the half, twelve for the three-quarters, sixteen for
+the hour, and then the deep Amen of the strokes. At twelve o'clock it
+swells richly to its zenith of expression and almost says something
+else. Through even the organ fulness of the cathedral bells I shall hear
+the tingling melody of the rosewood clock chimes, for their sweet
+incidence has been to me both matins and lullaby and often trembles
+within my sleep. I have the clock always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> with me. It is a little
+voice-friend, it is one of those half folk, like flowers and the wind
+and an open fireplace and a piano, which are a frail, semi-born race,
+wistful of complete life, but as yet only partly overlapping our own
+sphere. These fascinate me almost as much as the articulate. That was
+why, when my little maid Elfa had brought me the summons to-day, I stood
+on the threshold and in some satisfaction watched Miggy, rapt before my
+clock in its musical maximum of noon.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy is as thin as a bough, and her rather large head is swept by an
+ungovernable lot of fine brown hair. Her face was turned from me, and
+she was wearing a high-necked gingham apron faded to varying values of
+brown and faint purple and violet of a quite surprising beauty. When the
+last stroke ceased, she turned to me as if I had been there all the
+time.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I could hear it do that again," she said, standing where she had
+stood, arms folded.</p>
+
+<p>"You will, perhaps, to-morrow," I answered.</p>
+
+<p>Truly, if it was to be Miggy, then she would hear the chimes to-morrow
+and to-morrow; and as she turned, my emotion of finality increased. I
+have never loved the tribe of the Headlongs, though I am very sorry for
+any one who has not had with them an occasional innocent tribal junket;
+but I hold that through our intuitions, we may become<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> a kind of
+apotheosis of the Headlongs. Who of us has not chosen a vase, a chair, a
+rug, by some motive transcending taste, by the bidding of a
+friendly-faithful monitor who, somewhere inside one, nodded a choice
+which we obeyed? And yet a vase is a dead thing with no little seeking
+tentacles that catch and cling, while in choosing the living it is that
+one's friendly-faithful monitor is simply recognizing the monitor of the
+other person. I, for one, am more and more willing to trust these two to
+avow their own. For I think that this monitor is, perhaps, that silent
+Custodian whom, if ever I can win through her elusiveness, I shall know
+to be myself. As the years pass I trust her more and more. I find that
+we like the same people, she and I! And instantly we both liked Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy stood regarding me intently.</p>
+
+<p>"I saw you go past the Brevy's yesterday, where the crape is on the
+door," she observed; "I thought it was you."</p>
+
+<p>I wonder at the precision with which very little people and very big
+people brush aside the minor conventions and do it in such ways that one
+nature is never mistaken for the other.</p>
+
+<p>"The girl who died there was your friend, then?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No," Miggy said; "I just knew her to speak to. And she didn't always
+bother her head to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> speak to me. I just went in there yesterday morning
+to get the feeling."</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon. To get&mdash;what?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Miggy, "you know when you look at a corpse you can always
+sense your own breath better&mdash;like it was something alive inside you.
+That's why I never miss seeing one if I can help. It's the only time I'm
+real glad I'm living."</p>
+
+<p>As I motioned her to the chair and took my own, I felt a kind of
+weariness. The neurotics, I do believe, are of us all the nearest to the
+truth about things, but as I grow older I find myself getting to take a
+surpassing comfort in the normal. Or rather, I am always willing to have
+the normal thrust upon me, but my neurotics I wish to select for myself.</p>
+
+<p>"My neighbour tells me," I said merely, "that she thinks you should be
+my secretary." (It is a big word for the office, but a little hill is
+still a hill.)</p>
+
+<p>"I think so, too," said Miggy, simply, "I was afraid you wouldn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you ever been anybody's secretary?" I continued.</p>
+
+<p>"Never," said Miggy. "I never saw anybody before that had a secretary."</p>
+
+<p>"But something must have made her think you would do," I suggested. "And
+what made you think so?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Miggy said, "she thinks so because she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> wants me to get ahead.
+And I think so because I generally think I can do anything&mdash;except
+mathematics. Has Secretary got any mathematics about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not my secretary work," I told her, reviewing these extraordinary
+qualifications for duty; "except counting the words on a page. You could
+do that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that!" said Miggy. "But if you told me to multiply two fractions
+you'd never see me again, no matter how much I wanted to come back.
+Calliope Marsh says she's always expecting to find some folks' heads
+caved in on one side&mdash;same as red and blue balloons. If mine caved, it'd
+be on the mathematics corner."</p>
+
+<p>I assured her that I never have a fraction in my house.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I'll come," said Miggy, simply.</p>
+
+<p>But immediately she leaned forward with a look of anxiety, and her face
+was pointed and big-eyed, so that distress became a part of it.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "I <i>forgot</i>. I meant to tell you first."</p>
+
+<p>"What is it? Can you not come, after all?" I inquired gravely.</p>
+
+<p>"I've got a drawback," said Miggy, soberly. "A man's in love with me."</p>
+
+<p>She linked her arms before her, a hand on either<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> shoulder&mdash;arms whose
+slenderness amazes me, though at the wrist they taper and in their
+extreme littleness are yet round. Because of this frailty she has a kind
+of little girl look which at that moment curiously moved me.</p>
+
+<p>"Who told you that?" I asked abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"About it being a drawback? Everybody 'most," said Miggy. "They all
+laugh about us and act like it was a pity."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment I felt a kind of anger as I felt it once when a woman said
+to me of a wife of many years whose first little child was coming, that
+she was "in trouble." I own that,&mdash;save with my neighbour, and Calliope,
+and a few more whom I love&mdash;here in the village I miss the simple good
+breeding of the perception that nothing is nobler than the emotions, and
+the simple good taste of taking seriously love among its young. Taking
+it seriously, I say. Not, heaven forbid, taking it for granted, as do
+the cities.</p>
+
+<p>"Other things being equal, I prefer folk who are in love," I told Miggy.
+Though I observe that I instance a commercialization which I deplore by
+not insisting on this secretarial qualification to anything like the
+extent with which I insist on, say, spelling.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy nodded&mdash;three little nods which seemed to settle everything.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I'll come," she repeated. "Anyhow, it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> isn't me that's in love at
+all. It's Peter. But of course I have to have some of the blame."</p>
+
+<p>So! It was, then, not "all Peter with Miggy." Poor Peter. It must be a
+terrific problem to be a Peter to such a Miggy. I must have looked "Poor
+Peter," because the girl's face took on its first smile. Such a smile as
+it was, brilliant, sparkling, occupying her features instead of
+informing them.</p>
+
+<p>"He won't interfere much," she observed. "He's in the cannery all day
+and then he practises violin and tinkers. I only see him one or two
+evenings a week; and I never think of him at all."</p>
+
+<p>"As my secretary," said I, "you may make a mental note for me: remind me
+that I wish sometime to meet Peter."</p>
+
+<p>"He'll be real pleased," said Miggy, "and real scared. Now about my
+being your secretary: do I have to take down everything you do?"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear child!" I exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't I?" said Miggy. "Why, the Ladies' Aid has a secretary and she
+takes down every single thing the society does. I thought that was being
+one."</p>
+
+<p>I told her, as well as might be, what I should require of her&mdash;not by
+now, I own, with any particularity of idea that I had a secretary, but
+rather that I had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be of use in
+many a little mechanical task. She listened,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> and, when I had made an
+end, gave her three little nods; but her face fell.</p>
+
+<p>"It's just doing as you're told," she summed it up with a sigh.
+"Everything is, ain't it? I thought maybe Secretary was doing your
+best."</p>
+
+<p>"But it is," I told her.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said positively, "you can't do your best when you have to do
+just exactly what you're told. Your <i>best</i> tells you how to do itself."</p>
+
+<p>At this na&iuml;ve putting of the personal equation which should play so
+powerful a part in the economics of toil I was minded to apologize for
+intending to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible duties with
+me. She had the truth, though: that the strong creative instinct is the
+chief endowment, primal as breath; for on it depend both life and the
+expression of life, the life of the race and the ultimate racial
+utterance.</p>
+
+<p>We talked on for a little, Miggy, I observed, having that royal
+indifference to time which, when it does not involve indifference to the
+time of other people, I delightedly commend. For myself, I can never
+understand why I should eat at one or sleep at eleven, if it is, as it
+often is, <i>my</i> one and <i>my</i> eleven and nobody else's. For, as between
+the clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other o'clocks are mine
+and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who
+would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> interrupt a sunset to go to dine, or wave away the stars in their
+courses to go to sleep, merely because the hour had struck. It must be
+in their blood, poor things, as descendants from the cell, to which time
+and space were the only considerations.</p>
+
+<p>When Miggy was leaving, she paused on the threshold with her first hint
+of shyness, a hint which I welcomed. I think that every one to whom I am
+permanently drawn must have in his nature a phase of shyness, even of
+unconquerable timidity.</p>
+
+<p>"If I shouldn't do things," Miggy said, "like you're used to having them
+done&mdash;would you tell me? I know a few nice things to do and I do 'em.
+But I'm always waking up in the night and thinking what a lot there must
+be that I do wrong. So if I do 'em wrong would you mind not just
+squirming and keeping still about 'em&mdash;but tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you, child, if there is need," I promised her. And I caught
+her smile&mdash;that faint, swift, solemn minute which sometimes reveals on a
+face the childlike wistfulness of every one of us, under the mask, to
+come as near as may be to the others.</p>
+
+<p>I own that when, just now, I turned from her leave-taking, I had that
+infrequent sense of emptiness-in-the-room which I have had usually only
+with those I love or with some rare being, all fire and spirit and idea,
+who has flamed in my presence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> and died into departure. I cannot see why
+we do not feel this sense of emptiness whenever we leave one another.
+Would you not think that it would be so with us who live above the abyss
+and below the uttermost spaces? It is not so, and there are those from
+whose presence I long to be gone in a discomfort which is a kind of
+orison of my soul to my body to hurry away. It is so that I long to be
+gone from that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, and of this I am
+sorely ashamed. But I think that all such dissonance is merely a failure
+in method, and that the spirit of this business of being is that we long
+for one another to be near.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, in "this world of visible images" and patterns and schedules and
+o'clocks, it is like stumbling on the true game to come on some one who
+is not on any dial. And I fancy that Miggy is no o'clock. She is not
+Dawn o'clock, because already she has lived so much; nor Noon o'clock,
+because she is far from her high moment; nor is she Dusk o'clock,
+because she is so poignantly alive. Rather, she is like the chimes of a
+clock&mdash;which do not tell the time, but which almost say something else.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>IV</span> <span class="smaller">SPLENDOUR TOWN</span></h2>
+
+<p>Last night I went for a walk across the river, and Little Child went
+with me to the other end of the bridge.</p>
+
+<p>I would have expected it to be impossible to come to the fourth chapter
+and to have said nothing of the river. But the reason is quite clear:
+for the setting of the stories of the village as I know them is
+pre&euml;minently rambling streets and trim dooryards, and neat interiors
+with tidy centre-tables. Nature is merely the necessary opera-house, not
+the intimate setting. Nature's speech through the trees is most
+curiously taken for granted as being trees alone, and she is, as I have
+shown, sometimes cut off quite rudely in the midst of an elm or linden
+sentence and curtly interrupted by a sidewalk. If a grove of trees is
+allowed to remain in a north dooryard it is almost certainly because the
+trees break the wind. Likewise, Nature's unfoldings in our turf and
+clover we incline to regard as merely lawns, the results of seeds and
+autumn fertilizing. Our vines<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> are for purposes of shade, cheaper and
+prettier than awnings or porch rollers. With our gardens, where our
+"table vegetables" are grown, Nature is, I think, considered to have
+little or nothing to do; and we openly pride ourselves on our early this
+and our prodigious that, quite as when we cut a dress or build a
+lean-to. We admit the rain or the sunny slope into partnership, but what
+we recognize is weather rather than the mighty spirit of motherhood in
+Nature. Indeed, our flower gardens, where are wrought such miracles of
+poppies and pinks, are perhaps the only threshold on which we stand
+abashed, as at the sound of a singing voice, a voice that sings
+believing itself to be alone.</p>
+
+<p>These things being so, it is no wonder that the river has been for so
+long no integral part of village life. The river is accounted a place to
+fish, a place to bathe, a thing to cross to get to the other side, an
+objective point&mdash;including the new iron bridge&mdash;to which to take guests.
+But of the everyday life it is no proper part. On the contrary, the
+other little river, which strikes out silverly for itself to eastward,
+is quite a personality in the village, for on it is a fine fleet of
+little launches with which folk take delight. But this river of mine to
+the west is a thing of whims and eddies and shifting sand bars, and here
+not many boats adventure. So the river is accepted as a kind of pleasant
+hermit living on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> edge of the village. It draws few of us as Nature
+can draw to herself. We know the water as a taste only and not yet as an
+emotion. We say that we should enjoy going there if we had the time. I
+know, I know. You see that we do not yet <i>live</i> the river, as an ancient
+people would live their moor. But in our launches, our camping parties,
+our flights to a little near lake for dinner, in a tent here and a swing
+there, set to face riverward, there lies the thrill of process, and by
+these things Nature is wooing us surely to her heart. Already the Pump
+pasture has for us the quality of individuality, and we have picnics
+there and speak of the pasture almost as of a host. Presently we shall
+be companioned by all our calm stretches of meadow, our brown sand bars,
+our Caledonia hills, our quiet lakes, our unnavigable river, as the
+Northmen were fellowed of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Little Child has at once a wilder and a tamer instinct. She has this
+fellowship and the fellowship of more.</p>
+
+<p>"Where shall we go to-day?" I ask her, and she always says, "Far away
+for a party"&mdash;in a combination, it would seem, of the blood of shepherd
+kings with certain corpuscles of modernity. And when we are in the woods
+she instances the same dual quality by, "Now let's sit down in a <i>roll</i>
+and wait for a fairy, and be a society."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p><p>We always go along the levee, Little Child and I, and I watch the hour
+have its way with her, and I do not deny that occasionally I try to
+improve on the hour by a tale of magic or by the pastime of teaching her
+a lyric. I love to hear her pretty treble in "Who is Sylvia? What is
+she?" and "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," and "April, April, laugh
+thy girlish laughter," and in Pippa's song. Last night, to be sure, the
+lyrics rather gave way to some talk about the circus to be to-day, an
+unwonted benison on the village. But even the reality of the circus
+could not long keep Little Child from certain sweet vagaries, and I love
+best to hear her in these fancyings.</p>
+
+<p>"Here," she said to me last night, "is her sponge."</p>
+
+<p>I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are always finding the fairy's
+cast-off ornaments and articles of toilet. On occasion we have found her
+crown, her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her plumed fan,
+her parasol&mdash;a skirtful of fancies which next day Little Child has
+brought to me in a shoe box for safe keeping so that "They" would not
+throw the things away: that threatening "They" which overhangs
+childhood, casting away its treasures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying
+a ladder straight through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the
+back yard. I can visualize that "They" as I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> believe it seems to some
+children, something dark and beetling and menacing and imminent, less
+like the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this precious idea of
+the Family, to conserve which is one of our chief hopes, should so often
+be made to appear to its youngest member in the general semblance of a
+phalanx?</p>
+
+<p>We sat down for a little at the south terminal of the bridge, where a
+steep bank and a few desperately clinging trees have arranged a little
+shrine to the sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across the bridge
+I had been watching against the gold the majestic or apathetic or sodden
+profiles of the farmers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face,
+it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it to forecast the
+weather. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky
+and called "The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the
+village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white
+pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital. And
+there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the butcher's cart halted in
+snow while a tawny-jerseyed boy lifts high his yellow light to find a
+parcel. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising
+values and fresco our village libraries with them&mdash;yes, and our drug
+stores, too.</p>
+
+<p>The story that I told Little Child while we rested<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> had the symbolism
+which I often choose for her: that of a girl keeping a garden for the
+coming of a child. All her life she has been making ready and nothing
+has been badly done. In one green room of the garden she has put fair
+thoughts, in another fair words, and in the innermost fastnesses of the
+garden fair deeds. Here she has laid colour, there sweet sound, there
+something magic which is a special kind of seeing. When the child comes,
+these things will be first toys, then tools, then weapons. Sometimes the
+old witch of the wood tries to blow into the garden a thistle of discord
+or bubbles of delight to be followed, and these must be warded away. All
+day the spirit of the child to come wanders through the garden, telling
+the girl what to do here or here, keeping her from guile or from
+idleness-without-dreams. She knows its presence and I think that she has
+even named it. If it shall be a little girl, then it is to be Dagmar,
+Mother of Day, or Dawn; but if a little boy, then it shall be called for
+one whom she has not yet seen. Meanwhile, outside the door of the garden
+many would speak with the girl. On these she looks, sometimes she even
+leans from her casement, and once, it may be, she reaches out her hand,
+ever so swiftly, and some one without there touches it. But at that she
+snatches back her hand and bars the garden, and for a time the spirit of
+the little child does not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> come very near. So she goes serenely on
+toward the day when a far horn sounds and somebody comes down the air
+from heaven, as it has occurred to nobody else to do. And they hear the
+voice of the little child, singing in the garden.</p>
+
+<p>"The girl is me," says little Little Child, as she always says when I
+have finished this story.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I tell her.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd like to see that garden," she says thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>Then I show her the village in the trees of the other shore, roof upon
+roof pricked by a slim steeple; for that is the garden.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care about just bein' good," she says, "but I'd like to
+housekeep that garden."</p>
+
+<p>"For a sometime-little-child of your own," I tell her.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she assents, "an' make dresses for."</p>
+
+<p>I cannot understand how mothers let them grow up not knowing, these
+little mothers-to-be who so often never guess their vocation. It is a
+reason for everything commonly urged on the ground of conduct, a ground
+so lifeless to youth. But quicken every desert space with "It must be
+done so for the sake of the little child you will have some day," and
+there rises a living spirit. Morals, civics, town and home economics,
+learning&mdash;there is the concrete reason for them all; and the abstract
+understanding<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> of these things for their own sakes will follow,
+flower-wise, fruit-wise, for the healing of the times.</p>
+
+<p>I had told to that old Aunt Effie who keeps house for Miggy and Little
+Child something of what I thought to do&mdash;breaking in upon the old
+woman's talk of linoleum and beans and other things having, so to say,
+one foot in the universe.</p>
+
+<p>"Goodness," that old woman had answered, with her worried turn of head,
+"I'm real glad you're going to be here. <i>I dread saying anything.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Here too we must look to the larger day when the state shall train for
+parenthood and for citizenship, when the schools and the universities
+shall speak for the state the cosmic truths, and when by comparison
+botany and differential calculus shall be regarded as somewhat less
+vital in ushering in the kingdom of God.</p>
+
+<p>The water reservoir rose slim against the woods to the north; to the
+south was a crouching hop house covered with old vines. I said to Little
+Child:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Look everywhere and tell me where you think a princess would live if
+she lived here."</p>
+
+<p>She looked everywhere and answered:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"In the water tower in those woods."</p>
+
+<p>"And where would the old witch live?" I asked her.</p>
+
+<p>"In the Barden's hop house," she answered.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p><p>"And where would the spirit of the little child be?" I tested her.</p>
+
+<p>She looked long out across the water.</p>
+
+<p>"I think in the sunset," she said at last. And then of her own will she
+said over the Sunset Spell I have taught her:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"I love to stand in this great air</div>
+<div>And see the sun go down.</div>
+<div>It shows me a bright veil to wear</div>
+<div>And such a pretty gown.</div>
+<div>Oh, I can see a playmate there</div>
+<div>Far up in Splendour Town."</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>I could hardly bear to let her go home, but eight o'clock is very
+properly Little Child's bedtime, and so I sent her across the bridge
+waving her hand every little way in that fashion of children who, I
+think, are hoping thus to save the moment that has just died. I have
+known times when I, too, have wanted to wave my hand at a moment and
+keep it looking at me as long as possible. But presently the moment
+almost always turned away.</p>
+
+<p>Last night I half thought that the sunset itself would like to have
+stayed. It went so delicately about its departure, taking to itself
+first a shawl of soft dyes, then a painted scarf, then frail iris wings.
+It mounted far up the heavens, testing its strength for flight and
+shaking brightness from its garments. And it slipped lingeringly away as
+if the riot of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> colour were after all the casual part, and the real
+business of the moment were to stay on with everybody. In the tenuity of
+the old anthropomorphisms I marvel that they did not find the sunset a
+living thing, tender of mortals, forever loth to step from out one
+moment into the cherishing arms of the next. Think! The sunset that the
+Greeks knew has been flaming round the world, dying from moment to
+moment and from mile to mile, with no more of pause than the human
+heart, since sunset flamed for Hero and Helen and Ariadne.</p>
+
+<p>If the sunset was made for lovers, and in our midland summers lingers on
+their account, then last night it was lingering partly for Miggy and
+Peter. At the end of the bridge I came on them together.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy did not flush when she saw me, and though I would not have
+expected that she would flush I was yet disappointed. I take an
+old-fashioned delight in women whose high spirit is compatible with a
+sensibility which causes them the little agonizings proper to this
+moment, and to that.</p>
+
+<p>But Miggy introduced Peter with all composure.</p>
+
+<p>"This," she said, "is Peter. His last name is Cary."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you do, Peter?" I said very heartily.</p>
+
+<p>I thought that Peter did something the rationale of which might have
+been envied of courts. He turned to Miggy and said "Thank you."
+Secretly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> I congratulated him on his embarrassment. In a certain milieu
+social shyness is as authentic a patent of perception as in another
+milieu is taste.</p>
+
+<p>"Come home with me," I besought them. "We can find cake. We can make
+lemonade. We can do some reading aloud." For I will not ask the mere
+cake and lemonade folk to my house. They must be, in addition, good or
+wise or not averse to becoming either.</p>
+
+<p>I conceived Peter's evident agony to rise from his need to reply.
+Instead, it rose from his need to refuse.</p>
+
+<p>"I take my violin lesson," he explained miserably.</p>
+
+<p>"He takes his violin lesson," Miggy added, with a pretty, somewhat
+maternal manner of translating. I took note of this faint manner of
+proprietorship, for it is my belief that when a woman assumes it she
+means more than she knows that she means.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm awful sorry," said Peter, from his heart; "I was just having to go
+back this minute."</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow's his regular lesson day," Miggy explained, "but to-morrow
+he's going to take me to the circus, so he has his lesson to-night. Go
+on," she added, "you'll be late and you'll have to pay just the same
+anyway." I took note of this frank fashion of protection of interests,
+for it is my belief that matters are advancing when the lady practises
+economics in courtship. But I saw that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> Miggy was manifesting no
+symptoms of accompanying Peter, and I begged them not to let me spoil
+their walk.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right," Miggy said; "he'll have to hurry and I don't want to
+go in yet anyway. I'll walk back with you." And of this I took note with
+less satisfaction. It was as if Miggy had not come alive.</p>
+
+<p>Peter smiled at us, caught off his hat, and went away with it in his
+hand, and the moment that he left my presence he became another being. I
+could see by his back that he was himself, free again, under no bondage
+of manner. It is a terrific problem, this enslavement of speech and
+trivial conduct which to some of us provides a pleasant medium and for
+some of us furnishes fetters. When will they manage a wireless society?
+I am tired waiting. For be it a pleasant medium or be it fetters, the
+present communication keeps us all apart. "I hope," I said once at
+dinner, "that I shall be living when they think they get the first sign
+from Mars." "I hope," said my companion, "that I shall be living when I
+think I get the first sign from you&mdash;and you&mdash;and you, about this
+table." If this young Shelley could really have made some sign, what
+might it not have been?</p>
+
+<p>"Everybody's out walking to-night," Miggy observed. "There's Liva Vesey
+and Timothy Toplady ahead of us."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p><p>"They are going to be married, are they not?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy looked as if I had said something indelicate.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she answered, "not out loud yet."</p>
+
+<p>Then, fearing that she had rebuked me, "He's going to take her to the
+circus to-morrow in their new buckboard," she volunteered. And I find in
+Friendship that the circus is accounted a kind of official
+trysting-place for all sweethearts.</p>
+
+<p>We kept a little way back of the lovers, the sun making Liva Vesey's
+pink frock like a vase-shaped lamp of rose. Timothy was looking down at
+her and straightway looking away again when Liva had summoned her
+courage to look up. They were extremely pleasant to watch, but this
+Miggy did not know and she was intent upon me. She had met Little Child
+running home.</p>
+
+<p>"She's nice to take a walk with," Miggy said; "but I like to walk around
+by myself too. Only to-night Peter came."</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy," said I, "I want to congratulate you that Peter is in love with
+you."</p>
+
+<p>She looked up with puzzled eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, that was nothing," she said; "he seemed to do it real easy."</p>
+
+<p>"But it is <i>not</i> easy," I assured her, "to find many such fine young
+fellows as Peter seems to be. I hope you will be very happy together."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p><p>"I'm not engaged," said Miggy, earnestly; "I'm only invited."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, well," I said, "if I may be allowed&mdash;I hope you are not sending
+regrets."</p>
+
+<p>Miggy laughed out suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Married isn't like a party," she said; "I know that much about society.
+Party you either accept or regret. Married you do both."</p>
+
+<p>I could have been no more amazed if the rosewood clock had said it.</p>
+
+<p>"Who has been talking to you, child?" I asked in distress.</p>
+
+<p>"I got it out of living," said Miggy, solemnly. "You live along and you
+live along and you find out 'most everything."</p>
+
+<p>I looked away across the Pump pasture where the railway tracks cut the
+Plank Road, that comes on and on until it is modified into Daphne
+Street. I remembered a morning of mist and dogwood when I had walked
+that road through the gateway into an earthly paradise. Have I not said
+that since that time we two have been, as it were, set to music and
+sung; so that the silences of separation are difficult to beguile save
+by the companionship of the village&mdash;the village that has somehow taught
+Miggy its bourgeoise lesson of doubt?</p>
+
+<p>My silence laid on her some vague burden of proof.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p><p>"Besides," she said, "I'm not like the women who marry people. Most of
+'em that's married ain't all married, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean, child?" I demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"They're not," protested Miggy. "They marry like they pick out a way to
+have a dress made when they don't admire any of the styles very much,
+and they've wore out everything else. Women like some things about
+somebody, and that much they marry. Then the rest of him never is
+married at all, and by and by that rest starts to get lonesome."</p>
+
+<p>"But Miggy," I said to all this, "I should think you might like Peter
+entirely."</p>
+
+<p>She surprised me by her seriousness.</p>
+
+<p>"Anyhow, I've got my little sister to bring up," she said; "Aunt Effie
+hasn't anything. And I couldn't put two on him to support."</p>
+
+<p>I wondered why not, but I said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"And besides," Miggy said after a pause, "there's Peter's father. You
+know about him?"</p>
+
+<p>I did know&mdash;who in the village did not know? Since my neighbour had told
+me of him I had myself seen him singing through the village streets,
+shouting out and disturbing the serene evenings, drunken, piteous....</p>
+
+<p>"Peter has him all the time," I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>She must have found a hint of resistance in my voice, for her look
+questioned me.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p><p>"I never could stand it to have anybody like that in the house," she
+said defensively. "I've told Peter. I've told him both reasons...."
+Miggy threw out her arms and stood still, facing the sunset. "Anyway, I
+want to keep on feeling all free and liberty-like!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>This intense individualism of youth, passioning only for far spaces,
+taking no account of the common lot nor as yet urgent to share it is,
+like the panther grace in the tread of the cat, a survival of the
+ancient immunity from accountabilities. To note it is to range down the
+evolution of ages. To tame it&mdash;there is a task for all the servants of
+the new order.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy was like some little bright creature caught unaware in the net of
+living and still remembering the colonnades of otherwhere, renowned for
+their shining. She was looking within the sunset, where it was a thing
+of wings and doors ajar and fair corridors. I saw the great freedoms of
+sunset in her face&mdash;the sunset where Little Child and I had agreed that
+a certain spirit lived.... Perhaps it was that that little vagrant
+spirit signalled to me&mdash;and the Custodian understood it. Perhaps it was
+that I saw, beneath the freedoms, the woman-tenderness in the girl's
+face. In any case I spoke abruptly and half without intention.</p>
+
+<p>"But you don't want to be free from Little Child.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> It is almost as if
+she were your little girl, is it not?" I said.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy's eyes did not leave the sunset. It was rather as if she saw some
+answer there.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I like to pretend she is," she said simply.</p>
+
+<p>"That," I said quietly, "is pleasant to pretend."</p>
+
+<p>And now her mood had changed as if some one had come to take her place.</p>
+
+<p>"But if she <i>was</i>&mdash;that," she said, "her name, then, would most likely
+be Margaret, like mine, wouldn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It would be very well to have it Margaret," I agreed.</p>
+
+<p>Her step was quickened as by sudden shyness.</p>
+
+<p>"It's funny to think about," she said. "Sometimes I most think of&mdash;her,
+till she seems in the room. Not quite my sister. I mean <i>Margaret</i>."</p>
+
+<p>It made my heart beat somewhat. I wondered if anything of my story to
+Little Child was left in my mind, and if subconsciously Miggy was
+reading it. This has sometimes happened to me with a definiteness which
+would be surprising if the supernatural were to me less natural. But I
+think that it was merely because Miggy had no idea of the sanctity of
+what she felt that she was speaking of it.</p>
+
+<p>"How does she look?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Like me," said Miggy, readily; "I don't want her to either. I want her
+to be pretty and I'm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> not. But when I think of her running 'round in the
+house or on the street, I always make her look like me. Only little."</p>
+
+<p>"Running 'round in the house." That was the way my neighbour had put it.
+Perhaps it is the way that every woman puts it.</p>
+
+<p>"Does she seem like you, too?" I tempted her on.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, better," Miggy said confidently; "learning to play on the piano and
+not much afraid of folks and real happy."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you ever pretend about a boy?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said; "if I do&mdash;I never can think him out real plain. Margaret
+I can most see."</p>
+
+<p>And this, too, was like the girl in the garden and the spirit of that
+one to be called by a name of one whom she had not seen.</p>
+
+<p>I think that I have never hoped so much that I might know the right
+thing to say. And when most I wish this I do as I did then: I keep my
+impulse silent and I see if that vague Custodian within, somewhere
+between the seeing and the knowing, will not speak for me. I wonder if
+she did? At all events, what either she or I said was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy! Look everywhere and tell me the most beautiful thing you can
+see."</p>
+
+<p>She was not an instant in deciding.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p><p>"Why, sunset," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Promise me," said I&mdash;said we!&mdash;"that you will remember <i>Now</i>. And that
+after to-night, when you see a sunset&mdash;always, always, till she
+comes&mdash;you will think about her. About Margaret."</p>
+
+<p>Because this caught her fancy she promised readily enough. And then we
+lingered a little, while the moment gave up its full argosy. I have a
+fancy for these times when I say "I will remember," and I am always
+selecting them and knowing, as if I had tied a knot in them, that I will
+remember. These times become the moments at which I keep waving my hand
+in the hope that they will never turn away. And it was this significance
+which I wished the hour to have for Miggy, so that for her the sunset
+should forever hold, as Little Child had said that it holds, that tiny,
+wandering spirit....</p>
+
+<p>Liva Vesey and Timothy had lingered, too, and we passed them on the
+bridge, he still trying to win her eyes, and his own eyes fleeing
+precipitantly whenever she looked up. The two seemed leaning upon the
+winged light, the calm stretches of the Pump pasture, the brown sand
+bar, the Caledonia hills. And the lovers and the quiet river and the
+village, roof upon roof, in the trees of the other shore, and most of
+all Miggy and her shadowy Margaret seemed to me like the words of some
+mighty cosmic utterance, with the country evening for its tranquil voice.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>V</span> <span class="smaller">DIFFERENT</span></h2>
+
+<p>Those who had expected the circus procession to arrive from across the
+canal to-day were amazed to observe it filing silently across the tracks
+from the Plank Road. The Eight Big Shows Combined had arrived in the
+gray dawn; and word had not yet gone the rounds that, the Fair Ground
+being too wet, the performance would "show" in the Pump pasture, beyond
+the mill. There was to be no evening amusement. It was a wait between
+trains that conferred the circus on Friendship at all.</p>
+
+<p>Half the country-side, having brought its lunch into town to make a day
+of it, trailed as a matter of course after the clown's cart at the end
+of the parade, and about noon arrived in the pasture with the
+pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to find it transformed
+into unknown ground. Who in the vicinity of the village had not known
+the Pump pasture of old? Haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,
+it had lain expressionless as the hills,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> for as long as memory. When in
+spring, "Where you goin'? Don't you go far in the hot sun!" from
+Friendship mothers was answered by, "We're just goin' up to the Pump
+pasture for vi'lets" from Friendship young, no more was to be said. The
+pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great, faithful Newfoundland
+dog; and about it was something of the safety of silence and warmth and
+night-in-a-trundle-bed.</p>
+
+<p>And lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture were articulate. The great
+elliptical tent, the strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of
+the hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were doing&mdash;these gave
+to the place the aspect of having from the first been secretly familiar
+with more than one had suspected.</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't it the divil?" demanded Timothy Toplady, Jr., ecstatically, as
+the glory of the scene burst upon him.</p>
+
+<p>Liva Vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in the buckboard, looked up
+at his brown Adam's apple&mdash;she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as
+her sweetheart's face&mdash;and rejoined:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Timmie! ain't it just what you might say <i>great</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly, "that it is that."</p>
+
+<p>He looked down in her face with a lifting of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>eyebrows and an honest
+fatuity of mouth. Liva Vesey knew the look&mdash;without ever having met it
+squarely, she could tell when it was there, and she promptly turned her
+head, displaying to Timothy's ardent eyes tight coils of beautiful blond
+crinkly hair, a little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver
+locket chain. At which Timothy now collapsed with the mien of a man who
+is unwillingly having second thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>"My!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>They drove into the meadow, and when the horse had been loosed and cared
+for, they found a great cottonwood tree, its leaves shimmering and
+moving like little banners, and there they spread their lunch. The sunny
+slope was dotted with other lunchers. The look of it all was very gay,
+partly because the trees were in June green, and among them windmills
+were whirling like gaunt and acrobatic witches, and partly because it
+was the season when the women were brave in new hats, very pink and very
+perishable.</p>
+
+<p>The others observed the two good-humouredly from afar, and once or twice
+a tittering group of girls, unescorted, passed the cottonwood tree,
+making elaborate detours to avoid it. At which Liva flushed, pretending
+not to notice; and Timothy looked wistfully in her face to see if she
+wished that she had not come with him. However, Timothy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> never dared
+look at her long enough to find out anything at all; for the moment that
+she seemed about to meet his look he always dropped his eyes
+precipitantly to her little round chin and so to the silver chain and
+locket. And then he was miserable.</p>
+
+<p>It was strange that a plain heart-shaped locket, having no initials,
+could make a man so utterly, extravagantly unhappy. Three months
+earlier, Liva, back from a visit in the city, had appeared with her
+locket. Up to that time the only personality in which Timothy had ever
+indulged was to mention to her that her eyes were the colour of his
+sister's eyes, whose eyes were the colour of their mother's eyes and
+their father's eyes, and of Timothy's own, and "Our eyes match, mine and
+yours," he had blurted out, crimson. And yet, even on these terms, he
+had taken the liberty of being wretched because of her. How much more
+now when he was infinitely nearer to her? For with the long spring
+evenings upon them, when he had sat late at the Vesey farm, matters had
+so far advanced with Timothy that, with his own hand, he had picked a
+green measuring-worm from Liva's throat. Every time he looked at her
+throat he thought of that worm with rapture. But also every time he
+looked at her throat he saw the silver chain and locket. And on circus
+day, if the oracles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> seemed auspicious, he meant to find out whose
+picture was worn in that locket, even though the knowledge made him a
+banished man.</p>
+
+<p>If only she would ever mention the locket! he thought disconsolately
+over lunch. If only she would "bring up the subject," then he could find
+courage. But she never did mention it. And the talk ran now:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Would you ever, ever think this was the Pump pasture?" from Liva.</p>
+
+<p>"No, you wouldn't, would you? It don't look the same, does it? You'd
+think you was in a city or somewheres, wouldn't you now? Ain't it
+differ'nt?"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you count the elephants?"</p>
+
+<p>"I bet I did. Didn't you? Ten, wa'n't it? Did you count the cages?
+Neither did I. And they was too many of 'em shut up. I don't know
+whether it's much of a circus or not&mdash;" with gloomy superiority&mdash;"they
+not bein' any calliope, so."</p>
+
+<p>"A good many cute fellows in the band," observed Liva. For Liva would
+have teased a bit if Timothy would have teased too. But Timothy replied
+in mere misery:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You can't tell much about these circus men, Liva. They're apt to be the
+kind that carouse around. I guess they ain't much to 'em but their swell
+way."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p><p>"Oh, I don't know," said Liva.</p>
+
+<p>Then a silence fell, resembling nothing so much as the breath of
+hesitation following a <i>faux pas</i>, save that this silence was longer,
+and was terminated by Liva humming a little snatch of song to symbolize
+how wholly delightful everything was.</p>
+
+<p>"My!" said Timothy, finally. "You wouldn't think this was the Pump
+pasture at all, it looks so differ'nt."</p>
+
+<p>"That's so," Liva said. "You wouldn't."</p>
+
+<p>It was almost as if the two were inarticulate, as the pasture had been
+until the strange influences of the day had come to quicken it.</p>
+
+<p>While Liva, with housewifely hands, put away the lunch things in their
+basket, Timothy nibbled along lengths of grass and hugged his knees and
+gloomed at the locket. It was then that Miggy and Peter passed them and
+the four greeted one another with the delicate, sheepish enjoyment of
+lovers who look on and understand other lovers. Then Timothy's look went
+back to Liva. Liva's rose-pink dress was cut distractingly without a
+collar, and the chain seemed to caress her little throat. Moreover, the
+locket had a way of hiding beneath a fold of ruffle, as if it were <i>her</i>
+locket and as if Timothy had no share in it.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," cried Liva, "<i>Timmie</i>! That was the lion roared. Did you hear?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p><p>Timothy nodded darkly, as if there were worse than lions.</p>
+
+<p>"Wasn't it the lion?" she insisted.</p>
+
+<p>Timothy nodded again; he thought it might have been the lion.</p>
+
+<p>"What you so glum about, Timmie?" his sweetheart asked, glancing at him
+fleetingly.</p>
+
+<p>Timothy flushed to the line of his hair.</p>
+
+<p>"Gosh," he said, "this here pasture looks so differ'nt I can't get over
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Liva, "it does look differ'nt, don't it?"</p>
+
+<p>Before one o'clock they drifted with the rest toward the animal tent.
+They went incuriously past the snake show, the Eats-'em-alive show, and
+the Eastern vaudeville. But hard by the red wagon where tickets were
+sold Timothy halted spellbound. What he had heard was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Types. Types. Right this way AND in this direction for Types. No,
+Ladies, and no, Gents: Not Tin-types. But Photo-types. Photo<i>graphs</i> put
+up in Tintype style AT Tintype price. Three for a quarter. The fourth of
+a dozen for the fourth of a dollar. Elegant pictures, elegant finish,
+refined, up-to-date. Of yourself, Gents, of yourself. Or of any one you
+see around you. And WHILE you wait."</p>
+
+<p>Timothy said it before he had any idea that he meant to say it:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span></p><p>"Liva," he begged, "come on. You."</p>
+
+<p>When she understood and when Timothy saw the momentary abashment in her
+eyes, it is certain that he had never loved her more. But the very next
+moment she was far more adorable.</p>
+
+<p>"Not unless you will, Timmie," she said, "and trade."</p>
+
+<p>He followed her into the hot little tent as if the waiting chair were a
+throne of empire. And perhaps it was. For presently Timothy had in his
+pocket a tiny blurry bit of paper at which he had hardly dared so much
+as glance, and he had given another blurry bit into her keeping. But
+that was not all. When she thanked him she had met his eyes. And he
+thought&mdash;oh, no matter what he thought. But it was as if there were
+established a throne of empire with Timothy lord of his world.</p>
+
+<p>Then they stepped along the green way of the Pump pasture and they
+entered the animal tent, and Strange Things closed about them. There
+underfoot lay the green of the meadow, verdant grass and not infrequent
+moss, plantain and sorrel and clover, all as yet hardly trampled and
+still sweet with the breath of kine and sheep. And three feet above,
+foregathered from the Antipodes, crouched and snarled the striped and
+spotted things of the wild, with teeth and claws quick to kill, and with
+generations of the jungle in their shifting eyes. The bright<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> wings of
+unknown birds, the scream of some harsh throat of an alien wood, the
+monkeys chattering, the soft stamp and padding of the elephants chained
+in a stately central line along the clover&mdash;it was certain, one would
+have said, that these must change the humour of the pasture as the
+companionship of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the
+mind. That the pasture, indeed, would never be the same, and that its
+influence would be breathed on all who entered there. Already Liva and
+Timothy, each with the other's picture in a pocket, moved down that tent
+of the field in another world. Or had that world begun at the door of
+the stuffy little phototype tent?</p>
+
+<p>It was the cage of bright-winged birds that held the two. Timothy stood
+grasping his elbows and looking at that flitting flame and orange. Dare
+he ask her if she would wear his phototype in her locket&mdash;dare he&mdash;dare
+he&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>He turned to look at her. Oh, and the rose-pink cambric was so near his
+elbow! Her face, upturned to the birds, was flushed, her lips were
+parted, her eyes that matched Timothy's were alight; but there was
+always in Timothy's eyes a look, a softness, a kind of speech that
+Liva's could not match. He longed inexpressibly to say to her what was
+in his heart concerning the locket&mdash;the phototype&mdash;themselves. And Liva
+herself was longing to say<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> something about the sheer glory of the hour.
+So she looked up at his brown Adam's apple, and,</p>
+
+<p>"Think, Timmie," she said, "they're all in the Pump pasture where
+nothin' but cows an' robins an' orioles ever was before!"</p>
+
+<p>"I know it&mdash;I know it!" breathed Timothy fervently. "Don't seem like it
+could be the same place, does it?"</p>
+
+<p>Liva barely lifted her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"It makes us seem differ'nt, too," she said, and flushed a little, and
+turned to hurry on.</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinkin' that too!" he cried ecstatically, overtaking her. But
+all that Timothy could see was tight coils of blond, crinkled hair, and
+a little ear and a curve of white throat, with a silver locket chain.</p>
+
+<p>Down the majestic line of the elephants, towering in the apotheosis of
+mere bulk to preach ineffectually that spirit is apocryphal and mass
+alone is potent; past the panthers that sniffed as if they guessed the
+nearness of the grazing herd in the next pasture; past the cage in which
+the lioness lay snarling and baring her teeth above her cubs, so
+pathetically akin to the meadow in her motherhood; past unknown
+creatures with surprising horns and shaggy necks and lolling tongues&mdash;it
+was a wonderful progress. But it was as if Liva had found something more
+wonderful than these when, before the tigers' cage, she stepped
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>forward, stooped a little beneath the rope, and stood erect with
+shining eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Look!" she said. "Look, Timmie."</p>
+
+<p>She was holding a blue violet.</p>
+
+<p>"In front of the tigers; it was <i>growing</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you give it to me?" was Timothy's only answer.</p>
+
+<p>She laid it in his hand, laughing a little at her daring.</p>
+
+<p>"It won't ever be the same," she said. "Tigers have walked over it. My,
+ain't everything in the pasture differ'nt?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just as differ'nt as differ'nt can be," Timothy admitted.</p>
+
+<p>"Here we are back to the birds again," Liva said, sighing.</p>
+
+<p>Timothy had put the violet in his coat pocket and he stood staring at
+the orange and flame in the cage: Her phototype and a violet&mdash;her
+phototype and a violet.</p>
+
+<p>But all he said, not daring to look at her at all, was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I can't make it seem like the Pump pasture to save me."</p>
+
+<p>There is something, as they have said of a bugle, "winged and warlike"
+about a circus&mdash;the confusions, the tramplings, the shapes, the keen
+flavour of the Impending, and above all the sense of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>Untoward,
+which is eternal and which survives glamour as his grave survives a man.
+Liva and Timothy sat on the top row of seats and felt it all, and
+believed it to be merely honest mirth. Occasionally Liva turned and
+peered out through the crack in the canvas where the side met the roof,
+for the pure joy of feeling herself alien to the long green fields with
+their grazing herds and their orioles, and at one with the colour and
+music and life within. And she was glad of it all, glad to be there with
+Timothy. But all she said was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Timmie, I hope it ain't half over yet. Do you s'pose it is? When I
+look outside it makes me feel as if it was over."</p>
+
+<p>And Timothy, his heart beating, a great hope living in his breast,
+answered only:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"No, I guess it'll be quite some time yet. It's a nice show. Nice
+performance for the money, right through. Ain't it?"</p>
+
+<p>When at length it really was over and they left the tent, the wagons
+from town and country-side and the "depot busses" had made such a place
+of dust and confusion that he took her back to the cottonwood on the
+slope to wait until he brought the buckboard round. He left her leaning
+against the tree, the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly on
+the smooth silver locket. And when he drove back, and reached down a
+hand to draw her up to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment,
+as she mounted, with all the panorama of the field behind her, he
+perceived instantly that the locket was gone. Oh, and at that his heart
+leaped up! What more natural than to dream that she had taken it off to
+slip his phototype inside and that he had come back too soon? What more
+natural than to divine the reality of dreams?</p>
+
+<p>His trembling hope held him silent until they reached the highway. Then
+he looked at the field, elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming
+crowds, and he observed as well as he could for the thumping of his
+heart:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I kind o' hate to go off an' leave it. To-morrow when I go to town with
+the pie-plant, it'll look just like nothin' but a pasture again."</p>
+
+<p>Liva glanced up at him and dropped her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't sure," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" he asked her, wondering.</p>
+
+<p>But Liva shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't sure," she said evasively, "but I don't think somehow the Pump
+pasture'll <i>ever</i> be the same again."</p>
+
+<p>Timothy mulled that for a moment. Oh, could she <i>possibly</i> mean
+because....</p>
+
+<p>Yet what he said was, "Well, the old pasture looks differ'nt enough now,
+all right."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," assented Liva, "don't it?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p><p>Timothy had supper at the Vesey farm. It was eight o'clock and the
+elder Veseys had been gone to prayer-meeting for an hour when Liva
+discovered that she had lost her locket.</p>
+
+<p>"Lost your locket!" Timothy repeated. It was the first time, for all his
+striving, that he had been able to mention the locket in her presence.
+He had tried, all the way home that afternoon, to call her attention
+innocently to its absence, but the thing that he hoped held fast his
+intention. "Why," he cried now, in the crash of that hope, "you had it
+on when I left you under the cottonwood."</p>
+
+<p>"You sure?" Liva demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure," Timothy said earnestly; "didn't&mdash;didn't you have it off while I
+was gone?" he asked wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>"No," Liva replied blankly; she had not taken it off.</p>
+
+<p>When they had looked in the buckboard and had found nothing, Timothy
+spoke tentatively.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell you what," he said. "We'll light a lantern and hitch up and drive
+back to the Pump pasture and look."</p>
+
+<p>"Could we?" Liva hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>It was gloriously starlight when the buckboard rattled out on the Plank
+Road. Timothy, wretched as he was at her concern over the locket, was
+yet recklessly, magnificently happy in being alone by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> her side in the
+warm dusk, and on her ministry. She was silent, and, for almost the
+first time since he had known her, Timothy was silent too&mdash;as if he were
+giving his inarticulateness honest expression instead of forcing it
+continually to antics of speech.</p>
+
+<p>From the top of the hill they looked down on the Pump pasture. It lay
+there, silent and dark, but no longer expressionless; for instantly
+their imagination quickened it with all the music and colour and life of
+the afternoon. Just as Timothy's silence was now of the pattern of
+dreams.</p>
+
+<p>He tied the horse, and together they entered the field by the great open
+place where the fence had not yet been replaced. The turf was still soft
+and yielding, in spite of all the treading feet. The pasture was girdled
+by trees&mdash;locusts and box-alders outlined dimly upon the sky,
+nest-places for orioles; and here and there a great oak or a cottonwood
+made a mysterious figure on the stars. One would have said that
+underfoot would certainly be violets. A far light pricked out an answer
+to their lantern, and a nearer firefly joined the signalling.</p>
+
+<p>"I keep thinkin' the way it looked here this afternoon," said Liva once.</p>
+
+<p>"That's funny, so do I," he cried.</p>
+
+<p>Under the cottonwood on the slope, its leaves stirring like little
+banners, Timothy flashed his light,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> first on tufted grass, then on
+red-tasselled sorrel, then&mdash;lying there as simply as if it belonged
+there&mdash;on Liva's silver locket. She caught it from him with a little
+cry.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "I'm so glad. Oh, thank you ever so much, Timmie."</p>
+
+<p>He faced her for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you so almighty glad?" he burst out.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it's the first locket I ever had!" she said in surprise. "So of
+course I'm glad. Oh, Timmie&mdash;thank you!"</p>
+
+<p>"You're welcome, I'm sure," he returned stiffly.</p>
+
+<p>She gave a little skipping step beside him.</p>
+
+<p>"Timmie," she said, "let's circle round a little ways and come by where
+the big tent was. I want to see how it'll seem."</p>
+
+<p>His ill-humour was gone in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"That's what we <i>will</i> do!" he cried joyously.</p>
+
+<p>He walked beside her, his lantern swinging a little rug of brightness
+about their feet. So they passed the site of the big red ticket wagon,
+of the Eastern vaudeville, of the phototype tent; so they traversed the
+length where had stretched the great elliptical tent that had prisoned
+for them colour and music and life, as in a cup. And so at last they
+stepped along that green way of the pasture where underfoot lay the
+grass and the not infrequent moss and clover, not yet wholly trampled to
+dust; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> this was where there had been assembled bright-winged birds
+of orange and flame and creatures of the wild from the Antipodes, and
+where Strange Things had closed them round.</p>
+
+<p>The influence of what the pasture had seen must have been breathed on
+all who entered there that night: something of the immemorial freedom of
+bright birds in alien woods, of the ancestral kinship of the wild. For
+that tranquil meadow, long haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,
+expressionless as the hills, dependable as a nurse, had that day known
+strange breath, strange tramplings, cries and trumpetings, music and
+colour and life and the beating of wild hearts&mdash;and was it not certain
+that these must change the humour of the place as the coming of the
+grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind? The field bore the
+semblance of a place exquisitely of the country and, here in the dark,
+it was inarticulate once more. But something was stirring there,
+something that swept away what had always been as a wind sweeps,
+something that caught up the heart of the boy as ancient voices stir in
+the blood.</p>
+
+<p>Timothy cast down his lantern and gathered Liva Vesey in his arms. Her
+cheek lay against his shoulder and he lifted her face and kissed her,
+three times or four, with all the love that he bore her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p><p>"Liva," he said, "all the time&mdash;every day&mdash;I've meant this. Did you
+mean it, too?"</p>
+
+<p>She struggled a little from him, but when he would have let her go she
+stood still in his arms. And then he would have her words and "Did you?"
+he begged again. He could not hear what she said without bending close,
+close, and it was the sweeter for that.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Timmie," she answered, "I don't know. I don't know if I <i>did</i>. But
+I do&mdash;now."</p>
+
+<p>Timothy's courage came upon him like a mantle.</p>
+
+<p>"An' be my wife?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"An' be ..." Liva assented, and the words faltered away. But they were
+not greatly missed.</p>
+
+<p>Timothy looked over the pasture, and over the world. And lo, it was
+suddenly as if, with these, he were become articulate, and they were all
+three saying something together.</p>
+
+<p>When they turned, there was the lantern glimmering alight on the trodden
+turf. And in its little circle of brightness they saw something coloured
+and soft. It was a gay feather, and Timothy took it curiously in his
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>"See, it's from one of the circus birds," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"No!" Liva cried. "It's an oriole feather. One of the pasture orioles,
+Timmie!"</p>
+
+<p>"So it is," he assented, and without knowing why, he was glad that it
+was so. He folded it away with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> the violet Liva had gathered that
+afternoon. After all the strangeness, what he treasured most had
+belonged to the pasture all the time.</p>
+
+<p>"Liva!" he begged. "Will you wear the picture&mdash;my picture&mdash;in that
+locket?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "Timmie, I'm so sorry. The locket's one I bought cheap
+in the city, and it don't open."</p>
+
+<p>She wondered why that seemed to make him love her more. She wondered a
+little, too, when on the edge of the pasture Timothy stood still,
+looking back.</p>
+
+<p>"Liva!" he said, "don't the Pump pasture seem differ'nt? Don't it seem
+like another place?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Liva said, "it don't seem the same."</p>
+
+<p>"Liva!" Timothy said again, "it ain't the pasture that's so differ'nt.
+It's <i>us</i>."</p>
+
+<p>She laughed a little&mdash;softly, and very near his coat sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>"I 'most knew that this afternoon," she answered.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>VI</span> <span class="smaller">THE FOND FORENOON</span></h2>
+
+<p>This morning Miggy came by appointment to do a little work for me, and
+she appeared in some "best" frock to honour the occasion. It was a blue
+silk muslin, cut in an antiquated style and trimmed with tarnished
+silver passementerie. In it the child was hardly less distinguished than
+she had been in her faded violet apron. It was impossible for her to
+seem to be unconscious of her dress, and she spoke of it at once with
+her fine directness.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't have anything good enough to wear," she said. "I haven't got
+any good dress this summer till I get it made myself. I got this out of
+the trunk. It was my mother's."</p>
+
+<p>"It suits you very well, Miggy," I told her.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought maybe she'd like my wearing it&mdash;here," said Miggy, shyly.
+"You've got things the way she always wanted 'em."</p>
+
+<p>We went in my workroom and sat among my books and strewn papers. A
+lighted theatre with raised curtain and breathless audience, a room
+which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> one wakens to find flooded by a gibbous moon, these have for me
+no greater sorcery than morning in a little book-filled room, with the
+day before me. Perhaps it is that I ought to be doing so many things
+that I take an idler's delight in merely attending to my own occupation.</p>
+
+<p>While I wondered at what I should set Miggy, I looked for the spirit of
+the minute and tried not to see its skeleton. The skeleton was that I
+had here an inexperienced little girl who was of almost no use to me.
+The spirit was that whatever I chose to do, my work was delightful to
+me, and that to bring Miggy in contact with these things was a kind of
+adventure. It is, I find, seldom sufficient to think even of the body of
+one's work, which to-day proved to be in my case a search in certain old
+books and manuscripts for fond allusions. If one can, so to say, think
+in and out till one comes to the spirit of a task, then there will be
+evident an indeterminate sense of wings. Without these wings there can
+be no expression and no creation. And in the true democracy no work will
+be wingless. It will still be, please God, laborious, arduous, even
+heart-breaking, but never body-fettered, never with its birdlike spirit
+quenched. And in myself I would bring to pass, even now, this fair order
+of sweet and willing toil by taking to my hand no task without looking
+deep within for its essential life.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p><p>So it was with a sense not only of pleasure but of leisure that I
+established Miggy by the window with a manuscript of ancient romances
+and told her what to do: to look through them for a certain story,
+barely more than a reference, to the love of an Indian woman of this
+Middle West for her Indian husband, sold into slavery by the French
+Canadians. It is a simple story&mdash;you will find small mention made of
+it&mdash;but having once heard it the romance had haunted me, and I was fain
+to come on it again: the story of the wife of Kiala, fit to stand niched
+with the great loves of the world.</p>
+
+<p>The morning sun&mdash;it was hardly more than eight o'clock&mdash;slanted across
+the carpet; some roses that Little Child had brought me before her
+breakfast were fresh on my table; and the whole time was like a quiet
+cup. In that still hour experience seemed drained of all but fellowship,
+the fellowship of Miggy and my books and the darling insistence of the
+near outdoors. Do you not think how much of life is so made up, free of
+rapture or anxiety, dedicated, in task or in pastime, to serene
+companionship?</p>
+
+<p>I have said that for me there are few greater sorceries than morning,
+with the day before me, in a small book-filled room. I wonder if this is
+not partly because of my anticipations of the parentheses I shall take?
+Not recesses, but parentheses, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> can flavour a whole day. I
+remember a beloved house in which breakfast and luncheon were daily
+observations looked forward to not so much for themselves, as that they
+were occasions for the most delightful interruptions. Dinner was a
+ceremony which was allowed to proceed; but a breakfast or a luncheon was
+seldom got through without one or two of us leaving the table to look up
+a stanza, or to settle if two words had the same derivation, or to find
+if some obsolete fashion in meanings could not yet be worn with
+impunity. It grieved the dear housewife, I remember, and we tried to
+tell her how much more important these things were than that our new
+potatoes should be buttered while they were hot. But she never could see
+it, and potatoes made us think of Ireland, and in no time we were deep
+in the Celtic revival and racing off to find "The Love Talker." I
+remember but one dinner interruption, and that was when we all left in
+the midst of the fish to go in the study and determine if moonlight
+shining through stained glass does cast a coloured shadow, as it did on
+St. Agnes' eve.... I suppose, in those days, we must have eaten
+something, though, save a certain deep-dish cherry pie I cannot remember
+what we ate; but those interruptions are with me like so many gifts, and
+I maintain that these were the realities. Those days&mdash;and especially the
+morning when we read through the "Ancient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> Mariner" between pasting in
+two book plates!&mdash;taught me the precious lesson that the interruption
+and not the task may hold the angel. It was so that I felt that morning
+with Miggy; and I know that what we did with that forenoon will persist
+somewhere when all my envelopes of clippings are gone to dust.</p>
+
+<p>After a time I became conscious that the faint rustling of the papers
+through which I was looking was absorbed by another sound, rhythmic,
+stedfast. I looked out on my neighbour's lawn, and at that moment,
+crossing my line of vision through the window before which Miggy was
+seated, I saw Peter, cutting my neighbour's grass. I understood at once
+that he had chosen this morning for his service in order to be near
+Miggy. It all made a charming sight,&mdash;Peter, bareheaded, in an
+open-throated, neutral shirt, cutting the grass there beyond Miggy in
+her quaint dress, reading a romance. I forgot my work for a little, and
+watched for those moments of his passing. Miggy read on, absorbed. Then,
+for a little, I watched her, pleased at her absorption.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, from my window, I have looked down on the river and the long
+yellow sand bar and the mystery of the opposite shore where I have never
+been, and I have felt a great pity that these things cannot know that
+they are these things. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>Sometimes, in the middle of a summer night, when
+the moon is so bright that one can see well within one's own soul, I
+have fancied that I have detected an aroma of consciousness, of definite
+self-wonder, in the Out-of-doors. Fleetingly I have divined it in the
+surprise of Dawn, the laughter of a blue Forenoon, the girlish shyness
+of Twilight. And this morning I wanted self-wonder for Miggy and Peter.
+What a pity that they could not see it all as I saw it: the Shelley-like
+boy cutting the grass and loving this girl, in her mother's gown. But
+you must not suppose, either, that I do not know how that vast
+unconsciousness of Nature and Love flows with a sovereign essence almost
+more precious than awareness.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy," I said presently, "Peter is not at work to-day. That is he
+cutting grass."</p>
+
+<p>She looked out briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"He's got two days off coming to him," she answered. "It's for overtime.
+This must be one of 'em. Have <i>you</i> read these stories?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I said, "I have. Miggy, don't you want to go and ask Peter to
+have lunch with us at twelve?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, thank you," she dismissed this. "This isn't the day I see him."</p>
+
+<p>"But wouldn't you like it?" I pressed the matter curiously. "Just we
+three at luncheon alone?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p><p>She was turning the leaves of the manuscript and she looked up to set
+me right.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you know," she said, "I don't know Peter <i>that</i> way at all. I just
+know him to have him walk home with me, or call, or go walking. Peter
+never eats with me."</p>
+
+<p>Poor Peter, indeed, to be denied the simple intimacy of sometimes
+breaking bread with Miggy. I understood that to invite a man to "noon
+lunch" in the village was almost unheard of, but,</p>
+
+<p>"I think he would eat this noon if he never ate before," said I. To
+which Miggy made answer:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"If you have read all these stories will you&mdash;wouldn't you&mdash;tell me
+some, please? I can't bear to think of having to wait to read 'em before
+I know 'em!"</p>
+
+<p>She shut the book and leaned her chin in her hand and looked at me. And
+the idea of having Peter with us for lunch drifted out of the room,
+unattended.</p>
+
+<p>I maintain that one who loves the craft of letters for its own sake, one
+who loves both those who have followed it and the records that they have
+left, and one who is striving to make letters his way of service, must
+all have acted in the same way; and that was the way that I took. In
+these days when Helen and Juliet are read aloud to children while they
+work buttonholes in domestic science class, think of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> pure
+self-indulgence of coming on a living spirit&mdash;I say a <i>living</i>
+spirit&mdash;who had never heard of the beloved women of the world. I wonder
+if we could not find such spirits oftener if we looked with care? When I
+see certain women shopping, marketing, jolting about in busses, I am
+sometimes moved to wonder if they know anything about Nicolete and, if
+they were to be told, whether it would not rest them.</p>
+
+<p>I love it, I love this going back into old time and bringing out its
+sweet elements. I have said that there is a certain conservatism in
+which, if I let my taste have its way with me, I would luxuriate, as I
+might then indulge my love of the semi-precious stones, or of old
+tiling, or of lilies-of-the-valley, all day long. And it is so that my
+self-indulgence would lead me to spend my days idling over these shadowy
+figures in the old romances and the old biographies. The joy of it never
+leaves me. Always from these books drifts out to me the smoke of some
+hidden incense that makes the world other. Not that I want the world to
+be that way, but I like to pretend. I know now that in a world where one
+must give of one's utmost, spend and be spent if one is even to pay for
+one's keep, these incense hours must be occasional, not to say stolen.
+So that to find a Miggy to whom to play preceptor of romance was like
+digging a moonstone out of the river bank.</p>
+
+<p>What did I tell her? Not of Helen or Cleopatra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> or Isolde or Heloise or
+Guinevere, because&mdash;why, I think that you would not have told her of
+these, either. Of Beatrice and Brunhilde and Elaine and Enid I told her,
+for, though these are so sad, there beat the mighty motives, seeds of
+the living heart. Last I told her, of Nicolete and of Griselda and of
+Psyche and of the great sun of these loves that broke from cloud. She
+listened, wrapt as I was wrapt in the telling. Was it strange that the
+room, which had been like a quiet cup for serene companionship, should
+abruptly be throbbing with the potent principles of the human heart? I
+think that it was not strange, for assuredly these are nearer to us than
+breathing, instant to leap from us, the lightning of the soul, electric
+with life or with death. We are never very far from strong emotion. Even
+while I recounted these things to Miggy, there, without my window, was
+Peter, cutting the grass.</p>
+
+<p>When I had done, "Is there more like that in books?" asked Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, yes; thank heaven and the people who wrote them down, there are in
+books many more like these.</p>
+
+<p>"I s'pose lots didn't get into the books at all," said Miggy,
+thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>It is seldom that one finds and mourns a bird that is dead. But think of
+the choir of little bright breasts whose raptures nobody hears, nobody
+misses,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> nobody remembers. How like them we are, we of the loving
+hearts.</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't wonder if there's lots of folks being that way right, right
+now," concluded Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>Who am I that I should doubt this?</p>
+
+<p>"A tournament," said Miggy, dreamily; "I s'pose that was something like
+the Java entertainment is going to be."</p>
+
+<p>She slipped to one side of the big chair and laid both hands on its arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen," she said. "Would this be one? You know Delly Watson that's
+crazy? She was in love with Jem Pitlaw, a school teacher that used to be
+here, an' that died, an' that wasn't in love with her even if he had
+stayed living, and it did that to her. You know ... she talks about
+things that nobody ever heard of, and listens, and laughs at what she
+thinks she hears. Ain't that like Elaine?"</p>
+
+<p>Yes, if poor Delly Watson of the village had had a barge and a dwarf and
+a river winding from towered city to towered city, she would not have
+been unlike Elaine.</p>
+
+<p>"And Jerry, that sets up folks's stoves and is so in love with the music
+teacher that he joined the chorus and paid his dues and set in the bass
+corner all winter to watch her and he can't sing a note. And she don't
+even see him when she passes him. Ain't that like Beatrice and the Pale
+Man?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p><p>Jerry is so true and patient, and our young music teacher is so fair,
+that no one could find it sacrilege to note this sad likeness.</p>
+
+<p>"And Mis' Uppers that her husband went out West and she didn't get any
+word, and he don't come, and he don't come, and she's selling tickets on
+the parlour clock, and she cries when anybody even whistles his
+tunes&mdash;isn't that some like Brunhilde, that you said about, waiting all
+alone on top of the mountain? I guess Brunhilde had money, but I don't
+think Mis' Uppers' principal trouble is that she ain't. With both of 'em
+the worst of it must 'a' been the waiting."</p>
+
+<p>And I am in no wise sure that that slow-walking woman in the pointed
+gray shawl may not have a heart which aches and burns and passions like
+a valkyr's.</p>
+
+<p>"And Mame Wallace, that her beau died and all she's got is to keep house
+for the family, and keep house, and <i>keep</i> house. It seems as if she's
+sort of like Psyche, that had such an awful lot of things to do&mdash;and her
+life all mussed up."</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it is so that in that gaunt Mame Wallace, whose homing passion
+has turned into the colourless, tidy keeping of her house, there is
+something shining, like the spirit of Psyche, that would win back her
+own by the tasks of her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"And then there's Threat Hubbelthwait," said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> Miggy, "that gets drunk
+and sets in his hotel bar fiddling, and Mis' Hubbelthwait shoves him his
+meals in on to the cigar show-case and runs before he throws his bow at
+her&mdash;she's just exactly like those two&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Enid or Griselda?" I recognized them, and Miggy nodded. Poor Mis'
+Hubbelthwait! Was she not indeed an Enid, lacking her beauty, and a
+Griselda, with no hope of a sweet surprise of a love that but tested
+her? Truly, it was as Miggy said: in some form they were all there in
+the village, minus the bower and the silken kirtle, but with the same
+living hearts.</p>
+
+<p>And these were not all.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy," I said, "what about Liva Vesey and Timothy? Did you count
+them?" For Aucassin and Nicolete were happy and so are Liva and Timothy,
+and I think that they have all understood meadows.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy looked startled. One's own generation never seems so typical of
+anything as did a generation or two past.</p>
+
+<p>"Could they be?" she asked. "They got engaged the night of the circus
+Liva told me&mdash;everybody knows. Could they be counted in?"</p>
+
+<p>Oh, yes, I assured her. They might be counted. So, I fancy, might all
+love-in-the-village, if we knew its authentic essence.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p><p>"Goodness," said Miggy, meditatively, "then there's Christopha and
+Allen last winter, that I was their bridesmaid, and that rode off in the
+hills that way on their wedding night. I s'pose that was like something,
+if we only knew?"</p>
+
+<p>I could well believe that that first adventure of the young husband and
+wife, of whom I shall tell you, was like something sweet and bright and
+long ago.</p>
+
+<p>"And what," I said to Miggy abruptly, "about Peter?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Peter?</i>" repeated Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>Why not Peter?</p>
+
+<p>She looked out the window at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," she said, "but he's <i>now</i>. Peter's now. And he wears black
+clothes. And he's cutting grass...."</p>
+
+<p>True for Peter, to all these impeachments. I told her that, in his day,
+Aucassin was <i>now</i>, too; and that he wore the clothes of his times, and
+that if he did not do the tasks nearest his hand, then Nicolete should
+not have loved him.</p>
+
+<p>"And," said I, "unless I'm very much mistaken, in the same way that all
+the ancient lovers loved their ladies, Peter loves you."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>That</i> way?" said Miggy, laying her hand on the manuscript.</p>
+
+<p>"That way," said I. And a very good way it was, too.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p><p>Miggy put up both hands with a manner of pointing at herself.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," she said, "not me." Then her little shoulders went up and she
+caught her breath like a child. "<i>Honest?</i>" she said.</p>
+
+<p>I said no more, but sat silent for a little, watching her across the
+fallen manuscript of ancient romances. Presently I picked up the sheets,
+and by chance my look fell on the very thing for which we had been
+searching: the story of the wife of Kiala, a Wisconsin Indian chief who
+was sold into slavery and carried to Martinique. And alone, across those
+hundreds of miles of pathless snow and sea, the wife of Kiala somehow
+followed him to the door of his West Indian owner. And to him she gave
+herself into slavery so that she might be with her husband.</p>
+
+<p>I read the story to Miggy. And because the story is true, and because it
+happened so near and because of this universe in general, I was not able
+to read it quite so tranquilly as I should have wished.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," Miggy said, "is it like <i>that</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>Yes, please God; if the heart is big enough to hold it, it is like that.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy put her hand down quickly on the blue muslin dress she wore.</p>
+
+<p>"My mother knew!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>And that is the most wonderful thing of all: one's mother knew.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p><p>Miggy turned once more and looked out the window at Peter. Bless Peter!
+I think that he must have been over that grass with the mower quite
+twice&mdash;perhaps twice and a half. Almost immediately Miggy looked away
+from Peter, and I thought&mdash;though perhaps after all it was merely the
+faint colour that often hovers in her cheek. I felt, however, that if I
+had again suggested to Miggy that we ask Peter to lunch, Peter might
+possibly have lunched with us. But now I did not suggest it. No, if ever
+it gets to be "all Peter with Miggy," it must be so by divine
+non-interference.</p>
+
+<p>My little voice-friend up there on the shelf, the Westminster chimes,
+struck twelve, in its manner of sweet apology for being to blame for
+things ending. In the village we lunch at twelve, and so my forenoon was
+done and even the simple tasks I had set were not all finished. I
+wonder, though, if deep within this fond forenoon we have not found
+something&mdash;wings, or a light, or a singing&mdash;that was of the spirit of
+the tasks? I wish that I thought so with reasons which I could give to a
+scientist.</p>
+
+<p>At all events I am richly content. And over our luncheon Miggy has just
+flattered me unconscionably.</p>
+
+<p>"My!" she said, "I should think everybody would want to be Secretary."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>VII</span> <span class="smaller">AFRAID</span></h2>
+
+<p>I must turn aside to tell of Allen and Christopha, that young husband
+and wife whose first adventure, Miggy thought, was like something sweet
+and bright and long ago. It happened this last winter, but I cannot
+perceive any grave difference between that winter night and this June.
+Believe me, the seasons and the silences and we ourselves are not so
+different as we are alike.</p>
+
+<p>On the night of her wedding, Christopha threw her bouquet from the
+dining-room doorway, because there were no front stairs from which to
+throw it, but instead only a stairway between walls and to be reached
+from the dining room: a mere clerk of a stair instead of a
+proprietor-like hall staircase. In the confusion which followed&mdash;the
+carnations had narrowly missed the blazing white gas burner high in the
+room&mdash;the bride ran away above stairs, her two bridesmaids following.
+Her mother was already there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As Miggy
+had told me, she herself was one of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>Christopha's bridesmaids, and it is
+from Miggy that I have heard something of the outcome of the story.</p>
+
+<p>Almost as soon as the door was closed there was a rap at it, a rap
+peremptory, confident.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me in," said Allen; "I'm the groom!" Chris herself opened the door.
+Her muslin-wedding gown and the little bells of lilies unfaded in her
+blond hair became her wholly, and all her simple prettiness still wore
+the mystery and authority of the hour.</p>
+
+<p>"Allen," she said, "you oughtn't to of."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir, I ought!" he protested gayly, his voice pleasant with mirth
+and with its new, deep note. "I'll never see you a bride again&mdash;a real,
+weddin'-dress bride. I had to come."</p>
+
+<p>Christopha's mother looked up from her vague, bright fabrics.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you started to take the minister the kodak album," she said
+to Allen plaintively. "Has he got anybody to show him any attention? I
+should think you might&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But the two bridesmaids edged their way into the next room, and on some
+pretext of fabrics, took Christopha's mother with them,&mdash;as if there
+were abroad some secret Word of which they knew the meaning. For Miggy
+is sufficiently dramatic to know the Word for another, though she is not
+sufficiently simple to know it for herself.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p><p>Allen sat beside his bride on the cretonne-covered skirt box. And after
+all, he did not look at her, but only at her warm left hand in his.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the funniest thing," he said, "when I see you comin' in the
+parlour lookin' so differ'nt, I'm blessed if I wasn't afraid of you.
+What do you think of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"You's afraid of my dress," Chris told him, laughing, "not me. You use'
+to be afraid of me when we's first engaged, but you ain't now. It's
+<i>me</i>. I feel afraid of you&mdash;Allen. You're&mdash;differ'nt."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed tenderly, confidently.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Boo!</i>" he said. "Now are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she answered seriously; "now."</p>
+
+<p>"Chris!" he cried boyishly, "we're married! We're goin' to keep house."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "Allen! Think of the fun of puttin' the presents in the
+house&mdash;the dishes, and the glass, and the ornaments. There won't be
+another dinin' room in town like ours. Sideboard an' plate rail, an' the
+rug not tacked down."</p>
+
+<p>Their thoughts flew to the little house, furnished and waiting, down the
+snowy street by the Triangle park: their house.</p>
+
+<p>"Dinners, and suppers, and breakfas's&mdash;just us two by ourselves," Allen
+said. "<i>And</i> the presents. My!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, and company," she reminded him,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> "that's what I want. The girls
+in to tea in our own house."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he assented. "Right away?" he wanted to know.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said, "not right away, Silly! We've got to buy curtains and
+things. I never thought I'd have so many presents," she went on happily.
+"They's two water pitchers alike. Bess says I can change hers. We'll
+take it to the City"&mdash;she gave a little bounce on the skirt box&mdash;"and
+see a show, a really, truly show."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure we will," said he, magnificently. "And I'll take you to the place
+I told you about&mdash;where I got picked up."</p>
+
+<p>The little bride nodded, her eyes softening almost maternally. It was as
+if that story were her own, the story of Allen, the little stray child
+picked up on the streets of the City by that good woman whom Chris had
+never seen. But the name of Sarah Ernestine was like a charm to Chris,
+for the woman had been to Allen father and mother both.</p>
+
+<p>Chris bent down swiftly to his hands, closed over her own, and kissed
+them.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Allen," she said, with a curious wistfulness, "will you <i>always</i>,
+always be just like you are now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I should say I would," he answered gently. "They's nobody like
+you anywheres, Chris. Mis' Chris, Mis' Allen Martin."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p><p>"Don't it scare you to say it?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir, it does," he confessed. "It's like sayin' your own name over
+the telephone. What about you? Will <i>you</i> always, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, "always. Only&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Only what?" he repeated anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "don't let's let any outside things come between us,
+Allen&mdash;like they do, like with Bess and Opie,&mdash;business and
+sewin',&mdash;that's what I'm afraid of," she ended vaguely.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, "I guess we ain't much afraid of each other, honey. I
+guess we're just afraid of what could come between us."</p>
+
+<p>A voice, unconvincing, unimportant, a part of the inessential aspect of
+alien things, detached itself from the accompaniment in the next room,
+saying something responsible and plaintive about only an hour till train
+time.</p>
+
+<p>"An hour," Allen said over, and put his arms about her, with boyish
+awkwardness for the sake of the crisp muslin gown that had so terrified
+him. She rose and stood beside him, and he waited for a moment looking
+up in her face. "Chris," he said, "I'm scared of this one hour even.
+Till train time."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll hurry up and get the hour done as quick as I can," she promised
+him gayly.</p>
+
+<p>"Honestly, now&mdash;" said Chris's mother from the vague and indeterminate
+region where she moved.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span></p><p>"Right off, Mis' Mother!" Allen said, and knew that she was in the
+doorway, with the bridesmaids laughing beside her. And then he went down
+the stairway, his first radiant moment gone by.</p>
+
+<p>In the dining room the messenger was waiting. The messenger had arrived,
+in the clear cold of the night, from a drive across the Caledonia hills,
+and some one had sent him to that deserted room to warm himself. But
+Allen found him breathing on his fingers and staring out the frosty
+window into the dark. It was Jacob Ernestine, brother to the woman who
+had brought up Allen and had been kind to him when nobody else in the
+world was kind. For years Sarah Ernestine had been "West"&mdash;and with that
+awful inarticulacy of her class, mere distance had become an impassable
+gulf and the Silence had taken her. Allen had not even known that she
+meant to return. And now, Jacob told him, she was here, at his own home
+back in the hills&mdash;Sarah and a child, a little stray boy, whom she had
+found and befriended as she had once befriended Allen. And she was
+dying.</p>
+
+<p>"She didn't get your letter, I guess," the old man said, "'bout gettin'
+married. She come to-day, so sick she couldn't hold her head up. I see
+she didn't know nothin' 'bout your doin's. I didn't let her know. I jus'
+drove in, like split, to tell you, when the doctor went. He says she
+can't&mdash;she won't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> ... till mornin'. I thought," he apologized wistfully,
+"ye'd want to know, anyways, so I jus' drove in."</p>
+
+<p>"That was all right," Allen said. "You done right, Jacob."</p>
+
+<p>Then he stood still for a moment, looking down at the bright figures of
+the carpet. Jacob lived twelve miles back in the hills.</p>
+
+<p>"How'd you come?" Allen asked him briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"I've got the new cutter," the old man answered, with a touch of eager
+pride. "I'll drive ye."</p>
+
+<p>Then some one in the parlour caught sight of the bridegroom, and they
+all called to him and came where he was, besieging him with
+good-natured, trivial talk. The old man waited, looking out the window
+into the dark. He had known them all since they were children, and their
+merrymaking did not impress him as wholly real. Neither, for that
+matter, did Allen's wedding. Besides, his own sister was dying&mdash;somehow
+putting an end to the time when he and she had been at home together.
+That was all he had thought of during his drive to town, and hardly at
+all of Allen and his wedding. He waited patiently now while Allen got
+the wedding guests back to the parlour, and then slipped away from them,
+and came through the dining room to the stair door.</p>
+
+<p>"Stay there a minute," Allen bade him shortly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> and went back to the
+upper floor and to Chris's door again.</p>
+
+<p>It was her mother who answered his summons this time, and Allen's manner
+and face checked her words. Before he had done telling her what had
+happened, Chris herself was on the threshold, already in sober brown, as
+one who has put aside rainbows and entered on life. She had a little
+brown hat in one hand, and for the other hand he groped out and held it
+while he told her, as well as he could.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I've got to go, Chrissie," he ended miserably.</p>
+
+<p>She met his eyes, her own soft with sympathy for the plight of the other
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes," she said quietly, "of course we've got to go."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her breathlessly. That possibility had not crossed his
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>"You!" he cried. "You couldn't go, dear. Twelve miles out in Caledonia,
+cold as it is to-night. You&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>In spite of her sympathy, she laughed at him then.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you honestly think I wouldn't?" she asked, in a kind of wonder.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm sure&mdash;" began her mother. But the two bridesmaids manifestly
+heard the Word again, for they talked with her both at once.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p><p>"Not with Jacob, though," Chris was saying decisively. "You help father
+and the boys get out our cutter, Allen."</p>
+
+<p>Allen strode past the mother and lifted his wife's face in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean it?" he demanded. "Will you go&mdash;in the cold&mdash;all that long
+way&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You Silly!" she answered, and drew away from him and set the little
+brown hat on her head.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above">The road lay white before them, twelve miles of snow and stars to
+Jacob's cottage among the Caledonia hills. Jacob had gone on&mdash;from the
+crest of the rise by the Corner church they saw him and heard the faint
+signalling of his bells. It was a place, that rise by the Corner church
+on the edge of the village, where two others in such case might have
+drawn rein to look at Everything, stretching before, rhythmic crest and
+shallow, and all silent and waiting. But not these two, incurious as the
+gods, na&iuml;ve as the first lovers. Only, though of this they were
+unconscious, they saw things a little differently that night.</p>
+
+<p>"Look!" said the girl, with a sign to the lowlands, expressive with
+lights. "So many folks's houses&mdash;homes, all started. I s'pose it was
+just as big a thing for them. But <i>theirs</i> don't seem like anything,
+side of ours!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p><p>"That's so, too," assented Allen. "And theirs <i>ain't</i> anything side of
+ours!" he maintained stoutly.</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir," she agreed, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>Then she grew suddenly grave, and fell silent for a little, her eyes
+here and there on the valley lights, while Allen calculated aloud the
+time of the arrival at Jacob's house.</p>
+
+<p>"Allen!" she said at last.</p>
+
+<p>"Here!" he answered. "I'm here, you bet."</p>
+
+<p>"Just look at the lights," she said seriously, "and then <i>think</i>.
+There's Bess and Opie&mdash;not speakin' to each other. Over there's the
+Hubbelthwait farm that they've left for the hotel&mdash;an' Threat
+Hubbelthwait drunk all the time. An' Howells's, poor and can't pay, and
+don't care if they can't, and quarrels so folks can hear 'em from the
+road. And the Moneys', that's so ugly to the children, and her findin'
+fault, and him can't speak without an oath. That only leaves the
+Topladys' over there that's real, regular people. And she kind o' bosses
+him."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, looking at the lights with
+a difference.</p>
+
+<p>Chris's right hand was warm in his great-coat pocket, and she suddenly
+snuggled close to him, her chin on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Allen," she said, "I'm <i>afraid</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"What? On the Plank Road?" he wanted to know, missing her meaning.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p><p>"All them folks started out with presents, and a house, like us," she
+said, "and with their minds all made up to bein' happy. But just look at
+'em."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Allen, reasonably, "we <i>ain't</i> them."</p>
+
+<p>"We might get like 'em," she insisted. "How can you tell? Folks just do
+get that way or they just don't. How can you <i>tell</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"I s'pose that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother's got a picture of the Hubbelthwaits when they was married,"
+Chris pursued. "Her in white an' slippers and bracelets, and him slick
+as a kitten's foot. Think of her now, Allen, with <i>bracelets</i>. And him
+drunk all the time, 'most. How can you tell how things'll turn out? Oh,
+Allen, I <i>am</i>! I'm afraid."</p>
+
+<p>He bent to her face and laid his own against hers, glowing and cold and
+with fresh, warm lips.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's just try to be happy and keep ourselves happy," he said.</p>
+
+<p>The troubled woman was still in her face, but at his touch the fears
+went a little away, and the valley lights being already left behind
+among the echoes of the bells, they forgot both the lights and their
+shadows and drifted back to talk about the new house and the presents,
+and the dinners and suppers and breakfasts together. For these were the
+stuff of which the time was made. As it was made, too,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> of that shadowy,
+hovering fear for the future, and the tragic pity of their errand, and
+of sad conjecture about the little stray child whom Sarah Ernestine had
+brought.</p>
+
+<p>"That ain't it a'ready, is it?" Christopha exclaimed when they saw
+Jacob's cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"It just is&mdash;it's 'leven o'clock now," Allen answered, and gave the
+horse to the old man; and they two went within.</p>
+
+<p>The light in the room, like the lights back in the valley, was as if
+some great outside influence here and there should part the darkness to
+win a little stage for a scene of the tragedy: in the valley, for the
+drunkenness at the Hubbelthwaits', the poverty at the Howells', the ill
+nature at the Moneys'; and here, in Jacob's cottage, for death. There
+was no doubt of the quality of the hour in the cottage. The room was
+instinct with the outside touch. Already it was laid upon the woman in
+the bed, and with a mystery and authority not unlike that which had come
+upon Christopha in her marriage hour and was upon her still.</p>
+
+<p>The woman knew Allen, smiled at him, made him understand her
+thankfulness that he had come. At Christopha she looked kindly and quite
+without curiosity. Some way, that absence of curiosity at what was so
+vital to him gripped Allen's heart, and without his knowing the process,
+showed him the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> nature of death. The neighbour who had been with the
+sick woman slipped outside, and as she went she patted Chris's shoulder;
+and Allen felt that she understood, and he was dumbly grateful to her.</p>
+
+<p>Allen sat by the bed and held the hand of his foster-mother; and Chris
+moved about the room, heating water for a little pot of tea. And so it
+was Chris who first saw the child. He was sitting at the end of the wood
+box, on the floor before the oven&mdash;that little stray boy whom Sarah
+Ernestine had picked up as she had once picked up Allen. He looked up at
+Christopha with big, soft eyes, na&iuml;ve as the first bird. Almost before
+she knew that she meant to do so, Chris stooped, with a wondering word,
+and took him in her arms. He clung to her and she sat in the rocking
+chair near the window where stood Jacob's carnation plant. And she tried
+both to look at the child and to love him, at the same time.</p>
+
+<p>"See, Allen," she said, "this little boy!"</p>
+
+<p>The child looked over his shoulder at Allen, his little arms leaning on
+Christopha's breast. And very likely because he had felt strange and
+lonely and now was taken some account of, he suddenly and beautifully
+smiled, and you would have loved him the more for the way he did that.</p>
+
+<p>The woman, lying with closed eyes, understood and remembered.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p><p>"Allen," she said, "that's little John. You find him&mdash;a home
+somewheres. If you can...."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes, mother, we'll do that. We can do that, I guess. Don't you
+worry any about <i>him</i>," said Allen.</p>
+
+<p>"He's all alone. I donno his name, even.... But you be good to him,
+Allen, will you?" she said restlessly. "I found him somewheres."</p>
+
+<p>"Like me," Allen said.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head feebly.</p>
+
+<p>"Worse," she said, "worse. I knew I couldn't&mdash;do much. I just&mdash;thought I
+could keep him from bein' wicked&mdash;mebbe."</p>
+
+<p>"Like you did me, mother, I guess," the boy said.</p>
+
+<p>Then she opened her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Allen!" she said clearly. "Oh, if I did! When I think how mebbe I done
+that&mdash;<i>I ain't afraid to die</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Jacob Ernestine came in the room and stood rubbing one hand on the back
+of the other. He saw the kettle's high column of steam and looked
+inquiringly at Chris. But she sat mothering the little silent boy, who
+looked at her gravely, or smiled, or pulled at her collar, responsive to
+her touch as she was thrillingly responsive to his nearness. So Jacob
+lifted the kettle to the back of the stove, moved his carnation plant a
+little away from the frost of the pane, and settled himself at the
+bed's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> foot to watch. And when, after a long time, the child fell
+asleep, Chris would not lay him down. Allen would have taken him, and
+Jacob came and tried to do so, but she shook her head and they let her
+be. She sat so still, hour after hour, that at last she herself dozed;
+and it seemed to her, in a manner of dreaming, that the carnation plant
+on the window-sill had lifted and multiplied until something white and
+like fragrance filled the room; and this, then, she dreamed, was what
+death is, death in the room for the woman. Or might it not be the
+perfume of her own bridal bouquet, the carnations which she had carried
+that night? But then the child stirred, and Christopha roused a little,
+and after all, the sense of flowers in the room was the sense of the
+little one in her arms. As if many things mean one thing.</p>
+
+<p>It was toward dawn that the end came, quite simply and with no manner of
+finality, as if one were to pass into another chamber. And after that,
+as quickly as might be, Christopha and Allen made ready to drive back to
+the village for the last bitter business of all.</p>
+
+<p>Allen, in the barn with Jacob, wondered what he must do. Allen was
+sore-hearted at his loss, grateful for the charge that he had been
+given; but what was he to do? The child ought not to stay in Jacob's
+cottage. If Chris's mother would take him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> for a little,&mdash;but Allen
+knew, without at all being able to define it, her plaintive, burdened
+manner, the burdened manner of the irresponsible. Still puzzling over
+this, he brought the cutter to the side door; and the side door opened,
+and Chris came out in the pale light, leading the little boy&mdash;awake,
+warmly wrapped, ready for the ride.</p>
+
+<p>"Where you goin' to take him to, Chrissie?" Allen asked breathlessly.</p>
+
+<p>"Some of the neighbours, I guess, ain't we?" she answered. "I donno. I
+thought we could see. He mustn't be left here&mdash;now."</p>
+
+<p>"No, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen only. "He mustn't."</p>
+
+<p>The three drove out together into the land lying about the gate of dawn.
+A fragment of moon was in the east. There was about the hour something
+primitive, as if, in this loneliest of all the hours, the world reverted
+to type, remembered ancient savage differences, and fell in the primal
+lines.</p>
+
+<p>"Allen," Chris said, "you'll miss her. I mean miss knowin' she's alive."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," the boy said, "I'll miss knowin' she's alive."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we must try to settle what to do with the little boy," she
+suggested hastily.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he assented, "that's right. We've got to settle that," and at
+this they fell silent.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p><p>"There's Hopkins's," Chris said presently, nodding toward the home of
+the neighbour who had waited their coming to Jacob's cottage. "But
+she'll hev to be over there lots to-day and to-morrow. And she was kep'
+up so late it don't hardly seem as if we'd ought to stop and ask her."</p>
+
+<p>"No," Allen said, "I donno as it does, really."</p>
+
+<p>"There's Cripps's," she suggested a little farther on, "but they ain't
+up yet. I donno's 'twould do to roust 'em up."</p>
+
+<p>"No," Allen agreed, "best not do that, I guess." Christopha looked over
+the great fields.</p>
+
+<p>"My!" she said, "you'll miss her&mdash;miss thinkin' of her bein' somewheres.
+Allen! Where do you s'pose she is?"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought o' that," said Allen, soberly.</p>
+
+<p>"Goodness!" said Christopha, and shivered, and suddenly drew the child
+close to her. He was sleeping again. And it was so, with his little body
+between them, that she could no longer keep her hand warm in Allen's
+greatcoat pocket. But above the child's head her eyes and Allen's would
+meet, and in that hour the two had never been so near. Nearer they were
+than in the talk about the new house, and the presents, and the dinners
+and suppers and breakfasts together.</p>
+
+<p>They passed the farmhouses that looked asleep, and the farmhouses that
+looked watchfully awake<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> while their owners slept. It would not be well
+to knock at these, still and sombre-windowed. And though there were
+lights at the Moneys' and at the Howells' and at the Hubbelthwait farm,
+and even at Bess and Opie's, their gates, by common consent, were also
+passed. Nor did they stop at the Topladys'.</p>
+
+<p>"They're real, regular people with a grown son," Chris said of them
+vaguely, "and it don't seem hardly fair to give 'em little John, too!"</p>
+
+<p>"Little John," Allen said over wonderingly. When they called him that
+the child seemed suddenly a person, like themselves. Their eyes met
+above his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Allen!" Chris said.</p>
+
+<p>"What? What is it?" he asked eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>"Could&mdash;do you think&mdash;could <i>we</i>?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"My!" he answered, "I been a-wishin'&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Involuntarily he drew rein. They were on the rise by the Corner church
+at the edge of the village. The village, rhythmic crest of wall and
+shallow of lawn, lay below them, and near the little Triangle park would
+be their waiting house.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you mean have him live with us?" Allen made sure.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I did," Chris said, "if we had the money."</p>
+
+<p>"Well!" said the boy, "well, I guess <i>that'll</i> be all right!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p><p>"How much <i>she'd</i> of liked it," said Chris.</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't she, though," Allen assented; "wouldn't she? And you heard
+what she said&mdash;that about keepin' him from bein'&mdash;wicked?
+Chrissie&mdash;<i>could</i> we, you and me? This little fellow?"</p>
+
+<p>Chris lifted her face and nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't afraid," she said simply.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't either," her husband said.</p>
+
+<p>As if, in this new future, there were less need of fear than in the
+future which had sought to "try to be happy and keep ourselves happy."</p>
+
+<p>They looked down where their house would be, near the gate of the coming
+dawn. And&mdash;as two others in such case might have seen&mdash;it was as if they
+were the genii of their own mysterious future, a future whose solution
+trembled very near. For with the charge of the child had come a courage,
+even as the dead woman had known, when she thought of her charge of
+Allen, that she was not afraid to die.</p>
+
+<p>"Allen," said Chris, stumblingly, "it don't seem as if we could get like
+the Howells' an' the Hubbelthwaits and them. Somehow it don't seem as if
+we <i>could</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Allen, "we couldn't. That's so, ain't it?"</p>
+
+<p>Above little John's head their eyes met in a kind of new betrothal, new
+marriage, new birth. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> when he would have driven on, Allen pulled at
+the reins again, and,</p>
+
+<p>"Chrissie," he said suddenly, "if afterwards&mdash;there should be
+anybody&mdash;else. I mean for us. Would&mdash;would you keep on lovin' this
+little kiddie, too?"</p>
+
+<p>She met his eyes bravely, sweetly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you Silly," she said, "of course I would!"</p>
+
+<p>At which Allen laughed joyously, confidently.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Chris," he cried, "we're married! For always an' always. An'
+here's this little old man to see to. Who's afraid?"</p>
+
+<p>Then they kissed each other above the head of the sleeping child, and
+drove on toward the village, and toward their waiting house.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>VIII</span> <span class="smaller">THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT</span></h2>
+
+<p>When I opened my door this morning, the Outdoors was like a thing coming
+to meet me. I mean that it was like a person coming to meet me&mdash;no, it
+was like many persons, hand in hand and, so to speak, mind in mind; a
+great company of whom straightway I became one. I felt that swift, good
+gladness that <i>now</i> was <i>now</i>,&mdash;that delicate, fleeting Now, that very
+coquette of time, given and withdrawn. I remember that I could not soon
+go to sleep on the night of the day on which I learned that the Hebrew
+tongue has no present tense. They could not catch at that needle-point
+of experience, and we can do so. I like to glory in it by myself when no
+one else is thinking of it; to think aside, as if <i>to</i> Something, that
+now is being now.... And I long for the time when we shall all know it
+together, all the time, and understand its potentialities and let it be
+breath and pulse to keep the Spirit Future alive and pure.</p>
+
+<p>It would have been no great wonder if I had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> rejoicing past all
+reason in the moment. For at that very instant came Calliope Marsh, home
+for the Java entertainment which was set for to-night, and driving to my
+gate the Sykes's white horse in the post-office store delivery wagon.
+And as I saw her, so precisely did she look like herself, that I could
+have believed that Now was not Now, but Then, when first I knew her.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope brought the buckled lines informally over the horse's head and
+let them fall about the tie post, and ran to me. I am afraid that I am
+not going to tell what we said. But it was full of being once more in
+the presence of those whom you love. Do you not think that such being
+together is a means of actual life transcending both breath and
+perception?</p>
+
+<p>When our greeting was done, Calliope sat down on the stair in my hall,
+and,</p>
+
+<p>"Hev you got any spare candle-shades an' sherbet glasses, an' pretty
+doilies an' lunch cloths an' rugs an' willow chairs an' a statue of
+almost anybody an' a meat-chopper with a peanut-butter attachment an' a
+cap an' gown like colleges?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>And when I told her that I thought I might have some of these things,</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Calliope said, "she wants 'em all. Who do I mean by She? Mis'
+Oliver Wheeler Johnson, the personal queen of things."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p><p>She leaned forward, hugging her thin little arms, and she looked up at
+me from under the brim of her round straw hat.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm in need of grace," she said shortly. "I never felt like this toward
+any human being. But I tell you, when that little Mis' Johnson comes
+dilly-nippin' around where I am, noddin' her blue ostrich tip, seems my
+spine just stiffens out in me like it was going to strike at her, same
+as a stick. Do you know the feelin'?"</p>
+
+<p>I answered reluctantly, and not as I should wish to answer; for it is
+certain that I, too, have seldom seen Mrs. Johnson without an urgency to
+be gone from her little fluttering presence. But Calliope! I could not
+imagine Calliope shrinking from any one, or knowing herself alien to
+another.</p>
+
+<p>"For sixty years," she answered my thought of her, "I've never known
+what it was to couldn't bear anybody, not without I had a reason. They
+ain't much of anybody I what you might say don't like, without they're
+malicious or ugly a-purpose. Ugly by nature, ugly an' can't help it,
+ugly an' don't know it&mdash;I can forgive all them. An' Mis' Johnson ain't
+ugly at all&mdash;she's just a real sweet little slip of a thing, doin' her
+hard-workin' best. But when I first see her in church that day, I says
+to myself: 'I'll give that little piece two months to carry the sail
+she's carryin' here to-day; four months<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> to hev folks tired of her, an'
+six months to get herself the cold shoulder all 'round.' An' I hold to
+what I said. An' when her baby-blue nineteen-inch feather swings in an'
+'round, an' when she tells how things ought to be, I kind o' bristle all
+over me. I'm ashamed of it&mdash;an' yet, do you know, I like to give in to
+it?" Calliope said solemnly. "I donno what's come over me. Hev you heard
+where the Java entertainment's put to be?"</p>
+
+<p>I had not heard, nor was I sure just why it was of Java, save that
+Friendship is continually giving entertainments with foreign names and
+practising a wild imperialism to carry out an effect of foreign parts.
+And since, at the missionary meeting which had projected the affair,
+Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had told about <i>their</i> Java entertainment in
+<i>their</i> church at home, that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady, who
+was president of the society, had appointed her chairman of the Java
+entertainment committee.</p>
+
+<p>"And," Calliope informed me, "she's picked out the engine-house for it.
+Yes, sir,&mdash;the fire-engine house. No other place was <i>quaint</i> enough. No
+other place lent itself to decoration probabilities&mdash;or somethin' like
+that. She turned her back flat on the church an' went round to empty
+stores, lookin' for <i>quaint-ity</i>. One while I thought she'd hev us in
+the Chinese laundry, she seemed that took with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> the tomato-coloured
+signs on the walls. But, finally, she lit on the engine-house; an' when
+she see the big, bare engine-room, with the big, shinin' engine in it,
+an' harnesses hangin' from them rough board beams in a kind of avenoo,
+an' the board walls all streaked down, she spatted her hands an' 'lowed
+we'd hev our Java there. 'What a dear, quaint place,' s's she,&mdash;'so
+<i>flexible</i>!' She held out about the harnesses bein' so quaintly
+picturesque an' the fire-engine a piece o' resistance&mdash;or somethin' like
+that. An' she rents the room, without ay, yes, no, nor boo. My way of
+thinkin', a chairman ought to hev boo for a background, even if she <i>is</i>
+chairman. That's where she wants the statue an' the nut butter an' the
+cap an' gown. Can we borrow 'em of you?"</p>
+
+<p>"The engine-house!" I repeated incredulously. "You cannot mean the
+fire-engine house, Calliope?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do," Calliope said firmly, "the quaint, flexible fire-engine house.
+They ain't been a fire in Friendship in over two years, so Mis' Johnson
+says we ain't got that to think of&mdash;an' I donno as we hev. An' they
+never use the engine any more, now they've got city water, excep' for
+fires in the country, and then nobody ever gets in to give the alarm
+till the house is burned down an' no need to bother goin'. Even if they
+do get in in some sort of season, the department has to go to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> mayor
+to get a permit to go outside the city limits. It was so when the
+Topladys' barn burned. Timothy told 'em, when they come gallopin' up
+after it was most done smokin', that if they had held off a little
+longer they could have been a sight of help to him in shinglin' the new
+one. Oh, no, they ain't much of any danger of our being disturbed by a
+fire in them two hours to-night. Anyhow, they can't be a fire. Mis'
+Oliver Wheeler Johnson said so."</p>
+
+<p>We laughed like children as we loaded my "Java" stuffs on the wagon.
+Calliope was a valiant helper to Mrs. Johnson, and so I told her. She
+was standing in the wagon box, one arm about my palm, the other free for
+driving.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm the chairman o' the refreshments, too," she confessed. "Oh, well.
+Yourself you can boss round, you know," she threw back, smiling;
+"anybody can do that. But your feelin's you're some cramped about
+runnin'."</p>
+
+<p>It is certain that Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson was signally unfitted for
+a future in Friendship Village. She was a woman of some little world in
+which she had moved before she came to us, and in the two worlds she
+perceived no difference. Or, where she saw a difference, she sought to
+modify it by a touch when a breath would have been too much, and the
+only factor of potency would have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> been a kind of potency of spirit,
+which she did not possess.</p>
+
+<p>The Oliver Wheeler Johnsons had moved to Friendship only three months
+before, and nobody had looked for them at church on their first Sunday.
+"Movin' so, you want your Sabbath to take some rest in, an' you ain't
+expected to dress yourself up an' get out to Sunday service an' face
+strangers," the village said&mdash;and when the two walked into church while
+the responses were being made nearly everybody lost the place.</p>
+
+<p>They were very young, and they were extremely well dressed.</p>
+
+<p>"He's got on one o' the long coats," comment ran after church, "an' he's
+got a real soft-speakin' voice. But he seems to know how to act."</p>
+
+<p>And, "I declare, nice white gloves an' a nineteen-inch baby-blue ostrich
+feather durin' movin' seems some like puttin' on."</p>
+
+<p>And, "The back of her dress fits her just like the front, an' I must say
+she knows it. No pullin' down the jacket or hitchin' the strings forward
+for <i>her</i>, when she stands up!"</p>
+
+<p>As Miggy, who first told me about that day, had said, "That Sunday
+morning, Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson was the belle of the congregation."</p>
+
+<p>After service that day, instead of going directly home or waiting to be
+addressed, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> Johnson had spoken to the woman with
+whom she had been seated. It was Mis' Postmaster Sykes.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you so much," Mrs. Johnson said, "for letting us share your pew.
+May I present my husband? We have come to Friendship to live, and we
+shall be coming here to church. And I shall want to join your Ladies'
+Aid Society and your Missionary Circle and, perhaps, be in the
+Sunday-school right away. I&mdash;I think I'll be less homesick&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Actually," Mis' Sykes said afterward, "she took my breath clear away
+from me. I never heard of such a thing. Of course, we're real glad to
+hev our newcomers Christian people, but we want quiet Christians. An'
+did you notice how she was when I give her an introduction around? Why,
+she up an' out with somethin' to say to everybody. Just a neat little
+'How d' do' wouldn't do for her to remark. I always suspicion them
+talkative-at-first kind. It's like they'd been on the stage or brought
+up in a hotel."</p>
+
+<p>When she first came to the Ladies' Aid and the missionary meetings, Mrs.
+Johnson "said something." She was "up to her feet" three or four times
+at each session with suggestion, information, or description of how they
+did in her home church. And some way I think that what chiefly separated
+her from the village was the way that inevitable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> nineteen-inch blue
+ostrich plume on the little woman's hat bobbed and won attention and was
+everywhere at once. Or, perhaps&mdash;such creatures of wax we are to our
+impressions&mdash;it may have been little Mrs. Johnson's mere way of lifting
+her small, pointed chin when she talked, and of frowning and
+over-emphasizing. Or it may have been that she stood with her hands
+clasped behind her in what seemed to Friendship exaggerated ease, or
+that she smiled arbitrarily and ingratiatingly as she talked when there
+was absolutely nothing at which to smile. I think that these made her
+seem as alien to us as, in varied measure, certain moral defects might
+have done.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, she mentioned with familiarity objects and usages of which
+Friendship Village knew nothing: Carriage shoes, a new cake of soap for
+each guest, some kind of ice served, it was incredulously repeated, "in
+the middle o' the meal!" She innocently let fall that she sent to the
+city for her letter-paper. She had travelled in a state-room on a train,
+and she said so. She knew a noted woman. She used, we saw from the
+street, shaded candles on the table when she and her husband were at
+supper alone. She thought nothing of ordering Jimmy Sturgis and the bus
+to take her down town to her marketing on a rainy day. She had inclined
+to blame the village that Daphne Street was not paved, instead of
+joining<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> with the village to blame somebody else. Above all, she tried
+to buy our old furniture. I do not know that another might not have done
+all these quite without giving offence, and, indeed, rather have left us
+impressed with her superior familiarity with an envied world. But by the
+time of the Java entertainment Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had
+innocently alienated half Friendship Village. And this morning Calliope
+merely voiced what I knew to be the sentiment of most of Mrs. Johnson's
+neighbours and acquaintances. For these people are the kindly of earth;
+but they are of earth, where reign both the centrifugal and centripetal
+forces,&mdash;and the control is not always so swift as science and the human
+heart could wish.</p>
+
+<p>At five o'clock to-day&mdash;the day set for the Java evening
+entertainment&mdash;I made my way to the engine-house. This was partly
+because I wished to be as much as possible with Calliope during her few
+days in the village, and partly it was because the affair would belong
+to the class of festivity which I am loath to miss, and I think that,
+for Friendship's sake, I will never willingly pass by a "hall" in which
+is to be found a like diversion. Already on the great room, receiving
+its final preparation, had descended something of the excited spirit of
+the evening: the heat, the insufficient light, the committee members'
+shrill, rollicking children sliding on the floor, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> booths which in
+all bazaars contain with a precision fairly bewildering the same class
+of objects; and the inevitable sense of hurry and silk waists and aching
+feet and mustn't-take-your-change-back. But to all these things the Java
+engine-house affair would add an element of novelty, almost a flavour of
+romance. Certainly the room lent itself to "decoration probabilities,"
+as Calliope had vaguely quoted; it had been a roller-skating rink,
+utilized by the fire-department on the decline of the pastime, and there
+was, as Mrs. Johnson's <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i>, the fire-engine.</p>
+
+<p>I had never before been in the engine-house&mdash;you know how there will be
+commonplace enough spots in your own town to which you never go: the
+engine-house, the church belfry, the wood yard, upstairs over this store
+and that, and grocery cellars whose sloping trap-doors, open now and
+then to the walk, are as alien as the inside of the trunks of your
+trees. When I stepped in the engine-house, it seemed insistently a place
+in which I had never been before. And this may have been partly because
+the whole idea of a village fire-department is to me singular: the
+waiting horses and ladders and hose, whose sole reason for being is
+merely ameliorative, and never human and preventive; that pealing of the
+sharp, peculiar, terrifying alarm and summons first imprinting something
+on the very air, stabbing us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> with <i>Halt</i> while we count the bell
+strokes for the ward, and then clanging the wild fury of the
+quick-stroke command to help.</p>
+
+<p>To-day the great glittering fire-engine, flanked by hose-cart and
+hook-and-ladder wagon, occupied almost wonderingly the head of the room
+which had been invaded, and an inspired committee had garlanded the
+engine with paper roses and American flags. The flag of the Netherlands,
+copied from a dictionary and wrought in red-white-and-blue cambric with
+a silver crown, drooped meditatively from the smoke-stack; a scarlet fez
+and a peacock-feather fan hung on the supply hose; and on the
+tongue-bracer was fixed a pink sofa cushion from Mis' Amanda Toplady's
+parlour, with an olive Indian gentleman in a tinsel zouave jacket
+stamped on the cover. On the two big sliding doors, back of which stood
+the fire company's horses, were tacked innumerable Javanese trifles more
+picturesque than authentic; and on outlying booths and tables there were
+others. Directly before the engine was to be the tea-table, where Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes was to serve Java tea from a Java canister, loaned by
+the Post-office store.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as I entered I sought out Calliope's booth, a huge affair
+constructed of rugs whose red-tongued, couchant dogs and bounding fawns
+somewhat marred the Eastern effect. And within, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> found myself in a
+circle of the Friendship women whom I know best&mdash;all of them tired with
+that deadly tiredness born of a day's work at a church fair of any
+nation. But at once I saw that it was not merely fatigue which was
+disquieting them.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope was leaning against a bit of Bagelen blue, loaned by the new
+minister's wife. And she said to me as if, I thought, in explanation of
+what I was to hear,&mdash;"I guess we're all pretty tired. Most of us look
+like we wanted to pant. I'm all of a shake, myself."</p>
+
+<p>When Mis' Postmaster Sykes spoke unsmilingly, I understood:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It ain't the bein' tired," she disclaimed; "tired I can stand an' hev
+stood since my own birth. But it's the bein' commanded 'round&mdash;me,
+<i>commanded</i>&mdash;by that little I'm-the-one-an'-you-do-as-I-say out there!"</p>
+
+<p>"Land-a-livin' an' a-dyin'!" said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "I
+declare if I know whether I'm on foot or on horseback. It's bad enough
+to hev to run a fair, without you've got to be run yourself, too. Ain't
+it enough for Mis' Johnson to be made chairman without her wantin' to
+boss besides? She might as well say to me, 'Mis' Holcomb, you do
+everything the opposite way from the way you've just done it,' an' hev
+it over with."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p><p>Mis' Amanda Toplady&mdash;even that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda&mdash;shook her
+head.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Johnson surely acts used to bein' bowed down to," she admitted;
+"she seems fair bent on lordin' it. My land, if she wasn't bound to
+borrow my Tea rose plant that's just nearin' ready to bud."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope laughed, a little ruefully, and wholly in sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>"Honest," she said, "I guess what's the matter with all of us ain't so
+much what she does as the particular way she does it. It's so with some
+folks. They just seem to sort of <i>set</i> you all over, when you come near
+'em&mdash;same as the cold does to gravy. We'd all ought to wrostle with the
+feelin', I expect."</p>
+
+<p>"I expect we had," said Mis' Holcomb, "but you could wrostle all your
+days with vinegar an' it'd pucker your mouth same way."</p>
+
+<p>"Funny part," Calliope observed, "everybody feels just alike about her.
+When she skips around so sort o' momentous, we all want to dodge. I felt
+sorry for her, first, because I thought she was in for nervous
+prostration. But after a while I see it wasn't disease&mdash;it was just her
+feelin' so up an' down significant, you might say."</p>
+
+<p>"I donno," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "but it's part the way
+she says her <i>a</i>'s. That real <i>a</i>-soundin' <i>a</i> kind," she explained
+vaguely.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p><p>"She's so right an' left cuffy&mdash;I guess that's the whole thing,"
+Calliope put it in her rich idiom.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Mis' Amanda, sadly, "there must be somethin' we could like
+her for, even if it was only her husband."</p>
+
+<p>"He ain't what I'd call much, either," Calliope dismissed Mr. Oliver
+Wheeler Johnson positively; "he's got too soft-speakin' a voice. I like
+a man's voice to rumble up soft from his chest an' not slip down thin
+from his brain."</p>
+
+<p>I remember that I listened in a great wonder to these women whom I had
+seen at many an office of friendliness to strangers and aliens. Yet as I
+looked across the floor at that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson&mdash;who,
+in the hat with the blue plume, was everywhere, directing, altering,
+objecting, arranging, commanding and, especially, doing over&mdash;I most
+unwillingly felt much as they felt. If only Mrs. Johnson had not
+continually lifted her little pointed chin. If only she had not
+perpetually and ingratiatingly smiled when there was nothing at which to
+smile at all.</p>
+
+<p>Then Abigail Arnold hurried up to us with a tray of cups for the Java
+tea.</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope," she said to the chairman of the refreshments, "Mis' Johnson
+jus' put up her little chin an' says, 'What! ain't we no lemons for the
+tea?'"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p><p>Calliope compressed her lips and lifted their thin line tight and high.</p>
+
+<p>"Lemins," she replied, "ain't necessarily found in Java. I've a good big
+mind to go home to bed."</p>
+
+<p>Then we saw little Mrs. Johnson's blue linen dress hurrying toward us
+with the waving line of the blue feather above her, like a last little
+daring flourish by the artist of her. She was really very pretty and
+childish, with a manner of moving in wreaths and lines and never in
+solids. Her little feet twinkled along like the signature to the pretty
+picture of her. But yet she was not appealing. She was like an
+overconfident child whom you long to shut in a closet. Yes, I understand
+that I sound like a barbarian in these days of splendid corrective
+treatment of children who are studied and not stormed at. And in this
+treatment I believe to the uttermost. And yet, overconfidence in a child
+is of all things the most&mdash;I will amend what I said: Mrs. Oliver Wheeler
+Johnson was like an overconfident child whom you long to shut in a
+closet because of your ignorance of what else on earth to do. No doubt
+there is a better way, but none of us knew it. And she came toward us
+intent, every one felt, on some radical change in arrangements, though
+the big room was now in the pink of appointment and ready to be left
+while the committee went home to sup on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> "just sauce and
+bread-and-butter," and to don silk waists.</p>
+
+<p>We saw little Mrs. Johnson hurrying toward us, upon a background of the
+great, patient room, all-tolerant of its petty bedizening. And then Mrs.
+Johnson, we in Calliope's booth, the sliding, rollicking children, and
+all the others about stood still, at the sharp, peculiar terrifying
+alarm and summons which seemed to imprint something on the very air,
+stabbing us with <i>Halt</i> that we might count the bell strokes for the
+ward, and clanging a wild fury of the quick-stroke command to help. For
+the first time in two years the Friendship fire alarm was sounding from
+the tower above our heads.</p>
+
+<p>There was a panting sweep and scurry for the edges of the room, as
+instantly a gong on the wall sounded with the alarm, and the two big
+sliding doors went back, scattering like feathers the innumerable
+Javanese trifles that had been tacked there. Forward, down the rug-hung
+vista, plunged the two big horses of the department. We saw the Java
+tea-table borne to earth, the Javanese exhibits adorning outlying
+counters swept away, and all the "decoration probabilities" vanish in
+savage wreck. Then the quaintly picturesque harnesses fell to the
+horses' necks, their hoofs trampled terrifyingly on the loose boards of
+the floor, and forth from the yawning doors the horses pounded, dragging
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i>, with garlands on its sides, the pink zouave
+cushion crushed beneath it, and the flag of the Netherlands streaming
+from the stack. Horses rushed thither in competition, came thundering at
+the doors, and galloped to place before the two carts. I think not a
+full minute can have been consumed. But the ruin of the Java
+entertainment committee's work was unbelievably complete. Though there
+had been not a fire in Friendship Village in two years, that night, of
+all nights, Jimmy Sturgis's "hay-barn," for the omnibus horses, "took it
+on itself," it was said, "to go to work an' burn up." And Jimmy's barn
+is outside the city limits, so that the <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i> had to be
+used. And Jimmy is in the fire-department, so that the company galloped
+informally to the rescue without the benefit of the mayor's authority.</p>
+
+<p>As the last of the department disappeared, and the women of the
+committee stood looking at one another&mdash;tired with the deadly tiredness
+of a day such as theirs&mdash;a little blue linen figure sprang upon a chair
+and clasped her hands behind her, and a blue ostrich feather lifted and
+dipped as she spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"Quickly!" Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson cried. "All hands at work now!
+Mrs. Sykes, will you set up the tea-table? You can get more dishes from
+my house. Mrs. Toplady, this booth, please. You can make it right in no
+time. Mrs. Holcomb, you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> will have to do your booth entirely over&mdash;you
+can get some things from my house. Miss Marsh&mdash;ah, Calliope Marsh, you
+must go to my house for my lace curtains&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled ingratiatingly and surely arbitrarily, for we all knew full
+well that there was absolutely nothing to smile at. And with that
+Calliope's indignation, as she afterward said, "kind of crystallized and
+boiled over." I remember how she stood, hugging her thin little arms and
+speaking her defiance.</p>
+
+<p>"I donno how you feel, Mis' Johnson," she said dryly, "but, <i>my</i> idea,
+Bedlam let loose ain't near quaint enough for a Java entertainment. Nor
+I don't think it's what you might say real Java, either. Things here
+looks to me too flexible. I'm goin' home an' go to bed."</p>
+
+<p>There was no doubt what the rest meant to do. With one impulse they
+turned toward the door as Calliope turned, and silently they took the
+way that the <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i> had taken before them. Little Mrs.
+Johnson stood on her chair making many gestures; but no one went back.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope looked straight before her.</p>
+
+<p>"My feet ache like I done my thinkin' with 'em," she said, "an' my head
+feels like I'd stood on it. An' what's it all for?"</p>
+
+<p>"Regular clock performance," Mis' Postmaster<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> Sykes assented. "We've
+ticked hard all day long an' ain't got a thing out of it. I often think
+it's that way with my housework, but I did think the Ladies' Missionary
+could tick, when it <i>did</i> tick, for eternity. I'm tuckered to the bone."</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody knows," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was Mame-Bliss, "how my poor neck
+aches. It's there I suffer first an' most."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was walking behind the rest, took three great
+steps and caught us up and spoke, a little breathlessly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Land, land," she said, "I guess I'll go home an' pop some corn. Seems
+to me it'd smell sort of cosy an' homelike an' soothin' down. It's a
+grand thing to smell when you're feelin' far off from yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope laughed a little then.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she said, "anyhow I ain't got my silk waist to get into&mdash;and I
+didn't hev a nice one to put on anyway. I was wishin' I had, and now my
+wish has come true by bein' took away from me, bodily&mdash;like they will.
+But just the same&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She turned on the walk and faced us, and hugged her thin little arms.</p>
+
+<p>"A while ago," she said, "I give that little woman there six months to
+get herself the cold shoulder all around. Well, the time ain't up
+yet&mdash;but both my shoulders feels stone cold!"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>IX</span> <span class="smaller">THE COLD SHOULDER</span></h2>
+
+<p>There is something more about Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson.</p>
+
+<p>Did you ever look through an old school-book of your own and, say, on
+the history picture of Vesuvius in eruption impose your own memory of
+Pompeii, visited in these twenty years since you studied about it; and
+have you not stared hard at the time between and felt yourself some one
+other than that one who once dreamed over the Vesuvius picture? Or,
+years after you read the Letters, you have made a little mark below
+Cicero's cry from exile, "Oh, that I had been less eager for life!" and
+you look at the cry and at the mark, and you and one of these become an
+anachronism&mdash;but you are not sure which it is that so becomes. So now,
+in reading over these notes some while after I have set them down, I am
+minded here to give you my look ahead to the end of the summer and to
+slip in some account of what happened as a closing of the tale. And I
+confess that something about me&mdash;perhaps it is the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>Custodian
+herself&mdash;likes this way of pretending a freedom from time and of looking
+upon its fruit to say which seeds have grown and which have not.</p>
+
+<p>Friendship Village is not superstitious, but when curious coincidences
+occur we do, as we say, "take down note." And it did seem like a
+judgment upon us that, a little time after the Java fiasco, and while
+indignation was yet at high noon, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson fell ill.</p>
+
+<p>At first I think we affected not to know it. When she did not appear at
+church, none of us mentioned it for a Sunday or two. Then when some one
+casually noted her absence we said, "Oh, wasn't she? Got little cold,
+likely." That we saw her no more down town or "brushing up" about her
+door we facilely laid to chance. When the village heard that her
+maid&mdash;who always offended by talking almost in a whisper&mdash;had once or
+twice excused her mistress to callers, every one shut lips and hardened
+hearts and said some folk acted <i>very</i> funny about their calling duties.
+But when, at the twelve o'clock breakfast of the new minister's
+wife&mdash;("Like enough breakfast at noon was a real Bible custom," the
+puzzled devotees solved that amazing hour), Mrs. Johnson did not appear,
+the village was forced to admit that something must be wrong.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, against its will the behaviour of young Mr. Johnson was
+gravely alarming Friendship.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> Mr. Johnson was in real estate and
+insurance in the city, and this did not impress the village as a serious
+business. "Because, what does he <i>sell</i>!" as Abigail Arnold said. "We
+know he don't own property. He rents the very house they live in. A
+doctor's a doctor an' he gives pills, an' a store's a store with the
+kind o' thing you need. But it don't seem like that man could make a
+real good livin' for her, dealin' vague in nothin' that way." His
+income, it was felt, was problematical, and the village had settled it
+that what the Oliver Wheeler Johnsons' had was chiefly wedding presents
+"an' high-falutin' tastes." But, in the face of the evidence, every
+afternoon at three o'clock the young husband ordered a pha&euml;ton from
+Jimmy Sturgis and came home from the city to take his wife to drive.
+Between shutters the village saw that little Mrs. Johnson's face did
+look betrayingly pale, and the blue ostrich plume lay motionless on her
+bright hair.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess Mis' Johnson's real run down," her acquaintances said to one
+another uneasily. Still we did not go to see her. The weeks went by
+until, one morning, Calliope met the little new Friendship doctor on the
+street and asked him about his patient.</p>
+
+<p>"I up an' ask' him flat out," Calliope confessed afterward; "not that I
+really cared to be told, but I hated to know I was heathenish. You don't
+like the feelin'. To know they ain't heathens is all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> that keeps some
+folks from <i>bein</i>' 'em. Well, so I ask' him. 'Doctor Heron,' s'I, 'is
+that Mis' Johnson real sick, or is she just sickish?' He looks at me
+an'&mdash;'Looks pretty sick, don't she?' s'e. 'Well,' s'I, 'I've seen folks
+look real rich that wa'n't it by right-down pocketbook evidence.' 'Been
+to see her?' s'e. 'No,' s'I, short. 'Might drop in,' s'e, an' walks off,
+lookin' cordial. That little Doctor Heron is that close-mouthed I
+declare if I don't respect him same as the minister an' the pipe-organ
+an' the skippin' hills."</p>
+
+<p>So, as midsummer passed and found the little woman still ailing, I
+obeyed an idle impulse and went one evening to see her. I recall that as
+soon as I had crossed her threshold the old influence came upon me, and
+I was minded to run from the place in sheer distaste of the overemphasis
+and the lifted, pointed chin and the fluttering importances of her
+presence. I was ashamed enough that this should be so, but so it was;
+and I held my ground to await her coming to the room only by a measure
+of will.</p>
+
+<p>I sat with Mrs. Johnson for an hour that evening. And it would seem
+that, as is the habit of many, having taken my own way I was straightway
+possessed to draw others after me. There are those who behave similarly
+and who set cunningly to work to gain their own ends, as, for example, I
+did.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> For one night soon I devised a little feast, which I have always
+held to be a good doorway to any enterprise, and, at the
+Friendship-appointed supper hour of six, I made my table as fair as
+possible, as has been done in like case ever since butter was first
+served "in a lordly dish." And my guests were Calliope, without whom no
+festival is wholly in keeping, and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and
+Mis' Postmaster Sykes, and that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady.</p>
+
+<p>Because they had arrived so unsuspectingly I own myself to have felt
+guilty enough when, in that comfortable half-hour after a new and
+delectable dessert had been pronounced upon, I suggested with what
+casualness I might summon that we five pay a visit that night to Mrs.
+Oliver Wheeler Johnson.</p>
+
+<p>"Land!" said Mis' Holcomb, "I've thought I would an' then I've thought I
+wouldn't till I feel all two-faced about myself. I donno. Sometimes I
+think one way an' sometimes I think the other. Are you ever like that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I s'pose," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, majestically, "that them in our
+position ought to overlook. I donno's 'twould hurt us any to go," she
+added graciously.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope's eyes twinkled.</p>
+
+<p>"That's it," she said; "let them that's got the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> social position to
+overlook things be Christian an' overlook 'em."</p>
+
+<p>That great Mis' Amanda Toplady folded her hands, dimpled like a baby
+giant's.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd be glad to go," she said simply; "I've got some grape jell that
+looks to me like it wasn't goin' to keep long, an' I'd be thankful to be
+on terms with her so's I could carry it in to her. They ain't a single
+other invalid in Friendship."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope sprang to her feet and crossed her little arms, a hand hugging
+either shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Well said!" she cried; "do let's go! I'm sick to death of slidin' off
+the subject whenever it comes up in my mind."</p>
+
+<p>So, in the fair October dusk, we five went down the Plank Road&mdash;where
+Summer lingers late. The air was gentle with the soft, impending dark. I
+wonder why the colonnade of sweet influences, down which we stepped, did
+not win us to themselves. But I remember how, instead, our imminent
+visit drew us back to the days of Mrs. Johnson's coming, so that
+presently we were going over the incident of the Java entertainment,
+and, as Calliope would have put it, "crystallizing and boiling over"
+again in the old distaste.</p>
+
+<p>But when we reached the little cottage of the Johnsons, our varied
+motives for the visit were abruptly merged in a common anxiety. For
+Doctor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> Heron's buggy stood at the gate and the little one-story cottage
+was dark save for a light in what we knew to be a corner bedroom. The
+hallway was open to the night, but though we could distinctly hear the
+bell jingle in the kitchen no one answered the summons. Then, there
+being somewhere about a murmur of voices, Calliope stepped within and
+called softly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor, Doctor Heron&mdash;you there? Is they anything we can do?"</p>
+
+<p>The doctor came momentarily to the lighted doorway down the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"That you, Calliope?" he said. "You might come here, will you? Tell the
+rest to sit down somewheres. And you tell Mr. Johnson he can come."</p>
+
+<p>On which, from out the dark living room, some one emerged very swiftly
+and without a word pushed by us all where we were crowded in the passage
+and strode down to the little lighted chamber. Calliope hurried after
+him, and we four shrank back in sudden dread and slipped silently into
+the room which the young husband had left, and stood together in the
+dimness. Was she so sick? In that room he must have heard the door-bell
+as we had heard it, and yet he had not answered. Was it possible that we
+had come too late?</p>
+
+<p>While we waited we said nothing at all, save that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> great Mis' Amanda
+Toplady, who said three times or four, "Oh, dear, oh, dear, I'm always
+waitin' till somethin's too late&mdash;either me or the other thing." It
+seemed very long before we heard some stir, but it can have been only a
+few minutes until the doctor came down the little hall and groped into
+the room. In answer to all that we asked he merely occupied himself in
+lighting a match and setting it deliberately to the candles on the table
+and adjusting their shades. They were, we noted afterward, the same
+candles whose presence we had detected and derided at those long ago
+t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te suppers in that house. The light glowed on the young
+doctor's pale face as he looked at us, each in turn, before he spoke.
+And when he had done with his slow scrutiny&mdash;I think that we cannot
+wholly have fancied its accusation&mdash;he said only:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, she's pretty sick. I can't tell yet."</p>
+
+<p>Then he turned and closed the outer door and stood leaning against it,
+looking up the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Marsh!" he called.</p>
+
+<p>But why did the man not tell us something, we wondered; and there
+flashed in my mind Calliope's reference to the pipe-organ and the
+skipping hills. At all events, Calliope would tell us.</p>
+
+<p>And so she did. We heard her step in the hall, coming quickly and yet
+with a manner of exceeding care. I think that with the swift sense which
+wings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> before intelligence, the others understood before they saw her,
+even as I understood. Calliope stopped in the doorway as if she could
+trust herself to go no farther. And she was holding something in her
+arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope," we said; "Calliope...."</p>
+
+<p>She looked down at that which she held, and then she looked at us. And
+the tears were in her eyes, but her face was brighter than I have ever
+known it.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a baby," she said, "a little bit of a baby. <i>Her</i> baby. An' it
+makes me feel&mdash;it makes me feel&mdash;oh," she broke off, "don't it make you
+feel that way, too?"</p>
+
+<p>We looked at one another, and avoided one another's look, and then
+looked long at the baby. I do not remember that we said anything at all,
+or if we did so, that it bore a meaning. But an instant after Calliope
+gave the baby to the nurse who appeared in the doorway, we all tiptoed
+down to the kitchen by common consent. And it was plain that Mrs.
+Johnson's baby made us feel that way, too.</p>
+
+<p>In our desire to be of tardy service we did the most absurd things. We
+took possession of the kitchen, rejoicing that we found the supper
+dishes uncared for, and we heated a great kettle of water, and washed
+and wiped and put away, as softly as we could; and then we "brushed up
+around." I think that only the need of silence kept us from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> cleaning
+windows. When the nurse appeared&mdash;who had arrived that day unknown of
+Friendship&mdash;we sprang as one to do her bidding. We sent the little maid
+to bed, we tidied the living room, walking tiptoe, and then we went back
+through the kitchen and sat down on the little side "stoop." And all
+this time we had addressed one another only about the tasks which we had
+in hand.</p>
+
+<p>After a little silence,</p>
+
+<p>"The milkman was quite late this morning," observed Mis' Holcomb.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he's begun to deliver in cans instead o' bottles," Mis' Sykes
+explained; "it takes him some longer to get around. He says bottles
+makes his wife just that much more to do."</p>
+
+<p>Then we fell silent again.</p>
+
+<p>It was Calliope, sitting on the porch step outside, where it was dark,
+who at last had the courage to be articulate.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope&mdash;I <i>hope</i>," she said, "she's goin' to be all right."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Sykes shaded her eyes from the bracket lamp within.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go bail," she said, "that little you-do-as-I-say chin'll carry her
+through. I'm glad she's got it."</p>
+
+<p>Just then we heard the thin crying of the child and we could divine
+Calliope, that on the step where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> she sat she was hugging her arms and
+rocking somewhat, to and fro.</p>
+
+<p>"Like enough," she said, "oh, like enough&mdash;folks ain't so cramped about
+runnin' their own feelin's as they think they are!"</p>
+
+<p>To this we murmured something indefinite in sound but positive enough in
+sense. And we all knew what we all knew.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's go out around the house to the front gate," said that great Mis'
+Amanda Toplady, abruptly. "Have any of you ladies got two
+handkerchiefs?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've got two," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, "an' I ain't used either
+one. Do you want the one with essence or the one without?"</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't partial," said Mis' Amanda.</p>
+
+<p>We rose and stumbled along the grassy path that led round the house. At
+the gate we met Doctor Heron.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said slowly, "well." And after a moment, "Will&mdash;will any of
+you be here in the morning?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," we all said simply.</p>
+
+<p>"That's good," he commented shortly, "I didn't know."</p>
+
+<p>We five had to separate at the first corner to go our home ways, and we
+stood for a moment under the gas-light. I remember how, just then,
+Peter's father came singing past us, like one of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>Friendship family
+who did not understand his kinship. Even as we five had not understood
+ours.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't got a shawl, hev you?" Mis' Sykes said to me solicitously.</p>
+
+<p>"The nights have been some chilly on a person's shoulders for a day or
+two now," said Mis' Holcomb.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope put her hand up quickly to her throat.</p>
+
+<p>"Quit," she said. "All of you. Thank God. An' shake hands. I tell you,
+after this I bet I'll run my own feelin's about folks or I'll bring down
+the sky an' make new feelin's! Oh," said Calliope, "don't her&mdash;an'
+<i>now</i>&mdash;an' the baby&mdash;an'&mdash;oh, an' that bright star winkin' over that
+hitchin' post, make things seem&mdash;easy? Good night. I can't stand out
+here any longer."</p>
+
+<p>But when we had gone away a few steps, Calliope called us back. And as
+we turned again,</p>
+
+<p>"To bring down the sky," she repeated, "I bet that's the way God meant
+us to do. They ain't any of us got enough <i>to</i> us to piece out without it!"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>X</span> <span class="smaller">EVENING DRESS</span></h2>
+
+<p>I have said that Daphne Street has been paved within the past year, but
+I had not heard of the manner in which the miracle had been wrought
+until the day when Calliope's brief stay in the village ended and she
+came to tell me good-by&mdash;and, more than incidentally, to show me some
+samples of a dress which she might have, and a dress which she wouldn't
+have, and a dress which she had made up her mind to have.</p>
+
+<p>"We don't dress much here in Friendship Village," she observed. "Not but
+what we'd like to, but we ain't the time nor the means nor the places to
+wear to. But they was one night&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at me, as always when she means to tell a story, somewhat
+with the manner of asking a permission.</p>
+
+<p>"None of the low-neck' fashion-plates used to seem real to us," she
+said. "We used to look at 'em pinned up in Lyddy Ember's dressmakin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+windows, ah-ahing in their low pink an' long blue, an' we'd look 'em
+over an' think tolerant enough, like about sea-serpents. But neither the
+one nor the other bit hold rill vital, because the plates was so young
+an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an' we was old an' busy, like you get,
+an' considered past the dressin' age. Still, it made kind of a nice
+thing to do on the way home from the grocery hot forenoons&mdash;draw up
+there on the shady side, where the street kitters some into a curve, an'
+look at Lyddy's plates, an' choose, like you was goin' to get one.</p>
+
+<p>"Land knows we needed some oasises on that street from the grocery up
+home. Daphne Street, our main street, didn't always use' to be what it
+is now&mdash;neat little wooden blocks an' a stone curb. You know how it use'
+to be&mdash;no curb an' the road a sight, over your shoe-tops with mud in the
+wet, an' over your shoe-tops with sand when it come dry. We ladies used
+to talk a good deal about it, but the men knew it meant money to hev it
+fixed, an' so they told us hevin' it fixed meant cuttin' the trees down,
+an' that kept us quiet&mdash;all but the Friendship Married Ladies Cemetery
+Improvement Sodality.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Postmaster Sykes was president o' the Sodality last year, you
+know,&mdash;she's most always president of everything,&mdash;an' we'd been
+workin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> quite hard all that winter, an' had got things in the cemetery
+rill ship-shape&mdash;at least I mean things <i>on</i> the cemetery was. An' at
+one o' the July meetin's last summer Mis' Sykes up an' proposed that we
+give over workin' for the dead an' turn to the livin', an' pave the main
+street of Friendship Village.</p>
+
+<p>"'True,' she says, 'our constitution states that the purpose of our
+Sodality shall be to keep up the graves of our townspeople an' make 'em
+attractive to others. But,' says she, 'when they ain't enough of us dead
+to occupy all the time, the only Christian way to remedy that is to work
+for folks before they die, while we're waitin' for their graves.'</p>
+
+<p>"This seemed reasonable, an' we voted unanimous to pave Daphne Street.
+An' on the way home Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Timothy Toplady an' I see
+Timothy Toplady settin' in the post-office store, an' we went in to tell
+him an' Silas Sykes about it. But before we could start in, Silas says,
+eyebrows all eager, 'Ain't you heard?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Heard what?' says his wife, kind o' cross, bein' he was her wedded
+husband an' she <i>hadn't</i> heard.</p>
+
+<p>"''Bout Threat Hubbelthwait,' says Silas, lookin' at Mis' Toplady an'
+me, bein's Mis' Sykes was his wife. 'Drunk again,' says Silas, 'an'
+fiddlin' for dear life, an' won't let anybody into the hotel. Mis'
+Hubbelthwait has gone over to her mother's,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> an' the hired girl with
+her; an' Threat's settin' in the bar an' playin' all the hymn tunes he
+knows.'</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't the first time it had happened, you know. Threat an' his wife
+an' the hired girl keep the only hotel in Friendship Village&mdash;when
+Threat is sober. When he isn't, he sometimes closes up the house an'
+turns out whoever happens to be there, an' won't let a soul in&mdash;though,
+of course, not much of anybody ever comes to Friendship anyway, excep'
+now an' then an automobile on its way somewheres. An' there Threat will
+set in the bar, sometimes most of one week, sometimes most of two, an'
+scrape away on the only tunes he knows&mdash;all hymns, 'Just As I Am,' an'
+'Can A Little Child Like Me?' Threat don't mean to be sacrilegious; he
+shows that by never singin' them two hymns in church, when they're give
+out.</p>
+
+<p>"'Land!' says Mis' Sykes, when Silas got through, 'what men are!'</p>
+
+<p>"'We ain't so much as woman, lemme tell you,' says Silas, right crisp.
+Which wasn't what he meant, an' we all laughed at him, so he was a
+little mad to start with.</p>
+
+<p>"'The Sodality's decided to pave Daphne Street,' Mis' Sykes mentions
+then, simple.</p>
+
+<p>"'Pave <i>what</i>?' shouts Silas&mdash;Silas always seems to think the more you
+do in sound the more you'll do in sense.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p><p>"'Do <i>what</i> to Daphne Street?' says Timothy, whirlin' from the peanut
+roaster.</p>
+
+<p>"'Pave Daphne Street,' says Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' me,
+wonderin'.</p>
+
+<p>"Silas wrapped his arms around his own shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"'When,' says he, lettin' his head lurch with his own emphasizin', 'did
+the Common Council hear about this?'</p>
+
+<p>"'They ain't heard, about it,' says Mis' Sykes, 'no more'n we ever hear
+anything about them.'</p>
+
+<p>"Silas an' Timothy is both aldermen, an' rill sensitive over it. I guess
+the Common Council always <i>is</i> a delicate subject, ain't it?</p>
+
+<p>"Mebbe it wasn't a rill diplomatic way to begin, but it hadn't entered
+the Sodality's head that the town wouldn't be glad to hev the pavin'
+done if the Sodality was willin' to do it. Ain't it a hard thing to
+learn that it ain't all willingness, nor yet all bein' capable, that
+gets things done in the world? It's part just edgin' round an' edgin'
+round.</p>
+
+<p>"What did the Common Council do that night but call a special meetin'
+an' vote not to order any city pavin' done that present year. Every
+member was there but Threat Hubbelthwait, who was fiddlin', an' every
+vote was switched by Silas an' Timothy to be unanimous, excep' Eppleby
+Holcomb's vote. Eppleby, we heard afterwards, said that when a pack o'
+women made up their minds to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> pave, they'd pave if it was to pave&mdash;some
+place that Eppleby hadn't ought to 'a' mentioned; an' he was goin' to be
+on the pavin' side. But then, Eppleby is the gentlest husband in
+Friendship Village, an' known to be.</p>
+
+<p>"Sodality met special next day, not so much to do anything as to let it
+be known that we'd took action. This we done by votin' to lay low till
+such time as we could order the wooden blocks. We preferred to pave
+peaceable, it bein' hot weather.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss an'
+Mis' Mayor Uppers an' I walked home together from that meetin'. It was a
+blisterin' July afternoon&mdash;one of them afternoons that melts itself out
+flat, same as a dropped pepp'mint on a brick walk, an' you're left
+stickin' in it helpless as a fly, an' generally buzzin'. I rec'lect we
+was buzzin'&mdash;comin' down Daphne Street in that chokin' dust an' no
+pavement.</p>
+
+<p>"'It's a dog's life, livin' in a little town&mdash;in some respects,' I
+remember Mis' Sykes says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, tolerant, 'I know. I know it is. But I'd
+rather live in a little town an' dog it out than go up to the city an'
+turn wolf, same as some.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' yet we all felt the same, every one of us. They ain't a woman
+livin' in a little place that don't feel the same, now and again. It's
+quiet an' it's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> easy housework, an' you get to know folks well. But oh,
+none of it what you might say <i>glitters</i>. An' they ain't no woman
+whatever&mdash;no matter how good a wife an' mother an' Christian an' even
+housekeeper she is&mdash;that don't, 'way down deep in her heart, feel that
+hankerin' after some sort o' <i>glitter</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"So it was natural enough that we should draw up at Lyddy's dressmakin'
+window an' rest ourself. An' that afternoon we'd have done so, anyway,
+for she hed been pinnin' up her new summer plates&mdash;Lyddy don't believe
+in rushin' the season. An' no sooner had we got a good look at 'em&mdash;big
+coloured sheets they was, with full-length pictures&mdash;than Mis' Toplady
+leaned 'way forward, her hands on her knees, an' stood lookin' at 'em
+the way you look at the parade.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, look-a-there,' she says. 'Look at that one.'</p>
+
+<p>"The one she meant was a woman with her hair all plaited an' fringed an'
+cut bias, an' with a little white hat o' lilacs 'bout as big as a cork;
+an' her dress&mdash;my land! Her dress was long an' rill light blue, an'
+seemed like it must have been paper, it was so fancy. It didn't seem
+like cloth goods at all, same as we hed on. It was more like we was
+wearin' meat an' vegetable dresses, an' this dress was dessert&mdash;all
+whipped cream an' pink sugar an' a flower on the plate.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p><p>"'Dear land!' says Mis' Toplady, lookin' 'round at us strange, 'do they
+do it when they get gray hair? I didn't know they done it when their
+hair was gray.'</p>
+
+<p>"We all looked, an' sure enough, the woman's hair was white. 'Afternoon
+Toilette for Elderly Woman,' it said underneath, plain as plain. Always
+before the plates hed all been young an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an'
+we'd thought of all that as past an' done for, with us, along with all
+the other things that didn't come true. But here was a woman grayer than
+any of us, an' yet lookin' as live as if she'd been wearin' a housework
+dress.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why,' says Mis' Sykes, starin', 'that must be a new thing this season.
+I never heard of a woman well along in years wearin' anything but brown
+or navy blue or gray,&mdash;besides black.' Mis' Sykes is terribly dressy,
+but even she never yet got anywheres inside the rainbow, except in a bow
+at the chin.</p>
+
+<p>"'My,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, wistful, 'wouldn't it seem
+like heaven to be able to wear colours without bein' talked about?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' Mis' Mayor Uppers&mdash;her that her husband grew well off bein' mayor,
+an' never'd been back to Friendship Village since he was put out of
+office, she says low:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'You ladies that has husbands to keep thinkin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> well of you, I should
+think you'd think about this thing. Men,' she says, 'loves the light
+shades.'</p>
+
+<p>"At that Mis' Toplady turned around on us, an' we see her eyes
+expressin' i-dees.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ladies,' says she, impressive, 'Mis' Uppers is right. We hadn't ought
+to talk back or show mad. We ladies of the Sodality had ought to be able
+to get our own way peaceable, just by takin' it, the way the Lord give
+women the weapons to do.'</p>
+
+<p>"We see that somethin' was seethin' in her mind, but we couldn't work
+our way to what it was.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ladies,' says she, an' stepped up on the wooden step to Lyddy's
+dressmakin' shop, 'has the husbands of any one of us seen us, for twenty
+years, dressed in the light shades?'</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't hev any husband to answer for, but I could truthfully say of
+the rest that you'd think black an' brown an' gray an' navy had
+exhausted the Lord's ingenuity, for all the attention they'd paid to any
+other colour He'd wove with.</p>
+
+<p>"'Let's the Sodality get up an evenin' party, an' hev it in post-office
+hall, an' invite our husbands an' buy new dresses&mdash;light shades an' some
+lace,' says Mis' Toplady, lettin' the i-dee drag her along, main
+strength.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes was studyin' the fashion-plate hungry, but she stopped an'
+stepped up side o' Mis' Toplady.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p><p>"'Well, sir,' she said, 'I donno but 'twould help us to work the pavin'
+of Daphne Street. Why, Silas Sykes, for one, is right down soft-hearted
+about clothes. He always notices which one of their waists the choir's
+got on. I heard him say once he wasn't goin' to church again till they
+bought somethin' new.'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Holcomb nodded. 'Five years ago,' she said, 'I went up to the city
+with Eppleby. An' I saw him <i>turn around</i> to look after a woman. I'll
+never forget the sensation it give me&mdash;like I was married to a man that
+wasn't my husband. The woman had on a light pink dress. I know I come
+home an' bought a pink collar; I didn't think I could go any farther,
+because she was quite young. Do you s'pose....'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady pointed at Lyddy's fashion-plate. 'I should go,' she says,
+'just as far as my money would let me go.'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Uppers stood lookin' down to the walk. 'The mayor,' she says&mdash;she
+calls him 'the mayor' yet&mdash;'was terrible fond o' coloured neckties. He
+was rill partial to green ones. Mebbe I didn't think enough about what
+that meant....'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady came down off the step. 'Every man is alike,' says she,
+decided. 'Most of us Friendship ladies thinks if we give 'em a clean
+roller towel we've done enough towards makin' things pretty;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> an' I
+think it's time, as wives, we took advantage of the styles.'</p>
+
+<p>"'An',' says Mis' Sykes, the president, rill dreamy for her, but firm,
+'I think so, too.'</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you, we all walked home feelin' like we'd hed a present&mdash;me too,
+though I knew very well I couldn't hev a light dress, an' I didn't hev
+any husband. You start out thinkin' them are the two principal things,
+but you get a-hold o' some others, if you pay attention. Still, I judged
+the ladies was on the right track, for men is men, say what who will.
+All but Threat Hubbelthwait. We passed the hotel an' heard him settin'
+in there by the bar scrapin' away on 'Can A Little Child Like Me?' We
+took shame to him, an' yet I know we all looked at each other sort of
+motherly, like he <i>was</i> some little shaver, same as he sung, an'
+performin' most fool.</p>
+
+<p>"It don't take us ladies long to do things, when our minds is made.
+Especially it don't when Mis' Timothy Toplady is chairman of the
+Entertainment Committee, or the Doin' Committee of whatever happens,
+like she was that time. First, we found out they was plenty enough nun's
+veilin' in the post-office store, cheap an' wide an' in stock an' all
+the light shades; an' I bought all the dresses, noons, of the clerk, so
+Silas wouldn't suspect&mdash;me not hevin' any husband to inquire around,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+like they do. Then we hired the post-office hall, vague, without sayin'
+for what&mdash;an' that pleased Silas that gets the rent. An' then we give
+the invitations, spectacular, through the <i>Friendship Daily</i> to the
+Sodality's husbands, for the next Tuesday night. We could do it that
+quick, not bein' dependent on dressmakers same as some. The ladies was
+all goin' to make their dresses themselves, an' the dresses wa'n't much
+to do to make. Nobody bothered a very great deal about how we should
+make 'em, the principal thing bein' the colour; Mis' Toplady's was blue,
+like the fashion-plate; Mis' Holcomb's pink, like the woman in the city;
+Mis' Uppers' green, like the mayor's necktie, an' so on. I made me up a
+dress out o' the spare-room curtains&mdash;white, with a little blue flower
+in it, an' a new blue ribbon belt. But Mis' Sykes, she went to work an'
+<i>rented</i> a dress from the city, for that one night. That much she give
+out about it, an' would give out no more. That woman loves a surprise.
+She's got a rill pleasant mind, Mis' Sykes has, but one that does enjoy
+jerkin' other people's minds up, an most anything'll do for the string.</p>
+
+<p>"For all we thought we hed so much time, an' it was so easy to do, the
+afternoon o' the party we went 'most crazy. We'd got up quite a nice
+little cold supper&mdash;Mis' Hubbelthwait had helped us, she bein' still at
+large, an' Threat fiddlin'. We planned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> meat loaf an' salad an' pickles
+an' jelly, an' scalloped potatoes for the hot dish, an' ice cream an'
+cake, enough in all for thirty folks: fifteen husbands an' fifteen
+Sodality, or approximatish. An' we planned to go to the hall in the
+afternoon an' take our dresses there, an' sly em' up and leave 'em, an'
+put 'em on after we'd got there that night, so's nobody's husbands
+should suspect. But when we all came in the afternoon, an' the
+decoratin' with greens an' festoons of cut paper an' all was to do,
+there Mis' Toplady, that was to make scalloped potatoes, hadn't got her
+sleeves in yet, an' she was down to the hall tryin' to do both; an' Mis'
+Holcomb, that was to make the salad dressing, had got so nervous over
+her collar that she couldn't tell which edge she'd cut for the top. But
+the rest of us was ready, an' Mis' Sykes's dress had come from the city,
+an' we all, Mis' Toplady an' Mame too, hed our dresses in boxes in the
+post-office hall kitchen cupboards. An' we done the decoratin', an' it
+looked rill lovely, with the long tables laid ready at each side, an'
+room for bein' a party left in between 'em.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb left the hall about five
+o'clock to go home an' lay out Silas's an' Timothy's an' Eppleby's best
+clothes for 'em&mdash;the rest hed done it at noon. Mis' Hubbelthwait was
+goin' over to the hotel to get some dishes out, an' I went with her to
+help. The bar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> was to the back, where Threat set an' slep' an' fiddled,
+an' Mis' Hubbelthwait was goin' to slip in still an' sly the dishes out
+to me. A good many of the hotel dishes was her individual weddin'
+presents, so she didn't think wrong of her conscience.</p>
+
+<p>"We was all five hurryin' along together, rehearsin' all we'd got to do
+before six-thirty, when we heard a funny sound. We listened, an' we
+thought they must be testin' the hose. But when we got to Lyddy's shop,
+where the street kitters off some in a curve, we looked ahead an' we see
+it wasn't that.</p>
+
+<p>"It's an automobile," says Mis' Toplady. 'My land,' she says, 'it ain't
+only one. It's two.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' we see it was. There come the two of 'em, ploughin' along through
+the awful sand of Daphne Street, that was fit for no human locomotive,
+unless ostriches. When the Proudfits are here, that's the only one in
+the village with an automobile, they understand the sand, and they'd put
+on the whole steam and tear right along through it. But strangers would
+go careful, for fear they'd get stuck, an' so they got it, like you do.
+An' them two big red cars was comin' slow, the dust like cloaks an'
+curtains billowin' up behind. They looked quite wild, includin' the
+seven folks in each one that was laughin' an' callin' out. An' by the
+time they'd come up to us, us four ladies of the Sodality an' Mis'
+Hubbelthwait was lined up on the walk watchin' 'em. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> stopped an'
+one of 'em hailed us, leanin' past his driver.</p>
+
+<p>"'I beg your pardon,' he says, 'is this the street to the best hotel?'</p>
+
+<p>"It was Mis' Toplady that answered him, rill collected. 'They's only one
+street in town,' says she, 'an' they's only one hotel, an' that they
+ain't now.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Can you tell me how soon there will be one?' says the man. 'By
+dinner-time, I hope.'</p>
+
+<p>"We all felt kind of delicate about answerin' this, an' so Mis'
+Hubbelthwait herself spoke up. 'Threat's drunk an' fiddlin', she says.
+'They's no tellin' when Friendship Village will ever hev a hotel again.'</p>
+
+<p>"Both automobiles was listenin' by then, an' though some of 'em laughed
+out sort o' rueful, not many of 'em see the funny.</p>
+
+<p>"'Gad,' one of the men says, 'how about the bird an' the bottle we were
+to send back to Bonner, sittin' by his tire in the desert, a ways back?
+Don't tell us there's no place,' he says, 'where we can find dinner,
+twenty-one of us and the three chauf&mdash;' that word.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady shook her head. 'They ain't a place big enough to seat
+twenty-one, even if they was the food to feed 'em&mdash;' she begun, an' then
+she stopped an' looked 'round at us, as though she was thinkin'
+somethin'.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p><p>"'Oh, come now,' says the man,&mdash;he was good-lookin' an' young, an'
+merry-seemin',&mdash;'Oh, come now,' he said, 'I am sure that the ladies of
+Friendship could cook things such as never man yet ate. We are
+sta-arving,' he says, humorous. 'Can't you do something for us? We'll
+give you,' he winds up, genial, 'two dollars a plate for a good,
+home-cooking dinner for the twenty-four of us. What do you say?'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady whirled toward us sort o' wild. 'Is two dollars times
+twenty-four, forty-eight dollars?' says she, low.</p>
+
+<p>"An' we see it was, though Mis' Holcomb was still figurin' it out in the
+palm of her other hand, while we stood gettin' glances out of each
+other's eyes, an' sendin' 'em, give for take. We see, quick as a flash,
+what Mis' Toplady was thinkin' about. An' it was about that hall, all
+festooned with greens an' cut paper, an' the two long tables laid ready,
+an' the veal loaf an' scalloped potatoes an' ice-cream for thirty. An'
+when Mis' Sykes, that usually speaks, stood still, an' didn't say one
+word, but just nodded a little bit, sort o' sad, Mis' Toplady, that was
+chairman o' the Entertainment Committee, done like she does
+sometimes&mdash;she took the whole thing into her own hands an' just settled
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, yes,' she says to 'em, rill pleasant, 'if you want to come up to
+post-office hall at half-past<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> six,' she says, 'the Friendship Married
+Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality will serve you your supper, nice
+as the nicest, for two dollars a head.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Good!' the men all sings out, an' the women spats their hands soft,
+an' one of 'em says somethin' to the merry-seemin' man.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, yes,' he says then, 'couldn't we all break into this hotel an'
+floss up a bit before dinner?'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Hubbelthwait stepped out towards 'em.</p>
+
+<p>"'I was thinkin' of that,' says she. 'My husband,' she says, dignified,
+'is settin' in the bar&mdash;practisin' his violin. He&mdash;he does that
+sometimes, an' we&mdash;don't bother him. But the bar is at the back. I can
+let you in, still, the front way to the rooms, if you want. An' I'll be
+there myself to wait on you.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' that was what they done, somebody takin' one o' the cars back for
+the other car, an' the rest of us fair breakin' into a run toward
+post-office hall.</p>
+
+<p>"'My land,' says Mis' Toplady, almost like a groan, 'what <i>hev</i> we
+done?'</p>
+
+<p>"It <i>was</i> a funny thing to do, we see it afterward. But I tell you, you
+can't appreciate the influence o' that forty-eight dollars unless you've
+tried to earn money in a town the size o' Friendship Village. Sodality
+hardly ever made more than five dollars to its ten-cent
+entertainments&mdash;an' that for a big turn-out on a dry night. An' here was
+the price<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> of about nine such entertainments give us outright, an' no
+extra work, an' rill feet-achin' weather. I say it was more than flesh
+an' blood <i>or</i> wives could stand. We done it automatic, like you
+contradict when it's necessary.</p>
+
+<p>"But there <i>was</i> the men to reckon with.</p>
+
+<p>"'What'll Timothy&mdash;an' Silas&mdash;an' Eppleby....' Mis' Toplady says, an'
+stops, some bothered an' some rill pained.</p>
+
+<p>"I judged, not havin' any husband to be doin' the inquirin', it wasn't
+polite for me to laugh. But I couldn't hardly help it, thinkin' o' them
+fifteen hungry men an' the supper et away from 'em, just William Nilly.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes, we remembered afterwards, never said a word, but only kep'
+up with us back to the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"Back to the hall, where the rest o' the Sodality was, we told 'em what
+we'd done&mdash;beginnin' with the forty-eight dollars, like some kind o'
+weapon. But I tell you, we hadn't reckoned without knowin' our
+hostesses, head an' heart. An' they went in pell mell, pleased an' glad
+as we was, an' plannin' like mad.</p>
+
+<p>"The first need was more food to make up that supper to somewheres near
+two dollars' worth&mdash;feedin' your husband is one thing an' gettin' up a
+two-dollar meal is another. But we collected that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> all in pretty sudden:
+leg o' lamb, left from the Holcombs' dinner an' only cut off of one
+side; the Sykes's roast o' veal, the same; three chickens for soup the
+Libertys hed just dressed for next day company dinner; big platter of
+devilled eggs chipped in from Mis' Toplady; a jar o' doughnuts, a
+steamer o' cookies, a fruit-cake a year old&mdash;we just made out our list
+an' scattered to empty out all our pantries.</p>
+
+<p>"By six o'clock we was back in the hall, an' all the food with us. But
+nobody hed met nobody's husband yet, an' nobody wanted to. We didn't
+quite know how we was goin' to do, I guess&mdash;but done is done, an' to do
+takes care of itself.</p>
+
+<p>"'Hadn't we ought to 'a' sent word to the men?' says Mis' Holcomb, for
+the third or fourth time. 'I sneaked around so's not to pass Eppleby's
+office, but I declare I feel mean. He'll hev to eat sauce an' plain
+bread-an'-butter for his supper. An' most o' the men-folks the same.
+'Seems though somebody'd ought to send 'em word an' not let 'em come up
+here, all washed an' dressed.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, cuttin' cake with her lips shut tight an'
+talkin' anyway, 'I kind o' thought&mdash;leave 'em come up. I bet they'd
+rather be in it than out of it, every one of 'em, an' who knows they
+might be some supper left? An' we can all&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p><p>"An' at that Mis' Toplady faces round from cuttin' the cake: 'My land,
+my land,' she says, sort o' hushed, 'why, doin' this, we can't none of
+us wear our new dresses!'</p>
+
+<p>"An' at that we looked at each other, each one sort of accusin', an' I
+guess all our hearts givin' one o' them sickish thumps. An' Mis' Sykes,
+her that hed been so still, snaps back:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'I wondered what you thought I'd rented my dress from the city for at
+<i>Three Dollars a night</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you, that made a hush in the middle of the plannin'. We'd forgot
+all about our own dresses, an' that was bad enough, with the hall all
+hired an' everything all ready, an' every chance in the world of
+everybody's husband's findin' out about the dresses before we could get
+up another Sodality party, same way. But here was Mis' Sykes, three
+dollars out, an mebbe wouldn't be able to rent her dress again at all.</p>
+
+<p>"'I did want Silas,' Mis' Sykes says then, wistful, 'to see me in that
+dress. Silas an' I have been married so long,' she says, 'that I often
+wonder if I seem like a person to him at all. But in that dress from the
+city, I think I would.'</p>
+
+<p>"We was each an' all ready to cry, an' I dunno but we would hev done
+it&mdash;though we was all ready to serve, too: coffee made, potatoes pipin'
+hot, veal an' lamb het up an' smellin' rich, chicken<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> soup steamin', an'
+all. But just that very minute we heard some of 'em comin' in the
+hall&mdash;an' the one 'ready' conquered the other 'ready,' like it will, an'
+we all made a rush, part curious an' part nerves, to peek through the
+little servin' window from the kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>What</i> do you think we saw? It was the automobile folks, hungry an' got
+there first. In they'd come, women laughin', men jokin', all makin' a
+lark out o' the whole thing. An' if the women wasn't, every last one of
+'em, wearin'&mdash;not the clothes they hed come in, but light pink an' light
+blue an' white an' flowered things, an' all like that.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Hubbelthwait burst in on us while we was lookin'. 'They hed things
+in their trunk at the back o' the automobile,' says she. 'They says they
+wanted to floss up for dinner, an' floss up they hev. They look like
+Lyddy's fashion sheets, one an' all.'</p>
+
+<p>"At that Mis' Sykes, a-ceasin' to peek, she drops her tray on the bare
+floor an' begun untyin' her apron. 'Quick!' she raps out, 'Mis'
+Hubbelthwait, you go an' set 'em down. An' every one o' you&mdash;into them
+togs of ours! Here's the chance to wear 'em&mdash;here an' <i>now</i>,' she says,
+'an' leave them folks see we know how to do things here in Friendship
+Village as good as the best.'</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p><p>"Well, bein' as she had rented the dress, an' three dollars hed to be
+paid out anyhow, an' bein' as she was president, an' bein' as we was all
+hankerin' in our hearts, we didn't need much urgin'. We slammed the
+servin' window shut an' set chairs against both doors, an' we whisked
+out of our regular dresses like wild.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, land&mdash;my land, the sleeves&mdash;the sleeves ain't in mine!' says Mis'
+Toplady, sort o' glazed, an' speakin' in a wail. But we encouraged her
+up to pin 'em in, which she done, an' it couldn't be told from stitches.
+Poor Mame Holcomb's collar that wasn't on yet we turned in for her
+V-shape, so's her dress was low, like the best. An' Mis' Uppers, that
+was seasonin' the chicken soup like none of us could, her we took turns
+in dressin' in her green. An' I'd got into my spare-room curtains,
+somehow, just as Mis' Hubbelthwait come shoving at that door.</p>
+
+<p>"'The men&mdash;the men!' says she, painful. 'They're all out here&mdash;Silas an'
+Timothy an' Eppleby an' all. They've all heard about it&mdash;the automobiles
+went to the post-office for their mail, an' Silas told 'em enjoyable
+about Threat, an' the automobiles told him where they was goin' to eat.
+An' they've come, thinkin' they's enough for all, an' they're out here
+now.'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady groaned a little, agonized an'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> stifled, but rill firm.
+'Tell 'em, then,' says she, 'to come back up here, like men, an'
+<i>help</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>"Then we heard a little rustle, soft an' silky an' kind o'
+pink-soundin', an' we looked around, an' there, from where she had been
+dressin' herself over behind the kitchen boiler all alone, Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes stepped out. My land, if she wasn't in a white dress, a
+little low in the neck, an' elbow sleeves, an' all covered solid as
+crust with glitterin' silver spangles.</p>
+
+<p>"'Let's tell 'em ourselves,' she says, 'come on&mdash;all of you. Let's take
+out the first course, an' tell the men what we want 'em to do.'</p>
+
+<p>"We made Mis' Sykes go first, carryin' high the tureen of chicken soup.
+An' on one side of her walked Mis' Timothy Toplady, in blue, with the
+wafers, an' on the other Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, in pink, with
+the radishes. An' neither one of 'em could hardly help lookin' at Mis'
+Sykes's dress all the way out. An' back of 'em went the rest o' the
+ladies, all in pink an' blue an' white an' pale green nun's veilin' that
+they'd made, an' carryin' the water-pitchers an' ice an' celery an' like
+that. An' me, I hung back in the kitchen watchin' an' lovin' 'em every
+one&mdash;an' almost lovin' Timothy Toplady an' Silas Sykes an' Eppleby when
+they looked on an' saw.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes set the soup down in front o' the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> merry-seemin' man for him
+to serve it. An' then she crossed over an' spoke to Silas, an' swep' up
+ahead of him in that spangly dress, the other ladies followin' an'
+noddin' bright when they passed the men, an' motionin' 'em toward the
+back o' the hall. An' back the men all come into the kitchen, followin'
+as they was asked to do, an' orderly through bein' dazed. Silas an'
+Timothy an' Eppleby was first, an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' Mame
+went up to 'em together.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll never forget that minute. I thought the men was goin' to burst out
+characteristic an' the whole time be tart, an' I shut both doors an' the
+servin' window careful. An' instead o' that, them three men stood there
+just smilin' a little an lookin' surprised an' agreeable; an' the other
+husbands, either takin' the cue or feelin' the same, done likewise, too.
+An' when Mame Bliss says, sort o' tremblin'&mdash;Eppleby bein' the gentlest
+husband in Friendship Village, an' known to be: 'How do you like us,
+Eppleby?' Eppleby just nods an' wrinkles up his eyes an' smiles at her,
+like he meant lots more. An' he says, 'Why didn't you never wear that
+dress before, Mame?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' 'Well, Timothy?' says Mis' Toplady, sort o' masterful, an' fully
+expectin' to hev to master. But Timothy Toplady, he just rubs his hands
+an' looks at her sort o' wonderin', an' he says, 'Blisterin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> Benson,
+you look as good as the city folks, Amandy&mdash;all light, an' loose made,
+an' stylish&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"But Silas Sykes, he just stood lookin' at his wife an' lookin'. Of
+course she <i>did</i> hev the advantage, bein' her spangles shone so. An'
+Silas looked at her an' looked, just as if her bein' his wife didn't
+make him admire her any the less. An' Mis' Sykes, she was rill pink an'
+pleased an' breathless, an' I guess she could see she seemed like a
+person to Silas, the way she'd wanted to.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above">"It all went off splendid. The men stayed an' dished in the kitchen an'
+helped carry away from the tables&mdash;the forty-eight dollars completin'
+their respect&mdash;an' we ladies done the servin'. An' I tell you, we served
+'em with an air, 'count o' bein' well dressed, like they was, an'
+knowin' it. An' we knew the automobile folks appreciated it&mdash;we could
+tell by the way they kep' lookin' at us. But of course we all understood
+Mis' Sykes looked the best, an' we let her do all the most prominent
+things&mdash;bringin' in the first dish of everything an' like that, so's
+they could hev a good look.</p>
+
+<p>"When it was over, the merry-seemin' man stood up an' made a little
+speech o' thanks, rill courteous an' sweet, an' like he knew how to act.
+An' when he was through we, one an' all, nudged Mis' Sykes to reply, an'
+she done so, the two tables<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> listenin', an' the Sodality standin' in
+between, an' the Sodality's husbands crowdin' in both kitchen doors to
+listen.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes says, rill dignified, an' the light catchin' in her
+spangles: 'We're all very much obliged, I'm sure, for our forty-eight
+dollars clear. An' we think perhaps you'd like to know what the money is
+goin' toward. It's goin',' she says, 'towards the pavin' of the main
+street of our little city.'</p>
+
+<p>"Silas Sykes was lookin' out the servin' window like it was a box.
+'What's that?' says he, more of him comin' out of the window, 'what's
+<i>that</i> you say?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' they was a little wave o' moves an' murmurs all around him like
+when somethin' is goin' to happen an' nobody knows what; an' I know the
+Sodality caught its breath, for, as Mis' Toplady always says, the dear
+land knows what men <i>will</i> do.</p>
+
+<p>"With that up springs the merry-seemin' man, his face all beamin', an'
+he says loud an' clear an' drowndin' out everything else: 'Hear, hear!
+Likewise, here an' now. I move that we as one man, an' that man's
+automobile having lately come up the main street of Friendship
+Village&mdash;do ourself contribute to this most worthy end. Get to work,'
+says he. 'Think civic thoughts!'</p>
+
+<p>"He slid the last roll off its plate, an' he laid somethin' in paper
+money on it, an' he started it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> down the table. An' every man of 'em
+done as he done. An' I tell you, when we see Mis' Hubbelthwait's bread
+plate pilin' with bills, an' knew what it was for, we couldn't help&mdash;the
+whole Sodality couldn't help&mdash;steppin' forwards, close to the table, an'
+standin' there an' holdin' our breaths. An' the men, back there in the
+kitchen, they hushed up when they see the money, an' they kep' hushed.
+Land, land, it was a great minute! I like to think about it.</p>
+
+<p>"An' when the plate come back to the merry-seemin' man, he took it an'
+he come over towards us with it in his hand, an' we nudged Mis' Sykes to
+take the money. An' she just lifted up the glitter part of her skirt an'
+spread it out an' he dropped the whole rustlin' heap on to the spangles.
+An' the rest of us all clapped our hands, hard as we could, an' right
+while we was doin' it we heard somethin' else&mdash;deeper an' more manly
+than us. An' there was the men streamin' out o' the kitchen doors, an'
+Silas Sykes high in the servin' window&mdash;an' every one of 'em was
+clappin', too.</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you, we was glad an' grateful. An' we was grateful, too, when
+afterwards they was plenty enough supper left for the men-folks. An'
+when we all set down together around that table, Mis' Sykes at the head
+an' the plate o' bills for a centrepiece, Mis' Toplady leaned back, hot
+an' tired, an' seein'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> if both her sleeves was still pinned in place,
+an' she says what we was all thinkin':&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, ladies,' she says, 'we can pave streets an' dress in the light
+shades even if we ain't young, like the run o' the fashion-plates. Ain't
+it like comin' to life again?' she says."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XI</span> <span class="smaller">UNDERN</span></h2>
+
+<p>I have a guest who is the best of the three kinds of welcome guests. Of
+these some are like a new rug which, however fine and unobtrusive it be,
+at first changes the character of your room so that when you enter you
+are less conscious of the room than of the rug. Some guests are like
+flowers on the table, leaving the room as it was save for their sweet,
+novel presence. And some guests are like a prized new book, unread, from
+which you simply cannot keep away. Of these last is my guest whom my
+neighbour calls the New Lady.</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour and Elfa and Miggy and Little Child and I have all been
+busy preparing for her. Elfa has an almost pathetic fondness for
+"company,"&mdash;I think it is that she leads such a lonely life in the
+little kitchen-prison that she welcomes even the companionship of
+more-voices-in-the-next-room. I have tried to do what I can for Elfa,
+but you never help people very much when you only try to do what you
+can. It must lie nearer the heart than that. And I perfectly understand
+that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> magazines and trifles of finery which I give to her, and the
+flowers I set on the kitchen clock shelf, and the talks which, since my
+neighbour's unconscious rebuke, I have contrived with her, are about as
+effectual as any merely ameliorative means of dealing with a social
+malady. For Elfa is suffering from a distinct form of the social malady,
+and not being able to fathom it, she knows merely that she is lonely. So
+she has borrowed fellowship from her anticipation of my guest and of
+those who next week will come down from the town; and I know, though she
+does not know, that her jars of fresh-fried cakes and cookies, her fine
+brown bread and her bowl of salad-dressing, are her utmost expression of
+longing to adjust the social balance and give to herself companionship,
+even a kind of household.</p>
+
+<p>Little Child to-day came, bringing me a few first sweet peas and
+Bless-your-Heart, Bless-your-Heart being her kitten, and as nearly pink
+as a cat can be and be still a cat.</p>
+
+<p>"To lay in the New Lady's room," she remarked, bestowing these things
+impartially upon me.</p>
+
+<p>Later, my neighbour came across the lawns with a plate of currant tarts
+and a quarter of a jelly cake.</p>
+
+<p>"Here," she said, "I don't know whether you like tarts or not. They're
+more for children, I always think. I always bake 'em, and the little
+round child fried cakes, too, and I put frosting faces<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> on the cookies,
+and such things. It makes my husband and I seem more like a family," she
+explained, "and that's why I always set the dining-room table. As long
+as we ain't any little folks running around, I always tell him that him
+and I would be eating meat and potatoes on the kitchen drop-leaf like
+savages if I didn't pretend there was more of us, and bake up for 'em."</p>
+
+<p>Miggy alone does not take wholly kindly to the New Lady idea, though I
+assure her that our mornings are to remain undisturbed.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," she observed, while in the New Lady's honour she gathered
+up strewn papers, "I know I'll like her because she's your friend. But I
+don't know what folks want to visit for. Don't you s'pose that's why the
+angels don't come back&mdash;because they know everything, and they know what
+a lot of extra work they'd make us?"</p>
+
+<p>In Miggy the tribal sense seems to have run itself out. Of the sanctity
+of the individual she discerns much; but of the wider sanctities she has
+no clear knowledge. Most relationships she seems to regard, like the
+love of Peter, as "drawbacks," save only her indefinite consciousness of
+that one who is "not quite her sister"&mdash;the little vague Margaret. And
+this, I think, will be the leaven. Perhaps it is the universal leaven,
+this consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>I was glad that the New Lady was to arrive in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> the afternoon. Sometimes
+I think that the village afternoon is the best time of all. It is no
+wonder that they used to call that time "undern." If they had not done
+so, the word must have grown of its own will&mdash;perhaps it did come to
+life with no past, an immaculate thing, so like its meaning that it
+could not help being here among us. I know very well that Sir John
+Mandeville and others used "undern" to mean the third hour, or about
+nine in the morning, but that may have been because at first not every
+one recognized the word. Many a fairy thing wanders for a long time on
+earth, patiently putting up with other connotations than its own.
+Opportunism, the subconscious mind, personality, evolution itself,&mdash;all
+these are still seeking their full incarnations in idea. No wonder
+"undern" was forced for a long while to mean morning. But nine o'clock
+in the morning! How, after all, was that possible? You have only to say
+it over&mdash;undern, undern, undern,&mdash;to be heavenly drowsy with summer
+afternoon. The north of England recognized this at last and put the word
+where it belongs; and I have, too, the authority of the lady of Golden
+Wing:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Undern cometh after noon,</div>
+<div>Golden Wings will be here soon...."</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>One can hardly stop saying that, once one is started. I should like to
+go on with it all down the page.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p><p>I was thinking of these things as I drove to the station alone to meet
+the New Lady. The time had taken on for me that pleasant, unlike-itself
+aspect which time bears in any mild excitement, so that if in the moment
+of reading a particularly charming letter one can remember to glance up
+and look the room in the face, one may catch its <i>other</i> expression, the
+expression which it has when one is not looking. So now I caught this
+look in the village and an air of
+Something-different-is-going-to-happen, such as we experience on
+holidays. Next week, when the New Lady's friends come down to us for two
+days, I dare say, if I can remember to look for it, that the village
+will have another expression still. Yet there will be the same quiet
+undern&mdash;though for me it is never a commonplace time. Indeed, usually I
+am in the most delighted embarrassment how to spend it. In the mornings
+now&mdash;Miggy being willing&mdash;I work, morning in the true democracy being
+the work time; afternoon the time for recreation and the more
+specialized forms of service <i>and</i> a little rest; the evening for
+delight, including the delight of others. Not every one in the village
+accepts my afternoon and evening classifications. I am constantly coming
+on people making preserves after mid-day, and if I see a light in a
+kitchen window after nine at night I know that somebody is ironing in
+the cool of the day. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> usually my division of time is the general
+division, save that&mdash;as in the true democracy&mdash;service is not always
+recognized as service. Our afternoons may be spent in cutting carpet
+rags, or in hemming linen, or sewing articles for an imminent bazaar,
+and this is likely to be denominated "gettin' through little odd jobs,"
+and accounted in a measure a self-indulgence. And if evening delight
+takes the form of gardening and later a flame of nasturtiums or dahlias
+is carried to a friend, nobody dreams that this is not a pleasant
+self-indulgence too, and it is so regarded. With these things true is it
+not as if a certain hope abroad in the world gave news of itself?</p>
+
+<p>Near the Pump pasture I came on Nicholas Moor&mdash;who rings the Catholic
+bell and is interested in celluloid&mdash;and who my neighbour had told me
+would doubtless come to me, bringing his little sheaf of "writin's." I
+had not yet met him, though I had seen in the daily paper a vagrant poem
+or two over his name&mdash;I remember a helpless lyric which made me think of
+a gorgeous green and gold beetle lying on its back, unable to recover
+its legs, but for all that flashing certain isolated iridescent colours.
+My heart ached for Nicholas, and when I saw him now going across the
+pasture his loneliness was like a gap in things, one of the places where
+two world-edges do not quite meet. There are so many pleasant ways to do
+and the boy seemed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> to know how to do none of them. How can he be lonely
+in the village? For myself, if I decide of an afternoon to take my work
+and pay a visit, I am in a pleasant quandary as to which way to turn. If
+I go to the west end of Daphne Street, there are at least five families
+among whom to choose, the other four of whom will wonder why I did not
+come to them. Think of knowing five families in two blocks who would
+welcome one's coming and even feel a little flattering bitterness if one
+chose the other four! If I take a cross street, I am in the same
+difficulty. And if I wish to go to the house of one of my neighbours, my
+motives clash so seriously that I often sit on my porch and call to
+whoever chances to be in sight to come to me. Do you wonder that, in
+town, the moment I open my address book I feel smothered? I recover and
+enjoy town as much as anybody, but sometimes in a stuffy coup&eacute;, hurrying
+to get a half-dozen of the pleasantest calls "done," I surprise a
+companion by saying: would now that it were undern on Daphne Street!</p>
+
+<p>I told this to the New Lady as we drove from the station. The New Lady
+is an exquisite little Someone, so little that it is as if she had been
+drawn quickly, in a single delicate curving line, and then left, lest
+another stroke should change her. She understands the things that I say
+in the way that I mean them; she is the way that you always think<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> the
+people whom you meet are going to be, though they so seldom are; like
+May, she is expectation come alive. What she says fits in all the
+crannies of what you did not say and have always known, or else have
+never thought of before and now never can forget. She laughs when she
+should laugh, and never, never when somebody else should laugh alone.
+When you tell her that you have walked eight miles and back, she says
+"<i>And back!</i>" with just the proper intonation of homage. She never tells
+a story upon the heels of your own little jest so swiftly that it cannot
+triumphantly escape. When you try to tell her something that you have
+not quite worked out, she nods a little and you see that she meant it
+before you did. She enters every moment by its gate and not over its
+wall, though she frequently wings her way in instead of walking. Also,
+she is good to look at and her gowns are as meet as the clouds to the
+sky&mdash;and no less distracting than the clouds are at their very best.
+There is no possible excuse for my saying so much about her, but I like
+to talk of her. And I like to talk to her as I did when we left the
+station and I was rambling on about undern.</p>
+
+<p>The New Lady looked about with a breath of content.</p>
+
+<p>"No wonder," she said, "you like to pretend Birthday, in New York."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span></p><p>It is true that when I am there where, next to the village, I like best
+to live, I am fond of this pretence. It is like the children's game of
+"Choosing" before shop windows, only it is extensive and not, as cream
+puffs and dolls and crumpets in the windows dictate to the children,
+purely intensive. Seeing this man and that woman in the subway or the
+tea-room or the caf&eacute; or the car, I find myself wondering if it is by any
+chance their birthdays; and if it is, I am always wishing to deal out
+poor little gifts at which I fancy they would hardly look. To the lithe
+idle blond woman, elbows on table; to the heavy-lidded,
+engagement-burdened gentlewoman; to the busy, high-eyebrowed man in a
+cab; to the tired, slow-winking gentleman in his motor; to the
+thick-handed labourer hanging to his strap, I find myself longing to
+distribute these gifts: a breakfast on our screened-in porch in the
+village, with morning-glories on the table; a full-throated call of my
+oriole&mdash;a June call, not the isolated reminiscent call of August; an
+hour of watering the lawn while robins try to bathe in the spray; a
+morning of pouring melted paraffin on the crimson tops of moulds of
+currant jelly; a yellow afternoon of going with me to "take my work and
+stay for supper." I dare say that none of my chosen beneficiaries would
+accept; but if I could pop from a magic purse a crop of caps and fit
+folk, willy nilly, I wonder if afterward, even if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> they remembered
+nothing of what had occurred, they might not find life a little
+different.</p>
+
+<p>"If it was my birthday," said the New Lady, "I would choose to be driven
+straight away through that meadow, as if I had on wings."</p>
+
+<p>That is the way she is, the New Lady. Lacking wings of her own she gives
+them to many a situation. Straightway I drove down into the Pump pasture
+and across it, springy soil and circus-trodden turf and mullein stalks
+and ten-inch high oak trees.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's let down the bars," said the New Lady, "and drive into that next
+meadow. If it <i>is</i> a sea, as it looks, it will be glad of your company."</p>
+
+<p>It was not a sea, for as we drove through the lush grass the yellow and
+purple people of the meadow came marching to meet us, as dignified as
+garden flowers, save that you knew, all the time, that wild hearts were
+beating beneath the rainbow tassels. It was a meadow with things to say,
+but with finger on lip&mdash;as a meadow should be and as a spirit must be.
+The meadow seemed to wish to say: "It is all very pleasant for you there
+in the village to admire one another's wings, but the real romance is in
+the flight." I wondered if it were not so that it had happened&mdash;that one
+day a part of the village had got tired waiting, and had broken off and
+become something free, of which the meadow was the body and its secret
+was the spirit. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> then the presence of the New Lady always sets me
+wondering things like this.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," I said to her suddenly, "spring has gone! I wonder how that
+happened. I have been waiting really to get hold of spring, and here it
+is June."</p>
+
+<p>"June-and-a-half," assented the New Lady, and touched the lines so that
+we came to a standstill in the shade of a cottonwood.</p>
+
+<p>"This way," she said&mdash;and added softly, as one who would not revive a
+sadness, her own idea of the matter.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Where did Spring die? I did not hear her go</div>
+<div>Down the soft lane she painted. All flower still</div>
+<div>She moved among her emblems on the hill</div>
+<div>Touching away their burden of old snow.</div>
+<div>Was it on some great down where long winds flow</div>
+<div>That the wild spirit of Spring went out to fill</div>
+<div>The eyes of Summer? Did a daffodil</div>
+<div>Lift the pale urn remote where she lies low?</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Oh, not as other moments did she die,</div>
+<div>That woman-season, outlined like a rose.</div>
+<div>Before the banner of Autumn's scarlet bough</div>
+<div>The Summer fell; and Winter, with a cry,</div>
+<div>Wed with March wind. Spring did not die like those;</div>
+<div>But vaguely, as if Love had prompted, 'Now.'"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>The New Lady's theory does not agree with that of Little Child. I am in
+doubt which to accept. But I like to think about both.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p><p>And when the New Lady had said the faint requiem, we drove on again and
+the next moment had almost run down Nicholas Moor, lying face downward
+in the lush grass.</p>
+
+<p>I recognized him at once, but of course the New Lady did not do so, and
+she leaned from the cart, thoroughly alarmed at the boy's posture and,
+as he looked up, at his pallor.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, what is the matter?" she cried, and her voice was so heavenly
+pitying that one would have been willing to have most things the matter
+only to hear her.</p>
+
+<p>Nicholas Moor scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and stood abashed,
+looking as strangely detached from the moment as if he had fallen from a
+frame and left the rest of the picture behind.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing. I just like to be here," he was surprised into saying.</p>
+
+<p>The New Lady sat down and smiled. And her smile was even more
+captivating than had been her late alarm.</p>
+
+<p>"So do I," she told him heartily. "So do I. What do you like about it,
+<i>best</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>I do not think that any one had ever before spoken to Nicholas so
+simply, and he answered, chord for chord.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess&mdash;I guess I like it just on account of its being the way it is,"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p><p>"That is a very, very nice reason," the New Lady commented. "Again, so
+do I."</p>
+
+<p>We left him, I remember, looking about as if he were seeing it all for
+the first time.</p>
+
+<p>As we drove away I told my New Lady about Nicholas, and she looked along
+her own thought and shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"There must be hundreds of them," she said, "and some are poets. But
+most of them are only lonesome. I wonder which Nicholas is?"</p>
+
+<p>We lingered out-of-doors as long as we might, because the touch of the
+outdoors was so companioning that to go indoors was a distinct good-by.
+Is it so with you that some Days, be they never so sunny, yet walk with
+you in a definite reserve and seem to be looking somewhere else; while
+other Days come to you like another way of being yourself and will not
+let you go? I know that some will put it down to mood and not to the Day
+at all; but, do what I will, I cannot credit this.</p>
+
+<p>It was after five o'clock when we drove into the village, and all Daphne
+Street was watering its lawns. Of those who were watering some pretended
+not to see us, but I understood that this they accounted the etiquette
+due to a new arrival. Some bowed with an excess of cordiality, and this
+I understood to be the pleasant thought that they would show my guest
+how friendly we all are. And some laid down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> the hose and came to the
+sidewalk's edge to meet the New Lady then and there.</p>
+
+<p>Of these were Mis' Postmaster Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss
+and my neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," Mis' Postmaster Sykes said graciously
+to the New Lady. "I must say it seems good to see a strange face now an'
+then. I s'pose you feel all travel dust an' mussed up?"</p>
+
+<p>And at Mis' Holcomb's hitching post:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Pleased to meet you," said Mis' Holcomb. "I was saying to Eppleby that
+I wondered if you'd come. Eppleby says, 'I donno, but like enough
+they've went for a ride somewheres.' Lovely day, ain't it? Been to the
+cemetery?"</p>
+
+<p>I said that we had not been there yet, and,</p>
+
+<p>"Since it's kept up it makes a real nice thing to show folks," Mis'
+Holcomb said. "I s'pose you wouldn't come inside for a bite of supper,
+would you?"</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour&mdash;bless her!&mdash;had on a black wool dress to do honour to my
+guest.</p>
+
+<p>"It's nice for the neighbours to see company comin' and goin'," she said
+cordially, "though of course we don't have any of the extra work. But I
+guess everybody likes extra work of <i>this</i> kind."</p>
+
+<p>And as we drove away:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span></p><p>"Good-by," she cried, "I hope you'll have a good night's rest and a
+good breakfast."</p>
+
+<p>When I looked at the New Lady I saw her eyes ever so slightly misted.</p>
+
+<p>"Spring didn't die," she said&mdash;as Little Child had said. "Spring knew
+how to keep alive. It got down in these people's hearts."</p>
+
+<p>Yes, the New Lady is a wholly satisfactory guest. She even pretended not
+to notice Peter's father who, as we alighted, came singing by, and bowed
+to us, his barren old face lighted with a smile, as a vacant room is
+lighted, revealing the waste. If I had some one staying with me who had
+smiled at Peter's father or&mdash;at any one, or who did not see the village
+as it is, I think I should be tempted to do as my neighbour did to me
+that morning: pick three carnation pinks for her and watch her go away.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XII</span> <span class="smaller">THE WAY THE WORLD IS</span></h2>
+
+<p>Was it not inevitable that poor, lonely Nicholas Moor should have sought
+out my New Lady? A night or two after her arrival he saw her again, at a
+supper in the church "lecture-room." He was bringing in a great freezer
+of ice-cream and when she greeted him he had all but dropped the
+freezer. Then a certain, big obvious deacon whose garden adjoined my own
+had come importantly and snatched the burden away, and the boy had
+stood, shamefast, trying to say something; but his face was lighted as
+at a summons. So the New Lady had divined his tragedy, the loneliness
+which his shyness masked as some constant plight of confusion.</p>
+
+<p>"Come and see me sometime," she had impulsively bidden him. "Do you know
+where I am staying?"</p>
+
+<p>Did he know that! Since he had seen her in the meadow had he known
+anything else? And after some days of hard trying he came one night,
+arriving within the dusk as behind a wall. Even in the twilight, when he
+was once under the poplars, he did<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> not know what way to look. To seem
+to look straight along the road was unnatural. To seem to look out
+across the opposite fields was hypocrisy. To look at the house which
+held the New Lady was unthinkable. So, as he went in at the gate and up
+the fern-bordered walk, he examined the back of his hand&mdash;near, and then
+a little farther away. As he reached the steps he was absorbedly
+studying his thumb.</p>
+
+<p>From a place of soft light, shed through a pink box shade on the table,
+and of scattered willow chairs and the big leaves of plants, the New
+Lady came toward him.</p>
+
+<p>"You did come!" she said. "I thought you wouldn't, really."</p>
+
+<p>With the utmost effort Nicholas detached one hand from his hat brim and
+gave it her. From head to foot he was conscious, not of the touch of her
+hand, little and soft, but of the bigness and coarseness of his own
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I hated to come like everything," he said.</p>
+
+<p>At this of course she laughed, and she went back to her willow chair and
+motioned him to his. He got upon it, crimson and wretched.</p>
+
+<p>"As much as that!" she observed.</p>
+
+<p>"You know I wanted to come awfully, too," he modified it, "but I dreaded
+it&mdash;like sixty. I&mdash;I can't explain...." he stumbled.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p><p>"Don't," said the New Lady, lightly, and took pity on him and rang a
+little bell.</p>
+
+<p>She thought again how fine and distinguished he was, as he had seemed to
+her on the day when she had first spoken to him. He sat staring at her,
+trying to realize that he was on the veranda with her, hearing the sound
+of the little bell she had rung. He had wanted something like this,
+wistfully, passionately. Miserable as he was, he rested in the moment as
+within arms. And the time seemed distilled in that little silver
+bell-sound and the intimacy of waiting with her for some one to come.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that some one with a light footfall did come to the veranda. He
+heard the New Lady call her Elfa. But he saw only her hands, plump and
+capable and shaped like his own, moving among the glasses. After which
+his whole being became absorbed in creditably receiving the tall, cool
+tumbler on the tray which the capable hands held out to him. A period of
+suspended intelligence ensued, until he set the empty glass on the
+table. Then the little maid had gone, and the New Lady, sipping her own
+glass, was talking to him.</p>
+
+<p>"You were lying on the grass that day," she said, "as if you understood
+grass. Not many do understand about grass, and almost nobody understands
+the country. People say, 'Come, let us go into the country,' and when
+they get there is it the country<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> they want at all? No, it is the
+country sports, the country home,&mdash;everything but the real country. They
+play match games. They make expeditions, climb things in a stated time,
+put in a day at a stated place. I often think that they must go home
+leaving the country aghast that they could have come and gone and paid
+so little heed to it. Presently we are going to have some charming
+people out here who will do the same thing."</p>
+
+<p>So she talked, asking him nothing, even her eyes leaving him free. It
+seemed to him, tense and alert and ill at ease as he listened, that he,
+too, was talking to her. From the pressing practicalities, the
+self-important deacon, the people who did not trouble to talk to him,
+his world abruptly escaped, and in that world he walked, an escaped
+thing too, forgetful even of the little roll of verses which he had
+dared to bring.</p>
+
+<p>Yet when she paused, he looked out at her shrinkingly from under his
+need to reply. He did not look at her face, but he looked at her hands,
+so little that each time he saw them they were a new surprise and alien
+to him. He looked away from them to the friendliness of her smile. And
+when he heard himself saying detached, irrelevant things, he again fell
+to studying one of his own hands, big and coarse and brown. Oh, he
+thought, the difference between her and him was so hopelessly the
+difference in their hands.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span></p><p>In an absurdly short time the need to be gone was upon him; but of this
+he could not speak, and he sat half unconscious of what she was saying,
+because of his groping for the means to get away. Clearly, he must not
+interrupt her to say that he must go. Neither could he reply to what she
+said by announcing his intention. And yet when he answered what she
+said, straightway her exquisite voice went on with its speech to him.
+How, he wondered, does anybody ever get away from anywhere? If only
+something would happen, so that he could slip within it as within doors,
+and take his leave.</p>
+
+<p>Something did happen. By way of the garden, and so to a side door, there
+arrived those whose garden adjoined,&mdash;the big, obvious, self-important
+deacon, and behind him Three Light Gowns. The little maid Elfa came
+showing them through the house, in the pleasant custom of the village.
+And when the New Lady, with pretty, expected murmurings, rose to meet
+them, Nicholas got to his feet confronting the crisis of saying good-by,
+and the moment closed upon him like a vise. He heard his voice falter
+among the other voices, he saw himself under the necessity to take her
+hand and the deacon's hand, and the hands, so to speak, of the Three
+Light Gowns; and this he did as in a kind of unpractised bewildering
+minuet.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p><p>And then he found his eyes on a level with eyes that he had not seen
+before&mdash;blue eyes, gentle, watching, wide&mdash;and a fresh, friendly little
+face under soft hair. It was Elfa, taking away the empty glasses. And
+the boy, in his dire need to ease the instant, abruptly and inexplicably
+held out his hand to her too. She blushed, sent a frightened look to the
+New Lady, and took the hand in hers that was plump and capable, with its
+strong, round wrist. And the little maid, being now in an embarrassment
+like his own, the two hands clung for a moment, as if they had each the
+need.</p>
+
+<p>"Good night," she said, trembling.</p>
+
+<p>"Good night," said the New Lady, very gently.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>good night</i>!" burst from the boy as he fled away.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above">It was Elfa who admitted him at his next coming. The screened porch was
+once more in soft light from the square rose shade, and the place had
+the usual pleasant, haunted air of the settings of potentialities. As if
+potentiality were a gift of enchantment to human folk.</p>
+
+<p>The New Lady was not at home, Elfa told him, in her motherly little
+heart pitying him. And at the news he sat down, quite simply, in the
+chair in which he had sat before. He must see her. It was unthinkable
+that she should be away. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>To-night he had meant to have the courage to
+leave with her his verses.</p>
+
+<p>On the willow table lay her needlework. It was soft and white beyond the
+texture of most clouds, and she had wrought on it a pattern like the
+lines on a river. As his eyes rested on it, Nicholas could fancy it
+lying against her white gown and upon it her incomparable hands. Some
+way, she seemed nearer to him when he was not with her than when, with
+her incomparable hands and her fluent speech, she was in his presence.
+When she was not with him, he could think what to say to her. When he
+stood before her&mdash;the thought of his leave-taking on that veranda seized
+upon him, so that he caught his breath in the sharp thrust of mortified
+recollection, and looked away and up.</p>
+
+<p>His eyes met those of Elfa, who was quietly sitting opposite.</p>
+
+<p>"How they must all have laughed at me. You too!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"That last time I was here. Shaking hands that way," he explained.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't laugh," she unexpectedly protested; "I cried."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her. And this was as if he were seeing her for the first
+time.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Cried?</i>" he repeated.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p><p>"Nobody ever shakes hands with me," Elfa told him.</p>
+
+<p>He stared at her as she sat on the edge of her chair, her plump hands
+idle on her apron.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he admitted, "no, I don't suppose they do. I didn't think&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But he had not thought of her at all.</p>
+
+<p>"By the door all day I let in hand-shakes," she said, "an' then I let
+'em out again. But I don't get any of 'em for me."</p>
+
+<p>That, Nicholas saw, was true enough. Even he had been mortified because
+he had taken her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Once," Elfa said, "I fed a woman at the back door. An' when she went
+she took hold o' my hand, thankful. An' then you done it too&mdash;like it
+was a mistake. That's all, since I worked out. I don't know folks
+outside much, only some that don't shake hands, 'count of seemin'
+ashamed to."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," said Nicholas.</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes," she went on, "folks come here an' walk in to see <i>her</i> an'
+they don't shake. Ain't it funny&mdash;when folks can an' don't? When they
+come from the city to-morrow, the whole house'll shake hands, but me.
+Once I went to prayer-meetin' an' I hung around waitin' to see if
+somebody wouldn't. But they didn't&mdash;any of 'em. It was rainin' outside
+an' I guess they thought I come with somebody's rubbers."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p><p>Nicholas looked at her a little fearfully. It had seemed to him that in
+a great world of light he had always moved in a little hollow of
+darkness and detachment. Were there, then, other hollows like that?
+Places to which outstretched hands never penetrate? A great
+understanding possessed him, and he burst out in an effort to express
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"You're a funny girl," he said.</p>
+
+<p>She flushed, and suddenly lifted one hand and looked at it. Nicholas
+watched her now intently. She studied the back of her hand, turned it,
+and sat absorbedly examining her little thumb. And Nicholas felt a
+sudden sense of understanding, of gladness that he understood. As he
+felt when he was afraid and wretched, so Elfa was feeling now.</p>
+
+<p>He leaned toward her.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't feel afraid," he said gently.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't," she said; "I don't, truly. I guess that's why I stayed here
+now. She won't be back till ten&mdash;I ought to have said so before.
+You&mdash;you won't want to wait so long."</p>
+
+<p>He rose at once. And now, being at his ease, his head was erect, his
+arms naturally fallen, his face as confident and as occupied by his
+spirit as when he lay alone in the meadows.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir," he said, "let's shake hands again!"</p>
+
+<p>She gave him her hand and, in their peculiarly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> winning upward look, her
+eyes&mdash;blue, wide, watchful, with that brooding mother watchfulness of
+some women, even in youth. And her hand met his in the clasp which is
+born of the simple, human longing of kind for kind.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-by," she answered his good-by, and they both laughed a little in a
+shyness which was a way of delight.</p>
+
+<p>In the days to follow there flowed in the boy's veins a tide of novel
+sweetness. And now his thoughts eluded one another and made no chain, so
+that when he tried to remember what, on that first evening, the New Lady
+and he had talked about, there came only a kind of pleasure, but it had
+no name. Everything that he had to do pressed upon him, and when he
+could get time he was away to the meadow, looking down on the chimneys
+of that house, and swept by a current that was like a singing. And
+always, always it was as if some one were with him.</p>
+
+<p>There came a night when he could no longer bear it, when his wish took
+him to itself and carried him with it. Those summer dusks, warm yellow
+with their moon and still odorous of spring, were hard to endure alone.
+Since the evening with her, Nicholas had not seen the New Lady save
+when, not seeing him, she had driven past in a pha&euml;ton. At the sight of
+her, and once at the sight of Elfa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> from that house, a faintness had
+seized him, so that he had wondered at himself for some one else, and
+then with a poignancy that was new pain, new joy, the new life, had
+rejoiced that he was himself. So, when he could no longer bear it, he
+took his evening way toward the row of poplars, regretting the moonlight
+lest by it they should see him coming. And to-night he had with him no
+verses, but only his longing heart.</p>
+
+<p>He had no intimation of the guests, for the windows at that house were
+always brightly lighted, and until he was within the screened veranda
+the sound of voices did not reach him. Then from the rooms there came a
+babel of soft speech and laughter, and a touch of chords; and when he
+would have incontinently retreated, the New Lady crossed the hall and
+saw him.</p>
+
+<p>She came to the doorway and greeted him, and Nicholas looked up in the
+choking discomfort of sudden fear. She was in a gown that was like her
+needlework, mysteriously fashioned and intricate with shining things
+which made her infinitely remote. The incomparable little hands were
+quite covered with jewels. It was as if he had come to see a spirit and
+had met a woman.</p>
+
+<p>"How good of you to come again," she said. "Come, I want my friends to
+meet you."</p>
+
+<p>Her friends! That quick crossing of words within<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> there, then, meant the
+presence of her friends from the city.</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't! I came for a book&mdash;I'll get it some other time. I've got to
+go now!" Nicholas said.</p>
+
+<p>Then, "Bettina&mdash;Bettina!" some one called from within, and a man
+appeared in the hallway, smiled at sight of the New Lady, dropped his
+glass at sight of Nicholas, bowed, turned away&mdash;oh, how should he know
+that her name was Bettina when Nicholas had not known!</p>
+
+<p>This time he did not say good night at all. This time he did not look at
+his great hand, which was trembling, but he got away, mumbling
+something, his retreat graciously covered by the New Lady's light words.
+And, the sooner to be gone and out of the moonlight that would let them
+see him go, he struck blindly into the path that led to the side gate of
+the garden. The mortification that chains spirit to flesh and tortures
+both held him and tortured him. For a breath he imagined himself up
+there among them all, his hands holding his hat, imagined having to
+shake hands with them: and somehow this way of fellowship, this meeting
+of hands outstretched for hands, seemed, with them, the supreme ordeal,
+the true symbol of his alien state from them and from the New Lady. No
+doubt she understood him, but for the first time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> Nicholas saw that this
+is not enough. For the first time he saw that she was as far away from
+him as were the others. How easy, Nicholas thought piteously, those
+people in her house all found it to act the way they wanted to! Their
+hands must be like her hands....</p>
+
+<p>He got through the garden and to the side gate. And now the old
+loneliness was twofold upon him because he had known what it is to reach
+from the dark toward the light; yet when he saw that at the gate some
+one was standing, he halted in his old impulse to be on guard, hunted by
+the fear that this would be somebody alien to him. Then he saw that it
+was no one from another star, but Elfa.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh...." he said, and that, too, was what she said, but he did not hear.
+Not from another star she came, but from the deep of the world where
+Nicholas felt himself alone.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;was just going away," he explained.</p>
+
+<p>For assent she stepped a little back, saying nothing. But when Nicholas
+would have passed her it was as if the immemorial loneliness and the
+seeking of forgotten men innumerable stirred within him in the ache of
+his heart, in the mere desperate wish to go to somebody, to be with
+somebody, to have somebody by the hand.</p>
+
+<p>He turned upon Elfa almost savagely.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span></p><p>"Shake hands!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>Obediently she put out her hand, which of itself stayed ever so briefly,
+within his. He held it, feeling himself crushing it, clinging to it,
+being possessed by it. Her hand was, like his, rough from its work, and
+it was something alive, something human, something that answered. And
+instantly it was not Elfa alone who was there companioning him, but the
+dark was quick with presences, besieging him, letting him know that no
+one alive is alone, that he was somehow one of a comrade company,
+within, without, encompassing. And the boy was caught up by the sweet
+will outside his own will and he never knew how it was that he had Elfa
+in his arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Come here. Come here...." he said.</p>
+
+<p>To Elfa, in her loneliness threaded by its own dream, the moment,
+exquisite and welcome as it was, was yet as natural as her own single
+being. But to the boy it was not yet the old miracle of one world built
+from another. It was only the answer to the groping of hands for hands,
+the mere human call to be companioned. And the need to reassure her came
+upon him like the mantle of an elder time.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't feel afraid," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes gave him their winning upward look, and it was as if their
+mother watchfulness answered him gravely:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I don't. I don't, truly."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p><p>And at this she laughed a little, so that he joined her; and their
+laughter together was a new delight.</p>
+
+<p>Across the adjoining lawn Nicholas could see in the moonlight the moving
+figure of the big deacon, a Light Gown or two attending. A sudden
+surprising sense of safety from them overswept the boy. What if they did
+come that way! What, he even thought, if those people in the house were
+to come by? Somehow, the little hollow of dark in which he had always
+walked in the midst of light was as light as the rest of the world, and
+he was not afraid. And all this because Elfa did not stir in his arms,
+but was still, as if they were her harbour. And then Nicholas knew what
+they both meant.</p>
+
+<p>"Elfa!" he cried, "do you...?"</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I must...." she said, and knew no way to finish that.</p>
+
+<p>"Love me?" said Nicholas, bold as a lion.</p>
+
+<p>"I meant that too," Elfa said.</p>
+
+<p>Between the New Lady's house and the big, obvious deacon's lawn the boy
+stood, silent, his arms about the girl. So this was the way the world
+is, people bound together, needing one another, wanting one another,
+stretching out their hands....</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it was <i>you</i> I wanted!" Nicholas said wonderingly.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XIII</span> <span class="smaller">HOUSEHOLDRY</span></h2>
+
+<p>"After supper" in the village is like another room of the day. On these
+summer nights we all come out to our porches to read the daily paper, or
+we go to sit on the porch of a neighbour, or we walk about our lawns in
+excesses of leisure, giving little twitches to this green and to that.
+"In our yards" we usually say. Of these some are so tiny that the
+hammocks or the red swinging-chairs find room on the planting spaces
+outside the walks, and there men smoke and children frolic and call
+across the street to one another. And this evening, as I went down
+Daphne Street to post my letters, I saw in process the occasional
+evening tasks which I have noted, performed out-of-doors: at the
+Sykeses' cucumbers in preparation for to-morrow's pickles; a bushel of
+over-ripe cherries arrived unexpectedly at the Herons' and being pitted
+by hand; a belated needle-task of Mis' Holcomb's finishing itself in the
+tenuous after-light. This fashion of taking various employments into the
+open delights me. If we have peas to shell or beans to string or corn to
+husk,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> straightway we take them to the porch or into the yard. This
+seems to me to hold something of the grace of the days in the Joyous
+Garde, or on the grounds of old ch&acirc;teaux where they embroidered or wound
+worsted in woodland glades, or of colonial America, where we had out our
+spinning wheels under the oaks. When I see a great shining boiler of
+gasoline carried to the side yard for the washing of delicate fabrics, I
+like to think of it as done out-of-doors for the charm of it as much as
+for the safety. So Nausicaa would have cleansed with gasoline!</p>
+
+<p>It was sight of the old Aunt Effie sewing a seam in Mis' Holcomb's
+dooryard which decided me to go to see Miggy. For I would not willingly
+be where Aunt Effie is, who has always some tragedy of gravy-scorching
+or dish-breaking to tell me. I have been for some time promising to go
+to see Miggy in her home, and this was the night to do so, for the New
+Lady went home to-day and I have been missing her sorely. There is a
+kind of minus-New Lady feeling about the universe.</p>
+
+<p>At the same moment that I decided for Miggy, Peter rose out of the
+ground. I wonder if he can have risen a very little first? But that is
+one of those puzzles much dwelt upon by the theologians, and I will not
+decide. Perhaps the thought of Miggy is a mighty motive on which Peter's
+very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> being is conditioned. Anyway, there he was, suddenly beside me,
+and telling me some everyday affair of how little use in the cannery
+were Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade, whose houses we were
+passing. And to his talk of shop I responded by inviting him to go with
+me to see Miggy. Would he go? He smiled his slow smile, with that little
+twist of mouth and lifting of brow.</p>
+
+<p>"This is like finding an evening where there wasn't one before," he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>The little house where Miggy lives has a copper beech in the
+dooryard&mdash;these red-leaved trees seem to be always in a kind of hush at
+their own difference. The house is no-colour, with trimmings of another
+no-colour for contrast, and the little front porch looks like something
+that has started to run out the front door and is being sternly snatched
+backward. The door stood ajar&mdash;no doubt for the completion of this
+transaction&mdash;and no one was about. We rapped, for above the bell push
+was a legend of Aunt Effie's inscribing, saying: "Bell don't ring." For
+a moment our summons was unanswered. Then Miggy called from upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be down in a minute," she said. "Go right in, both of you, and
+wait for me&mdash;will you?"</p>
+
+<p>To take the cards of one's visitors from a butler<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> of detached
+expression or from a maid with inquisitive eyelashes is to know nothing
+of the charm of this custom of ours of peeping from behind an upper
+curtain where we happen to be dressing, and alone in the house, at the
+ringing of the doorbell, and of calling down to a back which we
+recognize an informal "Oh, go right in and wait for me a minute, will
+you?" In this habit there is survival of old tribal loyalties and
+hospitalities; for let the back divined below be the back of a stranger,
+that is to say, of a barbarian, and we stay behind our curtains, silent,
+till it goes away.</p>
+
+<p>In the sitting room at Miggy's house a little hand lamp was burning, the
+fine yellow light making near disclosures of colour and form, and
+farther away formulating presences of shadow. Aunt Effie had been at her
+sewing, and there were yards of blue muslin billowing over a sunken
+arm-chair and a foam of white lining on the Brussels-covered couch. The
+long blue cotton spread made the big table look like a fat Delft sugar
+bowl, and the red curtains were robbed of crude colour and given an
+obscure rosy glow. A partly finished waist disguised the gingerbread of
+the what-not, one forgot the carpet, the pictures became to the neutral
+wall what words which nobody understands are to ministering music. And
+on the floor before the lounge lay Little Child and Bless-your-Heart,
+asleep.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p><p>At first I did not see the child. It was Peter who saw her. He stooped
+and lifted her, the kitten still in her arms, and instead of saying any
+of the things a woman might have said, Peter said <i>"Well....</i>" with a
+tenderness in his voice such as women can give and more. For a man's
+voice-to-a-child gets down deeper than happiness. I suppose it is that
+the woman has always stayed with the child in the cave or the tent or
+the house, while the man has gone out to kill or to conquer or to trade;
+and the ancient crooning safety is still in the woman's voice, and the
+ancient fear that he may not come back to them both is in the voice of
+the man. When Peter lifted Little Child in his arms, I wished that Miggy
+had been there to hear.</p>
+
+<p>"What's it dreaming about?" Peter said.</p>
+
+<p>"'Bout Miggy," said Little Child sleepily, and she snuggled in Peter's
+coat collar.</p>
+
+<p>"Dream about Peter too!" Peter commanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, <i>I</i> will," promised Little Child o' Dreams, and drifted off.</p>
+
+<p>Peter sank awkwardly down to the floor and held her so, and he sat there
+stroking Bless-your-Heart and looking as if he had forgotten me, save
+that, "Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade that I was telling
+you about," he remarked once irrelevantly, "<i>they've</i> each got a kiddie
+or so."</p>
+
+<p>Miggy came downstairs and, "I'm a surprise,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> she said in the doorway,
+and stood there in a sheer white frock&mdash;a frock which said nothing to
+make you look, but would not let you look away; and it had a little
+rhyme of lace on this end and on that. It was the frock that she had
+made herself&mdash;she told me so afterward, but she did not mention it
+before Peter, and I liked her the better for that. When I hear women
+boast of these things I always wonder why, then and there, I should not
+begin to recite a sonnet I have turned, so as to have a hand in things.
+To write an indifferent sonnet is much less than to make a frock which
+can be worn, but yet I should dislike infinitely to volunteer even so
+little as a sonnet or a quatrain. In any case, it would be amazing taste
+for me to do so; while "I made it myself" I hear everywhere in the
+village, especially in the presence of the Eligible. But I dare say that
+this criticism of mine is conditioned by the fact that my needle-craft
+cell got caught in the primal protozoan ooze and did not follow me.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy! Oh, Miggery!" said Peter, softly. He had made this name for a
+sort of superlative of her.</p>
+
+<p>"Like me?" inquired Miggy. I wonder if even the female atom does not
+coquette when the sun strikes her to shining in the presence of her atom
+lord?</p>
+
+<p>You know that low, emphatic, unspellable thing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> which may be said by the
+throat when a thing is liked very much? When one makes it, it feels like
+a vocal dash in vocal italics. Peter did that, very softly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Miggy, "I feel that dressed-up that I might be cut out of
+paper. What <i>are</i> you doing down there, Peter?"</p>
+
+<p>He glanced down mutely, and Miggy went round the table and saw what he
+held.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," she said, "that great heavy girl, Peter. Give her to me."</p>
+
+<p>Miggy bent over Peter, with her arms outstretched for the child. And
+Peter looked up at her and enjoyed the moment.</p>
+
+<p>"She's too heavy for you to lift," he said, with his occasional quiet
+authority. "I'll put her where you want her."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's so hot upstairs," Miggy hesitated. "It's past her bedtime,
+but I hate to take her up there."</p>
+
+<p>"Undress her down here," said I. "The Delft sugar bowl shuts you off a
+fine dressing-room. And let her sleep for a while on the couch."</p>
+
+<p>So Miggy went for the little nightgown, and Peter, with infinite pains,
+got to his feet, and detached Bless-your-Heart and deposited her on the
+table, where she yawned and humped her back and lay down on an
+unfinished sleeve and went to sleep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> again. And when Miggy came down,
+she threw a light quilt and a pillow near the couch and sat behind the
+table and held out her arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Now!" she said to Peter, and to me she said, "I thought maybe you'd
+spread her up a bed there on the couch."</p>
+
+<p>"Let Peter," said I. "I've another letter I ought to have written. If I
+may, I'll write that here while you undress her."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Miggy, "there's some sheets of letter-paper under the cover
+of the big Bible. And the ink&mdash;I guess there's some in the bottle&mdash;is on
+top of the organ. And the pen is there behind the clock. And you'd ought
+to find a clean envelope in that pile of newspapers. I think I saw one
+there the other day. You spread up her bed then, Peter."</p>
+
+<p>I wrote my letter, and Peter went at the making up of the lounge, and
+Miggy sat behind the table to undress Little Child. And Little Child
+began waking up. It touched me infinitely that she who in matters of
+fairies and visionings is so wise and old should now, in her sleepyhood,
+be just a baby again.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;<i>won't</i>&mdash;go&mdash;bed," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Miggy, "yes. Don't you feel all the little wingies on your
+face? They're little dream wings, and the dreams are getting in a hurry
+to be dreamed."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p><p>"I do' know those dreams," said Little Child, "I do' <i>want</i> those
+dreams. Where's Bless-your-Heart?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dreaming," said Miggy, "all alone. Goodness, I believe you've got a
+little fever."</p>
+
+<p>Peter stopped flopping the quilt aimlessly over the lounge and turned,
+and Miggy laid the back of her hand on Little Child's cheek and beneath
+her chin. The man watched her anxiously as, since the world began,
+millions of men have looked down at this mysterious pronouncement of the
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>"She has?" he said. "She'd ought not to have any milk, then, had she?"
+he added vaguely. It seemed to me that Miggy must have paused for a
+moment to like Peter for this wholly youthful, masculine eagerness to
+show that he knew about such things.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll fix her something to take," said Miggy, capably. "No, dear. The
+other arm. Straighten elbow."</p>
+
+<p>"I want my shoes an' stockin's on in bed," Little Child observed. She
+was sitting up, her head drooping, her curls fastened high with a
+hairpin of Miggy's. "An' I want my shirtie on. An' <i>all</i> my clothes. I
+won't go bed if you don't."</p>
+
+<p>Miggy laughed. "Bless-your-Heart hasn't got her clothes on," she
+parried.</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't she got her furs on any more?" demanded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> Little Child, opening
+her eyes. "She has, too. She has not, too, took a bath. An' I won't have
+no bath," she went on. "I'm too old for 'em."</p>
+
+<p>At that she would have Bless-your-Heart in her arms, and there was some
+argument arising from her intention to take the kitten in one hand all
+the way through her nightgown sleeve. And by this time sleepyhood tears
+were near.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Don't</i> curl your toes under so," said Miggy, struggling with a shoe.
+"Peter, do go on. You'll never have it done."</p>
+
+<p>Whereat Peter flapped the quilt again; and&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I will curl my toes up. That's what I want to do. I <i>want</i> to curl 'em
+up!" said Little Child. And now the sleepyhood tears were very near.</p>
+
+<p>"Goodness," said Miggy, suddenly, "to-morrow is Sunday. I'll have to do
+her hair up for curls. Peter!" she cried, "stop waving that quilt, and
+tear me off a strip of that white lining there."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, <i>I'll</i> have curls," said Little Child, unexpectedly, "because that
+is so becunning to me."</p>
+
+<p>But she was very sleepy, and when Peter had been sent for the brush from
+the kitchen shelf, her head was on Miggy's shoulder, and Miggy looked at
+Peter helplessly.</p>
+
+<p>"Give her to me," said Peter, and took the child and laid the kitten at
+large upon the floor; and then, holding Little Child's head in the
+hollow of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> his arm, he sat down before Miggy, leaning toward her, and
+all the child's soft brown hair lay on his sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>I should have liked to watch them then. And I should have liked Calliope
+and Mis' Toplady and my neighbour to see them&mdash;those three who of all
+the village best understood mystery. I know that Peter did not take his
+eyes from Miggy's face as she brushed and wound the curls. How could
+he?&mdash;and Miggy, "sweet as boughs of May" in that white frock, her look
+all motherly intent upon her task. She was very deft, and she had that
+fine mother-manner of caring for the child with her whole hand instead
+of tipsifingers. I would see a woman infinitely delicate in the touching
+of flowers or tea-cups or needlework, but when she is near a child, I
+want her to have more than delicacy. I was amazed at Miggy's gentleness
+and her pretty air of accustomedness. And when Little Child stirred,
+Miggy went off into some improvised song about a little black dog that
+got struck with a wagon and went Ki&mdash;yi&mdash;ki&mdash;yi&mdash;<i>ad infinitum</i>, and
+Miggy seemed to me to have quite the technical mother-air of tender
+abstraction.</p>
+
+<p>"How dark her hair is growing," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"It's just the colour of yours," said Peter, "and the little curls on
+the edges. They're like yours, too."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p><p>"My hair!" Miggy said deprecatingly. "You've got rather nice hair,
+Peter, if <i>only</i> it wouldn't stick up that way at the back."</p>
+
+<p>"I know it sticks up," Peter said contritely. "I do every way to make it
+stay down. But it won't."</p>
+
+<p>"It makes you look funny," observed Miggy, frankly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he told her, "if you wouldn't ever make me go 'way from you, you
+wouldn't ever need to see the back of my head."</p>
+
+<p>"That would be just what would turn your head," she put it positively.
+"Peter, doesn't your arm ache, holding her so?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked down at his arm to see, and, "I wouldn't care if it did," he
+replied, in some surprise. "No. It feels good. Oh, Miggy&mdash;do you do this
+every night?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't always curl her hair," said Miggy, "but I always put her to
+bed. If ever Aunt Effie undresses her, she tells her she <i>may</i> die
+before morning, so she'd better say her prayer, pretty. Goodness, she
+hasn't said her prayer yet, either."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't she too sleepy?" asked Peter.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Miggy answered; "but she feels bad in the morning if she doesn't
+say it. You know she thinks she says her prayer to mother, and that
+mother waits to hear her...."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p><p>Miggy looked up fleetingly at her mother's picture on the wall&mdash;one of
+those pale enlargements of a photograph which tell you definitely that
+the subject is dead.</p>
+
+<p>"I do' want any other curls on me," announced Little Child, suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Just one more, dear," Miggy told her, "and then we're through. Turn her
+head a little, Peter."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Little Child. "Now I'm all curly."</p>
+
+<p>And, "Yes, Precious. Be still on Peter's arm just a minute more," said
+Miggy at the same time.</p>
+
+<p>And, "If you say anything more, I'll kiss you," said Peter, to whom it
+might concern.</p>
+
+<p>"Kiss <i>me</i>?" said Little Child. "I won't be."</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody's got to be," said Peter, with decision.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, our prayer," ruled Miggy suddenly, and rose. "Come, dear."</p>
+
+<p>Peter looked up in Miggy's face.</p>
+
+<p>"Let her be here," he said. "Let her be here."</p>
+
+<p>He lifted Little Child so that she knelt, and her head drooped on his
+shoulder. He had one arm about her and the other hand on the pink,
+upturned soles of her feet. The child put out one hand blindly for
+Miggy's hand. So Miggy came and stood beside Peter, and together they
+waited for the little sleepy voice.</p>
+
+<p>It came with disconcerting promptness.</p>
+
+<p>"Now&mdash;I&mdash;lay&mdash;me&mdash;down&mdash;to&mdash;sleep&mdash;for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>&mdash;Jesus'&mdash;sake&mdash;Amen," prayed
+Little Child in one breath.</p>
+
+<p>"No, sweetheart," Miggy remonstrated, with her alluring emphasis on
+"sweet." "Say it right, dear."</p>
+
+<p>"Now I lay me&mdash;is Bless-your-Heart sayin' hers?" demanded Little Child.</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't you get along without her, when you're so sleepy?" Miggy
+coaxed.</p>
+
+<p>"Mustn't skip nights," Little Child told her. "Bless-your-Heart might
+die before morning."</p>
+
+<p>So Miggy found Bless-your-Heart under the couch, and haled her forth,
+and laid her in Little Child's arms. And Peter put his face close, close
+to Little Child's, and shut his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I
+should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take who'll I bless
+to-night?" said Little Child.</p>
+
+<p>"Aunt Effie," Miggy prompted.</p>
+
+<p>"Bless Aunt Effie," said Little Child, "and Miggy and Bless-your-Heart
+and New Auntie" (she meant me. Think of her meaning me!) "and the man
+that gave me the peanuts, and bless Stella's party and make 'em have
+ice-cream, and bless my new shoes and my sore finger. For Jesus' sake,
+Amen."</p>
+
+<p>Little Child drew a long breath and stirred to get down, but Peter did
+not move.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p><p>"And bless Peter," Miggy said.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Little Child, "He needn't. Peter's nice 'nuff."</p>
+
+<p>Peter got to his feet with Little Child in his arms, and his face was
+glowing, and he looked at Miggy as if she were what he meant whenever he
+said "universe." But Miggy had gone to the couch, and was smoothing the
+quilt that Peter had wrinkled in all directions, and patting the pillow
+that Peter had kneaded into a hard ball.</p>
+
+<p>"You lay her down," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Peter did so, setting the kitten on the floor, and then bending low over
+the couch, looking in the upturned face as the little dark head touched
+the pillow and sought its ease, and her hand fell from where it had
+rested on his shoulder. And he stooped and kissed her cheek more gently
+than he had ever done anything.</p>
+
+<p>"I want my drink o' water," said Little Child, and opened her eyes; and
+now from the couch she could see me. "Tell me a story," she commanded
+me, drowsily.</p>
+
+<p>I did not go to her, for who am I that I should have broken that trio?
+But when Miggy and Peter took the lamp and went away to the kitchen for
+the drink of water and for some simple remedy for the fever which Miggy
+had noted or fancied, I sat beside Little Child and said over something<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+that had been persistently in my mind as I had watched Miggy with her:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"I like to stand in this great air</div>
+<div>And see the sun go down;</div>
+<div>It shows me a bright veil to wear</div>
+<div>And such a pretty gown.</div>
+<div>Oh, I can see a playmate there</div>
+<div>Far up in Splendour Town!"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>Little Child began it with me, but her voice trailed away. I thought
+that in the darkness were many gentle presences&mdash;Little Child's tender
+breathing, the brushing wings of hurrying dreams, and perhaps that
+other&mdash;"not quite my sister," but a shadowy little Margaret.</p>
+
+<p>Afterward, Miggy and Peter and I sat together for a little while, but
+Peter had fallen in a silence. And presently Aunt Effie came home, and
+on the porch&mdash;which seemed not yet to have escaped&mdash;she told us about
+having broken her needle and left her shears at her neighbour's. While
+Peter ran over to Mis' Holcomb's for the shears, I had a word with
+Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy!" I said, "don't you see?"</p>
+
+<p>"See what?" she wanted to know, perversely.</p>
+
+<p>"How Peter would love to have Little Child, too?" I said.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed a little, and was silent; and laughed again.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span></p><p>"He was funny and nice," she admitted; "and wasn't Little Child funny
+not to bless him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because he is nice enough," I reminded her.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy laughed once more&mdash;I had never seen her in so tender and feminine
+a mood. And this may have been partly due to the new frock, though I
+cannot think that it was entirely this. But abruptly she shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter's father went by just before you came in," she said.
+"He&mdash;couldn't hardly walk. What if I was there to get supper for him
+when he got home? I never could&mdash;I never could...."</p>
+
+<p>By the time Peter and I were out alone on Daphne Street again, the
+sitting rooms in all the houses were dark, with a look of locked front
+doors&mdash;as if each house had set its lips together with, "We are a home
+and you are not."</p>
+
+<p>Peter looked out on all this palpable householdry.</p>
+
+<p>"See the lights upstairs," he said; "everybody's up there, hearing their
+prayers and giving 'em fever medicine. Yes, sir, Great Scott! Shorty
+Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade&mdash;they ain't good for a thing in
+the cannery. And yet they know...."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XIV</span> <span class="smaller">POSTMARKS</span></h2>
+
+<p>Between church service and Sunday School we of the First church have so
+many things to attend to that no one can spare a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Reverent things, not secular," Calliope explains, "plannin' for church
+chicken-pie suppers an' Christmas bazaars and like that; but not a word
+about a picnic, not even if they was to be one o' Monday sunrise."</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, this habit of ours occasionally causes a contretemps. As
+when one morning Mis' Toplady arrived late and, in a flurry, essayed to
+send up to the pulpit by the sexton a Missionary meeting notice to be
+read. Into this notice the minister plunged without the precaution of
+first examining it, and so delivered aloud:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags.</div>
+<div>"See Abigail about enough forks for her table.</div>
+<div>"Look around for my rubbers.</div>
+<div>"Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span></p><p>Not until he reached the fourth item was the minister stopped by the
+agonized rustle in a congregation that had easily recognized Mis'
+Toplady's "between services" list of reminder, the notice of the
+forthcoming meeting being safe in her hymn book.</p>
+
+<p>Still we persist in our Sabbath conferences when "everybody is there
+where you want 'em an' everybody can see everybody an' no time lost an'
+no party line listening"; and it is then that those who have been for
+some time away from the village receive their warmest welcome. I am not
+certain that the "I must get down to church and see everybody" of a
+returned neighbour does not hold in fair measure the principles of
+familyhood and of Christ's persuadings to this deep comradeship.</p>
+
+<p>It was in this time after church that we welcomed Calliope one August
+Sunday when she had unexpectedly come down from town on the Saturday
+night. And later, when the Sunday-school bell had rung, I waited with
+her in the church while she looked up her Bible, left somewhere in the
+pews. When she had found it, she opened it in a manner of eager haste,
+and I inadvertently saw pasted to the inside cover a sealed letter,
+superscription down, for whose safety she had been concerned. I had
+asked her to dine with me, and as we walked home together she told me
+about the letter and what its sealed presence in her Bible meant.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p><p>"I ain't ever read it," Calliope explained to me wistfully. "Every one
+o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle has got one, an' none of us has
+ever read 'em. It ain't my letter, so to say. It's one o' the Jem Pitlaw
+collection. The postmark," she imparted, looking up at me proudly, "is
+Bombay, India."</p>
+
+<p>At my question about the Jem Pitlaw collection she laughed
+deprecatingly, and then she sighed. ("Ain't it nice," she had once said
+to me, "your laughs hev a sigh for a linin', an' sighs can hev laughin'
+for trimmin'. Only trouble is, most folks want to line with trimmin's,
+an' they ain't rill durable, used that way.")</p>
+
+<p>"Jem Pitlaw," Calliope told me now, "used to be schoolmaster here&mdash;the
+kind that comes from Away an' is terrible looked up to on that account,
+but Jem deserved it. He knew all there was <i>to</i> know, an' yet he thought
+we knew some little things, too. We was all rill fond of him, though he
+kept to himself, an' never seemed to want to fall in love, an' not many
+of us knew him well enough to talk to at all familiar. But when he went
+off West on a vacation, an' didn't come back, an' never come back, an'
+then died, Friendship Village mourned for him,&mdash;sincere, though no
+crape,&mdash;an' missed him enormous.</p>
+
+<p>"He'd had a room at Postmaster Sykes's&mdash;that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> was when he was postmaster
+first an' they was still humble an' not above the honest penny. An' Jem
+Pitlaw left two trunks an' a sealed box to their house. An' when he
+didn't come back in two years, Silas Sykes moved the things out of the
+spare room over to the post-office store loft. An' there they set, three
+years on end, till we got word Jem was dead&mdash;the very week o' the
+Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle's Ten Cent Tropical F&ecirc;te. Though,
+rilly, the Tropical F&ecirc;te wasn't what you might say 'tropical.' It was
+held on the seventeenth of January, an' that night the thermometer was
+twenty-four degrees below on the bank corner. Nor it wasn't rilly what
+you might say a F&ecirc;te, either. But none o' the Circle regretted them
+lacks. A lack is as good as a gift, sometimes.</p>
+
+<p>"We'd started the Foreign Missionary Circle through Mis' Postmaster
+Sykes gettin' her palm. I donno what there is about palms, but you know
+the very name makes some folks think thoughts 'way outside their heads,
+an' not just stuffy-up inside their own brains. When I hear 'palm,' I
+sort o' feel like my i-dees got kind o' wordy wings an' just went it
+without me. An' that was the way with more than me, I found out. Nobody
+in Friendship Village hed a palm, but we'd all seen pictures an'
+hankered&mdash;like you do. An' all of a sudden Mis' Sykes got one, like she
+gets her new hat, sometimes,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> without a soul knowin' she's thinkin'
+'hat' till she flams out in it. Givin' surprise is breath an' bread to
+that woman. She unpacked the palm in the kitchen, an' telephoned around,
+an' we all went over just as we was an' set down there an' looked at it
+an' thought 'Palm'! You can't realize how we felt, all of us, if you
+ain't lived all your life with nothin' but begonias an' fuchsias from
+November to April, an' sometimes into May. But we was all mixed up about
+'em, now we see one. Some hed heard dates grew on palms. Others would
+have it it was cocoanuts. Still more said they was natives of the
+equator, an' give nothin' but shade. So it went. But after a while Mis'
+Timothy Toplady spoke up with that way o' comin' downstairs on her words
+an' rilly gettin' to a landin':&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'They's quite a number o' things,' she says, 'that I want to do so much
+it seems like I can't die without doin' 'em. But I guess prob'ly I will
+die without. Folks seems to drop off leavin' lots of doin's undone. An'
+one o' my worst is, I want to see palm trees growin' in hot lands&mdash;big
+spiky leaves pointin' into the blue sky <i>like fury</i>. 'Seems if I could
+do that,' s'she, 'I'd take in one long breath that'd make me all lungs
+an' float me up an' off.'</p>
+
+<p>"We all laughed, but we knew what she meant well enough, because we all
+felt the same way. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> think most North folks do&mdash;like they was cocoanuts
+an' dates in our actions, 'way back. An' so we was all ready for Mis'
+Toplady's idee when it come&mdash;which is the most any idee can expect:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'I tell you what,' s'she, 'le's hev a Ladies' Foreign Missionary
+Circle, an' get read up on them tropical countries. The only thing I
+really know about the tropics is what comes to me unbeknownst when I
+smell my tea rose. I've always been meanin' to take an interest in
+missions,' says she.</p>
+
+<p>"So we started it, then an' there, an' she an' I was the committee to
+draw out a constitution an' decide what officers should be elected an'
+do the general creatin'. We made it up that Mis' Sykes should be the
+president&mdash;that woman is a born leader, and, as a leader, you can depend
+on the very back of her head. An' at last we went off to the minister
+that then was to ask him what to take up.</p>
+
+<p>"'Most laudable,' s'he, when he'd heard. 'Well, now, what country is it
+you're most interested in?' he says. 'Some island of the sea, I s'pose?'
+he asks, bright.</p>
+
+<p>"'We're interested in palms,' Mis' Timothy Toplady explained it to him
+frank, 'an' we want to study about the missionaries in some country
+where they's dates an' cocoanuts an' oaseses.'</p>
+
+<p>"He smiled at that, sweet an' deep&mdash;I know it seemed to me as if he knew
+more about what we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> wanted than we knew ourselves. Because they's some
+ministers that understands that Christianity ain't all in the bottle
+labelled with it. Some of it is labelled 'ointment,' an' some 'perfume,'
+an' some just plain kitchen flavourin'. An' a good deal of it ain't
+labelled at all.</p>
+
+<p>"I forget what country it was we did study. But they was nine to ten of
+us, an' we met every week, an' I tell you the time wa'n't wasted. We
+took things in lavish. I know Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said that
+after belongin' to the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle she could never
+feel the same absent-minded sensation again when she dusted her parlour
+shells. An' Mis' Toplady said when she opened her kitchen cabinet an'
+smelt the cinnamon an' allspice out o' the perforated tops, 'most
+always, no matter how mad she was, she broke out in a hymn, like 'When
+All Thy Mercies,' sheer through knowin' how allspice was born of God an'
+not made of man. An' Mis' Sykes said when she read her Bible, an' it
+talked about India's coral strand, it seemed like, through knowin' what
+a reef was, she was right there on one, with her Lord. I felt the same
+way, too&mdash;though I'd always felt the same way, for that matter&mdash;I always
+did tip vanilla on my handkerchief an' pretend it was flowers an' that
+I'd gone down South for the cold months. An' it got so that when the
+minister give out a text that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> had geography in it, like the Red Sea, or
+Beer-elim, or 'a place called The Fair Haven,' the Ladies Foreign
+Missionary Circle would look round in our seats an' nod to each other,
+without it showin', because we knew that we knew, extra special, just
+what God was talkin' about. I tell you, knowledge makes you alive at
+places where you didn't know there was such a place.</p>
+
+<p>"In five months' time we felt we owed so much to the Ladies' Foreign
+Missionary Circle that it was Mis' Sykes suggested we give the Ten Cent
+Tropical F&ecirc;te, an' earn five dollars or so for missions.</p>
+
+<p>"'We know a great deal about the tropics now,' she says, 'an' I propose
+we earn a missionary thank-offering. Coral an' cocoanuts an' dates an'
+spices isn't all the Lord is interested in, by any means,' s'she. 'An'
+the winter is the time to give a tropic f&ecirc;te, when folks are thinkin'
+about warm things natural.'</p>
+
+<p>"We voted to hev the f&ecirc;te to Mis' Sykes's because it was too cold to
+carry the palm out. We went into it quite extensive&mdash;figs an' dates an'
+bananas an' ginger for refreshments, an' little nigger dolls for
+souvenirs, an' like that. It was quite a novel thing for Friendship, an'
+everybody was takin' an interest an' offerin' to lend Japanese umbrellas
+an' Indian baskets an' books on the South Sea, an' a bamboo chair with
+an elephant crocheted in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> tidy. An' then, bein' as happenin's always
+crowd along in flocks, what come that very week o' the f&ecirc;te but a letter
+from an old aunt of Jem Pitlaw's, out West. An' if Jem hadn't been dead
+almost ever since he left Friendship! an' the aunt wrote that we should
+sell his things to pay for keepin' 'em, as she was too poor to send for
+'em an' hadn't any room if she wasn't.</p>
+
+<p>"I donno whether you know what rill excitement is, but if you don't,
+you'd ought to drop two locked trunks an' a sealed box into a town the
+size o' Friendship Village, an' leave 'em there goin' on five years, an'
+then die an' let 'em be sold. That'll show you what a pitch true
+interest can get het up to. All of a sudden the Tropical F&ecirc;te was no
+more account than the telephone ringin' when a circus procession is
+going by. Some o' the Ladies' Missionary was rill indignant, an' said
+we'd ought to sue for repairin' rights, same as when you're interfered
+with in business. Mis' Sykes, she done her able best, too, but nothin'
+would do Silas but he must offer them things for sale on the instant.
+'The time,' s'he, firm, 'to do a thing is now, while the interest is up.
+An' in this country,' s'he, '"now" don't stay "now" more'n two minutes
+at a time.'</p>
+
+<p>"So he offered for sale the contents of them three things&mdash;the two
+trunks an' the sealed box&mdash;unsight, unseen, on the day before the F&ecirc;te
+was to be. Only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> one thing interfered with the 'unsight, unseen'
+business: the sealed box had got damp an' broke open, an' what was
+inside was all showin'.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes an' I saw it on the day o' the sale. Most o' the Circle was
+to her house finishin' up the decorations for the F&ecirc;te so's to leave the
+last day clear for seein' to the refreshments, an' her an' I run over to
+the post-office store for some odds an' ends. Silas had brought the two
+trunks an' the box down from the loft so to give 'em some advertisin'.
+An' lookin' in the corner o' the broke box we could see, just as plain
+as plain, was <i>letters</i>. Letters in bunches, all tied up, an' letters
+laid in loose&mdash;they must 'a' been full a hundred of 'em, all lookin'
+mysterious an' ready to tell you somethin', like letters will. I know
+the looks o' the letters sort o' went to my head, like the news of Far
+Off. An' I hated seein' Jem's trunks there, with his initials on,
+appearin' all trustin' an' as if they thought he was still alive.</p>
+
+<p>"But that wasn't the worst. They was three strangers there in the
+store&mdash;travellin' men that had just come in on the Through, an' they was
+hangin' round the things lookin' at 'em, as if they had the right to.
+This town ain't very much on the buy, an' we don't hev many strangers
+here, an' we ain't rill used to 'em. An' it did seem too bad, I know we
+thought, that them three should hev happened in on the day of a private
+Friendship Village sale that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> didn't concern nobody else but one, an'
+him dead. An' we felt this special when one o' the men took a-hold of a
+bunch o' the letters, an' we could see the address of the top one, to
+Jem Pitlaw, wrote thin an' tiny-fine, like a woman. An' at that Mis'
+Sykes says sharp to her husband:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Silas Sykes, you ain't goin' to sell them letters?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes, ma'am, I am,' Silas snaps, like he hed a right to all the letters
+on earth, bein' he was postmaster of Friendship Village. 'Letters,'
+Silas give out, 'is just precisely the same as books, only they ain't
+been through the expense of printin'. No differ'nce. No
+differ'nce!'&mdash;Silas always seems to think repeatin' a thing over'll get
+him somewheres, like a clock retickin' itself. 'An',' he says, 'I'm
+goin' to sell 'em for what they'll bring, same as the rest o' the
+things, an' you needn't to say one word.' An' bein' as Silas was
+snappin', not only as a postmaster but as a husband, Mis' Sykes, she
+kep' her silence. Matrimony an' politics both in one man is too much for
+any woman to face.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we two went back to Mis' Sykes's all het up an' sad, an' told the
+Circle about Jem Pitlaw's letters. An' we all stopped decoratin' an' set
+down just where we was an talked about what an awful thing it seemed. I
+donno as you'll sense it as strong as we did. It was more a feelin' than
+a wordin'. <i>Letters</i>&mdash;bein' sold an' read out loud an' gettin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> known
+about. It seemed like lookin' in somebody's purse before they're dead.</p>
+
+<p>"'I should of thought,' Mis' Sykes says, 'that Silas regardin' bein'
+postmaster as a sacred office would have made him do differ'nt. An' I
+know he talked that right along before he got his appointment. "Free
+Private Secretary to the People," an' "Trusted Curator of Public
+Communication," he put it when he was goin' around with his petition,'
+says she, grievin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says Mis' Amanda Toplady&mdash;I rec'lect she hed been puttin' up a
+big Japanese umbrella, an' she looked out from under it sort o' sweet
+an' sincere an' dreamy&mdash;'you've got to be a woman an' you've got to live
+in a little town before you know what a letter really is. I don't think
+these folks that hev lots o' mail left in the front hall in the
+mornin'&mdash;an' sometimes get one that same afternoon&mdash;<i>knows</i> about
+letters at all. An' I don't believe any man ever knows, sole except when
+he's in love. To sense what a letter is you've got to be a woman without
+what-you-may-say much to enjoy; you've got to hear the train whistle
+that might bring you one; you've got to calculate how long it'll take
+'em to distribute the mail, an' mebbe hurry to get your bread mixed, or
+your fried-cakes out o' the lard, or your cannin' where you can leave
+it&mdash;an' then go change your shoes an' slip on another skirt,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> an' poke
+your hair up under your hat so's it won't show, an' go down to the
+post-office in the hot sun, an' see the letter through the glass, there
+in your own box, waitin' for you. That minute, when your heart comes up
+in your throat, I tell you, is gettin' a letter.'</p>
+
+<p>"We all knew this is so&mdash;every one of us.</p>
+
+<p>"'It's just like that when you write 'em, only felt differ'nt,' says
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I do mine to my sister a little at a
+time&mdash;I keep it back o' the clock in the kitchen an' hide the pencil
+inside the clock door, so's it won't walk off, the way pencils do at our
+house. An' then, right in the midst of things, be it flour or be it
+suds, I can scratch down what comes in my head, till I declare sometimes
+I can hardly mail it for readin' it over an' thinkin' how she'll like to
+get it.'</p>
+
+<p>"'My, my!' says Mis' Sykes, reminiscent, ''specially since Silas has
+been postmaster an' we've had so much to do with other people's letters,
+I've been so hungry for letters of my own that I've wrote for samples. I
+can do that with a level conscience because, after all, you do get a new
+dress now an' then. But I couldn't answer advertisements, same as some,
+when I didn't mean true&mdash;just to get the letters back. That don't seem
+to me rill honest.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' then I owned up.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p><p>"'Last week, when I paid my taxes,' I says, 'I whipped out o' the
+clerk's office quick, sole so's he'd hev to mail me my tax receipt. But
+he didn't do it. He sent it over by their hired girl that noon. I love
+letters like I do my telephone bell an' my friends,' I know I says.</p>
+
+<p>"An' there was all that hundred letters or so&mdash;letters that somebody had
+put love in for Jem Pitlaw, an' that he'd read love out of an' saved
+'em&mdash;there they was goin' to be sold for all Friendship Village to read,
+includin' some that hadn't even known him, mebbe more than to speak to.</p>
+
+<p>"We wasn't quite through decoratin' when supper time come, so we stayed
+on to Mis' Sykes's for a pick-up lunch, et in the kitchen, an' finished
+up afterwards. Most of 'em could do that better than they could leave
+their work an' come down again next mornin'&mdash;men-folks can always get
+along for supper, bein' it's not a hot meal.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ain't it wonderful,' says Mis' Toplady, thoughtful, 'here we are,
+settin' 'round the kitchen table at Mis' Postmaster Sykes's in
+Friendship Village. An' away off in Arabia or Asia or somewhere that I
+ain't sure they is any such place, is somebody settin' that never heard
+of us nor we of him, an' he's goin' to hev our five dollars from the
+Tropical F&ecirc;te to-morrow night, an' put it to work doin' good.'</p>
+
+<p>"'It makes sort of a connection, don't it?' says<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'There they are an' here we are. Ain't it
+strange? 'Seems like our doin' this makes us feel nearer to them places.
+I donno but that,' says she, noddin', 'is the start of what it means
+about the lion and the lamb layin' down together.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh!'says Mis' Toplady, 'I tell you the Foreign Missionary Circle has
+been next best to <i>goin'</i>. 'Seems sometimes as if I've 'most been
+somewheres an' seen palms a-growin' an' a-wavin' an' a red sky back.
+Don't it to you? I've dreamed o' them places all my life, an' I ain't
+never had anything but Friendship Village, an' I don't know now that
+Arabia an' Asia an' India is rilly fitted in, the way they look on the
+map. An' so with some more. But if so be they are, then,' she says, 'we
+owe it to the Foreign Missionary Circle that we've got that far towards
+seein' 'em.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' we all agreed, warm, excep' Mis' Sykes, who was the hostess an' too
+busy to talk much; but we knew how she felt. An' we said some more about
+how wonderful things are, there in Mis' Sykes's kitchen while we et.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, when we got done decoratin' after supper, we all walked over to
+the post-office store to the sale&mdash;the whole Circle of us. Because, of
+course, if the letters was to be sold there wasn't any harm in seein'
+who got 'em, an' in knowin' just how mean<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> who was. Then, too, we was
+interested in what was in the two trunks. We was quite early&mdash;early
+enough to set along on the front rows of breakfast-food boxes that was
+fixed ready. An' in the very frontmost one was Mis' Sykes an' Mis'
+Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, an' me.</p>
+
+<p>"But we see, first thing when we got into the store, that they was
+strangers present. The three travellin' men that Mis' Sykes an' I had
+noticed that afternoon was still in town, of course, an' there they was
+to the sale, loungin' along on the counter each side o' the cheese. We
+couldn't bear their bein' there. It was our sale, an' they wasn't rill
+sure to understand. To us Mr. Pitlaw hed been Mr. Pitlaw. To them he was
+just somebody that hed been somebody. I didn't like it, nor they didn't
+none o' the Ladies' Missionary like it. We all looked at each other an'
+nodded without it showin', like we do, an' we could see we all felt the
+same.</p>
+
+<p>"Silas was goin' to officiate himself&mdash;that man has got the idee it's
+the whistle that runs the boat. They had persuaded him to open the
+trunks an' sell the things off piecemeal, an' he see that was rilly the
+only way to do it. So when the time come he broke open the two trunks
+an' he wouldn't let anybody touch hasp or strap or hammer but himself.
+It made me sort of sick to see even the trunk things of Mr. Pitlaw's
+come out&mdash;a pepper an' salt suit, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> pair of new suspenders, a collar
+an' cuff case&mdash;the kind that you'd recognize was a Christmas present; a
+nice brush an' comb he'd kept for best an' never used, a cake of
+pretty-paper soap he'd never opened, a bunch o' keys, an' like that. You
+know how it makes you feel to unpack even your own things that have been
+put away a good while; it's like thinkin' over forgot thoughts. Well,
+an' this was worse. Jem Pitlaw, that none of us had known well enough to
+mention familiar things to, was dead&mdash;he was <i>dead</i>; an' here we were,
+lookin' on an' seein' the things that was never out of his room before,
+an' that he'd put in there, neat an' nice, five years back, to be took
+out, he thought, in a few weeks. Quite a lot of us felt delicate, but
+some got behind the delicate idee an' made it an excuse for not buyin'
+much. They's all kinds to a sale&mdash;did you ever notice? Timothy Toplady,
+for instance&mdash;I donno but he's all kinds in his single self. 'Seems he
+couldn't bring himself to bid on a thing but Jem Pitlaw's keys.</p>
+
+<p>"'Of course nobody knows what they'll fit,' says he, disparagin', 'so to
+buy 'em don't seem like bein' too familiar with Mr. Pitlaw,' s'he, rill
+pleased with himself.</p>
+
+<p>"But Mis' Sykes whispers to me:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Them keys'll go dirt cheap, an' Timothy knows it, an' a strange key
+may come in handy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> any minute. Timothy's reasons never whip to a froth,'
+s'she, cold.</p>
+
+<p>"But I guess she was over-critical because of gettin' more fidgety, like
+we all did, the nearer Silas got to the letters. He hed left the letters
+till the last. An' what with folks peekin' in the box since he'd brought
+it down, an' what with handlin' what was ready to spill out, most of 'em
+by then was in plain sight. An' there I see more o' them same
+ones&mdash;little thin writin', like a woman's. We 'most all noticed it. An'
+I couldn't keep my eyes off of 'em. 'Seemed like she might be somebody
+with soft ways that ought to be there, savin' the letters, wardin' off
+the heartache for Mr. Pitlaw an' mebbe one for herself.</p>
+
+<p>"An' right while I was lookin' Silas turned to the box and cleared his
+throat, important as if he was the whistle for New York City, an' he
+lifted up the bunch of the letters that had the little fine writin' on
+top, just the way Mr. Pitlaw had tied 'em up with common string.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh!' says Mis' Toplady and Mis' Sykes, each side of me, the one 'oh!'
+strong an' the other low, but both 'oh's' meanin' the same thing.</p>
+
+<p>"'Now, what,' says Silas, brisk, 'am I bid for this package of nice
+letters here? Good clear writin', all in strong condition, an' no holes
+in, just as firm an' fresh,' s'he, 'as the day they was dropped into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
+the mail. What am I bid for 'em?' he asks, his eyebrows rill expectant.</p>
+
+<p>"Not one of the travellin' men had bid a thing. They had sat still, just
+merely loungin' each side the cheese, laughin' some, like men will,
+among each other, but not carin' to take any part, an' we ladies felt
+rill glad o' that. But all of a sudden, when Silas put up the bunch o'
+letters, them three men woke up, an' we see like lightnin' that this was
+what they hed been waitin' for.</p>
+
+<p>"'Twenty-five cents!' bids one of 'em, decisive.</p>
+
+<p>"There was a movement of horror spread around the Missionary Circle at
+the words. Sometimes it's bad enough to hev one thing happen, but often
+it's worse to hev another occur. Even Silas looked a little doubtful,
+but to Silas the main chance is always the main thing, an' instantly he
+see that these men, if they got in the spirit of it, would run them
+letters up rill high just for the fun of it. An' Silas was like some
+are: he felt that money is money.</p>
+
+<p>"So what did he do but begin cryin' the goods up higher&mdash;holdin' the
+letters in his hands, that little, thin writin' lookin' like it was
+askin' somethin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'Here we hev letters,' says Silas, 'letters from Away. Not just
+business letters, to judge by the envelopes&mdash;an' I allow, gentlemen,'
+says Silas, facetious, 'that, bein' postmaster of Friendship Village,
+I'm as good a judge of letters as there is a-goin'.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> Here we hev some
+intimate personal letters offered for sale legitimate by their heiress.
+What am I bid?' asks he.</p>
+
+<p>"'Thirty-five cents!'</p>
+
+<p>"'Fifty cents!' says the other two travellin' gentlemen, quick an' in
+turn.</p>
+
+<p>"'Seventy-five cents!' cries out the first, gettin' in earnest&mdash;though
+they was all laughin' at hevin' somethin' inspirin' to do.</p>
+
+<p>"But Silas merely caught a-hold of the mood they was in, crafty, as if
+he'd been gettin' the signers to his petition while they was feelin'
+good.</p>
+
+<p>"'One moment, gentlemen!' s'he. 'Do you know what you're biddin' on? I
+ain't told you the half yet,' s'he. 'I ain't told you,' s'he, 'where
+these letters come from.'</p>
+
+<p>"With that he hitches his glasses an' looked at the postmarks. An' he
+read 'em off. Oh, an' what do you guess them postmarks was? I'll never
+forget the feelin' that come over me when I heard what he was sayin',
+turnin' back in under the string to see. For the stamps on the letters
+was foreign stamps. The postmarks was foreign postmarks. An' what Silas
+read off was: Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Singapore&mdash;oh, I can't begin to
+remember all the names nor to pronounce 'em, but I think they was all in
+India, or leastwise in Asia. Think of it! in Asia, that none of the
+Ladies' Foreign<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> Missionary Circle hed been sure there was such a place.</p>
+
+<p>"I know how we all looked around at each other sudden, with the same
+little jump in the chest as when we remember we've got bread in the oven
+past the three-quarters, or when we've left the preserves on the blaze
+while we've done somethin' else an' think it's burnin', or when we've
+cut out both sleeves for one arm an' ain't got any more cloth. I mean it
+was that intimate, personal jump, like when awful, first-person things
+have happened. An' I tell you what, when the Ladies' Missionary feels a
+thing, they feel it strong an' they act it sudden. It's our way, as a
+Circle. An' in that look that went round among us there was hid the nod
+that knows what each other means.</p>
+
+<p>"'One dollar!' shouts one o' the travellin' men.</p>
+
+<p>"An' with that we all turned, like one solid human being, straight
+towards Mis' Postmaster Sykes, that was our president an' a born leader
+besides, an' the way we looked at her resembled a vote.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes stood up, grave an' scairt, though not to show. An' we was
+sure she'd do the right thing, though we didn't know what the right
+thing was; but we felt confidence, I know, in the very pattern on the
+back of her shawl. An' she says, clear:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'I'd like to be understood to bid for the whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> box o' Mr. Pitlaw's
+letters, includin' the bunch that's up. An' I bid five dollars.'</p>
+
+<p>"Of course we all knew in a minute what that meant: Mis' Sykes was
+biddin' with the proceeds of the Ten Cent Tropical F&ecirc;te that was to be.
+But we see, too, that this was a missionary cause if there ever was one,
+an' they wa'n't one of us that thought it irregular, or grudged it, or
+looked behind.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know whether you know how much five dollars rilly is&mdash;like you
+sense it when you've spoke it to a sale, or put it on a subscription
+paper in Friendship. There wasn't a sound in that store, everybody was
+so dumfounded. But none was so much as Silas Sykes. Silas was so
+surprised that he forgot that he was in public.</p>
+
+<p>"'My King!' says he, unexpected to himself. 'What you sayin', Huldy? You
+ain't biddin' that out o' your allowance, be you?' says he. Silas likes
+big words in the home.</p>
+
+<p>"'No, sir,' says she, crisp, back, 'I ain't. I can't do miracles out of
+nothin'. But I bid, an' you'll get your money, Silas. An' I may as well
+take the letters now.'</p>
+
+<p>"With that she rose up an' spread out her shawl almost broodin', an'
+gathered that box o' Jem Pitlaw's into her two arms. An' with one motion
+all the rest o' the Ladies' Missionary got up behind her an' stalked out
+of the store, like a big bid is sole all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> there is to an auction. An'
+they let us go. Why, there wasn't another thing for Silas Sykes to do
+but let be as was. Them three men over by the cheese just laughed, an'
+said out somethin' about no gentleman outbiddin' a lady, an' shut up,
+beat, but pretendin' to give in, like some will.</p>
+
+<p>"Just before we all got to the door we heard somebody's feet come down
+off'n a cracker-barrel or somethin', an' Timothy Toplady's voice after
+us, shrill-high an' nervous:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Amanda,' s'he, 'you ain't calculatin' to help back up this
+tomfoolishness, I hope?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' Mis' Amanda says at him, over her shoulder:</p>
+
+<p>"'If I was, that'd be between my hens an' me, Timothy Toplady,' says
+she.</p>
+
+<p>"An' the store door shut behind us&mdash;not mad, I remember, but gentle,
+like 'Amen.'</p>
+
+<p>"We took the letters straight to Mis' Sykes's an' through the house to
+the kitchen, where there was a good hot fire in the range. It was bitter
+cold outdoors, an' we set down around the stove just as we was, with the
+letters on the floor in front o' the hearth. An' when Mis' Sykes hed got
+the bracket lamp lit, she turned round, her bonnet all crooked but her
+face triumphant, an' took off a griddle of the stove an' stirred up the
+coals. An' we see what was in her mind.</p>
+
+<p>"'We can take turns puttin' 'em in,' she says.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p><p>"But I guess it was in all our minds what Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss says, wistful:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Don't you think,' she says, 'or <i>do</i> you think, it'd be wrongin' Mr.
+Pitlaw if we read over the postmarks out loud first?'</p>
+
+<p>"We divided up the bunches an' we set down around an' untied the
+strings, an', turn in an' turn out, we read the postmarks off. 'Most
+every one of 'em was foreign&mdash;oh, I can't begin to tell you where. It
+was all mixed up an' shinin' of names we'd never heard of before, an'
+names we had heard in sermons an' in the Bible&mdash;Egypt an' Greece an'
+Rome an' isles o' the sea. Mis' Toplady stopped right in the middle o'
+hers.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, I can't be sure I'm pronouncin' 'em right,' she says, huntin' for
+her handkerchief, 'but I guess you ladies get the <i>feel</i> o' the places,
+don't you?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' that was just it: we did. We got the feel of them far places that
+night like we never could hev hed it any other way. An' when we got all
+through, Mis' Toplady spoke up again&mdash;but this time it was like she flew
+up a little way an' lit on somethin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'It ain't likely,' she says, 'that we'll ever, any of us, hev a letter
+of our own from places like these. We don't get many letters, an' what
+we do get come from the same old towns, over an' over again, an' quite
+near by. Do you know,' she says, 'I believe this Writin' here'&mdash;she held
+out the tiny fine <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>writing that was like a woman with soft ways&mdash;'would
+understand if we each took one of her letters an' glued it together here
+an' now an' carried it home an' pasted it in our Bibles. <i>She</i> went
+travellin' off to them places, an' she must have wanted to; an' she
+would know what it is to want to go an' yet never get there.'</p>
+
+<p>"I think Mis' Amanda was right&mdash;we all thought so. An' we done what she
+mentioned, an' made our choice o' postmarks. I know Mis' Amanda took
+Cairo.</p>
+
+<p>"''Count of the name sort o' picturin' out a palm tree a-growin' an'
+a-wavin' against a red sky,' she says, when she was pinnin' her shawl
+clear up over her hat to go out in the cold. 'Think of it,' she says;
+'she might 'a' passed a palm the day she wrote it. Ain't it like seein'
+'em grow yourself?'</p>
+
+<p>... "Mebbe it all wasn't quite regular," Calliope added, "though we made
+over five dollars at the Ten Cent F&ecirc;te. But the minister, when we told
+him, he seemed to think it was all right, an' he kep' smilin', sweet an'
+deep, like we'd done more'n we <i>had</i> done. An' I think he knew what we
+meant when we said we was all feelin' nearer, lion an' lamb, to them
+strange missionary countries. Because&mdash;oh, well, sometimes, you know,"
+Calliope said, "they's things that makes you feel nearer to faraway
+places that couldn't hev any postmark at all."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XV</span> <span class="smaller">PETER</span></h2>
+
+<p>Last night in my room there was no sleeping, because the moon was there.
+It is a south room, and when the moon shines on the maple floor with its
+white cotton rugs and is reflected from the smooth white walls, to step
+within is like entering an open flower. Who could sleep in an open
+flower? I might sleep in a vast white petunia, because petunias do not
+have as much to say to me as do some other flowers. But in the bell of a
+lily, as in the bell of the sky or in my moonlit room, I should wish my
+thought to stay awake and be somebody. Be Somebody. On these nights, it
+is as if one had a friend in one's head conferring with one. And I think
+of this comrade as Her, the Custodian of me, who lives deep within and
+nearly comes outside to this white porch of the moon.</p>
+
+<p>I like to light my candle and watch its warm rays mix with the
+blue-white beams from without. There would have been a proper employment
+for a wizard:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> to diffuse varying insubstantialities, such as these, and
+to look within them, as within a pool&mdash;a pool free of its basin and
+enjoying the air. Yes, they were an unimaginative race, wizards. When
+will the era of white art come, with &aelig;sthetic witches and wizards who
+know our modern magics of colour and form and perception as a mere basis
+for their sorceries? Instead of pottering with thick, slab gruel and
+medi&aelig;val newts' eyes, think what witches they will be! Sometimes I think
+that they are already arriving. The New Lady told me the most delightful
+thing about a Thought of hers that she saw ... but it was such an
+elusive thing to tell and so much of it I had to guess, because words
+have not yet caught up with fancies, that it is hard to write down.
+Besides, perhaps you know. And if you did not know, you would skip this
+part anyway. So I merely mention that <i>she</i> mentioned the coming alive
+of a thought of hers which helped her spirit to grow, quite without her
+will. Very likely you understand other wizardries. An excellent place to
+think them out must be the line where candle rays meet moonbeams, but
+there is no such discoverable line, just as there is no discoverable
+line between the seeing and the knowing, where the Custodian dwells....
+By all of which I am merely showing you what the moon can do to one's
+head and that it is no great wonder that one cannot sleep.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span></p><p>"Ain't the moon kind of like a big, shinin' brain," Calliope said once,
+"an' moonlight nights it gets in your head and thinks for you."</p>
+
+<p>So last night when I went in my room I did not try to sleep; nor did I
+even light my candle. I went straight to a window and opened it&mdash;the one
+without a screen. I would not live in a house that did not have certain
+windows which one could open to let in the moon, or the night, or the
+living out-of-doors, with no screens to thwart their impulse. Suppose
+that sometime Diana&mdash;well, suppose what you will that is sensible, no
+moon can shine through a screen. Really, it cannot do its best through
+even an open window. And this was why I gave up trying to make it do so
+and went downstairs again&mdash;which is the earthly and rational of floating
+out into that utter beauty as I wanted to float.</p>
+
+<p>Of going out into such a night I would like to write for a long time, as
+I would like to keep on breathing lilies-of-the-valley and never have
+done. I think, though, that "into" such a night is not the word; to go
+out <i>upon</i> the night is the essential experience. For, like a June day,
+a moonlit night of itself will not let us inside. We must know some
+other way of entrance. And I suspect that some of us never quite find
+the way&mdash;I wonder if we are missed?</p>
+
+<p>I stepped round the house to the open ocean of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> light that broke on soft
+shores of leaf and line, solemnizing, magnifying. It was like a glimpse
+into something which, afterward and afterward, is going to be. The
+definiteness of its premonitory message was startling. As when on seeing
+once that something had happened on my birthday, 1500, I felt as if I
+had heard from a kind of twin-time, so now I understood that this night
+was the birthday of far-off, immortal moments of my own, yet to be lived
+... so friendly near we are to the immeasurable kindred.</p>
+
+<p>And there, from the shadow of the flowering currant bush, which just now
+is out of flower and fallen in meditative quiet&mdash;a man arose. My sharp
+fear, as savage a thing as if the world were ten thousand years younger,
+or as if I were a ptarmigan and he a cougar&mdash;was only momentary. For the
+cougar began to apologize and I recognized him.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," I said, "Peter."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes'm," said he, "I couldn't help being here&mdash;for a little while."</p>
+
+<p>"Neither could I, Peter," I told him.</p>
+
+<p>These were remarkable admissions of ours, for a large part of evening in
+the village is an uninhabitable part of day and, no matter in what
+splendour of sky it comes, is a thing to be shut outside experience. If
+we relate being wakened by something that goes bang, we begin it, "In
+the middle of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> night, about twelve o'clock;" and, "They have a light
+in their house 'most every night till midnight," is a bit of sharp
+criticism not lightly to be lived down. But now it was as if Peter were
+a part of the time itself, and outlaw too, if the evening was outlaw.
+"I'm glad I saw you," Peter said&mdash;as if we were here met by chance in
+the usual manner. "I wanted to see you and tell you: I'm going away&mdash;to
+be gone right along."</p>
+
+<p>"Why," I said again, "Peter!"</p>
+
+<p>"You'd go too," he said simply.</p>
+
+<p>"I should want to go," I told him, "but I doubt if I would go. Where are
+you going?"</p>
+
+<p>"They want to put in a cannery at Marl. It'd be a branch. I'd run it
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>I did not miss the implication of the conditional mood. And <i>Marl</i>. What
+wonderful names they give to some of the towns of this world. That word
+makes a picture all of white cornices and white wings of buildings and
+bright fa&ccedil;ades. I dare say from the railroad track the real town of Marl
+shows an unpainted livery barn and a blue barber shop, but the name
+sounds like the name of a chapter of travel, beginning: To-day we drove
+to Marl to see the queen. Or the cataract. Or the porch of the morning.</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you going, Peter?" I drove in the peg for him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p><p>"I guess you know," he said. "It's all Miggy with me."</p>
+
+<p>I knew that he wanted before all else to tell somebody, to talk to
+somebody, to have somebody know.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me, Peter," I said.</p>
+
+<p>And now Peter told me how things were with him. If I should repeat what
+he said you would be scornful, for it was so little. It was broken and
+commonplace and set with repetition. It was halting and unfinished, like
+the unformed writing of a boy. But in his words I felt the movings of
+life and destiny and death more than I feel them when I think about the
+rushing of the stars. He loved her, and for him the world became a
+transparent plane wherein his soul moved as simply as his body. Here was
+not only a boy longing for a girl. Here was not only a man, instinct
+with the eager hope of establishing a home. Here was something not
+unlike this very moon-washed area won from the illimitable void, this
+area where we stood and spoke together, this little spot which alone was
+to us articulate with form and line and night sounds. So Peter,
+stumbling over his confession of love for Miggy, was like the word
+uttered by destiny to explicate its principle. It mattered not at all
+what the night said or what Peter said. Both were celestial.</p>
+
+<p>These moments when the soul presses close to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> its windows are to be
+understood as many another hint at the cosmic&mdash;Dawn, May, the firmament,
+radio-activity, theistic evolution, a thousand manifestations of the
+supernal. In this cry of enduring spirit it was as if Peter had some
+intimacy with all that has no boundaries. I hardly heard his stumbling
+words. I listened to him down some long avenue of hearths whose
+twinkling lights were like a corridor of stars.</p>
+
+<p>And all this bright business was to be set at naught because Miggy would
+have none of it.</p>
+
+<p>"She seems to like me," Peter said miserably, "but I guess she'd like me
+just as well if I wasn't me. And if I was right down somebody else, I
+guess she'd like me a good deal better. She&mdash;don't like my hands&mdash;nor
+the way my hair sticks up at the back. She thinks of all such things. I
+wouldn't care if she said all her words crooked. I'd know what she
+meant."</p>
+
+<p>I knew the difference. To him she was Miggy. To her he was an
+individual. He had never in her eyes graduated from being a person to
+being himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope says," I told him, "that she likes almond extract better than
+any other kind, but that she hardly ever gets a bottle of almond with
+which she does not find fault. She says it's the same way with people
+one loves."</p>
+
+<p>Peter smiled&mdash;he is devoted to Calliope, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> alone in the village has
+been friendly with his father. <i>Friendly.</i> The rest of the village has
+only been kind.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he tried to put it, "but Miggy never seems to be thinking of me
+as <i>me</i>, only when she's finding fault with me. If she'd only think
+about me, even a little, the way I think about her. If she'd only miss
+me or want me or wonder how the house would seem if we were married. But
+she don't care&mdash;she don't care."</p>
+
+<p>"She says, you know," I ventured, "that she can't ask you to support
+Little Child too."</p>
+
+<p>"Can't she see," he cried, "that the little thing only makes me love her
+more? Don't she know how I felt the other night&mdash;when she let me help
+her that way? She must know. It's just an excuse&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He broke off and his hands dropped.</p>
+
+<p>"Then there's her other reason," he said, "I guess you know that. I
+can't blame her for it. But even with that, it kind of seems as if,&mdash;if
+she loved me&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I said, "Peter, it does seem so."</p>
+
+<p>And yet in my heart I am certain that the reason is not at all that
+Miggy cannot love him&mdash;I remember the woman-softening of her face that
+forenoon when she found the spirit of the old romances in the village. I
+am not even certain that the reason<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> is that she does not love Peter
+now&mdash;I remember how tender and feminine she was the other night with
+Peter and Little Child. I think it is only that the cheap cynicism of
+the village&mdash;which nobody means even when it is said!&mdash;has taught her
+badly; and that Life has not yet touched her hand, has not commanded
+"Look at me," has not bidden her follow with us all.</p>
+
+<p>I looked into the bright bowl of the night which is alternately with one
+and against one in one's mood of emprise; the bright bowl of the night
+inverted as if some mighty genii were shaking the stars about like
+tea-leaves to fortune the future. What a pastime <i>that</i> for a wizard!</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Peter," I said, "<i>if</i> one were a wizard!"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't understand," said Peter.</p>
+
+<p>"How pleasant it would be to make folk love folk," I put it.</p>
+
+<p>He understood that. "Wouldn't it, though?" he assented wistfully. So
+does everybody understand. Wouldn't it, though! Oh, <i>don't you wish you
+could</i>?</p>
+
+<p>In the silence which fell I kept on looking at those starry tea-leaves
+until I protest that a thought awoke in my mind as if it wanted to be
+somebody. Be Somebody. It was as if it came alive, quite without my
+will, so that almost I could see it. It was a friend conferring in my
+head. Perhaps it was the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> Custodian herself, come outside to that white
+porch of the moon.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," I said, "I think I'm going to tell you a story."</p>
+
+<p>For I longed to make him patient with Miggy, as men, who understand
+these things first, are not always patient with women, who often and
+often understand too late.</p>
+
+<p>He listened to the story as I am setting it down here&mdash;the story of the
+New Village. But in it I could say nothing of how, besides by these
+things celestial, cosmic, I was touched by the simple, human entreaty of
+the big, baffled man and that about his hands and the way his hair
+sticks up at the back.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XVI</span> <span class="smaller">THE NEW VILLAGE</span></h2>
+
+<p>Once upon a time there was a village which might have been called
+The-Way-Certain-Folk-Want-It-Now. That, however, was not its name&mdash;it
+had a proper, map-sounding name. And there every one went to and fro
+with a fervour and nimbleness which proved him to be skilfully intent
+upon his own welfare.</p>
+
+<p>The village had simple buildings and white walls, lanes and flowering
+things and the flow of pure air. But the strange thing about the town
+was that there each inhabitant lived alone. Every house had but one
+inmate and he well content. He liked everything that he owned and his
+taste was all-sufficient and he took his pleasure in his own walls and
+loved best his own ways. The day was spent in lonely selling or lonely
+buying, each man pitted against all others, and advantage and
+disadvantage were never equal, but yet the transactions were dreary,
+lacking the picturesqueness of unlicensed spoliation. The only greeting
+which folk exchanged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> in passing was, "Sir, what do you do for
+yourself?" There were no assemblings of the people. The town kept itself
+alive by accretion from without. When one died another appeared and took
+his place gladly, and also others arrived, like precept added to precept
+and not like a true flowering. There were no children. And the village
+common was overgrown and breast-high with weeds. When the day was done
+every one retired to his own garden and saw his flowers blossoming for
+him and answering to the stars which came and stood over his head. There
+was in the town an epidemic of the intensive, only the people thought of
+it as the normal, for frequently epidemics are so regarded.</p>
+
+<p>In one soul the contagion did not prevail. The soul was the lad Matthew,
+whose body lived on the town's only hill. When others sat at night in
+their gardens Matthew was wont to go up an airy path which he had made
+to the upper spaces and there wander conjecturing about being alive. For
+this was a detail which he never could take wholly for granted, in the
+manner in which he had become wonted to door-mats, napkin-rings,
+oatmeal, and mirrors. Therefore he took his thought some way nearer to
+the stars, and there he found so much beauty that he longed to fashion
+it to something, to create of it anew. And as he opened his heart he
+began to understand that there is some one of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> whom he was the
+offspring. As he was companioned by this idea, more and more he longed
+for things to come nearer. Once, in his walking a hurrying bird brushed
+his face, grew confused, fluttered at his breast, and as he would have
+closed it in his hands he found that the bird was gone and his hands
+were empty, but beneath them his own heart fluttered and throbbed like a
+thing apart.</p>
+
+<p>One night, so great was the abstraction of the boy, that instead of
+taking the upper path he fared down into the town. It was a curious way
+to do&mdash;to go walking in the town as if the thing were common property,
+but then the walls were very high and the gates were fast closed and
+bound round with creeping things, which grow very quickly. Matthew
+longed to enter these gardens, and he wondered who lived in the houses
+and what might be in their hearts.</p>
+
+<p>Amazingly, at the turn of a white wall, a gate was opened and she who
+had opened it leaned into the night as if she were looking for
+something. There was a fluttering in the breast of Matthew so that he
+looked down to see if the bird had come back. But no bird was there. And
+it smote him that the lady's beauty, and surely her goodness, were great
+enough so that of them something might be created, as he would fain have
+created marvels from the sky.</p>
+
+<p>"I would like to make your beauty into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>something other," he said to
+her. "I cannot think whether this would be a song or a picture or a
+vision."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with as much pleasure as if he had been an idea of her
+own.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me about my beauty," she bade him. "What thing is that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, that will take some while," Matthew said. "If I do that, I must
+come in your garden."</p>
+
+<p>Now, such a thing had never happened in the town. And as this seemed why
+it never happened, it seemed likely to go on never happening
+indefinitely. But loneliness and the longing to create and the
+conjecture about life have always been as potent as battles; and beauty
+and boredom and curiosity have had something to do with history as well.</p>
+
+<p>"Just this once, then," said the lady, and the gate closed upon the two.</p>
+
+<p>Here was a garden like Matthew's own, but indefinitely atmosphered
+other. It spoke strangely of a wonted presence, other than his own. In
+his own garden he fitted as if the space for him were niched in the air,
+and he went as a man accustomed will go without thinking. But here he
+moved free, making new niches. And whereas on his own walks and plots he
+looked with lack-lustre eye as a man looks on his own gas-jet or rain
+pipe, now Matthew looked on all that he saw as on strange flame and
+sweet waters. And it was not the shrubs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> and flowers which most
+delighted him, but it was rather on a garden bench the lady's hat and
+gloves and scissors.</p>
+
+<p>"How pleasing!" said he, and stopped before them.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you find them so?" asked the lady.</p>
+
+<p>And when he told her about her beauty, which was more difficult to do
+than he had imagined and took a longer time, she said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"There can be no other man in the world who would speak as you speak."</p>
+
+<p>On which he swore that there was no man who would not speak so, and
+likewise that no man could mean one-half what he himself meant. And he
+looked long at her house.</p>
+
+<p>"In those rooms," he said, "you go about. I wish that I could go about
+there."</p>
+
+<p>But that frightened her a little.</p>
+
+<p>"In there," he said, "are the lamps you light, the plates you use, the
+brush that smooths your hair. How strange that is."</p>
+
+<p>"Does it seem strange?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Sometime I will go there," said he, and with that he thought that the
+bird once more was fluttering at his breast. And again there was no
+bird.</p>
+
+<p>When the time was come that he must leave her, this seemed the most
+valiant thing to do that ever he had done. It was inconceivable to
+accept that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> though now she was with him, breathing, sentient, yet in
+another moment he would be out alone in the empty night. Alone. For the
+first time the word became a sinister thing. It meant to be where she
+was not.</p>
+
+<p>"How is this to go on," he said, "I living where you do not live?"</p>
+
+<p>But she said, "Such things have never been any other way," and closed
+the gate upon him.</p>
+
+<p>It is a mighty thing when one who has always lived alone abruptly finds
+himself to have a double sense. Here is his little box of ideas, neatly
+classified, ready for reference, which have always methodically bobbed
+out of their own will the moment they were mentioned. Here are his own
+varieties of impression ready to be laid like a pattern upon whatever
+presents itself to be cut out. Here are his tastes, his sentiments, his
+beliefs, his longings, all selected and labelled and established. And
+abruptly ideas and impressions and tastes are thrown into rapt disorder
+while he wonders what this other being would think, and his sentiment
+glows like a lamp, his belief embraces the world, his longing becomes
+only that the other being's longing be cast in counterpart. When he
+walks abroad, the other's step accompanies him, a little back, and
+invisible, but as authentic as his own. When he thinks, his thought,
+without his will, would share itself. All this is a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> new way of
+consciousness. All this makes two universes where one universe had
+previously been competent to support life.</p>
+
+<p>Back on his hill Matthew went through his house as if he were seeing it
+for the first time. There was the garden that he had planted, and she
+was not walking there. There was his window, and she was not looking
+from it; his table, and she was not sitting beside it; his book which he
+could not read for wondering if she had read. All the tools of his home,
+what could they not become if she touched them? The homely tasks of the
+cupboard, what joy if she shared them? But what to do? He thought that
+it might be something if they exchanged houses, so that he could be
+where she had been, could use what she had used, could think of her in
+her setting. But yet this did not wholly delight him, either.</p>
+
+<p>And now his house stifled him, so that he rushed out upon that airy path
+of his that he had made to reach the upper spaces, and he fled along,
+learning about being alive. Into the night he went, farther than ever he
+had gone before, till the stars looked nearer to him than houses
+commonly look, and things to think about seemed there waiting for him.</p>
+
+<p>So it adventured that he came abruptly upon the New Village. It lay upon
+the air as lightly as if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> strong, fair hands were uniting to bear it up,
+and it was not far from the stars and the clear places. Before he
+understood its nearness, the night was, so to say, endued with this
+village, and he entered upon its lanes as upon light.</p>
+
+<p>This was a town no larger than his own and no more fortuned of Nature.
+Here were buildings not too unlike, and white walls and flowering things
+and the flow of pure air. But here was also the touch of bells. And he
+saw that every one went to and fro in a manner of quiet purpose that was
+like a garment.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir, what do you do for yourself?" he asked courteously of one who was
+passing.</p>
+
+<p>The citizen gave him greeting.</p>
+
+<p>"I make bread for my family," said he, "and, it may be, a dream or two."</p>
+
+<p>Matthew tried hard to perceive, and could make nothing of this.</p>
+
+<p>"Your family," he said, "what thing is that?"</p>
+
+<p>The citizen looked at him narrowly.</p>
+
+<p>"I see that you rebuke me," said he, gently; "but I, too, labor for the
+community, so that the day shall become a better day."</p>
+
+<p>"Community," said Matthew. "Now I know not at all what that may be,
+either."</p>
+
+<p>Then the man understood that here was one who would learn about these
+things, and in the New<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> Village such a task is sacred and to be assumed
+on the moment by any to whom the opportunity presents. So the man took
+Matthew with him.</p>
+
+<p>"Come," he said, "this is the day when we meet together."</p>
+
+<p>"Together," said Matthew, and without knowing why he liked what he felt
+when he said that.</p>
+
+<p>They went first to the market-place, trodden of many feet, and about it
+a fair green common planted in gracious lines. Here Matthew found men in
+shops that were built simply and like one another in fashion, but with
+pleasant devices of difference, and he found many selling together and
+many buying, and no one was being robbed.</p>
+
+<p>"How can these things be?" he asked. "Here every man stands with the
+others."</p>
+
+<p>"Inside of all things," the citizen answered, "you will find that it is
+so written."</p>
+
+<p>On the common many were assembled to name certain projects and purposes:
+the following of paths to still clearer spaces, the nurturing of certain
+people, ways of cleanliness, purity of water, of milk, wide places for
+play, the fashioning of labour so that the shrines within be not
+foregone, the freeing of fountains, the planting of green things.</p>
+
+<p>"Why will all this be?" asked Matthew. "For these things a man does in
+his own garden or for his own house, and no other interferes."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p><p>"Nay, but look deep within all things, Friend," the citizen said, "and
+you will never find it written so."</p>
+
+<p>"Friend," repeated Matthew, "<i>friend</i>...."</p>
+
+<p>Then the citizen went to his own house, and Matthew with him. The wall
+was no wall, but a hedge, and the garden was very beautiful. And lo,
+when they went in, there came tumbling along the path little beings made
+in the image of the citizen himself. And with them a woman of exceeding
+beauty and power, which the little ones also bore. As if the citizen had
+chosen her beauty and power to make them into something other.</p>
+
+<p>It was as it had been when the bird was fluttering and beating at the
+boy's breast, but he did not even heed.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me!" he cried. "These&mdash;do they live here with you? Are they
+yours?"</p>
+
+<p>"We are one another's," said the citizen.</p>
+
+<p>Matthew sat among them, and to pleasure him they did many sweet tasks.
+They brought him to eat and drink in the garden. The woman gave quiet
+answers that had in them something living, and alive, too, some while
+after she had spoken. ("So <i>she</i> could answer," Matthew thought, "and
+better, too, than that.") And the children brought him a shell, a pretty
+stone, a broken watch, and a little woolly lamb on three wheels, and the
+fourth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> wheel missing. The lamb had a sound to make by squeezing, and
+this sound Matthew made a great many times, and every time the children
+laughed. And when they did that Matthew could think of nothing to say
+that seemed a thing to be said, but he was inscrutably elated, and did
+the trick again.</p>
+
+<p>And when he rose to take his leave:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Is it for them that you make bread and a dream or two?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that he should always like to remember the citizen's smile as he
+answered.</p>
+
+<p>They stood at the opening of the hedge and folk were going by.</p>
+
+<p>"Are they not jealous of you?" Matthew asked.</p>
+
+<p>"They have families and bread and dreams of their own," said the
+citizen. "Every house is filled with them."</p>
+
+<p>Matthew looked breathlessly along the street of the New Village, and he
+saw men, as they went, giving one another greeting: "Friend, is much
+accomplished?" or, "Peace to you, Friend." And they talked together, and
+entered gardens where were those who came to meet them or who waited
+within. They were a fine company, moving as to some secret way of being,
+and as if they had all looked deep within to see how it is written. And
+as he watched, something in Matthew would have cried out that he, too,
+was offspring of their Father, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> for all this had he too been
+created, and that for this would he live, joying and passioning and
+toiling in the common destiny. But when he spoke, all that he could say
+was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Every man, then, may sit down now with a lamb with three wheels and the
+fourth wheel missing...."</p>
+
+<p>On which he ceased for very shame. But the citizen understood and smiled
+once more, and said to him: "Come you here again, Brother."</p>
+
+<p>With that word Matthew was off, down from the clear upper spaces, to
+where, lonely on its hill, his own house stood among its lonely
+neighbours. And Matthew strode shouting down the deserted streets and
+calling at every gate; and, it being now day, every one came forth to
+his lonely toil.</p>
+
+<p>Matthew went and stood on the common where the weeds were high, and so
+amazed were the folk that they came about him, each suspecting the other
+of secret connivance in this strange business. For nothing had ever been
+done so.</p>
+
+<p>"Men and brothers," cried Matthew, "it is not so that it was meant. I
+pray you look deep within, and see how the meaning was written. Is it
+that you should live, each pitted against another, wounding the other,
+advantaging himself? Join now each his hand with that of a neighbour.
+<i>His neighbour.</i> Make the thing of which, it seems, the world is made;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>
+a family. Let the thing come alive which is greater than the family: the
+community. Oh, my comrades, let us work together for the coming of the
+kingdom of God."</p>
+
+<p>In the murmur that rose were the words which have been spoken since time
+began:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It is not so that it was done in the old time...."</p>
+
+<p>"It is not seemly that we change...."</p>
+
+<p>"If every one did this ... but we cannot do it alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you thought what will become of our business?"</p>
+
+<p>And again and yet again: "It is not so that it was done in the old
+time."</p>
+
+<p>And when the most would have none of it, Matthew made his way sadly
+through the throng&mdash;of whom were many who smiled (kindly!)&mdash;to the edge
+of the common, where stood a woman, trembling.</p>
+
+<p>"Come," he said.</p>
+
+<p>She went with him, and she with many little frightened breaths, but he
+had no pity, for he read deep within and saw that it was written that
+she wanted none. When they reached her own house, she would have
+entered.</p>
+
+<p>"Go we in here," she besought him, "I will show you the rooms where I go
+about and the lamps that I light."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p><p>"We are past all that now," said Matthew, gently, "I will not go on
+living where you do not live."</p>
+
+<p>He took her to his own house, through the garden that he had planted. He
+made her look from his window, sit by his table, open his books; and he
+bade her to a little task at the cupboard and laughed for joy that she
+performed it.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come away," he cried. "And now we will go quickly to the New
+Village, that one which I have found or another, where men know all this
+happiness and more."</p>
+
+<p>But she stood there by Matthew's cupboard and shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said gravely, "here we will stay, you and I, in your house.
+Here we will live&mdash;and it may be there is a handful of others who
+understand. And here we will do what we can."</p>
+
+<p>"But I must show you," Matthew cried, "the way the others live&mdash;the
+things they strive for: the following of paths to clearer spaces, the
+freeing of shrines."</p>
+
+<p>"All that," she said, "we will do here."</p>
+
+<p>"But," he urged, "you must see how else they do&mdash;the shell, the pretty
+stone, the watch, the woolly lamb on three wheels and one wheel
+missing...."</p>
+
+<p>"All that," she said, "is in my heart."</p>
+
+<p>Matthew looked in her face and marvelled, for he saw that beside her
+beauty there was her power, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> to that he bowed himself as to a far
+voice. And again it was as when the bird was at his breast, but now he
+knew what this would be.</p>
+
+<p>So they live there in Matthew's house. And a handful besides understand
+and toil for the fairer order. And this will come; and then that New
+Village, in the clear upper spaces, will hang just above every
+village&mdash;nay, will come down to clothe it like a garment.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above">When I had done,</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," I said&mdash;I nearly called him Matthew!&mdash;"these are the things
+that Miggy does not understand. And that she will understand."</p>
+
+<p>He knew. He said nothing; but he knew how it is written.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," I said, "I suppose Miggy will never have been to your house?"</p>
+
+<p>I knew that she could not have been there.</p>
+
+<p>"Some day soon," I said&mdash;"before you go away&mdash;ask us to come there. I
+should like her to sit by your table and look from your window."</p>
+
+<p>For how can one be sure that divine non-interference is always divine?</p>
+
+<p>Peter drew his breath long.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you?" he said; "would you? So many times I've thought maybe that
+would make her think of me as if I <i>was</i> me."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p><p>Yes, that might help. If only Miggy knew how to shake hands as Elfa
+shook hands with Nicholas Moor, that might help, too. How did it begin,
+this pride of individualism in a race which does not know its own
+destiny save as the great relationships, human and divine, can reveal
+that destiny? But Peter knows! And the hope of the world is that so many
+do know.</p>
+
+<p>Since he said his grateful good night and rushed away, I have been
+trying to readjust my impression of Peter. For I can no longer think of
+him in connection with Miggy and the cannery and my neighbour's lawn and
+the village. Now he is a figure ranging the ample intervals of a field
+fraternal to the night and to the day. Fraternal, too, to any little
+moon-washed area, won from the void, where it is easy to be in
+conference with the spirit without and within. Truly, it is as if the
+meaning of the universe were passioning for the comradeship of hearts
+that can understand.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XVII</span> <span class="smaller">ADOPTION</span></h2>
+
+<p>The big window of my sitting room is an isle of sirens on whose shore
+many of my bird neighbours are continually coming to grief. For, from
+without, the window makes a place of soft skies and seductive leaves
+where any bird might think to wing a way. And in that mirrored deep
+there is that curious atmosphere which makes In-a-looking-glass a better
+thing than the room which it reflects&mdash;an elusive sense which Little
+Child might call Isn't-any-such-placeness. I think that I might call it
+so too. And so, evidently, the birds would call it, for they are always
+trying to find there some path of flight.</p>
+
+<p>A morning or two ago, when I heard against the pane the soft thud of an
+eager little body, I hurried out to see lying under the window an
+oriole. It was too terrible that it should have been an oriole. For days
+I had seen him hanging here and there, back downward, on this limb and
+that, and heard his full-throated note ringing from the innermost air,
+so that the deeps of air could never again be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> wholly alien to me. And
+now he lay, his wings outstretched, his eyes dim, his breast hardly
+moving. I watched him, hoping for the breath to begin to flutter and
+labour. But though the great Nature was with him, herself passioning in
+all the little fibres to keep life pulsing on, yet her passion was not
+enough; and while I looked the little life went out.</p>
+
+<p>... I held the tiny body in my hand, and it was almost as if the
+difference between living and not living slipped through my fingers and
+was gone. If only that one within me, who watches between the seeing and
+the knowing, had been a little quicker, I might almost have
+understood....</p>
+
+<p>"Them little things go out like a match," said my neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>She was standing on the other side of the box hedge, and I caught a look
+on her face that I had seen there once or twice before, so that my heart
+had warmed to her; and now, because of that look, she fitted within the
+moment like the right word.</p>
+
+<p>"It don't seem like anybody could <i>mean</i> 'em to die before their time,"
+she said. "Ain't it almost as if it happened when Everything somehow
+couldn't help it?"</p>
+
+<p>It was this, the tragedy of the Unfulfilled Intention, that was in my
+mind while I hollowed the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> little grave under the hedge. And when we had
+finished, my neighbour, who had stepped informally over the box to help
+me, looked up with a return of that fleeting expression which I had
+noted.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess we've found one now for sure," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Found one?" I puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you knew," she told me. "I thought everybody knew&mdash;we've been
+looking for one so long. For a baby."</p>
+
+<p>She never had told me and no one had told me, but I loved her for
+thinking that all the world knew. There are abroad a multitude of these
+sweet suspicions as well as the sad misgivings of the hunted. She had
+simply let me know, that early morning in the garden, her sorrow that
+there was "no little thing runnin' round." And now she told me for how
+long they had been trying to find one to adopt, consciously serving no
+social need, but simply hungering for a child whom they could "take to."
+It was a story of fruitless visits to the homes in the city, the news
+sent of this little waif or that, all proving too old or of too sad an
+inheritance. To me it would seem that the more tragic the inheritance
+the more poignantly sounds the cry for foster-folk. And this may be
+extreme, I know, but virtue, I find, does not lie exclusively in the
+mean, either. It lies partly in one's taste in extremes. However,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> this
+special extreme I find not generally believed in as I believe in it; and
+my neighbour, not sharing it, had waited on with empty arms.</p>
+
+<p>And now, after all the long hoping, she had found a baby&mdash;a baby who
+filled all the requirements and more. First of all, he was a boy;
+second, he was of healthful Scotch parentage; third, he was six weeks
+old; and, fondest I could see in my neighbour's heart, he was good to
+look at. When she told me this she produced, from beneath her apron, a
+broken picture post-card. The baby was lying on a white blanket spread
+on the grass, and he was looking up with the intentness of some little
+soul not yet embodied; or as if, having been born, some shadow-thing,
+left over from his source of shadows, yet detained his attention.
+"William," it said beneath the picture.</p>
+
+<p>"But I shall call him Kenneth," my neighbour said; "I've always meant
+to. I don't want he should be called after his father, being he isn't
+ours, you might say. But he is ours," she added in a kind of challenge.
+"<i>He's</i> going after him to-morrow to the city"&mdash;and now "he" meant her
+husband, in that fine habit of use by these husbands and wives of the
+two third persons singular to mean only each other, in a splendid,
+ultimate, inevitable sense, authentic as the "we" of a sovereign, no
+more to be mistaken. "I'd go too," she added, "but we're adopting the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+baby with the egg money&mdash;we've saved it for years for when the time
+come. And one fare to the city and back is a lot of eggs. I thought I'd
+rather wait for him here and have the ticket money to spend on the
+clothes."</p>
+
+<p>She was on her way, I thought I guessed, to carry her good news to our
+friends in the village, for she bore that same air which I have noted,
+of being impermanent and subject to flight. And as she left me she
+turned to give me one of those rare compliments which are priceless.</p>
+
+<p>"You come over this afternoon," she said, "and I'll show you what little
+things I've made."</p>
+
+<p>I remember another compliment. It was when, in town, a charming little
+woman, a woman all of physical curves and mental tangents, had been
+telling a group of us about a gay day in a four-in-hand. She had not
+looked at me because for that sort of woman, as well as for others, I
+lack all that which would make them take account of my presence; but
+when in the four-in-hand she came to some mention of the road where the
+accident had nearly occurred ("Oh, it was a beautiful road," she said,
+"the river on one side, and the highlands, and a whole <i>mob</i> of trees,")
+she turned straight upon me through her description as consistently as
+she had neglected me when she described the elbow-bits of the leaders
+and the boots of the woman on the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>box-seat. It may have been a chance,
+but I have always hugged it to me.</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour's house is small, and her little upstairs rooms are the
+half-story with sloping ceilings and windows which extend from the floor
+to the top of one's head. It gives me a curious sense of
+over-familiarity with a window to be as tall as it is. I feel that I
+have it at advantage and that I am using it with undue intimacy. When I
+was a little girl I used to creep under the dining-room table and sit
+there, looking up, transfixed at the difference. A new angle of material
+vision, the sight of the other side of the shield, always gives me this
+pause. But whereas this other aspect of things used to be a delight,
+now, in life, I shrink a little from availing myself of certain
+revelations. I have a great wish to know things, but I would know them
+otherwise than by looking at their linings. I think that even a window
+should be sanctioned in its reticences.</p>
+
+<p>Before a black walnut commode my neighbour knelt that afternoon, and I
+found that it was filled with the things which she had made for the
+baby, when they should find him. These she showed to me&mdash;they were
+simple and none too fine, and she had made them on her sewing-machine in
+the intervals of her busy life. For three years she had wrought at them,
+buying them from the egg money.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> I wondered if this secret pastime of
+garment-making might not account for my impression of her that she must
+always be off to engage in something other. Perhaps it was this
+occupation, always calling her, which would not let her appear fixed at
+garden-watering or festival. I think that it may be so of any who are
+"pressed in the spirit" to serve, to witness to any truth: that is their
+vocation and every other is an avocation, a calling away from the real
+business of life. For this reason it is my habit to think of the social
+workers in any division of the service, family or town or state or
+church, as Vocationists. It is they who are following the one great
+occupation. The rest of us are avocationists. In my neighbour I
+perceived one of the great comrade company of the Vocationists,
+unconscious of her banner, but because of some sweet, secret piping,
+following, following....</p>
+
+<p>"I've always thought I'd get to do a little embroidering on a yoke or
+two," she said, "but so far I couldn't. Anyway I thought I could do the
+plain part and running the machine before he came. The other I could sit
+by the crib and do. Embroidery seems sort o' baby-watchin' work, don't
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>When I left her I walked across the lawns to my home in a sense of
+security and peace. With increasing thousands consciously striving and
+passioning to help, and thousands helping because of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> the unconscious
+spirit within them, are there not many windows in the walls?</p>
+
+<p>"He" was to go by the Accommodation early next morning to bring home the
+baby. Therefore when, just before seven o'clock, I observed my
+neighbour's husband leave his home and join Peter at his gate as usual,
+I went at once to see if something was amiss.</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour was having breakfast as her custom was "after the men-folks
+were out of the way." At all events she was pretending to eat. I saw in
+her eyes that something was troubling her, but she greeted me
+cheerfully. I sat by the sewing-machine while she went on with her
+pretence at breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>"The little thing's sick," she said. "Last night we got the despatch.
+'Baby in hospital for day or two. Will advise often,' it had in it. I'm
+glad they put that in. I'll feel better to know they'll get good
+advice."</p>
+
+<p>I sat with her for a long time, regardless of my work or that Miggy was
+waiting for me. I was struck by the charm of matter-of-fact hopefulness
+in my neighbour, not the deliberate forcing of hope, but the simple
+expectation that nothing tragic would occur. But for all that she ate no
+breakfast, and I knew well the faint, quite physical sickness that she
+must have endured since the message came.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to get his basket ready to-day," she said. "I never did that,
+two reasons. One was, it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> seemed sort of taking too much for granted,
+like heating your spider before the meat wagon drives up. The other
+reason was I needed the basket for the clothes."</p>
+
+<p>I stayed with her while she made ready the clothes-basket, lining it
+with an old muslin curtain, filling it with pillows, covering it with
+the afghan from the parlour couch. Then, in a shoe box edged with the
+curtain's broad ruffle, she put an array of little things: the brush
+from the spare-room bureau, the pincushion from her own work-basket, a
+sachet bag that had come with a last year's Christmas gift, a cake of
+"nice soap" which she had kept for years and never unwrapped because it
+was so expensive. And then she added a little glass-stoppered bottle of
+white pills.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what they're for," she said. "I found them when I
+housecleaned, and there was so many of 'em I hated to throw 'em away. Of
+course I'll never use 'em, but they look sort of nice in there&mdash;so white
+and a glass cork&mdash;don't you think so?"</p>
+
+<p>She walked with me across the lawn and stood brooding, one hand across
+her mouth, looking down at the disturbance&mdash;so slight!&mdash;in the grass
+where we had laid the bird. And on her face was the look which, each
+time that I saw it there, drew me nearer to her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p><p>"'Seems as if I'd ought to be there to the hospital," she said, "doing
+what I can. Do you s'pose they'll take good care of him? I guess they
+know more about it than I do. But if I could get hold of him in my arms
+it seems as if I could help 'em."</p>
+
+<p>I said what I could, and she went away to her house. And for the first
+time since I had known her she did not seem put upon to be back at some
+employment. These times of unwonted idleness are terrible to witness. I
+remember a farmer whom I once saw in the afternoon, dressed in his best,
+waiting in the kitchen for the hour of his daughter's wedding, and I
+wondered that the great hands did not work of their own will. The lost
+aspect of certain men on holidays, the awful inactivity of the day of a
+funeral, the sad idleness of old age, all these are very near to the
+tragedy of negation. Work, the positive, the normal, the joyous, is like
+an added way of being. I thought that I would never again marvel at my
+neighbour for being always on the edge of flight to some pressing
+occupation. Why should she not be so?&mdash;with all that there is to be
+done. Whether we rush about, or conceal the need and rush secretly, is a
+detail of our breeding; the need is to get things done, to become by
+doing. And while for myself I would prefer the accomplishment of not
+seeming to hurry, as another is accomplished at the harp, yet I own that
+I would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> cheerfully forego the pretty grace rather than find myself
+without some slight degree of the robust proficiency of getting things
+done.</p>
+
+<p>"If you're born a picture in a book," Calliope once said, "it's all very
+well to set still on the page an' hold your hands. But if you're born
+anyways human at all, stick up your head an' start out for somewhere."</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour rarely comes to my house. And therefore, though she is to
+me so familiar a figure in her garden, when next morning I found her
+awaiting me in my sitting room, she seemed strange to me. Perhaps, too,
+she was really strange to me that day.</p>
+
+<p>"My baby died," she said.</p>
+
+<p>She stood there looking at me, and I knew that what she said was true,
+but it seemed to me for a moment that I could not have it so.</p>
+
+<p>"He died yesterday in the evening," she told me. "I just heard this
+morning, when the telegraph office opened. I dressed myself to go after
+him, but <i>he's</i> gone."</p>
+
+<p>"To go after him?" I repeated.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"He was in the charity part. I was afraid they'd bury him in the
+potter's field and they wouldn't mark&mdash;it, and that I couldn't never
+tell which one it was. So I want to get him and have him buried here.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>
+<i>He</i> didn't want I should go&mdash;he thought it'd be too much for me. But I
+was bound to, so he says he'd go. They'd ought to get here on the Five
+o'Clock this afternoon. Oh, if I'd went yesterday, do you think it would
+'a' been any different?"</p>
+
+<p>There I could comfort her. I did not think it would have been different.
+But when I tried to tell her how much better it was this way than that
+the baby should first have come to her and then have sickened, she would
+have none of it.</p>
+
+<p>"I've never held him once," she said. "Do you s'pose anything could be
+worse than that? I'd rather have got hold of him once, no matter what."</p>
+
+<p>It touched me unutterably, the grief of this mother who was no mother. I
+had no knowledge what to say to her. But I think that what she wanted
+most was companionship. She went to one and another and another of our
+neighbours to whom she had shown so happily the broken post-card
+picture, and to them in the same way she took the news:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"My baby died."</p>
+
+<p>And I was amazed to find how in this little time, the tentacles of her
+heart having fastened and clung, she had made for herself, without ever
+having seen the child, little things to tell about him: His eyes were so
+bright; the sun was shining and the picture was made out-of-doors, yet
+the eyes were opened wide. They were blue eyes&mdash;had she told us?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> Had we
+noticed the hands in the picture? And the head was a beautiful shape....
+All this seemed to me marvellous. For I saw that no woman ever mourns
+for any child dumbly, as a bird mourns a fledgling, but even if she
+never sees it, she will yet contrive some little tender ways to give it
+personality and to cherish it.</p>
+
+<p>They did their best to comfort her, the women of the village. But many
+of them had lost little children of their own, and these women could not
+regard her loss as at all akin to theirs. I think that this my neighbour
+felt; and perhaps she dimly felt that to me her grief, hardly less than
+theirs, brimmed with the tragic disaster of the unfulfilled and bore,
+besides, its own peculiar bitterness. In any case I was of those who,
+that afternoon, went out to the cemetery to await the coming of my
+neighbour and "him" and their little burden. Calliope was there, and
+Mis' Amanda Toplady and Miggy; and when it was time to go Little Child
+was with me, so she went too. For I am not of those who keep from
+children familiarity with death. Familiarity with the ways of death I
+would spare them, but not the basic things, primal as day.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to give a real funeral," my neighbour had said. "I just
+want the few that I tell to happen out there to the cemetery, along
+about five. And then we'll come with him. It seems as if it'll hurt
+less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> that way. I couldn't bear to see a whole line driving along, and
+me look back and know who it was for."</p>
+
+<p>The cemetery had the dignity and serenity of a meadow, a meadow still
+somewhat amazed that it had been for a while distracted from its ancient
+uses, but, after all, perceiving no permanent difference in its
+function. I am never weary of walking down these grassy streets and of
+recounting their strangenesses. As that of the headstone of David
+Bibber's wives, one stone extending across the heads of the two graves
+and at either end of the stone two Gothic peaks from whose inner slopes
+reach two marble hands, clasped midway, and,</p>
+
+<p class="center">SACRED TO THE WIVES OF DAVID BIBBER</p>
+
+<p>inscribed below, the wifely names not appearing in the epitaph. And that
+of Mark Sturgis who, the village said, had had the good luck to marry
+two women named Dora; so he had erected a low monument to "Dora, Beloved
+Wife of Mark Sturgis, Jr." ("But how mixin' it must be to the ghosts!"
+Calliope said.) And of the young girl of a former Friendship family of
+wealth, a girl who sleeps beneath a monument on which stands a great
+figure of a young woman in a white marble dress made with three
+flounces. ("Honest," Calliope had put it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> "you can't hardly tell
+whether it's a tomb or a valentine.")</p>
+
+<p>But these have for me an interest less of the bizarre than of the human,
+and nothing that is human was alien to that hour.</p>
+
+<p>We waited for them by the new little grave, the disturbance&mdash;so
+slight!&mdash;in the earth where we would lay the stranger baby. Our hands
+were filled with garden flowers&mdash;Calliope had drawn a little hand cart
+laden with ferns and sweet-brier, and my dear Mis' Amanda Toplady had
+cut all the half-blown buds from her loved tea rose.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems like a little baby wasn't real dead that I hadn't helped lay
+out," said that great Mis' Amanda, trying to find her handkerchief. "Oh,
+I wish't it was alive. It seems like such a little bit of comin' alive
+to ask the Lord!"</p>
+
+<p>And as the afternoon shadows drew about us with fostering arms,</p>
+
+<p>"Out-Here knows we feel bad more than Down Town, don't it?" said Little
+Child.</p>
+
+<p>I have always thought very beautiful that village custom of which I have
+before spoken, which provides that the father and mother of a little
+baby who dies may take it with them in a closed carriage to the grave.
+It was so that my neighbour and her husband brought their baby to the
+cemetery from the station, with the little coffin on their knees.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span></p><p>On the box beside the driver Peter was riding. We learned afterward
+that he had appeared at the station and had himself taken that little
+coffin from the car. "So then it didn't have to be on the truck at all,"
+my neighbour noted thankfully when she told me. I think that it must be
+this living with only a street or two between folk and the open country
+which gives these unconscious sharpenings of sensibility often,
+otherwhere, bred only by old niceties of habit.</p>
+
+<p>So little Kenneth was buried, who never had the name save in unreality;
+whom my neighbour had never tended; who lived for her only in dream and
+on that broken post-card and here in the hidden dust. It made her grief
+so sad a thing that her arms did not miss him; nor had he slipped from
+any usage of the day; nor was any link broken with the past; only the
+plans that had hung in air had gone out, like flames which had kindled
+nothing. Because of this she sorrowed from within some closed place at
+which her husband could only guess, who stood patiently without in his
+embarrassed concern, his clumsy anxiety to do what there was to be done,
+his wondering distress at his wife's drooping grief. But her sorrow was
+rooted in the love of women for the "little young thing, runnin' round,"
+for which she had long passioned.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, God, who lived in the spirit of the little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> Lord Jesus, live Thou
+in this child's spirit, and it in Thee, world without end," Doctor June
+prayed. And Little Child whispered to me and then went to let fall a
+pink in the grave. "So if the flower gets to be an angel flower, then
+they can go round together," she explained.</p>
+
+<p>When I looked up there were in the west the first faint heraldings of
+rose. And against it stood Miggy and Peter, side by side, looking down
+this new way of each other's lives which took account of sorrow. He said
+something to her, and she nodded, and gave him her white hollyhocks to
+lay with the rest. And as they turned away together Little Child
+whispered to me, pulling herself, by my arm, to high tiptoe:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"That little child we put in the sunset," she said, nodding to the west,
+"it's there now. It's there now!"</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was that my heart was filled with the tragedy of the
+unfulfilled intention, perhaps it was that I thought that Little Child's
+whispering was true. In any case I hastened my steps, and as we passed
+out on the road I overtook Miggy and Peter.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," said I, "may Miggy and I come to pay you that visit now, on the
+way back?"</p>
+
+<p>Miggy looked startled.</p>
+
+<p>"It's supper time," she objected.</p>
+
+<p>Who are we that we should interrupt a sunset, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> a situation, or the
+stars in their courses, merely to sup? Neither Miggy nor I belong to
+those who do so. Besides, we had to pass Peter's very door. I said so,
+and all the time Peter's face was glowing.</p>
+
+<p>"Hurry on ahead," I bade him, "and Miggy and Little Child and I will
+come in your house to call."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at me gratefully, and waited for good night to my neighbour,
+and went swiftly away down the road toward the sunset.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, goody grand, goody grand," Little Child went on softly, in an
+invocation of her own to some secret divinity of her pleasure. "Oh, that
+little child we put there, it's talkin' to the sky, an' I guess that
+makes sunset be!"</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour was looking back across the tranquil meadow which might
+have been deep with summer hay instead of mounded to its sad harvest.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish," she said, "I could have had his little grave in my garden,
+same as you would a bird. Still I s'pose a cemet'ry is a cemet'ry and
+had ought to be buried in. But oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to
+have him here in Friendship Village. It's better to think about, ain't
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>But the thing that gripped my heart was to see her, beside her husband,
+go down the road and not hurry. All that bustling impermanence was
+fallen from her. I think that now I am becoming thankful for every one
+who goes busily quickening the day<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> with a multitude, yes, even with a
+confusion, of homely, cheerful tasks.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy slipped her hand within my arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you think of it?" she said. "I've been, all the time. It's most the
+same with her as it would be to me if I'd lost <i>her</i>. You know ... that
+little Margaret. I mean, if she should never be."</p>
+
+<p>As when one hears the note of an oriole ringing from the innermost air,
+so now it seems to me that after these things the deeps of air can never
+again be wholly alien to me.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XVIII</span> <span class="smaller">AT PETER'S HOUSE</span></h2>
+
+<p>I wondered somewhat that Peter did not come out of his house to fetch
+us. He was not even about the little yard when we went up the walk,
+though he knew that we must arrive but a few moments after he did.
+Little Child ran away to pick Bouncing Bet and Sweet Clover in the long,
+rank grass of the unkept garden. And Miggy and I went and stood on the
+porch before Peter's door, and I knew what I intended.</p>
+
+<p>"Rap!" I said to Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at me in surprise&mdash;I have not often commanded her like that.
+But I wanted to see her stand at Peter's door asking for admission. And
+I think that Peter had wanted it too and that this was why he had not
+come to the gate to fetch us. I guessed it by the light on his face
+when, in the middle of Miggy's knock, he caught open the door. I like to
+remember his face as it looked at that moment, with the little twist of
+mouth and lifting of brow which gave him a peculiar sweetness and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>
+na&iuml;vet&eacute;, curiously contradicted by the way his eyes were when they met
+Miggy's.</p>
+
+<p>"How long it took you," he said. "Come in. <i>Come in.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>We went in, and I looked at Miggy. For I did not want her to step in
+that house as she would have stepped in a house that was just a house.
+Is it not wonderful how some front doors are Front Doors Plus? I do not
+know plus what&mdash;that is one of those good little in-between things which
+we know without always naming. But there are some front doors which are
+to me boards and glass and a tinkling cymbal bell; while other doors of
+no better architecture let me within dear depths of homes which are to
+houses what friends are to inhabitants. It was so that I would have had
+Miggy go within Peter's house,&mdash;not as within doors, but as within arms.</p>
+
+<p>We entered directly from the porch into the small parlour&mdash;the kind of
+man's parlour that makes a woman long to take it on her lap and tend it.
+There were no curtains. Between the windows was a big table filled with
+neat piles of newspapers and weeklies till there should be time to look
+them over. The shelf had a lamp, not filled, a clock, not going, and a
+pile of seed catalogues. On two walls were three calendars with big
+hollyhocks and puppies and ladies in sunbonnets. The entire inner<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> wall
+was occupied by a map of the state&mdash;why does a man so cherish a map of
+something, hung up somewhere? On the organ was a row of blue books&mdash;what
+is it that men are always looking for in blue books? In a corner, on the
+floor, stood a shotgun. The wood stove had been "left up" all summer to
+save putting it up in the fall&mdash;this business of getting a stove on
+rollers and jacking it up and remembering where it stood so that the
+pipe will fit means, in the village, a day of annual masculine sacrifice
+to the feminine foolishness of wanting stoves down in summer. There was
+nothing disorderly about the room; but it was dressed with no sash or
+hair ribbon or coral beads, as a man dresses his little girl.</p>
+
+<p>"We don't use this room much," Peter said. "We sit in here sometimes in
+summer, but I think when a man sits in his parlour he always feels like
+he was being buried from it, same as they're used for."</p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;" said Miggy, and stopped. What she was going to say it was not
+important to know, but I was glad that she had been going to say it.
+Something, perhaps, about this being a very pretty room if there were
+somebody to give it a touch or two.</p>
+
+<p>Peter was obviously eager to be in the next room, and that, he
+explained, would have been the dining<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> room, only he had taken it for
+his own, and they ate in the kitchen. I think that I had never heard him
+mention his father at all, and this "we" of his now was a lonelier thing
+than any lonely "I."</p>
+
+<p>"This is my room," he said as we entered it. "It's where I live when I'm
+not at the works. Come and let me show you."</p>
+
+<p>So Peter showed Miggy his room, and he showed it to me, too, though I do
+not think that he was conscious of that. It was a big room, bare of
+floor and, save for the inescapable flowery calendar, bare of walls.
+There was a shelf of books&mdash;not many, but according to Peter's nature
+sufficiently well-selected to plead for him: "Look at us. Who could love
+us and not be worth while?"&mdash;bad enough logic, in all conscience, to
+please any lover. Miggy hardly looked at the books. She so
+exasperatingly took it for granted that a man must be everything in
+general that it left hardly anything for him to be in particular. But
+Peter made her look, and he let me look too, and I supplied the comments
+and Miggy occasionally did her three little nods. The writing table
+Peter had made from a box, and by this Miggy was equally untouched. All
+men, it appeared, should be able to make writing tables from boxes. With
+the linen table cover it was a little different&mdash;this Peter's mother had
+once worked in cross-stitch for his room, and Miggy lifted an end and
+looked at it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span></p><p>"She took all those stitches for you!" she said. "There's one broken,"
+she showed him.</p>
+
+<p>"I can mend that," Peter said proudly, "I'll show you my needle kit."</p>
+
+<p>At this she laughed out suddenly with, "<i>Needle kit!</i> What a real
+regular old bachelor you are, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't help that," said Peter, with "and the same cannot be said for
+you" sticking from the sentence.</p>
+
+<p>On the table lay the cannery account books, and one was open at a full
+page of weary little figures.</p>
+
+<p>"Is this where you sit nights and do your work and read?" Miggy
+demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Right here," Peter told her, "every night of the year, 'most. Except
+when I come to see you."</p>
+
+<p>Miggy stood looking at the table and the wooden chair.</p>
+
+<p>"That's funny," she remarked finally, with an air of meditative
+surprise; "they know you so much better than I do, don't they?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Peter said gravely, "they haven't been thought about as much as
+you have, Miggy&mdash;that's one thing."</p>
+
+<p>"Thinking's nothing," said Miggy, merrily; "sometimes you get a tune in
+your head and you can't get it out."</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down at the table," said Peter, abruptly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> "Sit down!" he repeated,
+when her look questioned him. "I want to see you there."</p>
+
+<p>She obeyed him, laughing a little, and quite in the woman's way of
+pretending that obedience is a choice. Peter looked at her. It is true
+that he had been doing nothing else all the while, but now that she sat
+at the table&mdash;his table&mdash;he looked more than before.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, "well, well." As a man says when he has a present and
+has no idea what to say about it.</p>
+
+<p>Peter's photographs were on the wall above the table, and Peter suddenly
+leaned past Miggy and took down the picture of his mother and put it in
+her hand, without saying anything. For the first time Miggy met his
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Your mother," she said, "why, Peter. She looked&mdash;oh, Peter, she looked
+like you!"</p>
+
+<p>Peter nodded. "Yes, I do look like she did," he said; "I'm always so
+glad."</p>
+
+<p>"She knew you when you were a little bit of a baby, Peter," Miggy
+advanced suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>Peter admitted it gravely. She had.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Miggy, as Peter had said it. "Well."</p>
+
+<p>There was a picture of Peter's father as a young man,&mdash;black,
+curly-haired, black-moustached, the cheeks slightly tinted in the
+picture, his hands laid trimly along his knees. The face was weak,
+empty,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> but it held that mere confidence of youth which always gives a
+special sting to the grief of unfulfilment. Over this they passed,
+saying nothing. It struck me that in the delicacy of that silence it was
+almost as if Miggy shared something with Peter. Also, it struck me
+pleasantly that Miggy's indifference to the personalities of divers
+aunts in straight bangs and long basques was slightly exaggerated,
+especially when, "I never thought about your having any aunts," she
+observed.</p>
+
+<p>And then Peter took down a tiny picture of the sort we call in the
+village "card size," and gave it to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Guess who," he said.</p>
+
+<p>It was a little boy of not more than five, in a straight black coat
+dress, buttoned in the front and trimmed with broad black velvet strips,
+and having a white scalloped collar and white cuffs. One hand was
+resting on the back of a camp-chair and the other held a black helmet
+cap. The shoes had double rows of buttons, and for some secret reason
+the photographer had had the child laboriously cross one foot
+negligently over the other. The fine head, light-curled, was resting in
+the horns of that ex-device that steadied one out of all semblance to
+self. But in spite of the man who had made the picture, the little boy
+was so wholly adorable that you wanted to say so.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span></p><p>"Peter!" Miggy said, "It's <i>you</i>."</p>
+
+<p>I do not know how she knew. I think that I would not have known. But
+Miggy knew, and her knowing made me understand something which evidently
+she herself did not understand. For she looked at the picture and looked
+at it, a strange, surprised smile on her face. And,</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well, <i>well</i>," she said again. "I never thought about that
+before. I mean about you. <i>Then.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Would&mdash;would you want that picture, Miggy?" Peter asked; "you can have
+it if you do."</p>
+
+<p>"Can I really?" said Miggy. "Well, I do want it. Goodness...."</p>
+
+<p>"I always kind of thought," Peter said slowly, "that when I have a son
+he'll look something like that. He might, you know."</p>
+
+<p>Peter was leaning beside her, elbows on the table, and Miggy looked up
+at him over the picture of the child, and made her three little nods.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, "you would want your little boy to look like you."</p>
+
+<p>"And I'd want him named Peter. It's a homely old name, but I'd want him
+to have it."</p>
+
+<p>"Peter isn't a homely name," said Miggy, in a manner of surprise. "Yes,
+of course you'd want him&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The sentence fell between them unfinished. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> I thought that Miggy's
+face, still somewhat saddened by the little Kenneth and now tender with
+its look for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing of colour.
+But then I saw that this would be the light of the sunset on her cheeks,
+for now the West was become a glory of rose and yellow, so that it held
+captive her eyes. It is too frail a thing for me to have grasped by
+sense, but the Moment seemed to say&mdash;and could give no reason&mdash;that our
+sunset compact Miggy kept then without remembering the compact.</p>
+
+<p>It almost startled me when out in the unkept garden Little Child began
+to sing. We had nearly forgotten her and we could not see her, so that
+she might have been any other little child wandering in the sweet
+clover, or merely a little voice coming in with the western light:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"I like to stand in this great air</div>
+<div>And see the sun go down.</div>
+<div>It shows me a bright veil to wear</div>
+<div>And such a pretty gown.</div>
+<div>Oh, I can see a playmate there</div>
+<div>Far up in Splendour Town!"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>"Look here," said Peter to Miggy; and I went over to the sunset window
+and let them go on alone.</p>
+
+<p>He led her about the room, and she still had the little picture in her
+hand. From the bureau, with its small array of cheap brushes and boxes,
+she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> turned abruptly away. I think that she may have felt as I felt
+about the splash of rose on the rose-breasted grosbeak's throat&mdash;that I
+ought not to have been looking. Beyond was a little old dry-goods box
+for odds and ends, a box which must have known, with a kind of feminine
+intelligence, that it ought to be covered with cretonne. On this box
+Miggy knelt to read Peter's high school diploma, and she stopped before
+a picture of the house where he was born. "Was it there?" she asked.
+"Doesn't that seem funny?" Which manifestly it did not seem. "Is <i>that</i>
+where your violin lives?" she asked, when they came to its
+corner&mdash;surely a way of betrayal that she had thought of it as living
+somewhere else. And all the while she carried the picture in her hand,
+and the sunset glorified the room, and Little Child was singing in the
+garden.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," said Miggy, "I don't believe a man who can play the violin can
+sew. Give me the needle kit. I'm going to mend the table cover&mdash;may I?"</p>
+
+<p>Might she! Peter, his face shining, brought out his red flannel
+needle-book&mdash;he kept it on the shelf with his shaving things!&mdash;and, his
+face shining more, sat on a creaking camp-chair and watched her.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy," he said, as she caught the threads skilfully together, "I don't
+believe I've ever seen you sew. I know I never have."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p><p>"This isn't sewing," Miggy said.</p>
+
+<p>"It's near enough like it to suit me," said Peter.</p>
+
+<p>He drew a breath long, and looked about him. I knew how he was seeing
+the bare room, lamp-lighted, and himself trying to work in spite of the
+longing that teased and possessed him and bade him give it up and lean
+back and think of her; or of tossing on the hard couch in the tyranny of
+living his last hour with her and of living, too, the hours that might
+never be. And here she was in this room&mdash;his room. Peter dropped his
+head on his hand and his eyes did not leave her face save to venture an
+occasional swift, ecstatic excursion to her fingers.</p>
+
+<p>Simply and all quietly, as Nature sends her gifts, miracles moved toward
+completion while Miggy sewed. The impulse to do for him this trifling
+service was like a signal, and when she took up the needle for him I
+think that women whose hands had long lain quiet stirred within her
+blood. As for Peter&mdash;but these little housewifely things which enlighten
+a woman merely tease a man, who already knows their import and longs for
+all sweet fragments of time to be merged in the long possession.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy gave the needle back to Peter and he took it&mdash;needle, red book,
+and hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy!" he said, and the name on his lips was like another name. And it
+was as if she were in some place remote and he were calling her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p><p>She looked at him as if she knew the call. Since the world began, only
+for one reason does a man call a woman like that.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it you want?" she said&mdash;and her voice was very sweet and very
+tired.</p>
+
+<p>"I want more of <i>you</i>!" said Peter Cary.</p>
+
+<p>She may have tried to say something, but her voice trembled away.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought it would be everything&mdash;your coming here to-day," Peter said.
+"I've wanted it and wanted it. And what does it amount to? Nothing,
+except to make me wild with wanting you never to go away. I dread to
+think of your leaving me here&mdash;shutting the door and being gone. If it
+was just plain wanting you I could meet that, and beat it, like I do the
+things down to the works. But it isn't that. It's like it was something
+big&mdash;bigger than me, and outside of me, and it gets hold of me, and it's
+like it asked for you without my knowing. I can't do anything that you
+aren't some of it. It isn't fair, Miggy. I want more of you&mdash;all of
+you&mdash;all the time, Miggy, all the time...."</p>
+
+<p>I should have liked to see Miggy's face when she looked at Peter, whose
+eyes were giving her everything and were asking everything of her; but I
+was studying the sunset, glory upon glory, to match the glory here. And
+the singing of Little Child began<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> again, like that of a little voice
+vagrant in the red west....</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Oh, I can see a playmate there,</div>
+<div>Far up in Splendour Town!"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>Miggy heard her, and remembered.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter, Peter!" she cried, "I couldn't&mdash;I never could bring us two on
+you to support."</p>
+
+<p>Peter gave her hands a little shake, as if he would have shaken her. I
+think that he would have shaken her if it had been two or three thousand
+years earlier in the world's history.</p>
+
+<p>"You two!" he cried; "why, Miggy, when we marry do I want&mdash;or do you
+want&mdash;that it should stay just you and me? We want children. I want you
+for their mother as much as I want you for my wife."</p>
+
+<p>It was the voice of the paramount, compelling spirit, the sovereign
+voice of the Family, calling through the wilderness. Peter knew,&mdash;this
+fine, vital boy seeking his own happiness; he gropingly understood this
+mighty thing, and he was trying his best to serve it. And, without
+knowing that she knew, Miggy knew too ... and the seal that she knew was
+in what was in the sunset. And as far removed from these things as the
+sunset itself was all Miggy's cheap cynicism about love and all the
+triviality of her criticism of Peter.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy stood motionless, looking at Peter. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> then, like an evil spell
+which began to work, another presence was in the room....</p>
+
+<p>Somewhile before I had begun to hear the sound, as a faint undercurrent
+to consciousness; an unimportant, unpleasant, insisting sound that
+somehow interfered. Gradually it had come nearer and had interfered more
+and had mingled harshly with the tender treble of Little Child. Now,
+from Peter's gate the sound besieged my ears and entered the room and
+explained itself to us all&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"My Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I <i>never</i> know,</div>
+<div>You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh&mdash;"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air....</p>
+
+<p>I knew what it was, and they knew. At the sound of his father's voice,
+drunken, piteous, Peter dropped Miggy's hands and his head went down and
+he stood silent, like a smitten thing. My own heart sank, for I knew
+what Miggy had felt, and I thought I knew what she would feel now. So
+here was another unfulfilled intention, another plan gone astray in an
+unperfected order.</p>
+
+<p>Peter had turned somewhat away before he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll have to go now," he said quietly, "I guess you'll excuse me."</p>
+
+<p>He went toward the kitchen door ashamed, miserable, all the brightness
+and vitality gone from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> him. I am sorry that he did not see Miggy's face
+when she lifted it. I saw it, and I could have sung as I looked. Not for
+Peter or for Miggy, but for the sake of something greater than they,
+something that touched her hand, commanded "Look at me," bade her follow
+with us all.</p>
+
+<p>Before Peter reached the door she overtook him, stood before him, put
+her hands together for a moment, and then laid one swiftly on his cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," she said, "that don't make any difference. That don't make any
+difference."</p>
+
+<p>No doubt he understood her words, but I think what he understood best
+was her hand on his cheek. He caught her shoulders and looked and
+looked....</p>
+
+<p>"Honest&mdash;honest, don't it?" he searched her.</p>
+
+<p>You would not have said that her answer to that was wholly direct. She
+only let fall her hand from his cheek to his shoulder, and,</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," she said, "<i>is it like this</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said simply, "it's like this."</p>
+
+<p>And then what she said was ever so slightly muffled, as if at last she
+had dropped her head in that sweet confusion which she had never seemed
+to know; as if at last she was looking at Peter as if he <i>was</i> Peter.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I don't ever want to be any place where you aren't," she told him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span></p><p>"Miggy!" Peter cried, "take care what you say. Remember&mdash;he'd live with
+us."</p>
+
+<p>She made her three little nods.</p>
+
+<p>"So he will," she answered, "so he will. He&mdash;and my little sister&mdash;and
+all of us."</p>
+
+<p>Peter's answer was a shout.</p>
+
+<p>"Say it out!" he cried, "say you will. Miggy! I've <i>got</i> to hear you say
+it out!"</p>
+
+<p>"Peter, Peter," she said, "I want to marry you."</p>
+
+<p>He took her in his arms and in the room was the glory upon glory of the
+west, a thing of wings and doors ajar. And strong as the light, there
+prevailed about them the soul of the Family, that distributes burdens,
+shares responsibilities, accepts what is and what is to come. Its voice
+was in the voice of Little Child singing in the garden, and of old Cary
+babbling at the gate. Its heart was the need of Peter and Miggy, each
+for the other. I saw in their faces the fine freedoms of the sunset,
+that sunset where Miggy and Little Child and I had agreed that a certain
+spirit lives. And it did but tally with the momentous utterance of these
+things and of the evening when Miggy spoke again.</p>
+
+<p>"Go now&mdash;you go to him," she said, "we'll wait. And&mdash;Peter&mdash;when you
+come back, I want to see everything in the room again."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XIX</span> <span class="smaller">THE CUSTODIAN</span></h2>
+
+<p>When the river is low, a broad, flat stone lying a little way from shore
+at the foot of our lawn becomes an instrument of music. In the day it
+plays now a rhapsody of sun, now a nocturne of cloud, now the last
+concerto, Opus Eternal. In the night it becomes a little friendly
+murmur, a cradle song, slumber spell, neighbour to the Dark, the alien
+Dark who very likely grows lonely, being the silent sister, whereas the
+Light goes on blithely companioned of us all. But if I were the Dark and
+owned the stars, and the potion which quickens conscience, and the sense
+of the great Spirit brooding, brooding, I do not know that I would
+exchange and be the Light. Still, the Light has rainbows and toil and
+the sun and laughter.... After all, it is best to be a human being and
+to have both Light and Darkness for one's own. And it is concerning this
+conclusion that the river plays on its instrument of music, this shallow river</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i3">"&mdash;to whose falls</div>
+<div>Melodious birds sing madrigals."</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span></p><p>I have heard our bank cat-birds in the willows sing madrigals to the
+stone-music until I wanted to be one of them&mdash;cat-bird, madrigal,
+shallows, or anything similar. But the human is perhaps what all these
+are striving to express, and so I have been granted wish within wish,
+and life is very good.</p>
+
+<p>Life was very good this summer afternoon when half the village gathered
+on our lawn above the singing stone, at Miggy's and Peter's
+"Announcement Supper." To be sure, all Friendship Village had for
+several days had the news and could even tell you when the betrothal
+took place and where; but the two were not yet engaged, as Miggy would
+have said, "out loud."</p>
+
+<p>"What <i>is</i> engaged?" asked Little Child, who was the first of my guests
+to arrive, and came bringing an offering of infinitesimal flowers which
+she finds in the grass where I think that they bloom for no one else.</p>
+
+<p>"It means that people love each other very much&mdash;" I began, and got no
+further.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, goody grand," cried Little Child. "Then I'm engaged, aren't I? To
+everybody."</p>
+
+<p>Whenever she leads me in deep water, I am accustomed to invite her to a
+dolphin's back by bidding her say over some song or spell which I have
+taught her. This afternoon while we waited on the lawn and her little
+voice went among the charmed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> words, something happened which surely
+must have been due to a prank of the dolphin. For when she had taken an
+accurate way to the last stanza of "Lucy," Little Child soberly
+concluded:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"'She lived unknown, and few could know</div>
+<div class="i1">When Lucy ceased to be;</div>
+<div>But she is in her grave, and what's</div>
+<div class="i1">The difference to me!'"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>But, even so, it was charming to have had the quiet metre present.</p>
+
+<p>I hope that there is no one who has not sometime been in a company on
+which he has looked and looked with something living in his eyes; on a
+company all of whom he holds in some degree of tenderness. It was so
+that I looked this afternoon on those who came across the lawn in the
+pleasant five o'clock sun, and I looked with a difference from my manner
+of looking on that evening of my visit to the village, when I first saw
+these, my neighbours. Then I saw them with delight; now I see them with
+delight-and-that-difference; and though that difference is, so to say,
+partly in my throat, yet it is chiefly deep in my understanding. There
+came my Mis' Amanda Toplady, with her great green umbrella, which she
+carries summer and winter; Mis' Postmaster Sykes, with the full-blooming
+stalk of her tuberose pinned on her left shoulder; Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss in the pink nun's veiling of the Post-office
+hall<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> supper; and my neighbour, who had consented to come, with: "I
+donno as that little thing would want I should stay home. Oh, but do you
+know, that's the worst&mdash;knowin' that the little thing never saw me and
+can't think about me at all!" And there came also those of whom it
+chances that this summer I have seen less than I should have wished: the
+Liberty sisters, in checked print. "It don't seem so much of a jump out
+of mournin' into wash goods as it does into real dress-up cloth," gentle
+Miss Lucy says. And Abigail Arnold, of the Home Bakery, who sent a great
+sugared cake for to-day's occasion. "Birthday cakes is correct," she
+observed, "an' weddin' cake is correct. Why ain't engagement cakes
+correct&mdash;especially when folks get along without the ring? I donno. I
+always think doin' for folks is correct, whether it's the style or
+whether it ain't." And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, with a new and
+upbraiding baby; Mis' Fire Chief Merriman in "new black, but not true
+mournin' now, an' anyway lit up by pearl buttons an' a lace handkerchief
+an' plenty o' scent." And Mis' "Mayor" Uppers who, the "mayor" not
+returning to his home and the tickets for the parlour clock having all
+been sold, to-day began offering for sale tickets on the "parlour
+'suit,' brocade' silk, each o' the four pieces a differ'nt colour and
+all as bright as new-in-the-store." And though we all understood what
+she was doing and she knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> that we all knew, she yet drew us aside, one
+after another, to offer the tickets for sale privately, and we slipped
+the money to her beneath our handkerchiefs or our fans or our sewing.</p>
+
+<p>We all had our sewing&mdash;even I have become pleasantly contaminated and
+have once or twice essayed eyelets. Though there was but an hour to
+elapse before supper-time and the arrival of the "men-folks," we settled
+ourselves about the green, making scallops on towels, or tatting for
+sheet hems, or crocheted strips for the hems of pillow-slips. Mis' Sykes
+had, as she almost always does have, new work which no one had ever seen
+before, and new work is accounted of almost as much interest as a new
+waist and is kept for a surprise, as a new waist should be kept. Little
+Child, too, had her sewing; she was buttonhole-stitching a wash-cloth
+and talking like a little old woman. I think that the little elf
+children like best to pretend in this way, as regular, arrant witches
+feign old womanhood.</p>
+
+<p>"Aunt Effie is sick," Little Child was telling Mis' Toplady; "she is
+sick from her hair to her slippers."</p>
+
+<p>I had a plan for Little Child and for us all; that after supper she
+should have leaves in her hair and on her shoulders and should dance on
+the singing stone in the river. And Miggy, whose shy independence is now
+become all shyness, was in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> house, weaving the leaves, and had not
+yet appeared at her party at all.</p>
+
+<p>Then one of those charming things happened which surely have a kind of
+life of their own and wake the hour to singing, as if an event were a
+river stone, and more, round which all manner of faint music may be set
+stirring.</p>
+
+<p>"Havin' a party when I ain't lookin'!" cried somebody. "My, my. I don't
+b'lieve a word of what's name&mdash;this evolution business. I bet you
+anything heaven is just <i>gettin' back</i>."</p>
+
+<p>And there was Calliope, in her round straw hat and tan ulster, who in
+response to my card had hastened her imminent return.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, when we had greeted her and put her in a chair under
+the mulberry tree, "my relation got well. At least, she ain't sick
+enough to be cross, so 'most anybody could take care of her now."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope laughed and leaned back and shut her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Land, land," she said, "I got so much to tell you about I don't know
+where to begin. It's all about one thing, too&mdash;somethin' I've found
+out."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Amanda Toplady drew a great breath and let fall her work and looked
+round at us all.</p>
+
+<p>"Goodness," she said, "ain't it comfortable&mdash;us all settin' here
+together, nobody's leg broke, nobody's house on fire, nor none of us
+dead?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span></p><p>"'Us all settin' here together,'" Calliope repeated, suddenly grave
+amid our laughter, "that's part of what I'm comin' to. I wonder," she
+said to us, "how you folks have always thought of the City? Up till I
+went there to stay this while I always thought of it as&mdash;well, as the
+City an' not so much as folks at all. The City always meant to me big
+crowds on the streets&mdash;hurryin', hurryin', eatin', eatin', and not
+payin' much attention to anything. One whole batch of 'em I knew was
+poor an' lookin' in bakery windows. One whole batch of 'em I knew was
+rich an' sayin' there has to be these distinctions. And some more I knew
+was good&mdash;I always see 'em, like a pretty lady, stoopin' over, givin'.
+And some more I knew was wicked an' I always thought of them climbin' in
+windows. And then there was the little bit o' batch that knows the
+things I want to know an' talks like I'd like to talk an' that I'd
+wanted an' wanted to go up to the City an' get with.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then I went. An' the first thing, I see my relative wa'n't rich
+nor poor nor bad nor good nor&mdash;the way I mean. Nor her friends that come
+to see her, they wan't either. The ones I took for rich talked economy,
+an' the ones I thought was poor spent money, an' the good ones gossiped,
+an' they all jabbered about music and pictures that I thought you
+couldn't talk about unless you knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> the 'way-inside-o'-things, like
+they didn't know. The kinds seemed all mixed up, and all of 'em far away
+an' formal, like&mdash;oh, like the books in a library when you can't think
+up one to draw out. I couldn't seem to get near to anything.</p>
+
+<p>"Then one night I done what I'd always wanted to do. I took two dollars
+an' went to the theatre alone an' got me a seat. I put on the best I
+had, an' still I didn't feel like I was one of 'em, nor one of much of
+anybody. The folks on the car wasn't the way I meant, an' I felt mad at
+'em for bein' differ'nt. There was a smilin' young fellow, all dressed
+black an' expensive, an' I thought: 'Put you side of Peter Cary an'
+there wouldn't be anybody there but Peter.' And when I got inside the
+theatre, it was just the same: one awful collection of dressed-up hair
+an' dressed-down backs an' everybody smilin' at somebody that wasn't me
+and all seemin' so sure of themselves. Specially the woman in front of
+me, but I guess it always is specially the woman in front of you. She
+was flammed out abundant. She had trimmin's in unexpected places, an' a
+good many colours took to do it, an' a cute little chatter to match. It
+come to me that she was more than different from me: she was the
+<i>otherest</i> a person can be. An' I felt glad when the curtain went up.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir," Calliope said, "it was a silly little play&mdash;all about
+nothin' that you could lay much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> speech to. But oh, they was somethin'
+in it that made you get down on your hands and knees in your own heart
+and look around in it, and <i>look</i>. They was an old lady and a young
+mother and a child and a man and a girl&mdash;well, that don't sound like
+much special, does it? And that's just it: it wasn't much special, but
+yet it was all of everything. It made 'em laugh, it made 'em cry, it
+made <i>me</i> laugh and cry till I was ashamed and glad and grateful. And
+when the lights come up at the end, I felt like I was kind of the mother
+to everything, an' I wanted to pick it up an' carry it off an' keep care
+of it. And it come over me all of a sudden how the old lady and the
+young mother an' man an' girl, man an' girl, <i>man an' girl</i> was right
+there in the theatre, near me, over an' over again; an' there I'd been
+feelin' mad at 'em for seemin' far off. But they wasn't far off. They'd
+been laughin' and cryin', too, an' they knew, just like I knew, what was
+what in the world. My, my. If it'd been Friendship I'd have gone from
+house to house all the way home, shakin' hands. An' as it was, I just
+<i>had</i> to speak to somebody. An' just then I see the flammed-out woman in
+front of me, that her collar had come open a little wee bit up top&mdash;not
+to notice even, but it give me an excuse. And I leaned right over to her
+and I says with all the sympathy in me:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span></p><p>"'Ma'am, your neck is peepin'."</p>
+
+<p>"She looked around su'prised and then she smiled&mdash;smiled 'most into
+laughin'. And she thanked me sweet as a friend an' nodded with it, an' I
+thought: 'Why, my land, you may have a baby home.' I never had thought
+of that. An' then I begun lookin' at folks an' lookin'. An' movin' up
+the aisles, there wasn't just a theatre-lettin'-out. They was <i>folks</i>.
+And all over each one was the good little things they'd begun
+rememberin' now that the play was over, or the hurt things that had come
+back onto 'em again.... An' out on the street it was the same. The folks
+had all got alive and was waitin' for me to feel friendly to 'em.
+<i>Friendly.</i> The young fellows in the cars was lovers, just like Peter.
+An' everybody was just like me, or anyhow more alike than differ'nt; and
+just like Friendship, only mebbe pronouncin' their words some differ'nt
+an' knowin' more kinds of things to eat. It seems to me now I could go
+anywhere an' find folks to be nice to. I don't love Friendship Village
+any the less, but I love more things the same way. Everything, 'most.
+An' I tell you I'm glad I didn't die before I found it out&mdash;that we're
+all one batch. <i>Do</i> you see what I mean&mdash;deep down inside what I say?"
+Calliope cried. "Does it sound like anything to you?"</p>
+
+<p>To whom should it sound like "anything" if not to us of Friendship
+Village? We know.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p><p>"Honestly," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady, trying to wipe her
+eyes on her crochet work, "Whoever God is, I don't believe He wants to
+keep it a secret. He's always 'most lettin' us know. I 'most knew Who He
+is right then, while Calliope was talkin'."</p>
+
+<p>"I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope was talkin'." ... I
+said the words over while the men crossed the lawn, all arriving
+together in order to lighten the trial of guesthood: Dear Doctor June,
+little Timothy Toplady, Eppleby Holcomb, Postmaster Sykes, Photographer
+Jimmie Sturgis, Peter, and Timothy, Jr., and the others. Liva Vesey was
+already in the kitchen with Miggy and Elfa, and I knew that, somewhere
+invisible, Nicholas Moor was hovering, waiting to help dish the
+ice-cream. When the little tables, each with its bright, strewn
+nasturtiums, were set about the lawn, Miggy reluctantly appeared from
+the kitchen. She was in the white frock which she herself had made, and
+she was, as I have said, a new Miggy, not less merry or less elfin, but
+infinitely more human. It was charming, I thought, to see how she and
+Peter, far from tensely avoiding each other, went straight to each
+other's side. With them at table were Liva and Timothy, Jr., now meeting
+each other's eyes as simply as if eyes were for this purpose.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p><p>"I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope was talkin'" ... I
+thought again as we stood in our places and Doctor June lifted his hands
+to the summer sky as if He were there, too.</p>
+
+<p>"Father," he said, "bless these young people who are going to belong to
+each other&mdash;Thou knowest their names and so do we. Bless our being
+together now in their honour, and be Thou in our midst. And bless our
+being together always. Amen."</p>
+
+<p>And that was the announcement of Miggy's and Peter's betrothal, at their
+Engagement Party.</p>
+
+<p>Little Child, who was sitting beside Calliope, leaned toward her.</p>
+
+<p>"How long will it take for God to know," she asked, "after Doctor June
+sent it up?"</p>
+
+<p>Calliope put her arm about her and told her.</p>
+
+<p>"Then did He get here since Doctor June invited Him?" Little Child
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"You think, 'way deep inside your head, an' see if He isn't here," I
+heard Calliope say.</p>
+
+<p>Little Child shut her eyes tightly, and though she did open them briefly
+to see what was on the plate which they set before her, I think that she
+found the truth.</p>
+
+<p>"I 'most know," she said presently. "Pretty near I know He is. I guess
+I'm too little to be sure nor certain. When I'm big will I know sure?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Calliope answered, "then you'll know sure."</p>
+
+<p>"I 'most knew Who He is while Calliope was talkin'" ... I said over once
+more. And suddenly in the words and in the homely talk and in the happy
+comradeship I think that I slipped between the seeing and the knowing,
+and for a moment stood very near to the Custodian&mdash;Himself. The
+Custodian Who is in us all, Who speaks, now as you, now as I, most
+clearly in our human fellowship, in our widest kinship, in the universal
+<i>togetherness</i>. Truly, it is not as my neighbour once said, for I think
+that God has many and many to "neighbour with," if only we would be
+neighbours.</p>
+
+<p>Presently, as if it knew that it belonged there, the sunset came, a
+thing of wings and doors ajar. Then Miggy fastened the leaves in Little
+Child's hair and led her down to dance on the broad, flat stone which is
+an instrument of music. Above the friendly murmur of the shallows the
+little elf child seemed beckoning to us others of the human voices on
+the shore. And in that fair light it was as if the river were some clear
+highway, leading from Friendship Village to Splendour Town, where
+together we might all find our way.</p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 54676 ***</div>
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Friendship Village Love Stories, by Zona Gale

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license

-

-

-Title: Friendship Village Love Stories

-

-Author: Zona Gale

-

-Release Date: May 7, 2017 [EBook #54676]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

-

-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES ***

-

-

-

-

-Produced by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed

-Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was

-produced from images generously made available by The

-Internet Archive)

-

-

-

-

-

-

-FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES

-

-BY

-

-ZONA GALE

-

-AUTHOR OF "FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," "THE LOVES

-OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE," ETC.

-

-NEW YORK

-GROSSET & DUNLAP

-PUBLISHERS

-

-

-COPYRIGHT, 1909,

-

-BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

-

-Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909. Reprinted

-November, 1909; April, 1912.

-

-

-_Norwood Press

-J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.

-Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._

-

-

-To

-

-MY FRIENDS IN PORTAGE

-WISCONSIN

-

-

-Certain of the following chapters have appeared in _Everybody's_, _The

-American Magazine_, _The Outlook_, _The Woman's Home Companion_, and

-_The Delineator_. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous

-permission to reprint these chapters, and to Messrs. Harper Brothers for

-permission to reprint the sonnet in Chapter XI.

-

-

-

-

-CONTENTS

-

-CHAPTER                         PAGE

-    I. OPEN ARMS                   1

-

-   II. INSIDE JUNE                15

-

-  III. MIGGY                      33

-

-   IV. SPLENDOUR TOWN             43

-

-    V. DIFFERENT                  62

-

-   VI. THE FOND FORENOON          81

-

-  VII. AFRAID                     96

-

- VIII. THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT    116

-

-   IX. THE COLD SHOULDER         136

-

-    X. EVENING DRESS             148

-

-   XI. UNDERN                    176

-

-  XII. THE WAY THE WORLD IS      191

-

- XIII. HOUSEHOLDRY               206

-

-  XIV. POSTMARKS                 223

-

-   XV. PETER                     248

-

-  XVI. THE NEW VILLAGE           258

-

- XVII. ADOPTION                  274

-

-XVIII. AT PETER'S HOUSE          293

-

-  XIX. THE CUSTODIAN             309

-

-

-

-

-Friendship Village Love Stories

-

-

-

-

-I

-

-OPEN ARMS

-

-

-Although it is June, the Little Child about whom I shall sometimes write

-in these pages this morning brought me a few violets. June violets. They

-sound unconvincing and even sentimental. However, here they are in their

-vase; and they are all white but one.

-

-"Only one blue one," said Little Child, regretfully; "May must be 'most

-dead by mistake."

-

-"Don't the months die as soon as they go away?" I asked her, and a

-little shocked line troubled her forehead.

-

-"Oh, no," she said; "they never die at all. They wait and show the next

-months how."

-

-So this year's May is showing June how. As if one should have a kind of

-pre-self, who kept on, after one's birth, and told one what to live and

-what not to live. I wish that I had had a pre-self and that it had kept

-on with me to show me how. It is what one's mother is, only one is so

-occupied in being one's born self that one thinks of her worshipfully

-as one's mother instead. But this young June seems to be chiefly May,

-and I am glad: for of all the months, May is to me most nearly the

-essence of time to be. In May I have always an impulse to date my

-letters "To-morrow," for all the enchantment of the usual future seems

-come upon me. The other months are richly themselves, but May is all the

-great premonitory zest come true; it is expectation come alive; it is

-the Then made Now. Conservatively, however, I date my May letters merely

-"To-morrow," and it is pleasant to find a conservative estimate which no

-one is likely to exceed. For I own that though there is a conservatism

-which is now wholly forbidden to me, yet I continue to take in it a

-sensuous, stolen pleasure, such as I take in certain ceremonies; and I

-know that if I were wholly pagan, extreme conservatism would be my chief

-indulgence.

-

-This yet-May morning, then, I have been down in the village, gardening

-about the streets. My sort of gardening. As in spring another looks

-along the wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the

-upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence I peered round this

-wall and that for faces and things in the renascence of recognition, or

-in the pleasant importance of having just been born. Many a gate and

-façade and well-house, of which in my absence I have not thought even

-once, has not changed a whit in consequence. And when changes have come,

-they have done so with the prettiest preening air of accomplishment: "We

-too," they say, "have not been idle."

-

-Thus the streets came unrolling to meet me and to show me their

-treasures: my neighbour's new screened-in porch "with a round extension

-so to see folks pass on the cross street"; in the house in which I am to

-live a former blank parlour wall gravely regarding me with a magnificent

-new plate glass eye; Daphne Street, hitherto a way of sand, now become a

-thing of proud macadam; the corner catalpas old enough to bloom; a white

-frame cottage rising like a domestic Venus from a once vacant lot of

-foam-green "Timothy"; a veranda window-box acquired, like a bright

-bow-knot at its house's throat; and, farther on, the Herons' freshly

-laid cement sidewalk, a flying heron stamped on every block. I fancy

-they will have done that with the wooden heron knocker which in the

-kitchen their grandfather Heron himself carved on sleepless nights.

-("Six hundred and twenty hours of Grandpa Heron's life hanging on our

-front door," his son's wife said; "I declare I feel like that bird could

-just about lay.") To see all these venturesome innovations, these

-obscure and pleasant substitutions, is to be greeted by the very annuals

-of this little garden as a real gardener in green lore might be

-signalled, here by a trembling of new purple and there by a yellow

-marching line of little volunteers.

-

-I do not miss from their places many friends. In this house and that I

-find a new family domiciled and to be divined by the subtle changes

-which no old tenant would ever have made: the woodpile in an

-unaccustomed place, the side shed door disused and strung for vines, a

-wagon now kept by a north and south space once sacred to the sweet-pea

-trench. Here a building partly ruined by fire shows grim, returned to

-the inarticulate, not evidently to be rebuilt, but to be accepted, like

-any death. But these variations are the exception, and only one

-variation is the rule, and against that one I have in me some special

-heritage of burning. I mean the felling of the village trees. We have

-been used wantonly to sacrifice to the base and the trivial, trees

-already stored with years of symmetry when we of these Midlands were the

-intruders and not they--and I own that for me the time has never wholly

-passed. They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel our lawns

-with twigs, they rot the shingles on our barns. It has seemed to occur

-to almost nobody to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too, are

-beginning to discern, so that when in the laying of a sidewalk we meet a

-tree who was there before we were anywhere at all, though we may not

-yet recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our love of a

-straight line, and our votive offering is to give the tree the

-walk--such a slight swerving is all the deference she asks!--and in

-return she blesses us with balms and odours.... For me these signs of

-our mellowing are more delightful to experience than might be the

-already-made quietudes of a nation of effected and distinguished

-standards. I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves an

-elemental gesture, though I personally would prefer not to be the one to

-have made the gesture. And this is my solace when with some

-inquisitioner I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine--an

-isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hemlock: verily, I say,

-it was so that we did here in the old days when there were forests to

-conquer, and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his blood as he

-has his genius for toil. And I try not to remember that if in America we

-had had plane trees, we should almost certainly have cut them into

-cabins.... But this morning even the trees that I missed could not make

-me sad. No, nor even the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers

-hanging on a street door which I passed. All these were as if something

-elementary had happened, needless wounds, it might be, on the plan of

-things, contortions which science has not yet bred away, but, as truly

-as the natural death from age, eloquent of the cosmic persuading to

-shape in which the nations of quietude and we of strivings are all in

-fellowship.

-

-In fellowship! I think that in this simple basic emotion lies my joy in

-living in this, my village. Here, this year long, folk have been

-adventuring together, knowing the details of one another's lives,

-striving a little but companioning far more than striving, kindling to

-one another's interests instead of practising the faint morality of mere

-civility; and I love them all--unless it be only that little Mrs. Oliver

-Wheeler Johnson, newly come to Friendship; and perhaps my faint liking

-for her arises from the fact that she has not yet lived here long enough

-to be understood, as Friendship Village understands. The ways of these

-primal tribal bonds are in my blood, for from my heart I felt what my

-neighbour felt when she told me of the donation party which the whole

-village has just given to Lyddy Ember:--

-

-"I declare," she said, "it wasn't so much the stuff they brought in,

-though that was all elegant, but it was the _Togetherness_ of it. I

-couldn't get to sleep that night for thinkin' about God not havin'

-anybody to neighbour with."

-

-It was no wonder, therefore, that when in the middle of Daphne Street my

-neighbour met me this morning, for the first time since my return, and

-held out her arms, I walked straight into them. Here is the secret, as

-more of us know than have the wisdom to acknowledge: fellowship,

-comradeship, kinship--call it what you will. My neighbour and I will

-understand.

-

-"I heard you was here," my neighbour said--bless her, her voice

-trembled. I suppose there never was such a compliment as that tremor of

-her voice.

-

-I am afraid that I am not going to tell what else she said. But it was

-all about our coming to Friendship Village to live; and that is a thing

-which, as I feel about it, should be set to music and sung in the

-wind--where Thoreau said that some apples are to be eaten. As for me, I

-nodded at my neighbour, and could do no more than that--as is the custom

-of mortals when they are face to face with these sorceries of Return and

-Meeting and Being Together.

-

-I am not yet wonted to the sweetness of our coming to Friendship Village

-to live, the Stranger and I. Here they still call him the Stranger; and

-this summer, because of the busts and tablets which he must fashion in

-many far places, so do I. Have I said that that Stranger of mine is a

-sculptor? He is. But if anyone expects me to write about him, I tell you

-that it is impossible. Save this: That since he came out of the mist one

-morning on the Plank Road here in Friendship Village, we two have kept

-house in the world, shared in the common welfare, toiled as we might

-for the common good, observed the stars, and thanked God. And this: that

-since that morning, it is as if Someone had picked us up and set us to

-music and sung us to the universal piping. And we remember that once we

-were only words, and that sometime we shall be whatever music is when it

-is free of its body of sound, and for that time we strive. But I repeat

-that these vagrant notes are not about this great Stranger, absent on

-his quests of holy soul prisoned in this stone and that marble, nor yet

-about our life together. Rather, I write about our Family, which is this

-loved town of ours. For we have bought Oldmoxon House, and here, save

-for what flights may be about and over-seas, we hope that we may tell

-our days to their end.

-

-My neighbour had both my hands, there in the middle of Daphne Street,

-and the white horse of the post-office store delivery wagon turned out

-for us as if he knew.

-

-"If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd have put on my other

-hat," my neighbour said, "but I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down

-for some rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't what they

-used to be, are they? One season an' they lay down life. I could jounce

-up an' down I'm so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed

-gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'. I heard the girl that

-was comin' to help you ain't comin' near."

-

-My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and she has done the

-disappointing by telegraph. I had almost said, publicly by telegraph.

-But I protest that I would rather an entire village should read my

-telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole city should care

-almost nothing for me or my telegrams either. And if you please, I would

-rather not have that telegram-reading criticised.

-

-"Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity, "I've got you one. She'll be

-up to talk to you in a day or two--I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can

-spell like the minister."

-

-I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her name with something of

-that sense of the inescapable to which the finality of my neighbour

-impressed me. As if I were to have said, "So, then, it is to be Miggy!"

-Or was it something more than that? Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and

-mine had struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have come to

-call the emotion of finality. I suppose that other people have it: that

-occasional prophetic sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses

-this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness of--shall I

-say?--brightness; a mental area of clearness; a quite definite physical

-emotion of yes-ness. But if the thing will not happen this says itself

-by a complementary apprehension of dim, down-sloping, vacant negation. I

-have seldom known this divination to fail me--though I am chary of using

-it lest I use it up! And then I do not always wish to know. But this

-morning my emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware: I _knew_ that

-it would be Miggy.

-

-"What a curious name," I said, in a manner of feebly fending off the

-imminent; "_why_ Miggy?" For it seemed to me one of those names instead

-of which any other name would have done as well and perhaps better.

-

-"Her name is Margaret," my neighbour explained, "and her mother was a

-real lady that come here from Off and that hard work killed her because

-she _was_ a lady. The father was bound there shouldn't be any lady about

-Miggy, but he couldn't seem to help himself. Margaret was her mother's

-name and so he shaved it and shrunk it and strained it down to Miggy.

-'No frills for nobody,' was his motto, up to his death. Miggy and her

-little sister lives with her old Aunt Effie that dress-makes real French

-but not enough to keep 'em alive on. Miggy does odd jobs around. So when

-I heard about your needin' somebody, I says to myself, 'Miggy!'--just

-like I've said it to you."

-

-It was not the name, as a name, which I would have said could be

-uppermost in my mind as I walked on that street of June--that May was

-helping to make fair. And I was annoyed to have the peace of my return

-so soon invaded. I fell wondering if I could not get on, as I usually

-do, with no one to bother. I have never wanted a helper at all if I

-could avoid it, and I have never, never wanted a helper with a

-personality. A personality among my strewn papers puts me in a fever of

-embarrassment and misery. Once such an one said to me in the midst of a

-chapter: "Madame, I'd like to ask you a question. What do _you_ think of

-your hero?" In an utter rout of confusion I owned that I thought very

-badly of him, indeed; but I did not add the truth, that she had

-effectually drugged him and disabled me for at least that day. My taste

-in helpers is for one colourless, noiseless, above all intonationless,

-usually speechless, and always without curiosity--some one, save for the

-tips of her trained fingers, negligible. As all this does sad violence

-to my democratic passions, I usually prefer my negligible self. So the

-idea of a Miggy terrified me, and I said to myself that I would not have

-one about. As I knew the village, she was not of it. She was not a part

-of my gardening. She was no proper annual. She was no doubt merely a

-showy little seedling, chance sown in the village.... But all the time,

-moving within me, was that serene area of brightness, that clear

-certainty that, do what I could, it would still be Miggy.

-

-... It is through this faint soothsaying, this conception which is

-partly of sight and partly of feeling, that some understanding may be

-won of the orchestration of the senses. I am always telling myself that

-if I could touch at that fluent line where the senses merge, I should

-occasionally find there that silent Custodian who is myself. I think,

-because emotion is so noble, that the Custodian must sometimes visit

-this line where the barrier between her and me is so frail. Her presence

-seems possible to me only for a moment, only, it may be, for the

-fraction of a second in which I catch the romance, the _idea_ of

-something old and long familiar. And when this happens, I say: She has

-just been there, between the seeing and the feeling, or between the

-seeing and the knowing. Often I am sure that I have barely missed her.

-But I am never quick enough to let her know....

-

-When I finished my walk and stepped under the poplars before my gate, I

-caught a faint exclamation. It was that Little Child, who had been

-waiting for me on my doorstep and came running to meet me and bring me

-the violets. When she saw me, she said, "Oh!" quickly and sweetly in her

-throat, and, as I stood still to taste the delight of having her run

-toward me, I felt very sorry for every one who has not heard that

-involuntary "Oh!" of a child at one's coming. Little Child and I have

-met only once before, and that early this morning, at large, on the

-village street, as spirits met in air, with no background of names nor

-auxiliary of exchange of names; but we had some talk which for me

-touched on eternal truth and for her savoured of story-telling; and we

-are friends. So now when she gave me the violets and explained to me Who

-was showing June how, I accepted this fair perception of the motherhood

-of May, this childish discernment of the familyhood of things, and,

-

-"Will you come some day soon to have another story?" I asked her.

-

-"Prob'ly I can," said Little Child. "I'll ask Miggy."

-

-"Miggy! But is it your Miggy, too?" I demanded.

-

-"It's my sister," said Little Child, nodding.

-

-I thought that the concreteness of her reply to my ill-defined query was

-almost as if she remembered how to understand without words. You would

-think that children would need to have things said out, but they are

-evidently closer to a more excellent way.

-

-So when I entered the house just now, I brought in with me a kind of

-premonitory Miggy, one of those ghostly, anticipatory births which we

-are constantly giving to those whom we have not met. As if every one

-had for us a way of life without the formality of being seen. As if we

-are a big, near family whether we want to be so or not. Verily, it is

-not only May and June, or Little Child and Miggy, who are found

-unexpectedly to be related; it is the whole world, it seems, and he is

-wise who quickens to many kinships. I like to think of the comrade

-company that already I have found here: June and Little Child and

-Miggy-to-be and my neighbour and Daphne Street and the remembered faces

-of the village and the hamadryads. I think that I include the very

-herons in the cement sidewalk. Like a kind of perpetual gift it is, this

-which my neighbour called _Togetherness_.

-

-

-

-

-II

-

-INSIDE JUNE

-

-

-_The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough to

-it. This month comes within few houses, and if you want it you must go

-out to it. When you are within doors, knowing that out-of-doors it is

-June, the urge to be out there with it is resistless. But though you

-wade in green, steep in sun, breast wind, and glory in them all, still

-the day itself eludes you. It would seem, in June, that there should be

-a specific for the malady of being oneself, so that one might get to be

-a June day outright. However, if one were oneself more and more, might

-not one finally become a June day?..._

-

-Or something of this sort. I am quoting, as nearly as may be, from the

-Book of Our Youth, your youth and mine. Always the Book of Youth will

-open at a page like this. And occasionally it is as if we turned back

-and read there and made a path right away through the page.

-

-This morning a rose-breasted grosbeak wakened me, singing on a bough of

-box-elder so close to my window that the splash of rose on his throat

-almost startled me. It was as if I ought not to have been looking. And

-to turn away from out-of-doors was like leaving some one who was saying

-something. But as soon as I stepped into the day I perceived my old

-problem: _The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near

-enough_.

-

-I stood for a little at the front gate trying soberly to solve the

-matter--or I stood where the front gate should have been; for in our

-midland American villages we have few fences or hedges, and, alas, no

-stone walls. Though undoubtedly this lack comes from an insufficient

-regard for privacy, yet this negative factor I am inclined to condone

-for the sake of the positive motive. And this I conceive to be that we

-are wistful of more ample occupation than is commonly contrived by our

-fifty-feet village lots, and so we royally add to our "yards" the

-sidewalk and the planting space and the road and as much of our

-neighbour's lawn as our imagination can annex. There seems to me to be

-in this a certain charming pathos; as it were, a survival in us of the

-time when we had only to name broad lands our own and to stay upon them

-in order to make them ours in very fact. And now it is as if this serene

-pushing back of imaginary borders were in reality an appending, a kind

-of spiritual taking up of a claim.

-

-How to get nearer to June? I admit that it is a question of the veriest

-idler. But what a delightful company of these questions one can

-assemble. As, How to find one's way to a place that _is_ the way it

-seems Away Across a Meadow. How to meet enough people who hear what one

-says in just the way that one means it. How to get back at will those

-fugitive moments when one almost _knows_ ... what it is all about. And

-with this question the field of the idler becomes the field of the wise

-man; and, indeed, if one idles properly--or rather, if the proper person

-idles--the two fields are not always on opposite sides of the road. To

-idle is by no means merely to do nothing. It is an avocation, a calling

-away, nay, one should say, a piping away. To idle is to inhibit the body

-and to let the spirit keep on. Not every one can idle. I know estimable

-people who frequently relax, like chickens in the sun; but I know only a

-few who use relaxation as a threshold and not as a goal, and who idle

-until the hour yields its full blessing.

-

-I wondered if to idle at adventure might not be the way to June, so I

-went out on the six o'clock street in somewhat the spirit in which

-another might ride the greenwood. Almost immediately I had an encounter,

-for I came on my neighbour in her garden. Not my neighbour who lives on

-the other side of me, and who is a big and obvious deacon, with a

-family of a great many Light Gowns; but My Neighbour. She was watering

-her garden. These water rules and regulations of the village are among

-its spells. To look at the members of the water commission one would

-never suspect them of romance. But if they have it not, why have they

-named from five until nine o'clock the only morning hours when one may

-use the city water for one's lawn and garden? I insist that it cannot be

-a mere regard for the municipal resources, and that the commissioners

-must see something of the romance of getting up before five o'clock to

-drench one's garden, and are providing for the special educational value

-of such a custom. Or, if I do not believe this, I wish very much that I

-did, with the proper grounds.

-

-To tell the truth, however, I do not credit even my neighbour with

-feeling the romance of the hour and of her occupation. She is a still

-woman of more than forty, who does not feel a difference between her

-flower and her vegetable gardens, but regards them both as a part of her

-life in the kind of car-window indifference and complacency of certain

-travellers. She raises foxgloves and parsley, and the sun shines over

-all. I must note a strange impression which my neighbour gives me: she

-has always for me an air of personal impermanence. I have the fancy,

-amounting to a sensation, that she is where she is for just a moment,

-and that she must rush back and be at it again. I do not know at what.

-But whether I see her in church or at a festival, I have always all I

-can do to resist saying to her, "How _did_ you get away?" It was so that

-she was watering her flowers; as if she were intending at any moment to

-hurry off to get breakfast or put up the hammock or mend. And yet before

-she did so she told me, who was a willing listener, a motion or two of

-the spirit of the village.

-

-There is, I observe, a nicety of etiquette here, about the

-Not-quite-news, Not-quite-gossip shared with strangers and

-semi-strangers. The rules seem to be:--

-

-Strangers shall be told only the pleasant occurrences and conditions.

-

-Half strangers may discuss the unpleasant matters which they themselves

-have somehow heard, but only pleasant matters may be added by accretion.

-

-The rest of society may say whatever it "has a mind." But this mind, as

-I believe, is not harsh, since nobody ever gossips except to people who

-gossip back.

-

-"Mis' Toplady told me last night that Calliope Marsh is coming home for

-the Java entertainment, next week," my neighbour imparted first. And

-this was the best news that she could have given me.

-

-It has been a great regret to me that this summer Calliope is not in the

-village. She has gone to the city to nurse some distant kinswoman more

-lonely than she, and until ill-health came, long forgetful of Calliope.

-But she is to come back now and again, to this and to that, for the

-village interests are all her own. I have never known any one in whom

-the tribal sense is so persistently alive as in Calliope.

-

-I asked my neighbour what this Java entertainment would be, which was to

-give back Calliope, and she looked her amazement that I did not know. It

-would be, it appeared, one of those great fairs which the missionary

-society is always projecting and carrying magnificently forward.

-

-"It's awful feet-aching work," said my neighbour, reflectively; "but

-honestly, Calliope seems to like it. I donno but I do, too. The Sodality

-meant to have one when they set out to pave Daphne Street, but it turned

-out it wasn't needed. Well, big affairs like that makes it seem as if

-we'd been born into the whole world and not just into Friendship

-Village."

-

-My neighbour told me that a new public library had been opened in a

-corner of the post-office store, and that "a great crowd" was drawing

-books, though for this she herself cannot vouch, since the library is

-only open Saturday evenings, and "Saturday," she says with decision, "is

-a bad night." It is, in fact, I note, very difficult to find a free

-night in the village, save only Tuesday. Monday, because of its obvious

-duties and incident fatigue, is as impossible as Sunday; Wednesday is

-club day; Thursday "is prayer-meeting"; Friday is sacred to church

-suppers and entertainments and the Ladies' Aid Society; and Saturday is

-invariably denominated a bad night and omitted without question. We are

-remote from society, but Tuesday is literally our only free evening.

-

-"Of course it won't be the same with you about books," my neighbour

-admits. "You can send your girl down to get a book for you. But I have

-to be home to get out the clean clothes. How's your girl going to like

-the country?" she asked.

-

-I am to have here in the village, I find, many a rebuke for habits of

-mine which lag behind my theories. For though I try to solve my share of

-a tragic question by giving to my Swedish maid, Elfa, the self-respect

-and the privilege suited to a human being dependent on me, together with

-ways of comfort and some leisure, yet I find the homely customs of the

-place to have accomplished more than my careful system. And though, when

-I took her from town I scrupulously added to the earnings of my little

-maid, I confess that it had not occurred to me to wonder whether or not

-she would like Friendship Village. We seem so weary-far from the

-conditions which we so facilely conceive. Especially, I seem far. I am

-afraid that I engaged Elfa in the first place with less attention to her

-economic fitness than that she is so trim and still and wistful, with

-such a peculiarly winning upward look; and that her name is Elfa. I told

-my neighbour that I did not know yet, whether Elfa would like it here or

-not; and for refuge I found fault with the worms on the rose bushes.

-Also I made a note in my head to ask Elfa how she likes the country. But

-the spirit of a thing is flown when you make a note of it in your head.

-How does Elfa like the town, for that matter? I never have asked her

-this, either.

-

-"She'll be getting married on your hands, anyway," my neighbour

-observed; "the ladies here say that's one trouble with trying to keep a

-hired girl. They _will_ get married. But I say, let 'em."

-

-At least here is a matter in which my theory, like that of my

-neighbour's, outruns those of certain folk of both town and village. For

-I myself have heard women complain of their servants marrying and

-establishing families, and deplore this shortsightedness in not staying

-where there is "a good home, a nice room, plenty to eat, and all the

-flat pieces sent to the laundry."

-

-"Speaking of books," said my neighbour, "have you seen Nicholas Moor?"

-

-"I see almost no new books," I told her guiltily.

-

-"Me either," she said; "I don't mean he's a book. He's a boy. Nicholas

-Moor--that does a little writin' himself? I guess you will see him.

-He'll be bringin' some of his writing up to show you. He took some to

-the new school principal, I heard, and to the invalid that was here from

-the city. He seems to be sort of lonesome, though he _has_ got a good

-position. He's interested in celluloid and he rings the Catholic bell.

-Nicholas must be near thirty, but he hasn't even showed any signs."

-

-"Signs?" I hazarded.

-

-"Of being in love," she says simply. And I have pondered pleasantly on

-this significant ellipsis of hers which takes serenely for granted the

-basic business of the world. Her elision reminds me of the delicate

-animism of the Japanese which says, "When the rice pot speaks with a

-human voice, then the demon's name is Kanjo." One can appraise a race or

-an individual by the class of things which speech takes for granted,

-love or a demon or whatever it be.

-

-And apropos of "showing signs," do I remember Liva Vesey and Timothy

-Toplady, Jr.? I am forced to confess that I remember neither. I recall,

-to be sure, that the Topladys had a son, but I had thought of him as a

-kind of qualifying clause and it is difficult to conceive of him as the

-subject of a new sentence. When I hear of Liva Vesey I get her confused

-with a pink gingham apron and a pail of buttermilk which used sometimes

-to pass my house with Liva combined. Fancy that pink gingham and that

-pail becoming a person! And my neighbour tells me that the Qualifying

-Clause and the Pink Gingham are "keeping company," and perhaps are to

-determine the cut of indeterminate clauses and aprons, world without

-end.

-

-"The young folks _will_ couple off," says my neighbour; "and," she adds,

-in a manner of spontaneous impression, "_I_ think it's nice. And it's

-nice for the whole family, too. I've seen families that wouldn't ever

-have looked at each other come to be real friends and able to see the

-angels in each other just by the young folks pairing off. This whole

-town's married crisscross and kittering, family into family. I like it.

-It kind o' binds the soil."

-

-My neighbour told me of other matters current in the village, pleasant

-commonplaces having for her the living spirit which the commonplace

-holds in hostage. ("I'm breathing," Little Child soberly announced to me

-that first day of our acquaintance. And I wonder why I smiled?) My

-neighbour slowly crossed her garden and I followed on the walk--these

-informal colloquies of no mean length are perfectly usual in the village

-and they do not carry the necessity for an invitation within the house

-or the implication of a call. The relations of hostess and guest seem

-simply to be suspended, and we talk with the freedom of spirits met in

-air. Is this not in its way prophetic of the time when we shall meet,

-burdened of no conventions or upholstery or perhaps even words, and

-there talk with the very freedom of villagers? Meanwhile I am content

-with conventions, and passive amid upholstery. But I do catch myself

-looking forward.

-

-Suddenly my neighbour turned to me with such a startled, inquiring

-manner that I sent my attention out as at an alarm to see what she

-meant. And then I heard what I had not before noted: a thin, wavering

-line of singing, that had begun in the street beyond our houses, and now

-floated inconsequently to us, lifting, dipping, wandering. I could even

-hear the absurd words.

-

-

-     "_My_ Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I _never_ know.

-     You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh--"

-

-

-the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air.

-

-To say something was like interrupting my neighbour's expression; so I

-waited, and,

-

-"It's old Cary," she explained briefly. "When he does that it's like

-something hurts you, ain't it?"

-

-I thought that this would be no one of my acquaintance, and I said so,

-but tentatively, lest I should be forgetting some inherent figure of the

-village.

-

-"He's come here in the year," she explained--and, save about the obvious

-import of old Cary's maudlin song, she maintained that fine, tribal

-reticence of hers. "Except for the drinking," she even said, "he seems

-to be a quiet, nice man. But it's a shame--for Peter's sake. Peter

-Cary," she added, like a challenge, "is the brainiest young man in

-_this_ town, say what you want."

-

-On which she told me something of this young superintendent of the

-canning factory who has "tried it in Nebraska," and could not bear to

-leave his father here, "this way," and has just returned. "He works

-hard, and plays the violin, and is making a man of himself generally,"

-she told me; "Don't miss him." And I have promised that I will try not

-to miss Peter Cary.

-

-"They live out towards the cemetery way," she added, "him and his

-father, all alone. Peter'll be along by here in a minute on his way to

-work--it's most quarter to. I set my husband down to his breakfast and

-got up his lunch before I come out--I don't have my breakfast till the

-men folks get out of the way."

-

-I never cease to marvel at these splendid capabilities which prepare

-breakfasts, put up lunches, turn the attention to the garden, and all,

-so to speak, with the left hand; ready at any moment to enter upon the

-real business of life--to minister to the sick or bury the dead, or

-conduct a town meeting or a church supper or a birth. They have a kind

-of goddess-like competence, these women. At any of these offices they

-arrive, lacking the cloud, it is true, but magnificently equipped to

-settle the occasion. In crises of, say, deafness, they will clap a hot

-pancake on a friend's ear with an Æsculapian _savoir faire_, for their

-efficiencies combine those of lost generations with all that they hear

-of in this, in an open-minded eclecticism. With Puritans and foresters

-and courtiers in our blood, who knows but that we have, too, the

-lingering ichor of gods and goddesses? Oh--"_don't you wish you had_?"

-What a charming peculiarity it would be to be descended from a state of

-immortality as well as to be preparing for it, nay, even now to be

-entered upon it!

-

-In a few moments after that piteous, fuddled song had died away on the

-other street, Peter Cary came by my neighbour's house. He was a

-splendid, muscular figure in a neutral, belted shirt and a hat battered

-quite to college exactions, though I am sure that Peter did not know

-that. I could well believe that he was making a man of himself. I have

-temerity to say that this boy superintendent of a canning factory looked

-as, in another milieu, Shelley might have looked, but so it was. It was

-not the first time that I have seen in such an one the look, the eyes

-with the vision and the shadow. I have seen it in the face of a man who

-stood on a step-ladder, papering a wall; I have seen it in a mason who

-looked up from the foundation that he mortared; I have seen it often

-and often in the faces of men who till the soil. I was not surprised to

-know that Peter Cary "took" on the violin. The violin is a way out (for

-that look in one's eyes), as, for Nicholas Moor, I have no doubt, is the

-ringing of the Catholic bell. And I am not prepared to say that

-celluloid, and wall-paper, and mortar, and meadows, and canneries,--run

-under good conditions,--may not be a way out as well. At all events, the

-look was still in Peter's face.

-

-Peter glanced briefly at my neighbour, running the risk of finding us

-both looking at him, realized the worst, blushed a man's brown blush,

-and nodded and smiled after he had looked away from us.

-

-"You see this grass?" said my neighbour. "Peter keeps it cut, my husband

-don't get home till so late. We're awful fond of Peter."

-

-There is no more tender eulogy. And I would rather have that said of me

-in the village than in any place I know. No grace of manner or dress or

-mind can deceive anybody. They are fond of you or they are not, and I

-would trust their reasons for either.

-

-My neighbour's husband came out the front door at that moment, and he

-and Peter, without greeting, went on together. Her husband did not look

-toward us, because, in the village, it seems not to be a husband and

-wife ceremonial to say good-by in the morning. I often fall wondering

-how it is in other places. Is it possible that men in general go away

-to work without the consciousness of family, of themselves as going

-forth on the common quest? Is it possible that women see them go and are

-so unaware of the wonder of material life that they do not instance it

-in, at least, good-by? One would think that even the female bear in the

-back of the cave must growl out something simple when her lord leaves

-her in the hope of a good kill.

-

-And when the two men had turned down the brick walk, the maple leaves

-making a come-and-go of shadows and sun-patterns on their backs, my

-neighbour looked at me with a smile--or, say, with two-thirds of a

-smile--as if her vote to smile were unanimous, but she were unwilling by

-it to impart too much.

-

-"It's all Miggy with Peter," she said, as if she were mentioning a

-symptom.

-

-"Miggy?" I said with interest--and found myself nodding to this new

-relationship as to a new acquaintance. And I was once more struck with

-the precision with which certain simple people and nearly all great

-people discard the particularities and lay bare their truths. Could any

-amount of elegant phrasing so reach the heart of the thing and show it

-beating as did, "It's all Miggy with Peter"?

-

-"Yes," my neighbour told me, "it's been her with him ever since he come

-here."

-

-Assuredly I thought the better of Miggy for this; and,

-

-"Is it all Peter with Miggy?" I inquired, with some eagerness.

-

-Land knows, my neighbour thought, and handed me the hose to hold while

-she turned off the water at the hydrant. I remember that a young robin

-tried to alight on the curving spray just as the water failed and

-drooped.

-

-"I like to get a joke on a robin that way," said my neighbour, and

-laughed out, in a kind of pleasant fellowship with jokes in general and

-especially with robins. "It made Miggy's little sister laugh so the

-other day when that happened," she added. Then she glanced over at me

-with a look in her face that I have not seen there before.

-

-"Land," she said, "this is the time of day, after my husband goes off in

-the morning, when I wish I had a little young thing, runnin' round.

-_Now_ almost more than at night. Well--I don't know; both times."

-

-I nodded, without saying anything, my eyes on a golden robin prospecting

-vainly among the green mulberries. I wish that I were of those who know

-what to say when a door is opened like this to some shut place.

-

-"Well," said my neighbour, "now I'll bake up the rest of the batter.

-Want a pink?"

-

-Thus tacitly excused--how true her instinct was, courteously to put the

-three fringed pinks in my hand to palliate her leaving!--I have come

-back to my house and my own breakfast.

-

-"Elfa," said I, first thing, "do you think you are going to like the

-country?"

-

-My little maid turned to me with her winning upward look.

-

-"No'm," she shocked me by saying. And there was another door, opened

-into another shut place; and I did not know what to say to that either.

-

-But I am near to my neighbour; and, in a manner to which Elfa's trimness

-and wistfulness never have impressed me, near to Elfa herself, and I am

-near, near to the village. As I left the outdoors just now, all the

-street was alive: with men and girls going to work, women opening

-windows, a wagon or two in from a Caledonia farm, a general, universal,

-not to say cosmic air of activity and coffee. All the little houses, set

-close together up and down the street, were like a friendly porch party,

-on a long, narrow veranda, where folk sit knee to knee with an avenue

-between for the ice-cream to be handed. All the little lawns and gardens

-were disposed like soft green skirts, delicately embroidered, fragrant,

-flowing.... As I looked, it seemed to me that I could hear the faint hum

-of the village talk--in every house the intimate, revealing confidences

-of the Family, quick with hope or anxiety or humour or passion,

-animated by its common need to live. And along the street flooded the

-sun, akin to the morning quickening in many a heart.

-

-The day has become charged for me with something besides daylight,

-something which no less than daylight pervades, illumines, comes to meet

-me at a thousand points. I wonder if it can be that, unaware, I did get

-near to June?

-

-

-

-

-III

-

-MIGGY

-

-

-I have never heard the chimes of Westminster cathedral, but when some

-time they do sound for me I shall find in them something all my own. For

-the old rosewood clock which has told time for me these many years is

-possessed of a kind of intelligence because its maker gave to it the

-Westminster chimes. Thus, though the clock must by patient ticking teach

-the rhythm of duration until the secret monotony of rhythm is confessed,

-it has also its high tides of life, rhythmic, too, and at every quarter

-hour fills a kind of general creative office: four notes for the

-quarter, eight for the half, twelve for the three-quarters, sixteen for

-the hour, and then the deep Amen of the strokes. At twelve o'clock it

-swells richly to its zenith of expression and almost says something

-else. Through even the organ fulness of the cathedral bells I shall hear

-the tingling melody of the rosewood clock chimes, for their sweet

-incidence has been to me both matins and lullaby and often trembles

-within my sleep. I have the clock always with me. It is a little

-voice-friend, it is one of those half folk, like flowers and the wind

-and an open fireplace and a piano, which are a frail, semi-born race,

-wistful of complete life, but as yet only partly overlapping our own

-sphere. These fascinate me almost as much as the articulate. That was

-why, when my little maid Elfa had brought me the summons to-day, I stood

-on the threshold and in some satisfaction watched Miggy, rapt before my

-clock in its musical maximum of noon.

-

-Miggy is as thin as a bough, and her rather large head is swept by an

-ungovernable lot of fine brown hair. Her face was turned from me, and

-she was wearing a high-necked gingham apron faded to varying values of

-brown and faint purple and violet of a quite surprising beauty. When the

-last stroke ceased, she turned to me as if I had been there all the

-time.

-

-"I wish I could hear it do that again," she said, standing where she had

-stood, arms folded.

-

-"You will, perhaps, to-morrow," I answered.

-

-Truly, if it was to be Miggy, then she would hear the chimes to-morrow

-and to-morrow; and as she turned, my emotion of finality increased. I

-have never loved the tribe of the Headlongs, though I am very sorry for

-any one who has not had with them an occasional innocent tribal junket;

-but I hold that through our intuitions, we may become a kind of

-apotheosis of the Headlongs. Who of us has not chosen a vase, a chair, a

-rug, by some motive transcending taste, by the bidding of a

-friendly-faithful monitor who, somewhere inside one, nodded a choice

-which we obeyed? And yet a vase is a dead thing with no little seeking

-tentacles that catch and cling, while in choosing the living it is that

-one's friendly-faithful monitor is simply recognizing the monitor of the

-other person. I, for one, am more and more willing to trust these two to

-avow their own. For I think that this monitor is, perhaps, that silent

-Custodian whom, if ever I can win through her elusiveness, I shall know

-to be myself. As the years pass I trust her more and more. I find that

-we like the same people, she and I! And instantly we both liked Miggy.

-

-Miggy stood regarding me intently.

-

-"I saw you go past the Brevy's yesterday, where the crape is on the

-door," she observed; "I thought it was you."

-

-I wonder at the precision with which very little people and very big

-people brush aside the minor conventions and do it in such ways that one

-nature is never mistaken for the other.

-

-"The girl who died there was your friend, then?" I asked.

-

-"No," Miggy said; "I just knew her to speak to. And she didn't always

-bother her head to speak to me. I just went in there yesterday morning

-to get the feeling."

-

-"I beg your pardon. To get--what?" I asked.

-

-"Well," said Miggy, "you know when you look at a corpse you can always

-sense your own breath better--like it was something alive inside you.

-That's why I never miss seeing one if I can help. It's the only time I'm

-real glad I'm living."

-

-As I motioned her to the chair and took my own, I felt a kind of

-weariness. The neurotics, I do believe, are of us all the nearest to the

-truth about things, but as I grow older I find myself getting to take a

-surpassing comfort in the normal. Or rather, I am always willing to have

-the normal thrust upon me, but my neurotics I wish to select for myself.

-

-"My neighbour tells me," I said merely, "that she thinks you should be

-my secretary." (It is a big word for the office, but a little hill is

-still a hill.)

-

-"I think so, too," said Miggy, simply, "I was afraid you wouldn't."

-

-"Have you ever been anybody's secretary?" I continued.

-

-"Never," said Miggy. "I never saw anybody before that had a secretary."

-

-"But something must have made her think you would do," I suggested. "And

-what made you think so?"

-

-"Well," Miggy said, "she thinks so because she wants me to get ahead.

-And I think so because I generally think I can do anything--except

-mathematics. Has Secretary got any mathematics about it?"

-

-"Not my secretary work," I told her, reviewing these extraordinary

-qualifications for duty; "except counting the words on a page. You could

-do that?"

-

-"Oh, that!" said Miggy. "But if you told me to multiply two fractions

-you'd never see me again, no matter how much I wanted to come back.

-Calliope Marsh says she's always expecting to find some folks' heads

-caved in on one side--same as red and blue balloons. If mine caved, it'd

-be on the mathematics corner."

-

-I assured her that I never have a fraction in my house.

-

-"Then I'll come," said Miggy, simply.

-

-But immediately she leaned forward with a look of anxiety, and her face

-was pointed and big-eyed, so that distress became a part of it.

-

-"Oh," she said, "I _forgot_. I meant to tell you first."

-

-"What is it? Can you not come, after all?" I inquired gravely.

-

-"I've got a drawback," said Miggy, soberly. "A man's in love with me."

-

-She linked her arms before her, a hand on either shoulder--arms whose

-slenderness amazes me, though at the wrist they taper and in their

-extreme littleness are yet round. Because of this frailty she has a kind

-of little girl look which at that moment curiously moved me.

-

-"Who told you that?" I asked abruptly.

-

-"About it being a drawback? Everybody 'most," said Miggy. "They all

-laugh about us and act like it was a pity."

-

-For a moment I felt a kind of anger as I felt it once when a woman said

-to me of a wife of many years whose first little child was coming, that

-she was "in trouble." I own that,--save with my neighbour, and Calliope,

-and a few more whom I love--here in the village I miss the simple good

-breeding of the perception that nothing is nobler than the emotions, and

-the simple good taste of taking seriously love among its young. Taking

-it seriously, I say. Not, heaven forbid, taking it for granted, as do

-the cities.

-

-"Other things being equal, I prefer folk who are in love," I told Miggy.

-Though I observe that I instance a commercialization which I deplore by

-not insisting on this secretarial qualification to anything like the

-extent with which I insist on, say, spelling.

-

-Miggy nodded--three little nods which seemed to settle everything.

-

-"Then I'll come," she repeated. "Anyhow, it isn't me that's in love at

-all. It's Peter. But of course I have to have some of the blame."

-

-So! It was, then, not "all Peter with Miggy." Poor Peter. It must be a

-terrific problem to be a Peter to such a Miggy. I must have looked "Poor

-Peter," because the girl's face took on its first smile. Such a smile as

-it was, brilliant, sparkling, occupying her features instead of

-informing them.

-

-"He won't interfere much," she observed. "He's in the cannery all day

-and then he practises violin and tinkers. I only see him one or two

-evenings a week; and I never think of him at all."

-

-"As my secretary," said I, "you may make a mental note for me: remind me

-that I wish sometime to meet Peter."

-

-"He'll be real pleased," said Miggy, "and real scared. Now about my

-being your secretary: do I have to take down everything you do?"

-

-"My dear child!" I exclaimed.

-

-"Don't I?" said Miggy. "Why, the Ladies' Aid has a secretary and she

-takes down every single thing the society does. I thought that was being

-one."

-

-I told her, as well as might be, what I should require of her--not by

-now, I own, with any particularity of idea that I had a secretary, but

-rather that I had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be of use in

-many a little mechanical task. She listened, and, when I had made an

-end, gave her three little nods; but her face fell.

-

-"It's just doing as you're told," she summed it up with a sigh.

-"Everything is, ain't it? I thought maybe Secretary was doing your

-best."

-

-"But it is," I told her.

-

-"No," she said positively, "you can't do your best when you have to do

-just exactly what you're told. Your _best_ tells you how to do itself."

-

-At this naïve putting of the personal equation which should play so

-powerful a part in the economics of toil I was minded to apologize for

-intending to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible duties with

-me. She had the truth, though: that the strong creative instinct is the

-chief endowment, primal as breath; for on it depend both life and the

-expression of life, the life of the race and the ultimate racial

-utterance.

-

-We talked on for a little, Miggy, I observed, having that royal

-indifference to time which, when it does not involve indifference to the

-time of other people, I delightedly commend. For myself, I can never

-understand why I should eat at one or sleep at eleven, if it is, as it

-often is, _my_ one and _my_ eleven and nobody else's. For, as between

-the clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other o'clocks are mine

-and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who

-would interrupt a sunset to go to dine, or wave away the stars in their

-courses to go to sleep, merely because the hour had struck. It must be

-in their blood, poor things, as descendants from the cell, to which time

-and space were the only considerations.

-

-When Miggy was leaving, she paused on the threshold with her first hint

-of shyness, a hint which I welcomed. I think that every one to whom I am

-permanently drawn must have in his nature a phase of shyness, even of

-unconquerable timidity.

-

-"If I shouldn't do things," Miggy said, "like you're used to having them

-done--would you tell me? I know a few nice things to do and I do 'em.

-But I'm always waking up in the night and thinking what a lot there must

-be that I do wrong. So if I do 'em wrong would you mind not just

-squirming and keeping still about 'em--but tell me?"

-

-"I'll tell you, child, if there is need," I promised her. And I caught

-her smile--that faint, swift, solemn minute which sometimes reveals on a

-face the childlike wistfulness of every one of us, under the mask, to

-come as near as may be to the others.

-

-I own that when, just now, I turned from her leave-taking, I had that

-infrequent sense of emptiness-in-the-room which I have had usually only

-with those I love or with some rare being, all fire and spirit and idea,

-who has flamed in my presence and died into departure. I cannot see why

-we do not feel this sense of emptiness whenever we leave one another.

-Would you not think that it would be so with us who live above the abyss

-and below the uttermost spaces? It is not so, and there are those from

-whose presence I long to be gone in a discomfort which is a kind of

-orison of my soul to my body to hurry away. It is so that I long to be

-gone from that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, and of this I am

-sorely ashamed. But I think that all such dissonance is merely a failure

-in method, and that the spirit of this business of being is that we long

-for one another to be near.

-

-Yes, in "this world of visible images" and patterns and schedules and

-o'clocks, it is like stumbling on the true game to come on some one who

-is not on any dial. And I fancy that Miggy is no o'clock. She is not

-Dawn o'clock, because already she has lived so much; nor Noon o'clock,

-because she is far from her high moment; nor is she Dusk o'clock,

-because she is so poignantly alive. Rather, she is like the chimes of a

-clock--which do not tell the time, but which almost say something else.

-

-

-

-

-IV

-

-SPLENDOUR TOWN

-

-

-Last night I went for a walk across the river, and Little Child went

-with me to the other end of the bridge.

-

-I would have expected it to be impossible to come to the fourth chapter

-and to have said nothing of the river. But the reason is quite clear:

-for the setting of the stories of the village as I know them is

-preëminently rambling streets and trim dooryards, and neat interiors

-with tidy centre-tables. Nature is merely the necessary opera-house, not

-the intimate setting. Nature's speech through the trees is most

-curiously taken for granted as being trees alone, and she is, as I have

-shown, sometimes cut off quite rudely in the midst of an elm or linden

-sentence and curtly interrupted by a sidewalk. If a grove of trees is

-allowed to remain in a north dooryard it is almost certainly because the

-trees break the wind. Likewise, Nature's unfoldings in our turf and

-clover we incline to regard as merely lawns, the results of seeds and

-autumn fertilizing. Our vines are for purposes of shade, cheaper and

-prettier than awnings or porch rollers. With our gardens, where our

-"table vegetables" are grown, Nature is, I think, considered to have

-little or nothing to do; and we openly pride ourselves on our early this

-and our prodigious that, quite as when we cut a dress or build a

-lean-to. We admit the rain or the sunny slope into partnership, but what

-we recognize is weather rather than the mighty spirit of motherhood in

-Nature. Indeed, our flower gardens, where are wrought such miracles of

-poppies and pinks, are perhaps the only threshold on which we stand

-abashed, as at the sound of a singing voice, a voice that sings

-believing itself to be alone.

-

-These things being so, it is no wonder that the river has been for so

-long no integral part of village life. The river is accounted a place to

-fish, a place to bathe, a thing to cross to get to the other side, an

-objective point--including the new iron bridge--to which to take guests.

-But of the everyday life it is no proper part. On the contrary, the

-other little river, which strikes out silverly for itself to eastward,

-is quite a personality in the village, for on it is a fine fleet of

-little launches with which folk take delight. But this river of mine to

-the west is a thing of whims and eddies and shifting sand bars, and here

-not many boats adventure. So the river is accepted as a kind of pleasant

-hermit living on the edge of the village. It draws few of us as Nature

-can draw to herself. We know the water as a taste only and not yet as an

-emotion. We say that we should enjoy going there if we had the time. I

-know, I know. You see that we do not yet _live_ the river, as an ancient

-people would live their moor. But in our launches, our camping parties,

-our flights to a little near lake for dinner, in a tent here and a swing

-there, set to face riverward, there lies the thrill of process, and by

-these things Nature is wooing us surely to her heart. Already the Pump

-pasture has for us the quality of individuality, and we have picnics

-there and speak of the pasture almost as of a host. Presently we shall

-be companioned by all our calm stretches of meadow, our brown sand bars,

-our Caledonia hills, our quiet lakes, our unnavigable river, as the

-Northmen were fellowed of the sea.

-

-Little Child has at once a wilder and a tamer instinct. She has this

-fellowship and the fellowship of more.

-

-"Where shall we go to-day?" I ask her, and she always says, "Far away

-for a party"--in a combination, it would seem, of the blood of shepherd

-kings with certain corpuscles of modernity. And when we are in the woods

-she instances the same dual quality by, "Now let's sit down in a _roll_

-and wait for a fairy, and be a society."

-

-We always go along the levee, Little Child and I, and I watch the hour

-have its way with her, and I do not deny that occasionally I try to

-improve on the hour by a tale of magic or by the pastime of teaching her

-a lyric. I love to hear her pretty treble in "Who is Sylvia? What is

-she?" and "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," and "April, April, laugh

-thy girlish laughter," and in Pippa's song. Last night, to be sure, the

-lyrics rather gave way to some talk about the circus to be to-day, an

-unwonted benison on the village. But even the reality of the circus

-could not long keep Little Child from certain sweet vagaries, and I love

-best to hear her in these fancyings.

-

-"Here," she said to me last night, "is her sponge."

-

-I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are always finding the fairy's

-cast-off ornaments and articles of toilet. On occasion we have found her

-crown, her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her plumed fan,

-her parasol--a skirtful of fancies which next day Little Child has

-brought to me in a shoe box for safe keeping so that "They" would not

-throw the things away: that threatening "They" which overhangs

-childhood, casting away its treasures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying

-a ladder straight through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the

-back yard. I can visualize that "They" as I believe it seems to some

-children, something dark and beetling and menacing and imminent, less

-like the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this precious idea of

-the Family, to conserve which is one of our chief hopes, should so often

-be made to appear to its youngest member in the general semblance of a

-phalanx?

-

-We sat down for a little at the south terminal of the bridge, where a

-steep bank and a few desperately clinging trees have arranged a little

-shrine to the sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across the bridge

-I had been watching against the gold the majestic or apathetic or sodden

-profiles of the farmers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face,

-it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it to forecast the

-weather. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky

-and called "The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the

-village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white

-pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital. And

-there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the butcher's cart halted in

-snow while a tawny-jerseyed boy lifts high his yellow light to find a

-parcel. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising

-values and fresco our village libraries with them--yes, and our drug

-stores, too.

-

-The story that I told Little Child while we rested had the symbolism

-which I often choose for her: that of a girl keeping a garden for the

-coming of a child. All her life she has been making ready and nothing

-has been badly done. In one green room of the garden she has put fair

-thoughts, in another fair words, and in the innermost fastnesses of the

-garden fair deeds. Here she has laid colour, there sweet sound, there

-something magic which is a special kind of seeing. When the child comes,

-these things will be first toys, then tools, then weapons. Sometimes the

-old witch of the wood tries to blow into the garden a thistle of discord

-or bubbles of delight to be followed, and these must be warded away. All

-day the spirit of the child to come wanders through the garden, telling

-the girl what to do here or here, keeping her from guile or from

-idleness-without-dreams. She knows its presence and I think that she has

-even named it. If it shall be a little girl, then it is to be Dagmar,

-Mother of Day, or Dawn; but if a little boy, then it shall be called for

-one whom she has not yet seen. Meanwhile, outside the door of the garden

-many would speak with the girl. On these she looks, sometimes she even

-leans from her casement, and once, it may be, she reaches out her hand,

-ever so swiftly, and some one without there touches it. But at that she

-snatches back her hand and bars the garden, and for a time the spirit of

-the little child does not come very near. So she goes serenely on

-toward the day when a far horn sounds and somebody comes down the air

-from heaven, as it has occurred to nobody else to do. And they hear the

-voice of the little child, singing in the garden.

-

-"The girl is me," says little Little Child, as she always says when I

-have finished this story.

-

-"Yes," I tell her.

-

-"I'd like to see that garden," she says thoughtfully.

-

-Then I show her the village in the trees of the other shore, roof upon

-roof pricked by a slim steeple; for that is the garden.

-

-"I don't care about just bein' good," she says, "but I'd like to

-housekeep that garden."

-

-"For a sometime-little-child of your own," I tell her.

-

-"Yes," she assents, "an' make dresses for."

-

-I cannot understand how mothers let them grow up not knowing, these

-little mothers-to-be who so often never guess their vocation. It is a

-reason for everything commonly urged on the ground of conduct, a ground

-so lifeless to youth. But quicken every desert space with "It must be

-done so for the sake of the little child you will have some day," and

-there rises a living spirit. Morals, civics, town and home economics,

-learning--there is the concrete reason for them all; and the abstract

-understanding of these things for their own sakes will follow,

-flower-wise, fruit-wise, for the healing of the times.

-

-I had told to that old Aunt Effie who keeps house for Miggy and Little

-Child something of what I thought to do--breaking in upon the old

-woman's talk of linoleum and beans and other things having, so to say,

-one foot in the universe.

-

-"Goodness," that old woman had answered, with her worried turn of head,

-"I'm real glad you're going to be here. _I dread saying anything._"

-

-Here too we must look to the larger day when the state shall train for

-parenthood and for citizenship, when the schools and the universities

-shall speak for the state the cosmic truths, and when by comparison

-botany and differential calculus shall be regarded as somewhat less

-vital in ushering in the kingdom of God.

-

-The water reservoir rose slim against the woods to the north; to the

-south was a crouching hop house covered with old vines. I said to Little

-Child:--

-

-"Look everywhere and tell me where you think a princess would live if

-she lived here."

-

-She looked everywhere and answered:--

-

-"In the water tower in those woods."

-

-"And where would the old witch live?" I asked her.

-

-"In the Barden's hop house," she answered.

-

-"And where would the spirit of the little child be?" I tested her.

-

-She looked long out across the water.

-

-"I think in the sunset," she said at last. And then of her own will she

-said over the Sunset Spell I have taught her:--

-

-

-     "I love to stand in this great air

-     And see the sun go down.

-     It shows me a bright veil to wear

-     And such a pretty gown.

-     Oh, I can see a playmate there

-     Far up in Splendour Town."

-

-

-I could hardly bear to let her go home, but eight o'clock is very

-properly Little Child's bedtime, and so I sent her across the bridge

-waving her hand every little way in that fashion of children who, I

-think, are hoping thus to save the moment that has just died. I have

-known times when I, too, have wanted to wave my hand at a moment and

-keep it looking at me as long as possible. But presently the moment

-almost always turned away.

-

-Last night I half thought that the sunset itself would like to have

-stayed. It went so delicately about its departure, taking to itself

-first a shawl of soft dyes, then a painted scarf, then frail iris wings.

-It mounted far up the heavens, testing its strength for flight and

-shaking brightness from its garments. And it slipped lingeringly away as

-if the riot of colour were after all the casual part, and the real

-business of the moment were to stay on with everybody. In the tenuity of

-the old anthropomorphisms I marvel that they did not find the sunset a

-living thing, tender of mortals, forever loth to step from out one

-moment into the cherishing arms of the next. Think! The sunset that the

-Greeks knew has been flaming round the world, dying from moment to

-moment and from mile to mile, with no more of pause than the human

-heart, since sunset flamed for Hero and Helen and Ariadne.

-

-If the sunset was made for lovers, and in our midland summers lingers on

-their account, then last night it was lingering partly for Miggy and

-Peter. At the end of the bridge I came on them together.

-

-Miggy did not flush when she saw me, and though I would not have

-expected that she would flush I was yet disappointed. I take an

-old-fashioned delight in women whose high spirit is compatible with a

-sensibility which causes them the little agonizings proper to this

-moment, and to that.

-

-But Miggy introduced Peter with all composure.

-

-"This," she said, "is Peter. His last name is Cary."

-

-"How do you do, Peter?" I said very heartily.

-

-I thought that Peter did something the rationale of which might have

-been envied of courts. He turned to Miggy and said "Thank you."

-Secretly I congratulated him on his embarrassment. In a certain milieu

-social shyness is as authentic a patent of perception as in another

-milieu is taste.

-

-"Come home with me," I besought them. "We can find cake. We can make

-lemonade. We can do some reading aloud." For I will not ask the mere

-cake and lemonade folk to my house. They must be, in addition, good or

-wise or not averse to becoming either.

-

-I conceived Peter's evident agony to rise from his need to reply.

-Instead, it rose from his need to refuse.

-

-"I take my violin lesson," he explained miserably.

-

-"He takes his violin lesson," Miggy added, with a pretty, somewhat

-maternal manner of translating. I took note of this faint manner of

-proprietorship, for it is my belief that when a woman assumes it she

-means more than she knows that she means.

-

-"I'm awful sorry," said Peter, from his heart; "I was just having to go

-back this minute."

-

-"To-morrow's his regular lesson day," Miggy explained, "but to-morrow

-he's going to take me to the circus, so he has his lesson to-night. Go

-on," she added, "you'll be late and you'll have to pay just the same

-anyway." I took note of this frank fashion of protection of interests,

-for it is my belief that matters are advancing when the lady practises

-economics in courtship. But I saw that Miggy was manifesting no

-symptoms of accompanying Peter, and I begged them not to let me spoil

-their walk.

-

-"It's all right," Miggy said; "he'll have to hurry and I don't want to

-go in yet anyway. I'll walk back with you." And of this I took note with

-less satisfaction. It was as if Miggy had not come alive.

-

-Peter smiled at us, caught off his hat, and went away with it in his

-hand, and the moment that he left my presence he became another being. I

-could see by his back that he was himself, free again, under no bondage

-of manner. It is a terrific problem, this enslavement of speech and

-trivial conduct which to some of us provides a pleasant medium and for

-some of us furnishes fetters. When will they manage a wireless society?

-I am tired waiting. For be it a pleasant medium or be it fetters, the

-present communication keeps us all apart. "I hope," I said once at

-dinner, "that I shall be living when they think they get the first sign

-from Mars." "I hope," said my companion, "that I shall be living when I

-think I get the first sign from you--and you--and you, about this

-table." If this young Shelley could really have made some sign, what

-might it not have been?

-

-"Everybody's out walking to-night," Miggy observed. "There's Liva Vesey

-and Timothy Toplady ahead of us."

-

-"They are going to be married, are they not?" I asked.

-

-Miggy looked as if I had said something indelicate.

-

-"Well," she answered, "not out loud yet."

-

-Then, fearing that she had rebuked me, "He's going to take her to the

-circus to-morrow in their new buckboard," she volunteered. And I find in

-Friendship that the circus is accounted a kind of official

-trysting-place for all sweethearts.

-

-We kept a little way back of the lovers, the sun making Liva Vesey's

-pink frock like a vase-shaped lamp of rose. Timothy was looking down at

-her and straightway looking away again when Liva had summoned her

-courage to look up. They were extremely pleasant to watch, but this

-Miggy did not know and she was intent upon me. She had met Little Child

-running home.

-

-"She's nice to take a walk with," Miggy said; "but I like to walk around

-by myself too. Only to-night Peter came."

-

-"Miggy," said I, "I want to congratulate you that Peter is in love with

-you."

-

-She looked up with puzzled eyes.

-

-"Why, that was nothing," she said; "he seemed to do it real easy."

-

-"But it is _not_ easy," I assured her, "to find many such fine young

-fellows as Peter seems to be. I hope you will be very happy together."

-

-"I'm not engaged," said Miggy, earnestly; "I'm only invited."

-

-"Ah, well," I said, "if I may be allowed--I hope you are not sending

-regrets."

-

-Miggy laughed out suddenly.

-

-"Married isn't like a party," she said; "I know that much about society.

-Party you either accept or regret. Married you do both."

-

-I could have been no more amazed if the rosewood clock had said it.

-

-"Who has been talking to you, child?" I asked in distress.

-

-"I got it out of living," said Miggy, solemnly. "You live along and you

-live along and you find out 'most everything."

-

-I looked away across the Pump pasture where the railway tracks cut the

-Plank Road, that comes on and on until it is modified into Daphne

-Street. I remembered a morning of mist and dogwood when I had walked

-that road through the gateway into an earthly paradise. Have I not said

-that since that time we two have been, as it were, set to music and

-sung; so that the silences of separation are difficult to beguile save

-by the companionship of the village--the village that has somehow taught

-Miggy its bourgeoise lesson of doubt?

-

-My silence laid on her some vague burden of proof.

-

-"Besides," she said, "I'm not like the women who marry people. Most of

-'em that's married ain't all married, anyway."

-

-"What do you mean, child?" I demanded.

-

-"They're not," protested Miggy. "They marry like they pick out a way to

-have a dress made when they don't admire any of the styles very much,

-and they've wore out everything else. Women like some things about

-somebody, and that much they marry. Then the rest of him never is

-married at all, and by and by that rest starts to get lonesome."

-

-"But Miggy," I said to all this, "I should think you might like Peter

-entirely."

-

-She surprised me by her seriousness.

-

-"Anyhow, I've got my little sister to bring up," she said; "Aunt Effie

-hasn't anything. And I couldn't put two on him to support."

-

-I wondered why not, but I said nothing.

-

-"And besides," Miggy said after a pause, "there's Peter's father. You

-know about him?"

-

-I did know--who in the village did not know? Since my neighbour had told

-me of him I had myself seen him singing through the village streets,

-shouting out and disturbing the serene evenings, drunken, piteous....

-

-"Peter has him all the time," I suggested.

-

-She must have found a hint of resistance in my voice, for her look

-questioned me.

-

-"I never could stand it to have anybody like that in the house," she

-said defensively. "I've told Peter. I've told him both reasons...."

-Miggy threw out her arms and stood still, facing the sunset. "Anyway, I

-want to keep on feeling all free and liberty-like!" she said.

-

-This intense individualism of youth, passioning only for far spaces,

-taking no account of the common lot nor as yet urgent to share it is,

-like the panther grace in the tread of the cat, a survival of the

-ancient immunity from accountabilities. To note it is to range down the

-evolution of ages. To tame it--there is a task for all the servants of

-the new order.

-

-Miggy was like some little bright creature caught unaware in the net of

-living and still remembering the colonnades of otherwhere, renowned for

-their shining. She was looking within the sunset, where it was a thing

-of wings and doors ajar and fair corridors. I saw the great freedoms of

-sunset in her face--the sunset where Little Child and I had agreed that

-a certain spirit lived.... Perhaps it was that that little vagrant

-spirit signalled to me--and the Custodian understood it. Perhaps it was

-that I saw, beneath the freedoms, the woman-tenderness in the girl's

-face. In any case I spoke abruptly and half without intention.

-

-"But you don't want to be free from Little Child. It is almost as if

-she were your little girl, is it not?" I said.

-

-Miggy's eyes did not leave the sunset. It was rather as if she saw some

-answer there.

-

-"Well, I like to pretend she is," she said simply.

-

-"That," I said quietly, "is pleasant to pretend."

-

-And now her mood had changed as if some one had come to take her place.

-

-"But if she _was_--that," she said, "her name, then, would most likely

-be Margaret, like mine, wouldn't it?"

-

-"It would be very well to have it Margaret," I agreed.

-

-Her step was quickened as by sudden shyness.

-

-"It's funny to think about," she said. "Sometimes I most think of--her,

-till she seems in the room. Not quite my sister. I mean _Margaret_."

-

-It made my heart beat somewhat. I wondered if anything of my story to

-Little Child was left in my mind, and if subconsciously Miggy was

-reading it. This has sometimes happened to me with a definiteness which

-would be surprising if the supernatural were to me less natural. But I

-think that it was merely because Miggy had no idea of the sanctity of

-what she felt that she was speaking of it.

-

-"How does she look?" I asked.

-

-"Like me," said Miggy, readily; "I don't want her to either. I want her

-to be pretty and I'm not. But when I think of her running 'round in the

-house or on the street, I always make her look like me. Only little."

-

-"Running 'round in the house." That was the way my neighbour had put it.

-Perhaps it is the way that every woman puts it.

-

-"Does she seem like you, too?" I tempted her on.

-

-"Oh, better," Miggy said confidently; "learning to play on the piano and

-not much afraid of folks and real happy."

-

-"Don't you ever pretend about a boy?" I asked.

-

-She shook her head.

-

-"No," she said; "if I do--I never can think him out real plain. Margaret

-I can most see."

-

-And this, too, was like the girl in the garden and the spirit of that

-one to be called by a name of one whom she had not seen.

-

-I think that I have never hoped so much that I might know the right

-thing to say. And when most I wish this I do as I did then: I keep my

-impulse silent and I see if that vague Custodian within, somewhere

-between the seeing and the knowing, will not speak for me. I wonder if

-she did? At all events, what either she or I said was:--

-

-"Miggy! Look everywhere and tell me the most beautiful thing you can

-see."

-

-She was not an instant in deciding.

-

-"Why, sunset," she said.

-

-"Promise me," said I--said we!--"that you will remember _Now_. And that

-after to-night, when you see a sunset--always, always, till she

-comes--you will think about her. About Margaret."

-

-Because this caught her fancy she promised readily enough. And then we

-lingered a little, while the moment gave up its full argosy. I have a

-fancy for these times when I say "I will remember," and I am always

-selecting them and knowing, as if I had tied a knot in them, that I will

-remember. These times become the moments at which I keep waving my hand

-in the hope that they will never turn away. And it was this significance

-which I wished the hour to have for Miggy, so that for her the sunset

-should forever hold, as Little Child had said that it holds, that tiny,

-wandering spirit....

-

-Liva Vesey and Timothy had lingered, too, and we passed them on the

-bridge, he still trying to win her eyes, and his own eyes fleeing

-precipitantly whenever she looked up. The two seemed leaning upon the

-winged light, the calm stretches of the Pump pasture, the brown sand

-bar, the Caledonia hills. And the lovers and the quiet river and the

-village, roof upon roof, in the trees of the other shore, and most of

-all Miggy and her shadowy Margaret seemed to me like the words of some

-mighty cosmic utterance, with the country evening for its tranquil

-voice.

-

-

-

-

-V

-

-DIFFERENT

-

-

-Those who had expected the circus procession to arrive from across the

-canal to-day were amazed to observe it filing silently across the tracks

-from the Plank Road. The Eight Big Shows Combined had arrived in the

-gray dawn; and word had not yet gone the rounds that, the Fair Ground

-being too wet, the performance would "show" in the Pump pasture, beyond

-the mill. There was to be no evening amusement. It was a wait between

-trains that conferred the circus on Friendship at all.

-

-Half the country-side, having brought its lunch into town to make a day

-of it, trailed as a matter of course after the clown's cart at the end

-of the parade, and about noon arrived in the pasture with the

-pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to find it transformed

-into unknown ground. Who in the vicinity of the village had not known

-the Pump pasture of old? Haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,

-it had lain expressionless as the hills, for as long as memory. When in

-spring, "Where you goin'? Don't you go far in the hot sun!" from

-Friendship mothers was answered by, "We're just goin' up to the Pump

-pasture for vi'lets" from Friendship young, no more was to be said. The

-pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great, faithful Newfoundland

-dog; and about it was something of the safety of silence and warmth and

-night-in-a-trundle-bed.

-

-And lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture were articulate. The great

-elliptical tent, the strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of

-the hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were doing--these gave

-to the place the aspect of having from the first been secretly familiar

-with more than one had suspected.

-

-"Ain't it the divil?" demanded Timothy Toplady, Jr., ecstatically, as

-the glory of the scene burst upon him.

-

-Liva Vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in the buckboard, looked up

-at his brown Adam's apple--she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as

-her sweetheart's face--and rejoined:--

-

-"Oh, Timmie! ain't it just what you might say _great_?"

-

-"You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly, "that it is that."

-

-He looked down in her face with a lifting of eyebrows and an honest

-fatuity of mouth. Liva Vesey knew the look--without ever having met it

-squarely, she could tell when it was there, and she promptly turned her

-head, displaying to Timothy's ardent eyes tight coils of beautiful blond

-crinkly hair, a little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver

-locket chain. At which Timothy now collapsed with the mien of a man who

-is unwillingly having second thoughts.

-

-"My!" he said.

-

-They drove into the meadow, and when the horse had been loosed and cared

-for, they found a great cottonwood tree, its leaves shimmering and

-moving like little banners, and there they spread their lunch. The sunny

-slope was dotted with other lunchers. The look of it all was very gay,

-partly because the trees were in June green, and among them windmills

-were whirling like gaunt and acrobatic witches, and partly because it

-was the season when the women were brave in new hats, very pink and very

-perishable.

-

-The others observed the two good-humouredly from afar, and once or twice

-a tittering group of girls, unescorted, passed the cottonwood tree,

-making elaborate detours to avoid it. At which Liva flushed, pretending

-not to notice; and Timothy looked wistfully in her face to see if she

-wished that she had not come with him. However, Timothy never dared

-look at her long enough to find out anything at all; for the moment that

-she seemed about to meet his look he always dropped his eyes

-precipitantly to her little round chin and so to the silver chain and

-locket. And then he was miserable.

-

-It was strange that a plain heart-shaped locket, having no initials,

-could make a man so utterly, extravagantly unhappy. Three months

-earlier, Liva, back from a visit in the city, had appeared with her

-locket. Up to that time the only personality in which Timothy had ever

-indulged was to mention to her that her eyes were the colour of his

-sister's eyes, whose eyes were the colour of their mother's eyes and

-their father's eyes, and of Timothy's own, and "Our eyes match, mine and

-yours," he had blurted out, crimson. And yet, even on these terms, he

-had taken the liberty of being wretched because of her. How much more

-now when he was infinitely nearer to her? For with the long spring

-evenings upon them, when he had sat late at the Vesey farm, matters had

-so far advanced with Timothy that, with his own hand, he had picked a

-green measuring-worm from Liva's throat. Every time he looked at her

-throat he thought of that worm with rapture. But also every time he

-looked at her throat he saw the silver chain and locket. And on circus

-day, if the oracles seemed auspicious, he meant to find out whose

-picture was worn in that locket, even though the knowledge made him a

-banished man.

-

-If only she would ever mention the locket! he thought disconsolately

-over lunch. If only she would "bring up the subject," then he could find

-courage. But she never did mention it. And the talk ran now:--

-

-"Would you ever, ever think this was the Pump pasture?" from Liva.

-

-"No, you wouldn't, would you? It don't look the same, does it? You'd

-think you was in a city or somewheres, wouldn't you now? Ain't it

-differ'nt?"

-

-"Did you count the elephants?"

-

-"I bet I did. Didn't you? Ten, wa'n't it? Did you count the cages?

-Neither did I. And they was too many of 'em shut up. I don't know

-whether it's much of a circus or not--" with gloomy superiority--"they

-not bein' any calliope, so."

-

-"A good many cute fellows in the band," observed Liva. For Liva would

-have teased a bit if Timothy would have teased too. But Timothy replied

-in mere misery:--

-

-"You can't tell much about these circus men, Liva. They're apt to be the

-kind that carouse around. I guess they ain't much to 'em but their swell

-way."

-

-"Oh, I don't know," said Liva.

-

-Then a silence fell, resembling nothing so much as the breath of

-hesitation following a _faux pas_, save that this silence was longer,

-and was terminated by Liva humming a little snatch of song to symbolize

-how wholly delightful everything was.

-

-"My!" said Timothy, finally. "You wouldn't think this was the Pump

-pasture at all, it looks so differ'nt."

-

-"That's so," Liva said. "You wouldn't."

-

-It was almost as if the two were inarticulate, as the pasture had been

-until the strange influences of the day had come to quicken it.

-

-While Liva, with housewifely hands, put away the lunch things in their

-basket, Timothy nibbled along lengths of grass and hugged his knees and

-gloomed at the locket. It was then that Miggy and Peter passed them and

-the four greeted one another with the delicate, sheepish enjoyment of

-lovers who look on and understand other lovers. Then Timothy's look went

-back to Liva. Liva's rose-pink dress was cut distractingly without a

-collar, and the chain seemed to caress her little throat. Moreover, the

-locket had a way of hiding beneath a fold of ruffle, as if it were _her_

-locket and as if Timothy had no share in it.

-

-"Oh," cried Liva, "_Timmie_! That was the lion roared. Did you hear?"

-

-Timothy nodded darkly, as if there were worse than lions.

-

-"Wasn't it the lion?" she insisted.

-

-Timothy nodded again; he thought it might have been the lion.

-

-"What you so glum about, Timmie?" his sweetheart asked, glancing at him

-fleetingly.

-

-Timothy flushed to the line of his hair.

-

-"Gosh," he said, "this here pasture looks so differ'nt I can't get over

-it."

-

-"Yes," said Liva, "it does look differ'nt, don't it?"

-

-Before one o'clock they drifted with the rest toward the animal tent.

-They went incuriously past the snake show, the Eats-'em-alive show, and

-the Eastern vaudeville. But hard by the red wagon where tickets were

-sold Timothy halted spellbound. What he had heard was:--

-

-"Types. Types. Right this way AND in this direction for Types. No,

-Ladies, and no, Gents: Not Tin-types. But Photo-types. Photo_graphs_ put

-up in Tintype style AT Tintype price. Three for a quarter. The fourth of

-a dozen for the fourth of a dollar. Elegant pictures, elegant finish,

-refined, up-to-date. Of yourself, Gents, of yourself. Or of any one you

-see around you. And WHILE you wait."

-

-Timothy said it before he had any idea that he meant to say it:--

-

-"Liva," he begged, "come on. You."

-

-When she understood and when Timothy saw the momentary abashment in her

-eyes, it is certain that he had never loved her more. But the very next

-moment she was far more adorable.

-

-"Not unless you will, Timmie," she said, "and trade."

-

-He followed her into the hot little tent as if the waiting chair were a

-throne of empire. And perhaps it was. For presently Timothy had in his

-pocket a tiny blurry bit of paper at which he had hardly dared so much

-as glance, and he had given another blurry bit into her keeping. But

-that was not all. When she thanked him she had met his eyes. And he

-thought--oh, no matter what he thought. But it was as if there were

-established a throne of empire with Timothy lord of his world.

-

-Then they stepped along the green way of the Pump pasture and they

-entered the animal tent, and Strange Things closed about them. There

-underfoot lay the green of the meadow, verdant grass and not infrequent

-moss, plantain and sorrel and clover, all as yet hardly trampled and

-still sweet with the breath of kine and sheep. And three feet above,

-foregathered from the Antipodes, crouched and snarled the striped and

-spotted things of the wild, with teeth and claws quick to kill, and with

-generations of the jungle in their shifting eyes. The bright wings of

-unknown birds, the scream of some harsh throat of an alien wood, the

-monkeys chattering, the soft stamp and padding of the elephants chained

-in a stately central line along the clover--it was certain, one would

-have said, that these must change the humour of the pasture as the

-companionship of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the

-mind. That the pasture, indeed, would never be the same, and that its

-influence would be breathed on all who entered there. Already Liva and

-Timothy, each with the other's picture in a pocket, moved down that tent

-of the field in another world. Or had that world begun at the door of

-the stuffy little phototype tent?

-

-It was the cage of bright-winged birds that held the two. Timothy stood

-grasping his elbows and looking at that flitting flame and orange. Dare

-he ask her if she would wear his phototype in her locket--dare he--dare

-he----

-

-He turned to look at her. Oh, and the rose-pink cambric was so near his

-elbow! Her face, upturned to the birds, was flushed, her lips were

-parted, her eyes that matched Timothy's were alight; but there was

-always in Timothy's eyes a look, a softness, a kind of speech that

-Liva's could not match. He longed inexpressibly to say to her what was

-in his heart concerning the locket--the phototype--themselves. And Liva

-herself was longing to say something about the sheer glory of the hour.

-So she looked up at his brown Adam's apple, and,

-

-"Think, Timmie," she said, "they're all in the Pump pasture where

-nothin' but cows an' robins an' orioles ever was before!"

-

-"I know it--I know it!" breathed Timothy fervently. "Don't seem like it

-could be the same place, does it?"

-

-Liva barely lifted her eyes.

-

-"It makes us seem differ'nt, too," she said, and flushed a little, and

-turned to hurry on.

-

-"I was thinkin' that too!" he cried ecstatically, overtaking her. But

-all that Timothy could see was tight coils of blond, crinkled hair, and

-a little ear and a curve of white throat, with a silver locket chain.

-

-Down the majestic line of the elephants, towering in the apotheosis of

-mere bulk to preach ineffectually that spirit is apocryphal and mass

-alone is potent; past the panthers that sniffed as if they guessed the

-nearness of the grazing herd in the next pasture; past the cage in which

-the lioness lay snarling and baring her teeth above her cubs, so

-pathetically akin to the meadow in her motherhood; past unknown

-creatures with surprising horns and shaggy necks and lolling tongues--it

-was a wonderful progress. But it was as if Liva had found something more

-wonderful than these when, before the tigers' cage, she stepped

-forward, stooped a little beneath the rope, and stood erect with

-shining eyes.

-

-"Look!" she said. "Look, Timmie."

-

-She was holding a blue violet.

-

-"In front of the tigers; it was _growing_!"

-

-"Why don't you give it to me?" was Timothy's only answer.

-

-She laid it in his hand, laughing a little at her daring.

-

-"It won't ever be the same," she said. "Tigers have walked over it. My,

-ain't everything in the pasture differ'nt?"

-

-"Just as differ'nt as differ'nt can be," Timothy admitted.

-

-"Here we are back to the birds again," Liva said, sighing.

-

-Timothy had put the violet in his coat pocket and he stood staring at

-the orange and flame in the cage: Her phototype and a violet--her

-phototype and a violet.

-

-But all he said, not daring to look at her at all, was:--

-

-"I can't make it seem like the Pump pasture to save me."

-

-There is something, as they have said of a bugle, "winged and warlike"

-about a circus--the confusions, the tramplings, the shapes, the keen

-flavour of the Impending, and above all the sense of the Untoward,

-which is eternal and which survives glamour as his grave survives a man.

-Liva and Timothy sat on the top row of seats and felt it all, and

-believed it to be merely honest mirth. Occasionally Liva turned and

-peered out through the crack in the canvas where the side met the roof,

-for the pure joy of feeling herself alien to the long green fields with

-their grazing herds and their orioles, and at one with the colour and

-music and life within. And she was glad of it all, glad to be there with

-Timothy. But all she said was:--

-

-"Oh, Timmie, I hope it ain't half over yet. Do you s'pose it is? When I

-look outside it makes me feel as if it was over."

-

-And Timothy, his heart beating, a great hope living in his breast,

-answered only:--

-

-"No, I guess it'll be quite some time yet. It's a nice show. Nice

-performance for the money, right through. Ain't it?"

-

-When at length it really was over and they left the tent, the wagons

-from town and country-side and the "depot busses" had made such a place

-of dust and confusion that he took her back to the cottonwood on the

-slope to wait until he brought the buckboard round. He left her leaning

-against the tree, the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly on

-the smooth silver locket. And when he drove back, and reached down a

-hand to draw her up to the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment,

-as she mounted, with all the panorama of the field behind her, he

-perceived instantly that the locket was gone. Oh, and at that his heart

-leaped up! What more natural than to dream that she had taken it off to

-slip his phototype inside and that he had come back too soon? What more

-natural than to divine the reality of dreams?

-

-His trembling hope held him silent until they reached the highway. Then

-he looked at the field, elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming

-crowds, and he observed as well as he could for the thumping of his

-heart:--

-

-"I kind o' hate to go off an' leave it. To-morrow when I go to town with

-the pie-plant, it'll look just like nothin' but a pasture again."

-

-Liva glanced up at him and dropped her eyes.

-

-"I ain't sure," she said.

-

-"What do you mean?" he asked her, wondering.

-

-But Liva shook her head.

-

-"I ain't sure," she said evasively, "but I don't think somehow the Pump

-pasture'll _ever_ be the same again."

-

-Timothy mulled that for a moment. Oh, could she _possibly_ mean

-because....

-

-Yet what he said was, "Well, the old pasture looks differ'nt enough now,

-all right."

-

-"Yes," assented Liva, "don't it?"

-

-Timothy had supper at the Vesey farm. It was eight o'clock and the

-elder Veseys had been gone to prayer-meeting for an hour when Liva

-discovered that she had lost her locket.

-

-"Lost your locket!" Timothy repeated. It was the first time, for all his

-striving, that he had been able to mention the locket in her presence.

-He had tried, all the way home that afternoon, to call her attention

-innocently to its absence, but the thing that he hoped held fast his

-intention. "Why," he cried now, in the crash of that hope, "you had it

-on when I left you under the cottonwood."

-

-"You sure?" Liva demanded.

-

-"Sure," Timothy said earnestly; "didn't--didn't you have it off while I

-was gone?" he asked wistfully.

-

-"No," Liva replied blankly; she had not taken it off.

-

-When they had looked in the buckboard and had found nothing, Timothy

-spoke tentatively.

-

-"Tell you what," he said. "We'll light a lantern and hitch up and drive

-back to the Pump pasture and look."

-

-"Could we?" Liva hesitated.

-

-It was gloriously starlight when the buckboard rattled out on the Plank

-Road. Timothy, wretched as he was at her concern over the locket, was

-yet recklessly, magnificently happy in being alone by her side in the

-warm dusk, and on her ministry. She was silent, and, for almost the

-first time since he had known her, Timothy was silent too--as if he were

-giving his inarticulateness honest expression instead of forcing it

-continually to antics of speech.

-

-From the top of the hill they looked down on the Pump pasture. It lay

-there, silent and dark, but no longer expressionless; for instantly

-their imagination quickened it with all the music and colour and life of

-the afternoon. Just as Timothy's silence was now of the pattern of

-dreams.

-

-He tied the horse, and together they entered the field by the great open

-place where the fence had not yet been replaced. The turf was still soft

-and yielding, in spite of all the treading feet. The pasture was girdled

-by trees--locusts and box-alders outlined dimly upon the sky,

-nest-places for orioles; and here and there a great oak or a cottonwood

-made a mysterious figure on the stars. One would have said that

-underfoot would certainly be violets. A far light pricked out an answer

-to their lantern, and a nearer firefly joined the signalling.

-

-"I keep thinkin' the way it looked here this afternoon," said Liva once.

-

-"That's funny, so do I," he cried.

-

-Under the cottonwood on the slope, its leaves stirring like little

-banners, Timothy flashed his light, first on tufted grass, then on

-red-tasselled sorrel, then--lying there as simply as if it belonged

-there--on Liva's silver locket. She caught it from him with a little

-cry.

-

-"Oh," she said, "I'm so glad. Oh, thank you ever so much, Timmie."

-

-He faced her for a moment.

-

-"Why are you so almighty glad?" he burst out.

-

-"Why, it's the first locket I ever had!" she said in surprise. "So of

-course I'm glad. Oh, Timmie--thank you!"

-

-"You're welcome, I'm sure," he returned stiffly.

-

-She gave a little skipping step beside him.

-

-"Timmie," she said, "let's circle round a little ways and come by where

-the big tent was. I want to see how it'll seem."

-

-His ill-humour was gone in a moment.

-

-"That's what we _will_ do!" he cried joyously.

-

-He walked beside her, his lantern swinging a little rug of brightness

-about their feet. So they passed the site of the big red ticket wagon,

-of the Eastern vaudeville, of the phototype tent; so they traversed the

-length where had stretched the great elliptical tent that had prisoned

-for them colour and music and life, as in a cup. And so at last they

-stepped along that green way of the pasture where underfoot lay the

-grass and the not infrequent moss and clover, not yet wholly trampled to

-dust; and this was where there had been assembled bright-winged birds

-of orange and flame and creatures of the wild from the Antipodes, and

-where Strange Things had closed them round.

-

-The influence of what the pasture had seen must have been breathed on

-all who entered there that night: something of the immemorial freedom of

-bright birds in alien woods, of the ancestral kinship of the wild. For

-that tranquil meadow, long haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,

-expressionless as the hills, dependable as a nurse, had that day known

-strange breath, strange tramplings, cries and trumpetings, music and

-colour and life and the beating of wild hearts--and was it not certain

-that these must change the humour of the place as the coming of the

-grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind? The field bore the

-semblance of a place exquisitely of the country and, here in the dark,

-it was inarticulate once more. But something was stirring there,

-something that swept away what had always been as a wind sweeps,

-something that caught up the heart of the boy as ancient voices stir in

-the blood.

-

-Timothy cast down his lantern and gathered Liva Vesey in his arms. Her

-cheek lay against his shoulder and he lifted her face and kissed her,

-three times or four, with all the love that he bore her.

-

-"Liva," he said, "all the time--every day--I've meant this. Did you

-mean it, too?"

-

-She struggled a little from him, but when he would have let her go she

-stood still in his arms. And then he would have her words and "Did you?"

-he begged again. He could not hear what she said without bending close,

-close, and it was the sweeter for that.

-

-"Oh, Timmie," she answered, "I don't know. I don't know if I _did_. But

-I do--now."

-

-Timothy's courage came upon him like a mantle.

-

-"An' be my wife?" he asked.

-

-"An' be ..." Liva assented, and the words faltered away. But they were

-not greatly missed.

-

-Timothy looked over the pasture, and over the world. And lo, it was

-suddenly as if, with these, he were become articulate, and they were all

-three saying something together.

-

-When they turned, there was the lantern glimmering alight on the trodden

-turf. And in its little circle of brightness they saw something coloured

-and soft. It was a gay feather, and Timothy took it curiously in his

-hand.

-

-"See, it's from one of the circus birds," he said.

-

-"No!" Liva cried. "It's an oriole feather. One of the pasture orioles,

-Timmie!"

-

-"So it is," he assented, and without knowing why, he was glad that it

-was so. He folded it away with the violet Liva had gathered that

-afternoon. After all the strangeness, what he treasured most had

-belonged to the pasture all the time.

-

-"Liva!" he begged. "Will you wear the picture--my picture--in that

-locket?"

-

-"Oh," she said, "Timmie, I'm so sorry. The locket's one I bought cheap

-in the city, and it don't open."

-

-She wondered why that seemed to make him love her more. She wondered a

-little, too, when on the edge of the pasture Timothy stood still,

-looking back.

-

-"Liva!" he said, "don't the Pump pasture seem differ'nt? Don't it seem

-like another place?"

-

-"Yes," Liva said, "it don't seem the same."

-

-"Liva!" Timothy said again, "it ain't the pasture that's so differ'nt.

-It's _us_."

-

-She laughed a little--softly, and very near his coat sleeve.

-

-"I 'most knew that this afternoon," she answered.

-

-

-

-

-VI

-

-THE FOND FORENOON

-

-

-This morning Miggy came by appointment to do a little work for me, and

-she appeared in some "best" frock to honour the occasion. It was a blue

-silk muslin, cut in an antiquated style and trimmed with tarnished

-silver passementerie. In it the child was hardly less distinguished than

-she had been in her faded violet apron. It was impossible for her to

-seem to be unconscious of her dress, and she spoke of it at once with

-her fine directness.

-

-"I didn't have anything good enough to wear," she said. "I haven't got

-any good dress this summer till I get it made myself. I got this out of

-the trunk. It was my mother's."

-

-"It suits you very well, Miggy," I told her.

-

-"I thought maybe she'd like my wearing it--here," said Miggy, shyly.

-"You've got things the way she always wanted 'em."

-

-We went in my workroom and sat among my books and strewn papers. A

-lighted theatre with raised curtain and breathless audience, a room

-which one wakens to find flooded by a gibbous moon, these have for me

-no greater sorcery than morning in a little book-filled room, with the

-day before me. Perhaps it is that I ought to be doing so many things

-that I take an idler's delight in merely attending to my own occupation.

-

-While I wondered at what I should set Miggy, I looked for the spirit of

-the minute and tried not to see its skeleton. The skeleton was that I

-had here an inexperienced little girl who was of almost no use to me.

-The spirit was that whatever I chose to do, my work was delightful to

-me, and that to bring Miggy in contact with these things was a kind of

-adventure. It is, I find, seldom sufficient to think even of the body of

-one's work, which to-day proved to be in my case a search in certain old

-books and manuscripts for fond allusions. If one can, so to say, think

-in and out till one comes to the spirit of a task, then there will be

-evident an indeterminate sense of wings. Without these wings there can

-be no expression and no creation. And in the true democracy no work will

-be wingless. It will still be, please God, laborious, arduous, even

-heart-breaking, but never body-fettered, never with its birdlike spirit

-quenched. And in myself I would bring to pass, even now, this fair order

-of sweet and willing toil by taking to my hand no task without looking

-deep within for its essential life.

-

-So it was with a sense not only of pleasure but of leisure that I

-established Miggy by the window with a manuscript of ancient romances

-and told her what to do: to look through them for a certain story,

-barely more than a reference, to the love of an Indian woman of this

-Middle West for her Indian husband, sold into slavery by the French

-Canadians. It is a simple story--you will find small mention made of

-it--but having once heard it the romance had haunted me, and I was fain

-to come on it again: the story of the wife of Kiala, fit to stand niched

-with the great loves of the world.

-

-The morning sun--it was hardly more than eight o'clock--slanted across

-the carpet; some roses that Little Child had brought me before her

-breakfast were fresh on my table; and the whole time was like a quiet

-cup. In that still hour experience seemed drained of all but fellowship,

-the fellowship of Miggy and my books and the darling insistence of the

-near outdoors. Do you not think how much of life is so made up, free of

-rapture or anxiety, dedicated, in task or in pastime, to serene

-companionship?

-

-I have said that for me there are few greater sorceries than morning,

-with the day before me, in a small book-filled room. I wonder if this is

-not partly because of my anticipations of the parentheses I shall take?

-Not recesses, but parentheses, which can flavour a whole day. I

-remember a beloved house in which breakfast and luncheon were daily

-observations looked forward to not so much for themselves, as that they

-were occasions for the most delightful interruptions. Dinner was a

-ceremony which was allowed to proceed; but a breakfast or a luncheon was

-seldom got through without one or two of us leaving the table to look up

-a stanza, or to settle if two words had the same derivation, or to find

-if some obsolete fashion in meanings could not yet be worn with

-impunity. It grieved the dear housewife, I remember, and we tried to

-tell her how much more important these things were than that our new

-potatoes should be buttered while they were hot. But she never could see

-it, and potatoes made us think of Ireland, and in no time we were deep

-in the Celtic revival and racing off to find "The Love Talker." I

-remember but one dinner interruption, and that was when we all left in

-the midst of the fish to go in the study and determine if moonlight

-shining through stained glass does cast a coloured shadow, as it did on

-St. Agnes' eve.... I suppose, in those days, we must have eaten

-something, though, save a certain deep-dish cherry pie I cannot remember

-what we ate; but those interruptions are with me like so many gifts, and

-I maintain that these were the realities. Those days--and especially the

-morning when we read through the "Ancient Mariner" between pasting in

-two book plates!--taught me the precious lesson that the interruption

-and not the task may hold the angel. It was so that I felt that morning

-with Miggy; and I know that what we did with that forenoon will persist

-somewhere when all my envelopes of clippings are gone to dust.

-

-After a time I became conscious that the faint rustling of the papers

-through which I was looking was absorbed by another sound, rhythmic,

-stedfast. I looked out on my neighbour's lawn, and at that moment,

-crossing my line of vision through the window before which Miggy was

-seated, I saw Peter, cutting my neighbour's grass. I understood at once

-that he had chosen this morning for his service in order to be near

-Miggy. It all made a charming sight,--Peter, bareheaded, in an

-open-throated, neutral shirt, cutting the grass there beyond Miggy in

-her quaint dress, reading a romance. I forgot my work for a little, and

-watched for those moments of his passing. Miggy read on, absorbed. Then,

-for a little, I watched her, pleased at her absorption.

-

-Sometimes, from my window, I have looked down on the river and the long

-yellow sand bar and the mystery of the opposite shore where I have never

-been, and I have felt a great pity that these things cannot know that

-they are these things. Sometimes, in the middle of a summer night, when

-the moon is so bright that one can see well within one's own soul, I

-have fancied that I have detected an aroma of consciousness, of definite

-self-wonder, in the Out-of-doors. Fleetingly I have divined it in the

-surprise of Dawn, the laughter of a blue Forenoon, the girlish shyness

-of Twilight. And this morning I wanted self-wonder for Miggy and Peter.

-What a pity that they could not see it all as I saw it: the Shelley-like

-boy cutting the grass and loving this girl, in her mother's gown. But

-you must not suppose, either, that I do not know how that vast

-unconsciousness of Nature and Love flows with a sovereign essence almost

-more precious than awareness.

-

-"Miggy," I said presently, "Peter is not at work to-day. That is he

-cutting grass."

-

-She looked out briefly.

-

-"He's got two days off coming to him," she answered. "It's for overtime.

-This must be one of 'em. Have _you_ read these stories?"

-

-"Yes," I said, "I have. Miggy, don't you want to go and ask Peter to

-have lunch with us at twelve?"

-

-"Oh, no, thank you," she dismissed this. "This isn't the day I see him."

-

-"But wouldn't you like it?" I pressed the matter curiously. "Just we

-three at luncheon alone?"

-

-She was turning the leaves of the manuscript and she looked up to set

-me right.

-

-"Oh, you know," she said, "I don't know Peter _that_ way at all. I just

-know him to have him walk home with me, or call, or go walking. Peter

-never eats with me."

-

-Poor Peter, indeed, to be denied the simple intimacy of sometimes

-breaking bread with Miggy. I understood that to invite a man to "noon

-lunch" in the village was almost unheard of, but,

-

-"I think he would eat this noon if he never ate before," said I. To

-which Miggy made answer:--

-

-"If you have read all these stories will you--wouldn't you--tell me

-some, please? I can't bear to think of having to wait to read 'em before

-I know 'em!"

-

-She shut the book and leaned her chin in her hand and looked at me. And

-the idea of having Peter with us for lunch drifted out of the room,

-unattended.

-

-I maintain that one who loves the craft of letters for its own sake, one

-who loves both those who have followed it and the records that they have

-left, and one who is striving to make letters his way of service, must

-all have acted in the same way; and that was the way that I took. In

-these days when Helen and Juliet are read aloud to children while they

-work buttonholes in domestic science class, think of the pure

-self-indulgence of coming on a living spirit--I say a _living_

-spirit--who had never heard of the beloved women of the world. I wonder

-if we could not find such spirits oftener if we looked with care? When I

-see certain women shopping, marketing, jolting about in busses, I am

-sometimes moved to wonder if they know anything about Nicolete and, if

-they were to be told, whether it would not rest them.

-

-I love it, I love this going back into old time and bringing out its

-sweet elements. I have said that there is a certain conservatism in

-which, if I let my taste have its way with me, I would luxuriate, as I

-might then indulge my love of the semi-precious stones, or of old

-tiling, or of lilies-of-the-valley, all day long. And it is so that my

-self-indulgence would lead me to spend my days idling over these shadowy

-figures in the old romances and the old biographies. The joy of it never

-leaves me. Always from these books drifts out to me the smoke of some

-hidden incense that makes the world other. Not that I want the world to

-be that way, but I like to pretend. I know now that in a world where one

-must give of one's utmost, spend and be spent if one is even to pay for

-one's keep, these incense hours must be occasional, not to say stolen.

-So that to find a Miggy to whom to play preceptor of romance was like

-digging a moonstone out of the river bank.

-

-What did I tell her? Not of Helen or Cleopatra or Isolde or Heloise or

-Guinevere, because--why, I think that you would not have told her of

-these, either. Of Beatrice and Brunhilde and Elaine and Enid I told her,

-for, though these are so sad, there beat the mighty motives, seeds of

-the living heart. Last I told her, of Nicolete and of Griselda and of

-Psyche and of the great sun of these loves that broke from cloud. She

-listened, wrapt as I was wrapt in the telling. Was it strange that the

-room, which had been like a quiet cup for serene companionship, should

-abruptly be throbbing with the potent principles of the human heart? I

-think that it was not strange, for assuredly these are nearer to us than

-breathing, instant to leap from us, the lightning of the soul, electric

-with life or with death. We are never very far from strong emotion. Even

-while I recounted these things to Miggy, there, without my window, was

-Peter, cutting the grass.

-

-When I had done, "Is there more like that in books?" asked Miggy.

-

-Oh, yes; thank heaven and the people who wrote them down, there are in

-books many more like these.

-

-"I s'pose lots didn't get into the books at all," said Miggy,

-thoughtfully.

-

-It is seldom that one finds and mourns a bird that is dead. But think of

-the choir of little bright breasts whose raptures nobody hears, nobody

-misses, nobody remembers. How like them we are, we of the loving

-hearts.

-

-"I wouldn't wonder if there's lots of folks being that way right, right

-now," concluded Miggy.

-

-Who am I that I should doubt this?

-

-"A tournament," said Miggy, dreamily; "I s'pose that was something like

-the Java entertainment is going to be."

-

-She slipped to one side of the big chair and laid both hands on its arm.

-

-"Listen," she said. "Would this be one? You know Delly Watson that's

-crazy? She was in love with Jem Pitlaw, a school teacher that used to be

-here, an' that died, an' that wasn't in love with her even if he had

-stayed living, and it did that to her. You know ... she talks about

-things that nobody ever heard of, and listens, and laughs at what she

-thinks she hears. Ain't that like Elaine?"

-

-Yes, if poor Delly Watson of the village had had a barge and a dwarf and

-a river winding from towered city to towered city, she would not have

-been unlike Elaine.

-

-"And Jerry, that sets up folks's stoves and is so in love with the music

-teacher that he joined the chorus and paid his dues and set in the bass

-corner all winter to watch her and he can't sing a note. And she don't

-even see him when she passes him. Ain't that like Beatrice and the Pale

-Man?"

-

-Jerry is so true and patient, and our young music teacher is so fair,

-that no one could find it sacrilege to note this sad likeness.

-

-"And Mis' Uppers that her husband went out West and she didn't get any

-word, and he don't come, and he don't come, and she's selling tickets on

-the parlour clock, and she cries when anybody even whistles his

-tunes--isn't that some like Brunhilde, that you said about, waiting all

-alone on top of the mountain? I guess Brunhilde had money, but I don't

-think Mis' Uppers' principal trouble is that she ain't. With both of 'em

-the worst of it must 'a' been the waiting."

-

-And I am in no wise sure that that slow-walking woman in the pointed

-gray shawl may not have a heart which aches and burns and passions like

-a valkyr's.

-

-"And Mame Wallace, that her beau died and all she's got is to keep house

-for the family, and keep house, and _keep_ house. It seems as if she's

-sort of like Psyche, that had such an awful lot of things to do--and her

-life all mussed up."

-

-Perhaps it is so that in that gaunt Mame Wallace, whose homing passion

-has turned into the colourless, tidy keeping of her house, there is

-something shining, like the spirit of Psyche, that would win back her

-own by the tasks of her hand.

-

-"And then there's Threat Hubbelthwait," said Miggy, "that gets drunk

-and sets in his hotel bar fiddling, and Mis' Hubbelthwait shoves him his

-meals in on to the cigar show-case and runs before he throws his bow at

-her--she's just exactly like those two----"

-

-"Enid or Griselda?" I recognized them, and Miggy nodded. Poor Mis'

-Hubbelthwait! Was she not indeed an Enid, lacking her beauty, and a

-Griselda, with no hope of a sweet surprise of a love that but tested

-her? Truly, it was as Miggy said: in some form they were all there in

-the village, minus the bower and the silken kirtle, but with the same

-living hearts.

-

-And these were not all.

-

-"Miggy," I said, "what about Liva Vesey and Timothy? Did you count

-them?" For Aucassin and Nicolete were happy and so are Liva and Timothy,

-and I think that they have all understood meadows.

-

-Miggy looked startled. One's own generation never seems so typical of

-anything as did a generation or two past.

-

-"Could they be?" she asked. "They got engaged the night of the circus

-Liva told me--everybody knows. Could they be counted in?"

-

-Oh, yes, I assured her. They might be counted. So, I fancy, might all

-love-in-the-village, if we knew its authentic essence.

-

-"Goodness," said Miggy, meditatively, "then there's Christopha and

-Allen last winter, that I was their bridesmaid, and that rode off in the

-hills that way on their wedding night. I s'pose that was like something,

-if we only knew?"

-

-I could well believe that that first adventure of the young husband and

-wife, of whom I shall tell you, was like something sweet and bright and

-long ago.

-

-"And what," I said to Miggy abruptly, "about Peter?"

-

-"_Peter?_" repeated Miggy.

-

-Why not Peter?

-

-She looked out the window at him.

-

-"Why," she said, "but he's _now_. Peter's now. And he wears black

-clothes. And he's cutting grass...."

-

-True for Peter, to all these impeachments. I told her that, in his day,

-Aucassin was _now_, too; and that he wore the clothes of his times, and

-that if he did not do the tasks nearest his hand, then Nicolete should

-not have loved him.

-

-"And," said I, "unless I'm very much mistaken, in the same way that all

-the ancient lovers loved their ladies, Peter loves you."

-

-"_That_ way?" said Miggy, laying her hand on the manuscript.

-

-"That way," said I. And a very good way it was, too.

-

-Miggy put up both hands with a manner of pointing at herself.

-

-"Oh, no," she said, "not me." Then her little shoulders went up and she

-caught her breath like a child. "_Honest?_" she said.

-

-I said no more, but sat silent for a little, watching her across the

-fallen manuscript of ancient romances. Presently I picked up the sheets,

-and by chance my look fell on the very thing for which we had been

-searching: the story of the wife of Kiala, a Wisconsin Indian chief who

-was sold into slavery and carried to Martinique. And alone, across those

-hundreds of miles of pathless snow and sea, the wife of Kiala somehow

-followed him to the door of his West Indian owner. And to him she gave

-herself into slavery so that she might be with her husband.

-

-I read the story to Miggy. And because the story is true, and because it

-happened so near and because of this universe in general, I was not able

-to read it quite so tranquilly as I should have wished.

-

-"Oh," Miggy said, "is it like _that_?"

-

-Yes, please God; if the heart is big enough to hold it, it is like that.

-

-Miggy put her hand down quickly on the blue muslin dress she wore.

-

-"My mother knew!" she said.

-

-And that is the most wonderful thing of all: one's mother knew.

-

-Miggy turned once more and looked out the window at Peter. Bless Peter!

-I think that he must have been over that grass with the mower quite

-twice--perhaps twice and a half. Almost immediately Miggy looked away

-from Peter, and I thought--though perhaps after all it was merely the

-faint colour that often hovers in her cheek. I felt, however, that if I

-had again suggested to Miggy that we ask Peter to lunch, Peter might

-possibly have lunched with us. But now I did not suggest it. No, if ever

-it gets to be "all Peter with Miggy," it must be so by divine

-non-interference.

-

-My little voice-friend up there on the shelf, the Westminster chimes,

-struck twelve, in its manner of sweet apology for being to blame for

-things ending. In the village we lunch at twelve, and so my forenoon was

-done and even the simple tasks I had set were not all finished. I

-wonder, though, if deep within this fond forenoon we have not found

-something--wings, or a light, or a singing--that was of the spirit of

-the tasks? I wish that I thought so with reasons which I could give to a

-scientist.

-

-At all events I am richly content. And over our luncheon Miggy has just

-flattered me unconscionably.

-

-"My!" she said, "I should think everybody would want to be Secretary."

-

-

-

-

-VII

-

-AFRAID

-

-

-I must turn aside to tell of Allen and Christopha, that young husband

-and wife whose first adventure, Miggy thought, was like something sweet

-and bright and long ago. It happened this last winter, but I cannot

-perceive any grave difference between that winter night and this June.

-Believe me, the seasons and the silences and we ourselves are not so

-different as we are alike.

-

-On the night of her wedding, Christopha threw her bouquet from the

-dining-room doorway, because there were no front stairs from which to

-throw it, but instead only a stairway between walls and to be reached

-from the dining room: a mere clerk of a stair instead of a

-proprietor-like hall staircase. In the confusion which followed--the

-carnations had narrowly missed the blazing white gas burner high in the

-room--the bride ran away above stairs, her two bridesmaids following.

-Her mother was already there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As Miggy

-had told me, she herself was one of Christopha's bridesmaids, and it is

-from Miggy that I have heard something of the outcome of the story.

-

-Almost as soon as the door was closed there was a rap at it, a rap

-peremptory, confident.

-

-"Let me in," said Allen; "I'm the groom!" Chris herself opened the door.

-Her muslin-wedding gown and the little bells of lilies unfaded in her

-blond hair became her wholly, and all her simple prettiness still wore

-the mystery and authority of the hour.

-

-"Allen," she said, "you oughtn't to of."

-

-"Yes, sir, I ought!" he protested gayly, his voice pleasant with mirth

-and with its new, deep note. "I'll never see you a bride again--a real,

-weddin'-dress bride. I had to come."

-

-Christopha's mother looked up from her vague, bright fabrics.

-

-"I thought you started to take the minister the kodak album," she said

-to Allen plaintively. "Has he got anybody to show him any attention? I

-should think you might--"

-

-But the two bridesmaids edged their way into the next room, and on some

-pretext of fabrics, took Christopha's mother with them,--as if there

-were abroad some secret Word of which they knew the meaning. For Miggy

-is sufficiently dramatic to know the Word for another, though she is not

-sufficiently simple to know it for herself.

-

-Allen sat beside his bride on the cretonne-covered skirt box. And after

-all, he did not look at her, but only at her warm left hand in his.

-

-"It is the funniest thing," he said, "when I see you comin' in the

-parlour lookin' so differ'nt, I'm blessed if I wasn't afraid of you.

-What do you think of that?"

-

-"You's afraid of my dress," Chris told him, laughing, "not me. You use'

-to be afraid of me when we's first engaged, but you ain't now. It's

-_me_. I feel afraid of you--Allen. You're--differ'nt."

-

-He laughed tenderly, confidently.

-

-"_Boo!_" he said. "Now are you?"

-

-"Yes," she answered seriously; "now."

-

-"Chris!" he cried boyishly, "we're married! We're goin' to keep house."

-

-"Oh," she said, "Allen! Think of the fun of puttin' the presents in the

-house--the dishes, and the glass, and the ornaments. There won't be

-another dinin' room in town like ours. Sideboard an' plate rail, an' the

-rug not tacked down."

-

-Their thoughts flew to the little house, furnished and waiting, down the

-snowy street by the Triangle park: their house.

-

-"Dinners, and suppers, and breakfas's--just us two by ourselves," Allen

-said. "_And_ the presents. My!"

-

-"Well, and company," she reminded him, "that's what I want. The girls

-in to tea in our own house."

-

-"Yes," he assented. "Right away?" he wanted to know.

-

-"No," she said, "not right away, Silly! We've got to buy curtains and

-things. I never thought I'd have so many presents," she went on happily.

-"They's two water pitchers alike. Bess says I can change hers. We'll

-take it to the City"--she gave a little bounce on the skirt box--"and

-see a show, a really, truly show."

-

-"Sure we will," said he, magnificently. "And I'll take you to the place

-I told you about--where I got picked up."

-

-The little bride nodded, her eyes softening almost maternally. It was as

-if that story were her own, the story of Allen, the little stray child

-picked up on the streets of the City by that good woman whom Chris had

-never seen. But the name of Sarah Ernestine was like a charm to Chris,

-for the woman had been to Allen father and mother both.

-

-Chris bent down swiftly to his hands, closed over her own, and kissed

-them.

-

-"Oh, Allen," she said, with a curious wistfulness, "will you _always_,

-always be just like you are now?"

-

-"Well, I should say I would," he answered gently. "They's nobody like

-you anywheres, Chris. Mis' Chris, Mis' Allen Martin."

-

-"Don't it scare you to say it?" she demanded.

-

-"Yes, sir, it does," he confessed. "It's like sayin' your own name over

-the telephone. What about you? Will _you_ always, too?"

-

-"Yes," she said, "always. Only--"

-

-"Only what?" he repeated anxiously.

-

-"Oh," she said, "don't let's let any outside things come between us,

-Allen--like they do, like with Bess and Opie,--business and

-sewin',--that's what I'm afraid of," she ended vaguely.

-

-"Well," he said, "I guess we ain't much afraid of each other, honey. I

-guess we're just afraid of what could come between us."

-

-A voice, unconvincing, unimportant, a part of the inessential aspect of

-alien things, detached itself from the accompaniment in the next room,

-saying something responsible and plaintive about only an hour till train

-time.

-

-"An hour," Allen said over, and put his arms about her, with boyish

-awkwardness for the sake of the crisp muslin gown that had so terrified

-him. She rose and stood beside him, and he waited for a moment looking

-up in her face. "Chris," he said, "I'm scared of this one hour even.

-Till train time."

-

-"I'll hurry up and get the hour done as quick as I can," she promised

-him gayly.

-

-"Honestly, now--" said Chris's mother from the vague and indeterminate

-region where she moved.

-

-"Right off, Mis' Mother!" Allen said, and knew that she was in the

-doorway, with the bridesmaids laughing beside her. And then he went down

-the stairway, his first radiant moment gone by.

-

-In the dining room the messenger was waiting. The messenger had arrived,

-in the clear cold of the night, from a drive across the Caledonia hills,

-and some one had sent him to that deserted room to warm himself. But

-Allen found him breathing on his fingers and staring out the frosty

-window into the dark. It was Jacob Ernestine, brother to the woman who

-had brought up Allen and had been kind to him when nobody else in the

-world was kind. For years Sarah Ernestine had been "West"--and with that

-awful inarticulacy of her class, mere distance had become an impassable

-gulf and the Silence had taken her. Allen had not even known that she

-meant to return. And now, Jacob told him, she was here, at his own home

-back in the hills--Sarah and a child, a little stray boy, whom she had

-found and befriended as she had once befriended Allen. And she was

-dying.

-

-"She didn't get your letter, I guess," the old man said, "'bout gettin'

-married. She come to-day, so sick she couldn't hold her head up. I see

-she didn't know nothin' 'bout your doin's. I didn't let her know. I jus'

-drove in, like split, to tell you, when the doctor went. He says she

-can't--she won't ... till mornin'. I thought," he apologized wistfully,

-"ye'd want to know, anyways, so I jus' drove in."

-

-"That was all right," Allen said. "You done right, Jacob."

-

-Then he stood still for a moment, looking down at the bright figures of

-the carpet. Jacob lived twelve miles back in the hills.

-

-"How'd you come?" Allen asked him briefly.

-

-"I've got the new cutter," the old man answered, with a touch of eager

-pride. "I'll drive ye."

-

-Then some one in the parlour caught sight of the bridegroom, and they

-all called to him and came where he was, besieging him with

-good-natured, trivial talk. The old man waited, looking out the window

-into the dark. He had known them all since they were children, and their

-merrymaking did not impress him as wholly real. Neither, for that

-matter, did Allen's wedding. Besides, his own sister was dying--somehow

-putting an end to the time when he and she had been at home together.

-That was all he had thought of during his drive to town, and hardly at

-all of Allen and his wedding. He waited patiently now while Allen got

-the wedding guests back to the parlour, and then slipped away from them,

-and came through the dining room to the stair door.

-

-"Stay there a minute," Allen bade him shortly, and went back to the

-upper floor and to Chris's door again.

-

-It was her mother who answered his summons this time, and Allen's manner

-and face checked her words. Before he had done telling her what had

-happened, Chris herself was on the threshold, already in sober brown, as

-one who has put aside rainbows and entered on life. She had a little

-brown hat in one hand, and for the other hand he groped out and held it

-while he told her, as well as he could.

-

-"I guess I've got to go, Chrissie," he ended miserably.

-

-She met his eyes, her own soft with sympathy for the plight of the other

-woman.

-

-"Well, yes," she said quietly, "of course we've got to go."

-

-He looked at her breathlessly. That possibility had not crossed his

-mind.

-

-"You!" he cried. "You couldn't go, dear. Twelve miles out in Caledonia,

-cold as it is to-night. You--"

-

-In spite of her sympathy, she laughed at him then.

-

-"Did you honestly think I wouldn't?" she asked, in a kind of wonder.

-

-"Well, I'm sure--" began her mother. But the two bridesmaids manifestly

-heard the Word again, for they talked with her both at once.

-

-"Not with Jacob, though," Chris was saying decisively. "You help father

-and the boys get out our cutter, Allen."

-

-Allen strode past the mother and lifted his wife's face in his hands.

-

-"Do you mean it?" he demanded. "Will you go--in the cold--all that long

-way--"

-

-"You Silly!" she answered, and drew away from him and set the little

-brown hat on her head.

-

-

-The road lay white before them, twelve miles of snow and stars to

-Jacob's cottage among the Caledonia hills. Jacob had gone on--from the

-crest of the rise by the Corner church they saw him and heard the faint

-signalling of his bells. It was a place, that rise by the Corner church

-on the edge of the village, where two others in such case might have

-drawn rein to look at Everything, stretching before, rhythmic crest and

-shallow, and all silent and waiting. But not these two, incurious as the

-gods, naïve as the first lovers. Only, though of this they were

-unconscious, they saw things a little differently that night.

-

-"Look!" said the girl, with a sign to the lowlands, expressive with

-lights. "So many folks's houses--homes, all started. I s'pose it was

-just as big a thing for them. But _theirs_ don't seem like anything,

-side of ours!"

-

-"That's so, too," assented Allen. "And theirs _ain't_ anything side of

-ours!" he maintained stoutly.

-

-"No, sir," she agreed, laughing.

-

-Then she grew suddenly grave, and fell silent for a little, her eyes

-here and there on the valley lights, while Allen calculated aloud the

-time of the arrival at Jacob's house.

-

-"Allen!" she said at last.

-

-"Here!" he answered. "I'm here, you bet."

-

-"Just look at the lights," she said seriously, "and then _think_.

-There's Bess and Opie--not speakin' to each other. Over there's the

-Hubbelthwait farm that they've left for the hotel--an' Threat

-Hubbelthwait drunk all the time. An' Howells's, poor and can't pay, and

-don't care if they can't, and quarrels so folks can hear 'em from the

-road. And the Moneys', that's so ugly to the children, and her findin'

-fault, and him can't speak without an oath. That only leaves the

-Topladys' over there that's real, regular people. And she kind o' bosses

-him."

-

-"Well, now, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, looking at the lights with

-a difference.

-

-Chris's right hand was warm in his great-coat pocket, and she suddenly

-snuggled close to him, her chin on his shoulder.

-

-"Oh, Allen," she said, "I'm _afraid_!"

-

-"What? On the Plank Road?" he wanted to know, missing her meaning.

-

-"All them folks started out with presents, and a house, like us," she

-said, "and with their minds all made up to bein' happy. But just look at

-'em."

-

-"Well," said Allen, reasonably, "we _ain't_ them."

-

-"We might get like 'em," she insisted. "How can you tell? Folks just do

-get that way or they just don't. How can you _tell_?"

-

-"I s'pose that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, thoughtfully.

-

-"Mother's got a picture of the Hubbelthwaits when they was married,"

-Chris pursued. "Her in white an' slippers and bracelets, and him slick

-as a kitten's foot. Think of her now, Allen, with _bracelets_. And him

-drunk all the time, 'most. How can you tell how things'll turn out? Oh,

-Allen, I _am_! I'm afraid."

-

-He bent to her face and laid his own against hers, glowing and cold and

-with fresh, warm lips.

-

-"Let's just try to be happy and keep ourselves happy," he said.

-

-The troubled woman was still in her face, but at his touch the fears

-went a little away, and the valley lights being already left behind

-among the echoes of the bells, they forgot both the lights and their

-shadows and drifted back to talk about the new house and the presents,

-and the dinners and suppers and breakfasts together. For these were the

-stuff of which the time was made. As it was made, too, of that shadowy,

-hovering fear for the future, and the tragic pity of their errand, and

-of sad conjecture about the little stray child whom Sarah Ernestine had

-brought.

-

-"That ain't it a'ready, is it?" Christopha exclaimed when they saw

-Jacob's cottage.

-

-"It just is--it's 'leven o'clock now," Allen answered, and gave the

-horse to the old man; and they two went within.

-

-The light in the room, like the lights back in the valley, was as if

-some great outside influence here and there should part the darkness to

-win a little stage for a scene of the tragedy: in the valley, for the

-drunkenness at the Hubbelthwaits', the poverty at the Howells', the ill

-nature at the Moneys'; and here, in Jacob's cottage, for death. There

-was no doubt of the quality of the hour in the cottage. The room was

-instinct with the outside touch. Already it was laid upon the woman in

-the bed, and with a mystery and authority not unlike that which had come

-upon Christopha in her marriage hour and was upon her still.

-

-The woman knew Allen, smiled at him, made him understand her

-thankfulness that he had come. At Christopha she looked kindly and quite

-without curiosity. Some way, that absence of curiosity at what was so

-vital to him gripped Allen's heart, and without his knowing the process,

-showed him the nature of death. The neighbour who had been with the

-sick woman slipped outside, and as she went she patted Chris's shoulder;

-and Allen felt that she understood, and he was dumbly grateful to her.

-

-Allen sat by the bed and held the hand of his foster-mother; and Chris

-moved about the room, heating water for a little pot of tea. And so it

-was Chris who first saw the child. He was sitting at the end of the wood

-box, on the floor before the oven--that little stray boy whom Sarah

-Ernestine had picked up as she had once picked up Allen. He looked up at

-Christopha with big, soft eyes, naïve as the first bird. Almost before

-she knew that she meant to do so, Chris stooped, with a wondering word,

-and took him in her arms. He clung to her and she sat in the rocking

-chair near the window where stood Jacob's carnation plant. And she tried

-both to look at the child and to love him, at the same time.

-

-"See, Allen," she said, "this little boy!"

-

-The child looked over his shoulder at Allen, his little arms leaning on

-Christopha's breast. And very likely because he had felt strange and

-lonely and now was taken some account of, he suddenly and beautifully

-smiled, and you would have loved him the more for the way he did that.

-

-The woman, lying with closed eyes, understood and remembered.

-

-"Allen," she said, "that's little John. You find him--a home

-somewheres. If you can...."

-

-"Why, yes, mother, we'll do that. We can do that, I guess. Don't you

-worry any about _him_," said Allen.

-

-"He's all alone. I donno his name, even.... But you be good to him,

-Allen, will you?" she said restlessly. "I found him somewheres."

-

-"Like me," Allen said.

-

-She shook her head feebly.

-

-"Worse," she said, "worse. I knew I couldn't--do much. I just--thought I

-could keep him from bein' wicked--mebbe."

-

-"Like you did me, mother, I guess," the boy said.

-

-Then she opened her eyes.

-

-"Allen!" she said clearly. "Oh, if I did! When I think how mebbe I done

-that--_I ain't afraid to die_."

-

-Jacob Ernestine came in the room and stood rubbing one hand on the back

-of the other. He saw the kettle's high column of steam and looked

-inquiringly at Chris. But she sat mothering the little silent boy, who

-looked at her gravely, or smiled, or pulled at her collar, responsive to

-her touch as she was thrillingly responsive to his nearness. So Jacob

-lifted the kettle to the back of the stove, moved his carnation plant a

-little away from the frost of the pane, and settled himself at the

-bed's foot to watch. And when, after a long time, the child fell

-asleep, Chris would not lay him down. Allen would have taken him, and

-Jacob came and tried to do so, but she shook her head and they let her

-be. She sat so still, hour after hour, that at last she herself dozed;

-and it seemed to her, in a manner of dreaming, that the carnation plant

-on the window-sill had lifted and multiplied until something white and

-like fragrance filled the room; and this, then, she dreamed, was what

-death is, death in the room for the woman. Or might it not be the

-perfume of her own bridal bouquet, the carnations which she had carried

-that night? But then the child stirred, and Christopha roused a little,

-and after all, the sense of flowers in the room was the sense of the

-little one in her arms. As if many things mean one thing.

-

-It was toward dawn that the end came, quite simply and with no manner of

-finality, as if one were to pass into another chamber. And after that,

-as quickly as might be, Christopha and Allen made ready to drive back to

-the village for the last bitter business of all.

-

-Allen, in the barn with Jacob, wondered what he must do. Allen was

-sore-hearted at his loss, grateful for the charge that he had been

-given; but what was he to do? The child ought not to stay in Jacob's

-cottage. If Chris's mother would take him for a little,--but Allen

-knew, without at all being able to define it, her plaintive, burdened

-manner, the burdened manner of the irresponsible. Still puzzling over

-this, he brought the cutter to the side door; and the side door opened,

-and Chris came out in the pale light, leading the little boy--awake,

-warmly wrapped, ready for the ride.

-

-"Where you goin' to take him to, Chrissie?" Allen asked breathlessly.

-

-"Some of the neighbours, I guess, ain't we?" she answered. "I donno. I

-thought we could see. He mustn't be left here--now."

-

-"No, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen only. "He mustn't."

-

-The three drove out together into the land lying about the gate of dawn.

-A fragment of moon was in the east. There was about the hour something

-primitive, as if, in this loneliest of all the hours, the world reverted

-to type, remembered ancient savage differences, and fell in the primal

-lines.

-

-"Allen," Chris said, "you'll miss her. I mean miss knowin' she's alive."

-

-"Yes," the boy said, "I'll miss knowin' she's alive."

-

-"Well, we must try to settle what to do with the little boy," she

-suggested hastily.

-

-"Yes," he assented, "that's right. We've got to settle that," and at

-this they fell silent.

-

-"There's Hopkins's," Chris said presently, nodding toward the home of

-the neighbour who had waited their coming to Jacob's cottage. "But

-she'll hev to be over there lots to-day and to-morrow. And she was kep'

-up so late it don't hardly seem as if we'd ought to stop and ask her."

-

-"No," Allen said, "I donno as it does, really."

-

-"There's Cripps's," she suggested a little farther on, "but they ain't

-up yet. I donno's 'twould do to roust 'em up."

-

-"No," Allen agreed, "best not do that, I guess." Christopha looked over

-the great fields.

-

-"My!" she said, "you'll miss her--miss thinkin' of her bein' somewheres.

-Allen! Where do you s'pose she is?"

-

-"I thought o' that," said Allen, soberly.

-

-"Goodness!" said Christopha, and shivered, and suddenly drew the child

-close to her. He was sleeping again. And it was so, with his little body

-between them, that she could no longer keep her hand warm in Allen's

-greatcoat pocket. But above the child's head her eyes and Allen's would

-meet, and in that hour the two had never been so near. Nearer they were

-than in the talk about the new house, and the presents, and the dinners

-and suppers and breakfasts together.

-

-They passed the farmhouses that looked asleep, and the farmhouses that

-looked watchfully awake while their owners slept. It would not be well

-to knock at these, still and sombre-windowed. And though there were

-lights at the Moneys' and at the Howells' and at the Hubbelthwait farm,

-and even at Bess and Opie's, their gates, by common consent, were also

-passed. Nor did they stop at the Topladys'.

-

-"They're real, regular people with a grown son," Chris said of them

-vaguely, "and it don't seem hardly fair to give 'em little John, too!"

-

-"Little John," Allen said over wonderingly. When they called him that

-the child seemed suddenly a person, like themselves. Their eyes met

-above his head.

-

-"Allen!" Chris said.

-

-"What? What is it?" he asked eagerly.

-

-"Could--do you think--could _we_?" she demanded.

-

-"My!" he answered, "I been a-wishin'--"

-

-Involuntarily he drew rein. They were on the rise by the Corner church

-at the edge of the village. The village, rhythmic crest of wall and

-shallow of lawn, lay below them, and near the little Triangle park would

-be their waiting house.

-

-"Did you mean have him live with us?" Allen made sure.

-

-"Yes, I did," Chris said, "if we had the money."

-

-"Well!" said the boy, "well, I guess _that'll_ be all right!"

-

-"How much _she'd_ of liked it," said Chris.

-

-"Wouldn't she, though," Allen assented; "wouldn't she? And you heard

-what she said--that about keepin' him from bein'--wicked?

-Chrissie--_could_ we, you and me? This little fellow?"

-

-Chris lifted her face and nodded.

-

-"I ain't afraid," she said simply.

-

-"I ain't either," her husband said.

-

-As if, in this new future, there were less need of fear than in the

-future which had sought to "try to be happy and keep ourselves happy."

-

-They looked down where their house would be, near the gate of the coming

-dawn. And--as two others in such case might have seen--it was as if they

-were the genii of their own mysterious future, a future whose solution

-trembled very near. For with the charge of the child had come a courage,

-even as the dead woman had known, when she thought of her charge of

-Allen, that she was not afraid to die.

-

-"Allen," said Chris, stumblingly, "it don't seem as if we could get like

-the Howells' an' the Hubbelthwaits and them. Somehow it don't seem as if

-we _could_!"

-

-"No," said Allen, "we couldn't. That's so, ain't it?"

-

-Above little John's head their eyes met in a kind of new betrothal, new

-marriage, new birth. But when he would have driven on, Allen pulled at

-the reins again, and,

-

-"Chrissie," he said suddenly, "if afterwards--there should be

-anybody--else. I mean for us. Would--would you keep on lovin' this

-little kiddie, too?"

-

-She met his eyes bravely, sweetly.

-

-"Well, you Silly," she said, "of course I would!"

-

-At which Allen laughed joyously, confidently.

-

-"Why, Chris," he cried, "we're married! For always an' always. An'

-here's this little old man to see to. Who's afraid?"

-

-Then they kissed each other above the head of the sleeping child, and

-drove on toward the village, and toward their waiting house.

-

-

-

-

-VIII

-

-THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT

-

-

-When I opened my door this morning, the Outdoors was like a thing coming

-to meet me. I mean that it was like a person coming to meet me--no, it

-was like many persons, hand in hand and, so to speak, mind in mind; a

-great company of whom straightway I became one. I felt that swift, good

-gladness that _now_ was _now_,--that delicate, fleeting Now, that very

-coquette of time, given and withdrawn. I remember that I could not soon

-go to sleep on the night of the day on which I learned that the Hebrew

-tongue has no present tense. They could not catch at that needle-point

-of experience, and we can do so. I like to glory in it by myself when no

-one else is thinking of it; to think aside, as if _to_ Something, that

-now is being now.... And I long for the time when we shall all know it

-together, all the time, and understand its potentialities and let it be

-breath and pulse to keep the Spirit Future alive and pure.

-

-It would have been no great wonder if I had been rejoicing past all

-reason in the moment. For at that very instant came Calliope Marsh, home

-for the Java entertainment which was set for to-night, and driving to my

-gate the Sykes's white horse in the post-office store delivery wagon.

-And as I saw her, so precisely did she look like herself, that I could

-have believed that Now was not Now, but Then, when first I knew her.

-

-Calliope brought the buckled lines informally over the horse's head and

-let them fall about the tie post, and ran to me. I am afraid that I am

-not going to tell what we said. But it was full of being once more in

-the presence of those whom you love. Do you not think that such being

-together is a means of actual life transcending both breath and

-perception?

-

-When our greeting was done, Calliope sat down on the stair in my hall,

-and,

-

-"Hev you got any spare candle-shades an' sherbet glasses, an' pretty

-doilies an' lunch cloths an' rugs an' willow chairs an' a statue of

-almost anybody an' a meat-chopper with a peanut-butter attachment an' a

-cap an' gown like colleges?" she demanded.

-

-And when I told her that I thought I might have some of these things,

-

-"Well," Calliope said, "she wants 'em all. Who do I mean by She? Mis'

-Oliver Wheeler Johnson, the personal queen of things."

-

-She leaned forward, hugging her thin little arms, and she looked up at

-me from under the brim of her round straw hat.

-

-"I'm in need of grace," she said shortly. "I never felt like this toward

-any human being. But I tell you, when that little Mis' Johnson comes

-dilly-nippin' around where I am, noddin' her blue ostrich tip, seems my

-spine just stiffens out in me like it was going to strike at her, same

-as a stick. Do you know the feelin'?"

-

-I answered reluctantly, and not as I should wish to answer; for it is

-certain that I, too, have seldom seen Mrs. Johnson without an urgency to

-be gone from her little fluttering presence. But Calliope! I could not

-imagine Calliope shrinking from any one, or knowing herself alien to

-another.

-

-"For sixty years," she answered my thought of her, "I've never known

-what it was to couldn't bear anybody, not without I had a reason. They

-ain't much of anybody I what you might say don't like, without they're

-malicious or ugly a-purpose. Ugly by nature, ugly an' can't help it,

-ugly an' don't know it--I can forgive all them. An' Mis' Johnson ain't

-ugly at all--she's just a real sweet little slip of a thing, doin' her

-hard-workin' best. But when I first see her in church that day, I says

-to myself: 'I'll give that little piece two months to carry the sail

-she's carryin' here to-day; four months to hev folks tired of her, an'

-six months to get herself the cold shoulder all 'round.' An' I hold to

-what I said. An' when her baby-blue nineteen-inch feather swings in an'

-'round, an' when she tells how things ought to be, I kind o' bristle all

-over me. I'm ashamed of it--an' yet, do you know, I like to give in to

-it?" Calliope said solemnly. "I donno what's come over me. Hev you heard

-where the Java entertainment's put to be?"

-

-I had not heard, nor was I sure just why it was of Java, save that

-Friendship is continually giving entertainments with foreign names and

-practising a wild imperialism to carry out an effect of foreign parts.

-And since, at the missionary meeting which had projected the affair,

-Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had told about _their_ Java entertainment in

-_their_ church at home, that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady, who

-was president of the society, had appointed her chairman of the Java

-entertainment committee.

-

-"And," Calliope informed me, "she's picked out the engine-house for it.

-Yes, sir,--the fire-engine house. No other place was _quaint_ enough. No

-other place lent itself to decoration probabilities--or somethin' like

-that. She turned her back flat on the church an' went round to empty

-stores, lookin' for _quaint-ity_. One while I thought she'd hev us in

-the Chinese laundry, she seemed that took with the tomato-coloured

-signs on the walls. But, finally, she lit on the engine-house; an' when

-she see the big, bare engine-room, with the big, shinin' engine in it,

-an' harnesses hangin' from them rough board beams in a kind of avenoo,

-an' the board walls all streaked down, she spatted her hands an' 'lowed

-we'd hev our Java there. 'What a dear, quaint place,' s's she,--'so

-_flexible_!' She held out about the harnesses bein' so quaintly

-picturesque an' the fire-engine a piece o' resistance--or somethin' like

-that. An' she rents the room, without ay, yes, no, nor boo. My way of

-thinkin', a chairman ought to hev boo for a background, even if she _is_

-chairman. That's where she wants the statue an' the nut butter an' the

-cap an' gown. Can we borrow 'em of you?"

-

-"The engine-house!" I repeated incredulously. "You cannot mean the

-fire-engine house, Calliope?"

-

-"I do," Calliope said firmly, "the quaint, flexible fire-engine house.

-They ain't been a fire in Friendship in over two years, so Mis' Johnson

-says we ain't got that to think of--an' I donno as we hev. An' they

-never use the engine any more, now they've got city water, excep' for

-fires in the country, and then nobody ever gets in to give the alarm

-till the house is burned down an' no need to bother goin'. Even if they

-do get in in some sort of season, the department has to go to the mayor

-to get a permit to go outside the city limits. It was so when the

-Topladys' barn burned. Timothy told 'em, when they come gallopin' up

-after it was most done smokin', that if they had held off a little

-longer they could have been a sight of help to him in shinglin' the new

-one. Oh, no, they ain't much of any danger of our being disturbed by a

-fire in them two hours to-night. Anyhow, they can't be a fire. Mis'

-Oliver Wheeler Johnson said so."

-

-We laughed like children as we loaded my "Java" stuffs on the wagon.

-Calliope was a valiant helper to Mrs. Johnson, and so I told her. She

-was standing in the wagon box, one arm about my palm, the other free for

-driving.

-

-"I'm the chairman o' the refreshments, too," she confessed. "Oh, well.

-Yourself you can boss round, you know," she threw back, smiling;

-"anybody can do that. But your feelin's you're some cramped about

-runnin'."

-

-It is certain that Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson was signally unfitted for

-a future in Friendship Village. She was a woman of some little world in

-which she had moved before she came to us, and in the two worlds she

-perceived no difference. Or, where she saw a difference, she sought to

-modify it by a touch when a breath would have been too much, and the

-only factor of potency would have been a kind of potency of spirit,

-which she did not possess.

-

-The Oliver Wheeler Johnsons had moved to Friendship only three months

-before, and nobody had looked for them at church on their first Sunday.

-"Movin' so, you want your Sabbath to take some rest in, an' you ain't

-expected to dress yourself up an' get out to Sunday service an' face

-strangers," the village said--and when the two walked into church while

-the responses were being made nearly everybody lost the place.

-

-They were very young, and they were extremely well dressed.

-

-"He's got on one o' the long coats," comment ran after church, "an' he's

-got a real soft-speakin' voice. But he seems to know how to act."

-

-And, "I declare, nice white gloves an' a nineteen-inch baby-blue ostrich

-feather durin' movin' seems some like puttin' on."

-

-And, "The back of her dress fits her just like the front, an' I must say

-she knows it. No pullin' down the jacket or hitchin' the strings forward

-for _her_, when she stands up!"

-

-As Miggy, who first told me about that day, had said, "That Sunday

-morning, Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson was the belle of the congregation."

-

-After service that day, instead of going directly home or waiting to be

-addressed, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had spoken to the woman with

-whom she had been seated. It was Mis' Postmaster Sykes.

-

-"Thank you so much," Mrs. Johnson said, "for letting us share your pew.

-May I present my husband? We have come to Friendship to live, and we

-shall be coming here to church. And I shall want to join your Ladies'

-Aid Society and your Missionary Circle and, perhaps, be in the

-Sunday-school right away. I--I think I'll be less homesick--"

-

-"Actually," Mis' Sykes said afterward, "she took my breath clear away

-from me. I never heard of such a thing. Of course, we're real glad to

-hev our newcomers Christian people, but we want quiet Christians. An'

-did you notice how she was when I give her an introduction around? Why,

-she up an' out with somethin' to say to everybody. Just a neat little

-'How d' do' wouldn't do for her to remark. I always suspicion them

-talkative-at-first kind. It's like they'd been on the stage or brought

-up in a hotel."

-

-When she first came to the Ladies' Aid and the missionary meetings, Mrs.

-Johnson "said something." She was "up to her feet" three or four times

-at each session with suggestion, information, or description of how they

-did in her home church. And some way I think that what chiefly separated

-her from the village was the way that inevitable nineteen-inch blue

-ostrich plume on the little woman's hat bobbed and won attention and was

-everywhere at once. Or, perhaps--such creatures of wax we are to our

-impressions--it may have been little Mrs. Johnson's mere way of lifting

-her small, pointed chin when she talked, and of frowning and

-over-emphasizing. Or it may have been that she stood with her hands

-clasped behind her in what seemed to Friendship exaggerated ease, or

-that she smiled arbitrarily and ingratiatingly as she talked when there

-was absolutely nothing at which to smile. I think that these made her

-seem as alien to us as, in varied measure, certain moral defects might

-have done.

-

-Moreover, she mentioned with familiarity objects and usages of which

-Friendship Village knew nothing: Carriage shoes, a new cake of soap for

-each guest, some kind of ice served, it was incredulously repeated, "in

-the middle o' the meal!" She innocently let fall that she sent to the

-city for her letter-paper. She had travelled in a state-room on a train,

-and she said so. She knew a noted woman. She used, we saw from the

-street, shaded candles on the table when she and her husband were at

-supper alone. She thought nothing of ordering Jimmy Sturgis and the bus

-to take her down town to her marketing on a rainy day. She had inclined

-to blame the village that Daphne Street was not paved, instead of

-joining with the village to blame somebody else. Above all, she tried

-to buy our old furniture. I do not know that another might not have done

-all these quite without giving offence, and, indeed, rather have left us

-impressed with her superior familiarity with an envied world. But by the

-time of the Java entertainment Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had

-innocently alienated half Friendship Village. And this morning Calliope

-merely voiced what I knew to be the sentiment of most of Mrs. Johnson's

-neighbours and acquaintances. For these people are the kindly of earth;

-but they are of earth, where reign both the centrifugal and centripetal

-forces,--and the control is not always so swift as science and the human

-heart could wish.

-

-At five o'clock to-day--the day set for the Java evening

-entertainment--I made my way to the engine-house. This was partly

-because I wished to be as much as possible with Calliope during her few

-days in the village, and partly it was because the affair would belong

-to the class of festivity which I am loath to miss, and I think that,

-for Friendship's sake, I will never willingly pass by a "hall" in which

-is to be found a like diversion. Already on the great room, receiving

-its final preparation, had descended something of the excited spirit of

-the evening: the heat, the insufficient light, the committee members'

-shrill, rollicking children sliding on the floor, the booths which in

-all bazaars contain with a precision fairly bewildering the same class

-of objects; and the inevitable sense of hurry and silk waists and aching

-feet and mustn't-take-your-change-back. But to all these things the Java

-engine-house affair would add an element of novelty, almost a flavour of

-romance. Certainly the room lent itself to "decoration probabilities,"

-as Calliope had vaguely quoted; it had been a roller-skating rink,

-utilized by the fire-department on the decline of the pastime, and there

-was, as Mrs. Johnson's _pièce de résistance_, the fire-engine.

-

-I had never before been in the engine-house--you know how there will be

-commonplace enough spots in your own town to which you never go: the

-engine-house, the church belfry, the wood yard, upstairs over this store

-and that, and grocery cellars whose sloping trap-doors, open now and

-then to the walk, are as alien as the inside of the trunks of your

-trees. When I stepped in the engine-house, it seemed insistently a place

-in which I had never been before. And this may have been partly because

-the whole idea of a village fire-department is to me singular: the

-waiting horses and ladders and hose, whose sole reason for being is

-merely ameliorative, and never human and preventive; that pealing of the

-sharp, peculiar, terrifying alarm and summons first imprinting something

-on the very air, stabbing us with _Halt_ while we count the bell

-strokes for the ward, and then clanging the wild fury of the

-quick-stroke command to help.

-

-To-day the great glittering fire-engine, flanked by hose-cart and

-hook-and-ladder wagon, occupied almost wonderingly the head of the room

-which had been invaded, and an inspired committee had garlanded the

-engine with paper roses and American flags. The flag of the Netherlands,

-copied from a dictionary and wrought in red-white-and-blue cambric with

-a silver crown, drooped meditatively from the smoke-stack; a scarlet fez

-and a peacock-feather fan hung on the supply hose; and on the

-tongue-bracer was fixed a pink sofa cushion from Mis' Amanda Toplady's

-parlour, with an olive Indian gentleman in a tinsel zouave jacket

-stamped on the cover. On the two big sliding doors, back of which stood

-the fire company's horses, were tacked innumerable Javanese trifles more

-picturesque than authentic; and on outlying booths and tables there were

-others. Directly before the engine was to be the tea-table, where Mis'

-Postmaster Sykes was to serve Java tea from a Java canister, loaned by

-the Post-office store.

-

-As soon as I entered I sought out Calliope's booth, a huge affair

-constructed of rugs whose red-tongued, couchant dogs and bounding fawns

-somewhat marred the Eastern effect. And within, I found myself in a

-circle of the Friendship women whom I know best--all of them tired with

-that deadly tiredness born of a day's work at a church fair of any

-nation. But at once I saw that it was not merely fatigue which was

-disquieting them.

-

-Calliope was leaning against a bit of Bagelen blue, loaned by the new

-minister's wife. And she said to me as if, I thought, in explanation of

-what I was to hear,--"I guess we're all pretty tired. Most of us look

-like we wanted to pant. I'm all of a shake, myself."

-

-When Mis' Postmaster Sykes spoke unsmilingly, I understood:--

-

-"It ain't the bein' tired," she disclaimed; "tired I can stand an' hev

-stood since my own birth. But it's the bein' commanded 'round--me,

-_commanded_--by that little I'm-the-one-an'-you-do-as-I-say out there!"

-

-"Land-a-livin' an' a-dyin'!" said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "I

-declare if I know whether I'm on foot or on horseback. It's bad enough

-to hev to run a fair, without you've got to be run yourself, too. Ain't

-it enough for Mis' Johnson to be made chairman without her wantin' to

-boss besides? She might as well say to me, 'Mis' Holcomb, you do

-everything the opposite way from the way you've just done it,' an' hev

-it over with."

-

-Mis' Amanda Toplady--even that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda--shook her

-head.

-

-"Mis' Johnson surely acts used to bein' bowed down to," she admitted;

-"she seems fair bent on lordin' it. My land, if she wasn't bound to

-borrow my Tea rose plant that's just nearin' ready to bud."

-

-Calliope laughed, a little ruefully, and wholly in sympathy.

-

-"Honest," she said, "I guess what's the matter with all of us ain't so

-much what she does as the particular way she does it. It's so with some

-folks. They just seem to sort of _set_ you all over, when you come near

-'em--same as the cold does to gravy. We'd all ought to wrostle with the

-feelin', I expect."

-

-"I expect we had," said Mis' Holcomb, "but you could wrostle all your

-days with vinegar an' it'd pucker your mouth same way."

-

-"Funny part," Calliope observed, "everybody feels just alike about her.

-When she skips around so sort o' momentous, we all want to dodge. I felt

-sorry for her, first, because I thought she was in for nervous

-prostration. But after a while I see it wasn't disease--it was just her

-feelin' so up an' down significant, you might say."

-

-"I donno," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "but it's part the way

-she says her _a_'s. That real _a_-soundin' _a_ kind," she explained

-vaguely.

-

-"She's so right an' left cuffy--I guess that's the whole thing,"

-Calliope put it in her rich idiom.

-

-"Well," said Mis' Amanda, sadly, "there must be somethin' we could like

-her for, even if it was only her husband."

-

-"He ain't what I'd call much, either," Calliope dismissed Mr. Oliver

-Wheeler Johnson positively; "he's got too soft-speakin' a voice. I like

-a man's voice to rumble up soft from his chest an' not slip down thin

-from his brain."

-

-I remember that I listened in a great wonder to these women whom I had

-seen at many an office of friendliness to strangers and aliens. Yet as I

-looked across the floor at that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson--who,

-in the hat with the blue plume, was everywhere, directing, altering,

-objecting, arranging, commanding and, especially, doing over--I most

-unwillingly felt much as they felt. If only Mrs. Johnson had not

-continually lifted her little pointed chin. If only she had not

-perpetually and ingratiatingly smiled when there was nothing at which to

-smile at all.

-

-Then Abigail Arnold hurried up to us with a tray of cups for the Java

-tea.

-

-"Calliope," she said to the chairman of the refreshments, "Mis' Johnson

-jus' put up her little chin an' says, 'What! ain't we no lemons for the

-tea?'"

-

-Calliope compressed her lips and lifted their thin line tight and high.

-

-"Lemins," she replied, "ain't necessarily found in Java. I've a good big

-mind to go home to bed."

-

-Then we saw little Mrs. Johnson's blue linen dress hurrying toward us

-with the waving line of the blue feather above her, like a last little

-daring flourish by the artist of her. She was really very pretty and

-childish, with a manner of moving in wreaths and lines and never in

-solids. Her little feet twinkled along like the signature to the pretty

-picture of her. But yet she was not appealing. She was like an

-overconfident child whom you long to shut in a closet. Yes, I understand

-that I sound like a barbarian in these days of splendid corrective

-treatment of children who are studied and not stormed at. And in this

-treatment I believe to the uttermost. And yet, overconfidence in a child

-is of all things the most--I will amend what I said: Mrs. Oliver Wheeler

-Johnson was like an overconfident child whom you long to shut in a

-closet because of your ignorance of what else on earth to do. No doubt

-there is a better way, but none of us knew it. And she came toward us

-intent, every one felt, on some radical change in arrangements, though

-the big room was now in the pink of appointment and ready to be left

-while the committee went home to sup on "just sauce and

-bread-and-butter," and to don silk waists.

-

-We saw little Mrs. Johnson hurrying toward us, upon a background of the

-great, patient room, all-tolerant of its petty bedizening. And then Mrs.

-Johnson, we in Calliope's booth, the sliding, rollicking children, and

-all the others about stood still, at the sharp, peculiar terrifying

-alarm and summons which seemed to imprint something on the very air,

-stabbing us with _Halt_ that we might count the bell strokes for the

-ward, and clanging a wild fury of the quick-stroke command to help. For

-the first time in two years the Friendship fire alarm was sounding from

-the tower above our heads.

-

-There was a panting sweep and scurry for the edges of the room, as

-instantly a gong on the wall sounded with the alarm, and the two big

-sliding doors went back, scattering like feathers the innumerable

-Javanese trifles that had been tacked there. Forward, down the rug-hung

-vista, plunged the two big horses of the department. We saw the Java

-tea-table borne to earth, the Javanese exhibits adorning outlying

-counters swept away, and all the "decoration probabilities" vanish in

-savage wreck. Then the quaintly picturesque harnesses fell to the

-horses' necks, their hoofs trampled terrifyingly on the loose boards of

-the floor, and forth from the yawning doors the horses pounded, dragging

-the _pièce de résistance_, with garlands on its sides, the pink zouave

-cushion crushed beneath it, and the flag of the Netherlands streaming

-from the stack. Horses rushed thither in competition, came thundering at

-the doors, and galloped to place before the two carts. I think not a

-full minute can have been consumed. But the ruin of the Java

-entertainment committee's work was unbelievably complete. Though there

-had been not a fire in Friendship Village in two years, that night, of

-all nights, Jimmy Sturgis's "hay-barn," for the omnibus horses, "took it

-on itself," it was said, "to go to work an' burn up." And Jimmy's barn

-is outside the city limits, so that the _pièce de résistance_ had to be

-used. And Jimmy is in the fire-department, so that the company galloped

-informally to the rescue without the benefit of the mayor's authority.

-

-As the last of the department disappeared, and the women of the

-committee stood looking at one another--tired with the deadly tiredness

-of a day such as theirs--a little blue linen figure sprang upon a chair

-and clasped her hands behind her, and a blue ostrich feather lifted and

-dipped as she spoke.

-

-"Quickly!" Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson cried. "All hands at work now!

-Mrs. Sykes, will you set up the tea-table? You can get more dishes from

-my house. Mrs. Toplady, this booth, please. You can make it right in no

-time. Mrs. Holcomb, you will have to do your booth entirely over--you

-can get some things from my house. Miss Marsh--ah, Calliope Marsh, you

-must go to my house for my lace curtains--"

-

-She smiled ingratiatingly and surely arbitrarily, for we all knew full

-well that there was absolutely nothing to smile at. And with that

-Calliope's indignation, as she afterward said, "kind of crystallized and

-boiled over." I remember how she stood, hugging her thin little arms and

-speaking her defiance.

-

-"I donno how you feel, Mis' Johnson," she said dryly, "but, _my_ idea,

-Bedlam let loose ain't near quaint enough for a Java entertainment. Nor

-I don't think it's what you might say real Java, either. Things here

-looks to me too flexible. I'm goin' home an' go to bed."

-

-There was no doubt what the rest meant to do. With one impulse they

-turned toward the door as Calliope turned, and silently they took the

-way that the _pièce de résistance_ had taken before them. Little Mrs.

-Johnson stood on her chair making many gestures; but no one went back.

-

-Calliope looked straight before her.

-

-"My feet ache like I done my thinkin' with 'em," she said, "an' my head

-feels like I'd stood on it. An' what's it all for?"

-

-"Regular clock performance," Mis' Postmaster Sykes assented. "We've

-ticked hard all day long an' ain't got a thing out of it. I often think

-it's that way with my housework, but I did think the Ladies' Missionary

-could tick, when it _did_ tick, for eternity. I'm tuckered to the bone."

-

-"Nobody knows," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was Mame-Bliss, "how my poor neck

-aches. It's there I suffer first an' most."

-

-Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was walking behind the rest, took three great

-steps and caught us up and spoke, a little breathlessly:--

-

-"Land, land," she said, "I guess I'll go home an' pop some corn. Seems

-to me it'd smell sort of cosy an' homelike an' soothin' down. It's a

-grand thing to smell when you're feelin' far off from yourself."

-

-Calliope laughed a little then.

-

-"Well," she said, "anyhow I ain't got my silk waist to get into--and I

-didn't hev a nice one to put on anyway. I was wishin' I had, and now my

-wish has come true by bein' took away from me, bodily--like they will.

-But just the same--"

-

-She turned on the walk and faced us, and hugged her thin little arms.

-

-"A while ago," she said, "I give that little woman there six months to

-get herself the cold shoulder all around. Well, the time ain't up

-yet--but both my shoulders feels stone cold!"

-

-

-

-

-IX

-

-THE COLD SHOULDER

-

-

-There is something more about Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson.

-

-Did you ever look through an old school-book of your own and, say, on

-the history picture of Vesuvius in eruption impose your own memory of

-Pompeii, visited in these twenty years since you studied about it; and

-have you not stared hard at the time between and felt yourself some one

-other than that one who once dreamed over the Vesuvius picture? Or,

-years after you read the Letters, you have made a little mark below

-Cicero's cry from exile, "Oh, that I had been less eager for life!" and

-you look at the cry and at the mark, and you and one of these become an

-anachronism--but you are not sure which it is that so becomes. So now,

-in reading over these notes some while after I have set them down, I am

-minded here to give you my look ahead to the end of the summer and to

-slip in some account of what happened as a closing of the tale. And I

-confess that something about me--perhaps it is the Custodian

-herself--likes this way of pretending a freedom from time and of looking

-upon its fruit to say which seeds have grown and which have not.

-

-Friendship Village is not superstitious, but when curious coincidences

-occur we do, as we say, "take down note." And it did seem like a

-judgment upon us that, a little time after the Java fiasco, and while

-indignation was yet at high noon, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson fell ill.

-

-At first I think we affected not to know it. When she did not appear at

-church, none of us mentioned it for a Sunday or two. Then when some one

-casually noted her absence we said, "Oh, wasn't she? Got little cold,

-likely." That we saw her no more down town or "brushing up" about her

-door we facilely laid to chance. When the village heard that her

-maid--who always offended by talking almost in a whisper--had once or

-twice excused her mistress to callers, every one shut lips and hardened

-hearts and said some folk acted _very_ funny about their calling duties.

-But when, at the twelve o'clock breakfast of the new minister's

-wife--("Like enough breakfast at noon was a real Bible custom," the

-puzzled devotees solved that amazing hour), Mrs. Johnson did not appear,

-the village was forced to admit that something must be wrong.

-

-Moreover, against its will the behaviour of young Mr. Johnson was

-gravely alarming Friendship. Mr. Johnson was in real estate and

-insurance in the city, and this did not impress the village as a serious

-business. "Because, what does he _sell_!" as Abigail Arnold said. "We

-know he don't own property. He rents the very house they live in. A

-doctor's a doctor an' he gives pills, an' a store's a store with the

-kind o' thing you need. But it don't seem like that man could make a

-real good livin' for her, dealin' vague in nothin' that way." His

-income, it was felt, was problematical, and the village had settled it

-that what the Oliver Wheeler Johnsons' had was chiefly wedding presents

-"an' high-falutin' tastes." But, in the face of the evidence, every

-afternoon at three o'clock the young husband ordered a phaëton from

-Jimmy Sturgis and came home from the city to take his wife to drive.

-Between shutters the village saw that little Mrs. Johnson's face did

-look betrayingly pale, and the blue ostrich plume lay motionless on her

-bright hair.

-

-"I guess Mis' Johnson's real run down," her acquaintances said to one

-another uneasily. Still we did not go to see her. The weeks went by

-until, one morning, Calliope met the little new Friendship doctor on the

-street and asked him about his patient.

-

-"I up an' ask' him flat out," Calliope confessed afterward; "not that I

-really cared to be told, but I hated to know I was heathenish. You don't

-like the feelin'. To know they ain't heathens is all that keeps some

-folks from _bein_' 'em. Well, so I ask' him. 'Doctor Heron,' s'I, 'is

-that Mis' Johnson real sick, or is she just sickish?' He looks at me

-an'--'Looks pretty sick, don't she?' s'e. 'Well,' s'I, 'I've seen folks

-look real rich that wa'n't it by right-down pocketbook evidence.' 'Been

-to see her?' s'e. 'No,' s'I, short. 'Might drop in,' s'e, an' walks off,

-lookin' cordial. That little Doctor Heron is that close-mouthed I

-declare if I don't respect him same as the minister an' the pipe-organ

-an' the skippin' hills."

-

-So, as midsummer passed and found the little woman still ailing, I

-obeyed an idle impulse and went one evening to see her. I recall that as

-soon as I had crossed her threshold the old influence came upon me, and

-I was minded to run from the place in sheer distaste of the overemphasis

-and the lifted, pointed chin and the fluttering importances of her

-presence. I was ashamed enough that this should be so, but so it was;

-and I held my ground to await her coming to the room only by a measure

-of will.

-

-I sat with Mrs. Johnson for an hour that evening. And it would seem

-that, as is the habit of many, having taken my own way I was straightway

-possessed to draw others after me. There are those who behave similarly

-and who set cunningly to work to gain their own ends, as, for example, I

-did. For one night soon I devised a little feast, which I have always

-held to be a good doorway to any enterprise, and, at the

-Friendship-appointed supper hour of six, I made my table as fair as

-possible, as has been done in like case ever since butter was first

-served "in a lordly dish." And my guests were Calliope, without whom no

-festival is wholly in keeping, and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and

-Mis' Postmaster Sykes, and that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady.

-

-Because they had arrived so unsuspectingly I own myself to have felt

-guilty enough when, in that comfortable half-hour after a new and

-delectable dessert had been pronounced upon, I suggested with what

-casualness I might summon that we five pay a visit that night to Mrs.

-Oliver Wheeler Johnson.

-

-"Land!" said Mis' Holcomb, "I've thought I would an' then I've thought I

-wouldn't till I feel all two-faced about myself. I donno. Sometimes I

-think one way an' sometimes I think the other. Are you ever like that?"

-

-"I s'pose," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, majestically, "that them in our

-position ought to overlook. I donno's 'twould hurt us any to go," she

-added graciously.

-

-Calliope's eyes twinkled.

-

-"That's it," she said; "let them that's got the social position to

-overlook things be Christian an' overlook 'em."

-

-That great Mis' Amanda Toplady folded her hands, dimpled like a baby

-giant's.

-

-"I'd be glad to go," she said simply; "I've got some grape jell that

-looks to me like it wasn't goin' to keep long, an' I'd be thankful to be

-on terms with her so's I could carry it in to her. They ain't a single

-other invalid in Friendship."

-

-Calliope sprang to her feet and crossed her little arms, a hand hugging

-either shoulder.

-

-"Well said!" she cried; "do let's go! I'm sick to death of slidin' off

-the subject whenever it comes up in my mind."

-

-So, in the fair October dusk, we five went down the Plank Road--where

-Summer lingers late. The air was gentle with the soft, impending dark. I

-wonder why the colonnade of sweet influences, down which we stepped, did

-not win us to themselves. But I remember how, instead, our imminent

-visit drew us back to the days of Mrs. Johnson's coming, so that

-presently we were going over the incident of the Java entertainment,

-and, as Calliope would have put it, "crystallizing and boiling over"

-again in the old distaste.

-

-But when we reached the little cottage of the Johnsons, our varied

-motives for the visit were abruptly merged in a common anxiety. For

-Doctor Heron's buggy stood at the gate and the little one-story cottage

-was dark save for a light in what we knew to be a corner bedroom. The

-hallway was open to the night, but though we could distinctly hear the

-bell jingle in the kitchen no one answered the summons. Then, there

-being somewhere about a murmur of voices, Calliope stepped within and

-called softly:--

-

-"Doctor, Doctor Heron--you there? Is they anything we can do?"

-

-The doctor came momentarily to the lighted doorway down the hall.

-

-"That you, Calliope?" he said. "You might come here, will you? Tell the

-rest to sit down somewheres. And you tell Mr. Johnson he can come."

-

-On which, from out the dark living room, some one emerged very swiftly

-and without a word pushed by us all where we were crowded in the passage

-and strode down to the little lighted chamber. Calliope hurried after

-him, and we four shrank back in sudden dread and slipped silently into

-the room which the young husband had left, and stood together in the

-dimness. Was she so sick? In that room he must have heard the door-bell

-as we had heard it, and yet he had not answered. Was it possible that we

-had come too late?

-

-While we waited we said nothing at all, save that great Mis' Amanda

-Toplady, who said three times or four, "Oh, dear, oh, dear, I'm always

-waitin' till somethin's too late--either me or the other thing." It

-seemed very long before we heard some stir, but it can have been only a

-few minutes until the doctor came down the little hall and groped into

-the room. In answer to all that we asked he merely occupied himself in

-lighting a match and setting it deliberately to the candles on the table

-and adjusting their shades. They were, we noted afterward, the same

-candles whose presence we had detected and derided at those long ago

-tête-à-tête suppers in that house. The light glowed on the young

-doctor's pale face as he looked at us, each in turn, before he spoke.

-And when he had done with his slow scrutiny--I think that we cannot

-wholly have fancied its accusation--he said only:--

-

-"Yes, she's pretty sick. I can't tell yet."

-

-Then he turned and closed the outer door and stood leaning against it,

-looking up the hall.

-

-"Miss Marsh!" he called.

-

-But why did the man not tell us something, we wondered; and there

-flashed in my mind Calliope's reference to the pipe-organ and the

-skipping hills. At all events, Calliope would tell us.

-

-And so she did. We heard her step in the hall, coming quickly and yet

-with a manner of exceeding care. I think that with the swift sense which

-wings before intelligence, the others understood before they saw her,

-even as I understood. Calliope stopped in the doorway as if she could

-trust herself to go no farther. And she was holding something in her

-arms.

-

-"Calliope," we said; "Calliope...."

-

-She looked down at that which she held, and then she looked at us. And

-the tears were in her eyes, but her face was brighter than I have ever

-known it.

-

-"It's a baby," she said, "a little bit of a baby. _Her_ baby. An' it

-makes me feel--it makes me feel--oh," she broke off, "don't it make you

-feel that way, too?"

-

-We looked at one another, and avoided one another's look, and then

-looked long at the baby. I do not remember that we said anything at all,

-or if we did so, that it bore a meaning. But an instant after Calliope

-gave the baby to the nurse who appeared in the doorway, we all tiptoed

-down to the kitchen by common consent. And it was plain that Mrs.

-Johnson's baby made us feel that way, too.

-

-In our desire to be of tardy service we did the most absurd things. We

-took possession of the kitchen, rejoicing that we found the supper

-dishes uncared for, and we heated a great kettle of water, and washed

-and wiped and put away, as softly as we could; and then we "brushed up

-around." I think that only the need of silence kept us from cleaning

-windows. When the nurse appeared--who had arrived that day unknown of

-Friendship--we sprang as one to do her bidding. We sent the little maid

-to bed, we tidied the living room, walking tiptoe, and then we went back

-through the kitchen and sat down on the little side "stoop." And all

-this time we had addressed one another only about the tasks which we had

-in hand.

-

-After a little silence,

-

-"The milkman was quite late this morning," observed Mis' Holcomb.

-

-"Well, he's begun to deliver in cans instead o' bottles," Mis' Sykes

-explained; "it takes him some longer to get around. He says bottles

-makes his wife just that much more to do."

-

-Then we fell silent again.

-

-It was Calliope, sitting on the porch step outside, where it was dark,

-who at last had the courage to be articulate.

-

-"I hope--I _hope_," she said, "she's goin' to be all right."

-

-Mis' Sykes shaded her eyes from the bracket lamp within.

-

-"I'll go bail," she said, "that little you-do-as-I-say chin'll carry her

-through. I'm glad she's got it."

-

-Just then we heard the thin crying of the child and we could divine

-Calliope, that on the step where she sat she was hugging her arms and

-rocking somewhat, to and fro.

-

-"Like enough," she said, "oh, like enough--folks ain't so cramped about

-runnin' their own feelin's as they think they are!"

-

-To this we murmured something indefinite in sound but positive enough in

-sense. And we all knew what we all knew.

-

-"Let's go out around the house to the front gate," said that great Mis'

-Amanda Toplady, abruptly. "Have any of you ladies got two

-handkerchiefs?"

-

-"I've got two," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, "an' I ain't used either

-one. Do you want the one with essence or the one without?"

-

-"I ain't partial," said Mis' Amanda.

-

-We rose and stumbled along the grassy path that led round the house. At

-the gate we met Doctor Heron.

-

-"Well," he said slowly, "well." And after a moment, "Will--will any of

-you be here in the morning?" he asked.

-

-"Yes," we all said simply.

-

-"That's good," he commented shortly, "I didn't know."

-

-We five had to separate at the first corner to go our home ways, and we

-stood for a moment under the gas-light. I remember how, just then,

-Peter's father came singing past us, like one of the Friendship family

-who did not understand his kinship. Even as we five had not understood

-ours.

-

-"You haven't got a shawl, hev you?" Mis' Sykes said to me solicitously.

-

-"The nights have been some chilly on a person's shoulders for a day or

-two now," said Mis' Holcomb.

-

-Calliope put her hand up quickly to her throat.

-

-"Quit," she said. "All of you. Thank God. An' shake hands. I tell you,

-after this I bet I'll run my own feelin's about folks or I'll bring down

-the sky an' make new feelin's! Oh," said Calliope, "don't her--an'

-_now_--an' the baby--an'--oh, an' that bright star winkin' over that

-hitchin' post, make things seem--easy? Good night. I can't stand out

-here any longer."

-

-But when we had gone away a few steps, Calliope called us back. And as

-we turned again,

-

-"To bring down the sky," she repeated, "I bet that's the way God meant

-us to do. They ain't any of us got enough _to_ us to piece out without

-it!"

-

-

-

-

-X

-

-EVENING DRESS

-

-

-I have said that Daphne Street has been paved within the past year, but

-I had not heard of the manner in which the miracle had been wrought

-until the day when Calliope's brief stay in the village ended and she

-came to tell me good-by--and, more than incidentally, to show me some

-samples of a dress which she might have, and a dress which she wouldn't

-have, and a dress which she had made up her mind to have.

-

-"We don't dress much here in Friendship Village," she observed. "Not but

-what we'd like to, but we ain't the time nor the means nor the places to

-wear to. But they was one night--"

-

-She looked at me, as always when she means to tell a story, somewhat

-with the manner of asking a permission.

-

-"None of the low-neck' fashion-plates used to seem real to us," she

-said. "We used to look at 'em pinned up in Lyddy Ember's dressmakin'

-windows, ah-ahing in their low pink an' long blue, an' we'd look 'em

-over an' think tolerant enough, like about sea-serpents. But neither the

-one nor the other bit hold rill vital, because the plates was so young

-an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an' we was old an' busy, like you get,

-an' considered past the dressin' age. Still, it made kind of a nice

-thing to do on the way home from the grocery hot forenoons--draw up

-there on the shady side, where the street kitters some into a curve, an'

-look at Lyddy's plates, an' choose, like you was goin' to get one.

-

-"Land knows we needed some oasises on that street from the grocery up

-home. Daphne Street, our main street, didn't always use' to be what it

-is now--neat little wooden blocks an' a stone curb. You know how it use'

-to be--no curb an' the road a sight, over your shoe-tops with mud in the

-wet, an' over your shoe-tops with sand when it come dry. We ladies used

-to talk a good deal about it, but the men knew it meant money to hev it

-fixed, an' so they told us hevin' it fixed meant cuttin' the trees down,

-an' that kept us quiet--all but the Friendship Married Ladies Cemetery

-Improvement Sodality.

-

-"Mis' Postmaster Sykes was president o' the Sodality last year, you

-know,--she's most always president of everything,--an' we'd been

-workin' quite hard all that winter, an' had got things in the cemetery

-rill ship-shape--at least I mean things _on_ the cemetery was. An' at

-one o' the July meetin's last summer Mis' Sykes up an' proposed that we

-give over workin' for the dead an' turn to the livin', an' pave the main

-street of Friendship Village.

-

-"'True,' she says, 'our constitution states that the purpose of our

-Sodality shall be to keep up the graves of our townspeople an' make 'em

-attractive to others. But,' says she, 'when they ain't enough of us dead

-to occupy all the time, the only Christian way to remedy that is to work

-for folks before they die, while we're waitin' for their graves.'

-

-"This seemed reasonable, an' we voted unanimous to pave Daphne Street.

-An' on the way home Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Timothy Toplady an' I see

-Timothy Toplady settin' in the post-office store, an' we went in to tell

-him an' Silas Sykes about it. But before we could start in, Silas says,

-eyebrows all eager, 'Ain't you heard?'

-

-"'Heard what?' says his wife, kind o' cross, bein' he was her wedded

-husband an' she _hadn't_ heard.

-

-"''Bout Threat Hubbelthwait,' says Silas, lookin' at Mis' Toplady an'

-me, bein's Mis' Sykes was his wife. 'Drunk again,' says Silas, 'an'

-fiddlin' for dear life, an' won't let anybody into the hotel. Mis'

-Hubbelthwait has gone over to her mother's, an' the hired girl with

-her; an' Threat's settin' in the bar an' playin' all the hymn tunes he

-knows.'

-

-"It wasn't the first time it had happened, you know. Threat an' his wife

-an' the hired girl keep the only hotel in Friendship Village--when

-Threat is sober. When he isn't, he sometimes closes up the house an'

-turns out whoever happens to be there, an' won't let a soul in--though,

-of course, not much of anybody ever comes to Friendship anyway, excep'

-now an' then an automobile on its way somewheres. An' there Threat will

-set in the bar, sometimes most of one week, sometimes most of two, an'

-scrape away on the only tunes he knows--all hymns, 'Just As I Am,' an'

-'Can A Little Child Like Me?' Threat don't mean to be sacrilegious; he

-shows that by never singin' them two hymns in church, when they're give

-out.

-

-"'Land!' says Mis' Sykes, when Silas got through, 'what men are!'

-

-"'We ain't so much as woman, lemme tell you,' says Silas, right crisp.

-Which wasn't what he meant, an' we all laughed at him, so he was a

-little mad to start with.

-

-"'The Sodality's decided to pave Daphne Street,' Mis' Sykes mentions

-then, simple.

-

-"'Pave _what_?' shouts Silas--Silas always seems to think the more you

-do in sound the more you'll do in sense.

-

-"'Do _what_ to Daphne Street?' says Timothy, whirlin' from the peanut

-roaster.

-

-"'Pave Daphne Street,' says Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' me,

-wonderin'.

-

-"Silas wrapped his arms around his own shoulders.

-

-"'When,' says he, lettin' his head lurch with his own emphasizin', 'did

-the Common Council hear about this?'

-

-"'They ain't heard, about it,' says Mis' Sykes, 'no more'n we ever hear

-anything about them.'

-

-"Silas an' Timothy is both aldermen, an' rill sensitive over it. I guess

-the Common Council always _is_ a delicate subject, ain't it?

-

-"Mebbe it wasn't a rill diplomatic way to begin, but it hadn't entered

-the Sodality's head that the town wouldn't be glad to hev the pavin'

-done if the Sodality was willin' to do it. Ain't it a hard thing to

-learn that it ain't all willingness, nor yet all bein' capable, that

-gets things done in the world? It's part just edgin' round an' edgin'

-round.

-

-"What did the Common Council do that night but call a special meetin'

-an' vote not to order any city pavin' done that present year. Every

-member was there but Threat Hubbelthwait, who was fiddlin', an' every

-vote was switched by Silas an' Timothy to be unanimous, excep' Eppleby

-Holcomb's vote. Eppleby, we heard afterwards, said that when a pack o'

-women made up their minds to pave, they'd pave if it was to pave--some

-place that Eppleby hadn't ought to 'a' mentioned; an' he was goin' to be

-on the pavin' side. But then, Eppleby is the gentlest husband in

-Friendship Village, an' known to be.

-

-"Sodality met special next day, not so much to do anything as to let it

-be known that we'd took action. This we done by votin' to lay low till

-such time as we could order the wooden blocks. We preferred to pave

-peaceable, it bein' hot weather.

-

-"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss an'

-Mis' Mayor Uppers an' I walked home together from that meetin'. It was a

-blisterin' July afternoon--one of them afternoons that melts itself out

-flat, same as a dropped pepp'mint on a brick walk, an' you're left

-stickin' in it helpless as a fly, an' generally buzzin'. I rec'lect we

-was buzzin'--comin' down Daphne Street in that chokin' dust an' no

-pavement.

-

-"'It's a dog's life, livin' in a little town--in some respects,' I

-remember Mis' Sykes says.

-

-"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, tolerant, 'I know. I know it is. But I'd

-rather live in a little town an' dog it out than go up to the city an'

-turn wolf, same as some.'

-

-"An' yet we all felt the same, every one of us. They ain't a woman

-livin' in a little place that don't feel the same, now and again. It's

-quiet an' it's easy housework, an' you get to know folks well. But oh,

-none of it what you might say _glitters_. An' they ain't no woman

-whatever--no matter how good a wife an' mother an' Christian an' even

-housekeeper she is--that don't, 'way down deep in her heart, feel that

-hankerin' after some sort o' _glitter_.

-

-"So it was natural enough that we should draw up at Lyddy's dressmakin'

-window an' rest ourself. An' that afternoon we'd have done so, anyway,

-for she hed been pinnin' up her new summer plates--Lyddy don't believe

-in rushin' the season. An' no sooner had we got a good look at 'em--big

-coloured sheets they was, with full-length pictures--than Mis' Toplady

-leaned 'way forward, her hands on her knees, an' stood lookin' at 'em

-the way you look at the parade.

-

-"'Well, look-a-there,' she says. 'Look at that one.'

-

-"The one she meant was a woman with her hair all plaited an' fringed an'

-cut bias, an' with a little white hat o' lilacs 'bout as big as a cork;

-an' her dress--my land! Her dress was long an' rill light blue, an'

-seemed like it must have been paper, it was so fancy. It didn't seem

-like cloth goods at all, same as we hed on. It was more like we was

-wearin' meat an' vegetable dresses, an' this dress was dessert--all

-whipped cream an' pink sugar an' a flower on the plate.

-

-"'Dear land!' says Mis' Toplady, lookin' 'round at us strange, 'do they

-do it when they get gray hair? I didn't know they done it when their

-hair was gray.'

-

-"We all looked, an' sure enough, the woman's hair was white. 'Afternoon

-Toilette for Elderly Woman,' it said underneath, plain as plain. Always

-before the plates hed all been young an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an'

-we'd thought of all that as past an' done for, with us, along with all

-the other things that didn't come true. But here was a woman grayer than

-any of us, an' yet lookin' as live as if she'd been wearin' a housework

-dress.

-

-"'Why,' says Mis' Sykes, starin', 'that must be a new thing this season.

-I never heard of a woman well along in years wearin' anything but brown

-or navy blue or gray,--besides black.' Mis' Sykes is terribly dressy,

-but even she never yet got anywheres inside the rainbow, except in a bow

-at the chin.

-

-"'My,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, wistful, 'wouldn't it seem

-like heaven to be able to wear colours without bein' talked about?'

-

-"An' Mis' Mayor Uppers--her that her husband grew well off bein' mayor,

-an' never'd been back to Friendship Village since he was put out of

-office, she says low:--

-

-"'You ladies that has husbands to keep thinkin' well of you, I should

-think you'd think about this thing. Men,' she says, 'loves the light

-shades.'

-

-"At that Mis' Toplady turned around on us, an' we see her eyes

-expressin' i-dees.

-

-"'Ladies,' says she, impressive, 'Mis' Uppers is right. We hadn't ought

-to talk back or show mad. We ladies of the Sodality had ought to be able

-to get our own way peaceable, just by takin' it, the way the Lord give

-women the weapons to do.'

-

-"We see that somethin' was seethin' in her mind, but we couldn't work

-our way to what it was.

-

-"'Ladies,' says she, an' stepped up on the wooden step to Lyddy's

-dressmakin' shop, 'has the husbands of any one of us seen us, for twenty

-years, dressed in the light shades?'

-

-"I didn't hev any husband to answer for, but I could truthfully say of

-the rest that you'd think black an' brown an' gray an' navy had

-exhausted the Lord's ingenuity, for all the attention they'd paid to any

-other colour He'd wove with.

-

-"'Let's the Sodality get up an evenin' party, an' hev it in post-office

-hall, an' invite our husbands an' buy new dresses--light shades an' some

-lace,' says Mis' Toplady, lettin' the i-dee drag her along, main

-strength.

-

-"Mis' Sykes was studyin' the fashion-plate hungry, but she stopped an'

-stepped up side o' Mis' Toplady.

-

-"'Well, sir,' she said, 'I donno but 'twould help us to work the pavin'

-of Daphne Street. Why, Silas Sykes, for one, is right down soft-hearted

-about clothes. He always notices which one of their waists the choir's

-got on. I heard him say once he wasn't goin' to church again till they

-bought somethin' new.'

-

-"Mis' Holcomb nodded. 'Five years ago,' she said, 'I went up to the city

-with Eppleby. An' I saw him _turn around_ to look after a woman. I'll

-never forget the sensation it give me--like I was married to a man that

-wasn't my husband. The woman had on a light pink dress. I know I come

-home an' bought a pink collar; I didn't think I could go any farther,

-because she was quite young. Do you s'pose....'

-

-"Mis' Toplady pointed at Lyddy's fashion-plate. 'I should go,' she says,

-'just as far as my money would let me go.'

-

-"Mis' Uppers stood lookin' down to the walk. 'The mayor,' she says--she

-calls him 'the mayor' yet--'was terrible fond o' coloured neckties. He

-was rill partial to green ones. Mebbe I didn't think enough about what

-that meant....'

-

-"Mis' Toplady came down off the step. 'Every man is alike,' says she,

-decided. 'Most of us Friendship ladies thinks if we give 'em a clean

-roller towel we've done enough towards makin' things pretty; an' I

-think it's time, as wives, we took advantage of the styles.'

-

-"'An',' says Mis' Sykes, the president, rill dreamy for her, but firm,

-'I think so, too.'

-

-"I tell you, we all walked home feelin' like we'd hed a present--me too,

-though I knew very well I couldn't hev a light dress, an' I didn't hev

-any husband. You start out thinkin' them are the two principal things,

-but you get a-hold o' some others, if you pay attention. Still, I judged

-the ladies was on the right track, for men is men, say what who will.

-All but Threat Hubbelthwait. We passed the hotel an' heard him settin'

-in there by the bar scrapin' away on 'Can A Little Child Like Me?' We

-took shame to him, an' yet I know we all looked at each other sort of

-motherly, like he _was_ some little shaver, same as he sung, an'

-performin' most fool.

-

-"It don't take us ladies long to do things, when our minds is made.

-Especially it don't when Mis' Timothy Toplady is chairman of the

-Entertainment Committee, or the Doin' Committee of whatever happens,

-like she was that time. First, we found out they was plenty enough nun's

-veilin' in the post-office store, cheap an' wide an' in stock an' all

-the light shades; an' I bought all the dresses, noons, of the clerk, so

-Silas wouldn't suspect--me not hevin' any husband to inquire around,

-like they do. Then we hired the post-office hall, vague, without sayin'

-for what--an' that pleased Silas that gets the rent. An' then we give

-the invitations, spectacular, through the _Friendship Daily_ to the

-Sodality's husbands, for the next Tuesday night. We could do it that

-quick, not bein' dependent on dressmakers same as some. The ladies was

-all goin' to make their dresses themselves, an' the dresses wa'n't much

-to do to make. Nobody bothered a very great deal about how we should

-make 'em, the principal thing bein' the colour; Mis' Toplady's was blue,

-like the fashion-plate; Mis' Holcomb's pink, like the woman in the city;

-Mis' Uppers' green, like the mayor's necktie, an' so on. I made me up a

-dress out o' the spare-room curtains--white, with a little blue flower

-in it, an' a new blue ribbon belt. But Mis' Sykes, she went to work an'

-_rented_ a dress from the city, for that one night. That much she give

-out about it, an' would give out no more. That woman loves a surprise.

-She's got a rill pleasant mind, Mis' Sykes has, but one that does enjoy

-jerkin' other people's minds up, an most anything'll do for the string.

-

-"For all we thought we hed so much time, an' it was so easy to do, the

-afternoon o' the party we went 'most crazy. We'd got up quite a nice

-little cold supper--Mis' Hubbelthwait had helped us, she bein' still at

-large, an' Threat fiddlin'. We planned meat loaf an' salad an' pickles

-an' jelly, an' scalloped potatoes for the hot dish, an' ice cream an'

-cake, enough in all for thirty folks: fifteen husbands an' fifteen

-Sodality, or approximatish. An' we planned to go to the hall in the

-afternoon an' take our dresses there, an' sly em' up and leave 'em, an'

-put 'em on after we'd got there that night, so's nobody's husbands

-should suspect. But when we all came in the afternoon, an' the

-decoratin' with greens an' festoons of cut paper an' all was to do,

-there Mis' Toplady, that was to make scalloped potatoes, hadn't got her

-sleeves in yet, an' she was down to the hall tryin' to do both; an' Mis'

-Holcomb, that was to make the salad dressing, had got so nervous over

-her collar that she couldn't tell which edge she'd cut for the top. But

-the rest of us was ready, an' Mis' Sykes's dress had come from the city,

-an' we all, Mis' Toplady an' Mame too, hed our dresses in boxes in the

-post-office hall kitchen cupboards. An' we done the decoratin', an' it

-looked rill lovely, with the long tables laid ready at each side, an'

-room for bein' a party left in between 'em.

-

-"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb left the hall about five

-o'clock to go home an' lay out Silas's an' Timothy's an' Eppleby's best

-clothes for 'em--the rest hed done it at noon. Mis' Hubbelthwait was

-goin' over to the hotel to get some dishes out, an' I went with her to

-help. The bar was to the back, where Threat set an' slep' an' fiddled,

-an' Mis' Hubbelthwait was goin' to slip in still an' sly the dishes out

-to me. A good many of the hotel dishes was her individual weddin'

-presents, so she didn't think wrong of her conscience.

-

-"We was all five hurryin' along together, rehearsin' all we'd got to do

-before six-thirty, when we heard a funny sound. We listened, an' we

-thought they must be testin' the hose. But when we got to Lyddy's shop,

-where the street kitters off some in a curve, we looked ahead an' we see

-it wasn't that.

-

-"It's an automobile," says Mis' Toplady. 'My land,' she says, 'it ain't

-only one. It's two.'

-

-"An' we see it was. There come the two of 'em, ploughin' along through

-the awful sand of Daphne Street, that was fit for no human locomotive,

-unless ostriches. When the Proudfits are here, that's the only one in

-the village with an automobile, they understand the sand, and they'd put

-on the whole steam and tear right along through it. But strangers would

-go careful, for fear they'd get stuck, an' so they got it, like you do.

-An' them two big red cars was comin' slow, the dust like cloaks an'

-curtains billowin' up behind. They looked quite wild, includin' the

-seven folks in each one that was laughin' an' callin' out. An' by the

-time they'd come up to us, us four ladies of the Sodality an' Mis'

-Hubbelthwait was lined up on the walk watchin' 'em. They stopped an'

-one of 'em hailed us, leanin' past his driver.

-

-"'I beg your pardon,' he says, 'is this the street to the best hotel?'

-

-"It was Mis' Toplady that answered him, rill collected. 'They's only one

-street in town,' says she, 'an' they's only one hotel, an' that they

-ain't now.'

-

-"'Can you tell me how soon there will be one?' says the man. 'By

-dinner-time, I hope.'

-

-"We all felt kind of delicate about answerin' this, an' so Mis'

-Hubbelthwait herself spoke up. 'Threat's drunk an' fiddlin', she says.

-'They's no tellin' when Friendship Village will ever hev a hotel again.'

-

-"Both automobiles was listenin' by then, an' though some of 'em laughed

-out sort o' rueful, not many of 'em see the funny.

-

-"'Gad,' one of the men says, 'how about the bird an' the bottle we were

-to send back to Bonner, sittin' by his tire in the desert, a ways back?

-Don't tell us there's no place,' he says, 'where we can find dinner,

-twenty-one of us and the three chauf--' that word.

-

-"Mis' Toplady shook her head. 'They ain't a place big enough to seat

-twenty-one, even if they was the food to feed 'em--' she begun, an' then

-she stopped an' looked 'round at us, as though she was thinkin'

-somethin'.

-

-"'Oh, come now,' says the man,--he was good-lookin' an' young, an'

-merry-seemin',--'Oh, come now,' he said, 'I am sure that the ladies of

-Friendship could cook things such as never man yet ate. We are

-sta-arving,' he says, humorous. 'Can't you do something for us? We'll

-give you,' he winds up, genial, 'two dollars a plate for a good,

-home-cooking dinner for the twenty-four of us. What do you say?'

-

-"Mis' Toplady whirled toward us sort o' wild. 'Is two dollars times

-twenty-four, forty-eight dollars?' says she, low.

-

-"An' we see it was, though Mis' Holcomb was still figurin' it out in the

-palm of her other hand, while we stood gettin' glances out of each

-other's eyes, an' sendin' 'em, give for take. We see, quick as a flash,

-what Mis' Toplady was thinkin' about. An' it was about that hall, all

-festooned with greens an' cut paper, an' the two long tables laid ready,

-an' the veal loaf an' scalloped potatoes an' ice-cream for thirty. An'

-when Mis' Sykes, that usually speaks, stood still, an' didn't say one

-word, but just nodded a little bit, sort o' sad, Mis' Toplady, that was

-chairman o' the Entertainment Committee, done like she does

-sometimes--she took the whole thing into her own hands an' just settled

-it.

-

-"'Why, yes,' she says to 'em, rill pleasant, 'if you want to come up to

-post-office hall at half-past six,' she says, 'the Friendship Married

-Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality will serve you your supper, nice

-as the nicest, for two dollars a head.'

-

-"'Good!' the men all sings out, an' the women spats their hands soft,

-an' one of 'em says somethin' to the merry-seemin' man.

-

-"'Oh, yes,' he says then, 'couldn't we all break into this hotel an'

-floss up a bit before dinner?'

-

-"Mis' Hubbelthwait stepped out towards 'em.

-

-"'I was thinkin' of that,' says she. 'My husband,' she says, dignified,

-'is settin' in the bar--practisin' his violin. He--he does that

-sometimes, an' we--don't bother him. But the bar is at the back. I can

-let you in, still, the front way to the rooms, if you want. An' I'll be

-there myself to wait on you.'

-

-"An' that was what they done, somebody takin' one o' the cars back for

-the other car, an' the rest of us fair breakin' into a run toward

-post-office hall.

-

-"'My land,' says Mis' Toplady, almost like a groan, 'what _hev_ we

-done?'

-

-"It _was_ a funny thing to do, we see it afterward. But I tell you, you

-can't appreciate the influence o' that forty-eight dollars unless you've

-tried to earn money in a town the size o' Friendship Village. Sodality

-hardly ever made more than five dollars to its ten-cent

-entertainments--an' that for a big turn-out on a dry night. An' here was

-the price of about nine such entertainments give us outright, an' no

-extra work, an' rill feet-achin' weather. I say it was more than flesh

-an' blood _or_ wives could stand. We done it automatic, like you

-contradict when it's necessary.

-

-"But there _was_ the men to reckon with.

-

-"'What'll Timothy--an' Silas--an' Eppleby....' Mis' Toplady says, an'

-stops, some bothered an' some rill pained.

-

-"I judged, not havin' any husband to be doin' the inquirin', it wasn't

-polite for me to laugh. But I couldn't hardly help it, thinkin' o' them

-fifteen hungry men an' the supper et away from 'em, just William Nilly.

-

-"Mis' Sykes, we remembered afterwards, never said a word, but only kep'

-up with us back to the hall.

-

-"Back to the hall, where the rest o' the Sodality was, we told 'em what

-we'd done--beginnin' with the forty-eight dollars, like some kind o'

-weapon. But I tell you, we hadn't reckoned without knowin' our

-hostesses, head an' heart. An' they went in pell mell, pleased an' glad

-as we was, an' plannin' like mad.

-

-"The first need was more food to make up that supper to somewheres near

-two dollars' worth--feedin' your husband is one thing an' gettin' up a

-two-dollar meal is another. But we collected that all in pretty sudden:

-leg o' lamb, left from the Holcombs' dinner an' only cut off of one

-side; the Sykes's roast o' veal, the same; three chickens for soup the

-Libertys hed just dressed for next day company dinner; big platter of

-devilled eggs chipped in from Mis' Toplady; a jar o' doughnuts, a

-steamer o' cookies, a fruit-cake a year old--we just made out our list

-an' scattered to empty out all our pantries.

-

-"By six o'clock we was back in the hall, an' all the food with us. But

-nobody hed met nobody's husband yet, an' nobody wanted to. We didn't

-quite know how we was goin' to do, I guess--but done is done, an' to do

-takes care of itself.

-

-"'Hadn't we ought to 'a' sent word to the men?' says Mis' Holcomb, for

-the third or fourth time. 'I sneaked around so's not to pass Eppleby's

-office, but I declare I feel mean. He'll hev to eat sauce an' plain

-bread-an'-butter for his supper. An' most o' the men-folks the same.

-'Seems though somebody'd ought to send 'em word an' not let 'em come up

-here, all washed an' dressed.'

-

-"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, cuttin' cake with her lips shut tight an'

-talkin' anyway, 'I kind o' thought--leave 'em come up. I bet they'd

-rather be in it than out of it, every one of 'em, an' who knows they

-might be some supper left? An' we can all--'

-

-"An' at that Mis' Toplady faces round from cuttin' the cake: 'My land,

-my land,' she says, sort o' hushed, 'why, doin' this, we can't none of

-us wear our new dresses!'

-

-"An' at that we looked at each other, each one sort of accusin', an' I

-guess all our hearts givin' one o' them sickish thumps. An' Mis' Sykes,

-her that hed been so still, snaps back:--

-

-"'I wondered what you thought I'd rented my dress from the city for at

-_Three Dollars a night_.'

-

-"I tell you, that made a hush in the middle of the plannin'. We'd forgot

-all about our own dresses, an' that was bad enough, with the hall all

-hired an' everything all ready, an' every chance in the world of

-everybody's husband's findin' out about the dresses before we could get

-up another Sodality party, same way. But here was Mis' Sykes, three

-dollars out, an mebbe wouldn't be able to rent her dress again at all.

-

-"'I did want Silas,' Mis' Sykes says then, wistful, 'to see me in that

-dress. Silas an' I have been married so long,' she says, 'that I often

-wonder if I seem like a person to him at all. But in that dress from the

-city, I think I would.'

-

-"We was each an' all ready to cry, an' I dunno but we would hev done

-it--though we was all ready to serve, too: coffee made, potatoes pipin'

-hot, veal an' lamb het up an' smellin' rich, chicken soup steamin', an'

-all. But just that very minute we heard some of 'em comin' in the

-hall--an' the one 'ready' conquered the other 'ready,' like it will, an'

-we all made a rush, part curious an' part nerves, to peek through the

-little servin' window from the kitchen.

-

-"_What_ do you think we saw? It was the automobile folks, hungry an' got

-there first. In they'd come, women laughin', men jokin', all makin' a

-lark out o' the whole thing. An' if the women wasn't, every last one of

-'em, wearin'--not the clothes they hed come in, but light pink an' light

-blue an' white an' flowered things, an' all like that.

-

-"Mis' Hubbelthwait burst in on us while we was lookin'. 'They hed things

-in their trunk at the back o' the automobile,' says she. 'They says they

-wanted to floss up for dinner, an' floss up they hev. They look like

-Lyddy's fashion sheets, one an' all.'

-

-"At that Mis' Sykes, a-ceasin' to peek, she drops her tray on the bare

-floor an' begun untyin' her apron. 'Quick!' she raps out, 'Mis'

-Hubbelthwait, you go an' set 'em down. An' every one o' you--into them

-togs of ours! Here's the chance to wear 'em--here an' _now_,' she says,

-'an' leave them folks see we know how to do things here in Friendship

-Village as good as the best.'

-

-"Well, bein' as she had rented the dress, an' three dollars hed to be

-paid out anyhow, an' bein' as she was president, an' bein' as we was all

-hankerin' in our hearts, we didn't need much urgin'. We slammed the

-servin' window shut an' set chairs against both doors, an' we whisked

-out of our regular dresses like wild.

-

-"'Oh, land--my land, the sleeves--the sleeves ain't in mine!' says Mis'

-Toplady, sort o' glazed, an' speakin' in a wail. But we encouraged her

-up to pin 'em in, which she done, an' it couldn't be told from stitches.

-Poor Mame Holcomb's collar that wasn't on yet we turned in for her

-V-shape, so's her dress was low, like the best. An' Mis' Uppers, that

-was seasonin' the chicken soup like none of us could, her we took turns

-in dressin' in her green. An' I'd got into my spare-room curtains,

-somehow, just as Mis' Hubbelthwait come shoving at that door.

-

-"'The men--the men!' says she, painful. 'They're all out here--Silas an'

-Timothy an' Eppleby an' all. They've all heard about it--the automobiles

-went to the post-office for their mail, an' Silas told 'em enjoyable

-about Threat, an' the automobiles told him where they was goin' to eat.

-An' they've come, thinkin' they's enough for all, an' they're out here

-now.'

-

-"Mis' Toplady groaned a little, agonized an' stifled, but rill firm.

-'Tell 'em, then,' says she, 'to come back up here, like men, an'

-_help_.'

-

-"Then we heard a little rustle, soft an' silky an' kind o'

-pink-soundin', an' we looked around, an' there, from where she had been

-dressin' herself over behind the kitchen boiler all alone, Mis'

-Postmaster Sykes stepped out. My land, if she wasn't in a white dress, a

-little low in the neck, an' elbow sleeves, an' all covered solid as

-crust with glitterin' silver spangles.

-

-"'Let's tell 'em ourselves,' she says, 'come on--all of you. Let's take

-out the first course, an' tell the men what we want 'em to do.'

-

-"We made Mis' Sykes go first, carryin' high the tureen of chicken soup.

-An' on one side of her walked Mis' Timothy Toplady, in blue, with the

-wafers, an' on the other Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, in pink, with

-the radishes. An' neither one of 'em could hardly help lookin' at Mis'

-Sykes's dress all the way out. An' back of 'em went the rest o' the

-ladies, all in pink an' blue an' white an' pale green nun's veilin' that

-they'd made, an' carryin' the water-pitchers an' ice an' celery an' like

-that. An' me, I hung back in the kitchen watchin' an' lovin' 'em every

-one--an' almost lovin' Timothy Toplady an' Silas Sykes an' Eppleby when

-they looked on an' saw.

-

-"Mis' Sykes set the soup down in front o' the merry-seemin' man for him

-to serve it. An' then she crossed over an' spoke to Silas, an' swep' up

-ahead of him in that spangly dress, the other ladies followin' an'

-noddin' bright when they passed the men, an' motionin' 'em toward the

-back o' the hall. An' back the men all come into the kitchen, followin'

-as they was asked to do, an' orderly through bein' dazed. Silas an'

-Timothy an' Eppleby was first, an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' Mame

-went up to 'em together.

-

-"I'll never forget that minute. I thought the men was goin' to burst out

-characteristic an' the whole time be tart, an' I shut both doors an' the

-servin' window careful. An' instead o' that, them three men stood there

-just smilin' a little an lookin' surprised an' agreeable; an' the other

-husbands, either takin' the cue or feelin' the same, done likewise, too.

-An' when Mame Bliss says, sort o' tremblin'--Eppleby bein' the gentlest

-husband in Friendship Village, an' known to be: 'How do you like us,

-Eppleby?' Eppleby just nods an' wrinkles up his eyes an' smiles at her,

-like he meant lots more. An' he says, 'Why didn't you never wear that

-dress before, Mame?'

-

-"An' 'Well, Timothy?' says Mis' Toplady, sort o' masterful, an' fully

-expectin' to hev to master. But Timothy Toplady, he just rubs his hands

-an' looks at her sort o' wonderin', an' he says, 'Blisterin' Benson,

-you look as good as the city folks, Amandy--all light, an' loose made,

-an' stylish--'

-

-"But Silas Sykes, he just stood lookin' at his wife an' lookin'. Of

-course she _did_ hev the advantage, bein' her spangles shone so. An'

-Silas looked at her an' looked, just as if her bein' his wife didn't

-make him admire her any the less. An' Mis' Sykes, she was rill pink an'

-pleased an' breathless, an' I guess she could see she seemed like a

-person to Silas, the way she'd wanted to.

-

-

-"It all went off splendid. The men stayed an' dished in the kitchen an'

-helped carry away from the tables--the forty-eight dollars completin'

-their respect--an' we ladies done the servin'. An' I tell you, we served

-'em with an air, 'count o' bein' well dressed, like they was, an'

-knowin' it. An' we knew the automobile folks appreciated it--we could

-tell by the way they kep' lookin' at us. But of course we all understood

-Mis' Sykes looked the best, an' we let her do all the most prominent

-things--bringin' in the first dish of everything an' like that, so's

-they could hev a good look.

-

-"When it was over, the merry-seemin' man stood up an' made a little

-speech o' thanks, rill courteous an' sweet, an' like he knew how to act.

-An' when he was through we, one an' all, nudged Mis' Sykes to reply, an'

-she done so, the two tables listenin', an' the Sodality standin' in

-between, an' the Sodality's husbands crowdin' in both kitchen doors to

-listen.

-

-"Mis' Sykes says, rill dignified, an' the light catchin' in her

-spangles: 'We're all very much obliged, I'm sure, for our forty-eight

-dollars clear. An' we think perhaps you'd like to know what the money is

-goin' toward. It's goin',' she says, 'towards the pavin' of the main

-street of our little city.'

-

-"Silas Sykes was lookin' out the servin' window like it was a box.

-'What's that?' says he, more of him comin' out of the window, 'what's

-_that_ you say?'

-

-"An' they was a little wave o' moves an' murmurs all around him like

-when somethin' is goin' to happen an' nobody knows what; an' I know the

-Sodality caught its breath, for, as Mis' Toplady always says, the dear

-land knows what men _will_ do.

-

-"With that up springs the merry-seemin' man, his face all beamin', an'

-he says loud an' clear an' drowndin' out everything else: 'Hear, hear!

-Likewise, here an' now. I move that we as one man, an' that man's

-automobile having lately come up the main street of Friendship

-Village--do ourself contribute to this most worthy end. Get to work,'

-says he. 'Think civic thoughts!'

-

-"He slid the last roll off its plate, an' he laid somethin' in paper

-money on it, an' he started it down the table. An' every man of 'em

-done as he done. An' I tell you, when we see Mis' Hubbelthwait's bread

-plate pilin' with bills, an' knew what it was for, we couldn't help--the

-whole Sodality couldn't help--steppin' forwards, close to the table, an'

-standin' there an' holdin' our breaths. An' the men, back there in the

-kitchen, they hushed up when they see the money, an' they kep' hushed.

-Land, land, it was a great minute! I like to think about it.

-

-"An' when the plate come back to the merry-seemin' man, he took it an'

-he come over towards us with it in his hand, an' we nudged Mis' Sykes to

-take the money. An' she just lifted up the glitter part of her skirt an'

-spread it out an' he dropped the whole rustlin' heap on to the spangles.

-An' the rest of us all clapped our hands, hard as we could, an' right

-while we was doin' it we heard somethin' else--deeper an' more manly

-than us. An' there was the men streamin' out o' the kitchen doors, an'

-Silas Sykes high in the servin' window--an' every one of 'em was

-clappin', too.

-

-"I tell you, we was glad an' grateful. An' we was grateful, too, when

-afterwards they was plenty enough supper left for the men-folks. An'

-when we all set down together around that table, Mis' Sykes at the head

-an' the plate o' bills for a centrepiece, Mis' Toplady leaned back, hot

-an' tired, an' seein' if both her sleeves was still pinned in place,

-an' she says what we was all thinkin':--

-

-"'Oh, ladies,' she says, 'we can pave streets an' dress in the light

-shades even if we ain't young, like the run o' the fashion-plates. Ain't

-it like comin' to life again?' she says."

-

-

-

-

-XI

-

-UNDERN

-

-

-I have a guest who is the best of the three kinds of welcome guests. Of

-these some are like a new rug which, however fine and unobtrusive it be,

-at first changes the character of your room so that when you enter you

-are less conscious of the room than of the rug. Some guests are like

-flowers on the table, leaving the room as it was save for their sweet,

-novel presence. And some guests are like a prized new book, unread, from

-which you simply cannot keep away. Of these last is my guest whom my

-neighbour calls the New Lady.

-

-My neighbour and Elfa and Miggy and Little Child and I have all been

-busy preparing for her. Elfa has an almost pathetic fondness for

-"company,"--I think it is that she leads such a lonely life in the

-little kitchen-prison that she welcomes even the companionship of

-more-voices-in-the-next-room. I have tried to do what I can for Elfa,

-but you never help people very much when you only try to do what you

-can. It must lie nearer the heart than that. And I perfectly understand

-that the magazines and trifles of finery which I give to her, and the

-flowers I set on the kitchen clock shelf, and the talks which, since my

-neighbour's unconscious rebuke, I have contrived with her, are about as

-effectual as any merely ameliorative means of dealing with a social

-malady. For Elfa is suffering from a distinct form of the social malady,

-and not being able to fathom it, she knows merely that she is lonely. So

-she has borrowed fellowship from her anticipation of my guest and of

-those who next week will come down from the town; and I know, though she

-does not know, that her jars of fresh-fried cakes and cookies, her fine

-brown bread and her bowl of salad-dressing, are her utmost expression of

-longing to adjust the social balance and give to herself companionship,

-even a kind of household.

-

-Little Child to-day came, bringing me a few first sweet peas and

-Bless-your-Heart, Bless-your-Heart being her kitten, and as nearly pink

-as a cat can be and be still a cat.

-

-"To lay in the New Lady's room," she remarked, bestowing these things

-impartially upon me.

-

-Later, my neighbour came across the lawns with a plate of currant tarts

-and a quarter of a jelly cake.

-

-"Here," she said, "I don't know whether you like tarts or not. They're

-more for children, I always think. I always bake 'em, and the little

-round child fried cakes, too, and I put frosting faces on the cookies,

-and such things. It makes my husband and I seem more like a family," she

-explained, "and that's why I always set the dining-room table. As long

-as we ain't any little folks running around, I always tell him that him

-and I would be eating meat and potatoes on the kitchen drop-leaf like

-savages if I didn't pretend there was more of us, and bake up for 'em."

-

-Miggy alone does not take wholly kindly to the New Lady idea, though I

-assure her that our mornings are to remain undisturbed.

-

-"Of course," she observed, while in the New Lady's honour she gathered

-up strewn papers, "I know I'll like her because she's your friend. But I

-don't know what folks want to visit for. Don't you s'pose that's why the

-angels don't come back--because they know everything, and they know what

-a lot of extra work they'd make us?"

-

-In Miggy the tribal sense seems to have run itself out. Of the sanctity

-of the individual she discerns much; but of the wider sanctities she has

-no clear knowledge. Most relationships she seems to regard, like the

-love of Peter, as "drawbacks," save only her indefinite consciousness of

-that one who is "not quite her sister"--the little vague Margaret. And

-this, I think, will be the leaven. Perhaps it is the universal leaven,

-this consciousness.

-

-I was glad that the New Lady was to arrive in the afternoon. Sometimes

-I think that the village afternoon is the best time of all. It is no

-wonder that they used to call that time "undern." If they had not done

-so, the word must have grown of its own will--perhaps it did come to

-life with no past, an immaculate thing, so like its meaning that it

-could not help being here among us. I know very well that Sir John

-Mandeville and others used "undern" to mean the third hour, or about

-nine in the morning, but that may have been because at first not every

-one recognized the word. Many a fairy thing wanders for a long time on

-earth, patiently putting up with other connotations than its own.

-Opportunism, the subconscious mind, personality, evolution itself,--all

-these are still seeking their full incarnations in idea. No wonder

-"undern" was forced for a long while to mean morning. But nine o'clock

-in the morning! How, after all, was that possible? You have only to say

-it over--undern, undern, undern,--to be heavenly drowsy with summer

-afternoon. The north of England recognized this at last and put the word

-where it belongs; and I have, too, the authority of the lady of Golden

-Wing:--

-

-

-     "Undern cometh after noon,

-     Golden Wings will be here soon...."

-

-

-One can hardly stop saying that, once one is started. I should like to

-go on with it all down the page.

-

-I was thinking of these things as I drove to the station alone to meet

-the New Lady. The time had taken on for me that pleasant, unlike-itself

-aspect which time bears in any mild excitement, so that if in the moment

-of reading a particularly charming letter one can remember to glance up

-and look the room in the face, one may catch its _other_ expression, the

-expression which it has when one is not looking. So now I caught this

-look in the village and an air of

-Something-different-is-going-to-happen, such as we experience on

-holidays. Next week, when the New Lady's friends come down to us for two

-days, I dare say, if I can remember to look for it, that the village

-will have another expression still. Yet there will be the same quiet

-undern--though for me it is never a commonplace time. Indeed, usually I

-am in the most delighted embarrassment how to spend it. In the mornings

-now--Miggy being willing--I work, morning in the true democracy being

-the work time; afternoon the time for recreation and the more

-specialized forms of service _and_ a little rest; the evening for

-delight, including the delight of others. Not every one in the village

-accepts my afternoon and evening classifications. I am constantly coming

-on people making preserves after mid-day, and if I see a light in a

-kitchen window after nine at night I know that somebody is ironing in

-the cool of the day. But usually my division of time is the general

-division, save that--as in the true democracy--service is not always

-recognized as service. Our afternoons may be spent in cutting carpet

-rags, or in hemming linen, or sewing articles for an imminent bazaar,

-and this is likely to be denominated "gettin' through little odd jobs,"

-and accounted in a measure a self-indulgence. And if evening delight

-takes the form of gardening and later a flame of nasturtiums or dahlias

-is carried to a friend, nobody dreams that this is not a pleasant

-self-indulgence too, and it is so regarded. With these things true is it

-not as if a certain hope abroad in the world gave news of itself?

-

-Near the Pump pasture I came on Nicholas Moor--who rings the Catholic

-bell and is interested in celluloid--and who my neighbour had told me

-would doubtless come to me, bringing his little sheaf of "writin's." I

-had not yet met him, though I had seen in the daily paper a vagrant poem

-or two over his name--I remember a helpless lyric which made me think of

-a gorgeous green and gold beetle lying on its back, unable to recover

-its legs, but for all that flashing certain isolated iridescent colours.

-My heart ached for Nicholas, and when I saw him now going across the

-pasture his loneliness was like a gap in things, one of the places where

-two world-edges do not quite meet. There are so many pleasant ways to do

-and the boy seemed to know how to do none of them. How can he be lonely

-in the village? For myself, if I decide of an afternoon to take my work

-and pay a visit, I am in a pleasant quandary as to which way to turn. If

-I go to the west end of Daphne Street, there are at least five families

-among whom to choose, the other four of whom will wonder why I did not

-come to them. Think of knowing five families in two blocks who would

-welcome one's coming and even feel a little flattering bitterness if one

-chose the other four! If I take a cross street, I am in the same

-difficulty. And if I wish to go to the house of one of my neighbours, my

-motives clash so seriously that I often sit on my porch and call to

-whoever chances to be in sight to come to me. Do you wonder that, in

-town, the moment I open my address book I feel smothered? I recover and

-enjoy town as much as anybody, but sometimes in a stuffy coupé, hurrying

-to get a half-dozen of the pleasantest calls "done," I surprise a

-companion by saying: would now that it were undern on Daphne Street!

-

-I told this to the New Lady as we drove from the station. The New Lady

-is an exquisite little Someone, so little that it is as if she had been

-drawn quickly, in a single delicate curving line, and then left, lest

-another stroke should change her. She understands the things that I say

-in the way that I mean them; she is the way that you always think the

-people whom you meet are going to be, though they so seldom are; like

-May, she is expectation come alive. What she says fits in all the

-crannies of what you did not say and have always known, or else have

-never thought of before and now never can forget. She laughs when she

-should laugh, and never, never when somebody else should laugh alone.

-When you tell her that you have walked eight miles and back, she says

-"_And back!_" with just the proper intonation of homage. She never tells

-a story upon the heels of your own little jest so swiftly that it cannot

-triumphantly escape. When you try to tell her something that you have

-not quite worked out, she nods a little and you see that she meant it

-before you did. She enters every moment by its gate and not over its

-wall, though she frequently wings her way in instead of walking. Also,

-she is good to look at and her gowns are as meet as the clouds to the

-sky--and no less distracting than the clouds are at their very best.

-There is no possible excuse for my saying so much about her, but I like

-to talk of her. And I like to talk to her as I did when we left the

-station and I was rambling on about undern.

-

-The New Lady looked about with a breath of content.

-

-"No wonder," she said, "you like to pretend Birthday, in New York."

-

-It is true that when I am there where, next to the village, I like best

-to live, I am fond of this pretence. It is like the children's game of

-"Choosing" before shop windows, only it is extensive and not, as cream

-puffs and dolls and crumpets in the windows dictate to the children,

-purely intensive. Seeing this man and that woman in the subway or the

-tea-room or the café or the car, I find myself wondering if it is by any

-chance their birthdays; and if it is, I am always wishing to deal out

-poor little gifts at which I fancy they would hardly look. To the lithe

-idle blond woman, elbows on table; to the heavy-lidded,

-engagement-burdened gentlewoman; to the busy, high-eyebrowed man in a

-cab; to the tired, slow-winking gentleman in his motor; to the

-thick-handed labourer hanging to his strap, I find myself longing to

-distribute these gifts: a breakfast on our screened-in porch in the

-village, with morning-glories on the table; a full-throated call of my

-oriole--a June call, not the isolated reminiscent call of August; an

-hour of watering the lawn while robins try to bathe in the spray; a

-morning of pouring melted paraffin on the crimson tops of moulds of

-currant jelly; a yellow afternoon of going with me to "take my work and

-stay for supper." I dare say that none of my chosen beneficiaries would

-accept; but if I could pop from a magic purse a crop of caps and fit

-folk, willy nilly, I wonder if afterward, even if they remembered

-nothing of what had occurred, they might not find life a little

-different.

-

-"If it was my birthday," said the New Lady, "I would choose to be driven

-straight away through that meadow, as if I had on wings."

-

-That is the way she is, the New Lady. Lacking wings of her own she gives

-them to many a situation. Straightway I drove down into the Pump pasture

-and across it, springy soil and circus-trodden turf and mullein stalks

-and ten-inch high oak trees.

-

-"Let's let down the bars," said the New Lady, "and drive into that next

-meadow. If it _is_ a sea, as it looks, it will be glad of your company."

-

-It was not a sea, for as we drove through the lush grass the yellow and

-purple people of the meadow came marching to meet us, as dignified as

-garden flowers, save that you knew, all the time, that wild hearts were

-beating beneath the rainbow tassels. It was a meadow with things to say,

-but with finger on lip--as a meadow should be and as a spirit must be.

-The meadow seemed to wish to say: "It is all very pleasant for you there

-in the village to admire one another's wings, but the real romance is in

-the flight." I wondered if it were not so that it had happened--that one

-day a part of the village had got tired waiting, and had broken off and

-become something free, of which the meadow was the body and its secret

-was the spirit. But then the presence of the New Lady always sets me

-wondering things like this.

-

-"Why," I said to her suddenly, "spring has gone! I wonder how that

-happened. I have been waiting really to get hold of spring, and here it

-is June."

-

-"June-and-a-half," assented the New Lady, and touched the lines so that

-we came to a standstill in the shade of a cottonwood.

-

-"This way," she said--and added softly, as one who would not revive a

-sadness, her own idea of the matter.

-

-

-     "Where did Spring die? I did not hear her go

-     Down the soft lane she painted. All flower still

-     She moved among her emblems on the hill

-     Touching away their burden of old snow.

-     Was it on some great down where long winds flow

-     That the wild spirit of Spring went out to fill

-     The eyes of Summer? Did a daffodil

-     Lift the pale urn remote where she lies low?

-

-     "Oh, not as other moments did she die,

-     That woman-season, outlined like a rose.

-     Before the banner of Autumn's scarlet bough

-     The Summer fell; and Winter, with a cry,

-     Wed with March wind. Spring did not die like those;

-     But vaguely, as if Love had prompted, 'Now.'"

-

-

-The New Lady's theory does not agree with that of Little Child. I am in

-doubt which to accept. But I like to think about both.

-

-And when the New Lady had said the faint requiem, we drove on again and

-the next moment had almost run down Nicholas Moor, lying face downward

-in the lush grass.

-

-I recognized him at once, but of course the New Lady did not do so, and

-she leaned from the cart, thoroughly alarmed at the boy's posture and,

-as he looked up, at his pallor.

-

-"Oh, what is the matter?" she cried, and her voice was so heavenly

-pitying that one would have been willing to have most things the matter

-only to hear her.

-

-Nicholas Moor scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and stood abashed,

-looking as strangely detached from the moment as if he had fallen from a

-frame and left the rest of the picture behind.

-

-"Nothing. I just like to be here," he was surprised into saying.

-

-The New Lady sat down and smiled. And her smile was even more

-captivating than had been her late alarm.

-

-"So do I," she told him heartily. "So do I. What do you like about it,

-_best_?"

-

-I do not think that any one had ever before spoken to Nicholas so

-simply, and he answered, chord for chord.

-

-"I guess--I guess I like it just on account of its being the way it is,"

-he said.

-

-"That is a very, very nice reason," the New Lady commented. "Again, so

-do I."

-

-We left him, I remember, looking about as if he were seeing it all for

-the first time.

-

-As we drove away I told my New Lady about Nicholas, and she looked along

-her own thought and shook her head.

-

-"There must be hundreds of them," she said, "and some are poets. But

-most of them are only lonesome. I wonder which Nicholas is?"

-

-We lingered out-of-doors as long as we might, because the touch of the

-outdoors was so companioning that to go indoors was a distinct good-by.

-Is it so with you that some Days, be they never so sunny, yet walk with

-you in a definite reserve and seem to be looking somewhere else; while

-other Days come to you like another way of being yourself and will not

-let you go? I know that some will put it down to mood and not to the Day

-at all; but, do what I will, I cannot credit this.

-

-It was after five o'clock when we drove into the village, and all Daphne

-Street was watering its lawns. Of those who were watering some pretended

-not to see us, but I understood that this they accounted the etiquette

-due to a new arrival. Some bowed with an excess of cordiality, and this

-I understood to be the pleasant thought that they would show my guest

-how friendly we all are. And some laid down the hose and came to the

-sidewalk's edge to meet the New Lady then and there.

-

-Of these were Mis' Postmaster Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss

-and my neighbour.

-

-"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," Mis' Postmaster Sykes said graciously

-to the New Lady. "I must say it seems good to see a strange face now an'

-then. I s'pose you feel all travel dust an' mussed up?"

-

-And at Mis' Holcomb's hitching post:--

-

-"Pleased to meet you," said Mis' Holcomb. "I was saying to Eppleby that

-I wondered if you'd come. Eppleby says, 'I donno, but like enough

-they've went for a ride somewheres.' Lovely day, ain't it? Been to the

-cemetery?"

-

-I said that we had not been there yet, and,

-

-"Since it's kept up it makes a real nice thing to show folks," Mis'

-Holcomb said. "I s'pose you wouldn't come inside for a bite of supper,

-would you?"

-

-My neighbour--bless her!--had on a black wool dress to do honour to my

-guest.

-

-"It's nice for the neighbours to see company comin' and goin'," she said

-cordially, "though of course we don't have any of the extra work. But I

-guess everybody likes extra work of _this_ kind."

-

-And as we drove away:--

-

-"Good-by," she cried, "I hope you'll have a good night's rest and a

-good breakfast."

-

-When I looked at the New Lady I saw her eyes ever so slightly misted.

-

-"Spring didn't die," she said--as Little Child had said. "Spring knew

-how to keep alive. It got down in these people's hearts."

-

-Yes, the New Lady is a wholly satisfactory guest. She even pretended not

-to notice Peter's father who, as we alighted, came singing by, and bowed

-to us, his barren old face lighted with a smile, as a vacant room is

-lighted, revealing the waste. If I had some one staying with me who had

-smiled at Peter's father or--at any one, or who did not see the village

-as it is, I think I should be tempted to do as my neighbour did to me

-that morning: pick three carnation pinks for her and watch her go away.

-

-

-

-

-XII

-

-THE WAY THE WORLD IS

-

-

-Was it not inevitable that poor, lonely Nicholas Moor should have sought

-out my New Lady? A night or two after her arrival he saw her again, at a

-supper in the church "lecture-room." He was bringing in a great freezer

-of ice-cream and when she greeted him he had all but dropped the

-freezer. Then a certain, big obvious deacon whose garden adjoined my own

-had come importantly and snatched the burden away, and the boy had

-stood, shamefast, trying to say something; but his face was lighted as

-at a summons. So the New Lady had divined his tragedy, the loneliness

-which his shyness masked as some constant plight of confusion.

-

-"Come and see me sometime," she had impulsively bidden him. "Do you know

-where I am staying?"

-

-Did he know that! Since he had seen her in the meadow had he known

-anything else? And after some days of hard trying he came one night,

-arriving within the dusk as behind a wall. Even in the twilight, when he

-was once under the poplars, he did not know what way to look. To seem

-to look straight along the road was unnatural. To seem to look out

-across the opposite fields was hypocrisy. To look at the house which

-held the New Lady was unthinkable. So, as he went in at the gate and up

-the fern-bordered walk, he examined the back of his hand--near, and then

-a little farther away. As he reached the steps he was absorbedly

-studying his thumb.

-

-From a place of soft light, shed through a pink box shade on the table,

-and of scattered willow chairs and the big leaves of plants, the New

-Lady came toward him.

-

-"You did come!" she said. "I thought you wouldn't, really."

-

-With the utmost effort Nicholas detached one hand from his hat brim and

-gave it her. From head to foot he was conscious, not of the touch of her

-hand, little and soft, but of the bigness and coarseness of his own

-hand.

-

-"I hated to come like everything," he said.

-

-At this of course she laughed, and she went back to her willow chair and

-motioned him to his. He got upon it, crimson and wretched.

-

-"As much as that!" she observed.

-

-"You know I wanted to come awfully, too," he modified it, "but I dreaded

-it--like sixty. I--I can't explain...." he stumbled.

-

-"Don't," said the New Lady, lightly, and took pity on him and rang a

-little bell.

-

-She thought again how fine and distinguished he was, as he had seemed to

-her on the day when she had first spoken to him. He sat staring at her,

-trying to realize that he was on the veranda with her, hearing the sound

-of the little bell she had rung. He had wanted something like this,

-wistfully, passionately. Miserable as he was, he rested in the moment as

-within arms. And the time seemed distilled in that little silver

-bell-sound and the intimacy of waiting with her for some one to come.

-

-He knew that some one with a light footfall did come to the veranda. He

-heard the New Lady call her Elfa. But he saw only her hands, plump and

-capable and shaped like his own, moving among the glasses. After which

-his whole being became absorbed in creditably receiving the tall, cool

-tumbler on the tray which the capable hands held out to him. A period of

-suspended intelligence ensued, until he set the empty glass on the

-table. Then the little maid had gone, and the New Lady, sipping her own

-glass, was talking to him.

-

-"You were lying on the grass that day," she said, "as if you understood

-grass. Not many do understand about grass, and almost nobody understands

-the country. People say, 'Come, let us go into the country,' and when

-they get there is it the country they want at all? No, it is the

-country sports, the country home,--everything but the real country. They

-play match games. They make expeditions, climb things in a stated time,

-put in a day at a stated place. I often think that they must go home

-leaving the country aghast that they could have come and gone and paid

-so little heed to it. Presently we are going to have some charming

-people out here who will do the same thing."

-

-So she talked, asking him nothing, even her eyes leaving him free. It

-seemed to him, tense and alert and ill at ease as he listened, that he,

-too, was talking to her. From the pressing practicalities, the

-self-important deacon, the people who did not trouble to talk to him,

-his world abruptly escaped, and in that world he walked, an escaped

-thing too, forgetful even of the little roll of verses which he had

-dared to bring.

-

-Yet when she paused, he looked out at her shrinkingly from under his

-need to reply. He did not look at her face, but he looked at her hands,

-so little that each time he saw them they were a new surprise and alien

-to him. He looked away from them to the friendliness of her smile. And

-when he heard himself saying detached, irrelevant things, he again fell

-to studying one of his own hands, big and coarse and brown. Oh, he

-thought, the difference between her and him was so hopelessly the

-difference in their hands.

-

-In an absurdly short time the need to be gone was upon him; but of this

-he could not speak, and he sat half unconscious of what she was saying,

-because of his groping for the means to get away. Clearly, he must not

-interrupt her to say that he must go. Neither could he reply to what she

-said by announcing his intention. And yet when he answered what she

-said, straightway her exquisite voice went on with its speech to him.

-How, he wondered, does anybody ever get away from anywhere? If only

-something would happen, so that he could slip within it as within doors,

-and take his leave.

-

-Something did happen. By way of the garden, and so to a side door, there

-arrived those whose garden adjoined,--the big, obvious, self-important

-deacon, and behind him Three Light Gowns. The little maid Elfa came

-showing them through the house, in the pleasant custom of the village.

-And when the New Lady, with pretty, expected murmurings, rose to meet

-them, Nicholas got to his feet confronting the crisis of saying good-by,

-and the moment closed upon him like a vise. He heard his voice falter

-among the other voices, he saw himself under the necessity to take her

-hand and the deacon's hand, and the hands, so to speak, of the Three

-Light Gowns; and this he did as in a kind of unpractised bewildering

-minuet.

-

-And then he found his eyes on a level with eyes that he had not seen

-before--blue eyes, gentle, watching, wide--and a fresh, friendly little

-face under soft hair. It was Elfa, taking away the empty glasses. And

-the boy, in his dire need to ease the instant, abruptly and inexplicably

-held out his hand to her too. She blushed, sent a frightened look to the

-New Lady, and took the hand in hers that was plump and capable, with its

-strong, round wrist. And the little maid, being now in an embarrassment

-like his own, the two hands clung for a moment, as if they had each the

-need.

-

-"Good night," she said, trembling.

-

-"Good night," said the New Lady, very gently.

-

-"Oh, _good night_!" burst from the boy as he fled away.

-

-

-It was Elfa who admitted him at his next coming. The screened porch was

-once more in soft light from the square rose shade, and the place had

-the usual pleasant, haunted air of the settings of potentialities. As if

-potentiality were a gift of enchantment to human folk.

-

-The New Lady was not at home, Elfa told him, in her motherly little

-heart pitying him. And at the news he sat down, quite simply, in the

-chair in which he had sat before. He must see her. It was unthinkable

-that she should be away. To-night he had meant to have the courage to

-leave with her his verses.

-

-On the willow table lay her needlework. It was soft and white beyond the

-texture of most clouds, and she had wrought on it a pattern like the

-lines on a river. As his eyes rested on it, Nicholas could fancy it

-lying against her white gown and upon it her incomparable hands. Some

-way, she seemed nearer to him when he was not with her than when, with

-her incomparable hands and her fluent speech, she was in his presence.

-When she was not with him, he could think what to say to her. When he

-stood before her--the thought of his leave-taking on that veranda seized

-upon him, so that he caught his breath in the sharp thrust of mortified

-recollection, and looked away and up.

-

-His eyes met those of Elfa, who was quietly sitting opposite.

-

-"How they must all have laughed at me. You too!" he said.

-

-"Why?" she asked.

-

-"That last time I was here. Shaking hands that way," he explained.

-

-"I didn't laugh," she unexpectedly protested; "I cried."

-

-He looked at her. And this was as if he were seeing her for the first

-time.

-

-"_Cried?_" he repeated.

-

-"Nobody ever shakes hands with me," Elfa told him.

-

-He stared at her as she sat on the edge of her chair, her plump hands

-idle on her apron.

-

-"No," he admitted, "no, I don't suppose they do. I didn't think--"

-

-But he had not thought of her at all.

-

-"By the door all day I let in hand-shakes," she said, "an' then I let

-'em out again. But I don't get any of 'em for me."

-

-That, Nicholas saw, was true enough. Even he had been mortified because

-he had taken her hand.

-

-"Once," Elfa said, "I fed a woman at the back door. An' when she went

-she took hold o' my hand, thankful. An' then you done it too--like it

-was a mistake. That's all, since I worked out. I don't know folks

-outside much, only some that don't shake hands, 'count of seemin'

-ashamed to."

-

-"I know," said Nicholas.

-

-"Sometimes," she went on, "folks come here an' walk in to see _her_ an'

-they don't shake. Ain't it funny--when folks can an' don't? When they

-come from the city to-morrow, the whole house'll shake hands, but me.

-Once I went to prayer-meetin' an' I hung around waitin' to see if

-somebody wouldn't. But they didn't--any of 'em. It was rainin' outside

-an' I guess they thought I come with somebody's rubbers."

-

-Nicholas looked at her a little fearfully. It had seemed to him that in

-a great world of light he had always moved in a little hollow of

-darkness and detachment. Were there, then, other hollows like that?

-Places to which outstretched hands never penetrate? A great

-understanding possessed him, and he burst out in an effort to express

-it.

-

-"You're a funny girl," he said.

-

-She flushed, and suddenly lifted one hand and looked at it. Nicholas

-watched her now intently. She studied the back of her hand, turned it,

-and sat absorbedly examining her little thumb. And Nicholas felt a

-sudden sense of understanding, of gladness that he understood. As he

-felt when he was afraid and wretched, so Elfa was feeling now.

-

-He leaned toward her.

-

-"Don't feel afraid," he said gently.

-

-She shook her head.

-

-"I don't," she said; "I don't, truly. I guess that's why I stayed here

-now. She won't be back till ten--I ought to have said so before.

-You--you won't want to wait so long."

-

-He rose at once. And now, being at his ease, his head was erect, his

-arms naturally fallen, his face as confident and as occupied by his

-spirit as when he lay alone in the meadows.

-

-"Well, sir," he said, "let's shake hands again!"

-

-She gave him her hand and, in their peculiarly winning upward look, her

-eyes--blue, wide, watchful, with that brooding mother watchfulness of

-some women, even in youth. And her hand met his in the clasp which is

-born of the simple, human longing of kind for kind.

-

-"Good-by," she answered his good-by, and they both laughed a little in a

-shyness which was a way of delight.

-

-In the days to follow there flowed in the boy's veins a tide of novel

-sweetness. And now his thoughts eluded one another and made no chain, so

-that when he tried to remember what, on that first evening, the New Lady

-and he had talked about, there came only a kind of pleasure, but it had

-no name. Everything that he had to do pressed upon him, and when he

-could get time he was away to the meadow, looking down on the chimneys

-of that house, and swept by a current that was like a singing. And

-always, always it was as if some one were with him.

-

-There came a night when he could no longer bear it, when his wish took

-him to itself and carried him with it. Those summer dusks, warm yellow

-with their moon and still odorous of spring, were hard to endure alone.

-Since the evening with her, Nicholas had not seen the New Lady save

-when, not seeing him, she had driven past in a phaëton. At the sight of

-her, and once at the sight of Elfa from that house, a faintness had

-seized him, so that he had wondered at himself for some one else, and

-then with a poignancy that was new pain, new joy, the new life, had

-rejoiced that he was himself. So, when he could no longer bear it, he

-took his evening way toward the row of poplars, regretting the moonlight

-lest by it they should see him coming. And to-night he had with him no

-verses, but only his longing heart.

-

-He had no intimation of the guests, for the windows at that house were

-always brightly lighted, and until he was within the screened veranda

-the sound of voices did not reach him. Then from the rooms there came a

-babel of soft speech and laughter, and a touch of chords; and when he

-would have incontinently retreated, the New Lady crossed the hall and

-saw him.

-

-She came to the doorway and greeted him, and Nicholas looked up in the

-choking discomfort of sudden fear. She was in a gown that was like her

-needlework, mysteriously fashioned and intricate with shining things

-which made her infinitely remote. The incomparable little hands were

-quite covered with jewels. It was as if he had come to see a spirit and

-had met a woman.

-

-"How good of you to come again," she said. "Come, I want my friends to

-meet you."

-

-Her friends! That quick crossing of words within there, then, meant the

-presence of her friends from the city.

-

-"I couldn't! I came for a book--I'll get it some other time. I've got to

-go now!" Nicholas said.

-

-Then, "Bettina--Bettina!" some one called from within, and a man

-appeared in the hallway, smiled at sight of the New Lady, dropped his

-glass at sight of Nicholas, bowed, turned away--oh, how should he know

-that her name was Bettina when Nicholas had not known!

-

-This time he did not say good night at all. This time he did not look at

-his great hand, which was trembling, but he got away, mumbling

-something, his retreat graciously covered by the New Lady's light words.

-And, the sooner to be gone and out of the moonlight that would let them

-see him go, he struck blindly into the path that led to the side gate of

-the garden. The mortification that chains spirit to flesh and tortures

-both held him and tortured him. For a breath he imagined himself up

-there among them all, his hands holding his hat, imagined having to

-shake hands with them: and somehow this way of fellowship, this meeting

-of hands outstretched for hands, seemed, with them, the supreme ordeal,

-the true symbol of his alien state from them and from the New Lady. No

-doubt she understood him, but for the first time Nicholas saw that this

-is not enough. For the first time he saw that she was as far away from

-him as were the others. How easy, Nicholas thought piteously, those

-people in her house all found it to act the way they wanted to! Their

-hands must be like her hands....

-

-He got through the garden and to the side gate. And now the old

-loneliness was twofold upon him because he had known what it is to reach

-from the dark toward the light; yet when he saw that at the gate some

-one was standing, he halted in his old impulse to be on guard, hunted by

-the fear that this would be somebody alien to him. Then he saw that it

-was no one from another star, but Elfa.

-

-"Oh...." he said, and that, too, was what she said, but he did not hear.

-Not from another star she came, but from the deep of the world where

-Nicholas felt himself alone.

-

-"I--was just going away," he explained.

-

-For assent she stepped a little back, saying nothing. But when Nicholas

-would have passed her it was as if the immemorial loneliness and the

-seeking of forgotten men innumerable stirred within him in the ache of

-his heart, in the mere desperate wish to go to somebody, to be with

-somebody, to have somebody by the hand.

-

-He turned upon Elfa almost savagely.

-

-"Shake hands!" he said.

-

-Obediently she put out her hand, which of itself stayed ever so briefly,

-within his. He held it, feeling himself crushing it, clinging to it,

-being possessed by it. Her hand was, like his, rough from its work, and

-it was something alive, something human, something that answered. And

-instantly it was not Elfa alone who was there companioning him, but the

-dark was quick with presences, besieging him, letting him know that no

-one alive is alone, that he was somehow one of a comrade company,

-within, without, encompassing. And the boy was caught up by the sweet

-will outside his own will and he never knew how it was that he had Elfa

-in his arms.

-

-"Come here. Come here...." he said.

-

-To Elfa, in her loneliness threaded by its own dream, the moment,

-exquisite and welcome as it was, was yet as natural as her own single

-being. But to the boy it was not yet the old miracle of one world built

-from another. It was only the answer to the groping of hands for hands,

-the mere human call to be companioned. And the need to reassure her came

-upon him like the mantle of an elder time.

-

-"Don't feel afraid," he said.

-

-Her eyes gave him their winning upward look, and it was as if their

-mother watchfulness answered him gravely:--

-

-"I don't. I don't, truly."

-

-And at this she laughed a little, so that he joined her; and their

-laughter together was a new delight.

-

-Across the adjoining lawn Nicholas could see in the moonlight the moving

-figure of the big deacon, a Light Gown or two attending. A sudden

-surprising sense of safety from them overswept the boy. What if they did

-come that way! What, he even thought, if those people in the house were

-to come by? Somehow, the little hollow of dark in which he had always

-walked in the midst of light was as light as the rest of the world, and

-he was not afraid. And all this because Elfa did not stir in his arms,

-but was still, as if they were her harbour. And then Nicholas knew what

-they both meant.

-

-"Elfa!" he cried, "do you...?"

-

-"I guess I must...." she said, and knew no way to finish that.

-

-"Love me?" said Nicholas, bold as a lion.

-

-"I meant that too," Elfa said.

-

-Between the New Lady's house and the big, obvious deacon's lawn the boy

-stood, silent, his arms about the girl. So this was the way the world

-is, people bound together, needing one another, wanting one another,

-stretching out their hands....

-

-"Why, it was _you_ I wanted!" Nicholas said wonderingly.

-

-

-

-

-XIII

-

-HOUSEHOLDRY

-

-

-"After supper" in the village is like another room of the day. On these

-summer nights we all come out to our porches to read the daily paper, or

-we go to sit on the porch of a neighbour, or we walk about our lawns in

-excesses of leisure, giving little twitches to this green and to that.

-"In our yards" we usually say. Of these some are so tiny that the

-hammocks or the red swinging-chairs find room on the planting spaces

-outside the walks, and there men smoke and children frolic and call

-across the street to one another. And this evening, as I went down

-Daphne Street to post my letters, I saw in process the occasional

-evening tasks which I have noted, performed out-of-doors: at the

-Sykeses' cucumbers in preparation for to-morrow's pickles; a bushel of

-over-ripe cherries arrived unexpectedly at the Herons' and being pitted

-by hand; a belated needle-task of Mis' Holcomb's finishing itself in the

-tenuous after-light. This fashion of taking various employments into the

-open delights me. If we have peas to shell or beans to string or corn to

-husk, straightway we take them to the porch or into the yard. This

-seems to me to hold something of the grace of the days in the Joyous

-Garde, or on the grounds of old châteaux where they embroidered or wound

-worsted in woodland glades, or of colonial America, where we had out our

-spinning wheels under the oaks. When I see a great shining boiler of

-gasoline carried to the side yard for the washing of delicate fabrics, I

-like to think of it as done out-of-doors for the charm of it as much as

-for the safety. So Nausicaa would have cleansed with gasoline!

-

-It was sight of the old Aunt Effie sewing a seam in Mis' Holcomb's

-dooryard which decided me to go to see Miggy. For I would not willingly

-be where Aunt Effie is, who has always some tragedy of gravy-scorching

-or dish-breaking to tell me. I have been for some time promising to go

-to see Miggy in her home, and this was the night to do so, for the New

-Lady went home to-day and I have been missing her sorely. There is a

-kind of minus-New Lady feeling about the universe.

-

-At the same moment that I decided for Miggy, Peter rose out of the

-ground. I wonder if he can have risen a very little first? But that is

-one of those puzzles much dwelt upon by the theologians, and I will not

-decide. Perhaps the thought of Miggy is a mighty motive on which Peter's

-very being is conditioned. Anyway, there he was, suddenly beside me,

-and telling me some everyday affair of how little use in the cannery

-were Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade, whose houses we were

-passing. And to his talk of shop I responded by inviting him to go with

-me to see Miggy. Would he go? He smiled his slow smile, with that little

-twist of mouth and lifting of brow.

-

-"This is like finding an evening where there wasn't one before," he

-said.

-

-The little house where Miggy lives has a copper beech in the

-dooryard--these red-leaved trees seem to be always in a kind of hush at

-their own difference. The house is no-colour, with trimmings of another

-no-colour for contrast, and the little front porch looks like something

-that has started to run out the front door and is being sternly snatched

-backward. The door stood ajar--no doubt for the completion of this

-transaction--and no one was about. We rapped, for above the bell push

-was a legend of Aunt Effie's inscribing, saying: "Bell don't ring." For

-a moment our summons was unanswered. Then Miggy called from upstairs.

-

-"I'll be down in a minute," she said. "Go right in, both of you, and

-wait for me--will you?"

-

-To take the cards of one's visitors from a butler of detached

-expression or from a maid with inquisitive eyelashes is to know nothing

-of the charm of this custom of ours of peeping from behind an upper

-curtain where we happen to be dressing, and alone in the house, at the

-ringing of the doorbell, and of calling down to a back which we

-recognize an informal "Oh, go right in and wait for me a minute, will

-you?" In this habit there is survival of old tribal loyalties and

-hospitalities; for let the back divined below be the back of a stranger,

-that is to say, of a barbarian, and we stay behind our curtains, silent,

-till it goes away.

-

-In the sitting room at Miggy's house a little hand lamp was burning, the

-fine yellow light making near disclosures of colour and form, and

-farther away formulating presences of shadow. Aunt Effie had been at her

-sewing, and there were yards of blue muslin billowing over a sunken

-arm-chair and a foam of white lining on the Brussels-covered couch. The

-long blue cotton spread made the big table look like a fat Delft sugar

-bowl, and the red curtains were robbed of crude colour and given an

-obscure rosy glow. A partly finished waist disguised the gingerbread of

-the what-not, one forgot the carpet, the pictures became to the neutral

-wall what words which nobody understands are to ministering music. And

-on the floor before the lounge lay Little Child and Bless-your-Heart,

-asleep.

-

-At first I did not see the child. It was Peter who saw her. He stooped

-and lifted her, the kitten still in her arms, and instead of saying any

-of the things a woman might have said, Peter said _"Well...._" with a

-tenderness in his voice such as women can give and more. For a man's

-voice-to-a-child gets down deeper than happiness. I suppose it is that

-the woman has always stayed with the child in the cave or the tent or

-the house, while the man has gone out to kill or to conquer or to trade;

-and the ancient crooning safety is still in the woman's voice, and the

-ancient fear that he may not come back to them both is in the voice of

-the man. When Peter lifted Little Child in his arms, I wished that Miggy

-had been there to hear.

-

-"What's it dreaming about?" Peter said.

-

-"'Bout Miggy," said Little Child sleepily, and she snuggled in Peter's

-coat collar.

-

-"Dream about Peter too!" Peter commanded.

-

-"Well, _I_ will," promised Little Child o' Dreams, and drifted off.

-

-Peter sank awkwardly down to the floor and held her so, and he sat there

-stroking Bless-your-Heart and looking as if he had forgotten me, save

-that, "Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade that I was telling

-you about," he remarked once irrelevantly, "_they've_ each got a kiddie

-or so."

-

-Miggy came downstairs and, "I'm a surprise," she said in the doorway,

-and stood there in a sheer white frock--a frock which said nothing to

-make you look, but would not let you look away; and it had a little

-rhyme of lace on this end and on that. It was the frock that she had

-made herself--she told me so afterward, but she did not mention it

-before Peter, and I liked her the better for that. When I hear women

-boast of these things I always wonder why, then and there, I should not

-begin to recite a sonnet I have turned, so as to have a hand in things.

-To write an indifferent sonnet is much less than to make a frock which

-can be worn, but yet I should dislike infinitely to volunteer even so

-little as a sonnet or a quatrain. In any case, it would be amazing taste

-for me to do so; while "I made it myself" I hear everywhere in the

-village, especially in the presence of the Eligible. But I dare say that

-this criticism of mine is conditioned by the fact that my needle-craft

-cell got caught in the primal protozoan ooze and did not follow me.

-

-"Miggy! Oh, Miggery!" said Peter, softly. He had made this name for a

-sort of superlative of her.

-

-"Like me?" inquired Miggy. I wonder if even the female atom does not

-coquette when the sun strikes her to shining in the presence of her atom

-lord?

-

-You know that low, emphatic, unspellable thing which may be said by the

-throat when a thing is liked very much? When one makes it, it feels like

-a vocal dash in vocal italics. Peter did that, very softly.

-

-"Well," said Miggy, "I feel that dressed-up that I might be cut out of

-paper. What _are_ you doing down there, Peter?"

-

-He glanced down mutely, and Miggy went round the table and saw what he

-held.

-

-"Why," she said, "that great heavy girl, Peter. Give her to me."

-

-Miggy bent over Peter, with her arms outstretched for the child. And

-Peter looked up at her and enjoyed the moment.

-

-"She's too heavy for you to lift," he said, with his occasional quiet

-authority. "I'll put her where you want her."

-

-"Well, it's so hot upstairs," Miggy hesitated. "It's past her bedtime,

-but I hate to take her up there."

-

-"Undress her down here," said I. "The Delft sugar bowl shuts you off a

-fine dressing-room. And let her sleep for a while on the couch."

-

-So Miggy went for the little nightgown, and Peter, with infinite pains,

-got to his feet, and detached Bless-your-Heart and deposited her on the

-table, where she yawned and humped her back and lay down on an

-unfinished sleeve and went to sleep again. And when Miggy came down,

-she threw a light quilt and a pillow near the couch and sat behind the

-table and held out her arms.

-

-"Now!" she said to Peter, and to me she said, "I thought maybe you'd

-spread her up a bed there on the couch."

-

-"Let Peter," said I. "I've another letter I ought to have written. If I

-may, I'll write that here while you undress her."

-

-"Well," said Miggy, "there's some sheets of letter-paper under the cover

-of the big Bible. And the ink--I guess there's some in the bottle--is on

-top of the organ. And the pen is there behind the clock. And you'd ought

-to find a clean envelope in that pile of newspapers. I think I saw one

-there the other day. You spread up her bed then, Peter."

-

-I wrote my letter, and Peter went at the making up of the lounge, and

-Miggy sat behind the table to undress Little Child. And Little Child

-began waking up. It touched me infinitely that she who in matters of

-fairies and visionings is so wise and old should now, in her sleepyhood,

-be just a baby again.

-

-"I--_won't_--go--bed," she said.

-

-"Oh," said Miggy, "yes. Don't you feel all the little wingies on your

-face? They're little dream wings, and the dreams are getting in a hurry

-to be dreamed."

-

-"I do' know those dreams," said Little Child, "I do' _want_ those

-dreams. Where's Bless-your-Heart?"

-

-"Dreaming," said Miggy, "all alone. Goodness, I believe you've got a

-little fever."

-

-Peter stopped flopping the quilt aimlessly over the lounge and turned,

-and Miggy laid the back of her hand on Little Child's cheek and beneath

-her chin. The man watched her anxiously as, since the world began,

-millions of men have looked down at this mysterious pronouncement of the

-woman.

-

-"She has?" he said. "She'd ought not to have any milk, then, had she?"

-he added vaguely. It seemed to me that Miggy must have paused for a

-moment to like Peter for this wholly youthful, masculine eagerness to

-show that he knew about such things.

-

-"I'll fix her something to take," said Miggy, capably. "No, dear. The

-other arm. Straighten elbow."

-

-"I want my shoes an' stockin's on in bed," Little Child observed. She

-was sitting up, her head drooping, her curls fastened high with a

-hairpin of Miggy's. "An' I want my shirtie on. An' _all_ my clothes. I

-won't go bed if you don't."

-

-Miggy laughed. "Bless-your-Heart hasn't got her clothes on," she

-parried.

-

-"Ain't she got her furs on any more?" demanded Little Child, opening

-her eyes. "She has, too. She has not, too, took a bath. An' I won't have

-no bath," she went on. "I'm too old for 'em."

-

-At that she would have Bless-your-Heart in her arms, and there was some

-argument arising from her intention to take the kitten in one hand all

-the way through her nightgown sleeve. And by this time sleepyhood tears

-were near.

-

-"_Don't_ curl your toes under so," said Miggy, struggling with a shoe.

-"Peter, do go on. You'll never have it done."

-

-Whereat Peter flapped the quilt again; and--

-

-"I will curl my toes up. That's what I want to do. I _want_ to curl 'em

-up!" said Little Child. And now the sleepyhood tears were very near.

-

-"Goodness," said Miggy, suddenly, "to-morrow is Sunday. I'll have to do

-her hair up for curls. Peter!" she cried, "stop waving that quilt, and

-tear me off a strip of that white lining there."

-

-"Yes, _I'll_ have curls," said Little Child, unexpectedly, "because that

-is so becunning to me."

-

-But she was very sleepy, and when Peter had been sent for the brush from

-the kitchen shelf, her head was on Miggy's shoulder, and Miggy looked at

-Peter helplessly.

-

-"Give her to me," said Peter, and took the child and laid the kitten at

-large upon the floor; and then, holding Little Child's head in the

-hollow of his arm, he sat down before Miggy, leaning toward her, and

-all the child's soft brown hair lay on his sleeve.

-

-I should have liked to watch them then. And I should have liked Calliope

-and Mis' Toplady and my neighbour to see them--those three who of all

-the village best understood mystery. I know that Peter did not take his

-eyes from Miggy's face as she brushed and wound the curls. How could

-he?--and Miggy, "sweet as boughs of May" in that white frock, her look

-all motherly intent upon her task. She was very deft, and she had that

-fine mother-manner of caring for the child with her whole hand instead

-of tipsifingers. I would see a woman infinitely delicate in the touching

-of flowers or tea-cups or needlework, but when she is near a child, I

-want her to have more than delicacy. I was amazed at Miggy's gentleness

-and her pretty air of accustomedness. And when Little Child stirred,

-Miggy went off into some improvised song about a little black dog that

-got struck with a wagon and went Ki--yi--ki--yi--_ad infinitum_, and

-Miggy seemed to me to have quite the technical mother-air of tender

-abstraction.

-

-"How dark her hair is growing," she said.

-

-"It's just the colour of yours," said Peter, "and the little curls on

-the edges. They're like yours, too."

-

-"My hair!" Miggy said deprecatingly. "You've got rather nice hair,

-Peter, if _only_ it wouldn't stick up that way at the back."

-

-"I know it sticks up," Peter said contritely. "I do every way to make it

-stay down. But it won't."

-

-"It makes you look funny," observed Miggy, frankly.

-

-"Well," he told her, "if you wouldn't ever make me go 'way from you, you

-wouldn't ever need to see the back of my head."

-

-"That would be just what would turn your head," she put it positively.

-"Peter, doesn't your arm ache, holding her so?"

-

-He looked down at his arm to see, and, "I wouldn't care if it did," he

-replied, in some surprise. "No. It feels good. Oh, Miggy--do you do this

-every night?"

-

-"I don't always curl her hair," said Miggy, "but I always put her to

-bed. If ever Aunt Effie undresses her, she tells her she _may_ die

-before morning, so she'd better say her prayer, pretty. Goodness, she

-hasn't said her prayer yet, either."

-

-"Isn't she too sleepy?" asked Peter.

-

-"Yes," Miggy answered; "but she feels bad in the morning if she doesn't

-say it. You know she thinks she says her prayer to mother, and that

-mother waits to hear her...."

-

-Miggy looked up fleetingly at her mother's picture on the wall--one of

-those pale enlargements of a photograph which tell you definitely that

-the subject is dead.

-

-"I do' want any other curls on me," announced Little Child, suddenly.

-

-"Just one more, dear," Miggy told her, "and then we're through. Turn her

-head a little, Peter."

-

-"No," said Little Child. "Now I'm all curly."

-

-And, "Yes, Precious. Be still on Peter's arm just a minute more," said

-Miggy at the same time.

-

-And, "If you say anything more, I'll kiss you," said Peter, to whom it

-might concern.

-

-"Kiss _me_?" said Little Child. "I won't be."

-

-"Somebody's got to be," said Peter, with decision.

-

-"Now, our prayer," ruled Miggy suddenly, and rose. "Come, dear."

-

-Peter looked up in Miggy's face.

-

-"Let her be here," he said. "Let her be here."

-

-He lifted Little Child so that she knelt, and her head drooped on his

-shoulder. He had one arm about her and the other hand on the pink,

-upturned soles of her feet. The child put out one hand blindly for

-Miggy's hand. So Miggy came and stood beside Peter, and together they

-waited for the little sleepy voice.

-

-It came with disconcerting promptness.

-

-"Now--I--lay--me--down--to--sleep--for--Jesus'--sake--Amen," prayed

-Little Child in one breath.

-

-"No, sweetheart," Miggy remonstrated, with her alluring emphasis on

-"sweet." "Say it right, dear."

-

-"Now I lay me--is Bless-your-Heart sayin' hers?" demanded Little Child.

-

-"Couldn't you get along without her, when you're so sleepy?" Miggy

-coaxed.

-

-"Mustn't skip nights," Little Child told her. "Bless-your-Heart might

-die before morning."

-

-So Miggy found Bless-your-Heart under the couch, and haled her forth,

-and laid her in Little Child's arms. And Peter put his face close, close

-to Little Child's, and shut his eyes.

-

-"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I

-should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take who'll I bless

-to-night?" said Little Child.

-

-"Aunt Effie," Miggy prompted.

-

-"Bless Aunt Effie," said Little Child, "and Miggy and Bless-your-Heart

-and New Auntie" (she meant me. Think of her meaning me!) "and the man

-that gave me the peanuts, and bless Stella's party and make 'em have

-ice-cream, and bless my new shoes and my sore finger. For Jesus' sake,

-Amen."

-

-Little Child drew a long breath and stirred to get down, but Peter did

-not move.

-

-"And bless Peter," Miggy said.

-

-"No," said Little Child, "He needn't. Peter's nice 'nuff."

-

-Peter got to his feet with Little Child in his arms, and his face was

-glowing, and he looked at Miggy as if she were what he meant whenever he

-said "universe." But Miggy had gone to the couch, and was smoothing the

-quilt that Peter had wrinkled in all directions, and patting the pillow

-that Peter had kneaded into a hard ball.

-

-"You lay her down," she said.

-

-Peter did so, setting the kitten on the floor, and then bending low over

-the couch, looking in the upturned face as the little dark head touched

-the pillow and sought its ease, and her hand fell from where it had

-rested on his shoulder. And he stooped and kissed her cheek more gently

-than he had ever done anything.

-

-"I want my drink o' water," said Little Child, and opened her eyes; and

-now from the couch she could see me. "Tell me a story," she commanded

-me, drowsily.

-

-I did not go to her, for who am I that I should have broken that trio?

-But when Miggy and Peter took the lamp and went away to the kitchen for

-the drink of water and for some simple remedy for the fever which Miggy

-had noted or fancied, I sat beside Little Child and said over something

-that had been persistently in my mind as I had watched Miggy with her:--

-

-

-     "I like to stand in this great air

-     And see the sun go down;

-     It shows me a bright veil to wear

-     And such a pretty gown.

-     Oh, I can see a playmate there

-     Far up in Splendour Town!"

-

-

-Little Child began it with me, but her voice trailed away. I thought

-that in the darkness were many gentle presences--Little Child's tender

-breathing, the brushing wings of hurrying dreams, and perhaps that

-other--"not quite my sister," but a shadowy little Margaret.

-

-Afterward, Miggy and Peter and I sat together for a little while, but

-Peter had fallen in a silence. And presently Aunt Effie came home, and

-on the porch--which seemed not yet to have escaped--she told us about

-having broken her needle and left her shears at her neighbour's. While

-Peter ran over to Mis' Holcomb's for the shears, I had a word with

-Miggy.

-

-"Miggy!" I said, "don't you see?"

-

-"See what?" she wanted to know, perversely.

-

-"How Peter would love to have Little Child, too?" I said.

-

-She laughed a little, and was silent; and laughed again.

-

-"He was funny and nice," she admitted; "and wasn't Little Child funny

-not to bless him?"

-

-"Because he is nice enough," I reminded her.

-

-Miggy laughed once more--I had never seen her in so tender and feminine

-a mood. And this may have been partly due to the new frock, though I

-cannot think that it was entirely this. But abruptly she shook her head.

-

-"Peter's father went by just before you came in," she said.

-"He--couldn't hardly walk. What if I was there to get supper for him

-when he got home? I never could--I never could...."

-

-By the time Peter and I were out alone on Daphne Street again, the

-sitting rooms in all the houses were dark, with a look of locked front

-doors--as if each house had set its lips together with, "We are a home

-and you are not."

-

-Peter looked out on all this palpable householdry.

-

-"See the lights upstairs," he said; "everybody's up there, hearing their

-prayers and giving 'em fever medicine. Yes, sir, Great Scott! Shorty

-Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade--they ain't good for a thing in

-the cannery. And yet they know...."

-

-

-

-

-XIV

-

-POSTMARKS

-

-

-Between church service and Sunday School we of the First church have so

-many things to attend to that no one can spare a moment.

-

-"Reverent things, not secular," Calliope explains, "plannin' for church

-chicken-pie suppers an' Christmas bazaars and like that; but not a word

-about a picnic, not even if they was to be one o' Monday sunrise."

-

-To be sure, this habit of ours occasionally causes a contretemps. As

-when one morning Mis' Toplady arrived late and, in a flurry, essayed to

-send up to the pulpit by the sexton a Missionary meeting notice to be

-read. Into this notice the minister plunged without the precaution of

-first examining it, and so delivered aloud:--

-

-

-     "See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags.

-     "See Abigail about enough forks for her table.

-     "Look around for my rubbers.

-     "Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."

-

-

-Not until he reached the fourth item was the minister stopped by the

-agonized rustle in a congregation that had easily recognized Mis'

-Toplady's "between services" list of reminder, the notice of the

-forthcoming meeting being safe in her hymn book.

-

-Still we persist in our Sabbath conferences when "everybody is there

-where you want 'em an' everybody can see everybody an' no time lost an'

-no party line listening"; and it is then that those who have been for

-some time away from the village receive their warmest welcome. I am not

-certain that the "I must get down to church and see everybody" of a

-returned neighbour does not hold in fair measure the principles of

-familyhood and of Christ's persuadings to this deep comradeship.

-

-It was in this time after church that we welcomed Calliope one August

-Sunday when she had unexpectedly come down from town on the Saturday

-night. And later, when the Sunday-school bell had rung, I waited with

-her in the church while she looked up her Bible, left somewhere in the

-pews. When she had found it, she opened it in a manner of eager haste,

-and I inadvertently saw pasted to the inside cover a sealed letter,

-superscription down, for whose safety she had been concerned. I had

-asked her to dine with me, and as we walked home together she told me

-about the letter and what its sealed presence in her Bible meant.

-

-"I ain't ever read it," Calliope explained to me wistfully. "Every one

-o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle has got one, an' none of us has

-ever read 'em. It ain't my letter, so to say. It's one o' the Jem Pitlaw

-collection. The postmark," she imparted, looking up at me proudly, "is

-Bombay, India."

-

-At my question about the Jem Pitlaw collection she laughed

-deprecatingly, and then she sighed. ("Ain't it nice," she had once said

-to me, "your laughs hev a sigh for a linin', an' sighs can hev laughin'

-for trimmin'. Only trouble is, most folks want to line with trimmin's,

-an' they ain't rill durable, used that way.")

-

-"Jem Pitlaw," Calliope told me now, "used to be schoolmaster here--the

-kind that comes from Away an' is terrible looked up to on that account,

-but Jem deserved it. He knew all there was _to_ know, an' yet he thought

-we knew some little things, too. We was all rill fond of him, though he

-kept to himself, an' never seemed to want to fall in love, an' not many

-of us knew him well enough to talk to at all familiar. But when he went

-off West on a vacation, an' didn't come back, an' never come back, an'

-then died, Friendship Village mourned for him,--sincere, though no

-crape,--an' missed him enormous.

-

-"He'd had a room at Postmaster Sykes's--that was when he was postmaster

-first an' they was still humble an' not above the honest penny. An' Jem

-Pitlaw left two trunks an' a sealed box to their house. An' when he

-didn't come back in two years, Silas Sykes moved the things out of the

-spare room over to the post-office store loft. An' there they set, three

-years on end, till we got word Jem was dead--the very week o' the

-Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle's Ten Cent Tropical Fête. Though,

-rilly, the Tropical Fête wasn't what you might say 'tropical.' It was

-held on the seventeenth of January, an' that night the thermometer was

-twenty-four degrees below on the bank corner. Nor it wasn't rilly what

-you might say a Fête, either. But none o' the Circle regretted them

-lacks. A lack is as good as a gift, sometimes.

-

-"We'd started the Foreign Missionary Circle through Mis' Postmaster

-Sykes gettin' her palm. I donno what there is about palms, but you know

-the very name makes some folks think thoughts 'way outside their heads,

-an' not just stuffy-up inside their own brains. When I hear 'palm,' I

-sort o' feel like my i-dees got kind o' wordy wings an' just went it

-without me. An' that was the way with more than me, I found out. Nobody

-in Friendship Village hed a palm, but we'd all seen pictures an'

-hankered--like you do. An' all of a sudden Mis' Sykes got one, like she

-gets her new hat, sometimes, without a soul knowin' she's thinkin'

-'hat' till she flams out in it. Givin' surprise is breath an' bread to

-that woman. She unpacked the palm in the kitchen, an' telephoned around,

-an' we all went over just as we was an' set down there an' looked at it

-an' thought 'Palm'! You can't realize how we felt, all of us, if you

-ain't lived all your life with nothin' but begonias an' fuchsias from

-November to April, an' sometimes into May. But we was all mixed up about

-'em, now we see one. Some hed heard dates grew on palms. Others would

-have it it was cocoanuts. Still more said they was natives of the

-equator, an' give nothin' but shade. So it went. But after a while Mis'

-Timothy Toplady spoke up with that way o' comin' downstairs on her words

-an' rilly gettin' to a landin':--

-

-"'They's quite a number o' things,' she says, 'that I want to do so much

-it seems like I can't die without doin' 'em. But I guess prob'ly I will

-die without. Folks seems to drop off leavin' lots of doin's undone. An'

-one o' my worst is, I want to see palm trees growin' in hot lands--big

-spiky leaves pointin' into the blue sky _like fury_. 'Seems if I could

-do that,' s'she, 'I'd take in one long breath that'd make me all lungs

-an' float me up an' off.'

-

-"We all laughed, but we knew what she meant well enough, because we all

-felt the same way. I think most North folks do--like they was cocoanuts

-an' dates in our actions, 'way back. An' so we was all ready for Mis'

-Toplady's idee when it come--which is the most any idee can expect:--

-

-"'I tell you what,' s'she, 'le's hev a Ladies' Foreign Missionary

-Circle, an' get read up on them tropical countries. The only thing I

-really know about the tropics is what comes to me unbeknownst when I

-smell my tea rose. I've always been meanin' to take an interest in

-missions,' says she.

-

-"So we started it, then an' there, an' she an' I was the committee to

-draw out a constitution an' decide what officers should be elected an'

-do the general creatin'. We made it up that Mis' Sykes should be the

-president--that woman is a born leader, and, as a leader, you can depend

-on the very back of her head. An' at last we went off to the minister

-that then was to ask him what to take up.

-

-"'Most laudable,' s'he, when he'd heard. 'Well, now, what country is it

-you're most interested in?' he says. 'Some island of the sea, I s'pose?'

-he asks, bright.

-

-"'We're interested in palms,' Mis' Timothy Toplady explained it to him

-frank, 'an' we want to study about the missionaries in some country

-where they's dates an' cocoanuts an' oaseses.'

-

-"He smiled at that, sweet an' deep--I know it seemed to me as if he knew

-more about what we wanted than we knew ourselves. Because they's some

-ministers that understands that Christianity ain't all in the bottle

-labelled with it. Some of it is labelled 'ointment,' an' some 'perfume,'

-an' some just plain kitchen flavourin'. An' a good deal of it ain't

-labelled at all.

-

-"I forget what country it was we did study. But they was nine to ten of

-us, an' we met every week, an' I tell you the time wa'n't wasted. We

-took things in lavish. I know Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said that

-after belongin' to the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle she could never

-feel the same absent-minded sensation again when she dusted her parlour

-shells. An' Mis' Toplady said when she opened her kitchen cabinet an'

-smelt the cinnamon an' allspice out o' the perforated tops, 'most

-always, no matter how mad she was, she broke out in a hymn, like 'When

-All Thy Mercies,' sheer through knowin' how allspice was born of God an'

-not made of man. An' Mis' Sykes said when she read her Bible, an' it

-talked about India's coral strand, it seemed like, through knowin' what

-a reef was, she was right there on one, with her Lord. I felt the same

-way, too--though I'd always felt the same way, for that matter--I always

-did tip vanilla on my handkerchief an' pretend it was flowers an' that

-I'd gone down South for the cold months. An' it got so that when the

-minister give out a text that had geography in it, like the Red Sea, or

-Beer-elim, or 'a place called The Fair Haven,' the Ladies Foreign

-Missionary Circle would look round in our seats an' nod to each other,

-without it showin', because we knew that we knew, extra special, just

-what God was talkin' about. I tell you, knowledge makes you alive at

-places where you didn't know there was such a place.

-

-"In five months' time we felt we owed so much to the Ladies' Foreign

-Missionary Circle that it was Mis' Sykes suggested we give the Ten Cent

-Tropical Fête, an' earn five dollars or so for missions.

-

-"'We know a great deal about the tropics now,' she says, 'an' I propose

-we earn a missionary thank-offering. Coral an' cocoanuts an' dates an'

-spices isn't all the Lord is interested in, by any means,' s'she. 'An'

-the winter is the time to give a tropic fête, when folks are thinkin'

-about warm things natural.'

-

-"We voted to hev the fête to Mis' Sykes's because it was too cold to

-carry the palm out. We went into it quite extensive--figs an' dates an'

-bananas an' ginger for refreshments, an' little nigger dolls for

-souvenirs, an' like that. It was quite a novel thing for Friendship, an'

-everybody was takin' an interest an' offerin' to lend Japanese umbrellas

-an' Indian baskets an' books on the South Sea, an' a bamboo chair with

-an elephant crocheted in the tidy. An' then, bein' as happenin's always

-crowd along in flocks, what come that very week o' the fête but a letter

-from an old aunt of Jem Pitlaw's, out West. An' if Jem hadn't been dead

-almost ever since he left Friendship! an' the aunt wrote that we should

-sell his things to pay for keepin' 'em, as she was too poor to send for

-'em an' hadn't any room if she wasn't.

-

-"I donno whether you know what rill excitement is, but if you don't,

-you'd ought to drop two locked trunks an' a sealed box into a town the

-size o' Friendship Village, an' leave 'em there goin' on five years, an'

-then die an' let 'em be sold. That'll show you what a pitch true

-interest can get het up to. All of a sudden the Tropical Fête was no

-more account than the telephone ringin' when a circus procession is

-going by. Some o' the Ladies' Missionary was rill indignant, an' said

-we'd ought to sue for repairin' rights, same as when you're interfered

-with in business. Mis' Sykes, she done her able best, too, but nothin'

-would do Silas but he must offer them things for sale on the instant.

-'The time,' s'he, firm, 'to do a thing is now, while the interest is up.

-An' in this country,' s'he, '"now" don't stay "now" more'n two minutes

-at a time.'

-

-"So he offered for sale the contents of them three things--the two

-trunks an' the sealed box--unsight, unseen, on the day before the Fête

-was to be. Only one thing interfered with the 'unsight, unseen'

-business: the sealed box had got damp an' broke open, an' what was

-inside was all showin'.

-

-"Mis' Sykes an' I saw it on the day o' the sale. Most o' the Circle was

-to her house finishin' up the decorations for the Fête so's to leave the

-last day clear for seein' to the refreshments, an' her an' I run over to

-the post-office store for some odds an' ends. Silas had brought the two

-trunks an' the box down from the loft so to give 'em some advertisin'.

-An' lookin' in the corner o' the broke box we could see, just as plain

-as plain, was _letters_. Letters in bunches, all tied up, an' letters

-laid in loose--they must 'a' been full a hundred of 'em, all lookin'

-mysterious an' ready to tell you somethin', like letters will. I know

-the looks o' the letters sort o' went to my head, like the news of Far

-Off. An' I hated seein' Jem's trunks there, with his initials on,

-appearin' all trustin' an' as if they thought he was still alive.

-

-"But that wasn't the worst. They was three strangers there in the

-store--travellin' men that had just come in on the Through, an' they was

-hangin' round the things lookin' at 'em, as if they had the right to.

-This town ain't very much on the buy, an' we don't hev many strangers

-here, an' we ain't rill used to 'em. An' it did seem too bad, I know we

-thought, that them three should hev happened in on the day of a private

-Friendship Village sale that didn't concern nobody else but one, an'

-him dead. An' we felt this special when one o' the men took a-hold of a

-bunch o' the letters, an' we could see the address of the top one, to

-Jem Pitlaw, wrote thin an' tiny-fine, like a woman. An' at that Mis'

-Sykes says sharp to her husband:--

-

-"'Silas Sykes, you ain't goin' to sell them letters?'

-

-"'Yes, ma'am, I am,' Silas snaps, like he hed a right to all the letters

-on earth, bein' he was postmaster of Friendship Village. 'Letters,'

-Silas give out, 'is just precisely the same as books, only they ain't

-been through the expense of printin'. No differ'nce. No

-differ'nce!'--Silas always seems to think repeatin' a thing over'll get

-him somewheres, like a clock retickin' itself. 'An',' he says, 'I'm

-goin' to sell 'em for what they'll bring, same as the rest o' the

-things, an' you needn't to say one word.' An' bein' as Silas was

-snappin', not only as a postmaster but as a husband, Mis' Sykes, she

-kep' her silence. Matrimony an' politics both in one man is too much for

-any woman to face.

-

-"Well, we two went back to Mis' Sykes's all het up an' sad, an' told the

-Circle about Jem Pitlaw's letters. An' we all stopped decoratin' an' set

-down just where we was an talked about what an awful thing it seemed. I

-donno as you'll sense it as strong as we did. It was more a feelin' than

-a wordin'. _Letters_--bein' sold an' read out loud an' gettin' known

-about. It seemed like lookin' in somebody's purse before they're dead.

-

-"'I should of thought,' Mis' Sykes says, 'that Silas regardin' bein'

-postmaster as a sacred office would have made him do differ'nt. An' I

-know he talked that right along before he got his appointment. "Free

-Private Secretary to the People," an' "Trusted Curator of Public

-Communication," he put it when he was goin' around with his petition,'

-says she, grievin'.

-

-"'Well,' says Mis' Amanda Toplady--I rec'lect she hed been puttin' up a

-big Japanese umbrella, an' she looked out from under it sort o' sweet

-an' sincere an' dreamy--'you've got to be a woman an' you've got to live

-in a little town before you know what a letter really is. I don't think

-these folks that hev lots o' mail left in the front hall in the

-mornin'--an' sometimes get one that same afternoon--_knows_ about

-letters at all. An' I don't believe any man ever knows, sole except when

-he's in love. To sense what a letter is you've got to be a woman without

-what-you-may-say much to enjoy; you've got to hear the train whistle

-that might bring you one; you've got to calculate how long it'll take

-'em to distribute the mail, an' mebbe hurry to get your bread mixed, or

-your fried-cakes out o' the lard, or your cannin' where you can leave

-it--an' then go change your shoes an' slip on another skirt, an' poke

-your hair up under your hat so's it won't show, an' go down to the

-post-office in the hot sun, an' see the letter through the glass, there

-in your own box, waitin' for you. That minute, when your heart comes up

-in your throat, I tell you, is gettin' a letter.'

-

-"We all knew this is so--every one of us.

-

-"'It's just like that when you write 'em, only felt differ'nt,' says

-Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I do mine to my sister a little at a

-time--I keep it back o' the clock in the kitchen an' hide the pencil

-inside the clock door, so's it won't walk off, the way pencils do at our

-house. An' then, right in the midst of things, be it flour or be it

-suds, I can scratch down what comes in my head, till I declare sometimes

-I can hardly mail it for readin' it over an' thinkin' how she'll like to

-get it.'

-

-"'My, my!' says Mis' Sykes, reminiscent, ''specially since Silas has

-been postmaster an' we've had so much to do with other people's letters,

-I've been so hungry for letters of my own that I've wrote for samples. I

-can do that with a level conscience because, after all, you do get a new

-dress now an' then. But I couldn't answer advertisements, same as some,

-when I didn't mean true--just to get the letters back. That don't seem

-to me rill honest.'

-

-"An' then I owned up.

-

-"'Last week, when I paid my taxes,' I says, 'I whipped out o' the

-clerk's office quick, sole so's he'd hev to mail me my tax receipt. But

-he didn't do it. He sent it over by their hired girl that noon. I love

-letters like I do my telephone bell an' my friends,' I know I says.

-

-"An' there was all that hundred letters or so--letters that somebody had

-put love in for Jem Pitlaw, an' that he'd read love out of an' saved

-'em--there they was goin' to be sold for all Friendship Village to read,

-includin' some that hadn't even known him, mebbe more than to speak to.

-

-"We wasn't quite through decoratin' when supper time come, so we stayed

-on to Mis' Sykes's for a pick-up lunch, et in the kitchen, an' finished

-up afterwards. Most of 'em could do that better than they could leave

-their work an' come down again next mornin'--men-folks can always get

-along for supper, bein' it's not a hot meal.

-

-"'Ain't it wonderful,' says Mis' Toplady, thoughtful, 'here we are,

-settin' 'round the kitchen table at Mis' Postmaster Sykes's in

-Friendship Village. An' away off in Arabia or Asia or somewhere that I

-ain't sure they is any such place, is somebody settin' that never heard

-of us nor we of him, an' he's goin' to hev our five dollars from the

-Tropical Fête to-morrow night, an' put it to work doin' good.'

-

-"'It makes sort of a connection, don't it?' says Mis'

-Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'There they are an' here we are. Ain't it

-strange? 'Seems like our doin' this makes us feel nearer to them places.

-I donno but that,' says she, noddin', 'is the start of what it means

-about the lion and the lamb layin' down together.'

-

-"'Oh!'says Mis' Toplady, 'I tell you the Foreign Missionary Circle has

-been next best to _goin'_. 'Seems sometimes as if I've 'most been

-somewheres an' seen palms a-growin' an' a-wavin' an' a red sky back.

-Don't it to you? I've dreamed o' them places all my life, an' I ain't

-never had anything but Friendship Village, an' I don't know now that

-Arabia an' Asia an' India is rilly fitted in, the way they look on the

-map. An' so with some more. But if so be they are, then,' she says, 'we

-owe it to the Foreign Missionary Circle that we've got that far towards

-seein' 'em.'

-

-"An' we all agreed, warm, excep' Mis' Sykes, who was the hostess an' too

-busy to talk much; but we knew how she felt. An' we said some more about

-how wonderful things are, there in Mis' Sykes's kitchen while we et.

-

-"Well, when we got done decoratin' after supper, we all walked over to

-the post-office store to the sale--the whole Circle of us. Because, of

-course, if the letters was to be sold there wasn't any harm in seein'

-who got 'em, an' in knowin' just how mean who was. Then, too, we was

-interested in what was in the two trunks. We was quite early--early

-enough to set along on the front rows of breakfast-food boxes that was

-fixed ready. An' in the very frontmost one was Mis' Sykes an' Mis'

-Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, an' me.

-

-"But we see, first thing when we got into the store, that they was

-strangers present. The three travellin' men that Mis' Sykes an' I had

-noticed that afternoon was still in town, of course, an' there they was

-to the sale, loungin' along on the counter each side o' the cheese. We

-couldn't bear their bein' there. It was our sale, an' they wasn't rill

-sure to understand. To us Mr. Pitlaw hed been Mr. Pitlaw. To them he was

-just somebody that hed been somebody. I didn't like it, nor they didn't

-none o' the Ladies' Missionary like it. We all looked at each other an'

-nodded without it showin', like we do, an' we could see we all felt the

-same.

-

-"Silas was goin' to officiate himself--that man has got the idee it's

-the whistle that runs the boat. They had persuaded him to open the

-trunks an' sell the things off piecemeal, an' he see that was rilly the

-only way to do it. So when the time come he broke open the two trunks

-an' he wouldn't let anybody touch hasp or strap or hammer but himself.

-It made me sort of sick to see even the trunk things of Mr. Pitlaw's

-come out--a pepper an' salt suit, a pair of new suspenders, a collar

-an' cuff case--the kind that you'd recognize was a Christmas present; a

-nice brush an' comb he'd kept for best an' never used, a cake of

-pretty-paper soap he'd never opened, a bunch o' keys, an' like that. You

-know how it makes you feel to unpack even your own things that have been

-put away a good while; it's like thinkin' over forgot thoughts. Well,

-an' this was worse. Jem Pitlaw, that none of us had known well enough to

-mention familiar things to, was dead--he was _dead_; an' here we were,

-lookin' on an' seein' the things that was never out of his room before,

-an' that he'd put in there, neat an' nice, five years back, to be took

-out, he thought, in a few weeks. Quite a lot of us felt delicate, but

-some got behind the delicate idee an' made it an excuse for not buyin'

-much. They's all kinds to a sale--did you ever notice? Timothy Toplady,

-for instance--I donno but he's all kinds in his single self. 'Seems he

-couldn't bring himself to bid on a thing but Jem Pitlaw's keys.

-

-"'Of course nobody knows what they'll fit,' says he, disparagin', 'so to

-buy 'em don't seem like bein' too familiar with Mr. Pitlaw,' s'he, rill

-pleased with himself.

-

-"But Mis' Sykes whispers to me:--

-

-"'Them keys'll go dirt cheap, an' Timothy knows it, an' a strange key

-may come in handy any minute. Timothy's reasons never whip to a froth,'

-s'she, cold.

-

-"But I guess she was over-critical because of gettin' more fidgety, like

-we all did, the nearer Silas got to the letters. He hed left the letters

-till the last. An' what with folks peekin' in the box since he'd brought

-it down, an' what with handlin' what was ready to spill out, most of 'em

-by then was in plain sight. An' there I see more o' them same

-ones--little thin writin', like a woman's. We 'most all noticed it. An'

-I couldn't keep my eyes off of 'em. 'Seemed like she might be somebody

-with soft ways that ought to be there, savin' the letters, wardin' off

-the heartache for Mr. Pitlaw an' mebbe one for herself.

-

-"An' right while I was lookin' Silas turned to the box and cleared his

-throat, important as if he was the whistle for New York City, an' he

-lifted up the bunch of the letters that had the little fine writin' on

-top, just the way Mr. Pitlaw had tied 'em up with common string.

-

-"'Oh!' says Mis' Toplady and Mis' Sykes, each side of me, the one 'oh!'

-strong an' the other low, but both 'oh's' meanin' the same thing.

-

-"'Now, what,' says Silas, brisk, 'am I bid for this package of nice

-letters here? Good clear writin', all in strong condition, an' no holes

-in, just as firm an' fresh,' s'he, 'as the day they was dropped into

-the mail. What am I bid for 'em?' he asks, his eyebrows rill expectant.

-

-"Not one of the travellin' men had bid a thing. They had sat still, just

-merely loungin' each side the cheese, laughin' some, like men will,

-among each other, but not carin' to take any part, an' we ladies felt

-rill glad o' that. But all of a sudden, when Silas put up the bunch o'

-letters, them three men woke up, an' we see like lightnin' that this was

-what they hed been waitin' for.

-

-"'Twenty-five cents!' bids one of 'em, decisive.

-

-"There was a movement of horror spread around the Missionary Circle at

-the words. Sometimes it's bad enough to hev one thing happen, but often

-it's worse to hev another occur. Even Silas looked a little doubtful,

-but to Silas the main chance is always the main thing, an' instantly he

-see that these men, if they got in the spirit of it, would run them

-letters up rill high just for the fun of it. An' Silas was like some

-are: he felt that money is money.

-

-"So what did he do but begin cryin' the goods up higher--holdin' the

-letters in his hands, that little, thin writin' lookin' like it was

-askin' somethin'.

-

-"'Here we hev letters,' says Silas, 'letters from Away. Not just

-business letters, to judge by the envelopes--an' I allow, gentlemen,'

-says Silas, facetious, 'that, bein' postmaster of Friendship Village,

-I'm as good a judge of letters as there is a-goin'. Here we hev some

-intimate personal letters offered for sale legitimate by their heiress.

-What am I bid?' asks he.

-

-"'Thirty-five cents!'

-

-"'Fifty cents!' says the other two travellin' gentlemen, quick an' in

-turn.

-

-"'Seventy-five cents!' cries out the first, gettin' in earnest--though

-they was all laughin' at hevin' somethin' inspirin' to do.

-

-"But Silas merely caught a-hold of the mood they was in, crafty, as if

-he'd been gettin' the signers to his petition while they was feelin'

-good.

-

-"'One moment, gentlemen!' s'he. 'Do you know what you're biddin' on? I

-ain't told you the half yet,' s'he. 'I ain't told you,' s'he, 'where

-these letters come from.'

-

-"With that he hitches his glasses an' looked at the postmarks. An' he

-read 'em off. Oh, an' what do you guess them postmarks was? I'll never

-forget the feelin' that come over me when I heard what he was sayin',

-turnin' back in under the string to see. For the stamps on the letters

-was foreign stamps. The postmarks was foreign postmarks. An' what Silas

-read off was: Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Singapore--oh, I can't begin to

-remember all the names nor to pronounce 'em, but I think they was all in

-India, or leastwise in Asia. Think of it! in Asia, that none of the

-Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle hed been sure there was such a place.

-

-"I know how we all looked around at each other sudden, with the same

-little jump in the chest as when we remember we've got bread in the oven

-past the three-quarters, or when we've left the preserves on the blaze

-while we've done somethin' else an' think it's burnin', or when we've

-cut out both sleeves for one arm an' ain't got any more cloth. I mean it

-was that intimate, personal jump, like when awful, first-person things

-have happened. An' I tell you what, when the Ladies' Missionary feels a

-thing, they feel it strong an' they act it sudden. It's our way, as a

-Circle. An' in that look that went round among us there was hid the nod

-that knows what each other means.

-

-"'One dollar!' shouts one o' the travellin' men.

-

-"An' with that we all turned, like one solid human being, straight

-towards Mis' Postmaster Sykes, that was our president an' a born leader

-besides, an' the way we looked at her resembled a vote.

-

-"Mis' Sykes stood up, grave an' scairt, though not to show. An' we was

-sure she'd do the right thing, though we didn't know what the right

-thing was; but we felt confidence, I know, in the very pattern on the

-back of her shawl. An' she says, clear:--

-

-"'I'd like to be understood to bid for the whole box o' Mr. Pitlaw's

-letters, includin' the bunch that's up. An' I bid five dollars.'

-

-"Of course we all knew in a minute what that meant: Mis' Sykes was

-biddin' with the proceeds of the Ten Cent Tropical Fête that was to be.

-But we see, too, that this was a missionary cause if there ever was one,

-an' they wa'n't one of us that thought it irregular, or grudged it, or

-looked behind.

-

-"I don't know whether you know how much five dollars rilly is--like you

-sense it when you've spoke it to a sale, or put it on a subscription

-paper in Friendship. There wasn't a sound in that store, everybody was

-so dumfounded. But none was so much as Silas Sykes. Silas was so

-surprised that he forgot that he was in public.

-

-"'My King!' says he, unexpected to himself. 'What you sayin', Huldy? You

-ain't biddin' that out o' your allowance, be you?' says he. Silas likes

-big words in the home.

-

-"'No, sir,' says she, crisp, back, 'I ain't. I can't do miracles out of

-nothin'. But I bid, an' you'll get your money, Silas. An' I may as well

-take the letters now.'

-

-"With that she rose up an' spread out her shawl almost broodin', an'

-gathered that box o' Jem Pitlaw's into her two arms. An' with one motion

-all the rest o' the Ladies' Missionary got up behind her an' stalked out

-of the store, like a big bid is sole all there is to an auction. An'

-they let us go. Why, there wasn't another thing for Silas Sykes to do

-but let be as was. Them three men over by the cheese just laughed, an'

-said out somethin' about no gentleman outbiddin' a lady, an' shut up,

-beat, but pretendin' to give in, like some will.

-

-"Just before we all got to the door we heard somebody's feet come down

-off'n a cracker-barrel or somethin', an' Timothy Toplady's voice after

-us, shrill-high an' nervous:--

-

-"'Amanda,' s'he, 'you ain't calculatin' to help back up this

-tomfoolishness, I hope?'

-

-"An' Mis' Amanda says at him, over her shoulder:

-

-"'If I was, that'd be between my hens an' me, Timothy Toplady,' says

-she.

-

-"An' the store door shut behind us--not mad, I remember, but gentle,

-like 'Amen.'

-

-"We took the letters straight to Mis' Sykes's an' through the house to

-the kitchen, where there was a good hot fire in the range. It was bitter

-cold outdoors, an' we set down around the stove just as we was, with the

-letters on the floor in front o' the hearth. An' when Mis' Sykes hed got

-the bracket lamp lit, she turned round, her bonnet all crooked but her

-face triumphant, an' took off a griddle of the stove an' stirred up the

-coals. An' we see what was in her mind.

-

-"'We can take turns puttin' 'em in,' she says.

-

-"But I guess it was in all our minds what Mis'

-Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss says, wistful:--

-

-"'Don't you think,' she says, 'or _do_ you think, it'd be wrongin' Mr.

-Pitlaw if we read over the postmarks out loud first?'

-

-"We divided up the bunches an' we set down around an' untied the

-strings, an', turn in an' turn out, we read the postmarks off. 'Most

-every one of 'em was foreign--oh, I can't begin to tell you where. It

-was all mixed up an' shinin' of names we'd never heard of before, an'

-names we had heard in sermons an' in the Bible--Egypt an' Greece an'

-Rome an' isles o' the sea. Mis' Toplady stopped right in the middle o'

-hers.

-

-"'Oh, I can't be sure I'm pronouncin' 'em right,' she says, huntin' for

-her handkerchief, 'but I guess you ladies get the _feel_ o' the places,

-don't you?'

-

-"An' that was just it: we did. We got the feel of them far places that

-night like we never could hev hed it any other way. An' when we got all

-through, Mis' Toplady spoke up again--but this time it was like she flew

-up a little way an' lit on somethin'.

-

-"'It ain't likely,' she says, 'that we'll ever, any of us, hev a letter

-of our own from places like these. We don't get many letters, an' what

-we do get come from the same old towns, over an' over again, an' quite

-near by. Do you know,' she says, 'I believe this Writin' here'--she held

-out the tiny fine writing that was like a woman with soft ways--'would

-understand if we each took one of her letters an' glued it together here

-an' now an' carried it home an' pasted it in our Bibles. _She_ went

-travellin' off to them places, an' she must have wanted to; an' she

-would know what it is to want to go an' yet never get there.'

-

-"I think Mis' Amanda was right--we all thought so. An' we done what she

-mentioned, an' made our choice o' postmarks. I know Mis' Amanda took

-Cairo.

-

-"''Count of the name sort o' picturin' out a palm tree a-growin' an'

-a-wavin' against a red sky,' she says, when she was pinnin' her shawl

-clear up over her hat to go out in the cold. 'Think of it,' she says;

-'she might 'a' passed a palm the day she wrote it. Ain't it like seein'

-'em grow yourself?'

-

-... "Mebbe it all wasn't quite regular," Calliope added, "though we made

-over five dollars at the Ten Cent Fête. But the minister, when we told

-him, he seemed to think it was all right, an' he kep' smilin', sweet an'

-deep, like we'd done more'n we _had_ done. An' I think he knew what we

-meant when we said we was all feelin' nearer, lion an' lamb, to them

-strange missionary countries. Because--oh, well, sometimes, you know,"

-Calliope said, "they's things that makes you feel nearer to faraway

-places that couldn't hev any postmark at all."

-

-

-

-

-XV

-

-PETER

-

-

-Last night in my room there was no sleeping, because the moon was there.

-It is a south room, and when the moon shines on the maple floor with its

-white cotton rugs and is reflected from the smooth white walls, to step

-within is like entering an open flower. Who could sleep in an open

-flower? I might sleep in a vast white petunia, because petunias do not

-have as much to say to me as do some other flowers. But in the bell of a

-lily, as in the bell of the sky or in my moonlit room, I should wish my

-thought to stay awake and be somebody. Be Somebody. On these nights, it

-is as if one had a friend in one's head conferring with one. And I think

-of this comrade as Her, the Custodian of me, who lives deep within and

-nearly comes outside to this white porch of the moon.

-

-I like to light my candle and watch its warm rays mix with the

-blue-white beams from without. There would have been a proper employment

-for a wizard: to diffuse varying insubstantialities, such as these, and

-to look within them, as within a pool--a pool free of its basin and

-enjoying the air. Yes, they were an unimaginative race, wizards. When

-will the era of white art come, with æsthetic witches and wizards who

-know our modern magics of colour and form and perception as a mere basis

-for their sorceries? Instead of pottering with thick, slab gruel and

-mediæval newts' eyes, think what witches they will be! Sometimes I think

-that they are already arriving. The New Lady told me the most delightful

-thing about a Thought of hers that she saw ... but it was such an

-elusive thing to tell and so much of it I had to guess, because words

-have not yet caught up with fancies, that it is hard to write down.

-Besides, perhaps you know. And if you did not know, you would skip this

-part anyway. So I merely mention that _she_ mentioned the coming alive

-of a thought of hers which helped her spirit to grow, quite without her

-will. Very likely you understand other wizardries. An excellent place to

-think them out must be the line where candle rays meet moonbeams, but

-there is no such discoverable line, just as there is no discoverable

-line between the seeing and the knowing, where the Custodian dwells....

-By all of which I am merely showing you what the moon can do to one's

-head and that it is no great wonder that one cannot sleep.

-

-"Ain't the moon kind of like a big, shinin' brain," Calliope said once,

-"an' moonlight nights it gets in your head and thinks for you."

-

-So last night when I went in my room I did not try to sleep; nor did I

-even light my candle. I went straight to a window and opened it--the one

-without a screen. I would not live in a house that did not have certain

-windows which one could open to let in the moon, or the night, or the

-living out-of-doors, with no screens to thwart their impulse. Suppose

-that sometime Diana--well, suppose what you will that is sensible, no

-moon can shine through a screen. Really, it cannot do its best through

-even an open window. And this was why I gave up trying to make it do so

-and went downstairs again--which is the earthly and rational of floating

-out into that utter beauty as I wanted to float.

-

-Of going out into such a night I would like to write for a long time, as

-I would like to keep on breathing lilies-of-the-valley and never have

-done. I think, though, that "into" such a night is not the word; to go

-out _upon_ the night is the essential experience. For, like a June day,

-a moonlit night of itself will not let us inside. We must know some

-other way of entrance. And I suspect that some of us never quite find

-the way--I wonder if we are missed?

-

-I stepped round the house to the open ocean of light that broke on soft

-shores of leaf and line, solemnizing, magnifying. It was like a glimpse

-into something which, afterward and afterward, is going to be. The

-definiteness of its premonitory message was startling. As when on seeing

-once that something had happened on my birthday, 1500, I felt as if I

-had heard from a kind of twin-time, so now I understood that this night

-was the birthday of far-off, immortal moments of my own, yet to be lived

-... so friendly near we are to the immeasurable kindred.

-

-And there, from the shadow of the flowering currant bush, which just now

-is out of flower and fallen in meditative quiet--a man arose. My sharp

-fear, as savage a thing as if the world were ten thousand years younger,

-or as if I were a ptarmigan and he a cougar--was only momentary. For the

-cougar began to apologize and I recognized him.

-

-"Why," I said, "Peter."

-

-"Yes'm," said he, "I couldn't help being here--for a little while."

-

-"Neither could I, Peter," I told him.

-

-These were remarkable admissions of ours, for a large part of evening in

-the village is an uninhabitable part of day and, no matter in what

-splendour of sky it comes, is a thing to be shut outside experience. If

-we relate being wakened by something that goes bang, we begin it, "In

-the middle of the night, about twelve o'clock;" and, "They have a light

-in their house 'most every night till midnight," is a bit of sharp

-criticism not lightly to be lived down. But now it was as if Peter were

-a part of the time itself, and outlaw too, if the evening was outlaw.

-"I'm glad I saw you," Peter said--as if we were here met by chance in

-the usual manner. "I wanted to see you and tell you: I'm going away--to

-be gone right along."

-

-"Why," I said again, "Peter!"

-

-"You'd go too," he said simply.

-

-"I should want to go," I told him, "but I doubt if I would go. Where are

-you going?"

-

-"They want to put in a cannery at Marl. It'd be a branch. I'd run it

-myself."

-

-I did not miss the implication of the conditional mood. And _Marl_. What

-wonderful names they give to some of the towns of this world. That word

-makes a picture all of white cornices and white wings of buildings and

-bright façades. I dare say from the railroad track the real town of Marl

-shows an unpainted livery barn and a blue barber shop, but the name

-sounds like the name of a chapter of travel, beginning: To-day we drove

-to Marl to see the queen. Or the cataract. Or the porch of the morning.

-

-"Why are you going, Peter?" I drove in the peg for him.

-

-"I guess you know," he said. "It's all Miggy with me."

-

-I knew that he wanted before all else to tell somebody, to talk to

-somebody, to have somebody know.

-

-"Tell me, Peter," I said.

-

-And now Peter told me how things were with him. If I should repeat what

-he said you would be scornful, for it was so little. It was broken and

-commonplace and set with repetition. It was halting and unfinished, like

-the unformed writing of a boy. But in his words I felt the movings of

-life and destiny and death more than I feel them when I think about the

-rushing of the stars. He loved her, and for him the world became a

-transparent plane wherein his soul moved as simply as his body. Here was

-not only a boy longing for a girl. Here was not only a man, instinct

-with the eager hope of establishing a home. Here was something not

-unlike this very moon-washed area won from the illimitable void, this

-area where we stood and spoke together, this little spot which alone was

-to us articulate with form and line and night sounds. So Peter,

-stumbling over his confession of love for Miggy, was like the word

-uttered by destiny to explicate its principle. It mattered not at all

-what the night said or what Peter said. Both were celestial.

-

-These moments when the soul presses close to its windows are to be

-understood as many another hint at the cosmic--Dawn, May, the firmament,

-radio-activity, theistic evolution, a thousand manifestations of the

-supernal. In this cry of enduring spirit it was as if Peter had some

-intimacy with all that has no boundaries. I hardly heard his stumbling

-words. I listened to him down some long avenue of hearths whose

-twinkling lights were like a corridor of stars.

-

-And all this bright business was to be set at naught because Miggy would

-have none of it.

-

-"She seems to like me," Peter said miserably, "but I guess she'd like me

-just as well if I wasn't me. And if I was right down somebody else, I

-guess she'd like me a good deal better. She--don't like my hands--nor

-the way my hair sticks up at the back. She thinks of all such things. I

-wouldn't care if she said all her words crooked. I'd know what she

-meant."

-

-I knew the difference. To him she was Miggy. To her he was an

-individual. He had never in her eyes graduated from being a person to

-being himself.

-

-"Calliope says," I told him, "that she likes almond extract better than

-any other kind, but that she hardly ever gets a bottle of almond with

-which she does not find fault. She says it's the same way with people

-one loves."

-

-Peter smiled--he is devoted to Calliope, who alone in the village has

-been friendly with his father. _Friendly._ The rest of the village has

-only been kind.

-

-"Well," he tried to put it, "but Miggy never seems to be thinking of me

-as _me_, only when she's finding fault with me. If she'd only think

-about me, even a little, the way I think about her. If she'd only miss

-me or want me or wonder how the house would seem if we were married. But

-she don't care--she don't care."

-

-"She says, you know," I ventured, "that she can't ask you to support

-Little Child too."

-

-"Can't she see," he cried, "that the little thing only makes me love her

-more? Don't she know how I felt the other night--when she let me help

-her that way? She must know. It's just an excuse--"

-

-He broke off and his hands dropped.

-

-"Then there's her other reason," he said, "I guess you know that. I

-can't blame her for it. But even with that, it kind of seems as if,--if

-she loved me--"

-

-"Yes," I said, "Peter, it does seem so."

-

-And yet in my heart I am certain that the reason is not at all that

-Miggy cannot love him--I remember the woman-softening of her face that

-forenoon when she found the spirit of the old romances in the village. I

-am not even certain that the reason is that she does not love Peter

-now--I remember how tender and feminine she was the other night with

-Peter and Little Child. I think it is only that the cheap cynicism of

-the village--which nobody means even when it is said!--has taught her

-badly; and that Life has not yet touched her hand, has not commanded

-"Look at me," has not bidden her follow with us all.

-

-I looked into the bright bowl of the night which is alternately with one

-and against one in one's mood of emprise; the bright bowl of the night

-inverted as if some mighty genii were shaking the stars about like

-tea-leaves to fortune the future. What a pastime _that_ for a wizard!

-

-"Oh, Peter," I said, "_if_ one were a wizard!"

-

-"I didn't understand," said Peter.

-

-"How pleasant it would be to make folk love folk," I put it.

-

-He understood that. "Wouldn't it, though?" he assented wistfully. So

-does everybody understand. Wouldn't it, though! Oh, _don't you wish you

-could_?

-

-In the silence which fell I kept on looking at those starry tea-leaves

-until I protest that a thought awoke in my mind as if it wanted to be

-somebody. Be Somebody. It was as if it came alive, quite without my

-will, so that almost I could see it. It was a friend conferring in my

-head. Perhaps it was the Custodian herself, come outside to that white

-porch of the moon.

-

-"Peter," I said, "I think I'm going to tell you a story."

-

-For I longed to make him patient with Miggy, as men, who understand

-these things first, are not always patient with women, who often and

-often understand too late.

-

-He listened to the story as I am setting it down here--the story of the

-New Village. But in it I could say nothing of how, besides by these

-things celestial, cosmic, I was touched by the simple, human entreaty of

-the big, baffled man and that about his hands and the way his hair

-sticks up at the back.

-

-

-

-

-XVI

-

-THE NEW VILLAGE

-

-

-Once upon a time there was a village which might have been called

-The-Way-Certain-Folk-Want-It-Now. That, however, was not its name--it

-had a proper, map-sounding name. And there every one went to and fro

-with a fervour and nimbleness which proved him to be skilfully intent

-upon his own welfare.

-

-The village had simple buildings and white walls, lanes and flowering

-things and the flow of pure air. But the strange thing about the town

-was that there each inhabitant lived alone. Every house had but one

-inmate and he well content. He liked everything that he owned and his

-taste was all-sufficient and he took his pleasure in his own walls and

-loved best his own ways. The day was spent in lonely selling or lonely

-buying, each man pitted against all others, and advantage and

-disadvantage were never equal, but yet the transactions were dreary,

-lacking the picturesqueness of unlicensed spoliation. The only greeting

-which folk exchanged in passing was, "Sir, what do you do for

-yourself?" There were no assemblings of the people. The town kept itself

-alive by accretion from without. When one died another appeared and took

-his place gladly, and also others arrived, like precept added to precept

-and not like a true flowering. There were no children. And the village

-common was overgrown and breast-high with weeds. When the day was done

-every one retired to his own garden and saw his flowers blossoming for

-him and answering to the stars which came and stood over his head. There

-was in the town an epidemic of the intensive, only the people thought of

-it as the normal, for frequently epidemics are so regarded.

-

-In one soul the contagion did not prevail. The soul was the lad Matthew,

-whose body lived on the town's only hill. When others sat at night in

-their gardens Matthew was wont to go up an airy path which he had made

-to the upper spaces and there wander conjecturing about being alive. For

-this was a detail which he never could take wholly for granted, in the

-manner in which he had become wonted to door-mats, napkin-rings,

-oatmeal, and mirrors. Therefore he took his thought some way nearer to

-the stars, and there he found so much beauty that he longed to fashion

-it to something, to create of it anew. And as he opened his heart he

-began to understand that there is some one of whom he was the

-offspring. As he was companioned by this idea, more and more he longed

-for things to come nearer. Once, in his walking a hurrying bird brushed

-his face, grew confused, fluttered at his breast, and as he would have

-closed it in his hands he found that the bird was gone and his hands

-were empty, but beneath them his own heart fluttered and throbbed like a

-thing apart.

-

-One night, so great was the abstraction of the boy, that instead of

-taking the upper path he fared down into the town. It was a curious way

-to do--to go walking in the town as if the thing were common property,

-but then the walls were very high and the gates were fast closed and

-bound round with creeping things, which grow very quickly. Matthew

-longed to enter these gardens, and he wondered who lived in the houses

-and what might be in their hearts.

-

-Amazingly, at the turn of a white wall, a gate was opened and she who

-had opened it leaned into the night as if she were looking for

-something. There was a fluttering in the breast of Matthew so that he

-looked down to see if the bird had come back. But no bird was there. And

-it smote him that the lady's beauty, and surely her goodness, were great

-enough so that of them something might be created, as he would fain have

-created marvels from the sky.

-

-"I would like to make your beauty into something other," he said to

-her. "I cannot think whether this would be a song or a picture or a

-vision."

-

-She looked at him with as much pleasure as if he had been an idea of her

-own.

-

-"Tell me about my beauty," she bade him. "What thing is that?"

-

-"Nay, that will take some while," Matthew said. "If I do that, I must

-come in your garden."

-

-Now, such a thing had never happened in the town. And as this seemed why

-it never happened, it seemed likely to go on never happening

-indefinitely. But loneliness and the longing to create and the

-conjecture about life have always been as potent as battles; and beauty

-and boredom and curiosity have had something to do with history as well.

-

-"Just this once, then," said the lady, and the gate closed upon the two.

-

-Here was a garden like Matthew's own, but indefinitely atmosphered

-other. It spoke strangely of a wonted presence, other than his own. In

-his own garden he fitted as if the space for him were niched in the air,

-and he went as a man accustomed will go without thinking. But here he

-moved free, making new niches. And whereas on his own walks and plots he

-looked with lack-lustre eye as a man looks on his own gas-jet or rain

-pipe, now Matthew looked on all that he saw as on strange flame and

-sweet waters. And it was not the shrubs and flowers which most

-delighted him, but it was rather on a garden bench the lady's hat and

-gloves and scissors.

-

-"How pleasing!" said he, and stopped before them.

-

-"Do you find them so?" asked the lady.

-

-And when he told her about her beauty, which was more difficult to do

-than he had imagined and took a longer time, she said:--

-

-"There can be no other man in the world who would speak as you speak."

-

-On which he swore that there was no man who would not speak so, and

-likewise that no man could mean one-half what he himself meant. And he

-looked long at her house.

-

-"In those rooms," he said, "you go about. I wish that I could go about

-there."

-

-But that frightened her a little.

-

-"In there," he said, "are the lamps you light, the plates you use, the

-brush that smooths your hair. How strange that is."

-

-"Does it seem strange?" she asked.

-

-"Sometime I will go there," said he, and with that he thought that the

-bird once more was fluttering at his breast. And again there was no

-bird.

-

-When the time was come that he must leave her, this seemed the most

-valiant thing to do that ever he had done. It was inconceivable to

-accept that though now she was with him, breathing, sentient, yet in

-another moment he would be out alone in the empty night. Alone. For the

-first time the word became a sinister thing. It meant to be where she

-was not.

-

-"How is this to go on," he said, "I living where you do not live?"

-

-But she said, "Such things have never been any other way," and closed

-the gate upon him.

-

-It is a mighty thing when one who has always lived alone abruptly finds

-himself to have a double sense. Here is his little box of ideas, neatly

-classified, ready for reference, which have always methodically bobbed

-out of their own will the moment they were mentioned. Here are his own

-varieties of impression ready to be laid like a pattern upon whatever

-presents itself to be cut out. Here are his tastes, his sentiments, his

-beliefs, his longings, all selected and labelled and established. And

-abruptly ideas and impressions and tastes are thrown into rapt disorder

-while he wonders what this other being would think, and his sentiment

-glows like a lamp, his belief embraces the world, his longing becomes

-only that the other being's longing be cast in counterpart. When he

-walks abroad, the other's step accompanies him, a little back, and

-invisible, but as authentic as his own. When he thinks, his thought,

-without his will, would share itself. All this is a new way of

-consciousness. All this makes two universes where one universe had

-previously been competent to support life.

-

-Back on his hill Matthew went through his house as if he were seeing it

-for the first time. There was the garden that he had planted, and she

-was not walking there. There was his window, and she was not looking

-from it; his table, and she was not sitting beside it; his book which he

-could not read for wondering if she had read. All the tools of his home,

-what could they not become if she touched them? The homely tasks of the

-cupboard, what joy if she shared them? But what to do? He thought that

-it might be something if they exchanged houses, so that he could be

-where she had been, could use what she had used, could think of her in

-her setting. But yet this did not wholly delight him, either.

-

-And now his house stifled him, so that he rushed out upon that airy path

-of his that he had made to reach the upper spaces, and he fled along,

-learning about being alive. Into the night he went, farther than ever he

-had gone before, till the stars looked nearer to him than houses

-commonly look, and things to think about seemed there waiting for him.

-

-So it adventured that he came abruptly upon the New Village. It lay upon

-the air as lightly as if strong, fair hands were uniting to bear it up,

-and it was not far from the stars and the clear places. Before he

-understood its nearness, the night was, so to say, endued with this

-village, and he entered upon its lanes as upon light.

-

-This was a town no larger than his own and no more fortuned of Nature.

-Here were buildings not too unlike, and white walls and flowering things

-and the flow of pure air. But here was also the touch of bells. And he

-saw that every one went to and fro in a manner of quiet purpose that was

-like a garment.

-

-"Sir, what do you do for yourself?" he asked courteously of one who was

-passing.

-

-The citizen gave him greeting.

-

-"I make bread for my family," said he, "and, it may be, a dream or two."

-

-Matthew tried hard to perceive, and could make nothing of this.

-

-"Your family," he said, "what thing is that?"

-

-The citizen looked at him narrowly.

-

-"I see that you rebuke me," said he, gently; "but I, too, labor for the

-community, so that the day shall become a better day."

-

-"Community," said Matthew. "Now I know not at all what that may be,

-either."

-

-Then the man understood that here was one who would learn about these

-things, and in the New Village such a task is sacred and to be assumed

-on the moment by any to whom the opportunity presents. So the man took

-Matthew with him.

-

-"Come," he said, "this is the day when we meet together."

-

-"Together," said Matthew, and without knowing why he liked what he felt

-when he said that.

-

-They went first to the market-place, trodden of many feet, and about it

-a fair green common planted in gracious lines. Here Matthew found men in

-shops that were built simply and like one another in fashion, but with

-pleasant devices of difference, and he found many selling together and

-many buying, and no one was being robbed.

-

-"How can these things be?" he asked. "Here every man stands with the

-others."

-

-"Inside of all things," the citizen answered, "you will find that it is

-so written."

-

-On the common many were assembled to name certain projects and purposes:

-the following of paths to still clearer spaces, the nurturing of certain

-people, ways of cleanliness, purity of water, of milk, wide places for

-play, the fashioning of labour so that the shrines within be not

-foregone, the freeing of fountains, the planting of green things.

-

-"Why will all this be?" asked Matthew. "For these things a man does in

-his own garden or for his own house, and no other interferes."

-

-"Nay, but look deep within all things, Friend," the citizen said, "and

-you will never find it written so."

-

-"Friend," repeated Matthew, "_friend_...."

-

-Then the citizen went to his own house, and Matthew with him. The wall

-was no wall, but a hedge, and the garden was very beautiful. And lo,

-when they went in, there came tumbling along the path little beings made

-in the image of the citizen himself. And with them a woman of exceeding

-beauty and power, which the little ones also bore. As if the citizen had

-chosen her beauty and power to make them into something other.

-

-It was as it had been when the bird was fluttering and beating at the

-boy's breast, but he did not even heed.

-

-"Tell me!" he cried. "These--do they live here with you? Are they

-yours?"

-

-"We are one another's," said the citizen.

-

-Matthew sat among them, and to pleasure him they did many sweet tasks.

-They brought him to eat and drink in the garden. The woman gave quiet

-answers that had in them something living, and alive, too, some while

-after she had spoken. ("So _she_ could answer," Matthew thought, "and

-better, too, than that.") And the children brought him a shell, a pretty

-stone, a broken watch, and a little woolly lamb on three wheels, and the

-fourth wheel missing. The lamb had a sound to make by squeezing, and

-this sound Matthew made a great many times, and every time the children

-laughed. And when they did that Matthew could think of nothing to say

-that seemed a thing to be said, but he was inscrutably elated, and did

-the trick again.

-

-And when he rose to take his leave:--

-

-"Is it for them that you make bread and a dream or two?" he asked.

-

-He knew that he should always like to remember the citizen's smile as he

-answered.

-

-They stood at the opening of the hedge and folk were going by.

-

-"Are they not jealous of you?" Matthew asked.

-

-"They have families and bread and dreams of their own," said the

-citizen. "Every house is filled with them."

-

-Matthew looked breathlessly along the street of the New Village, and he

-saw men, as they went, giving one another greeting: "Friend, is much

-accomplished?" or, "Peace to you, Friend." And they talked together, and

-entered gardens where were those who came to meet them or who waited

-within. They were a fine company, moving as to some secret way of being,

-and as if they had all looked deep within to see how it is written. And

-as he watched, something in Matthew would have cried out that he, too,

-was offspring of their Father, that for all this had he too been

-created, and that for this would he live, joying and passioning and

-toiling in the common destiny. But when he spoke, all that he could say

-was:--

-

-"Every man, then, may sit down now with a lamb with three wheels and the

-fourth wheel missing...."

-

-On which he ceased for very shame. But the citizen understood and smiled

-once more, and said to him: "Come you here again, Brother."

-

-With that word Matthew was off, down from the clear upper spaces, to

-where, lonely on its hill, his own house stood among its lonely

-neighbours. And Matthew strode shouting down the deserted streets and

-calling at every gate; and, it being now day, every one came forth to

-his lonely toil.

-

-Matthew went and stood on the common where the weeds were high, and so

-amazed were the folk that they came about him, each suspecting the other

-of secret connivance in this strange business. For nothing had ever been

-done so.

-

-"Men and brothers," cried Matthew, "it is not so that it was meant. I

-pray you look deep within, and see how the meaning was written. Is it

-that you should live, each pitted against another, wounding the other,

-advantaging himself? Join now each his hand with that of a neighbour.

-_His neighbour._ Make the thing of which, it seems, the world is made;

-a family. Let the thing come alive which is greater than the family: the

-community. Oh, my comrades, let us work together for the coming of the

-kingdom of God."

-

-In the murmur that rose were the words which have been spoken since time

-began:--

-

-"It is not so that it was done in the old time...."

-

-"It is not seemly that we change...."

-

-"If every one did this ... but we cannot do it alone."

-

-"Have you thought what will become of our business?"

-

-And again and yet again: "It is not so that it was done in the old

-time."

-

-And when the most would have none of it, Matthew made his way sadly

-through the throng--of whom were many who smiled (kindly!)--to the edge

-of the common, where stood a woman, trembling.

-

-"Come," he said.

-

-She went with him, and she with many little frightened breaths, but he

-had no pity, for he read deep within and saw that it was written that

-she wanted none. When they reached her own house, she would have

-entered.

-

-"Go we in here," she besought him, "I will show you the rooms where I go

-about and the lamps that I light."

-

-"We are past all that now," said Matthew, gently, "I will not go on

-living where you do not live."

-

-He took her to his own house, through the garden that he had planted. He

-made her look from his window, sit by his table, open his books; and he

-bade her to a little task at the cupboard and laughed for joy that she

-performed it.

-

-"Oh, come away," he cried. "And now we will go quickly to the New

-Village, that one which I have found or another, where men know all this

-happiness and more."

-

-But she stood there by Matthew's cupboard and shook her head.

-

-"No," she said gravely, "here we will stay, you and I, in your house.

-Here we will live--and it may be there is a handful of others who

-understand. And here we will do what we can."

-

-"But I must show you," Matthew cried, "the way the others live--the

-things they strive for: the following of paths to clearer spaces, the

-freeing of shrines."

-

-"All that," she said, "we will do here."

-

-"But," he urged, "you must see how else they do--the shell, the pretty

-stone, the watch, the woolly lamb on three wheels and one wheel

-missing...."

-

-"All that," she said, "is in my heart."

-

-Matthew looked in her face and marvelled, for he saw that beside her

-beauty there was her power, and to that he bowed himself as to a far

-voice. And again it was as when the bird was at his breast, but now he

-knew what this would be.

-

-So they live there in Matthew's house. And a handful besides understand

-and toil for the fairer order. And this will come; and then that New

-Village, in the clear upper spaces, will hang just above every

-village--nay, will come down to clothe it like a garment.

-

-

-When I had done,

-

-"Peter," I said--I nearly called him Matthew!--"these are the things

-that Miggy does not understand. And that she will understand."

-

-He knew. He said nothing; but he knew how it is written.

-

-"Peter," I said, "I suppose Miggy will never have been to your house?"

-

-I knew that she could not have been there.

-

-"Some day soon," I said--"before you go away--ask us to come there. I

-should like her to sit by your table and look from your window."

-

-For how can one be sure that divine non-interference is always divine?

-

-Peter drew his breath long.

-

-"Would you?" he said; "would you? So many times I've thought maybe that

-would make her think of me as if I _was_ me."

-

-Yes, that might help. If only Miggy knew how to shake hands as Elfa

-shook hands with Nicholas Moor, that might help, too. How did it begin,

-this pride of individualism in a race which does not know its own

-destiny save as the great relationships, human and divine, can reveal

-that destiny? But Peter knows! And the hope of the world is that so many

-do know.

-

-Since he said his grateful good night and rushed away, I have been

-trying to readjust my impression of Peter. For I can no longer think of

-him in connection with Miggy and the cannery and my neighbour's lawn and

-the village. Now he is a figure ranging the ample intervals of a field

-fraternal to the night and to the day. Fraternal, too, to any little

-moon-washed area, won from the void, where it is easy to be in

-conference with the spirit without and within. Truly, it is as if the

-meaning of the universe were passioning for the comradeship of hearts

-that can understand.

-

-

-

-

-XVII

-

-ADOPTION

-

-

-The big window of my sitting room is an isle of sirens on whose shore

-many of my bird neighbours are continually coming to grief. For, from

-without, the window makes a place of soft skies and seductive leaves

-where any bird might think to wing a way. And in that mirrored deep

-there is that curious atmosphere which makes In-a-looking-glass a better

-thing than the room which it reflects--an elusive sense which Little

-Child might call Isn't-any-such-placeness. I think that I might call it

-so too. And so, evidently, the birds would call it, for they are always

-trying to find there some path of flight.

-

-A morning or two ago, when I heard against the pane the soft thud of an

-eager little body, I hurried out to see lying under the window an

-oriole. It was too terrible that it should have been an oriole. For days

-I had seen him hanging here and there, back downward, on this limb and

-that, and heard his full-throated note ringing from the innermost air,

-so that the deeps of air could never again be wholly alien to me. And

-now he lay, his wings outstretched, his eyes dim, his breast hardly

-moving. I watched him, hoping for the breath to begin to flutter and

-labour. But though the great Nature was with him, herself passioning in

-all the little fibres to keep life pulsing on, yet her passion was not

-enough; and while I looked the little life went out.

-

-... I held the tiny body in my hand, and it was almost as if the

-difference between living and not living slipped through my fingers and

-was gone. If only that one within me, who watches between the seeing and

-the knowing, had been a little quicker, I might almost have

-understood....

-

-"Them little things go out like a match," said my neighbour.

-

-She was standing on the other side of the box hedge, and I caught a look

-on her face that I had seen there once or twice before, so that my heart

-had warmed to her; and now, because of that look, she fitted within the

-moment like the right word.

-

-"It don't seem like anybody could _mean_ 'em to die before their time,"

-she said. "Ain't it almost as if it happened when Everything somehow

-couldn't help it?"

-

-It was this, the tragedy of the Unfulfilled Intention, that was in my

-mind while I hollowed the little grave under the hedge. And when we had

-finished, my neighbour, who had stepped informally over the box to help

-me, looked up with a return of that fleeting expression which I had

-noted.

-

-"I guess we've found one now for sure," she said.

-

-"Found one?" I puzzled.

-

-"I thought you knew," she told me. "I thought everybody knew--we've been

-looking for one so long. For a baby."

-

-She never had told me and no one had told me, but I loved her for

-thinking that all the world knew. There are abroad a multitude of these

-sweet suspicions as well as the sad misgivings of the hunted. She had

-simply let me know, that early morning in the garden, her sorrow that

-there was "no little thing runnin' round." And now she told me for how

-long they had been trying to find one to adopt, consciously serving no

-social need, but simply hungering for a child whom they could "take to."

-It was a story of fruitless visits to the homes in the city, the news

-sent of this little waif or that, all proving too old or of too sad an

-inheritance. To me it would seem that the more tragic the inheritance

-the more poignantly sounds the cry for foster-folk. And this may be

-extreme, I know, but virtue, I find, does not lie exclusively in the

-mean, either. It lies partly in one's taste in extremes. However, this

-special extreme I find not generally believed in as I believe in it; and

-my neighbour, not sharing it, had waited on with empty arms.

-

-And now, after all the long hoping, she had found a baby--a baby who

-filled all the requirements and more. First of all, he was a boy;

-second, he was of healthful Scotch parentage; third, he was six weeks

-old; and, fondest I could see in my neighbour's heart, he was good to

-look at. When she told me this she produced, from beneath her apron, a

-broken picture post-card. The baby was lying on a white blanket spread

-on the grass, and he was looking up with the intentness of some little

-soul not yet embodied; or as if, having been born, some shadow-thing,

-left over from his source of shadows, yet detained his attention.

-"William," it said beneath the picture.

-

-"But I shall call him Kenneth," my neighbour said; "I've always meant

-to. I don't want he should be called after his father, being he isn't

-ours, you might say. But he is ours," she added in a kind of challenge.

-"_He's_ going after him to-morrow to the city"--and now "he" meant her

-husband, in that fine habit of use by these husbands and wives of the

-two third persons singular to mean only each other, in a splendid,

-ultimate, inevitable sense, authentic as the "we" of a sovereign, no

-more to be mistaken. "I'd go too," she added, "but we're adopting the

-baby with the egg money--we've saved it for years for when the time

-come. And one fare to the city and back is a lot of eggs. I thought I'd

-rather wait for him here and have the ticket money to spend on the

-clothes."

-

-She was on her way, I thought I guessed, to carry her good news to our

-friends in the village, for she bore that same air which I have noted,

-of being impermanent and subject to flight. And as she left me she

-turned to give me one of those rare compliments which are priceless.

-

-"You come over this afternoon," she said, "and I'll show you what little

-things I've made."

-

-I remember another compliment. It was when, in town, a charming little

-woman, a woman all of physical curves and mental tangents, had been

-telling a group of us about a gay day in a four-in-hand. She had not

-looked at me because for that sort of woman, as well as for others, I

-lack all that which would make them take account of my presence; but

-when in the four-in-hand she came to some mention of the road where the

-accident had nearly occurred ("Oh, it was a beautiful road," she said,

-"the river on one side, and the highlands, and a whole _mob_ of trees,")

-she turned straight upon me through her description as consistently as

-she had neglected me when she described the elbow-bits of the leaders

-and the boots of the woman on the box-seat. It may have been a chance,

-but I have always hugged it to me.

-

-My neighbour's house is small, and her little upstairs rooms are the

-half-story with sloping ceilings and windows which extend from the floor

-to the top of one's head. It gives me a curious sense of

-over-familiarity with a window to be as tall as it is. I feel that I

-have it at advantage and that I am using it with undue intimacy. When I

-was a little girl I used to creep under the dining-room table and sit

-there, looking up, transfixed at the difference. A new angle of material

-vision, the sight of the other side of the shield, always gives me this

-pause. But whereas this other aspect of things used to be a delight,

-now, in life, I shrink a little from availing myself of certain

-revelations. I have a great wish to know things, but I would know them

-otherwise than by looking at their linings. I think that even a window

-should be sanctioned in its reticences.

-

-Before a black walnut commode my neighbour knelt that afternoon, and I

-found that it was filled with the things which she had made for the

-baby, when they should find him. These she showed to me--they were

-simple and none too fine, and she had made them on her sewing-machine in

-the intervals of her busy life. For three years she had wrought at them,

-buying them from the egg money. I wondered if this secret pastime of

-garment-making might not account for my impression of her that she must

-always be off to engage in something other. Perhaps it was this

-occupation, always calling her, which would not let her appear fixed at

-garden-watering or festival. I think that it may be so of any who are

-"pressed in the spirit" to serve, to witness to any truth: that is their

-vocation and every other is an avocation, a calling away from the real

-business of life. For this reason it is my habit to think of the social

-workers in any division of the service, family or town or state or

-church, as Vocationists. It is they who are following the one great

-occupation. The rest of us are avocationists. In my neighbour I

-perceived one of the great comrade company of the Vocationists,

-unconscious of her banner, but because of some sweet, secret piping,

-following, following....

-

-"I've always thought I'd get to do a little embroidering on a yoke or

-two," she said, "but so far I couldn't. Anyway I thought I could do the

-plain part and running the machine before he came. The other I could sit

-by the crib and do. Embroidery seems sort o' baby-watchin' work, don't

-it?"

-

-When I left her I walked across the lawns to my home in a sense of

-security and peace. With increasing thousands consciously striving and

-passioning to help, and thousands helping because of the unconscious

-spirit within them, are there not many windows in the walls?

-

-"He" was to go by the Accommodation early next morning to bring home the

-baby. Therefore when, just before seven o'clock, I observed my

-neighbour's husband leave his home and join Peter at his gate as usual,

-I went at once to see if something was amiss.

-

-My neighbour was having breakfast as her custom was "after the men-folks

-were out of the way." At all events she was pretending to eat. I saw in

-her eyes that something was troubling her, but she greeted me

-cheerfully. I sat by the sewing-machine while she went on with her

-pretence at breakfast.

-

-"The little thing's sick," she said. "Last night we got the despatch.

-'Baby in hospital for day or two. Will advise often,' it had in it. I'm

-glad they put that in. I'll feel better to know they'll get good

-advice."

-

-I sat with her for a long time, regardless of my work or that Miggy was

-waiting for me. I was struck by the charm of matter-of-fact hopefulness

-in my neighbour, not the deliberate forcing of hope, but the simple

-expectation that nothing tragic would occur. But for all that she ate no

-breakfast, and I knew well the faint, quite physical sickness that she

-must have endured since the message came.

-

-"I'm going to get his basket ready to-day," she said. "I never did that,

-two reasons. One was, it seemed sort of taking too much for granted,

-like heating your spider before the meat wagon drives up. The other

-reason was I needed the basket for the clothes."

-

-I stayed with her while she made ready the clothes-basket, lining it

-with an old muslin curtain, filling it with pillows, covering it with

-the afghan from the parlour couch. Then, in a shoe box edged with the

-curtain's broad ruffle, she put an array of little things: the brush

-from the spare-room bureau, the pincushion from her own work-basket, a

-sachet bag that had come with a last year's Christmas gift, a cake of

-"nice soap" which she had kept for years and never unwrapped because it

-was so expensive. And then she added a little glass-stoppered bottle of

-white pills.

-

-"I don't know what they're for," she said. "I found them when I

-housecleaned, and there was so many of 'em I hated to throw 'em away. Of

-course I'll never use 'em, but they look sort of nice in there--so white

-and a glass cork--don't you think so?"

-

-She walked with me across the lawn and stood brooding, one hand across

-her mouth, looking down at the disturbance--so slight!--in the grass

-where we had laid the bird. And on her face was the look which, each

-time that I saw it there, drew me nearer to her.

-

-"'Seems as if I'd ought to be there to the hospital," she said, "doing

-what I can. Do you s'pose they'll take good care of him? I guess they

-know more about it than I do. But if I could get hold of him in my arms

-it seems as if I could help 'em."

-

-I said what I could, and she went away to her house. And for the first

-time since I had known her she did not seem put upon to be back at some

-employment. These times of unwonted idleness are terrible to witness. I

-remember a farmer whom I once saw in the afternoon, dressed in his best,

-waiting in the kitchen for the hour of his daughter's wedding, and I

-wondered that the great hands did not work of their own will. The lost

-aspect of certain men on holidays, the awful inactivity of the day of a

-funeral, the sad idleness of old age, all these are very near to the

-tragedy of negation. Work, the positive, the normal, the joyous, is like

-an added way of being. I thought that I would never again marvel at my

-neighbour for being always on the edge of flight to some pressing

-occupation. Why should she not be so?--with all that there is to be

-done. Whether we rush about, or conceal the need and rush secretly, is a

-detail of our breeding; the need is to get things done, to become by

-doing. And while for myself I would prefer the accomplishment of not

-seeming to hurry, as another is accomplished at the harp, yet I own that

-I would cheerfully forego the pretty grace rather than find myself

-without some slight degree of the robust proficiency of getting things

-done.

-

-"If you're born a picture in a book," Calliope once said, "it's all very

-well to set still on the page an' hold your hands. But if you're born

-anyways human at all, stick up your head an' start out for somewhere."

-

-My neighbour rarely comes to my house. And therefore, though she is to

-me so familiar a figure in her garden, when next morning I found her

-awaiting me in my sitting room, she seemed strange to me. Perhaps, too,

-she was really strange to me that day.

-

-"My baby died," she said.

-

-She stood there looking at me, and I knew that what she said was true,

-but it seemed to me for a moment that I could not have it so.

-

-"He died yesterday in the evening," she told me. "I just heard this

-morning, when the telegraph office opened. I dressed myself to go after

-him, but _he's_ gone."

-

-"To go after him?" I repeated.

-

-She nodded.

-

-"He was in the charity part. I was afraid they'd bury him in the

-potter's field and they wouldn't mark--it, and that I couldn't never

-tell which one it was. So I want to get him and have him buried here.

-_He_ didn't want I should go--he thought it'd be too much for me. But I

-was bound to, so he says he'd go. They'd ought to get here on the Five

-o'Clock this afternoon. Oh, if I'd went yesterday, do you think it would

-'a' been any different?"

-

-There I could comfort her. I did not think it would have been different.

-But when I tried to tell her how much better it was this way than that

-the baby should first have come to her and then have sickened, she would

-have none of it.

-

-"I've never held him once," she said. "Do you s'pose anything could be

-worse than that? I'd rather have got hold of him once, no matter what."

-

-It touched me unutterably, the grief of this mother who was no mother. I

-had no knowledge what to say to her. But I think that what she wanted

-most was companionship. She went to one and another and another of our

-neighbours to whom she had shown so happily the broken post-card

-picture, and to them in the same way she took the news:--

-

-"My baby died."

-

-And I was amazed to find how in this little time, the tentacles of her

-heart having fastened and clung, she had made for herself, without ever

-having seen the child, little things to tell about him: His eyes were so

-bright; the sun was shining and the picture was made out-of-doors, yet

-the eyes were opened wide. They were blue eyes--had she told us? Had we

-noticed the hands in the picture? And the head was a beautiful shape....

-All this seemed to me marvellous. For I saw that no woman ever mourns

-for any child dumbly, as a bird mourns a fledgling, but even if she

-never sees it, she will yet contrive some little tender ways to give it

-personality and to cherish it.

-

-They did their best to comfort her, the women of the village. But many

-of them had lost little children of their own, and these women could not

-regard her loss as at all akin to theirs. I think that this my neighbour

-felt; and perhaps she dimly felt that to me her grief, hardly less than

-theirs, brimmed with the tragic disaster of the unfulfilled and bore,

-besides, its own peculiar bitterness. In any case I was of those who,

-that afternoon, went out to the cemetery to await the coming of my

-neighbour and "him" and their little burden. Calliope was there, and

-Mis' Amanda Toplady and Miggy; and when it was time to go Little Child

-was with me, so she went too. For I am not of those who keep from

-children familiarity with death. Familiarity with the ways of death I

-would spare them, but not the basic things, primal as day.

-

-"I don't want to give a real funeral," my neighbour had said. "I just

-want the few that I tell to happen out there to the cemetery, along

-about five. And then we'll come with him. It seems as if it'll hurt

-less that way. I couldn't bear to see a whole line driving along, and

-me look back and know who it was for."

-

-The cemetery had the dignity and serenity of a meadow, a meadow still

-somewhat amazed that it had been for a while distracted from its ancient

-uses, but, after all, perceiving no permanent difference in its

-function. I am never weary of walking down these grassy streets and of

-recounting their strangenesses. As that of the headstone of David

-Bibber's wives, one stone extending across the heads of the two graves

-and at either end of the stone two Gothic peaks from whose inner slopes

-reach two marble hands, clasped midway, and,

-

-

-     SACRED TO THE WIVES OF DAVID BIBBER

-

-

-inscribed below, the wifely names not appearing in the epitaph. And that

-of Mark Sturgis who, the village said, had had the good luck to marry

-two women named Dora; so he had erected a low monument to "Dora, Beloved

-Wife of Mark Sturgis, Jr." ("But how mixin' it must be to the ghosts!"

-Calliope said.) And of the young girl of a former Friendship family of

-wealth, a girl who sleeps beneath a monument on which stands a great

-figure of a young woman in a white marble dress made with three

-flounces. ("Honest," Calliope had put it, "you can't hardly tell

-whether it's a tomb or a valentine.")

-

-But these have for me an interest less of the bizarre than of the human,

-and nothing that is human was alien to that hour.

-

-We waited for them by the new little grave, the disturbance--so

-slight!--in the earth where we would lay the stranger baby. Our hands

-were filled with garden flowers--Calliope had drawn a little hand cart

-laden with ferns and sweet-brier, and my dear Mis' Amanda Toplady had

-cut all the half-blown buds from her loved tea rose.

-

-"It seems like a little baby wasn't real dead that I hadn't helped lay

-out," said that great Mis' Amanda, trying to find her handkerchief. "Oh,

-I wish't it was alive. It seems like such a little bit of comin' alive

-to ask the Lord!"

-

-And as the afternoon shadows drew about us with fostering arms,

-

-"Out-Here knows we feel bad more than Down Town, don't it?" said Little

-Child.

-

-I have always thought very beautiful that village custom of which I have

-before spoken, which provides that the father and mother of a little

-baby who dies may take it with them in a closed carriage to the grave.

-It was so that my neighbour and her husband brought their baby to the

-cemetery from the station, with the little coffin on their knees.

-

-On the box beside the driver Peter was riding. We learned afterward

-that he had appeared at the station and had himself taken that little

-coffin from the car. "So then it didn't have to be on the truck at all,"

-my neighbour noted thankfully when she told me. I think that it must be

-this living with only a street or two between folk and the open country

-which gives these unconscious sharpenings of sensibility often,

-otherwhere, bred only by old niceties of habit.

-

-So little Kenneth was buried, who never had the name save in unreality;

-whom my neighbour had never tended; who lived for her only in dream and

-on that broken post-card and here in the hidden dust. It made her grief

-so sad a thing that her arms did not miss him; nor had he slipped from

-any usage of the day; nor was any link broken with the past; only the

-plans that had hung in air had gone out, like flames which had kindled

-nothing. Because of this she sorrowed from within some closed place at

-which her husband could only guess, who stood patiently without in his

-embarrassed concern, his clumsy anxiety to do what there was to be done,

-his wondering distress at his wife's drooping grief. But her sorrow was

-rooted in the love of women for the "little young thing, runnin' round,"

-for which she had long passioned.

-

-"Oh, God, who lived in the spirit of the little Lord Jesus, live Thou

-in this child's spirit, and it in Thee, world without end," Doctor June

-prayed. And Little Child whispered to me and then went to let fall a

-pink in the grave. "So if the flower gets to be an angel flower, then

-they can go round together," she explained.

-

-When I looked up there were in the west the first faint heraldings of

-rose. And against it stood Miggy and Peter, side by side, looking down

-this new way of each other's lives which took account of sorrow. He said

-something to her, and she nodded, and gave him her white hollyhocks to

-lay with the rest. And as they turned away together Little Child

-whispered to me, pulling herself, by my arm, to high tiptoe:--

-

-"That little child we put in the sunset," she said, nodding to the west,

-"it's there now. It's there now!"

-

-Perhaps it was that my heart was filled with the tragedy of the

-unfulfilled intention, perhaps it was that I thought that Little Child's

-whispering was true. In any case I hastened my steps, and as we passed

-out on the road I overtook Miggy and Peter.

-

-"Peter," said I, "may Miggy and I come to pay you that visit now, on the

-way back?"

-

-Miggy looked startled.

-

-"It's supper time," she objected.

-

-Who are we that we should interrupt a sunset, or a situation, or the

-stars in their courses, merely to sup? Neither Miggy nor I belong to

-those who do so. Besides, we had to pass Peter's very door. I said so,

-and all the time Peter's face was glowing.

-

-"Hurry on ahead," I bade him, "and Miggy and Little Child and I will

-come in your house to call."

-

-He looked at me gratefully, and waited for good night to my neighbour,

-and went swiftly away down the road toward the sunset.

-

-"Oh, goody grand, goody grand," Little Child went on softly, in an

-invocation of her own to some secret divinity of her pleasure. "Oh, that

-little child we put there, it's talkin' to the sky, an' I guess that

-makes sunset be!"

-

-My neighbour was looking back across the tranquil meadow which might

-have been deep with summer hay instead of mounded to its sad harvest.

-

-"I wish," she said, "I could have had his little grave in my garden,

-same as you would a bird. Still I s'pose a cemet'ry is a cemet'ry and

-had ought to be buried in. But oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to

-have him here in Friendship Village. It's better to think about, ain't

-it?"

-

-But the thing that gripped my heart was to see her, beside her husband,

-go down the road and not hurry. All that bustling impermanence was

-fallen from her. I think that now I am becoming thankful for every one

-who goes busily quickening the day with a multitude, yes, even with a

-confusion, of homely, cheerful tasks.

-

-Miggy slipped her hand within my arm.

-

-"Did you think of it?" she said. "I've been, all the time. It's most the

-same with her as it would be to me if I'd lost _her_. You know ... that

-little Margaret. I mean, if she should never be."

-

-As when one hears the note of an oriole ringing from the innermost air,

-so now it seems to me that after these things the deeps of air can never

-again be wholly alien to me.

-

-

-

-

-XVIII

-

-AT PETER'S HOUSE

-

-

-I wondered somewhat that Peter did not come out of his house to fetch

-us. He was not even about the little yard when we went up the walk,

-though he knew that we must arrive but a few moments after he did.

-Little Child ran away to pick Bouncing Bet and Sweet Clover in the long,

-rank grass of the unkept garden. And Miggy and I went and stood on the

-porch before Peter's door, and I knew what I intended.

-

-"Rap!" I said to Miggy.

-

-She looked at me in surprise--I have not often commanded her like that.

-But I wanted to see her stand at Peter's door asking for admission. And

-I think that Peter had wanted it too and that this was why he had not

-come to the gate to fetch us. I guessed it by the light on his face

-when, in the middle of Miggy's knock, he caught open the door. I like to

-remember his face as it looked at that moment, with the little twist of

-mouth and lifting of brow which gave him a peculiar sweetness and

-naïveté, curiously contradicted by the way his eyes were when they met

-Miggy's.

-

-"How long it took you," he said. "Come in. _Come in._"

-

-We went in, and I looked at Miggy. For I did not want her to step in

-that house as she would have stepped in a house that was just a house.

-Is it not wonderful how some front doors are Front Doors Plus? I do not

-know plus what--that is one of those good little in-between things which

-we know without always naming. But there are some front doors which are

-to me boards and glass and a tinkling cymbal bell; while other doors of

-no better architecture let me within dear depths of homes which are to

-houses what friends are to inhabitants. It was so that I would have had

-Miggy go within Peter's house,--not as within doors, but as within arms.

-

-We entered directly from the porch into the small parlour--the kind of

-man's parlour that makes a woman long to take it on her lap and tend it.

-There were no curtains. Between the windows was a big table filled with

-neat piles of newspapers and weeklies till there should be time to look

-them over. The shelf had a lamp, not filled, a clock, not going, and a

-pile of seed catalogues. On two walls were three calendars with big

-hollyhocks and puppies and ladies in sunbonnets. The entire inner wall

-was occupied by a map of the state--why does a man so cherish a map of

-something, hung up somewhere? On the organ was a row of blue books--what

-is it that men are always looking for in blue books? In a corner, on the

-floor, stood a shotgun. The wood stove had been "left up" all summer to

-save putting it up in the fall--this business of getting a stove on

-rollers and jacking it up and remembering where it stood so that the

-pipe will fit means, in the village, a day of annual masculine sacrifice

-to the feminine foolishness of wanting stoves down in summer. There was

-nothing disorderly about the room; but it was dressed with no sash or

-hair ribbon or coral beads, as a man dresses his little girl.

-

-"We don't use this room much," Peter said. "We sit in here sometimes in

-summer, but I think when a man sits in his parlour he always feels like

-he was being buried from it, same as they're used for."

-

-"Why--" said Miggy, and stopped. What she was going to say it was not

-important to know, but I was glad that she had been going to say it.

-Something, perhaps, about this being a very pretty room if there were

-somebody to give it a touch or two.

-

-Peter was obviously eager to be in the next room, and that, he

-explained, would have been the dining room, only he had taken it for

-his own, and they ate in the kitchen. I think that I had never heard him

-mention his father at all, and this "we" of his now was a lonelier thing

-than any lonely "I."

-

-"This is my room," he said as we entered it. "It's where I live when I'm

-not at the works. Come and let me show you."

-

-So Peter showed Miggy his room, and he showed it to me, too, though I do

-not think that he was conscious of that. It was a big room, bare of

-floor and, save for the inescapable flowery calendar, bare of walls.

-There was a shelf of books--not many, but according to Peter's nature

-sufficiently well-selected to plead for him: "Look at us. Who could love

-us and not be worth while?"--bad enough logic, in all conscience, to

-please any lover. Miggy hardly looked at the books. She so

-exasperatingly took it for granted that a man must be everything in

-general that it left hardly anything for him to be in particular. But

-Peter made her look, and he let me look too, and I supplied the comments

-and Miggy occasionally did her three little nods. The writing table

-Peter had made from a box, and by this Miggy was equally untouched. All

-men, it appeared, should be able to make writing tables from boxes. With

-the linen table cover it was a little different--this Peter's mother had

-once worked in cross-stitch for his room, and Miggy lifted an end and

-looked at it.

-

-"She took all those stitches for you!" she said. "There's one broken,"

-she showed him.

-

-"I can mend that," Peter said proudly, "I'll show you my needle kit."

-

-At this she laughed out suddenly with, "_Needle kit!_ What a real

-regular old bachelor you are, aren't you?"

-

-"I can't help that," said Peter, with "and the same cannot be said for

-you" sticking from the sentence.

-

-On the table lay the cannery account books, and one was open at a full

-page of weary little figures.

-

-"Is this where you sit nights and do your work and read?" Miggy

-demanded.

-

-"Right here," Peter told her, "every night of the year, 'most. Except

-when I come to see you."

-

-Miggy stood looking at the table and the wooden chair.

-

-"That's funny," she remarked finally, with an air of meditative

-surprise; "they know you so much better than I do, don't they?"

-

-"Well," Peter said gravely, "they haven't been thought about as much as

-you have, Miggy--that's one thing."

-

-"Thinking's nothing," said Miggy, merrily; "sometimes you get a tune in

-your head and you can't get it out."

-

-"Sit down at the table," said Peter, abruptly. "Sit down!" he repeated,

-when her look questioned him. "I want to see you there."

-

-She obeyed him, laughing a little, and quite in the woman's way of

-pretending that obedience is a choice. Peter looked at her. It is true

-that he had been doing nothing else all the while, but now that she sat

-at the table--his table--he looked more than before.

-

-"Well," he said, "well, well." As a man says when he has a present and

-has no idea what to say about it.

-

-Peter's photographs were on the wall above the table, and Peter suddenly

-leaned past Miggy and took down the picture of his mother and put it in

-her hand, without saying anything. For the first time Miggy met his

-eyes.

-

-"Your mother," she said, "why, Peter. She looked--oh, Peter, she looked

-like you!"

-

-Peter nodded. "Yes, I do look like she did," he said; "I'm always so

-glad."

-

-"She knew you when you were a little bit of a baby, Peter," Miggy

-advanced suddenly.

-

-Peter admitted it gravely. She had.

-

-"Well," said Miggy, as Peter had said it. "Well."

-

-There was a picture of Peter's father as a young man,--black,

-curly-haired, black-moustached, the cheeks slightly tinted in the

-picture, his hands laid trimly along his knees. The face was weak,

-empty, but it held that mere confidence of youth which always gives a

-special sting to the grief of unfulfilment. Over this they passed,

-saying nothing. It struck me that in the delicacy of that silence it was

-almost as if Miggy shared something with Peter. Also, it struck me

-pleasantly that Miggy's indifference to the personalities of divers

-aunts in straight bangs and long basques was slightly exaggerated,

-especially when, "I never thought about your having any aunts," she

-observed.

-

-And then Peter took down a tiny picture of the sort we call in the

-village "card size," and gave it to her.

-

-"Guess who," he said.

-

-It was a little boy of not more than five, in a straight black coat

-dress, buttoned in the front and trimmed with broad black velvet strips,

-and having a white scalloped collar and white cuffs. One hand was

-resting on the back of a camp-chair and the other held a black helmet

-cap. The shoes had double rows of buttons, and for some secret reason

-the photographer had had the child laboriously cross one foot

-negligently over the other. The fine head, light-curled, was resting in

-the horns of that ex-device that steadied one out of all semblance to

-self. But in spite of the man who had made the picture, the little boy

-was so wholly adorable that you wanted to say so.

-

-"Peter!" Miggy said, "It's _you_."

-

-I do not know how she knew. I think that I would not have known. But

-Miggy knew, and her knowing made me understand something which evidently

-she herself did not understand. For she looked at the picture and looked

-at it, a strange, surprised smile on her face. And,

-

-"Well, well, _well_," she said again. "I never thought about that

-before. I mean about you. _Then._"

-

-"Would--would you want that picture, Miggy?" Peter asked; "you can have

-it if you do."

-

-"Can I really?" said Miggy. "Well, I do want it. Goodness...."

-

-"I always kind of thought," Peter said slowly, "that when I have a son

-he'll look something like that. He might, you know."

-

-Peter was leaning beside her, elbows on the table, and Miggy looked up

-at him over the picture of the child, and made her three little nods.

-

-"Yes," she said, "you would want your little boy to look like you."

-

-"And I'd want him named Peter. It's a homely old name, but I'd want him

-to have it."

-

-"Peter isn't a homely name," said Miggy, in a manner of surprise. "Yes,

-of course you'd want him--"

-

-The sentence fell between them unfinished. And I thought that Miggy's

-face, still somewhat saddened by the little Kenneth and now tender with

-its look for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing of colour.

-But then I saw that this would be the light of the sunset on her cheeks,

-for now the West was become a glory of rose and yellow, so that it held

-captive her eyes. It is too frail a thing for me to have grasped by

-sense, but the Moment seemed to say--and could give no reason--that our

-sunset compact Miggy kept then without remembering the compact.

-

-It almost startled me when out in the unkept garden Little Child began

-to sing. We had nearly forgotten her and we could not see her, so that

-she might have been any other little child wandering in the sweet

-clover, or merely a little voice coming in with the western light:--

-

-

-     "I like to stand in this great air

-     And see the sun go down.

-     It shows me a bright veil to wear

-     And such a pretty gown.

-     Oh, I can see a playmate there

-     Far up in Splendour Town!"

-

-

-"Look here," said Peter to Miggy; and I went over to the sunset window

-and let them go on alone.

-

-He led her about the room, and she still had the little picture in her

-hand. From the bureau, with its small array of cheap brushes and boxes,

-she turned abruptly away. I think that she may have felt as I felt

-about the splash of rose on the rose-breasted grosbeak's throat--that I

-ought not to have been looking. Beyond was a little old dry-goods box

-for odds and ends, a box which must have known, with a kind of feminine

-intelligence, that it ought to be covered with cretonne. On this box

-Miggy knelt to read Peter's high school diploma, and she stopped before

-a picture of the house where he was born. "Was it there?" she asked.

-"Doesn't that seem funny?" Which manifestly it did not seem. "Is _that_

-where your violin lives?" she asked, when they came to its

-corner--surely a way of betrayal that she had thought of it as living

-somewhere else. And all the while she carried the picture in her hand,

-and the sunset glorified the room, and Little Child was singing in the

-garden.

-

-"Peter," said Miggy, "I don't believe a man who can play the violin can

-sew. Give me the needle kit. I'm going to mend the table cover--may I?"

-

-Might she! Peter, his face shining, brought out his red flannel

-needle-book--he kept it on the shelf with his shaving things!--and, his

-face shining more, sat on a creaking camp-chair and watched her.

-

-"Miggy," he said, as she caught the threads skilfully together, "I don't

-believe I've ever seen you sew. I know I never have."

-

-"This isn't sewing," Miggy said.

-

-"It's near enough like it to suit me," said Peter.

-

-He drew a breath long, and looked about him. I knew how he was seeing

-the bare room, lamp-lighted, and himself trying to work in spite of the

-longing that teased and possessed him and bade him give it up and lean

-back and think of her; or of tossing on the hard couch in the tyranny of

-living his last hour with her and of living, too, the hours that might

-never be. And here she was in this room--his room. Peter dropped his

-head on his hand and his eyes did not leave her face save to venture an

-occasional swift, ecstatic excursion to her fingers.

-

-Simply and all quietly, as Nature sends her gifts, miracles moved toward

-completion while Miggy sewed. The impulse to do for him this trifling

-service was like a signal, and when she took up the needle for him I

-think that women whose hands had long lain quiet stirred within her

-blood. As for Peter--but these little housewifely things which enlighten

-a woman merely tease a man, who already knows their import and longs for

-all sweet fragments of time to be merged in the long possession.

-

-Miggy gave the needle back to Peter and he took it--needle, red book,

-and hand.

-

-"Miggy!" he said, and the name on his lips was like another name. And it

-was as if she were in some place remote and he were calling her.

-

-She looked at him as if she knew the call. Since the world began, only

-for one reason does a man call a woman like that.

-

-"What is it you want?" she said--and her voice was very sweet and very

-tired.

-

-"I want more of _you_!" said Peter Cary.

-

-She may have tried to say something, but her voice trembled away.

-

-"I thought it would be everything--your coming here to-day," Peter said.

-"I've wanted it and wanted it. And what does it amount to? Nothing,

-except to make me wild with wanting you never to go away. I dread to

-think of your leaving me here--shutting the door and being gone. If it

-was just plain wanting you I could meet that, and beat it, like I do the

-things down to the works. But it isn't that. It's like it was something

-big--bigger than me, and outside of me, and it gets hold of me, and it's

-like it asked for you without my knowing. I can't do anything that you

-aren't some of it. It isn't fair, Miggy. I want more of you--all of

-you--all the time, Miggy, all the time...."

-

-I should have liked to see Miggy's face when she looked at Peter, whose

-eyes were giving her everything and were asking everything of her; but I

-was studying the sunset, glory upon glory, to match the glory here. And

-the singing of Little Child began again, like that of a little voice

-vagrant in the red west....

-

-

-     "Oh, I can see a playmate there,

-     Far up in Splendour Town!"

-

-

-Miggy heard her, and remembered.

-

-"Peter, Peter!" she cried, "I couldn't--I never could bring us two on

-you to support."

-

-Peter gave her hands a little shake, as if he would have shaken her. I

-think that he would have shaken her if it had been two or three thousand

-years earlier in the world's history.

-

-"You two!" he cried; "why, Miggy, when we marry do I want--or do you

-want--that it should stay just you and me? We want children. I want you

-for their mother as much as I want you for my wife."

-

-It was the voice of the paramount, compelling spirit, the sovereign

-voice of the Family, calling through the wilderness. Peter knew,--this

-fine, vital boy seeking his own happiness; he gropingly understood this

-mighty thing, and he was trying his best to serve it. And, without

-knowing that she knew, Miggy knew too ... and the seal that she knew was

-in what was in the sunset. And as far removed from these things as the

-sunset itself was all Miggy's cheap cynicism about love and all the

-triviality of her criticism of Peter.

-

-Miggy stood motionless, looking at Peter. And then, like an evil spell

-which began to work, another presence was in the room....

-

-Somewhile before I had begun to hear the sound, as a faint undercurrent

-to consciousness; an unimportant, unpleasant, insisting sound that

-somehow interfered. Gradually it had come nearer and had interfered more

-and had mingled harshly with the tender treble of Little Child. Now,

-from Peter's gate the sound besieged my ears and entered the room and

-explained itself to us all--

-

-

-     "My Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I _never_ know,

-     You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh--"

-

-

-the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air....

-

-I knew what it was, and they knew. At the sound of his father's voice,

-drunken, piteous, Peter dropped Miggy's hands and his head went down and

-he stood silent, like a smitten thing. My own heart sank, for I knew

-what Miggy had felt, and I thought I knew what she would feel now. So

-here was another unfulfilled intention, another plan gone astray in an

-unperfected order.

-

-Peter had turned somewhat away before he spoke.

-

-"I'll have to go now," he said quietly, "I guess you'll excuse me."

-

-He went toward the kitchen door ashamed, miserable, all the brightness

-and vitality gone from him. I am sorry that he did not see Miggy's face

-when she lifted it. I saw it, and I could have sung as I looked. Not for

-Peter or for Miggy, but for the sake of something greater than they,

-something that touched her hand, commanded "Look at me," bade her follow

-with us all.

-

-Before Peter reached the door she overtook him, stood before him, put

-her hands together for a moment, and then laid one swiftly on his cheek.

-

-"Peter," she said, "that don't make any difference. That don't make any

-difference."

-

-No doubt he understood her words, but I think what he understood best

-was her hand on his cheek. He caught her shoulders and looked and

-looked....

-

-"Honest--honest, don't it?" he searched her.

-

-You would not have said that her answer to that was wholly direct. She

-only let fall her hand from his cheek to his shoulder, and,

-

-"Peter," she said, "_is it like this_?"

-

-"Yes," he said simply, "it's like this."

-

-And then what she said was ever so slightly muffled, as if at last she

-had dropped her head in that sweet confusion which she had never seemed

-to know; as if at last she was looking at Peter as if he _was_ Peter.

-

-"Then I don't ever want to be any place where you aren't," she told him.

-

-"Miggy!" Peter cried, "take care what you say. Remember--he'd live with

-us."

-

-She made her three little nods.

-

-"So he will," she answered, "so he will. He--and my little sister--and

-all of us."

-

-Peter's answer was a shout.

-

-"Say it out!" he cried, "say you will. Miggy! I've _got_ to hear you say

-it out!"

-

-"Peter, Peter," she said, "I want to marry you."

-

-He took her in his arms and in the room was the glory upon glory of the

-west, a thing of wings and doors ajar. And strong as the light, there

-prevailed about them the soul of the Family, that distributes burdens,

-shares responsibilities, accepts what is and what is to come. Its voice

-was in the voice of Little Child singing in the garden, and of old Cary

-babbling at the gate. Its heart was the need of Peter and Miggy, each

-for the other. I saw in their faces the fine freedoms of the sunset,

-that sunset where Miggy and Little Child and I had agreed that a certain

-spirit lives. And it did but tally with the momentous utterance of these

-things and of the evening when Miggy spoke again.

-

-"Go now--you go to him," she said, "we'll wait. And--Peter--when you

-come back, I want to see everything in the room again."

-

-

-

-

-XIX

-

-THE CUSTODIAN

-

-

-When the river is low, a broad, flat stone lying a little way from shore

-at the foot of our lawn becomes an instrument of music. In the day it

-plays now a rhapsody of sun, now a nocturne of cloud, now the last

-concerto, Opus Eternal. In the night it becomes a little friendly

-murmur, a cradle song, slumber spell, neighbour to the Dark, the alien

-Dark who very likely grows lonely, being the silent sister, whereas the

-Light goes on blithely companioned of us all. But if I were the Dark and

-owned the stars, and the potion which quickens conscience, and the sense

-of the great Spirit brooding, brooding, I do not know that I would

-exchange and be the Light. Still, the Light has rainbows and toil and

-the sun and laughter.... After all, it is best to be a human being and

-to have both Light and Darkness for one's own. And it is concerning this

-conclusion that the river plays on its instrument of music, this shallow

-river

-

-

-              "--to whose falls

-     Melodious birds sing madrigals."

-

-

-I have heard our bank cat-birds in the willows sing madrigals to the

-stone-music until I wanted to be one of them--cat-bird, madrigal,

-shallows, or anything similar. But the human is perhaps what all these

-are striving to express, and so I have been granted wish within wish,

-and life is very good.

-

-Life was very good this summer afternoon when half the village gathered

-on our lawn above the singing stone, at Miggy's and Peter's

-"Announcement Supper." To be sure, all Friendship Village had for

-several days had the news and could even tell you when the betrothal

-took place and where; but the two were not yet engaged, as Miggy would

-have said, "out loud."

-

-"What _is_ engaged?" asked Little Child, who was the first of my guests

-to arrive, and came bringing an offering of infinitesimal flowers which

-she finds in the grass where I think that they bloom for no one else.

-

-"It means that people love each other very much--" I began, and got no

-further.

-

-"Oh, goody grand," cried Little Child. "Then I'm engaged, aren't I? To

-everybody."

-

-Whenever she leads me in deep water, I am accustomed to invite her to a

-dolphin's back by bidding her say over some song or spell which I have

-taught her. This afternoon while we waited on the lawn and her little

-voice went among the charmed words, something happened which surely

-must have been due to a prank of the dolphin. For when she had taken an

-accurate way to the last stanza of "Lucy," Little Child soberly

-concluded:--

-

-

-     "'She lived unknown, and few could know

-       When Lucy ceased to be;

-     But she is in her grave, and what's

-       The difference to me!'"

-

-

-But, even so, it was charming to have had the quiet metre present.

-

-I hope that there is no one who has not sometime been in a company on

-which he has looked and looked with something living in his eyes; on a

-company all of whom he holds in some degree of tenderness. It was so

-that I looked this afternoon on those who came across the lawn in the

-pleasant five o'clock sun, and I looked with a difference from my manner

-of looking on that evening of my visit to the village, when I first saw

-these, my neighbours. Then I saw them with delight; now I see them with

-delight-and-that-difference; and though that difference is, so to say,

-partly in my throat, yet it is chiefly deep in my understanding. There

-came my Mis' Amanda Toplady, with her great green umbrella, which she

-carries summer and winter; Mis' Postmaster Sykes, with the full-blooming

-stalk of her tuberose pinned on her left shoulder; Mis'

-Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss in the pink nun's veiling of the Post-office

-hall supper; and my neighbour, who had consented to come, with: "I

-donno as that little thing would want I should stay home. Oh, but do you

-know, that's the worst--knowin' that the little thing never saw me and

-can't think about me at all!" And there came also those of whom it

-chances that this summer I have seen less than I should have wished: the

-Liberty sisters, in checked print. "It don't seem so much of a jump out

-of mournin' into wash goods as it does into real dress-up cloth," gentle

-Miss Lucy says. And Abigail Arnold, of the Home Bakery, who sent a great

-sugared cake for to-day's occasion. "Birthday cakes is correct," she

-observed, "an' weddin' cake is correct. Why ain't engagement cakes

-correct--especially when folks get along without the ring? I donno. I

-always think doin' for folks is correct, whether it's the style or

-whether it ain't." And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, with a new and

-upbraiding baby; Mis' Fire Chief Merriman in "new black, but not true

-mournin' now, an' anyway lit up by pearl buttons an' a lace handkerchief

-an' plenty o' scent." And Mis' "Mayor" Uppers who, the "mayor" not

-returning to his home and the tickets for the parlour clock having all

-been sold, to-day began offering for sale tickets on the "parlour

-'suit,' brocade' silk, each o' the four pieces a differ'nt colour and

-all as bright as new-in-the-store." And though we all understood what

-she was doing and she knew that we all knew, she yet drew us aside, one

-after another, to offer the tickets for sale privately, and we slipped

-the money to her beneath our handkerchiefs or our fans or our sewing.

-

-We all had our sewing--even I have become pleasantly contaminated and

-have once or twice essayed eyelets. Though there was but an hour to

-elapse before supper-time and the arrival of the "men-folks," we settled

-ourselves about the green, making scallops on towels, or tatting for

-sheet hems, or crocheted strips for the hems of pillow-slips. Mis' Sykes

-had, as she almost always does have, new work which no one had ever seen

-before, and new work is accounted of almost as much interest as a new

-waist and is kept for a surprise, as a new waist should be kept. Little

-Child, too, had her sewing; she was buttonhole-stitching a wash-cloth

-and talking like a little old woman. I think that the little elf

-children like best to pretend in this way, as regular, arrant witches

-feign old womanhood.

-

-"Aunt Effie is sick," Little Child was telling Mis' Toplady; "she is

-sick from her hair to her slippers."

-

-I had a plan for Little Child and for us all; that after supper she

-should have leaves in her hair and on her shoulders and should dance on

-the singing stone in the river. And Miggy, whose shy independence is now

-become all shyness, was in the house, weaving the leaves, and had not

-yet appeared at her party at all.

-

-Then one of those charming things happened which surely have a kind of

-life of their own and wake the hour to singing, as if an event were a

-river stone, and more, round which all manner of faint music may be set

-stirring.

-

-"Havin' a party when I ain't lookin'!" cried somebody. "My, my. I don't

-b'lieve a word of what's name--this evolution business. I bet you

-anything heaven is just _gettin' back_."

-

-And there was Calliope, in her round straw hat and tan ulster, who in

-response to my card had hastened her imminent return.

-

-"Yes," she said, when we had greeted her and put her in a chair under

-the mulberry tree, "my relation got well. At least, she ain't sick

-enough to be cross, so 'most anybody could take care of her now."

-

-Calliope laughed and leaned back and shut her eyes.

-

-"Land, land," she said, "I got so much to tell you about I don't know

-where to begin. It's all about one thing, too--somethin' I've found

-out."

-

-Mis' Amanda Toplady drew a great breath and let fall her work and looked

-round at us all.

-

-"Goodness," she said, "ain't it comfortable--us all settin' here

-together, nobody's leg broke, nobody's house on fire, nor none of us

-dead?"

-

-"'Us all settin' here together,'" Calliope repeated, suddenly grave

-amid our laughter, "that's part of what I'm comin' to. I wonder," she

-said to us, "how you folks have always thought of the City? Up till I

-went there to stay this while I always thought of it as--well, as the

-City an' not so much as folks at all. The City always meant to me big

-crowds on the streets--hurryin', hurryin', eatin', eatin', and not

-payin' much attention to anything. One whole batch of 'em I knew was

-poor an' lookin' in bakery windows. One whole batch of 'em I knew was

-rich an' sayin' there has to be these distinctions. And some more I knew

-was good--I always see 'em, like a pretty lady, stoopin' over, givin'.

-And some more I knew was wicked an' I always thought of them climbin' in

-windows. And then there was the little bit o' batch that knows the

-things I want to know an' talks like I'd like to talk an' that I'd

-wanted an' wanted to go up to the City an' get with.

-

-"Well, then I went. An' the first thing, I see my relative wa'n't rich

-nor poor nor bad nor good nor--the way I mean. Nor her friends that come

-to see her, they wan't either. The ones I took for rich talked economy,

-an' the ones I thought was poor spent money, an' the good ones gossiped,

-an' they all jabbered about music and pictures that I thought you

-couldn't talk about unless you knew the 'way-inside-o'-things, like

-they didn't know. The kinds seemed all mixed up, and all of 'em far away

-an' formal, like--oh, like the books in a library when you can't think

-up one to draw out. I couldn't seem to get near to anything.

-

-"Then one night I done what I'd always wanted to do. I took two dollars

-an' went to the theatre alone an' got me a seat. I put on the best I

-had, an' still I didn't feel like I was one of 'em, nor one of much of

-anybody. The folks on the car wasn't the way I meant, an' I felt mad at

-'em for bein' differ'nt. There was a smilin' young fellow, all dressed

-black an' expensive, an' I thought: 'Put you side of Peter Cary an'

-there wouldn't be anybody there but Peter.' And when I got inside the

-theatre, it was just the same: one awful collection of dressed-up hair

-an' dressed-down backs an' everybody smilin' at somebody that wasn't me

-and all seemin' so sure of themselves. Specially the woman in front of

-me, but I guess it always is specially the woman in front of you. She

-was flammed out abundant. She had trimmin's in unexpected places, an' a

-good many colours took to do it, an' a cute little chatter to match. It

-come to me that she was more than different from me: she was the

-_otherest_ a person can be. An' I felt glad when the curtain went up.

-

-"Well, sir," Calliope said, "it was a silly little play--all about

-nothin' that you could lay much speech to. But oh, they was somethin'

-in it that made you get down on your hands and knees in your own heart

-and look around in it, and _look_. They was an old lady and a young

-mother and a child and a man and a girl--well, that don't sound like

-much special, does it? And that's just it: it wasn't much special, but

-yet it was all of everything. It made 'em laugh, it made 'em cry, it

-made _me_ laugh and cry till I was ashamed and glad and grateful. And

-when the lights come up at the end, I felt like I was kind of the mother

-to everything, an' I wanted to pick it up an' carry it off an' keep care

-of it. And it come over me all of a sudden how the old lady and the

-young mother an' man an' girl, man an' girl, _man an' girl_ was right

-there in the theatre, near me, over an' over again; an' there I'd been

-feelin' mad at 'em for seemin' far off. But they wasn't far off. They'd

-been laughin' and cryin', too, an' they knew, just like I knew, what was

-what in the world. My, my. If it'd been Friendship I'd have gone from

-house to house all the way home, shakin' hands. An' as it was, I just

-_had_ to speak to somebody. An' just then I see the flammed-out woman in

-front of me, that her collar had come open a little wee bit up top--not

-to notice even, but it give me an excuse. And I leaned right over to her

-and I says with all the sympathy in me:--

-

-"'Ma'am, your neck is peepin'."

-

-"She looked around su'prised and then she smiled--smiled 'most into

-laughin'. And she thanked me sweet as a friend an' nodded with it, an' I

-thought: 'Why, my land, you may have a baby home.' I never had thought

-of that. An' then I begun lookin' at folks an' lookin'. An' movin' up

-the aisles, there wasn't just a theatre-lettin'-out. They was _folks_.

-And all over each one was the good little things they'd begun

-rememberin' now that the play was over, or the hurt things that had come

-back onto 'em again.... An' out on the street it was the same. The folks

-had all got alive and was waitin' for me to feel friendly to 'em.

-_Friendly._ The young fellows in the cars was lovers, just like Peter.

-An' everybody was just like me, or anyhow more alike than differ'nt; and

-just like Friendship, only mebbe pronouncin' their words some differ'nt

-an' knowin' more kinds of things to eat. It seems to me now I could go

-anywhere an' find folks to be nice to. I don't love Friendship Village

-any the less, but I love more things the same way. Everything, 'most.

-An' I tell you I'm glad I didn't die before I found it out--that we're

-all one batch. _Do_ you see what I mean--deep down inside what I say?"

-Calliope cried. "Does it sound like anything to you?"

-

-To whom should it sound like "anything" if not to us of Friendship

-Village? We know.

-

-"Honestly," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady, trying to wipe her

-eyes on her crochet work, "Whoever God is, I don't believe He wants to

-keep it a secret. He's always 'most lettin' us know. I 'most knew Who He

-is right then, while Calliope was talkin'."

-

-"I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope was talkin'." ... I

-said the words over while the men crossed the lawn, all arriving

-together in order to lighten the trial of guesthood: Dear Doctor June,

-little Timothy Toplady, Eppleby Holcomb, Postmaster Sykes, Photographer

-Jimmie Sturgis, Peter, and Timothy, Jr., and the others. Liva Vesey was

-already in the kitchen with Miggy and Elfa, and I knew that, somewhere

-invisible, Nicholas Moor was hovering, waiting to help dish the

-ice-cream. When the little tables, each with its bright, strewn

-nasturtiums, were set about the lawn, Miggy reluctantly appeared from

-the kitchen. She was in the white frock which she herself had made, and

-she was, as I have said, a new Miggy, not less merry or less elfin, but

-infinitely more human. It was charming, I thought, to see how she and

-Peter, far from tensely avoiding each other, went straight to each

-other's side. With them at table were Liva and Timothy, Jr., now meeting

-each other's eyes as simply as if eyes were for this purpose.

-

-"I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope was talkin'" ... I

-thought again as we stood in our places and Doctor June lifted his hands

-to the summer sky as if He were there, too.

-

-"Father," he said, "bless these young people who are going to belong to

-each other--Thou knowest their names and so do we. Bless our being

-together now in their honour, and be Thou in our midst. And bless our

-being together always. Amen."

-

-And that was the announcement of Miggy's and Peter's betrothal, at their

-Engagement Party.

-

-Little Child, who was sitting beside Calliope, leaned toward her.

-

-"How long will it take for God to know," she asked, "after Doctor June

-sent it up?"

-

-Calliope put her arm about her and told her.

-

-"Then did He get here since Doctor June invited Him?" Little Child

-asked.

-

-"You think, 'way deep inside your head, an' see if He isn't here," I

-heard Calliope say.

-

-Little Child shut her eyes tightly, and though she did open them briefly

-to see what was on the plate which they set before her, I think that she

-found the truth.

-

-"I 'most know," she said presently. "Pretty near I know He is. I guess

-I'm too little to be sure nor certain. When I'm big will I know sure?"

-

-"Yes," Calliope answered, "then you'll know sure."

-

-"I 'most knew Who He is while Calliope was talkin'" ... I said over once

-more. And suddenly in the words and in the homely talk and in the happy

-comradeship I think that I slipped between the seeing and the knowing,

-and for a moment stood very near to the Custodian--Himself. The

-Custodian Who is in us all, Who speaks, now as you, now as I, most

-clearly in our human fellowship, in our widest kinship, in the universal

-_togetherness_. Truly, it is not as my neighbour once said, for I think

-that God has many and many to "neighbour with," if only we would be

-neighbours.

-

-Presently, as if it knew that it belonged there, the sunset came, a

-thing of wings and doors ajar. Then Miggy fastened the leaves in Little

-Child's hair and led her down to dance on the broad, flat stone which is

-an instrument of music. Above the friendly murmur of the shallows the

-little elf child seemed beckoning to us others of the human voices on

-the shore. And in that fair light it was as if the river were some clear

-highway, leading from Friendship Village to Splendour Town, where

-together we might all find our way.

-

-

-

-

-

-End of Project Gutenberg's Friendship Village Love Stories, by Zona Gale

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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Friendship Village Love Stories, by Zona Gale
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Friendship Village Love Stories
+
+Author: Zona Gale
+
+Release Date: May 7, 2017 [EBook #54676]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
+
+BY
+
+ZONA GALE
+
+AUTHOR OF "FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," "THE LOVES
+OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE," ETC.
+
+NEW YORK
+GROSSET & DUNLAP
+PUBLISHERS
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1909,
+
+BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909. Reprinted
+November, 1909; April, 1912.
+
+
+_Norwood Press
+J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
+Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._
+
+
+To
+
+MY FRIENDS IN PORTAGE
+WISCONSIN
+
+
+Certain of the following chapters have appeared in _Everybody's_, _The
+American Magazine_, _The Outlook_, _The Woman's Home Companion_, and
+_The Delineator_. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous
+permission to reprint these chapters, and to Messrs. Harper Brothers for
+permission to reprint the sonnet in Chapter XI.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER                         PAGE
+    I. OPEN ARMS                   1
+
+   II. INSIDE JUNE                15
+
+  III. MIGGY                      33
+
+   IV. SPLENDOUR TOWN             43
+
+    V. DIFFERENT                  62
+
+   VI. THE FOND FORENOON          81
+
+  VII. AFRAID                     96
+
+ VIII. THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT    116
+
+   IX. THE COLD SHOULDER         136
+
+    X. EVENING DRESS             148
+
+   XI. UNDERN                    176
+
+  XII. THE WAY THE WORLD IS      191
+
+ XIII. HOUSEHOLDRY               206
+
+  XIV. POSTMARKS                 223
+
+   XV. PETER                     248
+
+  XVI. THE NEW VILLAGE           258
+
+ XVII. ADOPTION                  274
+
+XVIII. AT PETER'S HOUSE          293
+
+  XIX. THE CUSTODIAN             309
+
+
+
+
+Friendship Village Love Stories
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+OPEN ARMS
+
+
+Although it is June, the Little Child about whom I shall sometimes write
+in these pages this morning brought me a few violets. June violets. They
+sound unconvincing and even sentimental. However, here they are in their
+vase; and they are all white but one.
+
+"Only one blue one," said Little Child, regretfully; "May must be 'most
+dead by mistake."
+
+"Don't the months die as soon as they go away?" I asked her, and a
+little shocked line troubled her forehead.
+
+"Oh, no," she said; "they never die at all. They wait and show the next
+months how."
+
+So this year's May is showing June how. As if one should have a kind of
+pre-self, who kept on, after one's birth, and told one what to live and
+what not to live. I wish that I had had a pre-self and that it had kept
+on with me to show me how. It is what one's mother is, only one is so
+occupied in being one's born self that one thinks of her worshipfully
+as one's mother instead. But this young June seems to be chiefly May,
+and I am glad: for of all the months, May is to me most nearly the
+essence of time to be. In May I have always an impulse to date my
+letters "To-morrow," for all the enchantment of the usual future seems
+come upon me. The other months are richly themselves, but May is all the
+great premonitory zest come true; it is expectation come alive; it is
+the Then made Now. Conservatively, however, I date my May letters merely
+"To-morrow," and it is pleasant to find a conservative estimate which no
+one is likely to exceed. For I own that though there is a conservatism
+which is now wholly forbidden to me, yet I continue to take in it a
+sensuous, stolen pleasure, such as I take in certain ceremonies; and I
+know that if I were wholly pagan, extreme conservatism would be my chief
+indulgence.
+
+This yet-May morning, then, I have been down in the village, gardening
+about the streets. My sort of gardening. As in spring another looks
+along the wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the
+upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence I peered round this
+wall and that for faces and things in the renascence of recognition, or
+in the pleasant importance of having just been born. Many a gate and
+façade and well-house, of which in my absence I have not thought even
+once, has not changed a whit in consequence. And when changes have come,
+they have done so with the prettiest preening air of accomplishment: "We
+too," they say, "have not been idle."
+
+Thus the streets came unrolling to meet me and to show me their
+treasures: my neighbour's new screened-in porch "with a round extension
+so to see folks pass on the cross street"; in the house in which I am to
+live a former blank parlour wall gravely regarding me with a magnificent
+new plate glass eye; Daphne Street, hitherto a way of sand, now become a
+thing of proud macadam; the corner catalpas old enough to bloom; a white
+frame cottage rising like a domestic Venus from a once vacant lot of
+foam-green "Timothy"; a veranda window-box acquired, like a bright
+bow-knot at its house's throat; and, farther on, the Herons' freshly
+laid cement sidewalk, a flying heron stamped on every block. I fancy
+they will have done that with the wooden heron knocker which in the
+kitchen their grandfather Heron himself carved on sleepless nights.
+("Six hundred and twenty hours of Grandpa Heron's life hanging on our
+front door," his son's wife said; "I declare I feel like that bird could
+just about lay.") To see all these venturesome innovations, these
+obscure and pleasant substitutions, is to be greeted by the very annuals
+of this little garden as a real gardener in green lore might be
+signalled, here by a trembling of new purple and there by a yellow
+marching line of little volunteers.
+
+I do not miss from their places many friends. In this house and that I
+find a new family domiciled and to be divined by the subtle changes
+which no old tenant would ever have made: the woodpile in an
+unaccustomed place, the side shed door disused and strung for vines, a
+wagon now kept by a north and south space once sacred to the sweet-pea
+trench. Here a building partly ruined by fire shows grim, returned to
+the inarticulate, not evidently to be rebuilt, but to be accepted, like
+any death. But these variations are the exception, and only one
+variation is the rule, and against that one I have in me some special
+heritage of burning. I mean the felling of the village trees. We have
+been used wantonly to sacrifice to the base and the trivial, trees
+already stored with years of symmetry when we of these Midlands were the
+intruders and not they--and I own that for me the time has never wholly
+passed. They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel our lawns
+with twigs, they rot the shingles on our barns. It has seemed to occur
+to almost nobody to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too, are
+beginning to discern, so that when in the laying of a sidewalk we meet a
+tree who was there before we were anywhere at all, though we may not
+yet recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our love of a
+straight line, and our votive offering is to give the tree the
+walk--such a slight swerving is all the deference she asks!--and in
+return she blesses us with balms and odours.... For me these signs of
+our mellowing are more delightful to experience than might be the
+already-made quietudes of a nation of effected and distinguished
+standards. I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves an
+elemental gesture, though I personally would prefer not to be the one to
+have made the gesture. And this is my solace when with some
+inquisitioner I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine--an
+isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hemlock: verily, I say,
+it was so that we did here in the old days when there were forests to
+conquer, and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his blood as he
+has his genius for toil. And I try not to remember that if in America we
+had had plane trees, we should almost certainly have cut them into
+cabins.... But this morning even the trees that I missed could not make
+me sad. No, nor even the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers
+hanging on a street door which I passed. All these were as if something
+elementary had happened, needless wounds, it might be, on the plan of
+things, contortions which science has not yet bred away, but, as truly
+as the natural death from age, eloquent of the cosmic persuading to
+shape in which the nations of quietude and we of strivings are all in
+fellowship.
+
+In fellowship! I think that in this simple basic emotion lies my joy in
+living in this, my village. Here, this year long, folk have been
+adventuring together, knowing the details of one another's lives,
+striving a little but companioning far more than striving, kindling to
+one another's interests instead of practising the faint morality of mere
+civility; and I love them all--unless it be only that little Mrs. Oliver
+Wheeler Johnson, newly come to Friendship; and perhaps my faint liking
+for her arises from the fact that she has not yet lived here long enough
+to be understood, as Friendship Village understands. The ways of these
+primal tribal bonds are in my blood, for from my heart I felt what my
+neighbour felt when she told me of the donation party which the whole
+village has just given to Lyddy Ember:--
+
+"I declare," she said, "it wasn't so much the stuff they brought in,
+though that was all elegant, but it was the _Togetherness_ of it. I
+couldn't get to sleep that night for thinkin' about God not havin'
+anybody to neighbour with."
+
+It was no wonder, therefore, that when in the middle of Daphne Street my
+neighbour met me this morning, for the first time since my return, and
+held out her arms, I walked straight into them. Here is the secret, as
+more of us know than have the wisdom to acknowledge: fellowship,
+comradeship, kinship--call it what you will. My neighbour and I will
+understand.
+
+"I heard you was here," my neighbour said--bless her, her voice
+trembled. I suppose there never was such a compliment as that tremor of
+her voice.
+
+I am afraid that I am not going to tell what else she said. But it was
+all about our coming to Friendship Village to live; and that is a thing
+which, as I feel about it, should be set to music and sung in the
+wind--where Thoreau said that some apples are to be eaten. As for me, I
+nodded at my neighbour, and could do no more than that--as is the custom
+of mortals when they are face to face with these sorceries of Return and
+Meeting and Being Together.
+
+I am not yet wonted to the sweetness of our coming to Friendship Village
+to live, the Stranger and I. Here they still call him the Stranger; and
+this summer, because of the busts and tablets which he must fashion in
+many far places, so do I. Have I said that that Stranger of mine is a
+sculptor? He is. But if anyone expects me to write about him, I tell you
+that it is impossible. Save this: That since he came out of the mist one
+morning on the Plank Road here in Friendship Village, we two have kept
+house in the world, shared in the common welfare, toiled as we might
+for the common good, observed the stars, and thanked God. And this: that
+since that morning, it is as if Someone had picked us up and set us to
+music and sung us to the universal piping. And we remember that once we
+were only words, and that sometime we shall be whatever music is when it
+is free of its body of sound, and for that time we strive. But I repeat
+that these vagrant notes are not about this great Stranger, absent on
+his quests of holy soul prisoned in this stone and that marble, nor yet
+about our life together. Rather, I write about our Family, which is this
+loved town of ours. For we have bought Oldmoxon House, and here, save
+for what flights may be about and over-seas, we hope that we may tell
+our days to their end.
+
+My neighbour had both my hands, there in the middle of Daphne Street,
+and the white horse of the post-office store delivery wagon turned out
+for us as if he knew.
+
+"If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd have put on my other
+hat," my neighbour said, "but I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down
+for some rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't what they
+used to be, are they? One season an' they lay down life. I could jounce
+up an' down I'm so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed
+gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'. I heard the girl that
+was comin' to help you ain't comin' near."
+
+My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and she has done the
+disappointing by telegraph. I had almost said, publicly by telegraph.
+But I protest that I would rather an entire village should read my
+telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole city should care
+almost nothing for me or my telegrams either. And if you please, I would
+rather not have that telegram-reading criticised.
+
+"Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity, "I've got you one. She'll be
+up to talk to you in a day or two--I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can
+spell like the minister."
+
+I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her name with something of
+that sense of the inescapable to which the finality of my neighbour
+impressed me. As if I were to have said, "So, then, it is to be Miggy!"
+Or was it something more than that? Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and
+mine had struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have come to
+call the emotion of finality. I suppose that other people have it: that
+occasional prophetic sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses
+this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness of--shall I
+say?--brightness; a mental area of clearness; a quite definite physical
+emotion of yes-ness. But if the thing will not happen this says itself
+by a complementary apprehension of dim, down-sloping, vacant negation. I
+have seldom known this divination to fail me--though I am chary of using
+it lest I use it up! And then I do not always wish to know. But this
+morning my emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware: I _knew_ that
+it would be Miggy.
+
+"What a curious name," I said, in a manner of feebly fending off the
+imminent; "_why_ Miggy?" For it seemed to me one of those names instead
+of which any other name would have done as well and perhaps better.
+
+"Her name is Margaret," my neighbour explained, "and her mother was a
+real lady that come here from Off and that hard work killed her because
+she _was_ a lady. The father was bound there shouldn't be any lady about
+Miggy, but he couldn't seem to help himself. Margaret was her mother's
+name and so he shaved it and shrunk it and strained it down to Miggy.
+'No frills for nobody,' was his motto, up to his death. Miggy and her
+little sister lives with her old Aunt Effie that dress-makes real French
+but not enough to keep 'em alive on. Miggy does odd jobs around. So when
+I heard about your needin' somebody, I says to myself, 'Miggy!'--just
+like I've said it to you."
+
+It was not the name, as a name, which I would have said could be
+uppermost in my mind as I walked on that street of June--that May was
+helping to make fair. And I was annoyed to have the peace of my return
+so soon invaded. I fell wondering if I could not get on, as I usually
+do, with no one to bother. I have never wanted a helper at all if I
+could avoid it, and I have never, never wanted a helper with a
+personality. A personality among my strewn papers puts me in a fever of
+embarrassment and misery. Once such an one said to me in the midst of a
+chapter: "Madame, I'd like to ask you a question. What do _you_ think of
+your hero?" In an utter rout of confusion I owned that I thought very
+badly of him, indeed; but I did not add the truth, that she had
+effectually drugged him and disabled me for at least that day. My taste
+in helpers is for one colourless, noiseless, above all intonationless,
+usually speechless, and always without curiosity--some one, save for the
+tips of her trained fingers, negligible. As all this does sad violence
+to my democratic passions, I usually prefer my negligible self. So the
+idea of a Miggy terrified me, and I said to myself that I would not have
+one about. As I knew the village, she was not of it. She was not a part
+of my gardening. She was no proper annual. She was no doubt merely a
+showy little seedling, chance sown in the village.... But all the time,
+moving within me, was that serene area of brightness, that clear
+certainty that, do what I could, it would still be Miggy.
+
+... It is through this faint soothsaying, this conception which is
+partly of sight and partly of feeling, that some understanding may be
+won of the orchestration of the senses. I am always telling myself that
+if I could touch at that fluent line where the senses merge, I should
+occasionally find there that silent Custodian who is myself. I think,
+because emotion is so noble, that the Custodian must sometimes visit
+this line where the barrier between her and me is so frail. Her presence
+seems possible to me only for a moment, only, it may be, for the
+fraction of a second in which I catch the romance, the _idea_ of
+something old and long familiar. And when this happens, I say: She has
+just been there, between the seeing and the feeling, or between the
+seeing and the knowing. Often I am sure that I have barely missed her.
+But I am never quick enough to let her know....
+
+When I finished my walk and stepped under the poplars before my gate, I
+caught a faint exclamation. It was that Little Child, who had been
+waiting for me on my doorstep and came running to meet me and bring me
+the violets. When she saw me, she said, "Oh!" quickly and sweetly in her
+throat, and, as I stood still to taste the delight of having her run
+toward me, I felt very sorry for every one who has not heard that
+involuntary "Oh!" of a child at one's coming. Little Child and I have
+met only once before, and that early this morning, at large, on the
+village street, as spirits met in air, with no background of names nor
+auxiliary of exchange of names; but we had some talk which for me
+touched on eternal truth and for her savoured of story-telling; and we
+are friends. So now when she gave me the violets and explained to me Who
+was showing June how, I accepted this fair perception of the motherhood
+of May, this childish discernment of the familyhood of things, and,
+
+"Will you come some day soon to have another story?" I asked her.
+
+"Prob'ly I can," said Little Child. "I'll ask Miggy."
+
+"Miggy! But is it your Miggy, too?" I demanded.
+
+"It's my sister," said Little Child, nodding.
+
+I thought that the concreteness of her reply to my ill-defined query was
+almost as if she remembered how to understand without words. You would
+think that children would need to have things said out, but they are
+evidently closer to a more excellent way.
+
+So when I entered the house just now, I brought in with me a kind of
+premonitory Miggy, one of those ghostly, anticipatory births which we
+are constantly giving to those whom we have not met. As if every one
+had for us a way of life without the formality of being seen. As if we
+are a big, near family whether we want to be so or not. Verily, it is
+not only May and June, or Little Child and Miggy, who are found
+unexpectedly to be related; it is the whole world, it seems, and he is
+wise who quickens to many kinships. I like to think of the comrade
+company that already I have found here: June and Little Child and
+Miggy-to-be and my neighbour and Daphne Street and the remembered faces
+of the village and the hamadryads. I think that I include the very
+herons in the cement sidewalk. Like a kind of perpetual gift it is, this
+which my neighbour called _Togetherness_.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+INSIDE JUNE
+
+
+_The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough to
+it. This month comes within few houses, and if you want it you must go
+out to it. When you are within doors, knowing that out-of-doors it is
+June, the urge to be out there with it is resistless. But though you
+wade in green, steep in sun, breast wind, and glory in them all, still
+the day itself eludes you. It would seem, in June, that there should be
+a specific for the malady of being oneself, so that one might get to be
+a June day outright. However, if one were oneself more and more, might
+not one finally become a June day?..._
+
+Or something of this sort. I am quoting, as nearly as may be, from the
+Book of Our Youth, your youth and mine. Always the Book of Youth will
+open at a page like this. And occasionally it is as if we turned back
+and read there and made a path right away through the page.
+
+This morning a rose-breasted grosbeak wakened me, singing on a bough of
+box-elder so close to my window that the splash of rose on his throat
+almost startled me. It was as if I ought not to have been looking. And
+to turn away from out-of-doors was like leaving some one who was saying
+something. But as soon as I stepped into the day I perceived my old
+problem: _The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near
+enough_.
+
+I stood for a little at the front gate trying soberly to solve the
+matter--or I stood where the front gate should have been; for in our
+midland American villages we have few fences or hedges, and, alas, no
+stone walls. Though undoubtedly this lack comes from an insufficient
+regard for privacy, yet this negative factor I am inclined to condone
+for the sake of the positive motive. And this I conceive to be that we
+are wistful of more ample occupation than is commonly contrived by our
+fifty-feet village lots, and so we royally add to our "yards" the
+sidewalk and the planting space and the road and as much of our
+neighbour's lawn as our imagination can annex. There seems to me to be
+in this a certain charming pathos; as it were, a survival in us of the
+time when we had only to name broad lands our own and to stay upon them
+in order to make them ours in very fact. And now it is as if this serene
+pushing back of imaginary borders were in reality an appending, a kind
+of spiritual taking up of a claim.
+
+How to get nearer to June? I admit that it is a question of the veriest
+idler. But what a delightful company of these questions one can
+assemble. As, How to find one's way to a place that _is_ the way it
+seems Away Across a Meadow. How to meet enough people who hear what one
+says in just the way that one means it. How to get back at will those
+fugitive moments when one almost _knows_ ... what it is all about. And
+with this question the field of the idler becomes the field of the wise
+man; and, indeed, if one idles properly--or rather, if the proper person
+idles--the two fields are not always on opposite sides of the road. To
+idle is by no means merely to do nothing. It is an avocation, a calling
+away, nay, one should say, a piping away. To idle is to inhibit the body
+and to let the spirit keep on. Not every one can idle. I know estimable
+people who frequently relax, like chickens in the sun; but I know only a
+few who use relaxation as a threshold and not as a goal, and who idle
+until the hour yields its full blessing.
+
+I wondered if to idle at adventure might not be the way to June, so I
+went out on the six o'clock street in somewhat the spirit in which
+another might ride the greenwood. Almost immediately I had an encounter,
+for I came on my neighbour in her garden. Not my neighbour who lives on
+the other side of me, and who is a big and obvious deacon, with a
+family of a great many Light Gowns; but My Neighbour. She was watering
+her garden. These water rules and regulations of the village are among
+its spells. To look at the members of the water commission one would
+never suspect them of romance. But if they have it not, why have they
+named from five until nine o'clock the only morning hours when one may
+use the city water for one's lawn and garden? I insist that it cannot be
+a mere regard for the municipal resources, and that the commissioners
+must see something of the romance of getting up before five o'clock to
+drench one's garden, and are providing for the special educational value
+of such a custom. Or, if I do not believe this, I wish very much that I
+did, with the proper grounds.
+
+To tell the truth, however, I do not credit even my neighbour with
+feeling the romance of the hour and of her occupation. She is a still
+woman of more than forty, who does not feel a difference between her
+flower and her vegetable gardens, but regards them both as a part of her
+life in the kind of car-window indifference and complacency of certain
+travellers. She raises foxgloves and parsley, and the sun shines over
+all. I must note a strange impression which my neighbour gives me: she
+has always for me an air of personal impermanence. I have the fancy,
+amounting to a sensation, that she is where she is for just a moment,
+and that she must rush back and be at it again. I do not know at what.
+But whether I see her in church or at a festival, I have always all I
+can do to resist saying to her, "How _did_ you get away?" It was so that
+she was watering her flowers; as if she were intending at any moment to
+hurry off to get breakfast or put up the hammock or mend. And yet before
+she did so she told me, who was a willing listener, a motion or two of
+the spirit of the village.
+
+There is, I observe, a nicety of etiquette here, about the
+Not-quite-news, Not-quite-gossip shared with strangers and
+semi-strangers. The rules seem to be:--
+
+Strangers shall be told only the pleasant occurrences and conditions.
+
+Half strangers may discuss the unpleasant matters which they themselves
+have somehow heard, but only pleasant matters may be added by accretion.
+
+The rest of society may say whatever it "has a mind." But this mind, as
+I believe, is not harsh, since nobody ever gossips except to people who
+gossip back.
+
+"Mis' Toplady told me last night that Calliope Marsh is coming home for
+the Java entertainment, next week," my neighbour imparted first. And
+this was the best news that she could have given me.
+
+It has been a great regret to me that this summer Calliope is not in the
+village. She has gone to the city to nurse some distant kinswoman more
+lonely than she, and until ill-health came, long forgetful of Calliope.
+But she is to come back now and again, to this and to that, for the
+village interests are all her own. I have never known any one in whom
+the tribal sense is so persistently alive as in Calliope.
+
+I asked my neighbour what this Java entertainment would be, which was to
+give back Calliope, and she looked her amazement that I did not know. It
+would be, it appeared, one of those great fairs which the missionary
+society is always projecting and carrying magnificently forward.
+
+"It's awful feet-aching work," said my neighbour, reflectively; "but
+honestly, Calliope seems to like it. I donno but I do, too. The Sodality
+meant to have one when they set out to pave Daphne Street, but it turned
+out it wasn't needed. Well, big affairs like that makes it seem as if
+we'd been born into the whole world and not just into Friendship
+Village."
+
+My neighbour told me that a new public library had been opened in a
+corner of the post-office store, and that "a great crowd" was drawing
+books, though for this she herself cannot vouch, since the library is
+only open Saturday evenings, and "Saturday," she says with decision, "is
+a bad night." It is, in fact, I note, very difficult to find a free
+night in the village, save only Tuesday. Monday, because of its obvious
+duties and incident fatigue, is as impossible as Sunday; Wednesday is
+club day; Thursday "is prayer-meeting"; Friday is sacred to church
+suppers and entertainments and the Ladies' Aid Society; and Saturday is
+invariably denominated a bad night and omitted without question. We are
+remote from society, but Tuesday is literally our only free evening.
+
+"Of course it won't be the same with you about books," my neighbour
+admits. "You can send your girl down to get a book for you. But I have
+to be home to get out the clean clothes. How's your girl going to like
+the country?" she asked.
+
+I am to have here in the village, I find, many a rebuke for habits of
+mine which lag behind my theories. For though I try to solve my share of
+a tragic question by giving to my Swedish maid, Elfa, the self-respect
+and the privilege suited to a human being dependent on me, together with
+ways of comfort and some leisure, yet I find the homely customs of the
+place to have accomplished more than my careful system. And though, when
+I took her from town I scrupulously added to the earnings of my little
+maid, I confess that it had not occurred to me to wonder whether or not
+she would like Friendship Village. We seem so weary-far from the
+conditions which we so facilely conceive. Especially, I seem far. I am
+afraid that I engaged Elfa in the first place with less attention to her
+economic fitness than that she is so trim and still and wistful, with
+such a peculiarly winning upward look; and that her name is Elfa. I told
+my neighbour that I did not know yet, whether Elfa would like it here or
+not; and for refuge I found fault with the worms on the rose bushes.
+Also I made a note in my head to ask Elfa how she likes the country. But
+the spirit of a thing is flown when you make a note of it in your head.
+How does Elfa like the town, for that matter? I never have asked her
+this, either.
+
+"She'll be getting married on your hands, anyway," my neighbour
+observed; "the ladies here say that's one trouble with trying to keep a
+hired girl. They _will_ get married. But I say, let 'em."
+
+At least here is a matter in which my theory, like that of my
+neighbour's, outruns those of certain folk of both town and village. For
+I myself have heard women complain of their servants marrying and
+establishing families, and deplore this shortsightedness in not staying
+where there is "a good home, a nice room, plenty to eat, and all the
+flat pieces sent to the laundry."
+
+"Speaking of books," said my neighbour, "have you seen Nicholas Moor?"
+
+"I see almost no new books," I told her guiltily.
+
+"Me either," she said; "I don't mean he's a book. He's a boy. Nicholas
+Moor--that does a little writin' himself? I guess you will see him.
+He'll be bringin' some of his writing up to show you. He took some to
+the new school principal, I heard, and to the invalid that was here from
+the city. He seems to be sort of lonesome, though he _has_ got a good
+position. He's interested in celluloid and he rings the Catholic bell.
+Nicholas must be near thirty, but he hasn't even showed any signs."
+
+"Signs?" I hazarded.
+
+"Of being in love," she says simply. And I have pondered pleasantly on
+this significant ellipsis of hers which takes serenely for granted the
+basic business of the world. Her elision reminds me of the delicate
+animism of the Japanese which says, "When the rice pot speaks with a
+human voice, then the demon's name is Kanjo." One can appraise a race or
+an individual by the class of things which speech takes for granted,
+love or a demon or whatever it be.
+
+And apropos of "showing signs," do I remember Liva Vesey and Timothy
+Toplady, Jr.? I am forced to confess that I remember neither. I recall,
+to be sure, that the Topladys had a son, but I had thought of him as a
+kind of qualifying clause and it is difficult to conceive of him as the
+subject of a new sentence. When I hear of Liva Vesey I get her confused
+with a pink gingham apron and a pail of buttermilk which used sometimes
+to pass my house with Liva combined. Fancy that pink gingham and that
+pail becoming a person! And my neighbour tells me that the Qualifying
+Clause and the Pink Gingham are "keeping company," and perhaps are to
+determine the cut of indeterminate clauses and aprons, world without
+end.
+
+"The young folks _will_ couple off," says my neighbour; "and," she adds,
+in a manner of spontaneous impression, "_I_ think it's nice. And it's
+nice for the whole family, too. I've seen families that wouldn't ever
+have looked at each other come to be real friends and able to see the
+angels in each other just by the young folks pairing off. This whole
+town's married crisscross and kittering, family into family. I like it.
+It kind o' binds the soil."
+
+My neighbour told me of other matters current in the village, pleasant
+commonplaces having for her the living spirit which the commonplace
+holds in hostage. ("I'm breathing," Little Child soberly announced to me
+that first day of our acquaintance. And I wonder why I smiled?) My
+neighbour slowly crossed her garden and I followed on the walk--these
+informal colloquies of no mean length are perfectly usual in the village
+and they do not carry the necessity for an invitation within the house
+or the implication of a call. The relations of hostess and guest seem
+simply to be suspended, and we talk with the freedom of spirits met in
+air. Is this not in its way prophetic of the time when we shall meet,
+burdened of no conventions or upholstery or perhaps even words, and
+there talk with the very freedom of villagers? Meanwhile I am content
+with conventions, and passive amid upholstery. But I do catch myself
+looking forward.
+
+Suddenly my neighbour turned to me with such a startled, inquiring
+manner that I sent my attention out as at an alarm to see what she
+meant. And then I heard what I had not before noted: a thin, wavering
+line of singing, that had begun in the street beyond our houses, and now
+floated inconsequently to us, lifting, dipping, wandering. I could even
+hear the absurd words.
+
+
+     "_My_ Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I _never_ know.
+     You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh--"
+
+
+the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air.
+
+To say something was like interrupting my neighbour's expression; so I
+waited, and,
+
+"It's old Cary," she explained briefly. "When he does that it's like
+something hurts you, ain't it?"
+
+I thought that this would be no one of my acquaintance, and I said so,
+but tentatively, lest I should be forgetting some inherent figure of the
+village.
+
+"He's come here in the year," she explained--and, save about the obvious
+import of old Cary's maudlin song, she maintained that fine, tribal
+reticence of hers. "Except for the drinking," she even said, "he seems
+to be a quiet, nice man. But it's a shame--for Peter's sake. Peter
+Cary," she added, like a challenge, "is the brainiest young man in
+_this_ town, say what you want."
+
+On which she told me something of this young superintendent of the
+canning factory who has "tried it in Nebraska," and could not bear to
+leave his father here, "this way," and has just returned. "He works
+hard, and plays the violin, and is making a man of himself generally,"
+she told me; "Don't miss him." And I have promised that I will try not
+to miss Peter Cary.
+
+"They live out towards the cemetery way," she added, "him and his
+father, all alone. Peter'll be along by here in a minute on his way to
+work--it's most quarter to. I set my husband down to his breakfast and
+got up his lunch before I come out--I don't have my breakfast till the
+men folks get out of the way."
+
+I never cease to marvel at these splendid capabilities which prepare
+breakfasts, put up lunches, turn the attention to the garden, and all,
+so to speak, with the left hand; ready at any moment to enter upon the
+real business of life--to minister to the sick or bury the dead, or
+conduct a town meeting or a church supper or a birth. They have a kind
+of goddess-like competence, these women. At any of these offices they
+arrive, lacking the cloud, it is true, but magnificently equipped to
+settle the occasion. In crises of, say, deafness, they will clap a hot
+pancake on a friend's ear with an Æsculapian _savoir faire_, for their
+efficiencies combine those of lost generations with all that they hear
+of in this, in an open-minded eclecticism. With Puritans and foresters
+and courtiers in our blood, who knows but that we have, too, the
+lingering ichor of gods and goddesses? Oh--"_don't you wish you had_?"
+What a charming peculiarity it would be to be descended from a state of
+immortality as well as to be preparing for it, nay, even now to be
+entered upon it!
+
+In a few moments after that piteous, fuddled song had died away on the
+other street, Peter Cary came by my neighbour's house. He was a
+splendid, muscular figure in a neutral, belted shirt and a hat battered
+quite to college exactions, though I am sure that Peter did not know
+that. I could well believe that he was making a man of himself. I have
+temerity to say that this boy superintendent of a canning factory looked
+as, in another milieu, Shelley might have looked, but so it was. It was
+not the first time that I have seen in such an one the look, the eyes
+with the vision and the shadow. I have seen it in the face of a man who
+stood on a step-ladder, papering a wall; I have seen it in a mason who
+looked up from the foundation that he mortared; I have seen it often
+and often in the faces of men who till the soil. I was not surprised to
+know that Peter Cary "took" on the violin. The violin is a way out (for
+that look in one's eyes), as, for Nicholas Moor, I have no doubt, is the
+ringing of the Catholic bell. And I am not prepared to say that
+celluloid, and wall-paper, and mortar, and meadows, and canneries,--run
+under good conditions,--may not be a way out as well. At all events, the
+look was still in Peter's face.
+
+Peter glanced briefly at my neighbour, running the risk of finding us
+both looking at him, realized the worst, blushed a man's brown blush,
+and nodded and smiled after he had looked away from us.
+
+"You see this grass?" said my neighbour. "Peter keeps it cut, my husband
+don't get home till so late. We're awful fond of Peter."
+
+There is no more tender eulogy. And I would rather have that said of me
+in the village than in any place I know. No grace of manner or dress or
+mind can deceive anybody. They are fond of you or they are not, and I
+would trust their reasons for either.
+
+My neighbour's husband came out the front door at that moment, and he
+and Peter, without greeting, went on together. Her husband did not look
+toward us, because, in the village, it seems not to be a husband and
+wife ceremonial to say good-by in the morning. I often fall wondering
+how it is in other places. Is it possible that men in general go away
+to work without the consciousness of family, of themselves as going
+forth on the common quest? Is it possible that women see them go and are
+so unaware of the wonder of material life that they do not instance it
+in, at least, good-by? One would think that even the female bear in the
+back of the cave must growl out something simple when her lord leaves
+her in the hope of a good kill.
+
+And when the two men had turned down the brick walk, the maple leaves
+making a come-and-go of shadows and sun-patterns on their backs, my
+neighbour looked at me with a smile--or, say, with two-thirds of a
+smile--as if her vote to smile were unanimous, but she were unwilling by
+it to impart too much.
+
+"It's all Miggy with Peter," she said, as if she were mentioning a
+symptom.
+
+"Miggy?" I said with interest--and found myself nodding to this new
+relationship as to a new acquaintance. And I was once more struck with
+the precision with which certain simple people and nearly all great
+people discard the particularities and lay bare their truths. Could any
+amount of elegant phrasing so reach the heart of the thing and show it
+beating as did, "It's all Miggy with Peter"?
+
+"Yes," my neighbour told me, "it's been her with him ever since he come
+here."
+
+Assuredly I thought the better of Miggy for this; and,
+
+"Is it all Peter with Miggy?" I inquired, with some eagerness.
+
+Land knows, my neighbour thought, and handed me the hose to hold while
+she turned off the water at the hydrant. I remember that a young robin
+tried to alight on the curving spray just as the water failed and
+drooped.
+
+"I like to get a joke on a robin that way," said my neighbour, and
+laughed out, in a kind of pleasant fellowship with jokes in general and
+especially with robins. "It made Miggy's little sister laugh so the
+other day when that happened," she added. Then she glanced over at me
+with a look in her face that I have not seen there before.
+
+"Land," she said, "this is the time of day, after my husband goes off in
+the morning, when I wish I had a little young thing, runnin' round.
+_Now_ almost more than at night. Well--I don't know; both times."
+
+I nodded, without saying anything, my eyes on a golden robin prospecting
+vainly among the green mulberries. I wish that I were of those who know
+what to say when a door is opened like this to some shut place.
+
+"Well," said my neighbour, "now I'll bake up the rest of the batter.
+Want a pink?"
+
+Thus tacitly excused--how true her instinct was, courteously to put the
+three fringed pinks in my hand to palliate her leaving!--I have come
+back to my house and my own breakfast.
+
+"Elfa," said I, first thing, "do you think you are going to like the
+country?"
+
+My little maid turned to me with her winning upward look.
+
+"No'm," she shocked me by saying. And there was another door, opened
+into another shut place; and I did not know what to say to that either.
+
+But I am near to my neighbour; and, in a manner to which Elfa's trimness
+and wistfulness never have impressed me, near to Elfa herself, and I am
+near, near to the village. As I left the outdoors just now, all the
+street was alive: with men and girls going to work, women opening
+windows, a wagon or two in from a Caledonia farm, a general, universal,
+not to say cosmic air of activity and coffee. All the little houses, set
+close together up and down the street, were like a friendly porch party,
+on a long, narrow veranda, where folk sit knee to knee with an avenue
+between for the ice-cream to be handed. All the little lawns and gardens
+were disposed like soft green skirts, delicately embroidered, fragrant,
+flowing.... As I looked, it seemed to me that I could hear the faint hum
+of the village talk--in every house the intimate, revealing confidences
+of the Family, quick with hope or anxiety or humour or passion,
+animated by its common need to live. And along the street flooded the
+sun, akin to the morning quickening in many a heart.
+
+The day has become charged for me with something besides daylight,
+something which no less than daylight pervades, illumines, comes to meet
+me at a thousand points. I wonder if it can be that, unaware, I did get
+near to June?
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MIGGY
+
+
+I have never heard the chimes of Westminster cathedral, but when some
+time they do sound for me I shall find in them something all my own. For
+the old rosewood clock which has told time for me these many years is
+possessed of a kind of intelligence because its maker gave to it the
+Westminster chimes. Thus, though the clock must by patient ticking teach
+the rhythm of duration until the secret monotony of rhythm is confessed,
+it has also its high tides of life, rhythmic, too, and at every quarter
+hour fills a kind of general creative office: four notes for the
+quarter, eight for the half, twelve for the three-quarters, sixteen for
+the hour, and then the deep Amen of the strokes. At twelve o'clock it
+swells richly to its zenith of expression and almost says something
+else. Through even the organ fulness of the cathedral bells I shall hear
+the tingling melody of the rosewood clock chimes, for their sweet
+incidence has been to me both matins and lullaby and often trembles
+within my sleep. I have the clock always with me. It is a little
+voice-friend, it is one of those half folk, like flowers and the wind
+and an open fireplace and a piano, which are a frail, semi-born race,
+wistful of complete life, but as yet only partly overlapping our own
+sphere. These fascinate me almost as much as the articulate. That was
+why, when my little maid Elfa had brought me the summons to-day, I stood
+on the threshold and in some satisfaction watched Miggy, rapt before my
+clock in its musical maximum of noon.
+
+Miggy is as thin as a bough, and her rather large head is swept by an
+ungovernable lot of fine brown hair. Her face was turned from me, and
+she was wearing a high-necked gingham apron faded to varying values of
+brown and faint purple and violet of a quite surprising beauty. When the
+last stroke ceased, she turned to me as if I had been there all the
+time.
+
+"I wish I could hear it do that again," she said, standing where she had
+stood, arms folded.
+
+"You will, perhaps, to-morrow," I answered.
+
+Truly, if it was to be Miggy, then she would hear the chimes to-morrow
+and to-morrow; and as she turned, my emotion of finality increased. I
+have never loved the tribe of the Headlongs, though I am very sorry for
+any one who has not had with them an occasional innocent tribal junket;
+but I hold that through our intuitions, we may become a kind of
+apotheosis of the Headlongs. Who of us has not chosen a vase, a chair, a
+rug, by some motive transcending taste, by the bidding of a
+friendly-faithful monitor who, somewhere inside one, nodded a choice
+which we obeyed? And yet a vase is a dead thing with no little seeking
+tentacles that catch and cling, while in choosing the living it is that
+one's friendly-faithful monitor is simply recognizing the monitor of the
+other person. I, for one, am more and more willing to trust these two to
+avow their own. For I think that this monitor is, perhaps, that silent
+Custodian whom, if ever I can win through her elusiveness, I shall know
+to be myself. As the years pass I trust her more and more. I find that
+we like the same people, she and I! And instantly we both liked Miggy.
+
+Miggy stood regarding me intently.
+
+"I saw you go past the Brevy's yesterday, where the crape is on the
+door," she observed; "I thought it was you."
+
+I wonder at the precision with which very little people and very big
+people brush aside the minor conventions and do it in such ways that one
+nature is never mistaken for the other.
+
+"The girl who died there was your friend, then?" I asked.
+
+"No," Miggy said; "I just knew her to speak to. And she didn't always
+bother her head to speak to me. I just went in there yesterday morning
+to get the feeling."
+
+"I beg your pardon. To get--what?" I asked.
+
+"Well," said Miggy, "you know when you look at a corpse you can always
+sense your own breath better--like it was something alive inside you.
+That's why I never miss seeing one if I can help. It's the only time I'm
+real glad I'm living."
+
+As I motioned her to the chair and took my own, I felt a kind of
+weariness. The neurotics, I do believe, are of us all the nearest to the
+truth about things, but as I grow older I find myself getting to take a
+surpassing comfort in the normal. Or rather, I am always willing to have
+the normal thrust upon me, but my neurotics I wish to select for myself.
+
+"My neighbour tells me," I said merely, "that she thinks you should be
+my secretary." (It is a big word for the office, but a little hill is
+still a hill.)
+
+"I think so, too," said Miggy, simply, "I was afraid you wouldn't."
+
+"Have you ever been anybody's secretary?" I continued.
+
+"Never," said Miggy. "I never saw anybody before that had a secretary."
+
+"But something must have made her think you would do," I suggested. "And
+what made you think so?"
+
+"Well," Miggy said, "she thinks so because she wants me to get ahead.
+And I think so because I generally think I can do anything--except
+mathematics. Has Secretary got any mathematics about it?"
+
+"Not my secretary work," I told her, reviewing these extraordinary
+qualifications for duty; "except counting the words on a page. You could
+do that?"
+
+"Oh, that!" said Miggy. "But if you told me to multiply two fractions
+you'd never see me again, no matter how much I wanted to come back.
+Calliope Marsh says she's always expecting to find some folks' heads
+caved in on one side--same as red and blue balloons. If mine caved, it'd
+be on the mathematics corner."
+
+I assured her that I never have a fraction in my house.
+
+"Then I'll come," said Miggy, simply.
+
+But immediately she leaned forward with a look of anxiety, and her face
+was pointed and big-eyed, so that distress became a part of it.
+
+"Oh," she said, "I _forgot_. I meant to tell you first."
+
+"What is it? Can you not come, after all?" I inquired gravely.
+
+"I've got a drawback," said Miggy, soberly. "A man's in love with me."
+
+She linked her arms before her, a hand on either shoulder--arms whose
+slenderness amazes me, though at the wrist they taper and in their
+extreme littleness are yet round. Because of this frailty she has a kind
+of little girl look which at that moment curiously moved me.
+
+"Who told you that?" I asked abruptly.
+
+"About it being a drawback? Everybody 'most," said Miggy. "They all
+laugh about us and act like it was a pity."
+
+For a moment I felt a kind of anger as I felt it once when a woman said
+to me of a wife of many years whose first little child was coming, that
+she was "in trouble." I own that,--save with my neighbour, and Calliope,
+and a few more whom I love--here in the village I miss the simple good
+breeding of the perception that nothing is nobler than the emotions, and
+the simple good taste of taking seriously love among its young. Taking
+it seriously, I say. Not, heaven forbid, taking it for granted, as do
+the cities.
+
+"Other things being equal, I prefer folk who are in love," I told Miggy.
+Though I observe that I instance a commercialization which I deplore by
+not insisting on this secretarial qualification to anything like the
+extent with which I insist on, say, spelling.
+
+Miggy nodded--three little nods which seemed to settle everything.
+
+"Then I'll come," she repeated. "Anyhow, it isn't me that's in love at
+all. It's Peter. But of course I have to have some of the blame."
+
+So! It was, then, not "all Peter with Miggy." Poor Peter. It must be a
+terrific problem to be a Peter to such a Miggy. I must have looked "Poor
+Peter," because the girl's face took on its first smile. Such a smile as
+it was, brilliant, sparkling, occupying her features instead of
+informing them.
+
+"He won't interfere much," she observed. "He's in the cannery all day
+and then he practises violin and tinkers. I only see him one or two
+evenings a week; and I never think of him at all."
+
+"As my secretary," said I, "you may make a mental note for me: remind me
+that I wish sometime to meet Peter."
+
+"He'll be real pleased," said Miggy, "and real scared. Now about my
+being your secretary: do I have to take down everything you do?"
+
+"My dear child!" I exclaimed.
+
+"Don't I?" said Miggy. "Why, the Ladies' Aid has a secretary and she
+takes down every single thing the society does. I thought that was being
+one."
+
+I told her, as well as might be, what I should require of her--not by
+now, I own, with any particularity of idea that I had a secretary, but
+rather that I had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be of use in
+many a little mechanical task. She listened, and, when I had made an
+end, gave her three little nods; but her face fell.
+
+"It's just doing as you're told," she summed it up with a sigh.
+"Everything is, ain't it? I thought maybe Secretary was doing your
+best."
+
+"But it is," I told her.
+
+"No," she said positively, "you can't do your best when you have to do
+just exactly what you're told. Your _best_ tells you how to do itself."
+
+At this naïve putting of the personal equation which should play so
+powerful a part in the economics of toil I was minded to apologize for
+intending to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible duties with
+me. She had the truth, though: that the strong creative instinct is the
+chief endowment, primal as breath; for on it depend both life and the
+expression of life, the life of the race and the ultimate racial
+utterance.
+
+We talked on for a little, Miggy, I observed, having that royal
+indifference to time which, when it does not involve indifference to the
+time of other people, I delightedly commend. For myself, I can never
+understand why I should eat at one or sleep at eleven, if it is, as it
+often is, _my_ one and _my_ eleven and nobody else's. For, as between
+the clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other o'clocks are mine
+and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who
+would interrupt a sunset to go to dine, or wave away the stars in their
+courses to go to sleep, merely because the hour had struck. It must be
+in their blood, poor things, as descendants from the cell, to which time
+and space were the only considerations.
+
+When Miggy was leaving, she paused on the threshold with her first hint
+of shyness, a hint which I welcomed. I think that every one to whom I am
+permanently drawn must have in his nature a phase of shyness, even of
+unconquerable timidity.
+
+"If I shouldn't do things," Miggy said, "like you're used to having them
+done--would you tell me? I know a few nice things to do and I do 'em.
+But I'm always waking up in the night and thinking what a lot there must
+be that I do wrong. So if I do 'em wrong would you mind not just
+squirming and keeping still about 'em--but tell me?"
+
+"I'll tell you, child, if there is need," I promised her. And I caught
+her smile--that faint, swift, solemn minute which sometimes reveals on a
+face the childlike wistfulness of every one of us, under the mask, to
+come as near as may be to the others.
+
+I own that when, just now, I turned from her leave-taking, I had that
+infrequent sense of emptiness-in-the-room which I have had usually only
+with those I love or with some rare being, all fire and spirit and idea,
+who has flamed in my presence and died into departure. I cannot see why
+we do not feel this sense of emptiness whenever we leave one another.
+Would you not think that it would be so with us who live above the abyss
+and below the uttermost spaces? It is not so, and there are those from
+whose presence I long to be gone in a discomfort which is a kind of
+orison of my soul to my body to hurry away. It is so that I long to be
+gone from that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, and of this I am
+sorely ashamed. But I think that all such dissonance is merely a failure
+in method, and that the spirit of this business of being is that we long
+for one another to be near.
+
+Yes, in "this world of visible images" and patterns and schedules and
+o'clocks, it is like stumbling on the true game to come on some one who
+is not on any dial. And I fancy that Miggy is no o'clock. She is not
+Dawn o'clock, because already she has lived so much; nor Noon o'clock,
+because she is far from her high moment; nor is she Dusk o'clock,
+because she is so poignantly alive. Rather, she is like the chimes of a
+clock--which do not tell the time, but which almost say something else.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SPLENDOUR TOWN
+
+
+Last night I went for a walk across the river, and Little Child went
+with me to the other end of the bridge.
+
+I would have expected it to be impossible to come to the fourth chapter
+and to have said nothing of the river. But the reason is quite clear:
+for the setting of the stories of the village as I know them is
+preëminently rambling streets and trim dooryards, and neat interiors
+with tidy centre-tables. Nature is merely the necessary opera-house, not
+the intimate setting. Nature's speech through the trees is most
+curiously taken for granted as being trees alone, and she is, as I have
+shown, sometimes cut off quite rudely in the midst of an elm or linden
+sentence and curtly interrupted by a sidewalk. If a grove of trees is
+allowed to remain in a north dooryard it is almost certainly because the
+trees break the wind. Likewise, Nature's unfoldings in our turf and
+clover we incline to regard as merely lawns, the results of seeds and
+autumn fertilizing. Our vines are for purposes of shade, cheaper and
+prettier than awnings or porch rollers. With our gardens, where our
+"table vegetables" are grown, Nature is, I think, considered to have
+little or nothing to do; and we openly pride ourselves on our early this
+and our prodigious that, quite as when we cut a dress or build a
+lean-to. We admit the rain or the sunny slope into partnership, but what
+we recognize is weather rather than the mighty spirit of motherhood in
+Nature. Indeed, our flower gardens, where are wrought such miracles of
+poppies and pinks, are perhaps the only threshold on which we stand
+abashed, as at the sound of a singing voice, a voice that sings
+believing itself to be alone.
+
+These things being so, it is no wonder that the river has been for so
+long no integral part of village life. The river is accounted a place to
+fish, a place to bathe, a thing to cross to get to the other side, an
+objective point--including the new iron bridge--to which to take guests.
+But of the everyday life it is no proper part. On the contrary, the
+other little river, which strikes out silverly for itself to eastward,
+is quite a personality in the village, for on it is a fine fleet of
+little launches with which folk take delight. But this river of mine to
+the west is a thing of whims and eddies and shifting sand bars, and here
+not many boats adventure. So the river is accepted as a kind of pleasant
+hermit living on the edge of the village. It draws few of us as Nature
+can draw to herself. We know the water as a taste only and not yet as an
+emotion. We say that we should enjoy going there if we had the time. I
+know, I know. You see that we do not yet _live_ the river, as an ancient
+people would live their moor. But in our launches, our camping parties,
+our flights to a little near lake for dinner, in a tent here and a swing
+there, set to face riverward, there lies the thrill of process, and by
+these things Nature is wooing us surely to her heart. Already the Pump
+pasture has for us the quality of individuality, and we have picnics
+there and speak of the pasture almost as of a host. Presently we shall
+be companioned by all our calm stretches of meadow, our brown sand bars,
+our Caledonia hills, our quiet lakes, our unnavigable river, as the
+Northmen were fellowed of the sea.
+
+Little Child has at once a wilder and a tamer instinct. She has this
+fellowship and the fellowship of more.
+
+"Where shall we go to-day?" I ask her, and she always says, "Far away
+for a party"--in a combination, it would seem, of the blood of shepherd
+kings with certain corpuscles of modernity. And when we are in the woods
+she instances the same dual quality by, "Now let's sit down in a _roll_
+and wait for a fairy, and be a society."
+
+We always go along the levee, Little Child and I, and I watch the hour
+have its way with her, and I do not deny that occasionally I try to
+improve on the hour by a tale of magic or by the pastime of teaching her
+a lyric. I love to hear her pretty treble in "Who is Sylvia? What is
+she?" and "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," and "April, April, laugh
+thy girlish laughter," and in Pippa's song. Last night, to be sure, the
+lyrics rather gave way to some talk about the circus to be to-day, an
+unwonted benison on the village. But even the reality of the circus
+could not long keep Little Child from certain sweet vagaries, and I love
+best to hear her in these fancyings.
+
+"Here," she said to me last night, "is her sponge."
+
+I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are always finding the fairy's
+cast-off ornaments and articles of toilet. On occasion we have found her
+crown, her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her plumed fan,
+her parasol--a skirtful of fancies which next day Little Child has
+brought to me in a shoe box for safe keeping so that "They" would not
+throw the things away: that threatening "They" which overhangs
+childhood, casting away its treasures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying
+a ladder straight through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the
+back yard. I can visualize that "They" as I believe it seems to some
+children, something dark and beetling and menacing and imminent, less
+like the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this precious idea of
+the Family, to conserve which is one of our chief hopes, should so often
+be made to appear to its youngest member in the general semblance of a
+phalanx?
+
+We sat down for a little at the south terminal of the bridge, where a
+steep bank and a few desperately clinging trees have arranged a little
+shrine to the sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across the bridge
+I had been watching against the gold the majestic or apathetic or sodden
+profiles of the farmers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face,
+it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it to forecast the
+weather. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky
+and called "The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the
+village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white
+pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital. And
+there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the butcher's cart halted in
+snow while a tawny-jerseyed boy lifts high his yellow light to find a
+parcel. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising
+values and fresco our village libraries with them--yes, and our drug
+stores, too.
+
+The story that I told Little Child while we rested had the symbolism
+which I often choose for her: that of a girl keeping a garden for the
+coming of a child. All her life she has been making ready and nothing
+has been badly done. In one green room of the garden she has put fair
+thoughts, in another fair words, and in the innermost fastnesses of the
+garden fair deeds. Here she has laid colour, there sweet sound, there
+something magic which is a special kind of seeing. When the child comes,
+these things will be first toys, then tools, then weapons. Sometimes the
+old witch of the wood tries to blow into the garden a thistle of discord
+or bubbles of delight to be followed, and these must be warded away. All
+day the spirit of the child to come wanders through the garden, telling
+the girl what to do here or here, keeping her from guile or from
+idleness-without-dreams. She knows its presence and I think that she has
+even named it. If it shall be a little girl, then it is to be Dagmar,
+Mother of Day, or Dawn; but if a little boy, then it shall be called for
+one whom she has not yet seen. Meanwhile, outside the door of the garden
+many would speak with the girl. On these she looks, sometimes she even
+leans from her casement, and once, it may be, she reaches out her hand,
+ever so swiftly, and some one without there touches it. But at that she
+snatches back her hand and bars the garden, and for a time the spirit of
+the little child does not come very near. So she goes serenely on
+toward the day when a far horn sounds and somebody comes down the air
+from heaven, as it has occurred to nobody else to do. And they hear the
+voice of the little child, singing in the garden.
+
+"The girl is me," says little Little Child, as she always says when I
+have finished this story.
+
+"Yes," I tell her.
+
+"I'd like to see that garden," she says thoughtfully.
+
+Then I show her the village in the trees of the other shore, roof upon
+roof pricked by a slim steeple; for that is the garden.
+
+"I don't care about just bein' good," she says, "but I'd like to
+housekeep that garden."
+
+"For a sometime-little-child of your own," I tell her.
+
+"Yes," she assents, "an' make dresses for."
+
+I cannot understand how mothers let them grow up not knowing, these
+little mothers-to-be who so often never guess their vocation. It is a
+reason for everything commonly urged on the ground of conduct, a ground
+so lifeless to youth. But quicken every desert space with "It must be
+done so for the sake of the little child you will have some day," and
+there rises a living spirit. Morals, civics, town and home economics,
+learning--there is the concrete reason for them all; and the abstract
+understanding of these things for their own sakes will follow,
+flower-wise, fruit-wise, for the healing of the times.
+
+I had told to that old Aunt Effie who keeps house for Miggy and Little
+Child something of what I thought to do--breaking in upon the old
+woman's talk of linoleum and beans and other things having, so to say,
+one foot in the universe.
+
+"Goodness," that old woman had answered, with her worried turn of head,
+"I'm real glad you're going to be here. _I dread saying anything._"
+
+Here too we must look to the larger day when the state shall train for
+parenthood and for citizenship, when the schools and the universities
+shall speak for the state the cosmic truths, and when by comparison
+botany and differential calculus shall be regarded as somewhat less
+vital in ushering in the kingdom of God.
+
+The water reservoir rose slim against the woods to the north; to the
+south was a crouching hop house covered with old vines. I said to Little
+Child:--
+
+"Look everywhere and tell me where you think a princess would live if
+she lived here."
+
+She looked everywhere and answered:--
+
+"In the water tower in those woods."
+
+"And where would the old witch live?" I asked her.
+
+"In the Barden's hop house," she answered.
+
+"And where would the spirit of the little child be?" I tested her.
+
+She looked long out across the water.
+
+"I think in the sunset," she said at last. And then of her own will she
+said over the Sunset Spell I have taught her:--
+
+
+     "I love to stand in this great air
+     And see the sun go down.
+     It shows me a bright veil to wear
+     And such a pretty gown.
+     Oh, I can see a playmate there
+     Far up in Splendour Town."
+
+
+I could hardly bear to let her go home, but eight o'clock is very
+properly Little Child's bedtime, and so I sent her across the bridge
+waving her hand every little way in that fashion of children who, I
+think, are hoping thus to save the moment that has just died. I have
+known times when I, too, have wanted to wave my hand at a moment and
+keep it looking at me as long as possible. But presently the moment
+almost always turned away.
+
+Last night I half thought that the sunset itself would like to have
+stayed. It went so delicately about its departure, taking to itself
+first a shawl of soft dyes, then a painted scarf, then frail iris wings.
+It mounted far up the heavens, testing its strength for flight and
+shaking brightness from its garments. And it slipped lingeringly away as
+if the riot of colour were after all the casual part, and the real
+business of the moment were to stay on with everybody. In the tenuity of
+the old anthropomorphisms I marvel that they did not find the sunset a
+living thing, tender of mortals, forever loth to step from out one
+moment into the cherishing arms of the next. Think! The sunset that the
+Greeks knew has been flaming round the world, dying from moment to
+moment and from mile to mile, with no more of pause than the human
+heart, since sunset flamed for Hero and Helen and Ariadne.
+
+If the sunset was made for lovers, and in our midland summers lingers on
+their account, then last night it was lingering partly for Miggy and
+Peter. At the end of the bridge I came on them together.
+
+Miggy did not flush when she saw me, and though I would not have
+expected that she would flush I was yet disappointed. I take an
+old-fashioned delight in women whose high spirit is compatible with a
+sensibility which causes them the little agonizings proper to this
+moment, and to that.
+
+But Miggy introduced Peter with all composure.
+
+"This," she said, "is Peter. His last name is Cary."
+
+"How do you do, Peter?" I said very heartily.
+
+I thought that Peter did something the rationale of which might have
+been envied of courts. He turned to Miggy and said "Thank you."
+Secretly I congratulated him on his embarrassment. In a certain milieu
+social shyness is as authentic a patent of perception as in another
+milieu is taste.
+
+"Come home with me," I besought them. "We can find cake. We can make
+lemonade. We can do some reading aloud." For I will not ask the mere
+cake and lemonade folk to my house. They must be, in addition, good or
+wise or not averse to becoming either.
+
+I conceived Peter's evident agony to rise from his need to reply.
+Instead, it rose from his need to refuse.
+
+"I take my violin lesson," he explained miserably.
+
+"He takes his violin lesson," Miggy added, with a pretty, somewhat
+maternal manner of translating. I took note of this faint manner of
+proprietorship, for it is my belief that when a woman assumes it she
+means more than she knows that she means.
+
+"I'm awful sorry," said Peter, from his heart; "I was just having to go
+back this minute."
+
+"To-morrow's his regular lesson day," Miggy explained, "but to-morrow
+he's going to take me to the circus, so he has his lesson to-night. Go
+on," she added, "you'll be late and you'll have to pay just the same
+anyway." I took note of this frank fashion of protection of interests,
+for it is my belief that matters are advancing when the lady practises
+economics in courtship. But I saw that Miggy was manifesting no
+symptoms of accompanying Peter, and I begged them not to let me spoil
+their walk.
+
+"It's all right," Miggy said; "he'll have to hurry and I don't want to
+go in yet anyway. I'll walk back with you." And of this I took note with
+less satisfaction. It was as if Miggy had not come alive.
+
+Peter smiled at us, caught off his hat, and went away with it in his
+hand, and the moment that he left my presence he became another being. I
+could see by his back that he was himself, free again, under no bondage
+of manner. It is a terrific problem, this enslavement of speech and
+trivial conduct which to some of us provides a pleasant medium and for
+some of us furnishes fetters. When will they manage a wireless society?
+I am tired waiting. For be it a pleasant medium or be it fetters, the
+present communication keeps us all apart. "I hope," I said once at
+dinner, "that I shall be living when they think they get the first sign
+from Mars." "I hope," said my companion, "that I shall be living when I
+think I get the first sign from you--and you--and you, about this
+table." If this young Shelley could really have made some sign, what
+might it not have been?
+
+"Everybody's out walking to-night," Miggy observed. "There's Liva Vesey
+and Timothy Toplady ahead of us."
+
+"They are going to be married, are they not?" I asked.
+
+Miggy looked as if I had said something indelicate.
+
+"Well," she answered, "not out loud yet."
+
+Then, fearing that she had rebuked me, "He's going to take her to the
+circus to-morrow in their new buckboard," she volunteered. And I find in
+Friendship that the circus is accounted a kind of official
+trysting-place for all sweethearts.
+
+We kept a little way back of the lovers, the sun making Liva Vesey's
+pink frock like a vase-shaped lamp of rose. Timothy was looking down at
+her and straightway looking away again when Liva had summoned her
+courage to look up. They were extremely pleasant to watch, but this
+Miggy did not know and she was intent upon me. She had met Little Child
+running home.
+
+"She's nice to take a walk with," Miggy said; "but I like to walk around
+by myself too. Only to-night Peter came."
+
+"Miggy," said I, "I want to congratulate you that Peter is in love with
+you."
+
+She looked up with puzzled eyes.
+
+"Why, that was nothing," she said; "he seemed to do it real easy."
+
+"But it is _not_ easy," I assured her, "to find many such fine young
+fellows as Peter seems to be. I hope you will be very happy together."
+
+"I'm not engaged," said Miggy, earnestly; "I'm only invited."
+
+"Ah, well," I said, "if I may be allowed--I hope you are not sending
+regrets."
+
+Miggy laughed out suddenly.
+
+"Married isn't like a party," she said; "I know that much about society.
+Party you either accept or regret. Married you do both."
+
+I could have been no more amazed if the rosewood clock had said it.
+
+"Who has been talking to you, child?" I asked in distress.
+
+"I got it out of living," said Miggy, solemnly. "You live along and you
+live along and you find out 'most everything."
+
+I looked away across the Pump pasture where the railway tracks cut the
+Plank Road, that comes on and on until it is modified into Daphne
+Street. I remembered a morning of mist and dogwood when I had walked
+that road through the gateway into an earthly paradise. Have I not said
+that since that time we two have been, as it were, set to music and
+sung; so that the silences of separation are difficult to beguile save
+by the companionship of the village--the village that has somehow taught
+Miggy its bourgeoise lesson of doubt?
+
+My silence laid on her some vague burden of proof.
+
+"Besides," she said, "I'm not like the women who marry people. Most of
+'em that's married ain't all married, anyway."
+
+"What do you mean, child?" I demanded.
+
+"They're not," protested Miggy. "They marry like they pick out a way to
+have a dress made when they don't admire any of the styles very much,
+and they've wore out everything else. Women like some things about
+somebody, and that much they marry. Then the rest of him never is
+married at all, and by and by that rest starts to get lonesome."
+
+"But Miggy," I said to all this, "I should think you might like Peter
+entirely."
+
+She surprised me by her seriousness.
+
+"Anyhow, I've got my little sister to bring up," she said; "Aunt Effie
+hasn't anything. And I couldn't put two on him to support."
+
+I wondered why not, but I said nothing.
+
+"And besides," Miggy said after a pause, "there's Peter's father. You
+know about him?"
+
+I did know--who in the village did not know? Since my neighbour had told
+me of him I had myself seen him singing through the village streets,
+shouting out and disturbing the serene evenings, drunken, piteous....
+
+"Peter has him all the time," I suggested.
+
+She must have found a hint of resistance in my voice, for her look
+questioned me.
+
+"I never could stand it to have anybody like that in the house," she
+said defensively. "I've told Peter. I've told him both reasons...."
+Miggy threw out her arms and stood still, facing the sunset. "Anyway, I
+want to keep on feeling all free and liberty-like!" she said.
+
+This intense individualism of youth, passioning only for far spaces,
+taking no account of the common lot nor as yet urgent to share it is,
+like the panther grace in the tread of the cat, a survival of the
+ancient immunity from accountabilities. To note it is to range down the
+evolution of ages. To tame it--there is a task for all the servants of
+the new order.
+
+Miggy was like some little bright creature caught unaware in the net of
+living and still remembering the colonnades of otherwhere, renowned for
+their shining. She was looking within the sunset, where it was a thing
+of wings and doors ajar and fair corridors. I saw the great freedoms of
+sunset in her face--the sunset where Little Child and I had agreed that
+a certain spirit lived.... Perhaps it was that that little vagrant
+spirit signalled to me--and the Custodian understood it. Perhaps it was
+that I saw, beneath the freedoms, the woman-tenderness in the girl's
+face. In any case I spoke abruptly and half without intention.
+
+"But you don't want to be free from Little Child. It is almost as if
+she were your little girl, is it not?" I said.
+
+Miggy's eyes did not leave the sunset. It was rather as if she saw some
+answer there.
+
+"Well, I like to pretend she is," she said simply.
+
+"That," I said quietly, "is pleasant to pretend."
+
+And now her mood had changed as if some one had come to take her place.
+
+"But if she _was_--that," she said, "her name, then, would most likely
+be Margaret, like mine, wouldn't it?"
+
+"It would be very well to have it Margaret," I agreed.
+
+Her step was quickened as by sudden shyness.
+
+"It's funny to think about," she said. "Sometimes I most think of--her,
+till she seems in the room. Not quite my sister. I mean _Margaret_."
+
+It made my heart beat somewhat. I wondered if anything of my story to
+Little Child was left in my mind, and if subconsciously Miggy was
+reading it. This has sometimes happened to me with a definiteness which
+would be surprising if the supernatural were to me less natural. But I
+think that it was merely because Miggy had no idea of the sanctity of
+what she felt that she was speaking of it.
+
+"How does she look?" I asked.
+
+"Like me," said Miggy, readily; "I don't want her to either. I want her
+to be pretty and I'm not. But when I think of her running 'round in the
+house or on the street, I always make her look like me. Only little."
+
+"Running 'round in the house." That was the way my neighbour had put it.
+Perhaps it is the way that every woman puts it.
+
+"Does she seem like you, too?" I tempted her on.
+
+"Oh, better," Miggy said confidently; "learning to play on the piano and
+not much afraid of folks and real happy."
+
+"Don't you ever pretend about a boy?" I asked.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No," she said; "if I do--I never can think him out real plain. Margaret
+I can most see."
+
+And this, too, was like the girl in the garden and the spirit of that
+one to be called by a name of one whom she had not seen.
+
+I think that I have never hoped so much that I might know the right
+thing to say. And when most I wish this I do as I did then: I keep my
+impulse silent and I see if that vague Custodian within, somewhere
+between the seeing and the knowing, will not speak for me. I wonder if
+she did? At all events, what either she or I said was:--
+
+"Miggy! Look everywhere and tell me the most beautiful thing you can
+see."
+
+She was not an instant in deciding.
+
+"Why, sunset," she said.
+
+"Promise me," said I--said we!--"that you will remember _Now_. And that
+after to-night, when you see a sunset--always, always, till she
+comes--you will think about her. About Margaret."
+
+Because this caught her fancy she promised readily enough. And then we
+lingered a little, while the moment gave up its full argosy. I have a
+fancy for these times when I say "I will remember," and I am always
+selecting them and knowing, as if I had tied a knot in them, that I will
+remember. These times become the moments at which I keep waving my hand
+in the hope that they will never turn away. And it was this significance
+which I wished the hour to have for Miggy, so that for her the sunset
+should forever hold, as Little Child had said that it holds, that tiny,
+wandering spirit....
+
+Liva Vesey and Timothy had lingered, too, and we passed them on the
+bridge, he still trying to win her eyes, and his own eyes fleeing
+precipitantly whenever she looked up. The two seemed leaning upon the
+winged light, the calm stretches of the Pump pasture, the brown sand
+bar, the Caledonia hills. And the lovers and the quiet river and the
+village, roof upon roof, in the trees of the other shore, and most of
+all Miggy and her shadowy Margaret seemed to me like the words of some
+mighty cosmic utterance, with the country evening for its tranquil
+voice.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+DIFFERENT
+
+
+Those who had expected the circus procession to arrive from across the
+canal to-day were amazed to observe it filing silently across the tracks
+from the Plank Road. The Eight Big Shows Combined had arrived in the
+gray dawn; and word had not yet gone the rounds that, the Fair Ground
+being too wet, the performance would "show" in the Pump pasture, beyond
+the mill. There was to be no evening amusement. It was a wait between
+trains that conferred the circus on Friendship at all.
+
+Half the country-side, having brought its lunch into town to make a day
+of it, trailed as a matter of course after the clown's cart at the end
+of the parade, and about noon arrived in the pasture with the
+pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to find it transformed
+into unknown ground. Who in the vicinity of the village had not known
+the Pump pasture of old? Haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,
+it had lain expressionless as the hills, for as long as memory. When in
+spring, "Where you goin'? Don't you go far in the hot sun!" from
+Friendship mothers was answered by, "We're just goin' up to the Pump
+pasture for vi'lets" from Friendship young, no more was to be said. The
+pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great, faithful Newfoundland
+dog; and about it was something of the safety of silence and warmth and
+night-in-a-trundle-bed.
+
+And lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture were articulate. The great
+elliptical tent, the strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of
+the hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were doing--these gave
+to the place the aspect of having from the first been secretly familiar
+with more than one had suspected.
+
+"Ain't it the divil?" demanded Timothy Toplady, Jr., ecstatically, as
+the glory of the scene burst upon him.
+
+Liva Vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in the buckboard, looked up
+at his brown Adam's apple--she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as
+her sweetheart's face--and rejoined:--
+
+"Oh, Timmie! ain't it just what you might say _great_?"
+
+"You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly, "that it is that."
+
+He looked down in her face with a lifting of eyebrows and an honest
+fatuity of mouth. Liva Vesey knew the look--without ever having met it
+squarely, she could tell when it was there, and she promptly turned her
+head, displaying to Timothy's ardent eyes tight coils of beautiful blond
+crinkly hair, a little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver
+locket chain. At which Timothy now collapsed with the mien of a man who
+is unwillingly having second thoughts.
+
+"My!" he said.
+
+They drove into the meadow, and when the horse had been loosed and cared
+for, they found a great cottonwood tree, its leaves shimmering and
+moving like little banners, and there they spread their lunch. The sunny
+slope was dotted with other lunchers. The look of it all was very gay,
+partly because the trees were in June green, and among them windmills
+were whirling like gaunt and acrobatic witches, and partly because it
+was the season when the women were brave in new hats, very pink and very
+perishable.
+
+The others observed the two good-humouredly from afar, and once or twice
+a tittering group of girls, unescorted, passed the cottonwood tree,
+making elaborate detours to avoid it. At which Liva flushed, pretending
+not to notice; and Timothy looked wistfully in her face to see if she
+wished that she had not come with him. However, Timothy never dared
+look at her long enough to find out anything at all; for the moment that
+she seemed about to meet his look he always dropped his eyes
+precipitantly to her little round chin and so to the silver chain and
+locket. And then he was miserable.
+
+It was strange that a plain heart-shaped locket, having no initials,
+could make a man so utterly, extravagantly unhappy. Three months
+earlier, Liva, back from a visit in the city, had appeared with her
+locket. Up to that time the only personality in which Timothy had ever
+indulged was to mention to her that her eyes were the colour of his
+sister's eyes, whose eyes were the colour of their mother's eyes and
+their father's eyes, and of Timothy's own, and "Our eyes match, mine and
+yours," he had blurted out, crimson. And yet, even on these terms, he
+had taken the liberty of being wretched because of her. How much more
+now when he was infinitely nearer to her? For with the long spring
+evenings upon them, when he had sat late at the Vesey farm, matters had
+so far advanced with Timothy that, with his own hand, he had picked a
+green measuring-worm from Liva's throat. Every time he looked at her
+throat he thought of that worm with rapture. But also every time he
+looked at her throat he saw the silver chain and locket. And on circus
+day, if the oracles seemed auspicious, he meant to find out whose
+picture was worn in that locket, even though the knowledge made him a
+banished man.
+
+If only she would ever mention the locket! he thought disconsolately
+over lunch. If only she would "bring up the subject," then he could find
+courage. But she never did mention it. And the talk ran now:--
+
+"Would you ever, ever think this was the Pump pasture?" from Liva.
+
+"No, you wouldn't, would you? It don't look the same, does it? You'd
+think you was in a city or somewheres, wouldn't you now? Ain't it
+differ'nt?"
+
+"Did you count the elephants?"
+
+"I bet I did. Didn't you? Ten, wa'n't it? Did you count the cages?
+Neither did I. And they was too many of 'em shut up. I don't know
+whether it's much of a circus or not--" with gloomy superiority--"they
+not bein' any calliope, so."
+
+"A good many cute fellows in the band," observed Liva. For Liva would
+have teased a bit if Timothy would have teased too. But Timothy replied
+in mere misery:--
+
+"You can't tell much about these circus men, Liva. They're apt to be the
+kind that carouse around. I guess they ain't much to 'em but their swell
+way."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Liva.
+
+Then a silence fell, resembling nothing so much as the breath of
+hesitation following a _faux pas_, save that this silence was longer,
+and was terminated by Liva humming a little snatch of song to symbolize
+how wholly delightful everything was.
+
+"My!" said Timothy, finally. "You wouldn't think this was the Pump
+pasture at all, it looks so differ'nt."
+
+"That's so," Liva said. "You wouldn't."
+
+It was almost as if the two were inarticulate, as the pasture had been
+until the strange influences of the day had come to quicken it.
+
+While Liva, with housewifely hands, put away the lunch things in their
+basket, Timothy nibbled along lengths of grass and hugged his knees and
+gloomed at the locket. It was then that Miggy and Peter passed them and
+the four greeted one another with the delicate, sheepish enjoyment of
+lovers who look on and understand other lovers. Then Timothy's look went
+back to Liva. Liva's rose-pink dress was cut distractingly without a
+collar, and the chain seemed to caress her little throat. Moreover, the
+locket had a way of hiding beneath a fold of ruffle, as if it were _her_
+locket and as if Timothy had no share in it.
+
+"Oh," cried Liva, "_Timmie_! That was the lion roared. Did you hear?"
+
+Timothy nodded darkly, as if there were worse than lions.
+
+"Wasn't it the lion?" she insisted.
+
+Timothy nodded again; he thought it might have been the lion.
+
+"What you so glum about, Timmie?" his sweetheart asked, glancing at him
+fleetingly.
+
+Timothy flushed to the line of his hair.
+
+"Gosh," he said, "this here pasture looks so differ'nt I can't get over
+it."
+
+"Yes," said Liva, "it does look differ'nt, don't it?"
+
+Before one o'clock they drifted with the rest toward the animal tent.
+They went incuriously past the snake show, the Eats-'em-alive show, and
+the Eastern vaudeville. But hard by the red wagon where tickets were
+sold Timothy halted spellbound. What he had heard was:--
+
+"Types. Types. Right this way AND in this direction for Types. No,
+Ladies, and no, Gents: Not Tin-types. But Photo-types. Photo_graphs_ put
+up in Tintype style AT Tintype price. Three for a quarter. The fourth of
+a dozen for the fourth of a dollar. Elegant pictures, elegant finish,
+refined, up-to-date. Of yourself, Gents, of yourself. Or of any one you
+see around you. And WHILE you wait."
+
+Timothy said it before he had any idea that he meant to say it:--
+
+"Liva," he begged, "come on. You."
+
+When she understood and when Timothy saw the momentary abashment in her
+eyes, it is certain that he had never loved her more. But the very next
+moment she was far more adorable.
+
+"Not unless you will, Timmie," she said, "and trade."
+
+He followed her into the hot little tent as if the waiting chair were a
+throne of empire. And perhaps it was. For presently Timothy had in his
+pocket a tiny blurry bit of paper at which he had hardly dared so much
+as glance, and he had given another blurry bit into her keeping. But
+that was not all. When she thanked him she had met his eyes. And he
+thought--oh, no matter what he thought. But it was as if there were
+established a throne of empire with Timothy lord of his world.
+
+Then they stepped along the green way of the Pump pasture and they
+entered the animal tent, and Strange Things closed about them. There
+underfoot lay the green of the meadow, verdant grass and not infrequent
+moss, plantain and sorrel and clover, all as yet hardly trampled and
+still sweet with the breath of kine and sheep. And three feet above,
+foregathered from the Antipodes, crouched and snarled the striped and
+spotted things of the wild, with teeth and claws quick to kill, and with
+generations of the jungle in their shifting eyes. The bright wings of
+unknown birds, the scream of some harsh throat of an alien wood, the
+monkeys chattering, the soft stamp and padding of the elephants chained
+in a stately central line along the clover--it was certain, one would
+have said, that these must change the humour of the pasture as the
+companionship of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the
+mind. That the pasture, indeed, would never be the same, and that its
+influence would be breathed on all who entered there. Already Liva and
+Timothy, each with the other's picture in a pocket, moved down that tent
+of the field in another world. Or had that world begun at the door of
+the stuffy little phototype tent?
+
+It was the cage of bright-winged birds that held the two. Timothy stood
+grasping his elbows and looking at that flitting flame and orange. Dare
+he ask her if she would wear his phototype in her locket--dare he--dare
+he----
+
+He turned to look at her. Oh, and the rose-pink cambric was so near his
+elbow! Her face, upturned to the birds, was flushed, her lips were
+parted, her eyes that matched Timothy's were alight; but there was
+always in Timothy's eyes a look, a softness, a kind of speech that
+Liva's could not match. He longed inexpressibly to say to her what was
+in his heart concerning the locket--the phototype--themselves. And Liva
+herself was longing to say something about the sheer glory of the hour.
+So she looked up at his brown Adam's apple, and,
+
+"Think, Timmie," she said, "they're all in the Pump pasture where
+nothin' but cows an' robins an' orioles ever was before!"
+
+"I know it--I know it!" breathed Timothy fervently. "Don't seem like it
+could be the same place, does it?"
+
+Liva barely lifted her eyes.
+
+"It makes us seem differ'nt, too," she said, and flushed a little, and
+turned to hurry on.
+
+"I was thinkin' that too!" he cried ecstatically, overtaking her. But
+all that Timothy could see was tight coils of blond, crinkled hair, and
+a little ear and a curve of white throat, with a silver locket chain.
+
+Down the majestic line of the elephants, towering in the apotheosis of
+mere bulk to preach ineffectually that spirit is apocryphal and mass
+alone is potent; past the panthers that sniffed as if they guessed the
+nearness of the grazing herd in the next pasture; past the cage in which
+the lioness lay snarling and baring her teeth above her cubs, so
+pathetically akin to the meadow in her motherhood; past unknown
+creatures with surprising horns and shaggy necks and lolling tongues--it
+was a wonderful progress. But it was as if Liva had found something more
+wonderful than these when, before the tigers' cage, she stepped
+forward, stooped a little beneath the rope, and stood erect with
+shining eyes.
+
+"Look!" she said. "Look, Timmie."
+
+She was holding a blue violet.
+
+"In front of the tigers; it was _growing_!"
+
+"Why don't you give it to me?" was Timothy's only answer.
+
+She laid it in his hand, laughing a little at her daring.
+
+"It won't ever be the same," she said. "Tigers have walked over it. My,
+ain't everything in the pasture differ'nt?"
+
+"Just as differ'nt as differ'nt can be," Timothy admitted.
+
+"Here we are back to the birds again," Liva said, sighing.
+
+Timothy had put the violet in his coat pocket and he stood staring at
+the orange and flame in the cage: Her phototype and a violet--her
+phototype and a violet.
+
+But all he said, not daring to look at her at all, was:--
+
+"I can't make it seem like the Pump pasture to save me."
+
+There is something, as they have said of a bugle, "winged and warlike"
+about a circus--the confusions, the tramplings, the shapes, the keen
+flavour of the Impending, and above all the sense of the Untoward,
+which is eternal and which survives glamour as his grave survives a man.
+Liva and Timothy sat on the top row of seats and felt it all, and
+believed it to be merely honest mirth. Occasionally Liva turned and
+peered out through the crack in the canvas where the side met the roof,
+for the pure joy of feeling herself alien to the long green fields with
+their grazing herds and their orioles, and at one with the colour and
+music and life within. And she was glad of it all, glad to be there with
+Timothy. But all she said was:--
+
+"Oh, Timmie, I hope it ain't half over yet. Do you s'pose it is? When I
+look outside it makes me feel as if it was over."
+
+And Timothy, his heart beating, a great hope living in his breast,
+answered only:--
+
+"No, I guess it'll be quite some time yet. It's a nice show. Nice
+performance for the money, right through. Ain't it?"
+
+When at length it really was over and they left the tent, the wagons
+from town and country-side and the "depot busses" had made such a place
+of dust and confusion that he took her back to the cottonwood on the
+slope to wait until he brought the buckboard round. He left her leaning
+against the tree, the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly on
+the smooth silver locket. And when he drove back, and reached down a
+hand to draw her up to the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment,
+as she mounted, with all the panorama of the field behind her, he
+perceived instantly that the locket was gone. Oh, and at that his heart
+leaped up! What more natural than to dream that she had taken it off to
+slip his phototype inside and that he had come back too soon? What more
+natural than to divine the reality of dreams?
+
+His trembling hope held him silent until they reached the highway. Then
+he looked at the field, elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming
+crowds, and he observed as well as he could for the thumping of his
+heart:--
+
+"I kind o' hate to go off an' leave it. To-morrow when I go to town with
+the pie-plant, it'll look just like nothin' but a pasture again."
+
+Liva glanced up at him and dropped her eyes.
+
+"I ain't sure," she said.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked her, wondering.
+
+But Liva shook her head.
+
+"I ain't sure," she said evasively, "but I don't think somehow the Pump
+pasture'll _ever_ be the same again."
+
+Timothy mulled that for a moment. Oh, could she _possibly_ mean
+because....
+
+Yet what he said was, "Well, the old pasture looks differ'nt enough now,
+all right."
+
+"Yes," assented Liva, "don't it?"
+
+Timothy had supper at the Vesey farm. It was eight o'clock and the
+elder Veseys had been gone to prayer-meeting for an hour when Liva
+discovered that she had lost her locket.
+
+"Lost your locket!" Timothy repeated. It was the first time, for all his
+striving, that he had been able to mention the locket in her presence.
+He had tried, all the way home that afternoon, to call her attention
+innocently to its absence, but the thing that he hoped held fast his
+intention. "Why," he cried now, in the crash of that hope, "you had it
+on when I left you under the cottonwood."
+
+"You sure?" Liva demanded.
+
+"Sure," Timothy said earnestly; "didn't--didn't you have it off while I
+was gone?" he asked wistfully.
+
+"No," Liva replied blankly; she had not taken it off.
+
+When they had looked in the buckboard and had found nothing, Timothy
+spoke tentatively.
+
+"Tell you what," he said. "We'll light a lantern and hitch up and drive
+back to the Pump pasture and look."
+
+"Could we?" Liva hesitated.
+
+It was gloriously starlight when the buckboard rattled out on the Plank
+Road. Timothy, wretched as he was at her concern over the locket, was
+yet recklessly, magnificently happy in being alone by her side in the
+warm dusk, and on her ministry. She was silent, and, for almost the
+first time since he had known her, Timothy was silent too--as if he were
+giving his inarticulateness honest expression instead of forcing it
+continually to antics of speech.
+
+From the top of the hill they looked down on the Pump pasture. It lay
+there, silent and dark, but no longer expressionless; for instantly
+their imagination quickened it with all the music and colour and life of
+the afternoon. Just as Timothy's silence was now of the pattern of
+dreams.
+
+He tied the horse, and together they entered the field by the great open
+place where the fence had not yet been replaced. The turf was still soft
+and yielding, in spite of all the treading feet. The pasture was girdled
+by trees--locusts and box-alders outlined dimly upon the sky,
+nest-places for orioles; and here and there a great oak or a cottonwood
+made a mysterious figure on the stars. One would have said that
+underfoot would certainly be violets. A far light pricked out an answer
+to their lantern, and a nearer firefly joined the signalling.
+
+"I keep thinkin' the way it looked here this afternoon," said Liva once.
+
+"That's funny, so do I," he cried.
+
+Under the cottonwood on the slope, its leaves stirring like little
+banners, Timothy flashed his light, first on tufted grass, then on
+red-tasselled sorrel, then--lying there as simply as if it belonged
+there--on Liva's silver locket. She caught it from him with a little
+cry.
+
+"Oh," she said, "I'm so glad. Oh, thank you ever so much, Timmie."
+
+He faced her for a moment.
+
+"Why are you so almighty glad?" he burst out.
+
+"Why, it's the first locket I ever had!" she said in surprise. "So of
+course I'm glad. Oh, Timmie--thank you!"
+
+"You're welcome, I'm sure," he returned stiffly.
+
+She gave a little skipping step beside him.
+
+"Timmie," she said, "let's circle round a little ways and come by where
+the big tent was. I want to see how it'll seem."
+
+His ill-humour was gone in a moment.
+
+"That's what we _will_ do!" he cried joyously.
+
+He walked beside her, his lantern swinging a little rug of brightness
+about their feet. So they passed the site of the big red ticket wagon,
+of the Eastern vaudeville, of the phototype tent; so they traversed the
+length where had stretched the great elliptical tent that had prisoned
+for them colour and music and life, as in a cup. And so at last they
+stepped along that green way of the pasture where underfoot lay the
+grass and the not infrequent moss and clover, not yet wholly trampled to
+dust; and this was where there had been assembled bright-winged birds
+of orange and flame and creatures of the wild from the Antipodes, and
+where Strange Things had closed them round.
+
+The influence of what the pasture had seen must have been breathed on
+all who entered there that night: something of the immemorial freedom of
+bright birds in alien woods, of the ancestral kinship of the wild. For
+that tranquil meadow, long haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,
+expressionless as the hills, dependable as a nurse, had that day known
+strange breath, strange tramplings, cries and trumpetings, music and
+colour and life and the beating of wild hearts--and was it not certain
+that these must change the humour of the place as the coming of the
+grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind? The field bore the
+semblance of a place exquisitely of the country and, here in the dark,
+it was inarticulate once more. But something was stirring there,
+something that swept away what had always been as a wind sweeps,
+something that caught up the heart of the boy as ancient voices stir in
+the blood.
+
+Timothy cast down his lantern and gathered Liva Vesey in his arms. Her
+cheek lay against his shoulder and he lifted her face and kissed her,
+three times or four, with all the love that he bore her.
+
+"Liva," he said, "all the time--every day--I've meant this. Did you
+mean it, too?"
+
+She struggled a little from him, but when he would have let her go she
+stood still in his arms. And then he would have her words and "Did you?"
+he begged again. He could not hear what she said without bending close,
+close, and it was the sweeter for that.
+
+"Oh, Timmie," she answered, "I don't know. I don't know if I _did_. But
+I do--now."
+
+Timothy's courage came upon him like a mantle.
+
+"An' be my wife?" he asked.
+
+"An' be ..." Liva assented, and the words faltered away. But they were
+not greatly missed.
+
+Timothy looked over the pasture, and over the world. And lo, it was
+suddenly as if, with these, he were become articulate, and they were all
+three saying something together.
+
+When they turned, there was the lantern glimmering alight on the trodden
+turf. And in its little circle of brightness they saw something coloured
+and soft. It was a gay feather, and Timothy took it curiously in his
+hand.
+
+"See, it's from one of the circus birds," he said.
+
+"No!" Liva cried. "It's an oriole feather. One of the pasture orioles,
+Timmie!"
+
+"So it is," he assented, and without knowing why, he was glad that it
+was so. He folded it away with the violet Liva had gathered that
+afternoon. After all the strangeness, what he treasured most had
+belonged to the pasture all the time.
+
+"Liva!" he begged. "Will you wear the picture--my picture--in that
+locket?"
+
+"Oh," she said, "Timmie, I'm so sorry. The locket's one I bought cheap
+in the city, and it don't open."
+
+She wondered why that seemed to make him love her more. She wondered a
+little, too, when on the edge of the pasture Timothy stood still,
+looking back.
+
+"Liva!" he said, "don't the Pump pasture seem differ'nt? Don't it seem
+like another place?"
+
+"Yes," Liva said, "it don't seem the same."
+
+"Liva!" Timothy said again, "it ain't the pasture that's so differ'nt.
+It's _us_."
+
+She laughed a little--softly, and very near his coat sleeve.
+
+"I 'most knew that this afternoon," she answered.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE FOND FORENOON
+
+
+This morning Miggy came by appointment to do a little work for me, and
+she appeared in some "best" frock to honour the occasion. It was a blue
+silk muslin, cut in an antiquated style and trimmed with tarnished
+silver passementerie. In it the child was hardly less distinguished than
+she had been in her faded violet apron. It was impossible for her to
+seem to be unconscious of her dress, and she spoke of it at once with
+her fine directness.
+
+"I didn't have anything good enough to wear," she said. "I haven't got
+any good dress this summer till I get it made myself. I got this out of
+the trunk. It was my mother's."
+
+"It suits you very well, Miggy," I told her.
+
+"I thought maybe she'd like my wearing it--here," said Miggy, shyly.
+"You've got things the way she always wanted 'em."
+
+We went in my workroom and sat among my books and strewn papers. A
+lighted theatre with raised curtain and breathless audience, a room
+which one wakens to find flooded by a gibbous moon, these have for me
+no greater sorcery than morning in a little book-filled room, with the
+day before me. Perhaps it is that I ought to be doing so many things
+that I take an idler's delight in merely attending to my own occupation.
+
+While I wondered at what I should set Miggy, I looked for the spirit of
+the minute and tried not to see its skeleton. The skeleton was that I
+had here an inexperienced little girl who was of almost no use to me.
+The spirit was that whatever I chose to do, my work was delightful to
+me, and that to bring Miggy in contact with these things was a kind of
+adventure. It is, I find, seldom sufficient to think even of the body of
+one's work, which to-day proved to be in my case a search in certain old
+books and manuscripts for fond allusions. If one can, so to say, think
+in and out till one comes to the spirit of a task, then there will be
+evident an indeterminate sense of wings. Without these wings there can
+be no expression and no creation. And in the true democracy no work will
+be wingless. It will still be, please God, laborious, arduous, even
+heart-breaking, but never body-fettered, never with its birdlike spirit
+quenched. And in myself I would bring to pass, even now, this fair order
+of sweet and willing toil by taking to my hand no task without looking
+deep within for its essential life.
+
+So it was with a sense not only of pleasure but of leisure that I
+established Miggy by the window with a manuscript of ancient romances
+and told her what to do: to look through them for a certain story,
+barely more than a reference, to the love of an Indian woman of this
+Middle West for her Indian husband, sold into slavery by the French
+Canadians. It is a simple story--you will find small mention made of
+it--but having once heard it the romance had haunted me, and I was fain
+to come on it again: the story of the wife of Kiala, fit to stand niched
+with the great loves of the world.
+
+The morning sun--it was hardly more than eight o'clock--slanted across
+the carpet; some roses that Little Child had brought me before her
+breakfast were fresh on my table; and the whole time was like a quiet
+cup. In that still hour experience seemed drained of all but fellowship,
+the fellowship of Miggy and my books and the darling insistence of the
+near outdoors. Do you not think how much of life is so made up, free of
+rapture or anxiety, dedicated, in task or in pastime, to serene
+companionship?
+
+I have said that for me there are few greater sorceries than morning,
+with the day before me, in a small book-filled room. I wonder if this is
+not partly because of my anticipations of the parentheses I shall take?
+Not recesses, but parentheses, which can flavour a whole day. I
+remember a beloved house in which breakfast and luncheon were daily
+observations looked forward to not so much for themselves, as that they
+were occasions for the most delightful interruptions. Dinner was a
+ceremony which was allowed to proceed; but a breakfast or a luncheon was
+seldom got through without one or two of us leaving the table to look up
+a stanza, or to settle if two words had the same derivation, or to find
+if some obsolete fashion in meanings could not yet be worn with
+impunity. It grieved the dear housewife, I remember, and we tried to
+tell her how much more important these things were than that our new
+potatoes should be buttered while they were hot. But she never could see
+it, and potatoes made us think of Ireland, and in no time we were deep
+in the Celtic revival and racing off to find "The Love Talker." I
+remember but one dinner interruption, and that was when we all left in
+the midst of the fish to go in the study and determine if moonlight
+shining through stained glass does cast a coloured shadow, as it did on
+St. Agnes' eve.... I suppose, in those days, we must have eaten
+something, though, save a certain deep-dish cherry pie I cannot remember
+what we ate; but those interruptions are with me like so many gifts, and
+I maintain that these were the realities. Those days--and especially the
+morning when we read through the "Ancient Mariner" between pasting in
+two book plates!--taught me the precious lesson that the interruption
+and not the task may hold the angel. It was so that I felt that morning
+with Miggy; and I know that what we did with that forenoon will persist
+somewhere when all my envelopes of clippings are gone to dust.
+
+After a time I became conscious that the faint rustling of the papers
+through which I was looking was absorbed by another sound, rhythmic,
+stedfast. I looked out on my neighbour's lawn, and at that moment,
+crossing my line of vision through the window before which Miggy was
+seated, I saw Peter, cutting my neighbour's grass. I understood at once
+that he had chosen this morning for his service in order to be near
+Miggy. It all made a charming sight,--Peter, bareheaded, in an
+open-throated, neutral shirt, cutting the grass there beyond Miggy in
+her quaint dress, reading a romance. I forgot my work for a little, and
+watched for those moments of his passing. Miggy read on, absorbed. Then,
+for a little, I watched her, pleased at her absorption.
+
+Sometimes, from my window, I have looked down on the river and the long
+yellow sand bar and the mystery of the opposite shore where I have never
+been, and I have felt a great pity that these things cannot know that
+they are these things. Sometimes, in the middle of a summer night, when
+the moon is so bright that one can see well within one's own soul, I
+have fancied that I have detected an aroma of consciousness, of definite
+self-wonder, in the Out-of-doors. Fleetingly I have divined it in the
+surprise of Dawn, the laughter of a blue Forenoon, the girlish shyness
+of Twilight. And this morning I wanted self-wonder for Miggy and Peter.
+What a pity that they could not see it all as I saw it: the Shelley-like
+boy cutting the grass and loving this girl, in her mother's gown. But
+you must not suppose, either, that I do not know how that vast
+unconsciousness of Nature and Love flows with a sovereign essence almost
+more precious than awareness.
+
+"Miggy," I said presently, "Peter is not at work to-day. That is he
+cutting grass."
+
+She looked out briefly.
+
+"He's got two days off coming to him," she answered. "It's for overtime.
+This must be one of 'em. Have _you_ read these stories?"
+
+"Yes," I said, "I have. Miggy, don't you want to go and ask Peter to
+have lunch with us at twelve?"
+
+"Oh, no, thank you," she dismissed this. "This isn't the day I see him."
+
+"But wouldn't you like it?" I pressed the matter curiously. "Just we
+three at luncheon alone?"
+
+She was turning the leaves of the manuscript and she looked up to set
+me right.
+
+"Oh, you know," she said, "I don't know Peter _that_ way at all. I just
+know him to have him walk home with me, or call, or go walking. Peter
+never eats with me."
+
+Poor Peter, indeed, to be denied the simple intimacy of sometimes
+breaking bread with Miggy. I understood that to invite a man to "noon
+lunch" in the village was almost unheard of, but,
+
+"I think he would eat this noon if he never ate before," said I. To
+which Miggy made answer:--
+
+"If you have read all these stories will you--wouldn't you--tell me
+some, please? I can't bear to think of having to wait to read 'em before
+I know 'em!"
+
+She shut the book and leaned her chin in her hand and looked at me. And
+the idea of having Peter with us for lunch drifted out of the room,
+unattended.
+
+I maintain that one who loves the craft of letters for its own sake, one
+who loves both those who have followed it and the records that they have
+left, and one who is striving to make letters his way of service, must
+all have acted in the same way; and that was the way that I took. In
+these days when Helen and Juliet are read aloud to children while they
+work buttonholes in domestic science class, think of the pure
+self-indulgence of coming on a living spirit--I say a _living_
+spirit--who had never heard of the beloved women of the world. I wonder
+if we could not find such spirits oftener if we looked with care? When I
+see certain women shopping, marketing, jolting about in busses, I am
+sometimes moved to wonder if they know anything about Nicolete and, if
+they were to be told, whether it would not rest them.
+
+I love it, I love this going back into old time and bringing out its
+sweet elements. I have said that there is a certain conservatism in
+which, if I let my taste have its way with me, I would luxuriate, as I
+might then indulge my love of the semi-precious stones, or of old
+tiling, or of lilies-of-the-valley, all day long. And it is so that my
+self-indulgence would lead me to spend my days idling over these shadowy
+figures in the old romances and the old biographies. The joy of it never
+leaves me. Always from these books drifts out to me the smoke of some
+hidden incense that makes the world other. Not that I want the world to
+be that way, but I like to pretend. I know now that in a world where one
+must give of one's utmost, spend and be spent if one is even to pay for
+one's keep, these incense hours must be occasional, not to say stolen.
+So that to find a Miggy to whom to play preceptor of romance was like
+digging a moonstone out of the river bank.
+
+What did I tell her? Not of Helen or Cleopatra or Isolde or Heloise or
+Guinevere, because--why, I think that you would not have told her of
+these, either. Of Beatrice and Brunhilde and Elaine and Enid I told her,
+for, though these are so sad, there beat the mighty motives, seeds of
+the living heart. Last I told her, of Nicolete and of Griselda and of
+Psyche and of the great sun of these loves that broke from cloud. She
+listened, wrapt as I was wrapt in the telling. Was it strange that the
+room, which had been like a quiet cup for serene companionship, should
+abruptly be throbbing with the potent principles of the human heart? I
+think that it was not strange, for assuredly these are nearer to us than
+breathing, instant to leap from us, the lightning of the soul, electric
+with life or with death. We are never very far from strong emotion. Even
+while I recounted these things to Miggy, there, without my window, was
+Peter, cutting the grass.
+
+When I had done, "Is there more like that in books?" asked Miggy.
+
+Oh, yes; thank heaven and the people who wrote them down, there are in
+books many more like these.
+
+"I s'pose lots didn't get into the books at all," said Miggy,
+thoughtfully.
+
+It is seldom that one finds and mourns a bird that is dead. But think of
+the choir of little bright breasts whose raptures nobody hears, nobody
+misses, nobody remembers. How like them we are, we of the loving
+hearts.
+
+"I wouldn't wonder if there's lots of folks being that way right, right
+now," concluded Miggy.
+
+Who am I that I should doubt this?
+
+"A tournament," said Miggy, dreamily; "I s'pose that was something like
+the Java entertainment is going to be."
+
+She slipped to one side of the big chair and laid both hands on its arm.
+
+"Listen," she said. "Would this be one? You know Delly Watson that's
+crazy? She was in love with Jem Pitlaw, a school teacher that used to be
+here, an' that died, an' that wasn't in love with her even if he had
+stayed living, and it did that to her. You know ... she talks about
+things that nobody ever heard of, and listens, and laughs at what she
+thinks she hears. Ain't that like Elaine?"
+
+Yes, if poor Delly Watson of the village had had a barge and a dwarf and
+a river winding from towered city to towered city, she would not have
+been unlike Elaine.
+
+"And Jerry, that sets up folks's stoves and is so in love with the music
+teacher that he joined the chorus and paid his dues and set in the bass
+corner all winter to watch her and he can't sing a note. And she don't
+even see him when she passes him. Ain't that like Beatrice and the Pale
+Man?"
+
+Jerry is so true and patient, and our young music teacher is so fair,
+that no one could find it sacrilege to note this sad likeness.
+
+"And Mis' Uppers that her husband went out West and she didn't get any
+word, and he don't come, and he don't come, and she's selling tickets on
+the parlour clock, and she cries when anybody even whistles his
+tunes--isn't that some like Brunhilde, that you said about, waiting all
+alone on top of the mountain? I guess Brunhilde had money, but I don't
+think Mis' Uppers' principal trouble is that she ain't. With both of 'em
+the worst of it must 'a' been the waiting."
+
+And I am in no wise sure that that slow-walking woman in the pointed
+gray shawl may not have a heart which aches and burns and passions like
+a valkyr's.
+
+"And Mame Wallace, that her beau died and all she's got is to keep house
+for the family, and keep house, and _keep_ house. It seems as if she's
+sort of like Psyche, that had such an awful lot of things to do--and her
+life all mussed up."
+
+Perhaps it is so that in that gaunt Mame Wallace, whose homing passion
+has turned into the colourless, tidy keeping of her house, there is
+something shining, like the spirit of Psyche, that would win back her
+own by the tasks of her hand.
+
+"And then there's Threat Hubbelthwait," said Miggy, "that gets drunk
+and sets in his hotel bar fiddling, and Mis' Hubbelthwait shoves him his
+meals in on to the cigar show-case and runs before he throws his bow at
+her--she's just exactly like those two----"
+
+"Enid or Griselda?" I recognized them, and Miggy nodded. Poor Mis'
+Hubbelthwait! Was she not indeed an Enid, lacking her beauty, and a
+Griselda, with no hope of a sweet surprise of a love that but tested
+her? Truly, it was as Miggy said: in some form they were all there in
+the village, minus the bower and the silken kirtle, but with the same
+living hearts.
+
+And these were not all.
+
+"Miggy," I said, "what about Liva Vesey and Timothy? Did you count
+them?" For Aucassin and Nicolete were happy and so are Liva and Timothy,
+and I think that they have all understood meadows.
+
+Miggy looked startled. One's own generation never seems so typical of
+anything as did a generation or two past.
+
+"Could they be?" she asked. "They got engaged the night of the circus
+Liva told me--everybody knows. Could they be counted in?"
+
+Oh, yes, I assured her. They might be counted. So, I fancy, might all
+love-in-the-village, if we knew its authentic essence.
+
+"Goodness," said Miggy, meditatively, "then there's Christopha and
+Allen last winter, that I was their bridesmaid, and that rode off in the
+hills that way on their wedding night. I s'pose that was like something,
+if we only knew?"
+
+I could well believe that that first adventure of the young husband and
+wife, of whom I shall tell you, was like something sweet and bright and
+long ago.
+
+"And what," I said to Miggy abruptly, "about Peter?"
+
+"_Peter?_" repeated Miggy.
+
+Why not Peter?
+
+She looked out the window at him.
+
+"Why," she said, "but he's _now_. Peter's now. And he wears black
+clothes. And he's cutting grass...."
+
+True for Peter, to all these impeachments. I told her that, in his day,
+Aucassin was _now_, too; and that he wore the clothes of his times, and
+that if he did not do the tasks nearest his hand, then Nicolete should
+not have loved him.
+
+"And," said I, "unless I'm very much mistaken, in the same way that all
+the ancient lovers loved their ladies, Peter loves you."
+
+"_That_ way?" said Miggy, laying her hand on the manuscript.
+
+"That way," said I. And a very good way it was, too.
+
+Miggy put up both hands with a manner of pointing at herself.
+
+"Oh, no," she said, "not me." Then her little shoulders went up and she
+caught her breath like a child. "_Honest?_" she said.
+
+I said no more, but sat silent for a little, watching her across the
+fallen manuscript of ancient romances. Presently I picked up the sheets,
+and by chance my look fell on the very thing for which we had been
+searching: the story of the wife of Kiala, a Wisconsin Indian chief who
+was sold into slavery and carried to Martinique. And alone, across those
+hundreds of miles of pathless snow and sea, the wife of Kiala somehow
+followed him to the door of his West Indian owner. And to him she gave
+herself into slavery so that she might be with her husband.
+
+I read the story to Miggy. And because the story is true, and because it
+happened so near and because of this universe in general, I was not able
+to read it quite so tranquilly as I should have wished.
+
+"Oh," Miggy said, "is it like _that_?"
+
+Yes, please God; if the heart is big enough to hold it, it is like that.
+
+Miggy put her hand down quickly on the blue muslin dress she wore.
+
+"My mother knew!" she said.
+
+And that is the most wonderful thing of all: one's mother knew.
+
+Miggy turned once more and looked out the window at Peter. Bless Peter!
+I think that he must have been over that grass with the mower quite
+twice--perhaps twice and a half. Almost immediately Miggy looked away
+from Peter, and I thought--though perhaps after all it was merely the
+faint colour that often hovers in her cheek. I felt, however, that if I
+had again suggested to Miggy that we ask Peter to lunch, Peter might
+possibly have lunched with us. But now I did not suggest it. No, if ever
+it gets to be "all Peter with Miggy," it must be so by divine
+non-interference.
+
+My little voice-friend up there on the shelf, the Westminster chimes,
+struck twelve, in its manner of sweet apology for being to blame for
+things ending. In the village we lunch at twelve, and so my forenoon was
+done and even the simple tasks I had set were not all finished. I
+wonder, though, if deep within this fond forenoon we have not found
+something--wings, or a light, or a singing--that was of the spirit of
+the tasks? I wish that I thought so with reasons which I could give to a
+scientist.
+
+At all events I am richly content. And over our luncheon Miggy has just
+flattered me unconscionably.
+
+"My!" she said, "I should think everybody would want to be Secretary."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+AFRAID
+
+
+I must turn aside to tell of Allen and Christopha, that young husband
+and wife whose first adventure, Miggy thought, was like something sweet
+and bright and long ago. It happened this last winter, but I cannot
+perceive any grave difference between that winter night and this June.
+Believe me, the seasons and the silences and we ourselves are not so
+different as we are alike.
+
+On the night of her wedding, Christopha threw her bouquet from the
+dining-room doorway, because there were no front stairs from which to
+throw it, but instead only a stairway between walls and to be reached
+from the dining room: a mere clerk of a stair instead of a
+proprietor-like hall staircase. In the confusion which followed--the
+carnations had narrowly missed the blazing white gas burner high in the
+room--the bride ran away above stairs, her two bridesmaids following.
+Her mother was already there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As Miggy
+had told me, she herself was one of Christopha's bridesmaids, and it is
+from Miggy that I have heard something of the outcome of the story.
+
+Almost as soon as the door was closed there was a rap at it, a rap
+peremptory, confident.
+
+"Let me in," said Allen; "I'm the groom!" Chris herself opened the door.
+Her muslin-wedding gown and the little bells of lilies unfaded in her
+blond hair became her wholly, and all her simple prettiness still wore
+the mystery and authority of the hour.
+
+"Allen," she said, "you oughtn't to of."
+
+"Yes, sir, I ought!" he protested gayly, his voice pleasant with mirth
+and with its new, deep note. "I'll never see you a bride again--a real,
+weddin'-dress bride. I had to come."
+
+Christopha's mother looked up from her vague, bright fabrics.
+
+"I thought you started to take the minister the kodak album," she said
+to Allen plaintively. "Has he got anybody to show him any attention? I
+should think you might--"
+
+But the two bridesmaids edged their way into the next room, and on some
+pretext of fabrics, took Christopha's mother with them,--as if there
+were abroad some secret Word of which they knew the meaning. For Miggy
+is sufficiently dramatic to know the Word for another, though she is not
+sufficiently simple to know it for herself.
+
+Allen sat beside his bride on the cretonne-covered skirt box. And after
+all, he did not look at her, but only at her warm left hand in his.
+
+"It is the funniest thing," he said, "when I see you comin' in the
+parlour lookin' so differ'nt, I'm blessed if I wasn't afraid of you.
+What do you think of that?"
+
+"You's afraid of my dress," Chris told him, laughing, "not me. You use'
+to be afraid of me when we's first engaged, but you ain't now. It's
+_me_. I feel afraid of you--Allen. You're--differ'nt."
+
+He laughed tenderly, confidently.
+
+"_Boo!_" he said. "Now are you?"
+
+"Yes," she answered seriously; "now."
+
+"Chris!" he cried boyishly, "we're married! We're goin' to keep house."
+
+"Oh," she said, "Allen! Think of the fun of puttin' the presents in the
+house--the dishes, and the glass, and the ornaments. There won't be
+another dinin' room in town like ours. Sideboard an' plate rail, an' the
+rug not tacked down."
+
+Their thoughts flew to the little house, furnished and waiting, down the
+snowy street by the Triangle park: their house.
+
+"Dinners, and suppers, and breakfas's--just us two by ourselves," Allen
+said. "_And_ the presents. My!"
+
+"Well, and company," she reminded him, "that's what I want. The girls
+in to tea in our own house."
+
+"Yes," he assented. "Right away?" he wanted to know.
+
+"No," she said, "not right away, Silly! We've got to buy curtains and
+things. I never thought I'd have so many presents," she went on happily.
+"They's two water pitchers alike. Bess says I can change hers. We'll
+take it to the City"--she gave a little bounce on the skirt box--"and
+see a show, a really, truly show."
+
+"Sure we will," said he, magnificently. "And I'll take you to the place
+I told you about--where I got picked up."
+
+The little bride nodded, her eyes softening almost maternally. It was as
+if that story were her own, the story of Allen, the little stray child
+picked up on the streets of the City by that good woman whom Chris had
+never seen. But the name of Sarah Ernestine was like a charm to Chris,
+for the woman had been to Allen father and mother both.
+
+Chris bent down swiftly to his hands, closed over her own, and kissed
+them.
+
+"Oh, Allen," she said, with a curious wistfulness, "will you _always_,
+always be just like you are now?"
+
+"Well, I should say I would," he answered gently. "They's nobody like
+you anywheres, Chris. Mis' Chris, Mis' Allen Martin."
+
+"Don't it scare you to say it?" she demanded.
+
+"Yes, sir, it does," he confessed. "It's like sayin' your own name over
+the telephone. What about you? Will _you_ always, too?"
+
+"Yes," she said, "always. Only--"
+
+"Only what?" he repeated anxiously.
+
+"Oh," she said, "don't let's let any outside things come between us,
+Allen--like they do, like with Bess and Opie,--business and
+sewin',--that's what I'm afraid of," she ended vaguely.
+
+"Well," he said, "I guess we ain't much afraid of each other, honey. I
+guess we're just afraid of what could come between us."
+
+A voice, unconvincing, unimportant, a part of the inessential aspect of
+alien things, detached itself from the accompaniment in the next room,
+saying something responsible and plaintive about only an hour till train
+time.
+
+"An hour," Allen said over, and put his arms about her, with boyish
+awkwardness for the sake of the crisp muslin gown that had so terrified
+him. She rose and stood beside him, and he waited for a moment looking
+up in her face. "Chris," he said, "I'm scared of this one hour even.
+Till train time."
+
+"I'll hurry up and get the hour done as quick as I can," she promised
+him gayly.
+
+"Honestly, now--" said Chris's mother from the vague and indeterminate
+region where she moved.
+
+"Right off, Mis' Mother!" Allen said, and knew that she was in the
+doorway, with the bridesmaids laughing beside her. And then he went down
+the stairway, his first radiant moment gone by.
+
+In the dining room the messenger was waiting. The messenger had arrived,
+in the clear cold of the night, from a drive across the Caledonia hills,
+and some one had sent him to that deserted room to warm himself. But
+Allen found him breathing on his fingers and staring out the frosty
+window into the dark. It was Jacob Ernestine, brother to the woman who
+had brought up Allen and had been kind to him when nobody else in the
+world was kind. For years Sarah Ernestine had been "West"--and with that
+awful inarticulacy of her class, mere distance had become an impassable
+gulf and the Silence had taken her. Allen had not even known that she
+meant to return. And now, Jacob told him, she was here, at his own home
+back in the hills--Sarah and a child, a little stray boy, whom she had
+found and befriended as she had once befriended Allen. And she was
+dying.
+
+"She didn't get your letter, I guess," the old man said, "'bout gettin'
+married. She come to-day, so sick she couldn't hold her head up. I see
+she didn't know nothin' 'bout your doin's. I didn't let her know. I jus'
+drove in, like split, to tell you, when the doctor went. He says she
+can't--she won't ... till mornin'. I thought," he apologized wistfully,
+"ye'd want to know, anyways, so I jus' drove in."
+
+"That was all right," Allen said. "You done right, Jacob."
+
+Then he stood still for a moment, looking down at the bright figures of
+the carpet. Jacob lived twelve miles back in the hills.
+
+"How'd you come?" Allen asked him briefly.
+
+"I've got the new cutter," the old man answered, with a touch of eager
+pride. "I'll drive ye."
+
+Then some one in the parlour caught sight of the bridegroom, and they
+all called to him and came where he was, besieging him with
+good-natured, trivial talk. The old man waited, looking out the window
+into the dark. He had known them all since they were children, and their
+merrymaking did not impress him as wholly real. Neither, for that
+matter, did Allen's wedding. Besides, his own sister was dying--somehow
+putting an end to the time when he and she had been at home together.
+That was all he had thought of during his drive to town, and hardly at
+all of Allen and his wedding. He waited patiently now while Allen got
+the wedding guests back to the parlour, and then slipped away from them,
+and came through the dining room to the stair door.
+
+"Stay there a minute," Allen bade him shortly, and went back to the
+upper floor and to Chris's door again.
+
+It was her mother who answered his summons this time, and Allen's manner
+and face checked her words. Before he had done telling her what had
+happened, Chris herself was on the threshold, already in sober brown, as
+one who has put aside rainbows and entered on life. She had a little
+brown hat in one hand, and for the other hand he groped out and held it
+while he told her, as well as he could.
+
+"I guess I've got to go, Chrissie," he ended miserably.
+
+She met his eyes, her own soft with sympathy for the plight of the other
+woman.
+
+"Well, yes," she said quietly, "of course we've got to go."
+
+He looked at her breathlessly. That possibility had not crossed his
+mind.
+
+"You!" he cried. "You couldn't go, dear. Twelve miles out in Caledonia,
+cold as it is to-night. You--"
+
+In spite of her sympathy, she laughed at him then.
+
+"Did you honestly think I wouldn't?" she asked, in a kind of wonder.
+
+"Well, I'm sure--" began her mother. But the two bridesmaids manifestly
+heard the Word again, for they talked with her both at once.
+
+"Not with Jacob, though," Chris was saying decisively. "You help father
+and the boys get out our cutter, Allen."
+
+Allen strode past the mother and lifted his wife's face in his hands.
+
+"Do you mean it?" he demanded. "Will you go--in the cold--all that long
+way--"
+
+"You Silly!" she answered, and drew away from him and set the little
+brown hat on her head.
+
+
+The road lay white before them, twelve miles of snow and stars to
+Jacob's cottage among the Caledonia hills. Jacob had gone on--from the
+crest of the rise by the Corner church they saw him and heard the faint
+signalling of his bells. It was a place, that rise by the Corner church
+on the edge of the village, where two others in such case might have
+drawn rein to look at Everything, stretching before, rhythmic crest and
+shallow, and all silent and waiting. But not these two, incurious as the
+gods, naïve as the first lovers. Only, though of this they were
+unconscious, they saw things a little differently that night.
+
+"Look!" said the girl, with a sign to the lowlands, expressive with
+lights. "So many folks's houses--homes, all started. I s'pose it was
+just as big a thing for them. But _theirs_ don't seem like anything,
+side of ours!"
+
+"That's so, too," assented Allen. "And theirs _ain't_ anything side of
+ours!" he maintained stoutly.
+
+"No, sir," she agreed, laughing.
+
+Then she grew suddenly grave, and fell silent for a little, her eyes
+here and there on the valley lights, while Allen calculated aloud the
+time of the arrival at Jacob's house.
+
+"Allen!" she said at last.
+
+"Here!" he answered. "I'm here, you bet."
+
+"Just look at the lights," she said seriously, "and then _think_.
+There's Bess and Opie--not speakin' to each other. Over there's the
+Hubbelthwait farm that they've left for the hotel--an' Threat
+Hubbelthwait drunk all the time. An' Howells's, poor and can't pay, and
+don't care if they can't, and quarrels so folks can hear 'em from the
+road. And the Moneys', that's so ugly to the children, and her findin'
+fault, and him can't speak without an oath. That only leaves the
+Topladys' over there that's real, regular people. And she kind o' bosses
+him."
+
+"Well, now, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, looking at the lights with
+a difference.
+
+Chris's right hand was warm in his great-coat pocket, and she suddenly
+snuggled close to him, her chin on his shoulder.
+
+"Oh, Allen," she said, "I'm _afraid_!"
+
+"What? On the Plank Road?" he wanted to know, missing her meaning.
+
+"All them folks started out with presents, and a house, like us," she
+said, "and with their minds all made up to bein' happy. But just look at
+'em."
+
+"Well," said Allen, reasonably, "we _ain't_ them."
+
+"We might get like 'em," she insisted. "How can you tell? Folks just do
+get that way or they just don't. How can you _tell_?"
+
+"I s'pose that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, thoughtfully.
+
+"Mother's got a picture of the Hubbelthwaits when they was married,"
+Chris pursued. "Her in white an' slippers and bracelets, and him slick
+as a kitten's foot. Think of her now, Allen, with _bracelets_. And him
+drunk all the time, 'most. How can you tell how things'll turn out? Oh,
+Allen, I _am_! I'm afraid."
+
+He bent to her face and laid his own against hers, glowing and cold and
+with fresh, warm lips.
+
+"Let's just try to be happy and keep ourselves happy," he said.
+
+The troubled woman was still in her face, but at his touch the fears
+went a little away, and the valley lights being already left behind
+among the echoes of the bells, they forgot both the lights and their
+shadows and drifted back to talk about the new house and the presents,
+and the dinners and suppers and breakfasts together. For these were the
+stuff of which the time was made. As it was made, too, of that shadowy,
+hovering fear for the future, and the tragic pity of their errand, and
+of sad conjecture about the little stray child whom Sarah Ernestine had
+brought.
+
+"That ain't it a'ready, is it?" Christopha exclaimed when they saw
+Jacob's cottage.
+
+"It just is--it's 'leven o'clock now," Allen answered, and gave the
+horse to the old man; and they two went within.
+
+The light in the room, like the lights back in the valley, was as if
+some great outside influence here and there should part the darkness to
+win a little stage for a scene of the tragedy: in the valley, for the
+drunkenness at the Hubbelthwaits', the poverty at the Howells', the ill
+nature at the Moneys'; and here, in Jacob's cottage, for death. There
+was no doubt of the quality of the hour in the cottage. The room was
+instinct with the outside touch. Already it was laid upon the woman in
+the bed, and with a mystery and authority not unlike that which had come
+upon Christopha in her marriage hour and was upon her still.
+
+The woman knew Allen, smiled at him, made him understand her
+thankfulness that he had come. At Christopha she looked kindly and quite
+without curiosity. Some way, that absence of curiosity at what was so
+vital to him gripped Allen's heart, and without his knowing the process,
+showed him the nature of death. The neighbour who had been with the
+sick woman slipped outside, and as she went she patted Chris's shoulder;
+and Allen felt that she understood, and he was dumbly grateful to her.
+
+Allen sat by the bed and held the hand of his foster-mother; and Chris
+moved about the room, heating water for a little pot of tea. And so it
+was Chris who first saw the child. He was sitting at the end of the wood
+box, on the floor before the oven--that little stray boy whom Sarah
+Ernestine had picked up as she had once picked up Allen. He looked up at
+Christopha with big, soft eyes, naïve as the first bird. Almost before
+she knew that she meant to do so, Chris stooped, with a wondering word,
+and took him in her arms. He clung to her and she sat in the rocking
+chair near the window where stood Jacob's carnation plant. And she tried
+both to look at the child and to love him, at the same time.
+
+"See, Allen," she said, "this little boy!"
+
+The child looked over his shoulder at Allen, his little arms leaning on
+Christopha's breast. And very likely because he had felt strange and
+lonely and now was taken some account of, he suddenly and beautifully
+smiled, and you would have loved him the more for the way he did that.
+
+The woman, lying with closed eyes, understood and remembered.
+
+"Allen," she said, "that's little John. You find him--a home
+somewheres. If you can...."
+
+"Why, yes, mother, we'll do that. We can do that, I guess. Don't you
+worry any about _him_," said Allen.
+
+"He's all alone. I donno his name, even.... But you be good to him,
+Allen, will you?" she said restlessly. "I found him somewheres."
+
+"Like me," Allen said.
+
+She shook her head feebly.
+
+"Worse," she said, "worse. I knew I couldn't--do much. I just--thought I
+could keep him from bein' wicked--mebbe."
+
+"Like you did me, mother, I guess," the boy said.
+
+Then she opened her eyes.
+
+"Allen!" she said clearly. "Oh, if I did! When I think how mebbe I done
+that--_I ain't afraid to die_."
+
+Jacob Ernestine came in the room and stood rubbing one hand on the back
+of the other. He saw the kettle's high column of steam and looked
+inquiringly at Chris. But she sat mothering the little silent boy, who
+looked at her gravely, or smiled, or pulled at her collar, responsive to
+her touch as she was thrillingly responsive to his nearness. So Jacob
+lifted the kettle to the back of the stove, moved his carnation plant a
+little away from the frost of the pane, and settled himself at the
+bed's foot to watch. And when, after a long time, the child fell
+asleep, Chris would not lay him down. Allen would have taken him, and
+Jacob came and tried to do so, but she shook her head and they let her
+be. She sat so still, hour after hour, that at last she herself dozed;
+and it seemed to her, in a manner of dreaming, that the carnation plant
+on the window-sill had lifted and multiplied until something white and
+like fragrance filled the room; and this, then, she dreamed, was what
+death is, death in the room for the woman. Or might it not be the
+perfume of her own bridal bouquet, the carnations which she had carried
+that night? But then the child stirred, and Christopha roused a little,
+and after all, the sense of flowers in the room was the sense of the
+little one in her arms. As if many things mean one thing.
+
+It was toward dawn that the end came, quite simply and with no manner of
+finality, as if one were to pass into another chamber. And after that,
+as quickly as might be, Christopha and Allen made ready to drive back to
+the village for the last bitter business of all.
+
+Allen, in the barn with Jacob, wondered what he must do. Allen was
+sore-hearted at his loss, grateful for the charge that he had been
+given; but what was he to do? The child ought not to stay in Jacob's
+cottage. If Chris's mother would take him for a little,--but Allen
+knew, without at all being able to define it, her plaintive, burdened
+manner, the burdened manner of the irresponsible. Still puzzling over
+this, he brought the cutter to the side door; and the side door opened,
+and Chris came out in the pale light, leading the little boy--awake,
+warmly wrapped, ready for the ride.
+
+"Where you goin' to take him to, Chrissie?" Allen asked breathlessly.
+
+"Some of the neighbours, I guess, ain't we?" she answered. "I donno. I
+thought we could see. He mustn't be left here--now."
+
+"No, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen only. "He mustn't."
+
+The three drove out together into the land lying about the gate of dawn.
+A fragment of moon was in the east. There was about the hour something
+primitive, as if, in this loneliest of all the hours, the world reverted
+to type, remembered ancient savage differences, and fell in the primal
+lines.
+
+"Allen," Chris said, "you'll miss her. I mean miss knowin' she's alive."
+
+"Yes," the boy said, "I'll miss knowin' she's alive."
+
+"Well, we must try to settle what to do with the little boy," she
+suggested hastily.
+
+"Yes," he assented, "that's right. We've got to settle that," and at
+this they fell silent.
+
+"There's Hopkins's," Chris said presently, nodding toward the home of
+the neighbour who had waited their coming to Jacob's cottage. "But
+she'll hev to be over there lots to-day and to-morrow. And she was kep'
+up so late it don't hardly seem as if we'd ought to stop and ask her."
+
+"No," Allen said, "I donno as it does, really."
+
+"There's Cripps's," she suggested a little farther on, "but they ain't
+up yet. I donno's 'twould do to roust 'em up."
+
+"No," Allen agreed, "best not do that, I guess." Christopha looked over
+the great fields.
+
+"My!" she said, "you'll miss her--miss thinkin' of her bein' somewheres.
+Allen! Where do you s'pose she is?"
+
+"I thought o' that," said Allen, soberly.
+
+"Goodness!" said Christopha, and shivered, and suddenly drew the child
+close to her. He was sleeping again. And it was so, with his little body
+between them, that she could no longer keep her hand warm in Allen's
+greatcoat pocket. But above the child's head her eyes and Allen's would
+meet, and in that hour the two had never been so near. Nearer they were
+than in the talk about the new house, and the presents, and the dinners
+and suppers and breakfasts together.
+
+They passed the farmhouses that looked asleep, and the farmhouses that
+looked watchfully awake while their owners slept. It would not be well
+to knock at these, still and sombre-windowed. And though there were
+lights at the Moneys' and at the Howells' and at the Hubbelthwait farm,
+and even at Bess and Opie's, their gates, by common consent, were also
+passed. Nor did they stop at the Topladys'.
+
+"They're real, regular people with a grown son," Chris said of them
+vaguely, "and it don't seem hardly fair to give 'em little John, too!"
+
+"Little John," Allen said over wonderingly. When they called him that
+the child seemed suddenly a person, like themselves. Their eyes met
+above his head.
+
+"Allen!" Chris said.
+
+"What? What is it?" he asked eagerly.
+
+"Could--do you think--could _we_?" she demanded.
+
+"My!" he answered, "I been a-wishin'--"
+
+Involuntarily he drew rein. They were on the rise by the Corner church
+at the edge of the village. The village, rhythmic crest of wall and
+shallow of lawn, lay below them, and near the little Triangle park would
+be their waiting house.
+
+"Did you mean have him live with us?" Allen made sure.
+
+"Yes, I did," Chris said, "if we had the money."
+
+"Well!" said the boy, "well, I guess _that'll_ be all right!"
+
+"How much _she'd_ of liked it," said Chris.
+
+"Wouldn't she, though," Allen assented; "wouldn't she? And you heard
+what she said--that about keepin' him from bein'--wicked?
+Chrissie--_could_ we, you and me? This little fellow?"
+
+Chris lifted her face and nodded.
+
+"I ain't afraid," she said simply.
+
+"I ain't either," her husband said.
+
+As if, in this new future, there were less need of fear than in the
+future which had sought to "try to be happy and keep ourselves happy."
+
+They looked down where their house would be, near the gate of the coming
+dawn. And--as two others in such case might have seen--it was as if they
+were the genii of their own mysterious future, a future whose solution
+trembled very near. For with the charge of the child had come a courage,
+even as the dead woman had known, when she thought of her charge of
+Allen, that she was not afraid to die.
+
+"Allen," said Chris, stumblingly, "it don't seem as if we could get like
+the Howells' an' the Hubbelthwaits and them. Somehow it don't seem as if
+we _could_!"
+
+"No," said Allen, "we couldn't. That's so, ain't it?"
+
+Above little John's head their eyes met in a kind of new betrothal, new
+marriage, new birth. But when he would have driven on, Allen pulled at
+the reins again, and,
+
+"Chrissie," he said suddenly, "if afterwards--there should be
+anybody--else. I mean for us. Would--would you keep on lovin' this
+little kiddie, too?"
+
+She met his eyes bravely, sweetly.
+
+"Well, you Silly," she said, "of course I would!"
+
+At which Allen laughed joyously, confidently.
+
+"Why, Chris," he cried, "we're married! For always an' always. An'
+here's this little old man to see to. Who's afraid?"
+
+Then they kissed each other above the head of the sleeping child, and
+drove on toward the village, and toward their waiting house.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT
+
+
+When I opened my door this morning, the Outdoors was like a thing coming
+to meet me. I mean that it was like a person coming to meet me--no, it
+was like many persons, hand in hand and, so to speak, mind in mind; a
+great company of whom straightway I became one. I felt that swift, good
+gladness that _now_ was _now_,--that delicate, fleeting Now, that very
+coquette of time, given and withdrawn. I remember that I could not soon
+go to sleep on the night of the day on which I learned that the Hebrew
+tongue has no present tense. They could not catch at that needle-point
+of experience, and we can do so. I like to glory in it by myself when no
+one else is thinking of it; to think aside, as if _to_ Something, that
+now is being now.... And I long for the time when we shall all know it
+together, all the time, and understand its potentialities and let it be
+breath and pulse to keep the Spirit Future alive and pure.
+
+It would have been no great wonder if I had been rejoicing past all
+reason in the moment. For at that very instant came Calliope Marsh, home
+for the Java entertainment which was set for to-night, and driving to my
+gate the Sykes's white horse in the post-office store delivery wagon.
+And as I saw her, so precisely did she look like herself, that I could
+have believed that Now was not Now, but Then, when first I knew her.
+
+Calliope brought the buckled lines informally over the horse's head and
+let them fall about the tie post, and ran to me. I am afraid that I am
+not going to tell what we said. But it was full of being once more in
+the presence of those whom you love. Do you not think that such being
+together is a means of actual life transcending both breath and
+perception?
+
+When our greeting was done, Calliope sat down on the stair in my hall,
+and,
+
+"Hev you got any spare candle-shades an' sherbet glasses, an' pretty
+doilies an' lunch cloths an' rugs an' willow chairs an' a statue of
+almost anybody an' a meat-chopper with a peanut-butter attachment an' a
+cap an' gown like colleges?" she demanded.
+
+And when I told her that I thought I might have some of these things,
+
+"Well," Calliope said, "she wants 'em all. Who do I mean by She? Mis'
+Oliver Wheeler Johnson, the personal queen of things."
+
+She leaned forward, hugging her thin little arms, and she looked up at
+me from under the brim of her round straw hat.
+
+"I'm in need of grace," she said shortly. "I never felt like this toward
+any human being. But I tell you, when that little Mis' Johnson comes
+dilly-nippin' around where I am, noddin' her blue ostrich tip, seems my
+spine just stiffens out in me like it was going to strike at her, same
+as a stick. Do you know the feelin'?"
+
+I answered reluctantly, and not as I should wish to answer; for it is
+certain that I, too, have seldom seen Mrs. Johnson without an urgency to
+be gone from her little fluttering presence. But Calliope! I could not
+imagine Calliope shrinking from any one, or knowing herself alien to
+another.
+
+"For sixty years," she answered my thought of her, "I've never known
+what it was to couldn't bear anybody, not without I had a reason. They
+ain't much of anybody I what you might say don't like, without they're
+malicious or ugly a-purpose. Ugly by nature, ugly an' can't help it,
+ugly an' don't know it--I can forgive all them. An' Mis' Johnson ain't
+ugly at all--she's just a real sweet little slip of a thing, doin' her
+hard-workin' best. But when I first see her in church that day, I says
+to myself: 'I'll give that little piece two months to carry the sail
+she's carryin' here to-day; four months to hev folks tired of her, an'
+six months to get herself the cold shoulder all 'round.' An' I hold to
+what I said. An' when her baby-blue nineteen-inch feather swings in an'
+'round, an' when she tells how things ought to be, I kind o' bristle all
+over me. I'm ashamed of it--an' yet, do you know, I like to give in to
+it?" Calliope said solemnly. "I donno what's come over me. Hev you heard
+where the Java entertainment's put to be?"
+
+I had not heard, nor was I sure just why it was of Java, save that
+Friendship is continually giving entertainments with foreign names and
+practising a wild imperialism to carry out an effect of foreign parts.
+And since, at the missionary meeting which had projected the affair,
+Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had told about _their_ Java entertainment in
+_their_ church at home, that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady, who
+was president of the society, had appointed her chairman of the Java
+entertainment committee.
+
+"And," Calliope informed me, "she's picked out the engine-house for it.
+Yes, sir,--the fire-engine house. No other place was _quaint_ enough. No
+other place lent itself to decoration probabilities--or somethin' like
+that. She turned her back flat on the church an' went round to empty
+stores, lookin' for _quaint-ity_. One while I thought she'd hev us in
+the Chinese laundry, she seemed that took with the tomato-coloured
+signs on the walls. But, finally, she lit on the engine-house; an' when
+she see the big, bare engine-room, with the big, shinin' engine in it,
+an' harnesses hangin' from them rough board beams in a kind of avenoo,
+an' the board walls all streaked down, she spatted her hands an' 'lowed
+we'd hev our Java there. 'What a dear, quaint place,' s's she,--'so
+_flexible_!' She held out about the harnesses bein' so quaintly
+picturesque an' the fire-engine a piece o' resistance--or somethin' like
+that. An' she rents the room, without ay, yes, no, nor boo. My way of
+thinkin', a chairman ought to hev boo for a background, even if she _is_
+chairman. That's where she wants the statue an' the nut butter an' the
+cap an' gown. Can we borrow 'em of you?"
+
+"The engine-house!" I repeated incredulously. "You cannot mean the
+fire-engine house, Calliope?"
+
+"I do," Calliope said firmly, "the quaint, flexible fire-engine house.
+They ain't been a fire in Friendship in over two years, so Mis' Johnson
+says we ain't got that to think of--an' I donno as we hev. An' they
+never use the engine any more, now they've got city water, excep' for
+fires in the country, and then nobody ever gets in to give the alarm
+till the house is burned down an' no need to bother goin'. Even if they
+do get in in some sort of season, the department has to go to the mayor
+to get a permit to go outside the city limits. It was so when the
+Topladys' barn burned. Timothy told 'em, when they come gallopin' up
+after it was most done smokin', that if they had held off a little
+longer they could have been a sight of help to him in shinglin' the new
+one. Oh, no, they ain't much of any danger of our being disturbed by a
+fire in them two hours to-night. Anyhow, they can't be a fire. Mis'
+Oliver Wheeler Johnson said so."
+
+We laughed like children as we loaded my "Java" stuffs on the wagon.
+Calliope was a valiant helper to Mrs. Johnson, and so I told her. She
+was standing in the wagon box, one arm about my palm, the other free for
+driving.
+
+"I'm the chairman o' the refreshments, too," she confessed. "Oh, well.
+Yourself you can boss round, you know," she threw back, smiling;
+"anybody can do that. But your feelin's you're some cramped about
+runnin'."
+
+It is certain that Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson was signally unfitted for
+a future in Friendship Village. She was a woman of some little world in
+which she had moved before she came to us, and in the two worlds she
+perceived no difference. Or, where she saw a difference, she sought to
+modify it by a touch when a breath would have been too much, and the
+only factor of potency would have been a kind of potency of spirit,
+which she did not possess.
+
+The Oliver Wheeler Johnsons had moved to Friendship only three months
+before, and nobody had looked for them at church on their first Sunday.
+"Movin' so, you want your Sabbath to take some rest in, an' you ain't
+expected to dress yourself up an' get out to Sunday service an' face
+strangers," the village said--and when the two walked into church while
+the responses were being made nearly everybody lost the place.
+
+They were very young, and they were extremely well dressed.
+
+"He's got on one o' the long coats," comment ran after church, "an' he's
+got a real soft-speakin' voice. But he seems to know how to act."
+
+And, "I declare, nice white gloves an' a nineteen-inch baby-blue ostrich
+feather durin' movin' seems some like puttin' on."
+
+And, "The back of her dress fits her just like the front, an' I must say
+she knows it. No pullin' down the jacket or hitchin' the strings forward
+for _her_, when she stands up!"
+
+As Miggy, who first told me about that day, had said, "That Sunday
+morning, Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson was the belle of the congregation."
+
+After service that day, instead of going directly home or waiting to be
+addressed, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had spoken to the woman with
+whom she had been seated. It was Mis' Postmaster Sykes.
+
+"Thank you so much," Mrs. Johnson said, "for letting us share your pew.
+May I present my husband? We have come to Friendship to live, and we
+shall be coming here to church. And I shall want to join your Ladies'
+Aid Society and your Missionary Circle and, perhaps, be in the
+Sunday-school right away. I--I think I'll be less homesick--"
+
+"Actually," Mis' Sykes said afterward, "she took my breath clear away
+from me. I never heard of such a thing. Of course, we're real glad to
+hev our newcomers Christian people, but we want quiet Christians. An'
+did you notice how she was when I give her an introduction around? Why,
+she up an' out with somethin' to say to everybody. Just a neat little
+'How d' do' wouldn't do for her to remark. I always suspicion them
+talkative-at-first kind. It's like they'd been on the stage or brought
+up in a hotel."
+
+When she first came to the Ladies' Aid and the missionary meetings, Mrs.
+Johnson "said something." She was "up to her feet" three or four times
+at each session with suggestion, information, or description of how they
+did in her home church. And some way I think that what chiefly separated
+her from the village was the way that inevitable nineteen-inch blue
+ostrich plume on the little woman's hat bobbed and won attention and was
+everywhere at once. Or, perhaps--such creatures of wax we are to our
+impressions--it may have been little Mrs. Johnson's mere way of lifting
+her small, pointed chin when she talked, and of frowning and
+over-emphasizing. Or it may have been that she stood with her hands
+clasped behind her in what seemed to Friendship exaggerated ease, or
+that she smiled arbitrarily and ingratiatingly as she talked when there
+was absolutely nothing at which to smile. I think that these made her
+seem as alien to us as, in varied measure, certain moral defects might
+have done.
+
+Moreover, she mentioned with familiarity objects and usages of which
+Friendship Village knew nothing: Carriage shoes, a new cake of soap for
+each guest, some kind of ice served, it was incredulously repeated, "in
+the middle o' the meal!" She innocently let fall that she sent to the
+city for her letter-paper. She had travelled in a state-room on a train,
+and she said so. She knew a noted woman. She used, we saw from the
+street, shaded candles on the table when she and her husband were at
+supper alone. She thought nothing of ordering Jimmy Sturgis and the bus
+to take her down town to her marketing on a rainy day. She had inclined
+to blame the village that Daphne Street was not paved, instead of
+joining with the village to blame somebody else. Above all, she tried
+to buy our old furniture. I do not know that another might not have done
+all these quite without giving offence, and, indeed, rather have left us
+impressed with her superior familiarity with an envied world. But by the
+time of the Java entertainment Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had
+innocently alienated half Friendship Village. And this morning Calliope
+merely voiced what I knew to be the sentiment of most of Mrs. Johnson's
+neighbours and acquaintances. For these people are the kindly of earth;
+but they are of earth, where reign both the centrifugal and centripetal
+forces,--and the control is not always so swift as science and the human
+heart could wish.
+
+At five o'clock to-day--the day set for the Java evening
+entertainment--I made my way to the engine-house. This was partly
+because I wished to be as much as possible with Calliope during her few
+days in the village, and partly it was because the affair would belong
+to the class of festivity which I am loath to miss, and I think that,
+for Friendship's sake, I will never willingly pass by a "hall" in which
+is to be found a like diversion. Already on the great room, receiving
+its final preparation, had descended something of the excited spirit of
+the evening: the heat, the insufficient light, the committee members'
+shrill, rollicking children sliding on the floor, the booths which in
+all bazaars contain with a precision fairly bewildering the same class
+of objects; and the inevitable sense of hurry and silk waists and aching
+feet and mustn't-take-your-change-back. But to all these things the Java
+engine-house affair would add an element of novelty, almost a flavour of
+romance. Certainly the room lent itself to "decoration probabilities,"
+as Calliope had vaguely quoted; it had been a roller-skating rink,
+utilized by the fire-department on the decline of the pastime, and there
+was, as Mrs. Johnson's _pièce de résistance_, the fire-engine.
+
+I had never before been in the engine-house--you know how there will be
+commonplace enough spots in your own town to which you never go: the
+engine-house, the church belfry, the wood yard, upstairs over this store
+and that, and grocery cellars whose sloping trap-doors, open now and
+then to the walk, are as alien as the inside of the trunks of your
+trees. When I stepped in the engine-house, it seemed insistently a place
+in which I had never been before. And this may have been partly because
+the whole idea of a village fire-department is to me singular: the
+waiting horses and ladders and hose, whose sole reason for being is
+merely ameliorative, and never human and preventive; that pealing of the
+sharp, peculiar, terrifying alarm and summons first imprinting something
+on the very air, stabbing us with _Halt_ while we count the bell
+strokes for the ward, and then clanging the wild fury of the
+quick-stroke command to help.
+
+To-day the great glittering fire-engine, flanked by hose-cart and
+hook-and-ladder wagon, occupied almost wonderingly the head of the room
+which had been invaded, and an inspired committee had garlanded the
+engine with paper roses and American flags. The flag of the Netherlands,
+copied from a dictionary and wrought in red-white-and-blue cambric with
+a silver crown, drooped meditatively from the smoke-stack; a scarlet fez
+and a peacock-feather fan hung on the supply hose; and on the
+tongue-bracer was fixed a pink sofa cushion from Mis' Amanda Toplady's
+parlour, with an olive Indian gentleman in a tinsel zouave jacket
+stamped on the cover. On the two big sliding doors, back of which stood
+the fire company's horses, were tacked innumerable Javanese trifles more
+picturesque than authentic; and on outlying booths and tables there were
+others. Directly before the engine was to be the tea-table, where Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes was to serve Java tea from a Java canister, loaned by
+the Post-office store.
+
+As soon as I entered I sought out Calliope's booth, a huge affair
+constructed of rugs whose red-tongued, couchant dogs and bounding fawns
+somewhat marred the Eastern effect. And within, I found myself in a
+circle of the Friendship women whom I know best--all of them tired with
+that deadly tiredness born of a day's work at a church fair of any
+nation. But at once I saw that it was not merely fatigue which was
+disquieting them.
+
+Calliope was leaning against a bit of Bagelen blue, loaned by the new
+minister's wife. And she said to me as if, I thought, in explanation of
+what I was to hear,--"I guess we're all pretty tired. Most of us look
+like we wanted to pant. I'm all of a shake, myself."
+
+When Mis' Postmaster Sykes spoke unsmilingly, I understood:--
+
+"It ain't the bein' tired," she disclaimed; "tired I can stand an' hev
+stood since my own birth. But it's the bein' commanded 'round--me,
+_commanded_--by that little I'm-the-one-an'-you-do-as-I-say out there!"
+
+"Land-a-livin' an' a-dyin'!" said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "I
+declare if I know whether I'm on foot or on horseback. It's bad enough
+to hev to run a fair, without you've got to be run yourself, too. Ain't
+it enough for Mis' Johnson to be made chairman without her wantin' to
+boss besides? She might as well say to me, 'Mis' Holcomb, you do
+everything the opposite way from the way you've just done it,' an' hev
+it over with."
+
+Mis' Amanda Toplady--even that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda--shook her
+head.
+
+"Mis' Johnson surely acts used to bein' bowed down to," she admitted;
+"she seems fair bent on lordin' it. My land, if she wasn't bound to
+borrow my Tea rose plant that's just nearin' ready to bud."
+
+Calliope laughed, a little ruefully, and wholly in sympathy.
+
+"Honest," she said, "I guess what's the matter with all of us ain't so
+much what she does as the particular way she does it. It's so with some
+folks. They just seem to sort of _set_ you all over, when you come near
+'em--same as the cold does to gravy. We'd all ought to wrostle with the
+feelin', I expect."
+
+"I expect we had," said Mis' Holcomb, "but you could wrostle all your
+days with vinegar an' it'd pucker your mouth same way."
+
+"Funny part," Calliope observed, "everybody feels just alike about her.
+When she skips around so sort o' momentous, we all want to dodge. I felt
+sorry for her, first, because I thought she was in for nervous
+prostration. But after a while I see it wasn't disease--it was just her
+feelin' so up an' down significant, you might say."
+
+"I donno," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "but it's part the way
+she says her _a_'s. That real _a_-soundin' _a_ kind," she explained
+vaguely.
+
+"She's so right an' left cuffy--I guess that's the whole thing,"
+Calliope put it in her rich idiom.
+
+"Well," said Mis' Amanda, sadly, "there must be somethin' we could like
+her for, even if it was only her husband."
+
+"He ain't what I'd call much, either," Calliope dismissed Mr. Oliver
+Wheeler Johnson positively; "he's got too soft-speakin' a voice. I like
+a man's voice to rumble up soft from his chest an' not slip down thin
+from his brain."
+
+I remember that I listened in a great wonder to these women whom I had
+seen at many an office of friendliness to strangers and aliens. Yet as I
+looked across the floor at that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson--who,
+in the hat with the blue plume, was everywhere, directing, altering,
+objecting, arranging, commanding and, especially, doing over--I most
+unwillingly felt much as they felt. If only Mrs. Johnson had not
+continually lifted her little pointed chin. If only she had not
+perpetually and ingratiatingly smiled when there was nothing at which to
+smile at all.
+
+Then Abigail Arnold hurried up to us with a tray of cups for the Java
+tea.
+
+"Calliope," she said to the chairman of the refreshments, "Mis' Johnson
+jus' put up her little chin an' says, 'What! ain't we no lemons for the
+tea?'"
+
+Calliope compressed her lips and lifted their thin line tight and high.
+
+"Lemins," she replied, "ain't necessarily found in Java. I've a good big
+mind to go home to bed."
+
+Then we saw little Mrs. Johnson's blue linen dress hurrying toward us
+with the waving line of the blue feather above her, like a last little
+daring flourish by the artist of her. She was really very pretty and
+childish, with a manner of moving in wreaths and lines and never in
+solids. Her little feet twinkled along like the signature to the pretty
+picture of her. But yet she was not appealing. She was like an
+overconfident child whom you long to shut in a closet. Yes, I understand
+that I sound like a barbarian in these days of splendid corrective
+treatment of children who are studied and not stormed at. And in this
+treatment I believe to the uttermost. And yet, overconfidence in a child
+is of all things the most--I will amend what I said: Mrs. Oliver Wheeler
+Johnson was like an overconfident child whom you long to shut in a
+closet because of your ignorance of what else on earth to do. No doubt
+there is a better way, but none of us knew it. And she came toward us
+intent, every one felt, on some radical change in arrangements, though
+the big room was now in the pink of appointment and ready to be left
+while the committee went home to sup on "just sauce and
+bread-and-butter," and to don silk waists.
+
+We saw little Mrs. Johnson hurrying toward us, upon a background of the
+great, patient room, all-tolerant of its petty bedizening. And then Mrs.
+Johnson, we in Calliope's booth, the sliding, rollicking children, and
+all the others about stood still, at the sharp, peculiar terrifying
+alarm and summons which seemed to imprint something on the very air,
+stabbing us with _Halt_ that we might count the bell strokes for the
+ward, and clanging a wild fury of the quick-stroke command to help. For
+the first time in two years the Friendship fire alarm was sounding from
+the tower above our heads.
+
+There was a panting sweep and scurry for the edges of the room, as
+instantly a gong on the wall sounded with the alarm, and the two big
+sliding doors went back, scattering like feathers the innumerable
+Javanese trifles that had been tacked there. Forward, down the rug-hung
+vista, plunged the two big horses of the department. We saw the Java
+tea-table borne to earth, the Javanese exhibits adorning outlying
+counters swept away, and all the "decoration probabilities" vanish in
+savage wreck. Then the quaintly picturesque harnesses fell to the
+horses' necks, their hoofs trampled terrifyingly on the loose boards of
+the floor, and forth from the yawning doors the horses pounded, dragging
+the _pièce de résistance_, with garlands on its sides, the pink zouave
+cushion crushed beneath it, and the flag of the Netherlands streaming
+from the stack. Horses rushed thither in competition, came thundering at
+the doors, and galloped to place before the two carts. I think not a
+full minute can have been consumed. But the ruin of the Java
+entertainment committee's work was unbelievably complete. Though there
+had been not a fire in Friendship Village in two years, that night, of
+all nights, Jimmy Sturgis's "hay-barn," for the omnibus horses, "took it
+on itself," it was said, "to go to work an' burn up." And Jimmy's barn
+is outside the city limits, so that the _pièce de résistance_ had to be
+used. And Jimmy is in the fire-department, so that the company galloped
+informally to the rescue without the benefit of the mayor's authority.
+
+As the last of the department disappeared, and the women of the
+committee stood looking at one another--tired with the deadly tiredness
+of a day such as theirs--a little blue linen figure sprang upon a chair
+and clasped her hands behind her, and a blue ostrich feather lifted and
+dipped as she spoke.
+
+"Quickly!" Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson cried. "All hands at work now!
+Mrs. Sykes, will you set up the tea-table? You can get more dishes from
+my house. Mrs. Toplady, this booth, please. You can make it right in no
+time. Mrs. Holcomb, you will have to do your booth entirely over--you
+can get some things from my house. Miss Marsh--ah, Calliope Marsh, you
+must go to my house for my lace curtains--"
+
+She smiled ingratiatingly and surely arbitrarily, for we all knew full
+well that there was absolutely nothing to smile at. And with that
+Calliope's indignation, as she afterward said, "kind of crystallized and
+boiled over." I remember how she stood, hugging her thin little arms and
+speaking her defiance.
+
+"I donno how you feel, Mis' Johnson," she said dryly, "but, _my_ idea,
+Bedlam let loose ain't near quaint enough for a Java entertainment. Nor
+I don't think it's what you might say real Java, either. Things here
+looks to me too flexible. I'm goin' home an' go to bed."
+
+There was no doubt what the rest meant to do. With one impulse they
+turned toward the door as Calliope turned, and silently they took the
+way that the _pièce de résistance_ had taken before them. Little Mrs.
+Johnson stood on her chair making many gestures; but no one went back.
+
+Calliope looked straight before her.
+
+"My feet ache like I done my thinkin' with 'em," she said, "an' my head
+feels like I'd stood on it. An' what's it all for?"
+
+"Regular clock performance," Mis' Postmaster Sykes assented. "We've
+ticked hard all day long an' ain't got a thing out of it. I often think
+it's that way with my housework, but I did think the Ladies' Missionary
+could tick, when it _did_ tick, for eternity. I'm tuckered to the bone."
+
+"Nobody knows," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was Mame-Bliss, "how my poor neck
+aches. It's there I suffer first an' most."
+
+Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was walking behind the rest, took three great
+steps and caught us up and spoke, a little breathlessly:--
+
+"Land, land," she said, "I guess I'll go home an' pop some corn. Seems
+to me it'd smell sort of cosy an' homelike an' soothin' down. It's a
+grand thing to smell when you're feelin' far off from yourself."
+
+Calliope laughed a little then.
+
+"Well," she said, "anyhow I ain't got my silk waist to get into--and I
+didn't hev a nice one to put on anyway. I was wishin' I had, and now my
+wish has come true by bein' took away from me, bodily--like they will.
+But just the same--"
+
+She turned on the walk and faced us, and hugged her thin little arms.
+
+"A while ago," she said, "I give that little woman there six months to
+get herself the cold shoulder all around. Well, the time ain't up
+yet--but both my shoulders feels stone cold!"
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE COLD SHOULDER
+
+
+There is something more about Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson.
+
+Did you ever look through an old school-book of your own and, say, on
+the history picture of Vesuvius in eruption impose your own memory of
+Pompeii, visited in these twenty years since you studied about it; and
+have you not stared hard at the time between and felt yourself some one
+other than that one who once dreamed over the Vesuvius picture? Or,
+years after you read the Letters, you have made a little mark below
+Cicero's cry from exile, "Oh, that I had been less eager for life!" and
+you look at the cry and at the mark, and you and one of these become an
+anachronism--but you are not sure which it is that so becomes. So now,
+in reading over these notes some while after I have set them down, I am
+minded here to give you my look ahead to the end of the summer and to
+slip in some account of what happened as a closing of the tale. And I
+confess that something about me--perhaps it is the Custodian
+herself--likes this way of pretending a freedom from time and of looking
+upon its fruit to say which seeds have grown and which have not.
+
+Friendship Village is not superstitious, but when curious coincidences
+occur we do, as we say, "take down note." And it did seem like a
+judgment upon us that, a little time after the Java fiasco, and while
+indignation was yet at high noon, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson fell ill.
+
+At first I think we affected not to know it. When she did not appear at
+church, none of us mentioned it for a Sunday or two. Then when some one
+casually noted her absence we said, "Oh, wasn't she? Got little cold,
+likely." That we saw her no more down town or "brushing up" about her
+door we facilely laid to chance. When the village heard that her
+maid--who always offended by talking almost in a whisper--had once or
+twice excused her mistress to callers, every one shut lips and hardened
+hearts and said some folk acted _very_ funny about their calling duties.
+But when, at the twelve o'clock breakfast of the new minister's
+wife--("Like enough breakfast at noon was a real Bible custom," the
+puzzled devotees solved that amazing hour), Mrs. Johnson did not appear,
+the village was forced to admit that something must be wrong.
+
+Moreover, against its will the behaviour of young Mr. Johnson was
+gravely alarming Friendship. Mr. Johnson was in real estate and
+insurance in the city, and this did not impress the village as a serious
+business. "Because, what does he _sell_!" as Abigail Arnold said. "We
+know he don't own property. He rents the very house they live in. A
+doctor's a doctor an' he gives pills, an' a store's a store with the
+kind o' thing you need. But it don't seem like that man could make a
+real good livin' for her, dealin' vague in nothin' that way." His
+income, it was felt, was problematical, and the village had settled it
+that what the Oliver Wheeler Johnsons' had was chiefly wedding presents
+"an' high-falutin' tastes." But, in the face of the evidence, every
+afternoon at three o'clock the young husband ordered a phaëton from
+Jimmy Sturgis and came home from the city to take his wife to drive.
+Between shutters the village saw that little Mrs. Johnson's face did
+look betrayingly pale, and the blue ostrich plume lay motionless on her
+bright hair.
+
+"I guess Mis' Johnson's real run down," her acquaintances said to one
+another uneasily. Still we did not go to see her. The weeks went by
+until, one morning, Calliope met the little new Friendship doctor on the
+street and asked him about his patient.
+
+"I up an' ask' him flat out," Calliope confessed afterward; "not that I
+really cared to be told, but I hated to know I was heathenish. You don't
+like the feelin'. To know they ain't heathens is all that keeps some
+folks from _bein_' 'em. Well, so I ask' him. 'Doctor Heron,' s'I, 'is
+that Mis' Johnson real sick, or is she just sickish?' He looks at me
+an'--'Looks pretty sick, don't she?' s'e. 'Well,' s'I, 'I've seen folks
+look real rich that wa'n't it by right-down pocketbook evidence.' 'Been
+to see her?' s'e. 'No,' s'I, short. 'Might drop in,' s'e, an' walks off,
+lookin' cordial. That little Doctor Heron is that close-mouthed I
+declare if I don't respect him same as the minister an' the pipe-organ
+an' the skippin' hills."
+
+So, as midsummer passed and found the little woman still ailing, I
+obeyed an idle impulse and went one evening to see her. I recall that as
+soon as I had crossed her threshold the old influence came upon me, and
+I was minded to run from the place in sheer distaste of the overemphasis
+and the lifted, pointed chin and the fluttering importances of her
+presence. I was ashamed enough that this should be so, but so it was;
+and I held my ground to await her coming to the room only by a measure
+of will.
+
+I sat with Mrs. Johnson for an hour that evening. And it would seem
+that, as is the habit of many, having taken my own way I was straightway
+possessed to draw others after me. There are those who behave similarly
+and who set cunningly to work to gain their own ends, as, for example, I
+did. For one night soon I devised a little feast, which I have always
+held to be a good doorway to any enterprise, and, at the
+Friendship-appointed supper hour of six, I made my table as fair as
+possible, as has been done in like case ever since butter was first
+served "in a lordly dish." And my guests were Calliope, without whom no
+festival is wholly in keeping, and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and
+Mis' Postmaster Sykes, and that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady.
+
+Because they had arrived so unsuspectingly I own myself to have felt
+guilty enough when, in that comfortable half-hour after a new and
+delectable dessert had been pronounced upon, I suggested with what
+casualness I might summon that we five pay a visit that night to Mrs.
+Oliver Wheeler Johnson.
+
+"Land!" said Mis' Holcomb, "I've thought I would an' then I've thought I
+wouldn't till I feel all two-faced about myself. I donno. Sometimes I
+think one way an' sometimes I think the other. Are you ever like that?"
+
+"I s'pose," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, majestically, "that them in our
+position ought to overlook. I donno's 'twould hurt us any to go," she
+added graciously.
+
+Calliope's eyes twinkled.
+
+"That's it," she said; "let them that's got the social position to
+overlook things be Christian an' overlook 'em."
+
+That great Mis' Amanda Toplady folded her hands, dimpled like a baby
+giant's.
+
+"I'd be glad to go," she said simply; "I've got some grape jell that
+looks to me like it wasn't goin' to keep long, an' I'd be thankful to be
+on terms with her so's I could carry it in to her. They ain't a single
+other invalid in Friendship."
+
+Calliope sprang to her feet and crossed her little arms, a hand hugging
+either shoulder.
+
+"Well said!" she cried; "do let's go! I'm sick to death of slidin' off
+the subject whenever it comes up in my mind."
+
+So, in the fair October dusk, we five went down the Plank Road--where
+Summer lingers late. The air was gentle with the soft, impending dark. I
+wonder why the colonnade of sweet influences, down which we stepped, did
+not win us to themselves. But I remember how, instead, our imminent
+visit drew us back to the days of Mrs. Johnson's coming, so that
+presently we were going over the incident of the Java entertainment,
+and, as Calliope would have put it, "crystallizing and boiling over"
+again in the old distaste.
+
+But when we reached the little cottage of the Johnsons, our varied
+motives for the visit were abruptly merged in a common anxiety. For
+Doctor Heron's buggy stood at the gate and the little one-story cottage
+was dark save for a light in what we knew to be a corner bedroom. The
+hallway was open to the night, but though we could distinctly hear the
+bell jingle in the kitchen no one answered the summons. Then, there
+being somewhere about a murmur of voices, Calliope stepped within and
+called softly:--
+
+"Doctor, Doctor Heron--you there? Is they anything we can do?"
+
+The doctor came momentarily to the lighted doorway down the hall.
+
+"That you, Calliope?" he said. "You might come here, will you? Tell the
+rest to sit down somewheres. And you tell Mr. Johnson he can come."
+
+On which, from out the dark living room, some one emerged very swiftly
+and without a word pushed by us all where we were crowded in the passage
+and strode down to the little lighted chamber. Calliope hurried after
+him, and we four shrank back in sudden dread and slipped silently into
+the room which the young husband had left, and stood together in the
+dimness. Was she so sick? In that room he must have heard the door-bell
+as we had heard it, and yet he had not answered. Was it possible that we
+had come too late?
+
+While we waited we said nothing at all, save that great Mis' Amanda
+Toplady, who said three times or four, "Oh, dear, oh, dear, I'm always
+waitin' till somethin's too late--either me or the other thing." It
+seemed very long before we heard some stir, but it can have been only a
+few minutes until the doctor came down the little hall and groped into
+the room. In answer to all that we asked he merely occupied himself in
+lighting a match and setting it deliberately to the candles on the table
+and adjusting their shades. They were, we noted afterward, the same
+candles whose presence we had detected and derided at those long ago
+tête-à-tête suppers in that house. The light glowed on the young
+doctor's pale face as he looked at us, each in turn, before he spoke.
+And when he had done with his slow scrutiny--I think that we cannot
+wholly have fancied its accusation--he said only:--
+
+"Yes, she's pretty sick. I can't tell yet."
+
+Then he turned and closed the outer door and stood leaning against it,
+looking up the hall.
+
+"Miss Marsh!" he called.
+
+But why did the man not tell us something, we wondered; and there
+flashed in my mind Calliope's reference to the pipe-organ and the
+skipping hills. At all events, Calliope would tell us.
+
+And so she did. We heard her step in the hall, coming quickly and yet
+with a manner of exceeding care. I think that with the swift sense which
+wings before intelligence, the others understood before they saw her,
+even as I understood. Calliope stopped in the doorway as if she could
+trust herself to go no farther. And she was holding something in her
+arms.
+
+"Calliope," we said; "Calliope...."
+
+She looked down at that which she held, and then she looked at us. And
+the tears were in her eyes, but her face was brighter than I have ever
+known it.
+
+"It's a baby," she said, "a little bit of a baby. _Her_ baby. An' it
+makes me feel--it makes me feel--oh," she broke off, "don't it make you
+feel that way, too?"
+
+We looked at one another, and avoided one another's look, and then
+looked long at the baby. I do not remember that we said anything at all,
+or if we did so, that it bore a meaning. But an instant after Calliope
+gave the baby to the nurse who appeared in the doorway, we all tiptoed
+down to the kitchen by common consent. And it was plain that Mrs.
+Johnson's baby made us feel that way, too.
+
+In our desire to be of tardy service we did the most absurd things. We
+took possession of the kitchen, rejoicing that we found the supper
+dishes uncared for, and we heated a great kettle of water, and washed
+and wiped and put away, as softly as we could; and then we "brushed up
+around." I think that only the need of silence kept us from cleaning
+windows. When the nurse appeared--who had arrived that day unknown of
+Friendship--we sprang as one to do her bidding. We sent the little maid
+to bed, we tidied the living room, walking tiptoe, and then we went back
+through the kitchen and sat down on the little side "stoop." And all
+this time we had addressed one another only about the tasks which we had
+in hand.
+
+After a little silence,
+
+"The milkman was quite late this morning," observed Mis' Holcomb.
+
+"Well, he's begun to deliver in cans instead o' bottles," Mis' Sykes
+explained; "it takes him some longer to get around. He says bottles
+makes his wife just that much more to do."
+
+Then we fell silent again.
+
+It was Calliope, sitting on the porch step outside, where it was dark,
+who at last had the courage to be articulate.
+
+"I hope--I _hope_," she said, "she's goin' to be all right."
+
+Mis' Sykes shaded her eyes from the bracket lamp within.
+
+"I'll go bail," she said, "that little you-do-as-I-say chin'll carry her
+through. I'm glad she's got it."
+
+Just then we heard the thin crying of the child and we could divine
+Calliope, that on the step where she sat she was hugging her arms and
+rocking somewhat, to and fro.
+
+"Like enough," she said, "oh, like enough--folks ain't so cramped about
+runnin' their own feelin's as they think they are!"
+
+To this we murmured something indefinite in sound but positive enough in
+sense. And we all knew what we all knew.
+
+"Let's go out around the house to the front gate," said that great Mis'
+Amanda Toplady, abruptly. "Have any of you ladies got two
+handkerchiefs?"
+
+"I've got two," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, "an' I ain't used either
+one. Do you want the one with essence or the one without?"
+
+"I ain't partial," said Mis' Amanda.
+
+We rose and stumbled along the grassy path that led round the house. At
+the gate we met Doctor Heron.
+
+"Well," he said slowly, "well." And after a moment, "Will--will any of
+you be here in the morning?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," we all said simply.
+
+"That's good," he commented shortly, "I didn't know."
+
+We five had to separate at the first corner to go our home ways, and we
+stood for a moment under the gas-light. I remember how, just then,
+Peter's father came singing past us, like one of the Friendship family
+who did not understand his kinship. Even as we five had not understood
+ours.
+
+"You haven't got a shawl, hev you?" Mis' Sykes said to me solicitously.
+
+"The nights have been some chilly on a person's shoulders for a day or
+two now," said Mis' Holcomb.
+
+Calliope put her hand up quickly to her throat.
+
+"Quit," she said. "All of you. Thank God. An' shake hands. I tell you,
+after this I bet I'll run my own feelin's about folks or I'll bring down
+the sky an' make new feelin's! Oh," said Calliope, "don't her--an'
+_now_--an' the baby--an'--oh, an' that bright star winkin' over that
+hitchin' post, make things seem--easy? Good night. I can't stand out
+here any longer."
+
+But when we had gone away a few steps, Calliope called us back. And as
+we turned again,
+
+"To bring down the sky," she repeated, "I bet that's the way God meant
+us to do. They ain't any of us got enough _to_ us to piece out without
+it!"
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+EVENING DRESS
+
+
+I have said that Daphne Street has been paved within the past year, but
+I had not heard of the manner in which the miracle had been wrought
+until the day when Calliope's brief stay in the village ended and she
+came to tell me good-by--and, more than incidentally, to show me some
+samples of a dress which she might have, and a dress which she wouldn't
+have, and a dress which she had made up her mind to have.
+
+"We don't dress much here in Friendship Village," she observed. "Not but
+what we'd like to, but we ain't the time nor the means nor the places to
+wear to. But they was one night--"
+
+She looked at me, as always when she means to tell a story, somewhat
+with the manner of asking a permission.
+
+"None of the low-neck' fashion-plates used to seem real to us," she
+said. "We used to look at 'em pinned up in Lyddy Ember's dressmakin'
+windows, ah-ahing in their low pink an' long blue, an' we'd look 'em
+over an' think tolerant enough, like about sea-serpents. But neither the
+one nor the other bit hold rill vital, because the plates was so young
+an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an' we was old an' busy, like you get,
+an' considered past the dressin' age. Still, it made kind of a nice
+thing to do on the way home from the grocery hot forenoons--draw up
+there on the shady side, where the street kitters some into a curve, an'
+look at Lyddy's plates, an' choose, like you was goin' to get one.
+
+"Land knows we needed some oasises on that street from the grocery up
+home. Daphne Street, our main street, didn't always use' to be what it
+is now--neat little wooden blocks an' a stone curb. You know how it use'
+to be--no curb an' the road a sight, over your shoe-tops with mud in the
+wet, an' over your shoe-tops with sand when it come dry. We ladies used
+to talk a good deal about it, but the men knew it meant money to hev it
+fixed, an' so they told us hevin' it fixed meant cuttin' the trees down,
+an' that kept us quiet--all but the Friendship Married Ladies Cemetery
+Improvement Sodality.
+
+"Mis' Postmaster Sykes was president o' the Sodality last year, you
+know,--she's most always president of everything,--an' we'd been
+workin' quite hard all that winter, an' had got things in the cemetery
+rill ship-shape--at least I mean things _on_ the cemetery was. An' at
+one o' the July meetin's last summer Mis' Sykes up an' proposed that we
+give over workin' for the dead an' turn to the livin', an' pave the main
+street of Friendship Village.
+
+"'True,' she says, 'our constitution states that the purpose of our
+Sodality shall be to keep up the graves of our townspeople an' make 'em
+attractive to others. But,' says she, 'when they ain't enough of us dead
+to occupy all the time, the only Christian way to remedy that is to work
+for folks before they die, while we're waitin' for their graves.'
+
+"This seemed reasonable, an' we voted unanimous to pave Daphne Street.
+An' on the way home Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Timothy Toplady an' I see
+Timothy Toplady settin' in the post-office store, an' we went in to tell
+him an' Silas Sykes about it. But before we could start in, Silas says,
+eyebrows all eager, 'Ain't you heard?'
+
+"'Heard what?' says his wife, kind o' cross, bein' he was her wedded
+husband an' she _hadn't_ heard.
+
+"''Bout Threat Hubbelthwait,' says Silas, lookin' at Mis' Toplady an'
+me, bein's Mis' Sykes was his wife. 'Drunk again,' says Silas, 'an'
+fiddlin' for dear life, an' won't let anybody into the hotel. Mis'
+Hubbelthwait has gone over to her mother's, an' the hired girl with
+her; an' Threat's settin' in the bar an' playin' all the hymn tunes he
+knows.'
+
+"It wasn't the first time it had happened, you know. Threat an' his wife
+an' the hired girl keep the only hotel in Friendship Village--when
+Threat is sober. When he isn't, he sometimes closes up the house an'
+turns out whoever happens to be there, an' won't let a soul in--though,
+of course, not much of anybody ever comes to Friendship anyway, excep'
+now an' then an automobile on its way somewheres. An' there Threat will
+set in the bar, sometimes most of one week, sometimes most of two, an'
+scrape away on the only tunes he knows--all hymns, 'Just As I Am,' an'
+'Can A Little Child Like Me?' Threat don't mean to be sacrilegious; he
+shows that by never singin' them two hymns in church, when they're give
+out.
+
+"'Land!' says Mis' Sykes, when Silas got through, 'what men are!'
+
+"'We ain't so much as woman, lemme tell you,' says Silas, right crisp.
+Which wasn't what he meant, an' we all laughed at him, so he was a
+little mad to start with.
+
+"'The Sodality's decided to pave Daphne Street,' Mis' Sykes mentions
+then, simple.
+
+"'Pave _what_?' shouts Silas--Silas always seems to think the more you
+do in sound the more you'll do in sense.
+
+"'Do _what_ to Daphne Street?' says Timothy, whirlin' from the peanut
+roaster.
+
+"'Pave Daphne Street,' says Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' me,
+wonderin'.
+
+"Silas wrapped his arms around his own shoulders.
+
+"'When,' says he, lettin' his head lurch with his own emphasizin', 'did
+the Common Council hear about this?'
+
+"'They ain't heard, about it,' says Mis' Sykes, 'no more'n we ever hear
+anything about them.'
+
+"Silas an' Timothy is both aldermen, an' rill sensitive over it. I guess
+the Common Council always _is_ a delicate subject, ain't it?
+
+"Mebbe it wasn't a rill diplomatic way to begin, but it hadn't entered
+the Sodality's head that the town wouldn't be glad to hev the pavin'
+done if the Sodality was willin' to do it. Ain't it a hard thing to
+learn that it ain't all willingness, nor yet all bein' capable, that
+gets things done in the world? It's part just edgin' round an' edgin'
+round.
+
+"What did the Common Council do that night but call a special meetin'
+an' vote not to order any city pavin' done that present year. Every
+member was there but Threat Hubbelthwait, who was fiddlin', an' every
+vote was switched by Silas an' Timothy to be unanimous, excep' Eppleby
+Holcomb's vote. Eppleby, we heard afterwards, said that when a pack o'
+women made up their minds to pave, they'd pave if it was to pave--some
+place that Eppleby hadn't ought to 'a' mentioned; an' he was goin' to be
+on the pavin' side. But then, Eppleby is the gentlest husband in
+Friendship Village, an' known to be.
+
+"Sodality met special next day, not so much to do anything as to let it
+be known that we'd took action. This we done by votin' to lay low till
+such time as we could order the wooden blocks. We preferred to pave
+peaceable, it bein' hot weather.
+
+"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss an'
+Mis' Mayor Uppers an' I walked home together from that meetin'. It was a
+blisterin' July afternoon--one of them afternoons that melts itself out
+flat, same as a dropped pepp'mint on a brick walk, an' you're left
+stickin' in it helpless as a fly, an' generally buzzin'. I rec'lect we
+was buzzin'--comin' down Daphne Street in that chokin' dust an' no
+pavement.
+
+"'It's a dog's life, livin' in a little town--in some respects,' I
+remember Mis' Sykes says.
+
+"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, tolerant, 'I know. I know it is. But I'd
+rather live in a little town an' dog it out than go up to the city an'
+turn wolf, same as some.'
+
+"An' yet we all felt the same, every one of us. They ain't a woman
+livin' in a little place that don't feel the same, now and again. It's
+quiet an' it's easy housework, an' you get to know folks well. But oh,
+none of it what you might say _glitters_. An' they ain't no woman
+whatever--no matter how good a wife an' mother an' Christian an' even
+housekeeper she is--that don't, 'way down deep in her heart, feel that
+hankerin' after some sort o' _glitter_.
+
+"So it was natural enough that we should draw up at Lyddy's dressmakin'
+window an' rest ourself. An' that afternoon we'd have done so, anyway,
+for she hed been pinnin' up her new summer plates--Lyddy don't believe
+in rushin' the season. An' no sooner had we got a good look at 'em--big
+coloured sheets they was, with full-length pictures--than Mis' Toplady
+leaned 'way forward, her hands on her knees, an' stood lookin' at 'em
+the way you look at the parade.
+
+"'Well, look-a-there,' she says. 'Look at that one.'
+
+"The one she meant was a woman with her hair all plaited an' fringed an'
+cut bias, an' with a little white hat o' lilacs 'bout as big as a cork;
+an' her dress--my land! Her dress was long an' rill light blue, an'
+seemed like it must have been paper, it was so fancy. It didn't seem
+like cloth goods at all, same as we hed on. It was more like we was
+wearin' meat an' vegetable dresses, an' this dress was dessert--all
+whipped cream an' pink sugar an' a flower on the plate.
+
+"'Dear land!' says Mis' Toplady, lookin' 'round at us strange, 'do they
+do it when they get gray hair? I didn't know they done it when their
+hair was gray.'
+
+"We all looked, an' sure enough, the woman's hair was white. 'Afternoon
+Toilette for Elderly Woman,' it said underneath, plain as plain. Always
+before the plates hed all been young an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an'
+we'd thought of all that as past an' done for, with us, along with all
+the other things that didn't come true. But here was a woman grayer than
+any of us, an' yet lookin' as live as if she'd been wearin' a housework
+dress.
+
+"'Why,' says Mis' Sykes, starin', 'that must be a new thing this season.
+I never heard of a woman well along in years wearin' anything but brown
+or navy blue or gray,--besides black.' Mis' Sykes is terribly dressy,
+but even she never yet got anywheres inside the rainbow, except in a bow
+at the chin.
+
+"'My,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, wistful, 'wouldn't it seem
+like heaven to be able to wear colours without bein' talked about?'
+
+"An' Mis' Mayor Uppers--her that her husband grew well off bein' mayor,
+an' never'd been back to Friendship Village since he was put out of
+office, she says low:--
+
+"'You ladies that has husbands to keep thinkin' well of you, I should
+think you'd think about this thing. Men,' she says, 'loves the light
+shades.'
+
+"At that Mis' Toplady turned around on us, an' we see her eyes
+expressin' i-dees.
+
+"'Ladies,' says she, impressive, 'Mis' Uppers is right. We hadn't ought
+to talk back or show mad. We ladies of the Sodality had ought to be able
+to get our own way peaceable, just by takin' it, the way the Lord give
+women the weapons to do.'
+
+"We see that somethin' was seethin' in her mind, but we couldn't work
+our way to what it was.
+
+"'Ladies,' says she, an' stepped up on the wooden step to Lyddy's
+dressmakin' shop, 'has the husbands of any one of us seen us, for twenty
+years, dressed in the light shades?'
+
+"I didn't hev any husband to answer for, but I could truthfully say of
+the rest that you'd think black an' brown an' gray an' navy had
+exhausted the Lord's ingenuity, for all the attention they'd paid to any
+other colour He'd wove with.
+
+"'Let's the Sodality get up an evenin' party, an' hev it in post-office
+hall, an' invite our husbands an' buy new dresses--light shades an' some
+lace,' says Mis' Toplady, lettin' the i-dee drag her along, main
+strength.
+
+"Mis' Sykes was studyin' the fashion-plate hungry, but she stopped an'
+stepped up side o' Mis' Toplady.
+
+"'Well, sir,' she said, 'I donno but 'twould help us to work the pavin'
+of Daphne Street. Why, Silas Sykes, for one, is right down soft-hearted
+about clothes. He always notices which one of their waists the choir's
+got on. I heard him say once he wasn't goin' to church again till they
+bought somethin' new.'
+
+"Mis' Holcomb nodded. 'Five years ago,' she said, 'I went up to the city
+with Eppleby. An' I saw him _turn around_ to look after a woman. I'll
+never forget the sensation it give me--like I was married to a man that
+wasn't my husband. The woman had on a light pink dress. I know I come
+home an' bought a pink collar; I didn't think I could go any farther,
+because she was quite young. Do you s'pose....'
+
+"Mis' Toplady pointed at Lyddy's fashion-plate. 'I should go,' she says,
+'just as far as my money would let me go.'
+
+"Mis' Uppers stood lookin' down to the walk. 'The mayor,' she says--she
+calls him 'the mayor' yet--'was terrible fond o' coloured neckties. He
+was rill partial to green ones. Mebbe I didn't think enough about what
+that meant....'
+
+"Mis' Toplady came down off the step. 'Every man is alike,' says she,
+decided. 'Most of us Friendship ladies thinks if we give 'em a clean
+roller towel we've done enough towards makin' things pretty; an' I
+think it's time, as wives, we took advantage of the styles.'
+
+"'An',' says Mis' Sykes, the president, rill dreamy for her, but firm,
+'I think so, too.'
+
+"I tell you, we all walked home feelin' like we'd hed a present--me too,
+though I knew very well I couldn't hev a light dress, an' I didn't hev
+any husband. You start out thinkin' them are the two principal things,
+but you get a-hold o' some others, if you pay attention. Still, I judged
+the ladies was on the right track, for men is men, say what who will.
+All but Threat Hubbelthwait. We passed the hotel an' heard him settin'
+in there by the bar scrapin' away on 'Can A Little Child Like Me?' We
+took shame to him, an' yet I know we all looked at each other sort of
+motherly, like he _was_ some little shaver, same as he sung, an'
+performin' most fool.
+
+"It don't take us ladies long to do things, when our minds is made.
+Especially it don't when Mis' Timothy Toplady is chairman of the
+Entertainment Committee, or the Doin' Committee of whatever happens,
+like she was that time. First, we found out they was plenty enough nun's
+veilin' in the post-office store, cheap an' wide an' in stock an' all
+the light shades; an' I bought all the dresses, noons, of the clerk, so
+Silas wouldn't suspect--me not hevin' any husband to inquire around,
+like they do. Then we hired the post-office hall, vague, without sayin'
+for what--an' that pleased Silas that gets the rent. An' then we give
+the invitations, spectacular, through the _Friendship Daily_ to the
+Sodality's husbands, for the next Tuesday night. We could do it that
+quick, not bein' dependent on dressmakers same as some. The ladies was
+all goin' to make their dresses themselves, an' the dresses wa'n't much
+to do to make. Nobody bothered a very great deal about how we should
+make 'em, the principal thing bein' the colour; Mis' Toplady's was blue,
+like the fashion-plate; Mis' Holcomb's pink, like the woman in the city;
+Mis' Uppers' green, like the mayor's necktie, an' so on. I made me up a
+dress out o' the spare-room curtains--white, with a little blue flower
+in it, an' a new blue ribbon belt. But Mis' Sykes, she went to work an'
+_rented_ a dress from the city, for that one night. That much she give
+out about it, an' would give out no more. That woman loves a surprise.
+She's got a rill pleasant mind, Mis' Sykes has, but one that does enjoy
+jerkin' other people's minds up, an most anything'll do for the string.
+
+"For all we thought we hed so much time, an' it was so easy to do, the
+afternoon o' the party we went 'most crazy. We'd got up quite a nice
+little cold supper--Mis' Hubbelthwait had helped us, she bein' still at
+large, an' Threat fiddlin'. We planned meat loaf an' salad an' pickles
+an' jelly, an' scalloped potatoes for the hot dish, an' ice cream an'
+cake, enough in all for thirty folks: fifteen husbands an' fifteen
+Sodality, or approximatish. An' we planned to go to the hall in the
+afternoon an' take our dresses there, an' sly em' up and leave 'em, an'
+put 'em on after we'd got there that night, so's nobody's husbands
+should suspect. But when we all came in the afternoon, an' the
+decoratin' with greens an' festoons of cut paper an' all was to do,
+there Mis' Toplady, that was to make scalloped potatoes, hadn't got her
+sleeves in yet, an' she was down to the hall tryin' to do both; an' Mis'
+Holcomb, that was to make the salad dressing, had got so nervous over
+her collar that she couldn't tell which edge she'd cut for the top. But
+the rest of us was ready, an' Mis' Sykes's dress had come from the city,
+an' we all, Mis' Toplady an' Mame too, hed our dresses in boxes in the
+post-office hall kitchen cupboards. An' we done the decoratin', an' it
+looked rill lovely, with the long tables laid ready at each side, an'
+room for bein' a party left in between 'em.
+
+"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb left the hall about five
+o'clock to go home an' lay out Silas's an' Timothy's an' Eppleby's best
+clothes for 'em--the rest hed done it at noon. Mis' Hubbelthwait was
+goin' over to the hotel to get some dishes out, an' I went with her to
+help. The bar was to the back, where Threat set an' slep' an' fiddled,
+an' Mis' Hubbelthwait was goin' to slip in still an' sly the dishes out
+to me. A good many of the hotel dishes was her individual weddin'
+presents, so she didn't think wrong of her conscience.
+
+"We was all five hurryin' along together, rehearsin' all we'd got to do
+before six-thirty, when we heard a funny sound. We listened, an' we
+thought they must be testin' the hose. But when we got to Lyddy's shop,
+where the street kitters off some in a curve, we looked ahead an' we see
+it wasn't that.
+
+"It's an automobile," says Mis' Toplady. 'My land,' she says, 'it ain't
+only one. It's two.'
+
+"An' we see it was. There come the two of 'em, ploughin' along through
+the awful sand of Daphne Street, that was fit for no human locomotive,
+unless ostriches. When the Proudfits are here, that's the only one in
+the village with an automobile, they understand the sand, and they'd put
+on the whole steam and tear right along through it. But strangers would
+go careful, for fear they'd get stuck, an' so they got it, like you do.
+An' them two big red cars was comin' slow, the dust like cloaks an'
+curtains billowin' up behind. They looked quite wild, includin' the
+seven folks in each one that was laughin' an' callin' out. An' by the
+time they'd come up to us, us four ladies of the Sodality an' Mis'
+Hubbelthwait was lined up on the walk watchin' 'em. They stopped an'
+one of 'em hailed us, leanin' past his driver.
+
+"'I beg your pardon,' he says, 'is this the street to the best hotel?'
+
+"It was Mis' Toplady that answered him, rill collected. 'They's only one
+street in town,' says she, 'an' they's only one hotel, an' that they
+ain't now.'
+
+"'Can you tell me how soon there will be one?' says the man. 'By
+dinner-time, I hope.'
+
+"We all felt kind of delicate about answerin' this, an' so Mis'
+Hubbelthwait herself spoke up. 'Threat's drunk an' fiddlin', she says.
+'They's no tellin' when Friendship Village will ever hev a hotel again.'
+
+"Both automobiles was listenin' by then, an' though some of 'em laughed
+out sort o' rueful, not many of 'em see the funny.
+
+"'Gad,' one of the men says, 'how about the bird an' the bottle we were
+to send back to Bonner, sittin' by his tire in the desert, a ways back?
+Don't tell us there's no place,' he says, 'where we can find dinner,
+twenty-one of us and the three chauf--' that word.
+
+"Mis' Toplady shook her head. 'They ain't a place big enough to seat
+twenty-one, even if they was the food to feed 'em--' she begun, an' then
+she stopped an' looked 'round at us, as though she was thinkin'
+somethin'.
+
+"'Oh, come now,' says the man,--he was good-lookin' an' young, an'
+merry-seemin',--'Oh, come now,' he said, 'I am sure that the ladies of
+Friendship could cook things such as never man yet ate. We are
+sta-arving,' he says, humorous. 'Can't you do something for us? We'll
+give you,' he winds up, genial, 'two dollars a plate for a good,
+home-cooking dinner for the twenty-four of us. What do you say?'
+
+"Mis' Toplady whirled toward us sort o' wild. 'Is two dollars times
+twenty-four, forty-eight dollars?' says she, low.
+
+"An' we see it was, though Mis' Holcomb was still figurin' it out in the
+palm of her other hand, while we stood gettin' glances out of each
+other's eyes, an' sendin' 'em, give for take. We see, quick as a flash,
+what Mis' Toplady was thinkin' about. An' it was about that hall, all
+festooned with greens an' cut paper, an' the two long tables laid ready,
+an' the veal loaf an' scalloped potatoes an' ice-cream for thirty. An'
+when Mis' Sykes, that usually speaks, stood still, an' didn't say one
+word, but just nodded a little bit, sort o' sad, Mis' Toplady, that was
+chairman o' the Entertainment Committee, done like she does
+sometimes--she took the whole thing into her own hands an' just settled
+it.
+
+"'Why, yes,' she says to 'em, rill pleasant, 'if you want to come up to
+post-office hall at half-past six,' she says, 'the Friendship Married
+Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality will serve you your supper, nice
+as the nicest, for two dollars a head.'
+
+"'Good!' the men all sings out, an' the women spats their hands soft,
+an' one of 'em says somethin' to the merry-seemin' man.
+
+"'Oh, yes,' he says then, 'couldn't we all break into this hotel an'
+floss up a bit before dinner?'
+
+"Mis' Hubbelthwait stepped out towards 'em.
+
+"'I was thinkin' of that,' says she. 'My husband,' she says, dignified,
+'is settin' in the bar--practisin' his violin. He--he does that
+sometimes, an' we--don't bother him. But the bar is at the back. I can
+let you in, still, the front way to the rooms, if you want. An' I'll be
+there myself to wait on you.'
+
+"An' that was what they done, somebody takin' one o' the cars back for
+the other car, an' the rest of us fair breakin' into a run toward
+post-office hall.
+
+"'My land,' says Mis' Toplady, almost like a groan, 'what _hev_ we
+done?'
+
+"It _was_ a funny thing to do, we see it afterward. But I tell you, you
+can't appreciate the influence o' that forty-eight dollars unless you've
+tried to earn money in a town the size o' Friendship Village. Sodality
+hardly ever made more than five dollars to its ten-cent
+entertainments--an' that for a big turn-out on a dry night. An' here was
+the price of about nine such entertainments give us outright, an' no
+extra work, an' rill feet-achin' weather. I say it was more than flesh
+an' blood _or_ wives could stand. We done it automatic, like you
+contradict when it's necessary.
+
+"But there _was_ the men to reckon with.
+
+"'What'll Timothy--an' Silas--an' Eppleby....' Mis' Toplady says, an'
+stops, some bothered an' some rill pained.
+
+"I judged, not havin' any husband to be doin' the inquirin', it wasn't
+polite for me to laugh. But I couldn't hardly help it, thinkin' o' them
+fifteen hungry men an' the supper et away from 'em, just William Nilly.
+
+"Mis' Sykes, we remembered afterwards, never said a word, but only kep'
+up with us back to the hall.
+
+"Back to the hall, where the rest o' the Sodality was, we told 'em what
+we'd done--beginnin' with the forty-eight dollars, like some kind o'
+weapon. But I tell you, we hadn't reckoned without knowin' our
+hostesses, head an' heart. An' they went in pell mell, pleased an' glad
+as we was, an' plannin' like mad.
+
+"The first need was more food to make up that supper to somewheres near
+two dollars' worth--feedin' your husband is one thing an' gettin' up a
+two-dollar meal is another. But we collected that all in pretty sudden:
+leg o' lamb, left from the Holcombs' dinner an' only cut off of one
+side; the Sykes's roast o' veal, the same; three chickens for soup the
+Libertys hed just dressed for next day company dinner; big platter of
+devilled eggs chipped in from Mis' Toplady; a jar o' doughnuts, a
+steamer o' cookies, a fruit-cake a year old--we just made out our list
+an' scattered to empty out all our pantries.
+
+"By six o'clock we was back in the hall, an' all the food with us. But
+nobody hed met nobody's husband yet, an' nobody wanted to. We didn't
+quite know how we was goin' to do, I guess--but done is done, an' to do
+takes care of itself.
+
+"'Hadn't we ought to 'a' sent word to the men?' says Mis' Holcomb, for
+the third or fourth time. 'I sneaked around so's not to pass Eppleby's
+office, but I declare I feel mean. He'll hev to eat sauce an' plain
+bread-an'-butter for his supper. An' most o' the men-folks the same.
+'Seems though somebody'd ought to send 'em word an' not let 'em come up
+here, all washed an' dressed.'
+
+"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, cuttin' cake with her lips shut tight an'
+talkin' anyway, 'I kind o' thought--leave 'em come up. I bet they'd
+rather be in it than out of it, every one of 'em, an' who knows they
+might be some supper left? An' we can all--'
+
+"An' at that Mis' Toplady faces round from cuttin' the cake: 'My land,
+my land,' she says, sort o' hushed, 'why, doin' this, we can't none of
+us wear our new dresses!'
+
+"An' at that we looked at each other, each one sort of accusin', an' I
+guess all our hearts givin' one o' them sickish thumps. An' Mis' Sykes,
+her that hed been so still, snaps back:--
+
+"'I wondered what you thought I'd rented my dress from the city for at
+_Three Dollars a night_.'
+
+"I tell you, that made a hush in the middle of the plannin'. We'd forgot
+all about our own dresses, an' that was bad enough, with the hall all
+hired an' everything all ready, an' every chance in the world of
+everybody's husband's findin' out about the dresses before we could get
+up another Sodality party, same way. But here was Mis' Sykes, three
+dollars out, an mebbe wouldn't be able to rent her dress again at all.
+
+"'I did want Silas,' Mis' Sykes says then, wistful, 'to see me in that
+dress. Silas an' I have been married so long,' she says, 'that I often
+wonder if I seem like a person to him at all. But in that dress from the
+city, I think I would.'
+
+"We was each an' all ready to cry, an' I dunno but we would hev done
+it--though we was all ready to serve, too: coffee made, potatoes pipin'
+hot, veal an' lamb het up an' smellin' rich, chicken soup steamin', an'
+all. But just that very minute we heard some of 'em comin' in the
+hall--an' the one 'ready' conquered the other 'ready,' like it will, an'
+we all made a rush, part curious an' part nerves, to peek through the
+little servin' window from the kitchen.
+
+"_What_ do you think we saw? It was the automobile folks, hungry an' got
+there first. In they'd come, women laughin', men jokin', all makin' a
+lark out o' the whole thing. An' if the women wasn't, every last one of
+'em, wearin'--not the clothes they hed come in, but light pink an' light
+blue an' white an' flowered things, an' all like that.
+
+"Mis' Hubbelthwait burst in on us while we was lookin'. 'They hed things
+in their trunk at the back o' the automobile,' says she. 'They says they
+wanted to floss up for dinner, an' floss up they hev. They look like
+Lyddy's fashion sheets, one an' all.'
+
+"At that Mis' Sykes, a-ceasin' to peek, she drops her tray on the bare
+floor an' begun untyin' her apron. 'Quick!' she raps out, 'Mis'
+Hubbelthwait, you go an' set 'em down. An' every one o' you--into them
+togs of ours! Here's the chance to wear 'em--here an' _now_,' she says,
+'an' leave them folks see we know how to do things here in Friendship
+Village as good as the best.'
+
+"Well, bein' as she had rented the dress, an' three dollars hed to be
+paid out anyhow, an' bein' as she was president, an' bein' as we was all
+hankerin' in our hearts, we didn't need much urgin'. We slammed the
+servin' window shut an' set chairs against both doors, an' we whisked
+out of our regular dresses like wild.
+
+"'Oh, land--my land, the sleeves--the sleeves ain't in mine!' says Mis'
+Toplady, sort o' glazed, an' speakin' in a wail. But we encouraged her
+up to pin 'em in, which she done, an' it couldn't be told from stitches.
+Poor Mame Holcomb's collar that wasn't on yet we turned in for her
+V-shape, so's her dress was low, like the best. An' Mis' Uppers, that
+was seasonin' the chicken soup like none of us could, her we took turns
+in dressin' in her green. An' I'd got into my spare-room curtains,
+somehow, just as Mis' Hubbelthwait come shoving at that door.
+
+"'The men--the men!' says she, painful. 'They're all out here--Silas an'
+Timothy an' Eppleby an' all. They've all heard about it--the automobiles
+went to the post-office for their mail, an' Silas told 'em enjoyable
+about Threat, an' the automobiles told him where they was goin' to eat.
+An' they've come, thinkin' they's enough for all, an' they're out here
+now.'
+
+"Mis' Toplady groaned a little, agonized an' stifled, but rill firm.
+'Tell 'em, then,' says she, 'to come back up here, like men, an'
+_help_.'
+
+"Then we heard a little rustle, soft an' silky an' kind o'
+pink-soundin', an' we looked around, an' there, from where she had been
+dressin' herself over behind the kitchen boiler all alone, Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes stepped out. My land, if she wasn't in a white dress, a
+little low in the neck, an' elbow sleeves, an' all covered solid as
+crust with glitterin' silver spangles.
+
+"'Let's tell 'em ourselves,' she says, 'come on--all of you. Let's take
+out the first course, an' tell the men what we want 'em to do.'
+
+"We made Mis' Sykes go first, carryin' high the tureen of chicken soup.
+An' on one side of her walked Mis' Timothy Toplady, in blue, with the
+wafers, an' on the other Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, in pink, with
+the radishes. An' neither one of 'em could hardly help lookin' at Mis'
+Sykes's dress all the way out. An' back of 'em went the rest o' the
+ladies, all in pink an' blue an' white an' pale green nun's veilin' that
+they'd made, an' carryin' the water-pitchers an' ice an' celery an' like
+that. An' me, I hung back in the kitchen watchin' an' lovin' 'em every
+one--an' almost lovin' Timothy Toplady an' Silas Sykes an' Eppleby when
+they looked on an' saw.
+
+"Mis' Sykes set the soup down in front o' the merry-seemin' man for him
+to serve it. An' then she crossed over an' spoke to Silas, an' swep' up
+ahead of him in that spangly dress, the other ladies followin' an'
+noddin' bright when they passed the men, an' motionin' 'em toward the
+back o' the hall. An' back the men all come into the kitchen, followin'
+as they was asked to do, an' orderly through bein' dazed. Silas an'
+Timothy an' Eppleby was first, an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' Mame
+went up to 'em together.
+
+"I'll never forget that minute. I thought the men was goin' to burst out
+characteristic an' the whole time be tart, an' I shut both doors an' the
+servin' window careful. An' instead o' that, them three men stood there
+just smilin' a little an lookin' surprised an' agreeable; an' the other
+husbands, either takin' the cue or feelin' the same, done likewise, too.
+An' when Mame Bliss says, sort o' tremblin'--Eppleby bein' the gentlest
+husband in Friendship Village, an' known to be: 'How do you like us,
+Eppleby?' Eppleby just nods an' wrinkles up his eyes an' smiles at her,
+like he meant lots more. An' he says, 'Why didn't you never wear that
+dress before, Mame?'
+
+"An' 'Well, Timothy?' says Mis' Toplady, sort o' masterful, an' fully
+expectin' to hev to master. But Timothy Toplady, he just rubs his hands
+an' looks at her sort o' wonderin', an' he says, 'Blisterin' Benson,
+you look as good as the city folks, Amandy--all light, an' loose made,
+an' stylish--'
+
+"But Silas Sykes, he just stood lookin' at his wife an' lookin'. Of
+course she _did_ hev the advantage, bein' her spangles shone so. An'
+Silas looked at her an' looked, just as if her bein' his wife didn't
+make him admire her any the less. An' Mis' Sykes, she was rill pink an'
+pleased an' breathless, an' I guess she could see she seemed like a
+person to Silas, the way she'd wanted to.
+
+
+"It all went off splendid. The men stayed an' dished in the kitchen an'
+helped carry away from the tables--the forty-eight dollars completin'
+their respect--an' we ladies done the servin'. An' I tell you, we served
+'em with an air, 'count o' bein' well dressed, like they was, an'
+knowin' it. An' we knew the automobile folks appreciated it--we could
+tell by the way they kep' lookin' at us. But of course we all understood
+Mis' Sykes looked the best, an' we let her do all the most prominent
+things--bringin' in the first dish of everything an' like that, so's
+they could hev a good look.
+
+"When it was over, the merry-seemin' man stood up an' made a little
+speech o' thanks, rill courteous an' sweet, an' like he knew how to act.
+An' when he was through we, one an' all, nudged Mis' Sykes to reply, an'
+she done so, the two tables listenin', an' the Sodality standin' in
+between, an' the Sodality's husbands crowdin' in both kitchen doors to
+listen.
+
+"Mis' Sykes says, rill dignified, an' the light catchin' in her
+spangles: 'We're all very much obliged, I'm sure, for our forty-eight
+dollars clear. An' we think perhaps you'd like to know what the money is
+goin' toward. It's goin',' she says, 'towards the pavin' of the main
+street of our little city.'
+
+"Silas Sykes was lookin' out the servin' window like it was a box.
+'What's that?' says he, more of him comin' out of the window, 'what's
+_that_ you say?'
+
+"An' they was a little wave o' moves an' murmurs all around him like
+when somethin' is goin' to happen an' nobody knows what; an' I know the
+Sodality caught its breath, for, as Mis' Toplady always says, the dear
+land knows what men _will_ do.
+
+"With that up springs the merry-seemin' man, his face all beamin', an'
+he says loud an' clear an' drowndin' out everything else: 'Hear, hear!
+Likewise, here an' now. I move that we as one man, an' that man's
+automobile having lately come up the main street of Friendship
+Village--do ourself contribute to this most worthy end. Get to work,'
+says he. 'Think civic thoughts!'
+
+"He slid the last roll off its plate, an' he laid somethin' in paper
+money on it, an' he started it down the table. An' every man of 'em
+done as he done. An' I tell you, when we see Mis' Hubbelthwait's bread
+plate pilin' with bills, an' knew what it was for, we couldn't help--the
+whole Sodality couldn't help--steppin' forwards, close to the table, an'
+standin' there an' holdin' our breaths. An' the men, back there in the
+kitchen, they hushed up when they see the money, an' they kep' hushed.
+Land, land, it was a great minute! I like to think about it.
+
+"An' when the plate come back to the merry-seemin' man, he took it an'
+he come over towards us with it in his hand, an' we nudged Mis' Sykes to
+take the money. An' she just lifted up the glitter part of her skirt an'
+spread it out an' he dropped the whole rustlin' heap on to the spangles.
+An' the rest of us all clapped our hands, hard as we could, an' right
+while we was doin' it we heard somethin' else--deeper an' more manly
+than us. An' there was the men streamin' out o' the kitchen doors, an'
+Silas Sykes high in the servin' window--an' every one of 'em was
+clappin', too.
+
+"I tell you, we was glad an' grateful. An' we was grateful, too, when
+afterwards they was plenty enough supper left for the men-folks. An'
+when we all set down together around that table, Mis' Sykes at the head
+an' the plate o' bills for a centrepiece, Mis' Toplady leaned back, hot
+an' tired, an' seein' if both her sleeves was still pinned in place,
+an' she says what we was all thinkin':--
+
+"'Oh, ladies,' she says, 'we can pave streets an' dress in the light
+shades even if we ain't young, like the run o' the fashion-plates. Ain't
+it like comin' to life again?' she says."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+UNDERN
+
+
+I have a guest who is the best of the three kinds of welcome guests. Of
+these some are like a new rug which, however fine and unobtrusive it be,
+at first changes the character of your room so that when you enter you
+are less conscious of the room than of the rug. Some guests are like
+flowers on the table, leaving the room as it was save for their sweet,
+novel presence. And some guests are like a prized new book, unread, from
+which you simply cannot keep away. Of these last is my guest whom my
+neighbour calls the New Lady.
+
+My neighbour and Elfa and Miggy and Little Child and I have all been
+busy preparing for her. Elfa has an almost pathetic fondness for
+"company,"--I think it is that she leads such a lonely life in the
+little kitchen-prison that she welcomes even the companionship of
+more-voices-in-the-next-room. I have tried to do what I can for Elfa,
+but you never help people very much when you only try to do what you
+can. It must lie nearer the heart than that. And I perfectly understand
+that the magazines and trifles of finery which I give to her, and the
+flowers I set on the kitchen clock shelf, and the talks which, since my
+neighbour's unconscious rebuke, I have contrived with her, are about as
+effectual as any merely ameliorative means of dealing with a social
+malady. For Elfa is suffering from a distinct form of the social malady,
+and not being able to fathom it, she knows merely that she is lonely. So
+she has borrowed fellowship from her anticipation of my guest and of
+those who next week will come down from the town; and I know, though she
+does not know, that her jars of fresh-fried cakes and cookies, her fine
+brown bread and her bowl of salad-dressing, are her utmost expression of
+longing to adjust the social balance and give to herself companionship,
+even a kind of household.
+
+Little Child to-day came, bringing me a few first sweet peas and
+Bless-your-Heart, Bless-your-Heart being her kitten, and as nearly pink
+as a cat can be and be still a cat.
+
+"To lay in the New Lady's room," she remarked, bestowing these things
+impartially upon me.
+
+Later, my neighbour came across the lawns with a plate of currant tarts
+and a quarter of a jelly cake.
+
+"Here," she said, "I don't know whether you like tarts or not. They're
+more for children, I always think. I always bake 'em, and the little
+round child fried cakes, too, and I put frosting faces on the cookies,
+and such things. It makes my husband and I seem more like a family," she
+explained, "and that's why I always set the dining-room table. As long
+as we ain't any little folks running around, I always tell him that him
+and I would be eating meat and potatoes on the kitchen drop-leaf like
+savages if I didn't pretend there was more of us, and bake up for 'em."
+
+Miggy alone does not take wholly kindly to the New Lady idea, though I
+assure her that our mornings are to remain undisturbed.
+
+"Of course," she observed, while in the New Lady's honour she gathered
+up strewn papers, "I know I'll like her because she's your friend. But I
+don't know what folks want to visit for. Don't you s'pose that's why the
+angels don't come back--because they know everything, and they know what
+a lot of extra work they'd make us?"
+
+In Miggy the tribal sense seems to have run itself out. Of the sanctity
+of the individual she discerns much; but of the wider sanctities she has
+no clear knowledge. Most relationships she seems to regard, like the
+love of Peter, as "drawbacks," save only her indefinite consciousness of
+that one who is "not quite her sister"--the little vague Margaret. And
+this, I think, will be the leaven. Perhaps it is the universal leaven,
+this consciousness.
+
+I was glad that the New Lady was to arrive in the afternoon. Sometimes
+I think that the village afternoon is the best time of all. It is no
+wonder that they used to call that time "undern." If they had not done
+so, the word must have grown of its own will--perhaps it did come to
+life with no past, an immaculate thing, so like its meaning that it
+could not help being here among us. I know very well that Sir John
+Mandeville and others used "undern" to mean the third hour, or about
+nine in the morning, but that may have been because at first not every
+one recognized the word. Many a fairy thing wanders for a long time on
+earth, patiently putting up with other connotations than its own.
+Opportunism, the subconscious mind, personality, evolution itself,--all
+these are still seeking their full incarnations in idea. No wonder
+"undern" was forced for a long while to mean morning. But nine o'clock
+in the morning! How, after all, was that possible? You have only to say
+it over--undern, undern, undern,--to be heavenly drowsy with summer
+afternoon. The north of England recognized this at last and put the word
+where it belongs; and I have, too, the authority of the lady of Golden
+Wing:--
+
+
+     "Undern cometh after noon,
+     Golden Wings will be here soon...."
+
+
+One can hardly stop saying that, once one is started. I should like to
+go on with it all down the page.
+
+I was thinking of these things as I drove to the station alone to meet
+the New Lady. The time had taken on for me that pleasant, unlike-itself
+aspect which time bears in any mild excitement, so that if in the moment
+of reading a particularly charming letter one can remember to glance up
+and look the room in the face, one may catch its _other_ expression, the
+expression which it has when one is not looking. So now I caught this
+look in the village and an air of
+Something-different-is-going-to-happen, such as we experience on
+holidays. Next week, when the New Lady's friends come down to us for two
+days, I dare say, if I can remember to look for it, that the village
+will have another expression still. Yet there will be the same quiet
+undern--though for me it is never a commonplace time. Indeed, usually I
+am in the most delighted embarrassment how to spend it. In the mornings
+now--Miggy being willing--I work, morning in the true democracy being
+the work time; afternoon the time for recreation and the more
+specialized forms of service _and_ a little rest; the evening for
+delight, including the delight of others. Not every one in the village
+accepts my afternoon and evening classifications. I am constantly coming
+on people making preserves after mid-day, and if I see a light in a
+kitchen window after nine at night I know that somebody is ironing in
+the cool of the day. But usually my division of time is the general
+division, save that--as in the true democracy--service is not always
+recognized as service. Our afternoons may be spent in cutting carpet
+rags, or in hemming linen, or sewing articles for an imminent bazaar,
+and this is likely to be denominated "gettin' through little odd jobs,"
+and accounted in a measure a self-indulgence. And if evening delight
+takes the form of gardening and later a flame of nasturtiums or dahlias
+is carried to a friend, nobody dreams that this is not a pleasant
+self-indulgence too, and it is so regarded. With these things true is it
+not as if a certain hope abroad in the world gave news of itself?
+
+Near the Pump pasture I came on Nicholas Moor--who rings the Catholic
+bell and is interested in celluloid--and who my neighbour had told me
+would doubtless come to me, bringing his little sheaf of "writin's." I
+had not yet met him, though I had seen in the daily paper a vagrant poem
+or two over his name--I remember a helpless lyric which made me think of
+a gorgeous green and gold beetle lying on its back, unable to recover
+its legs, but for all that flashing certain isolated iridescent colours.
+My heart ached for Nicholas, and when I saw him now going across the
+pasture his loneliness was like a gap in things, one of the places where
+two world-edges do not quite meet. There are so many pleasant ways to do
+and the boy seemed to know how to do none of them. How can he be lonely
+in the village? For myself, if I decide of an afternoon to take my work
+and pay a visit, I am in a pleasant quandary as to which way to turn. If
+I go to the west end of Daphne Street, there are at least five families
+among whom to choose, the other four of whom will wonder why I did not
+come to them. Think of knowing five families in two blocks who would
+welcome one's coming and even feel a little flattering bitterness if one
+chose the other four! If I take a cross street, I am in the same
+difficulty. And if I wish to go to the house of one of my neighbours, my
+motives clash so seriously that I often sit on my porch and call to
+whoever chances to be in sight to come to me. Do you wonder that, in
+town, the moment I open my address book I feel smothered? I recover and
+enjoy town as much as anybody, but sometimes in a stuffy coupé, hurrying
+to get a half-dozen of the pleasantest calls "done," I surprise a
+companion by saying: would now that it were undern on Daphne Street!
+
+I told this to the New Lady as we drove from the station. The New Lady
+is an exquisite little Someone, so little that it is as if she had been
+drawn quickly, in a single delicate curving line, and then left, lest
+another stroke should change her. She understands the things that I say
+in the way that I mean them; she is the way that you always think the
+people whom you meet are going to be, though they so seldom are; like
+May, she is expectation come alive. What she says fits in all the
+crannies of what you did not say and have always known, or else have
+never thought of before and now never can forget. She laughs when she
+should laugh, and never, never when somebody else should laugh alone.
+When you tell her that you have walked eight miles and back, she says
+"_And back!_" with just the proper intonation of homage. She never tells
+a story upon the heels of your own little jest so swiftly that it cannot
+triumphantly escape. When you try to tell her something that you have
+not quite worked out, she nods a little and you see that she meant it
+before you did. She enters every moment by its gate and not over its
+wall, though she frequently wings her way in instead of walking. Also,
+she is good to look at and her gowns are as meet as the clouds to the
+sky--and no less distracting than the clouds are at their very best.
+There is no possible excuse for my saying so much about her, but I like
+to talk of her. And I like to talk to her as I did when we left the
+station and I was rambling on about undern.
+
+The New Lady looked about with a breath of content.
+
+"No wonder," she said, "you like to pretend Birthday, in New York."
+
+It is true that when I am there where, next to the village, I like best
+to live, I am fond of this pretence. It is like the children's game of
+"Choosing" before shop windows, only it is extensive and not, as cream
+puffs and dolls and crumpets in the windows dictate to the children,
+purely intensive. Seeing this man and that woman in the subway or the
+tea-room or the café or the car, I find myself wondering if it is by any
+chance their birthdays; and if it is, I am always wishing to deal out
+poor little gifts at which I fancy they would hardly look. To the lithe
+idle blond woman, elbows on table; to the heavy-lidded,
+engagement-burdened gentlewoman; to the busy, high-eyebrowed man in a
+cab; to the tired, slow-winking gentleman in his motor; to the
+thick-handed labourer hanging to his strap, I find myself longing to
+distribute these gifts: a breakfast on our screened-in porch in the
+village, with morning-glories on the table; a full-throated call of my
+oriole--a June call, not the isolated reminiscent call of August; an
+hour of watering the lawn while robins try to bathe in the spray; a
+morning of pouring melted paraffin on the crimson tops of moulds of
+currant jelly; a yellow afternoon of going with me to "take my work and
+stay for supper." I dare say that none of my chosen beneficiaries would
+accept; but if I could pop from a magic purse a crop of caps and fit
+folk, willy nilly, I wonder if afterward, even if they remembered
+nothing of what had occurred, they might not find life a little
+different.
+
+"If it was my birthday," said the New Lady, "I would choose to be driven
+straight away through that meadow, as if I had on wings."
+
+That is the way she is, the New Lady. Lacking wings of her own she gives
+them to many a situation. Straightway I drove down into the Pump pasture
+and across it, springy soil and circus-trodden turf and mullein stalks
+and ten-inch high oak trees.
+
+"Let's let down the bars," said the New Lady, "and drive into that next
+meadow. If it _is_ a sea, as it looks, it will be glad of your company."
+
+It was not a sea, for as we drove through the lush grass the yellow and
+purple people of the meadow came marching to meet us, as dignified as
+garden flowers, save that you knew, all the time, that wild hearts were
+beating beneath the rainbow tassels. It was a meadow with things to say,
+but with finger on lip--as a meadow should be and as a spirit must be.
+The meadow seemed to wish to say: "It is all very pleasant for you there
+in the village to admire one another's wings, but the real romance is in
+the flight." I wondered if it were not so that it had happened--that one
+day a part of the village had got tired waiting, and had broken off and
+become something free, of which the meadow was the body and its secret
+was the spirit. But then the presence of the New Lady always sets me
+wondering things like this.
+
+"Why," I said to her suddenly, "spring has gone! I wonder how that
+happened. I have been waiting really to get hold of spring, and here it
+is June."
+
+"June-and-a-half," assented the New Lady, and touched the lines so that
+we came to a standstill in the shade of a cottonwood.
+
+"This way," she said--and added softly, as one who would not revive a
+sadness, her own idea of the matter.
+
+
+     "Where did Spring die? I did not hear her go
+     Down the soft lane she painted. All flower still
+     She moved among her emblems on the hill
+     Touching away their burden of old snow.
+     Was it on some great down where long winds flow
+     That the wild spirit of Spring went out to fill
+     The eyes of Summer? Did a daffodil
+     Lift the pale urn remote where she lies low?
+
+     "Oh, not as other moments did she die,
+     That woman-season, outlined like a rose.
+     Before the banner of Autumn's scarlet bough
+     The Summer fell; and Winter, with a cry,
+     Wed with March wind. Spring did not die like those;
+     But vaguely, as if Love had prompted, 'Now.'"
+
+
+The New Lady's theory does not agree with that of Little Child. I am in
+doubt which to accept. But I like to think about both.
+
+And when the New Lady had said the faint requiem, we drove on again and
+the next moment had almost run down Nicholas Moor, lying face downward
+in the lush grass.
+
+I recognized him at once, but of course the New Lady did not do so, and
+she leaned from the cart, thoroughly alarmed at the boy's posture and,
+as he looked up, at his pallor.
+
+"Oh, what is the matter?" she cried, and her voice was so heavenly
+pitying that one would have been willing to have most things the matter
+only to hear her.
+
+Nicholas Moor scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and stood abashed,
+looking as strangely detached from the moment as if he had fallen from a
+frame and left the rest of the picture behind.
+
+"Nothing. I just like to be here," he was surprised into saying.
+
+The New Lady sat down and smiled. And her smile was even more
+captivating than had been her late alarm.
+
+"So do I," she told him heartily. "So do I. What do you like about it,
+_best_?"
+
+I do not think that any one had ever before spoken to Nicholas so
+simply, and he answered, chord for chord.
+
+"I guess--I guess I like it just on account of its being the way it is,"
+he said.
+
+"That is a very, very nice reason," the New Lady commented. "Again, so
+do I."
+
+We left him, I remember, looking about as if he were seeing it all for
+the first time.
+
+As we drove away I told my New Lady about Nicholas, and she looked along
+her own thought and shook her head.
+
+"There must be hundreds of them," she said, "and some are poets. But
+most of them are only lonesome. I wonder which Nicholas is?"
+
+We lingered out-of-doors as long as we might, because the touch of the
+outdoors was so companioning that to go indoors was a distinct good-by.
+Is it so with you that some Days, be they never so sunny, yet walk with
+you in a definite reserve and seem to be looking somewhere else; while
+other Days come to you like another way of being yourself and will not
+let you go? I know that some will put it down to mood and not to the Day
+at all; but, do what I will, I cannot credit this.
+
+It was after five o'clock when we drove into the village, and all Daphne
+Street was watering its lawns. Of those who were watering some pretended
+not to see us, but I understood that this they accounted the etiquette
+due to a new arrival. Some bowed with an excess of cordiality, and this
+I understood to be the pleasant thought that they would show my guest
+how friendly we all are. And some laid down the hose and came to the
+sidewalk's edge to meet the New Lady then and there.
+
+Of these were Mis' Postmaster Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss
+and my neighbour.
+
+"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," Mis' Postmaster Sykes said graciously
+to the New Lady. "I must say it seems good to see a strange face now an'
+then. I s'pose you feel all travel dust an' mussed up?"
+
+And at Mis' Holcomb's hitching post:--
+
+"Pleased to meet you," said Mis' Holcomb. "I was saying to Eppleby that
+I wondered if you'd come. Eppleby says, 'I donno, but like enough
+they've went for a ride somewheres.' Lovely day, ain't it? Been to the
+cemetery?"
+
+I said that we had not been there yet, and,
+
+"Since it's kept up it makes a real nice thing to show folks," Mis'
+Holcomb said. "I s'pose you wouldn't come inside for a bite of supper,
+would you?"
+
+My neighbour--bless her!--had on a black wool dress to do honour to my
+guest.
+
+"It's nice for the neighbours to see company comin' and goin'," she said
+cordially, "though of course we don't have any of the extra work. But I
+guess everybody likes extra work of _this_ kind."
+
+And as we drove away:--
+
+"Good-by," she cried, "I hope you'll have a good night's rest and a
+good breakfast."
+
+When I looked at the New Lady I saw her eyes ever so slightly misted.
+
+"Spring didn't die," she said--as Little Child had said. "Spring knew
+how to keep alive. It got down in these people's hearts."
+
+Yes, the New Lady is a wholly satisfactory guest. She even pretended not
+to notice Peter's father who, as we alighted, came singing by, and bowed
+to us, his barren old face lighted with a smile, as a vacant room is
+lighted, revealing the waste. If I had some one staying with me who had
+smiled at Peter's father or--at any one, or who did not see the village
+as it is, I think I should be tempted to do as my neighbour did to me
+that morning: pick three carnation pinks for her and watch her go away.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE WAY THE WORLD IS
+
+
+Was it not inevitable that poor, lonely Nicholas Moor should have sought
+out my New Lady? A night or two after her arrival he saw her again, at a
+supper in the church "lecture-room." He was bringing in a great freezer
+of ice-cream and when she greeted him he had all but dropped the
+freezer. Then a certain, big obvious deacon whose garden adjoined my own
+had come importantly and snatched the burden away, and the boy had
+stood, shamefast, trying to say something; but his face was lighted as
+at a summons. So the New Lady had divined his tragedy, the loneliness
+which his shyness masked as some constant plight of confusion.
+
+"Come and see me sometime," she had impulsively bidden him. "Do you know
+where I am staying?"
+
+Did he know that! Since he had seen her in the meadow had he known
+anything else? And after some days of hard trying he came one night,
+arriving within the dusk as behind a wall. Even in the twilight, when he
+was once under the poplars, he did not know what way to look. To seem
+to look straight along the road was unnatural. To seem to look out
+across the opposite fields was hypocrisy. To look at the house which
+held the New Lady was unthinkable. So, as he went in at the gate and up
+the fern-bordered walk, he examined the back of his hand--near, and then
+a little farther away. As he reached the steps he was absorbedly
+studying his thumb.
+
+From a place of soft light, shed through a pink box shade on the table,
+and of scattered willow chairs and the big leaves of plants, the New
+Lady came toward him.
+
+"You did come!" she said. "I thought you wouldn't, really."
+
+With the utmost effort Nicholas detached one hand from his hat brim and
+gave it her. From head to foot he was conscious, not of the touch of her
+hand, little and soft, but of the bigness and coarseness of his own
+hand.
+
+"I hated to come like everything," he said.
+
+At this of course she laughed, and she went back to her willow chair and
+motioned him to his. He got upon it, crimson and wretched.
+
+"As much as that!" she observed.
+
+"You know I wanted to come awfully, too," he modified it, "but I dreaded
+it--like sixty. I--I can't explain...." he stumbled.
+
+"Don't," said the New Lady, lightly, and took pity on him and rang a
+little bell.
+
+She thought again how fine and distinguished he was, as he had seemed to
+her on the day when she had first spoken to him. He sat staring at her,
+trying to realize that he was on the veranda with her, hearing the sound
+of the little bell she had rung. He had wanted something like this,
+wistfully, passionately. Miserable as he was, he rested in the moment as
+within arms. And the time seemed distilled in that little silver
+bell-sound and the intimacy of waiting with her for some one to come.
+
+He knew that some one with a light footfall did come to the veranda. He
+heard the New Lady call her Elfa. But he saw only her hands, plump and
+capable and shaped like his own, moving among the glasses. After which
+his whole being became absorbed in creditably receiving the tall, cool
+tumbler on the tray which the capable hands held out to him. A period of
+suspended intelligence ensued, until he set the empty glass on the
+table. Then the little maid had gone, and the New Lady, sipping her own
+glass, was talking to him.
+
+"You were lying on the grass that day," she said, "as if you understood
+grass. Not many do understand about grass, and almost nobody understands
+the country. People say, 'Come, let us go into the country,' and when
+they get there is it the country they want at all? No, it is the
+country sports, the country home,--everything but the real country. They
+play match games. They make expeditions, climb things in a stated time,
+put in a day at a stated place. I often think that they must go home
+leaving the country aghast that they could have come and gone and paid
+so little heed to it. Presently we are going to have some charming
+people out here who will do the same thing."
+
+So she talked, asking him nothing, even her eyes leaving him free. It
+seemed to him, tense and alert and ill at ease as he listened, that he,
+too, was talking to her. From the pressing practicalities, the
+self-important deacon, the people who did not trouble to talk to him,
+his world abruptly escaped, and in that world he walked, an escaped
+thing too, forgetful even of the little roll of verses which he had
+dared to bring.
+
+Yet when she paused, he looked out at her shrinkingly from under his
+need to reply. He did not look at her face, but he looked at her hands,
+so little that each time he saw them they were a new surprise and alien
+to him. He looked away from them to the friendliness of her smile. And
+when he heard himself saying detached, irrelevant things, he again fell
+to studying one of his own hands, big and coarse and brown. Oh, he
+thought, the difference between her and him was so hopelessly the
+difference in their hands.
+
+In an absurdly short time the need to be gone was upon him; but of this
+he could not speak, and he sat half unconscious of what she was saying,
+because of his groping for the means to get away. Clearly, he must not
+interrupt her to say that he must go. Neither could he reply to what she
+said by announcing his intention. And yet when he answered what she
+said, straightway her exquisite voice went on with its speech to him.
+How, he wondered, does anybody ever get away from anywhere? If only
+something would happen, so that he could slip within it as within doors,
+and take his leave.
+
+Something did happen. By way of the garden, and so to a side door, there
+arrived those whose garden adjoined,--the big, obvious, self-important
+deacon, and behind him Three Light Gowns. The little maid Elfa came
+showing them through the house, in the pleasant custom of the village.
+And when the New Lady, with pretty, expected murmurings, rose to meet
+them, Nicholas got to his feet confronting the crisis of saying good-by,
+and the moment closed upon him like a vise. He heard his voice falter
+among the other voices, he saw himself under the necessity to take her
+hand and the deacon's hand, and the hands, so to speak, of the Three
+Light Gowns; and this he did as in a kind of unpractised bewildering
+minuet.
+
+And then he found his eyes on a level with eyes that he had not seen
+before--blue eyes, gentle, watching, wide--and a fresh, friendly little
+face under soft hair. It was Elfa, taking away the empty glasses. And
+the boy, in his dire need to ease the instant, abruptly and inexplicably
+held out his hand to her too. She blushed, sent a frightened look to the
+New Lady, and took the hand in hers that was plump and capable, with its
+strong, round wrist. And the little maid, being now in an embarrassment
+like his own, the two hands clung for a moment, as if they had each the
+need.
+
+"Good night," she said, trembling.
+
+"Good night," said the New Lady, very gently.
+
+"Oh, _good night_!" burst from the boy as he fled away.
+
+
+It was Elfa who admitted him at his next coming. The screened porch was
+once more in soft light from the square rose shade, and the place had
+the usual pleasant, haunted air of the settings of potentialities. As if
+potentiality were a gift of enchantment to human folk.
+
+The New Lady was not at home, Elfa told him, in her motherly little
+heart pitying him. And at the news he sat down, quite simply, in the
+chair in which he had sat before. He must see her. It was unthinkable
+that she should be away. To-night he had meant to have the courage to
+leave with her his verses.
+
+On the willow table lay her needlework. It was soft and white beyond the
+texture of most clouds, and she had wrought on it a pattern like the
+lines on a river. As his eyes rested on it, Nicholas could fancy it
+lying against her white gown and upon it her incomparable hands. Some
+way, she seemed nearer to him when he was not with her than when, with
+her incomparable hands and her fluent speech, she was in his presence.
+When she was not with him, he could think what to say to her. When he
+stood before her--the thought of his leave-taking on that veranda seized
+upon him, so that he caught his breath in the sharp thrust of mortified
+recollection, and looked away and up.
+
+His eyes met those of Elfa, who was quietly sitting opposite.
+
+"How they must all have laughed at me. You too!" he said.
+
+"Why?" she asked.
+
+"That last time I was here. Shaking hands that way," he explained.
+
+"I didn't laugh," she unexpectedly protested; "I cried."
+
+He looked at her. And this was as if he were seeing her for the first
+time.
+
+"_Cried?_" he repeated.
+
+"Nobody ever shakes hands with me," Elfa told him.
+
+He stared at her as she sat on the edge of her chair, her plump hands
+idle on her apron.
+
+"No," he admitted, "no, I don't suppose they do. I didn't think--"
+
+But he had not thought of her at all.
+
+"By the door all day I let in hand-shakes," she said, "an' then I let
+'em out again. But I don't get any of 'em for me."
+
+That, Nicholas saw, was true enough. Even he had been mortified because
+he had taken her hand.
+
+"Once," Elfa said, "I fed a woman at the back door. An' when she went
+she took hold o' my hand, thankful. An' then you done it too--like it
+was a mistake. That's all, since I worked out. I don't know folks
+outside much, only some that don't shake hands, 'count of seemin'
+ashamed to."
+
+"I know," said Nicholas.
+
+"Sometimes," she went on, "folks come here an' walk in to see _her_ an'
+they don't shake. Ain't it funny--when folks can an' don't? When they
+come from the city to-morrow, the whole house'll shake hands, but me.
+Once I went to prayer-meetin' an' I hung around waitin' to see if
+somebody wouldn't. But they didn't--any of 'em. It was rainin' outside
+an' I guess they thought I come with somebody's rubbers."
+
+Nicholas looked at her a little fearfully. It had seemed to him that in
+a great world of light he had always moved in a little hollow of
+darkness and detachment. Were there, then, other hollows like that?
+Places to which outstretched hands never penetrate? A great
+understanding possessed him, and he burst out in an effort to express
+it.
+
+"You're a funny girl," he said.
+
+She flushed, and suddenly lifted one hand and looked at it. Nicholas
+watched her now intently. She studied the back of her hand, turned it,
+and sat absorbedly examining her little thumb. And Nicholas felt a
+sudden sense of understanding, of gladness that he understood. As he
+felt when he was afraid and wretched, so Elfa was feeling now.
+
+He leaned toward her.
+
+"Don't feel afraid," he said gently.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I don't," she said; "I don't, truly. I guess that's why I stayed here
+now. She won't be back till ten--I ought to have said so before.
+You--you won't want to wait so long."
+
+He rose at once. And now, being at his ease, his head was erect, his
+arms naturally fallen, his face as confident and as occupied by his
+spirit as when he lay alone in the meadows.
+
+"Well, sir," he said, "let's shake hands again!"
+
+She gave him her hand and, in their peculiarly winning upward look, her
+eyes--blue, wide, watchful, with that brooding mother watchfulness of
+some women, even in youth. And her hand met his in the clasp which is
+born of the simple, human longing of kind for kind.
+
+"Good-by," she answered his good-by, and they both laughed a little in a
+shyness which was a way of delight.
+
+In the days to follow there flowed in the boy's veins a tide of novel
+sweetness. And now his thoughts eluded one another and made no chain, so
+that when he tried to remember what, on that first evening, the New Lady
+and he had talked about, there came only a kind of pleasure, but it had
+no name. Everything that he had to do pressed upon him, and when he
+could get time he was away to the meadow, looking down on the chimneys
+of that house, and swept by a current that was like a singing. And
+always, always it was as if some one were with him.
+
+There came a night when he could no longer bear it, when his wish took
+him to itself and carried him with it. Those summer dusks, warm yellow
+with their moon and still odorous of spring, were hard to endure alone.
+Since the evening with her, Nicholas had not seen the New Lady save
+when, not seeing him, she had driven past in a phaëton. At the sight of
+her, and once at the sight of Elfa from that house, a faintness had
+seized him, so that he had wondered at himself for some one else, and
+then with a poignancy that was new pain, new joy, the new life, had
+rejoiced that he was himself. So, when he could no longer bear it, he
+took his evening way toward the row of poplars, regretting the moonlight
+lest by it they should see him coming. And to-night he had with him no
+verses, but only his longing heart.
+
+He had no intimation of the guests, for the windows at that house were
+always brightly lighted, and until he was within the screened veranda
+the sound of voices did not reach him. Then from the rooms there came a
+babel of soft speech and laughter, and a touch of chords; and when he
+would have incontinently retreated, the New Lady crossed the hall and
+saw him.
+
+She came to the doorway and greeted him, and Nicholas looked up in the
+choking discomfort of sudden fear. She was in a gown that was like her
+needlework, mysteriously fashioned and intricate with shining things
+which made her infinitely remote. The incomparable little hands were
+quite covered with jewels. It was as if he had come to see a spirit and
+had met a woman.
+
+"How good of you to come again," she said. "Come, I want my friends to
+meet you."
+
+Her friends! That quick crossing of words within there, then, meant the
+presence of her friends from the city.
+
+"I couldn't! I came for a book--I'll get it some other time. I've got to
+go now!" Nicholas said.
+
+Then, "Bettina--Bettina!" some one called from within, and a man
+appeared in the hallway, smiled at sight of the New Lady, dropped his
+glass at sight of Nicholas, bowed, turned away--oh, how should he know
+that her name was Bettina when Nicholas had not known!
+
+This time he did not say good night at all. This time he did not look at
+his great hand, which was trembling, but he got away, mumbling
+something, his retreat graciously covered by the New Lady's light words.
+And, the sooner to be gone and out of the moonlight that would let them
+see him go, he struck blindly into the path that led to the side gate of
+the garden. The mortification that chains spirit to flesh and tortures
+both held him and tortured him. For a breath he imagined himself up
+there among them all, his hands holding his hat, imagined having to
+shake hands with them: and somehow this way of fellowship, this meeting
+of hands outstretched for hands, seemed, with them, the supreme ordeal,
+the true symbol of his alien state from them and from the New Lady. No
+doubt she understood him, but for the first time Nicholas saw that this
+is not enough. For the first time he saw that she was as far away from
+him as were the others. How easy, Nicholas thought piteously, those
+people in her house all found it to act the way they wanted to! Their
+hands must be like her hands....
+
+He got through the garden and to the side gate. And now the old
+loneliness was twofold upon him because he had known what it is to reach
+from the dark toward the light; yet when he saw that at the gate some
+one was standing, he halted in his old impulse to be on guard, hunted by
+the fear that this would be somebody alien to him. Then he saw that it
+was no one from another star, but Elfa.
+
+"Oh...." he said, and that, too, was what she said, but he did not hear.
+Not from another star she came, but from the deep of the world where
+Nicholas felt himself alone.
+
+"I--was just going away," he explained.
+
+For assent she stepped a little back, saying nothing. But when Nicholas
+would have passed her it was as if the immemorial loneliness and the
+seeking of forgotten men innumerable stirred within him in the ache of
+his heart, in the mere desperate wish to go to somebody, to be with
+somebody, to have somebody by the hand.
+
+He turned upon Elfa almost savagely.
+
+"Shake hands!" he said.
+
+Obediently she put out her hand, which of itself stayed ever so briefly,
+within his. He held it, feeling himself crushing it, clinging to it,
+being possessed by it. Her hand was, like his, rough from its work, and
+it was something alive, something human, something that answered. And
+instantly it was not Elfa alone who was there companioning him, but the
+dark was quick with presences, besieging him, letting him know that no
+one alive is alone, that he was somehow one of a comrade company,
+within, without, encompassing. And the boy was caught up by the sweet
+will outside his own will and he never knew how it was that he had Elfa
+in his arms.
+
+"Come here. Come here...." he said.
+
+To Elfa, in her loneliness threaded by its own dream, the moment,
+exquisite and welcome as it was, was yet as natural as her own single
+being. But to the boy it was not yet the old miracle of one world built
+from another. It was only the answer to the groping of hands for hands,
+the mere human call to be companioned. And the need to reassure her came
+upon him like the mantle of an elder time.
+
+"Don't feel afraid," he said.
+
+Her eyes gave him their winning upward look, and it was as if their
+mother watchfulness answered him gravely:--
+
+"I don't. I don't, truly."
+
+And at this she laughed a little, so that he joined her; and their
+laughter together was a new delight.
+
+Across the adjoining lawn Nicholas could see in the moonlight the moving
+figure of the big deacon, a Light Gown or two attending. A sudden
+surprising sense of safety from them overswept the boy. What if they did
+come that way! What, he even thought, if those people in the house were
+to come by? Somehow, the little hollow of dark in which he had always
+walked in the midst of light was as light as the rest of the world, and
+he was not afraid. And all this because Elfa did not stir in his arms,
+but was still, as if they were her harbour. And then Nicholas knew what
+they both meant.
+
+"Elfa!" he cried, "do you...?"
+
+"I guess I must...." she said, and knew no way to finish that.
+
+"Love me?" said Nicholas, bold as a lion.
+
+"I meant that too," Elfa said.
+
+Between the New Lady's house and the big, obvious deacon's lawn the boy
+stood, silent, his arms about the girl. So this was the way the world
+is, people bound together, needing one another, wanting one another,
+stretching out their hands....
+
+"Why, it was _you_ I wanted!" Nicholas said wonderingly.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+HOUSEHOLDRY
+
+
+"After supper" in the village is like another room of the day. On these
+summer nights we all come out to our porches to read the daily paper, or
+we go to sit on the porch of a neighbour, or we walk about our lawns in
+excesses of leisure, giving little twitches to this green and to that.
+"In our yards" we usually say. Of these some are so tiny that the
+hammocks or the red swinging-chairs find room on the planting spaces
+outside the walks, and there men smoke and children frolic and call
+across the street to one another. And this evening, as I went down
+Daphne Street to post my letters, I saw in process the occasional
+evening tasks which I have noted, performed out-of-doors: at the
+Sykeses' cucumbers in preparation for to-morrow's pickles; a bushel of
+over-ripe cherries arrived unexpectedly at the Herons' and being pitted
+by hand; a belated needle-task of Mis' Holcomb's finishing itself in the
+tenuous after-light. This fashion of taking various employments into the
+open delights me. If we have peas to shell or beans to string or corn to
+husk, straightway we take them to the porch or into the yard. This
+seems to me to hold something of the grace of the days in the Joyous
+Garde, or on the grounds of old châteaux where they embroidered or wound
+worsted in woodland glades, or of colonial America, where we had out our
+spinning wheels under the oaks. When I see a great shining boiler of
+gasoline carried to the side yard for the washing of delicate fabrics, I
+like to think of it as done out-of-doors for the charm of it as much as
+for the safety. So Nausicaa would have cleansed with gasoline!
+
+It was sight of the old Aunt Effie sewing a seam in Mis' Holcomb's
+dooryard which decided me to go to see Miggy. For I would not willingly
+be where Aunt Effie is, who has always some tragedy of gravy-scorching
+or dish-breaking to tell me. I have been for some time promising to go
+to see Miggy in her home, and this was the night to do so, for the New
+Lady went home to-day and I have been missing her sorely. There is a
+kind of minus-New Lady feeling about the universe.
+
+At the same moment that I decided for Miggy, Peter rose out of the
+ground. I wonder if he can have risen a very little first? But that is
+one of those puzzles much dwelt upon by the theologians, and I will not
+decide. Perhaps the thought of Miggy is a mighty motive on which Peter's
+very being is conditioned. Anyway, there he was, suddenly beside me,
+and telling me some everyday affair of how little use in the cannery
+were Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade, whose houses we were
+passing. And to his talk of shop I responded by inviting him to go with
+me to see Miggy. Would he go? He smiled his slow smile, with that little
+twist of mouth and lifting of brow.
+
+"This is like finding an evening where there wasn't one before," he
+said.
+
+The little house where Miggy lives has a copper beech in the
+dooryard--these red-leaved trees seem to be always in a kind of hush at
+their own difference. The house is no-colour, with trimmings of another
+no-colour for contrast, and the little front porch looks like something
+that has started to run out the front door and is being sternly snatched
+backward. The door stood ajar--no doubt for the completion of this
+transaction--and no one was about. We rapped, for above the bell push
+was a legend of Aunt Effie's inscribing, saying: "Bell don't ring." For
+a moment our summons was unanswered. Then Miggy called from upstairs.
+
+"I'll be down in a minute," she said. "Go right in, both of you, and
+wait for me--will you?"
+
+To take the cards of one's visitors from a butler of detached
+expression or from a maid with inquisitive eyelashes is to know nothing
+of the charm of this custom of ours of peeping from behind an upper
+curtain where we happen to be dressing, and alone in the house, at the
+ringing of the doorbell, and of calling down to a back which we
+recognize an informal "Oh, go right in and wait for me a minute, will
+you?" In this habit there is survival of old tribal loyalties and
+hospitalities; for let the back divined below be the back of a stranger,
+that is to say, of a barbarian, and we stay behind our curtains, silent,
+till it goes away.
+
+In the sitting room at Miggy's house a little hand lamp was burning, the
+fine yellow light making near disclosures of colour and form, and
+farther away formulating presences of shadow. Aunt Effie had been at her
+sewing, and there were yards of blue muslin billowing over a sunken
+arm-chair and a foam of white lining on the Brussels-covered couch. The
+long blue cotton spread made the big table look like a fat Delft sugar
+bowl, and the red curtains were robbed of crude colour and given an
+obscure rosy glow. A partly finished waist disguised the gingerbread of
+the what-not, one forgot the carpet, the pictures became to the neutral
+wall what words which nobody understands are to ministering music. And
+on the floor before the lounge lay Little Child and Bless-your-Heart,
+asleep.
+
+At first I did not see the child. It was Peter who saw her. He stooped
+and lifted her, the kitten still in her arms, and instead of saying any
+of the things a woman might have said, Peter said _"Well...._" with a
+tenderness in his voice such as women can give and more. For a man's
+voice-to-a-child gets down deeper than happiness. I suppose it is that
+the woman has always stayed with the child in the cave or the tent or
+the house, while the man has gone out to kill or to conquer or to trade;
+and the ancient crooning safety is still in the woman's voice, and the
+ancient fear that he may not come back to them both is in the voice of
+the man. When Peter lifted Little Child in his arms, I wished that Miggy
+had been there to hear.
+
+"What's it dreaming about?" Peter said.
+
+"'Bout Miggy," said Little Child sleepily, and she snuggled in Peter's
+coat collar.
+
+"Dream about Peter too!" Peter commanded.
+
+"Well, _I_ will," promised Little Child o' Dreams, and drifted off.
+
+Peter sank awkwardly down to the floor and held her so, and he sat there
+stroking Bless-your-Heart and looking as if he had forgotten me, save
+that, "Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade that I was telling
+you about," he remarked once irrelevantly, "_they've_ each got a kiddie
+or so."
+
+Miggy came downstairs and, "I'm a surprise," she said in the doorway,
+and stood there in a sheer white frock--a frock which said nothing to
+make you look, but would not let you look away; and it had a little
+rhyme of lace on this end and on that. It was the frock that she had
+made herself--she told me so afterward, but she did not mention it
+before Peter, and I liked her the better for that. When I hear women
+boast of these things I always wonder why, then and there, I should not
+begin to recite a sonnet I have turned, so as to have a hand in things.
+To write an indifferent sonnet is much less than to make a frock which
+can be worn, but yet I should dislike infinitely to volunteer even so
+little as a sonnet or a quatrain. In any case, it would be amazing taste
+for me to do so; while "I made it myself" I hear everywhere in the
+village, especially in the presence of the Eligible. But I dare say that
+this criticism of mine is conditioned by the fact that my needle-craft
+cell got caught in the primal protozoan ooze and did not follow me.
+
+"Miggy! Oh, Miggery!" said Peter, softly. He had made this name for a
+sort of superlative of her.
+
+"Like me?" inquired Miggy. I wonder if even the female atom does not
+coquette when the sun strikes her to shining in the presence of her atom
+lord?
+
+You know that low, emphatic, unspellable thing which may be said by the
+throat when a thing is liked very much? When one makes it, it feels like
+a vocal dash in vocal italics. Peter did that, very softly.
+
+"Well," said Miggy, "I feel that dressed-up that I might be cut out of
+paper. What _are_ you doing down there, Peter?"
+
+He glanced down mutely, and Miggy went round the table and saw what he
+held.
+
+"Why," she said, "that great heavy girl, Peter. Give her to me."
+
+Miggy bent over Peter, with her arms outstretched for the child. And
+Peter looked up at her and enjoyed the moment.
+
+"She's too heavy for you to lift," he said, with his occasional quiet
+authority. "I'll put her where you want her."
+
+"Well, it's so hot upstairs," Miggy hesitated. "It's past her bedtime,
+but I hate to take her up there."
+
+"Undress her down here," said I. "The Delft sugar bowl shuts you off a
+fine dressing-room. And let her sleep for a while on the couch."
+
+So Miggy went for the little nightgown, and Peter, with infinite pains,
+got to his feet, and detached Bless-your-Heart and deposited her on the
+table, where she yawned and humped her back and lay down on an
+unfinished sleeve and went to sleep again. And when Miggy came down,
+she threw a light quilt and a pillow near the couch and sat behind the
+table and held out her arms.
+
+"Now!" she said to Peter, and to me she said, "I thought maybe you'd
+spread her up a bed there on the couch."
+
+"Let Peter," said I. "I've another letter I ought to have written. If I
+may, I'll write that here while you undress her."
+
+"Well," said Miggy, "there's some sheets of letter-paper under the cover
+of the big Bible. And the ink--I guess there's some in the bottle--is on
+top of the organ. And the pen is there behind the clock. And you'd ought
+to find a clean envelope in that pile of newspapers. I think I saw one
+there the other day. You spread up her bed then, Peter."
+
+I wrote my letter, and Peter went at the making up of the lounge, and
+Miggy sat behind the table to undress Little Child. And Little Child
+began waking up. It touched me infinitely that she who in matters of
+fairies and visionings is so wise and old should now, in her sleepyhood,
+be just a baby again.
+
+"I--_won't_--go--bed," she said.
+
+"Oh," said Miggy, "yes. Don't you feel all the little wingies on your
+face? They're little dream wings, and the dreams are getting in a hurry
+to be dreamed."
+
+"I do' know those dreams," said Little Child, "I do' _want_ those
+dreams. Where's Bless-your-Heart?"
+
+"Dreaming," said Miggy, "all alone. Goodness, I believe you've got a
+little fever."
+
+Peter stopped flopping the quilt aimlessly over the lounge and turned,
+and Miggy laid the back of her hand on Little Child's cheek and beneath
+her chin. The man watched her anxiously as, since the world began,
+millions of men have looked down at this mysterious pronouncement of the
+woman.
+
+"She has?" he said. "She'd ought not to have any milk, then, had she?"
+he added vaguely. It seemed to me that Miggy must have paused for a
+moment to like Peter for this wholly youthful, masculine eagerness to
+show that he knew about such things.
+
+"I'll fix her something to take," said Miggy, capably. "No, dear. The
+other arm. Straighten elbow."
+
+"I want my shoes an' stockin's on in bed," Little Child observed. She
+was sitting up, her head drooping, her curls fastened high with a
+hairpin of Miggy's. "An' I want my shirtie on. An' _all_ my clothes. I
+won't go bed if you don't."
+
+Miggy laughed. "Bless-your-Heart hasn't got her clothes on," she
+parried.
+
+"Ain't she got her furs on any more?" demanded Little Child, opening
+her eyes. "She has, too. She has not, too, took a bath. An' I won't have
+no bath," she went on. "I'm too old for 'em."
+
+At that she would have Bless-your-Heart in her arms, and there was some
+argument arising from her intention to take the kitten in one hand all
+the way through her nightgown sleeve. And by this time sleepyhood tears
+were near.
+
+"_Don't_ curl your toes under so," said Miggy, struggling with a shoe.
+"Peter, do go on. You'll never have it done."
+
+Whereat Peter flapped the quilt again; and--
+
+"I will curl my toes up. That's what I want to do. I _want_ to curl 'em
+up!" said Little Child. And now the sleepyhood tears were very near.
+
+"Goodness," said Miggy, suddenly, "to-morrow is Sunday. I'll have to do
+her hair up for curls. Peter!" she cried, "stop waving that quilt, and
+tear me off a strip of that white lining there."
+
+"Yes, _I'll_ have curls," said Little Child, unexpectedly, "because that
+is so becunning to me."
+
+But she was very sleepy, and when Peter had been sent for the brush from
+the kitchen shelf, her head was on Miggy's shoulder, and Miggy looked at
+Peter helplessly.
+
+"Give her to me," said Peter, and took the child and laid the kitten at
+large upon the floor; and then, holding Little Child's head in the
+hollow of his arm, he sat down before Miggy, leaning toward her, and
+all the child's soft brown hair lay on his sleeve.
+
+I should have liked to watch them then. And I should have liked Calliope
+and Mis' Toplady and my neighbour to see them--those three who of all
+the village best understood mystery. I know that Peter did not take his
+eyes from Miggy's face as she brushed and wound the curls. How could
+he?--and Miggy, "sweet as boughs of May" in that white frock, her look
+all motherly intent upon her task. She was very deft, and she had that
+fine mother-manner of caring for the child with her whole hand instead
+of tipsifingers. I would see a woman infinitely delicate in the touching
+of flowers or tea-cups or needlework, but when she is near a child, I
+want her to have more than delicacy. I was amazed at Miggy's gentleness
+and her pretty air of accustomedness. And when Little Child stirred,
+Miggy went off into some improvised song about a little black dog that
+got struck with a wagon and went Ki--yi--ki--yi--_ad infinitum_, and
+Miggy seemed to me to have quite the technical mother-air of tender
+abstraction.
+
+"How dark her hair is growing," she said.
+
+"It's just the colour of yours," said Peter, "and the little curls on
+the edges. They're like yours, too."
+
+"My hair!" Miggy said deprecatingly. "You've got rather nice hair,
+Peter, if _only_ it wouldn't stick up that way at the back."
+
+"I know it sticks up," Peter said contritely. "I do every way to make it
+stay down. But it won't."
+
+"It makes you look funny," observed Miggy, frankly.
+
+"Well," he told her, "if you wouldn't ever make me go 'way from you, you
+wouldn't ever need to see the back of my head."
+
+"That would be just what would turn your head," she put it positively.
+"Peter, doesn't your arm ache, holding her so?"
+
+He looked down at his arm to see, and, "I wouldn't care if it did," he
+replied, in some surprise. "No. It feels good. Oh, Miggy--do you do this
+every night?"
+
+"I don't always curl her hair," said Miggy, "but I always put her to
+bed. If ever Aunt Effie undresses her, she tells her she _may_ die
+before morning, so she'd better say her prayer, pretty. Goodness, she
+hasn't said her prayer yet, either."
+
+"Isn't she too sleepy?" asked Peter.
+
+"Yes," Miggy answered; "but she feels bad in the morning if she doesn't
+say it. You know she thinks she says her prayer to mother, and that
+mother waits to hear her...."
+
+Miggy looked up fleetingly at her mother's picture on the wall--one of
+those pale enlargements of a photograph which tell you definitely that
+the subject is dead.
+
+"I do' want any other curls on me," announced Little Child, suddenly.
+
+"Just one more, dear," Miggy told her, "and then we're through. Turn her
+head a little, Peter."
+
+"No," said Little Child. "Now I'm all curly."
+
+And, "Yes, Precious. Be still on Peter's arm just a minute more," said
+Miggy at the same time.
+
+And, "If you say anything more, I'll kiss you," said Peter, to whom it
+might concern.
+
+"Kiss _me_?" said Little Child. "I won't be."
+
+"Somebody's got to be," said Peter, with decision.
+
+"Now, our prayer," ruled Miggy suddenly, and rose. "Come, dear."
+
+Peter looked up in Miggy's face.
+
+"Let her be here," he said. "Let her be here."
+
+He lifted Little Child so that she knelt, and her head drooped on his
+shoulder. He had one arm about her and the other hand on the pink,
+upturned soles of her feet. The child put out one hand blindly for
+Miggy's hand. So Miggy came and stood beside Peter, and together they
+waited for the little sleepy voice.
+
+It came with disconcerting promptness.
+
+"Now--I--lay--me--down--to--sleep--for--Jesus'--sake--Amen," prayed
+Little Child in one breath.
+
+"No, sweetheart," Miggy remonstrated, with her alluring emphasis on
+"sweet." "Say it right, dear."
+
+"Now I lay me--is Bless-your-Heart sayin' hers?" demanded Little Child.
+
+"Couldn't you get along without her, when you're so sleepy?" Miggy
+coaxed.
+
+"Mustn't skip nights," Little Child told her. "Bless-your-Heart might
+die before morning."
+
+So Miggy found Bless-your-Heart under the couch, and haled her forth,
+and laid her in Little Child's arms. And Peter put his face close, close
+to Little Child's, and shut his eyes.
+
+"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I
+should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take who'll I bless
+to-night?" said Little Child.
+
+"Aunt Effie," Miggy prompted.
+
+"Bless Aunt Effie," said Little Child, "and Miggy and Bless-your-Heart
+and New Auntie" (she meant me. Think of her meaning me!) "and the man
+that gave me the peanuts, and bless Stella's party and make 'em have
+ice-cream, and bless my new shoes and my sore finger. For Jesus' sake,
+Amen."
+
+Little Child drew a long breath and stirred to get down, but Peter did
+not move.
+
+"And bless Peter," Miggy said.
+
+"No," said Little Child, "He needn't. Peter's nice 'nuff."
+
+Peter got to his feet with Little Child in his arms, and his face was
+glowing, and he looked at Miggy as if she were what he meant whenever he
+said "universe." But Miggy had gone to the couch, and was smoothing the
+quilt that Peter had wrinkled in all directions, and patting the pillow
+that Peter had kneaded into a hard ball.
+
+"You lay her down," she said.
+
+Peter did so, setting the kitten on the floor, and then bending low over
+the couch, looking in the upturned face as the little dark head touched
+the pillow and sought its ease, and her hand fell from where it had
+rested on his shoulder. And he stooped and kissed her cheek more gently
+than he had ever done anything.
+
+"I want my drink o' water," said Little Child, and opened her eyes; and
+now from the couch she could see me. "Tell me a story," she commanded
+me, drowsily.
+
+I did not go to her, for who am I that I should have broken that trio?
+But when Miggy and Peter took the lamp and went away to the kitchen for
+the drink of water and for some simple remedy for the fever which Miggy
+had noted or fancied, I sat beside Little Child and said over something
+that had been persistently in my mind as I had watched Miggy with her:--
+
+
+     "I like to stand in this great air
+     And see the sun go down;
+     It shows me a bright veil to wear
+     And such a pretty gown.
+     Oh, I can see a playmate there
+     Far up in Splendour Town!"
+
+
+Little Child began it with me, but her voice trailed away. I thought
+that in the darkness were many gentle presences--Little Child's tender
+breathing, the brushing wings of hurrying dreams, and perhaps that
+other--"not quite my sister," but a shadowy little Margaret.
+
+Afterward, Miggy and Peter and I sat together for a little while, but
+Peter had fallen in a silence. And presently Aunt Effie came home, and
+on the porch--which seemed not yet to have escaped--she told us about
+having broken her needle and left her shears at her neighbour's. While
+Peter ran over to Mis' Holcomb's for the shears, I had a word with
+Miggy.
+
+"Miggy!" I said, "don't you see?"
+
+"See what?" she wanted to know, perversely.
+
+"How Peter would love to have Little Child, too?" I said.
+
+She laughed a little, and was silent; and laughed again.
+
+"He was funny and nice," she admitted; "and wasn't Little Child funny
+not to bless him?"
+
+"Because he is nice enough," I reminded her.
+
+Miggy laughed once more--I had never seen her in so tender and feminine
+a mood. And this may have been partly due to the new frock, though I
+cannot think that it was entirely this. But abruptly she shook her head.
+
+"Peter's father went by just before you came in," she said.
+"He--couldn't hardly walk. What if I was there to get supper for him
+when he got home? I never could--I never could...."
+
+By the time Peter and I were out alone on Daphne Street again, the
+sitting rooms in all the houses were dark, with a look of locked front
+doors--as if each house had set its lips together with, "We are a home
+and you are not."
+
+Peter looked out on all this palpable householdry.
+
+"See the lights upstairs," he said; "everybody's up there, hearing their
+prayers and giving 'em fever medicine. Yes, sir, Great Scott! Shorty
+Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade--they ain't good for a thing in
+the cannery. And yet they know...."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+POSTMARKS
+
+
+Between church service and Sunday School we of the First church have so
+many things to attend to that no one can spare a moment.
+
+"Reverent things, not secular," Calliope explains, "plannin' for church
+chicken-pie suppers an' Christmas bazaars and like that; but not a word
+about a picnic, not even if they was to be one o' Monday sunrise."
+
+To be sure, this habit of ours occasionally causes a contretemps. As
+when one morning Mis' Toplady arrived late and, in a flurry, essayed to
+send up to the pulpit by the sexton a Missionary meeting notice to be
+read. Into this notice the minister plunged without the precaution of
+first examining it, and so delivered aloud:--
+
+
+     "See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags.
+     "See Abigail about enough forks for her table.
+     "Look around for my rubbers.
+     "Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."
+
+
+Not until he reached the fourth item was the minister stopped by the
+agonized rustle in a congregation that had easily recognized Mis'
+Toplady's "between services" list of reminder, the notice of the
+forthcoming meeting being safe in her hymn book.
+
+Still we persist in our Sabbath conferences when "everybody is there
+where you want 'em an' everybody can see everybody an' no time lost an'
+no party line listening"; and it is then that those who have been for
+some time away from the village receive their warmest welcome. I am not
+certain that the "I must get down to church and see everybody" of a
+returned neighbour does not hold in fair measure the principles of
+familyhood and of Christ's persuadings to this deep comradeship.
+
+It was in this time after church that we welcomed Calliope one August
+Sunday when she had unexpectedly come down from town on the Saturday
+night. And later, when the Sunday-school bell had rung, I waited with
+her in the church while she looked up her Bible, left somewhere in the
+pews. When she had found it, she opened it in a manner of eager haste,
+and I inadvertently saw pasted to the inside cover a sealed letter,
+superscription down, for whose safety she had been concerned. I had
+asked her to dine with me, and as we walked home together she told me
+about the letter and what its sealed presence in her Bible meant.
+
+"I ain't ever read it," Calliope explained to me wistfully. "Every one
+o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle has got one, an' none of us has
+ever read 'em. It ain't my letter, so to say. It's one o' the Jem Pitlaw
+collection. The postmark," she imparted, looking up at me proudly, "is
+Bombay, India."
+
+At my question about the Jem Pitlaw collection she laughed
+deprecatingly, and then she sighed. ("Ain't it nice," she had once said
+to me, "your laughs hev a sigh for a linin', an' sighs can hev laughin'
+for trimmin'. Only trouble is, most folks want to line with trimmin's,
+an' they ain't rill durable, used that way.")
+
+"Jem Pitlaw," Calliope told me now, "used to be schoolmaster here--the
+kind that comes from Away an' is terrible looked up to on that account,
+but Jem deserved it. He knew all there was _to_ know, an' yet he thought
+we knew some little things, too. We was all rill fond of him, though he
+kept to himself, an' never seemed to want to fall in love, an' not many
+of us knew him well enough to talk to at all familiar. But when he went
+off West on a vacation, an' didn't come back, an' never come back, an'
+then died, Friendship Village mourned for him,--sincere, though no
+crape,--an' missed him enormous.
+
+"He'd had a room at Postmaster Sykes's--that was when he was postmaster
+first an' they was still humble an' not above the honest penny. An' Jem
+Pitlaw left two trunks an' a sealed box to their house. An' when he
+didn't come back in two years, Silas Sykes moved the things out of the
+spare room over to the post-office store loft. An' there they set, three
+years on end, till we got word Jem was dead--the very week o' the
+Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle's Ten Cent Tropical Fête. Though,
+rilly, the Tropical Fête wasn't what you might say 'tropical.' It was
+held on the seventeenth of January, an' that night the thermometer was
+twenty-four degrees below on the bank corner. Nor it wasn't rilly what
+you might say a Fête, either. But none o' the Circle regretted them
+lacks. A lack is as good as a gift, sometimes.
+
+"We'd started the Foreign Missionary Circle through Mis' Postmaster
+Sykes gettin' her palm. I donno what there is about palms, but you know
+the very name makes some folks think thoughts 'way outside their heads,
+an' not just stuffy-up inside their own brains. When I hear 'palm,' I
+sort o' feel like my i-dees got kind o' wordy wings an' just went it
+without me. An' that was the way with more than me, I found out. Nobody
+in Friendship Village hed a palm, but we'd all seen pictures an'
+hankered--like you do. An' all of a sudden Mis' Sykes got one, like she
+gets her new hat, sometimes, without a soul knowin' she's thinkin'
+'hat' till she flams out in it. Givin' surprise is breath an' bread to
+that woman. She unpacked the palm in the kitchen, an' telephoned around,
+an' we all went over just as we was an' set down there an' looked at it
+an' thought 'Palm'! You can't realize how we felt, all of us, if you
+ain't lived all your life with nothin' but begonias an' fuchsias from
+November to April, an' sometimes into May. But we was all mixed up about
+'em, now we see one. Some hed heard dates grew on palms. Others would
+have it it was cocoanuts. Still more said they was natives of the
+equator, an' give nothin' but shade. So it went. But after a while Mis'
+Timothy Toplady spoke up with that way o' comin' downstairs on her words
+an' rilly gettin' to a landin':--
+
+"'They's quite a number o' things,' she says, 'that I want to do so much
+it seems like I can't die without doin' 'em. But I guess prob'ly I will
+die without. Folks seems to drop off leavin' lots of doin's undone. An'
+one o' my worst is, I want to see palm trees growin' in hot lands--big
+spiky leaves pointin' into the blue sky _like fury_. 'Seems if I could
+do that,' s'she, 'I'd take in one long breath that'd make me all lungs
+an' float me up an' off.'
+
+"We all laughed, but we knew what she meant well enough, because we all
+felt the same way. I think most North folks do--like they was cocoanuts
+an' dates in our actions, 'way back. An' so we was all ready for Mis'
+Toplady's idee when it come--which is the most any idee can expect:--
+
+"'I tell you what,' s'she, 'le's hev a Ladies' Foreign Missionary
+Circle, an' get read up on them tropical countries. The only thing I
+really know about the tropics is what comes to me unbeknownst when I
+smell my tea rose. I've always been meanin' to take an interest in
+missions,' says she.
+
+"So we started it, then an' there, an' she an' I was the committee to
+draw out a constitution an' decide what officers should be elected an'
+do the general creatin'. We made it up that Mis' Sykes should be the
+president--that woman is a born leader, and, as a leader, you can depend
+on the very back of her head. An' at last we went off to the minister
+that then was to ask him what to take up.
+
+"'Most laudable,' s'he, when he'd heard. 'Well, now, what country is it
+you're most interested in?' he says. 'Some island of the sea, I s'pose?'
+he asks, bright.
+
+"'We're interested in palms,' Mis' Timothy Toplady explained it to him
+frank, 'an' we want to study about the missionaries in some country
+where they's dates an' cocoanuts an' oaseses.'
+
+"He smiled at that, sweet an' deep--I know it seemed to me as if he knew
+more about what we wanted than we knew ourselves. Because they's some
+ministers that understands that Christianity ain't all in the bottle
+labelled with it. Some of it is labelled 'ointment,' an' some 'perfume,'
+an' some just plain kitchen flavourin'. An' a good deal of it ain't
+labelled at all.
+
+"I forget what country it was we did study. But they was nine to ten of
+us, an' we met every week, an' I tell you the time wa'n't wasted. We
+took things in lavish. I know Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said that
+after belongin' to the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle she could never
+feel the same absent-minded sensation again when she dusted her parlour
+shells. An' Mis' Toplady said when she opened her kitchen cabinet an'
+smelt the cinnamon an' allspice out o' the perforated tops, 'most
+always, no matter how mad she was, she broke out in a hymn, like 'When
+All Thy Mercies,' sheer through knowin' how allspice was born of God an'
+not made of man. An' Mis' Sykes said when she read her Bible, an' it
+talked about India's coral strand, it seemed like, through knowin' what
+a reef was, she was right there on one, with her Lord. I felt the same
+way, too--though I'd always felt the same way, for that matter--I always
+did tip vanilla on my handkerchief an' pretend it was flowers an' that
+I'd gone down South for the cold months. An' it got so that when the
+minister give out a text that had geography in it, like the Red Sea, or
+Beer-elim, or 'a place called The Fair Haven,' the Ladies Foreign
+Missionary Circle would look round in our seats an' nod to each other,
+without it showin', because we knew that we knew, extra special, just
+what God was talkin' about. I tell you, knowledge makes you alive at
+places where you didn't know there was such a place.
+
+"In five months' time we felt we owed so much to the Ladies' Foreign
+Missionary Circle that it was Mis' Sykes suggested we give the Ten Cent
+Tropical Fête, an' earn five dollars or so for missions.
+
+"'We know a great deal about the tropics now,' she says, 'an' I propose
+we earn a missionary thank-offering. Coral an' cocoanuts an' dates an'
+spices isn't all the Lord is interested in, by any means,' s'she. 'An'
+the winter is the time to give a tropic fête, when folks are thinkin'
+about warm things natural.'
+
+"We voted to hev the fête to Mis' Sykes's because it was too cold to
+carry the palm out. We went into it quite extensive--figs an' dates an'
+bananas an' ginger for refreshments, an' little nigger dolls for
+souvenirs, an' like that. It was quite a novel thing for Friendship, an'
+everybody was takin' an interest an' offerin' to lend Japanese umbrellas
+an' Indian baskets an' books on the South Sea, an' a bamboo chair with
+an elephant crocheted in the tidy. An' then, bein' as happenin's always
+crowd along in flocks, what come that very week o' the fête but a letter
+from an old aunt of Jem Pitlaw's, out West. An' if Jem hadn't been dead
+almost ever since he left Friendship! an' the aunt wrote that we should
+sell his things to pay for keepin' 'em, as she was too poor to send for
+'em an' hadn't any room if she wasn't.
+
+"I donno whether you know what rill excitement is, but if you don't,
+you'd ought to drop two locked trunks an' a sealed box into a town the
+size o' Friendship Village, an' leave 'em there goin' on five years, an'
+then die an' let 'em be sold. That'll show you what a pitch true
+interest can get het up to. All of a sudden the Tropical Fête was no
+more account than the telephone ringin' when a circus procession is
+going by. Some o' the Ladies' Missionary was rill indignant, an' said
+we'd ought to sue for repairin' rights, same as when you're interfered
+with in business. Mis' Sykes, she done her able best, too, but nothin'
+would do Silas but he must offer them things for sale on the instant.
+'The time,' s'he, firm, 'to do a thing is now, while the interest is up.
+An' in this country,' s'he, '"now" don't stay "now" more'n two minutes
+at a time.'
+
+"So he offered for sale the contents of them three things--the two
+trunks an' the sealed box--unsight, unseen, on the day before the Fête
+was to be. Only one thing interfered with the 'unsight, unseen'
+business: the sealed box had got damp an' broke open, an' what was
+inside was all showin'.
+
+"Mis' Sykes an' I saw it on the day o' the sale. Most o' the Circle was
+to her house finishin' up the decorations for the Fête so's to leave the
+last day clear for seein' to the refreshments, an' her an' I run over to
+the post-office store for some odds an' ends. Silas had brought the two
+trunks an' the box down from the loft so to give 'em some advertisin'.
+An' lookin' in the corner o' the broke box we could see, just as plain
+as plain, was _letters_. Letters in bunches, all tied up, an' letters
+laid in loose--they must 'a' been full a hundred of 'em, all lookin'
+mysterious an' ready to tell you somethin', like letters will. I know
+the looks o' the letters sort o' went to my head, like the news of Far
+Off. An' I hated seein' Jem's trunks there, with his initials on,
+appearin' all trustin' an' as if they thought he was still alive.
+
+"But that wasn't the worst. They was three strangers there in the
+store--travellin' men that had just come in on the Through, an' they was
+hangin' round the things lookin' at 'em, as if they had the right to.
+This town ain't very much on the buy, an' we don't hev many strangers
+here, an' we ain't rill used to 'em. An' it did seem too bad, I know we
+thought, that them three should hev happened in on the day of a private
+Friendship Village sale that didn't concern nobody else but one, an'
+him dead. An' we felt this special when one o' the men took a-hold of a
+bunch o' the letters, an' we could see the address of the top one, to
+Jem Pitlaw, wrote thin an' tiny-fine, like a woman. An' at that Mis'
+Sykes says sharp to her husband:--
+
+"'Silas Sykes, you ain't goin' to sell them letters?'
+
+"'Yes, ma'am, I am,' Silas snaps, like he hed a right to all the letters
+on earth, bein' he was postmaster of Friendship Village. 'Letters,'
+Silas give out, 'is just precisely the same as books, only they ain't
+been through the expense of printin'. No differ'nce. No
+differ'nce!'--Silas always seems to think repeatin' a thing over'll get
+him somewheres, like a clock retickin' itself. 'An',' he says, 'I'm
+goin' to sell 'em for what they'll bring, same as the rest o' the
+things, an' you needn't to say one word.' An' bein' as Silas was
+snappin', not only as a postmaster but as a husband, Mis' Sykes, she
+kep' her silence. Matrimony an' politics both in one man is too much for
+any woman to face.
+
+"Well, we two went back to Mis' Sykes's all het up an' sad, an' told the
+Circle about Jem Pitlaw's letters. An' we all stopped decoratin' an' set
+down just where we was an talked about what an awful thing it seemed. I
+donno as you'll sense it as strong as we did. It was more a feelin' than
+a wordin'. _Letters_--bein' sold an' read out loud an' gettin' known
+about. It seemed like lookin' in somebody's purse before they're dead.
+
+"'I should of thought,' Mis' Sykes says, 'that Silas regardin' bein'
+postmaster as a sacred office would have made him do differ'nt. An' I
+know he talked that right along before he got his appointment. "Free
+Private Secretary to the People," an' "Trusted Curator of Public
+Communication," he put it when he was goin' around with his petition,'
+says she, grievin'.
+
+"'Well,' says Mis' Amanda Toplady--I rec'lect she hed been puttin' up a
+big Japanese umbrella, an' she looked out from under it sort o' sweet
+an' sincere an' dreamy--'you've got to be a woman an' you've got to live
+in a little town before you know what a letter really is. I don't think
+these folks that hev lots o' mail left in the front hall in the
+mornin'--an' sometimes get one that same afternoon--_knows_ about
+letters at all. An' I don't believe any man ever knows, sole except when
+he's in love. To sense what a letter is you've got to be a woman without
+what-you-may-say much to enjoy; you've got to hear the train whistle
+that might bring you one; you've got to calculate how long it'll take
+'em to distribute the mail, an' mebbe hurry to get your bread mixed, or
+your fried-cakes out o' the lard, or your cannin' where you can leave
+it--an' then go change your shoes an' slip on another skirt, an' poke
+your hair up under your hat so's it won't show, an' go down to the
+post-office in the hot sun, an' see the letter through the glass, there
+in your own box, waitin' for you. That minute, when your heart comes up
+in your throat, I tell you, is gettin' a letter.'
+
+"We all knew this is so--every one of us.
+
+"'It's just like that when you write 'em, only felt differ'nt,' says
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I do mine to my sister a little at a
+time--I keep it back o' the clock in the kitchen an' hide the pencil
+inside the clock door, so's it won't walk off, the way pencils do at our
+house. An' then, right in the midst of things, be it flour or be it
+suds, I can scratch down what comes in my head, till I declare sometimes
+I can hardly mail it for readin' it over an' thinkin' how she'll like to
+get it.'
+
+"'My, my!' says Mis' Sykes, reminiscent, ''specially since Silas has
+been postmaster an' we've had so much to do with other people's letters,
+I've been so hungry for letters of my own that I've wrote for samples. I
+can do that with a level conscience because, after all, you do get a new
+dress now an' then. But I couldn't answer advertisements, same as some,
+when I didn't mean true--just to get the letters back. That don't seem
+to me rill honest.'
+
+"An' then I owned up.
+
+"'Last week, when I paid my taxes,' I says, 'I whipped out o' the
+clerk's office quick, sole so's he'd hev to mail me my tax receipt. But
+he didn't do it. He sent it over by their hired girl that noon. I love
+letters like I do my telephone bell an' my friends,' I know I says.
+
+"An' there was all that hundred letters or so--letters that somebody had
+put love in for Jem Pitlaw, an' that he'd read love out of an' saved
+'em--there they was goin' to be sold for all Friendship Village to read,
+includin' some that hadn't even known him, mebbe more than to speak to.
+
+"We wasn't quite through decoratin' when supper time come, so we stayed
+on to Mis' Sykes's for a pick-up lunch, et in the kitchen, an' finished
+up afterwards. Most of 'em could do that better than they could leave
+their work an' come down again next mornin'--men-folks can always get
+along for supper, bein' it's not a hot meal.
+
+"'Ain't it wonderful,' says Mis' Toplady, thoughtful, 'here we are,
+settin' 'round the kitchen table at Mis' Postmaster Sykes's in
+Friendship Village. An' away off in Arabia or Asia or somewhere that I
+ain't sure they is any such place, is somebody settin' that never heard
+of us nor we of him, an' he's goin' to hev our five dollars from the
+Tropical Fête to-morrow night, an' put it to work doin' good.'
+
+"'It makes sort of a connection, don't it?' says Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'There they are an' here we are. Ain't it
+strange? 'Seems like our doin' this makes us feel nearer to them places.
+I donno but that,' says she, noddin', 'is the start of what it means
+about the lion and the lamb layin' down together.'
+
+"'Oh!'says Mis' Toplady, 'I tell you the Foreign Missionary Circle has
+been next best to _goin'_. 'Seems sometimes as if I've 'most been
+somewheres an' seen palms a-growin' an' a-wavin' an' a red sky back.
+Don't it to you? I've dreamed o' them places all my life, an' I ain't
+never had anything but Friendship Village, an' I don't know now that
+Arabia an' Asia an' India is rilly fitted in, the way they look on the
+map. An' so with some more. But if so be they are, then,' she says, 'we
+owe it to the Foreign Missionary Circle that we've got that far towards
+seein' 'em.'
+
+"An' we all agreed, warm, excep' Mis' Sykes, who was the hostess an' too
+busy to talk much; but we knew how she felt. An' we said some more about
+how wonderful things are, there in Mis' Sykes's kitchen while we et.
+
+"Well, when we got done decoratin' after supper, we all walked over to
+the post-office store to the sale--the whole Circle of us. Because, of
+course, if the letters was to be sold there wasn't any harm in seein'
+who got 'em, an' in knowin' just how mean who was. Then, too, we was
+interested in what was in the two trunks. We was quite early--early
+enough to set along on the front rows of breakfast-food boxes that was
+fixed ready. An' in the very frontmost one was Mis' Sykes an' Mis'
+Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, an' me.
+
+"But we see, first thing when we got into the store, that they was
+strangers present. The three travellin' men that Mis' Sykes an' I had
+noticed that afternoon was still in town, of course, an' there they was
+to the sale, loungin' along on the counter each side o' the cheese. We
+couldn't bear their bein' there. It was our sale, an' they wasn't rill
+sure to understand. To us Mr. Pitlaw hed been Mr. Pitlaw. To them he was
+just somebody that hed been somebody. I didn't like it, nor they didn't
+none o' the Ladies' Missionary like it. We all looked at each other an'
+nodded without it showin', like we do, an' we could see we all felt the
+same.
+
+"Silas was goin' to officiate himself--that man has got the idee it's
+the whistle that runs the boat. They had persuaded him to open the
+trunks an' sell the things off piecemeal, an' he see that was rilly the
+only way to do it. So when the time come he broke open the two trunks
+an' he wouldn't let anybody touch hasp or strap or hammer but himself.
+It made me sort of sick to see even the trunk things of Mr. Pitlaw's
+come out--a pepper an' salt suit, a pair of new suspenders, a collar
+an' cuff case--the kind that you'd recognize was a Christmas present; a
+nice brush an' comb he'd kept for best an' never used, a cake of
+pretty-paper soap he'd never opened, a bunch o' keys, an' like that. You
+know how it makes you feel to unpack even your own things that have been
+put away a good while; it's like thinkin' over forgot thoughts. Well,
+an' this was worse. Jem Pitlaw, that none of us had known well enough to
+mention familiar things to, was dead--he was _dead_; an' here we were,
+lookin' on an' seein' the things that was never out of his room before,
+an' that he'd put in there, neat an' nice, five years back, to be took
+out, he thought, in a few weeks. Quite a lot of us felt delicate, but
+some got behind the delicate idee an' made it an excuse for not buyin'
+much. They's all kinds to a sale--did you ever notice? Timothy Toplady,
+for instance--I donno but he's all kinds in his single self. 'Seems he
+couldn't bring himself to bid on a thing but Jem Pitlaw's keys.
+
+"'Of course nobody knows what they'll fit,' says he, disparagin', 'so to
+buy 'em don't seem like bein' too familiar with Mr. Pitlaw,' s'he, rill
+pleased with himself.
+
+"But Mis' Sykes whispers to me:--
+
+"'Them keys'll go dirt cheap, an' Timothy knows it, an' a strange key
+may come in handy any minute. Timothy's reasons never whip to a froth,'
+s'she, cold.
+
+"But I guess she was over-critical because of gettin' more fidgety, like
+we all did, the nearer Silas got to the letters. He hed left the letters
+till the last. An' what with folks peekin' in the box since he'd brought
+it down, an' what with handlin' what was ready to spill out, most of 'em
+by then was in plain sight. An' there I see more o' them same
+ones--little thin writin', like a woman's. We 'most all noticed it. An'
+I couldn't keep my eyes off of 'em. 'Seemed like she might be somebody
+with soft ways that ought to be there, savin' the letters, wardin' off
+the heartache for Mr. Pitlaw an' mebbe one for herself.
+
+"An' right while I was lookin' Silas turned to the box and cleared his
+throat, important as if he was the whistle for New York City, an' he
+lifted up the bunch of the letters that had the little fine writin' on
+top, just the way Mr. Pitlaw had tied 'em up with common string.
+
+"'Oh!' says Mis' Toplady and Mis' Sykes, each side of me, the one 'oh!'
+strong an' the other low, but both 'oh's' meanin' the same thing.
+
+"'Now, what,' says Silas, brisk, 'am I bid for this package of nice
+letters here? Good clear writin', all in strong condition, an' no holes
+in, just as firm an' fresh,' s'he, 'as the day they was dropped into
+the mail. What am I bid for 'em?' he asks, his eyebrows rill expectant.
+
+"Not one of the travellin' men had bid a thing. They had sat still, just
+merely loungin' each side the cheese, laughin' some, like men will,
+among each other, but not carin' to take any part, an' we ladies felt
+rill glad o' that. But all of a sudden, when Silas put up the bunch o'
+letters, them three men woke up, an' we see like lightnin' that this was
+what they hed been waitin' for.
+
+"'Twenty-five cents!' bids one of 'em, decisive.
+
+"There was a movement of horror spread around the Missionary Circle at
+the words. Sometimes it's bad enough to hev one thing happen, but often
+it's worse to hev another occur. Even Silas looked a little doubtful,
+but to Silas the main chance is always the main thing, an' instantly he
+see that these men, if they got in the spirit of it, would run them
+letters up rill high just for the fun of it. An' Silas was like some
+are: he felt that money is money.
+
+"So what did he do but begin cryin' the goods up higher--holdin' the
+letters in his hands, that little, thin writin' lookin' like it was
+askin' somethin'.
+
+"'Here we hev letters,' says Silas, 'letters from Away. Not just
+business letters, to judge by the envelopes--an' I allow, gentlemen,'
+says Silas, facetious, 'that, bein' postmaster of Friendship Village,
+I'm as good a judge of letters as there is a-goin'. Here we hev some
+intimate personal letters offered for sale legitimate by their heiress.
+What am I bid?' asks he.
+
+"'Thirty-five cents!'
+
+"'Fifty cents!' says the other two travellin' gentlemen, quick an' in
+turn.
+
+"'Seventy-five cents!' cries out the first, gettin' in earnest--though
+they was all laughin' at hevin' somethin' inspirin' to do.
+
+"But Silas merely caught a-hold of the mood they was in, crafty, as if
+he'd been gettin' the signers to his petition while they was feelin'
+good.
+
+"'One moment, gentlemen!' s'he. 'Do you know what you're biddin' on? I
+ain't told you the half yet,' s'he. 'I ain't told you,' s'he, 'where
+these letters come from.'
+
+"With that he hitches his glasses an' looked at the postmarks. An' he
+read 'em off. Oh, an' what do you guess them postmarks was? I'll never
+forget the feelin' that come over me when I heard what he was sayin',
+turnin' back in under the string to see. For the stamps on the letters
+was foreign stamps. The postmarks was foreign postmarks. An' what Silas
+read off was: Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Singapore--oh, I can't begin to
+remember all the names nor to pronounce 'em, but I think they was all in
+India, or leastwise in Asia. Think of it! in Asia, that none of the
+Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle hed been sure there was such a place.
+
+"I know how we all looked around at each other sudden, with the same
+little jump in the chest as when we remember we've got bread in the oven
+past the three-quarters, or when we've left the preserves on the blaze
+while we've done somethin' else an' think it's burnin', or when we've
+cut out both sleeves for one arm an' ain't got any more cloth. I mean it
+was that intimate, personal jump, like when awful, first-person things
+have happened. An' I tell you what, when the Ladies' Missionary feels a
+thing, they feel it strong an' they act it sudden. It's our way, as a
+Circle. An' in that look that went round among us there was hid the nod
+that knows what each other means.
+
+"'One dollar!' shouts one o' the travellin' men.
+
+"An' with that we all turned, like one solid human being, straight
+towards Mis' Postmaster Sykes, that was our president an' a born leader
+besides, an' the way we looked at her resembled a vote.
+
+"Mis' Sykes stood up, grave an' scairt, though not to show. An' we was
+sure she'd do the right thing, though we didn't know what the right
+thing was; but we felt confidence, I know, in the very pattern on the
+back of her shawl. An' she says, clear:--
+
+"'I'd like to be understood to bid for the whole box o' Mr. Pitlaw's
+letters, includin' the bunch that's up. An' I bid five dollars.'
+
+"Of course we all knew in a minute what that meant: Mis' Sykes was
+biddin' with the proceeds of the Ten Cent Tropical Fête that was to be.
+But we see, too, that this was a missionary cause if there ever was one,
+an' they wa'n't one of us that thought it irregular, or grudged it, or
+looked behind.
+
+"I don't know whether you know how much five dollars rilly is--like you
+sense it when you've spoke it to a sale, or put it on a subscription
+paper in Friendship. There wasn't a sound in that store, everybody was
+so dumfounded. But none was so much as Silas Sykes. Silas was so
+surprised that he forgot that he was in public.
+
+"'My King!' says he, unexpected to himself. 'What you sayin', Huldy? You
+ain't biddin' that out o' your allowance, be you?' says he. Silas likes
+big words in the home.
+
+"'No, sir,' says she, crisp, back, 'I ain't. I can't do miracles out of
+nothin'. But I bid, an' you'll get your money, Silas. An' I may as well
+take the letters now.'
+
+"With that she rose up an' spread out her shawl almost broodin', an'
+gathered that box o' Jem Pitlaw's into her two arms. An' with one motion
+all the rest o' the Ladies' Missionary got up behind her an' stalked out
+of the store, like a big bid is sole all there is to an auction. An'
+they let us go. Why, there wasn't another thing for Silas Sykes to do
+but let be as was. Them three men over by the cheese just laughed, an'
+said out somethin' about no gentleman outbiddin' a lady, an' shut up,
+beat, but pretendin' to give in, like some will.
+
+"Just before we all got to the door we heard somebody's feet come down
+off'n a cracker-barrel or somethin', an' Timothy Toplady's voice after
+us, shrill-high an' nervous:--
+
+"'Amanda,' s'he, 'you ain't calculatin' to help back up this
+tomfoolishness, I hope?'
+
+"An' Mis' Amanda says at him, over her shoulder:
+
+"'If I was, that'd be between my hens an' me, Timothy Toplady,' says
+she.
+
+"An' the store door shut behind us--not mad, I remember, but gentle,
+like 'Amen.'
+
+"We took the letters straight to Mis' Sykes's an' through the house to
+the kitchen, where there was a good hot fire in the range. It was bitter
+cold outdoors, an' we set down around the stove just as we was, with the
+letters on the floor in front o' the hearth. An' when Mis' Sykes hed got
+the bracket lamp lit, she turned round, her bonnet all crooked but her
+face triumphant, an' took off a griddle of the stove an' stirred up the
+coals. An' we see what was in her mind.
+
+"'We can take turns puttin' 'em in,' she says.
+
+"But I guess it was in all our minds what Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss says, wistful:--
+
+"'Don't you think,' she says, 'or _do_ you think, it'd be wrongin' Mr.
+Pitlaw if we read over the postmarks out loud first?'
+
+"We divided up the bunches an' we set down around an' untied the
+strings, an', turn in an' turn out, we read the postmarks off. 'Most
+every one of 'em was foreign--oh, I can't begin to tell you where. It
+was all mixed up an' shinin' of names we'd never heard of before, an'
+names we had heard in sermons an' in the Bible--Egypt an' Greece an'
+Rome an' isles o' the sea. Mis' Toplady stopped right in the middle o'
+hers.
+
+"'Oh, I can't be sure I'm pronouncin' 'em right,' she says, huntin' for
+her handkerchief, 'but I guess you ladies get the _feel_ o' the places,
+don't you?'
+
+"An' that was just it: we did. We got the feel of them far places that
+night like we never could hev hed it any other way. An' when we got all
+through, Mis' Toplady spoke up again--but this time it was like she flew
+up a little way an' lit on somethin'.
+
+"'It ain't likely,' she says, 'that we'll ever, any of us, hev a letter
+of our own from places like these. We don't get many letters, an' what
+we do get come from the same old towns, over an' over again, an' quite
+near by. Do you know,' she says, 'I believe this Writin' here'--she held
+out the tiny fine writing that was like a woman with soft ways--'would
+understand if we each took one of her letters an' glued it together here
+an' now an' carried it home an' pasted it in our Bibles. _She_ went
+travellin' off to them places, an' she must have wanted to; an' she
+would know what it is to want to go an' yet never get there.'
+
+"I think Mis' Amanda was right--we all thought so. An' we done what she
+mentioned, an' made our choice o' postmarks. I know Mis' Amanda took
+Cairo.
+
+"''Count of the name sort o' picturin' out a palm tree a-growin' an'
+a-wavin' against a red sky,' she says, when she was pinnin' her shawl
+clear up over her hat to go out in the cold. 'Think of it,' she says;
+'she might 'a' passed a palm the day she wrote it. Ain't it like seein'
+'em grow yourself?'
+
+... "Mebbe it all wasn't quite regular," Calliope added, "though we made
+over five dollars at the Ten Cent Fête. But the minister, when we told
+him, he seemed to think it was all right, an' he kep' smilin', sweet an'
+deep, like we'd done more'n we _had_ done. An' I think he knew what we
+meant when we said we was all feelin' nearer, lion an' lamb, to them
+strange missionary countries. Because--oh, well, sometimes, you know,"
+Calliope said, "they's things that makes you feel nearer to faraway
+places that couldn't hev any postmark at all."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+PETER
+
+
+Last night in my room there was no sleeping, because the moon was there.
+It is a south room, and when the moon shines on the maple floor with its
+white cotton rugs and is reflected from the smooth white walls, to step
+within is like entering an open flower. Who could sleep in an open
+flower? I might sleep in a vast white petunia, because petunias do not
+have as much to say to me as do some other flowers. But in the bell of a
+lily, as in the bell of the sky or in my moonlit room, I should wish my
+thought to stay awake and be somebody. Be Somebody. On these nights, it
+is as if one had a friend in one's head conferring with one. And I think
+of this comrade as Her, the Custodian of me, who lives deep within and
+nearly comes outside to this white porch of the moon.
+
+I like to light my candle and watch its warm rays mix with the
+blue-white beams from without. There would have been a proper employment
+for a wizard: to diffuse varying insubstantialities, such as these, and
+to look within them, as within a pool--a pool free of its basin and
+enjoying the air. Yes, they were an unimaginative race, wizards. When
+will the era of white art come, with æsthetic witches and wizards who
+know our modern magics of colour and form and perception as a mere basis
+for their sorceries? Instead of pottering with thick, slab gruel and
+mediæval newts' eyes, think what witches they will be! Sometimes I think
+that they are already arriving. The New Lady told me the most delightful
+thing about a Thought of hers that she saw ... but it was such an
+elusive thing to tell and so much of it I had to guess, because words
+have not yet caught up with fancies, that it is hard to write down.
+Besides, perhaps you know. And if you did not know, you would skip this
+part anyway. So I merely mention that _she_ mentioned the coming alive
+of a thought of hers which helped her spirit to grow, quite without her
+will. Very likely you understand other wizardries. An excellent place to
+think them out must be the line where candle rays meet moonbeams, but
+there is no such discoverable line, just as there is no discoverable
+line between the seeing and the knowing, where the Custodian dwells....
+By all of which I am merely showing you what the moon can do to one's
+head and that it is no great wonder that one cannot sleep.
+
+"Ain't the moon kind of like a big, shinin' brain," Calliope said once,
+"an' moonlight nights it gets in your head and thinks for you."
+
+So last night when I went in my room I did not try to sleep; nor did I
+even light my candle. I went straight to a window and opened it--the one
+without a screen. I would not live in a house that did not have certain
+windows which one could open to let in the moon, or the night, or the
+living out-of-doors, with no screens to thwart their impulse. Suppose
+that sometime Diana--well, suppose what you will that is sensible, no
+moon can shine through a screen. Really, it cannot do its best through
+even an open window. And this was why I gave up trying to make it do so
+and went downstairs again--which is the earthly and rational of floating
+out into that utter beauty as I wanted to float.
+
+Of going out into such a night I would like to write for a long time, as
+I would like to keep on breathing lilies-of-the-valley and never have
+done. I think, though, that "into" such a night is not the word; to go
+out _upon_ the night is the essential experience. For, like a June day,
+a moonlit night of itself will not let us inside. We must know some
+other way of entrance. And I suspect that some of us never quite find
+the way--I wonder if we are missed?
+
+I stepped round the house to the open ocean of light that broke on soft
+shores of leaf and line, solemnizing, magnifying. It was like a glimpse
+into something which, afterward and afterward, is going to be. The
+definiteness of its premonitory message was startling. As when on seeing
+once that something had happened on my birthday, 1500, I felt as if I
+had heard from a kind of twin-time, so now I understood that this night
+was the birthday of far-off, immortal moments of my own, yet to be lived
+... so friendly near we are to the immeasurable kindred.
+
+And there, from the shadow of the flowering currant bush, which just now
+is out of flower and fallen in meditative quiet--a man arose. My sharp
+fear, as savage a thing as if the world were ten thousand years younger,
+or as if I were a ptarmigan and he a cougar--was only momentary. For the
+cougar began to apologize and I recognized him.
+
+"Why," I said, "Peter."
+
+"Yes'm," said he, "I couldn't help being here--for a little while."
+
+"Neither could I, Peter," I told him.
+
+These were remarkable admissions of ours, for a large part of evening in
+the village is an uninhabitable part of day and, no matter in what
+splendour of sky it comes, is a thing to be shut outside experience. If
+we relate being wakened by something that goes bang, we begin it, "In
+the middle of the night, about twelve o'clock;" and, "They have a light
+in their house 'most every night till midnight," is a bit of sharp
+criticism not lightly to be lived down. But now it was as if Peter were
+a part of the time itself, and outlaw too, if the evening was outlaw.
+"I'm glad I saw you," Peter said--as if we were here met by chance in
+the usual manner. "I wanted to see you and tell you: I'm going away--to
+be gone right along."
+
+"Why," I said again, "Peter!"
+
+"You'd go too," he said simply.
+
+"I should want to go," I told him, "but I doubt if I would go. Where are
+you going?"
+
+"They want to put in a cannery at Marl. It'd be a branch. I'd run it
+myself."
+
+I did not miss the implication of the conditional mood. And _Marl_. What
+wonderful names they give to some of the towns of this world. That word
+makes a picture all of white cornices and white wings of buildings and
+bright façades. I dare say from the railroad track the real town of Marl
+shows an unpainted livery barn and a blue barber shop, but the name
+sounds like the name of a chapter of travel, beginning: To-day we drove
+to Marl to see the queen. Or the cataract. Or the porch of the morning.
+
+"Why are you going, Peter?" I drove in the peg for him.
+
+"I guess you know," he said. "It's all Miggy with me."
+
+I knew that he wanted before all else to tell somebody, to talk to
+somebody, to have somebody know.
+
+"Tell me, Peter," I said.
+
+And now Peter told me how things were with him. If I should repeat what
+he said you would be scornful, for it was so little. It was broken and
+commonplace and set with repetition. It was halting and unfinished, like
+the unformed writing of a boy. But in his words I felt the movings of
+life and destiny and death more than I feel them when I think about the
+rushing of the stars. He loved her, and for him the world became a
+transparent plane wherein his soul moved as simply as his body. Here was
+not only a boy longing for a girl. Here was not only a man, instinct
+with the eager hope of establishing a home. Here was something not
+unlike this very moon-washed area won from the illimitable void, this
+area where we stood and spoke together, this little spot which alone was
+to us articulate with form and line and night sounds. So Peter,
+stumbling over his confession of love for Miggy, was like the word
+uttered by destiny to explicate its principle. It mattered not at all
+what the night said or what Peter said. Both were celestial.
+
+These moments when the soul presses close to its windows are to be
+understood as many another hint at the cosmic--Dawn, May, the firmament,
+radio-activity, theistic evolution, a thousand manifestations of the
+supernal. In this cry of enduring spirit it was as if Peter had some
+intimacy with all that has no boundaries. I hardly heard his stumbling
+words. I listened to him down some long avenue of hearths whose
+twinkling lights were like a corridor of stars.
+
+And all this bright business was to be set at naught because Miggy would
+have none of it.
+
+"She seems to like me," Peter said miserably, "but I guess she'd like me
+just as well if I wasn't me. And if I was right down somebody else, I
+guess she'd like me a good deal better. She--don't like my hands--nor
+the way my hair sticks up at the back. She thinks of all such things. I
+wouldn't care if she said all her words crooked. I'd know what she
+meant."
+
+I knew the difference. To him she was Miggy. To her he was an
+individual. He had never in her eyes graduated from being a person to
+being himself.
+
+"Calliope says," I told him, "that she likes almond extract better than
+any other kind, but that she hardly ever gets a bottle of almond with
+which she does not find fault. She says it's the same way with people
+one loves."
+
+Peter smiled--he is devoted to Calliope, who alone in the village has
+been friendly with his father. _Friendly._ The rest of the village has
+only been kind.
+
+"Well," he tried to put it, "but Miggy never seems to be thinking of me
+as _me_, only when she's finding fault with me. If she'd only think
+about me, even a little, the way I think about her. If she'd only miss
+me or want me or wonder how the house would seem if we were married. But
+she don't care--she don't care."
+
+"She says, you know," I ventured, "that she can't ask you to support
+Little Child too."
+
+"Can't she see," he cried, "that the little thing only makes me love her
+more? Don't she know how I felt the other night--when she let me help
+her that way? She must know. It's just an excuse--"
+
+He broke off and his hands dropped.
+
+"Then there's her other reason," he said, "I guess you know that. I
+can't blame her for it. But even with that, it kind of seems as if,--if
+she loved me--"
+
+"Yes," I said, "Peter, it does seem so."
+
+And yet in my heart I am certain that the reason is not at all that
+Miggy cannot love him--I remember the woman-softening of her face that
+forenoon when she found the spirit of the old romances in the village. I
+am not even certain that the reason is that she does not love Peter
+now--I remember how tender and feminine she was the other night with
+Peter and Little Child. I think it is only that the cheap cynicism of
+the village--which nobody means even when it is said!--has taught her
+badly; and that Life has not yet touched her hand, has not commanded
+"Look at me," has not bidden her follow with us all.
+
+I looked into the bright bowl of the night which is alternately with one
+and against one in one's mood of emprise; the bright bowl of the night
+inverted as if some mighty genii were shaking the stars about like
+tea-leaves to fortune the future. What a pastime _that_ for a wizard!
+
+"Oh, Peter," I said, "_if_ one were a wizard!"
+
+"I didn't understand," said Peter.
+
+"How pleasant it would be to make folk love folk," I put it.
+
+He understood that. "Wouldn't it, though?" he assented wistfully. So
+does everybody understand. Wouldn't it, though! Oh, _don't you wish you
+could_?
+
+In the silence which fell I kept on looking at those starry tea-leaves
+until I protest that a thought awoke in my mind as if it wanted to be
+somebody. Be Somebody. It was as if it came alive, quite without my
+will, so that almost I could see it. It was a friend conferring in my
+head. Perhaps it was the Custodian herself, come outside to that white
+porch of the moon.
+
+"Peter," I said, "I think I'm going to tell you a story."
+
+For I longed to make him patient with Miggy, as men, who understand
+these things first, are not always patient with women, who often and
+often understand too late.
+
+He listened to the story as I am setting it down here--the story of the
+New Village. But in it I could say nothing of how, besides by these
+things celestial, cosmic, I was touched by the simple, human entreaty of
+the big, baffled man and that about his hands and the way his hair
+sticks up at the back.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+THE NEW VILLAGE
+
+
+Once upon a time there was a village which might have been called
+The-Way-Certain-Folk-Want-It-Now. That, however, was not its name--it
+had a proper, map-sounding name. And there every one went to and fro
+with a fervour and nimbleness which proved him to be skilfully intent
+upon his own welfare.
+
+The village had simple buildings and white walls, lanes and flowering
+things and the flow of pure air. But the strange thing about the town
+was that there each inhabitant lived alone. Every house had but one
+inmate and he well content. He liked everything that he owned and his
+taste was all-sufficient and he took his pleasure in his own walls and
+loved best his own ways. The day was spent in lonely selling or lonely
+buying, each man pitted against all others, and advantage and
+disadvantage were never equal, but yet the transactions were dreary,
+lacking the picturesqueness of unlicensed spoliation. The only greeting
+which folk exchanged in passing was, "Sir, what do you do for
+yourself?" There were no assemblings of the people. The town kept itself
+alive by accretion from without. When one died another appeared and took
+his place gladly, and also others arrived, like precept added to precept
+and not like a true flowering. There were no children. And the village
+common was overgrown and breast-high with weeds. When the day was done
+every one retired to his own garden and saw his flowers blossoming for
+him and answering to the stars which came and stood over his head. There
+was in the town an epidemic of the intensive, only the people thought of
+it as the normal, for frequently epidemics are so regarded.
+
+In one soul the contagion did not prevail. The soul was the lad Matthew,
+whose body lived on the town's only hill. When others sat at night in
+their gardens Matthew was wont to go up an airy path which he had made
+to the upper spaces and there wander conjecturing about being alive. For
+this was a detail which he never could take wholly for granted, in the
+manner in which he had become wonted to door-mats, napkin-rings,
+oatmeal, and mirrors. Therefore he took his thought some way nearer to
+the stars, and there he found so much beauty that he longed to fashion
+it to something, to create of it anew. And as he opened his heart he
+began to understand that there is some one of whom he was the
+offspring. As he was companioned by this idea, more and more he longed
+for things to come nearer. Once, in his walking a hurrying bird brushed
+his face, grew confused, fluttered at his breast, and as he would have
+closed it in his hands he found that the bird was gone and his hands
+were empty, but beneath them his own heart fluttered and throbbed like a
+thing apart.
+
+One night, so great was the abstraction of the boy, that instead of
+taking the upper path he fared down into the town. It was a curious way
+to do--to go walking in the town as if the thing were common property,
+but then the walls were very high and the gates were fast closed and
+bound round with creeping things, which grow very quickly. Matthew
+longed to enter these gardens, and he wondered who lived in the houses
+and what might be in their hearts.
+
+Amazingly, at the turn of a white wall, a gate was opened and she who
+had opened it leaned into the night as if she were looking for
+something. There was a fluttering in the breast of Matthew so that he
+looked down to see if the bird had come back. But no bird was there. And
+it smote him that the lady's beauty, and surely her goodness, were great
+enough so that of them something might be created, as he would fain have
+created marvels from the sky.
+
+"I would like to make your beauty into something other," he said to
+her. "I cannot think whether this would be a song or a picture or a
+vision."
+
+She looked at him with as much pleasure as if he had been an idea of her
+own.
+
+"Tell me about my beauty," she bade him. "What thing is that?"
+
+"Nay, that will take some while," Matthew said. "If I do that, I must
+come in your garden."
+
+Now, such a thing had never happened in the town. And as this seemed why
+it never happened, it seemed likely to go on never happening
+indefinitely. But loneliness and the longing to create and the
+conjecture about life have always been as potent as battles; and beauty
+and boredom and curiosity have had something to do with history as well.
+
+"Just this once, then," said the lady, and the gate closed upon the two.
+
+Here was a garden like Matthew's own, but indefinitely atmosphered
+other. It spoke strangely of a wonted presence, other than his own. In
+his own garden he fitted as if the space for him were niched in the air,
+and he went as a man accustomed will go without thinking. But here he
+moved free, making new niches. And whereas on his own walks and plots he
+looked with lack-lustre eye as a man looks on his own gas-jet or rain
+pipe, now Matthew looked on all that he saw as on strange flame and
+sweet waters. And it was not the shrubs and flowers which most
+delighted him, but it was rather on a garden bench the lady's hat and
+gloves and scissors.
+
+"How pleasing!" said he, and stopped before them.
+
+"Do you find them so?" asked the lady.
+
+And when he told her about her beauty, which was more difficult to do
+than he had imagined and took a longer time, she said:--
+
+"There can be no other man in the world who would speak as you speak."
+
+On which he swore that there was no man who would not speak so, and
+likewise that no man could mean one-half what he himself meant. And he
+looked long at her house.
+
+"In those rooms," he said, "you go about. I wish that I could go about
+there."
+
+But that frightened her a little.
+
+"In there," he said, "are the lamps you light, the plates you use, the
+brush that smooths your hair. How strange that is."
+
+"Does it seem strange?" she asked.
+
+"Sometime I will go there," said he, and with that he thought that the
+bird once more was fluttering at his breast. And again there was no
+bird.
+
+When the time was come that he must leave her, this seemed the most
+valiant thing to do that ever he had done. It was inconceivable to
+accept that though now she was with him, breathing, sentient, yet in
+another moment he would be out alone in the empty night. Alone. For the
+first time the word became a sinister thing. It meant to be where she
+was not.
+
+"How is this to go on," he said, "I living where you do not live?"
+
+But she said, "Such things have never been any other way," and closed
+the gate upon him.
+
+It is a mighty thing when one who has always lived alone abruptly finds
+himself to have a double sense. Here is his little box of ideas, neatly
+classified, ready for reference, which have always methodically bobbed
+out of their own will the moment they were mentioned. Here are his own
+varieties of impression ready to be laid like a pattern upon whatever
+presents itself to be cut out. Here are his tastes, his sentiments, his
+beliefs, his longings, all selected and labelled and established. And
+abruptly ideas and impressions and tastes are thrown into rapt disorder
+while he wonders what this other being would think, and his sentiment
+glows like a lamp, his belief embraces the world, his longing becomes
+only that the other being's longing be cast in counterpart. When he
+walks abroad, the other's step accompanies him, a little back, and
+invisible, but as authentic as his own. When he thinks, his thought,
+without his will, would share itself. All this is a new way of
+consciousness. All this makes two universes where one universe had
+previously been competent to support life.
+
+Back on his hill Matthew went through his house as if he were seeing it
+for the first time. There was the garden that he had planted, and she
+was not walking there. There was his window, and she was not looking
+from it; his table, and she was not sitting beside it; his book which he
+could not read for wondering if she had read. All the tools of his home,
+what could they not become if she touched them? The homely tasks of the
+cupboard, what joy if she shared them? But what to do? He thought that
+it might be something if they exchanged houses, so that he could be
+where she had been, could use what she had used, could think of her in
+her setting. But yet this did not wholly delight him, either.
+
+And now his house stifled him, so that he rushed out upon that airy path
+of his that he had made to reach the upper spaces, and he fled along,
+learning about being alive. Into the night he went, farther than ever he
+had gone before, till the stars looked nearer to him than houses
+commonly look, and things to think about seemed there waiting for him.
+
+So it adventured that he came abruptly upon the New Village. It lay upon
+the air as lightly as if strong, fair hands were uniting to bear it up,
+and it was not far from the stars and the clear places. Before he
+understood its nearness, the night was, so to say, endued with this
+village, and he entered upon its lanes as upon light.
+
+This was a town no larger than his own and no more fortuned of Nature.
+Here were buildings not too unlike, and white walls and flowering things
+and the flow of pure air. But here was also the touch of bells. And he
+saw that every one went to and fro in a manner of quiet purpose that was
+like a garment.
+
+"Sir, what do you do for yourself?" he asked courteously of one who was
+passing.
+
+The citizen gave him greeting.
+
+"I make bread for my family," said he, "and, it may be, a dream or two."
+
+Matthew tried hard to perceive, and could make nothing of this.
+
+"Your family," he said, "what thing is that?"
+
+The citizen looked at him narrowly.
+
+"I see that you rebuke me," said he, gently; "but I, too, labor for the
+community, so that the day shall become a better day."
+
+"Community," said Matthew. "Now I know not at all what that may be,
+either."
+
+Then the man understood that here was one who would learn about these
+things, and in the New Village such a task is sacred and to be assumed
+on the moment by any to whom the opportunity presents. So the man took
+Matthew with him.
+
+"Come," he said, "this is the day when we meet together."
+
+"Together," said Matthew, and without knowing why he liked what he felt
+when he said that.
+
+They went first to the market-place, trodden of many feet, and about it
+a fair green common planted in gracious lines. Here Matthew found men in
+shops that were built simply and like one another in fashion, but with
+pleasant devices of difference, and he found many selling together and
+many buying, and no one was being robbed.
+
+"How can these things be?" he asked. "Here every man stands with the
+others."
+
+"Inside of all things," the citizen answered, "you will find that it is
+so written."
+
+On the common many were assembled to name certain projects and purposes:
+the following of paths to still clearer spaces, the nurturing of certain
+people, ways of cleanliness, purity of water, of milk, wide places for
+play, the fashioning of labour so that the shrines within be not
+foregone, the freeing of fountains, the planting of green things.
+
+"Why will all this be?" asked Matthew. "For these things a man does in
+his own garden or for his own house, and no other interferes."
+
+"Nay, but look deep within all things, Friend," the citizen said, "and
+you will never find it written so."
+
+"Friend," repeated Matthew, "_friend_...."
+
+Then the citizen went to his own house, and Matthew with him. The wall
+was no wall, but a hedge, and the garden was very beautiful. And lo,
+when they went in, there came tumbling along the path little beings made
+in the image of the citizen himself. And with them a woman of exceeding
+beauty and power, which the little ones also bore. As if the citizen had
+chosen her beauty and power to make them into something other.
+
+It was as it had been when the bird was fluttering and beating at the
+boy's breast, but he did not even heed.
+
+"Tell me!" he cried. "These--do they live here with you? Are they
+yours?"
+
+"We are one another's," said the citizen.
+
+Matthew sat among them, and to pleasure him they did many sweet tasks.
+They brought him to eat and drink in the garden. The woman gave quiet
+answers that had in them something living, and alive, too, some while
+after she had spoken. ("So _she_ could answer," Matthew thought, "and
+better, too, than that.") And the children brought him a shell, a pretty
+stone, a broken watch, and a little woolly lamb on three wheels, and the
+fourth wheel missing. The lamb had a sound to make by squeezing, and
+this sound Matthew made a great many times, and every time the children
+laughed. And when they did that Matthew could think of nothing to say
+that seemed a thing to be said, but he was inscrutably elated, and did
+the trick again.
+
+And when he rose to take his leave:--
+
+"Is it for them that you make bread and a dream or two?" he asked.
+
+He knew that he should always like to remember the citizen's smile as he
+answered.
+
+They stood at the opening of the hedge and folk were going by.
+
+"Are they not jealous of you?" Matthew asked.
+
+"They have families and bread and dreams of their own," said the
+citizen. "Every house is filled with them."
+
+Matthew looked breathlessly along the street of the New Village, and he
+saw men, as they went, giving one another greeting: "Friend, is much
+accomplished?" or, "Peace to you, Friend." And they talked together, and
+entered gardens where were those who came to meet them or who waited
+within. They were a fine company, moving as to some secret way of being,
+and as if they had all looked deep within to see how it is written. And
+as he watched, something in Matthew would have cried out that he, too,
+was offspring of their Father, that for all this had he too been
+created, and that for this would he live, joying and passioning and
+toiling in the common destiny. But when he spoke, all that he could say
+was:--
+
+"Every man, then, may sit down now with a lamb with three wheels and the
+fourth wheel missing...."
+
+On which he ceased for very shame. But the citizen understood and smiled
+once more, and said to him: "Come you here again, Brother."
+
+With that word Matthew was off, down from the clear upper spaces, to
+where, lonely on its hill, his own house stood among its lonely
+neighbours. And Matthew strode shouting down the deserted streets and
+calling at every gate; and, it being now day, every one came forth to
+his lonely toil.
+
+Matthew went and stood on the common where the weeds were high, and so
+amazed were the folk that they came about him, each suspecting the other
+of secret connivance in this strange business. For nothing had ever been
+done so.
+
+"Men and brothers," cried Matthew, "it is not so that it was meant. I
+pray you look deep within, and see how the meaning was written. Is it
+that you should live, each pitted against another, wounding the other,
+advantaging himself? Join now each his hand with that of a neighbour.
+_His neighbour._ Make the thing of which, it seems, the world is made;
+a family. Let the thing come alive which is greater than the family: the
+community. Oh, my comrades, let us work together for the coming of the
+kingdom of God."
+
+In the murmur that rose were the words which have been spoken since time
+began:--
+
+"It is not so that it was done in the old time...."
+
+"It is not seemly that we change...."
+
+"If every one did this ... but we cannot do it alone."
+
+"Have you thought what will become of our business?"
+
+And again and yet again: "It is not so that it was done in the old
+time."
+
+And when the most would have none of it, Matthew made his way sadly
+through the throng--of whom were many who smiled (kindly!)--to the edge
+of the common, where stood a woman, trembling.
+
+"Come," he said.
+
+She went with him, and she with many little frightened breaths, but he
+had no pity, for he read deep within and saw that it was written that
+she wanted none. When they reached her own house, she would have
+entered.
+
+"Go we in here," she besought him, "I will show you the rooms where I go
+about and the lamps that I light."
+
+"We are past all that now," said Matthew, gently, "I will not go on
+living where you do not live."
+
+He took her to his own house, through the garden that he had planted. He
+made her look from his window, sit by his table, open his books; and he
+bade her to a little task at the cupboard and laughed for joy that she
+performed it.
+
+"Oh, come away," he cried. "And now we will go quickly to the New
+Village, that one which I have found or another, where men know all this
+happiness and more."
+
+But she stood there by Matthew's cupboard and shook her head.
+
+"No," she said gravely, "here we will stay, you and I, in your house.
+Here we will live--and it may be there is a handful of others who
+understand. And here we will do what we can."
+
+"But I must show you," Matthew cried, "the way the others live--the
+things they strive for: the following of paths to clearer spaces, the
+freeing of shrines."
+
+"All that," she said, "we will do here."
+
+"But," he urged, "you must see how else they do--the shell, the pretty
+stone, the watch, the woolly lamb on three wheels and one wheel
+missing...."
+
+"All that," she said, "is in my heart."
+
+Matthew looked in her face and marvelled, for he saw that beside her
+beauty there was her power, and to that he bowed himself as to a far
+voice. And again it was as when the bird was at his breast, but now he
+knew what this would be.
+
+So they live there in Matthew's house. And a handful besides understand
+and toil for the fairer order. And this will come; and then that New
+Village, in the clear upper spaces, will hang just above every
+village--nay, will come down to clothe it like a garment.
+
+
+When I had done,
+
+"Peter," I said--I nearly called him Matthew!--"these are the things
+that Miggy does not understand. And that she will understand."
+
+He knew. He said nothing; but he knew how it is written.
+
+"Peter," I said, "I suppose Miggy will never have been to your house?"
+
+I knew that she could not have been there.
+
+"Some day soon," I said--"before you go away--ask us to come there. I
+should like her to sit by your table and look from your window."
+
+For how can one be sure that divine non-interference is always divine?
+
+Peter drew his breath long.
+
+"Would you?" he said; "would you? So many times I've thought maybe that
+would make her think of me as if I _was_ me."
+
+Yes, that might help. If only Miggy knew how to shake hands as Elfa
+shook hands with Nicholas Moor, that might help, too. How did it begin,
+this pride of individualism in a race which does not know its own
+destiny save as the great relationships, human and divine, can reveal
+that destiny? But Peter knows! And the hope of the world is that so many
+do know.
+
+Since he said his grateful good night and rushed away, I have been
+trying to readjust my impression of Peter. For I can no longer think of
+him in connection with Miggy and the cannery and my neighbour's lawn and
+the village. Now he is a figure ranging the ample intervals of a field
+fraternal to the night and to the day. Fraternal, too, to any little
+moon-washed area, won from the void, where it is easy to be in
+conference with the spirit without and within. Truly, it is as if the
+meaning of the universe were passioning for the comradeship of hearts
+that can understand.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+ADOPTION
+
+
+The big window of my sitting room is an isle of sirens on whose shore
+many of my bird neighbours are continually coming to grief. For, from
+without, the window makes a place of soft skies and seductive leaves
+where any bird might think to wing a way. And in that mirrored deep
+there is that curious atmosphere which makes In-a-looking-glass a better
+thing than the room which it reflects--an elusive sense which Little
+Child might call Isn't-any-such-placeness. I think that I might call it
+so too. And so, evidently, the birds would call it, for they are always
+trying to find there some path of flight.
+
+A morning or two ago, when I heard against the pane the soft thud of an
+eager little body, I hurried out to see lying under the window an
+oriole. It was too terrible that it should have been an oriole. For days
+I had seen him hanging here and there, back downward, on this limb and
+that, and heard his full-throated note ringing from the innermost air,
+so that the deeps of air could never again be wholly alien to me. And
+now he lay, his wings outstretched, his eyes dim, his breast hardly
+moving. I watched him, hoping for the breath to begin to flutter and
+labour. But though the great Nature was with him, herself passioning in
+all the little fibres to keep life pulsing on, yet her passion was not
+enough; and while I looked the little life went out.
+
+... I held the tiny body in my hand, and it was almost as if the
+difference between living and not living slipped through my fingers and
+was gone. If only that one within me, who watches between the seeing and
+the knowing, had been a little quicker, I might almost have
+understood....
+
+"Them little things go out like a match," said my neighbour.
+
+She was standing on the other side of the box hedge, and I caught a look
+on her face that I had seen there once or twice before, so that my heart
+had warmed to her; and now, because of that look, she fitted within the
+moment like the right word.
+
+"It don't seem like anybody could _mean_ 'em to die before their time,"
+she said. "Ain't it almost as if it happened when Everything somehow
+couldn't help it?"
+
+It was this, the tragedy of the Unfulfilled Intention, that was in my
+mind while I hollowed the little grave under the hedge. And when we had
+finished, my neighbour, who had stepped informally over the box to help
+me, looked up with a return of that fleeting expression which I had
+noted.
+
+"I guess we've found one now for sure," she said.
+
+"Found one?" I puzzled.
+
+"I thought you knew," she told me. "I thought everybody knew--we've been
+looking for one so long. For a baby."
+
+She never had told me and no one had told me, but I loved her for
+thinking that all the world knew. There are abroad a multitude of these
+sweet suspicions as well as the sad misgivings of the hunted. She had
+simply let me know, that early morning in the garden, her sorrow that
+there was "no little thing runnin' round." And now she told me for how
+long they had been trying to find one to adopt, consciously serving no
+social need, but simply hungering for a child whom they could "take to."
+It was a story of fruitless visits to the homes in the city, the news
+sent of this little waif or that, all proving too old or of too sad an
+inheritance. To me it would seem that the more tragic the inheritance
+the more poignantly sounds the cry for foster-folk. And this may be
+extreme, I know, but virtue, I find, does not lie exclusively in the
+mean, either. It lies partly in one's taste in extremes. However, this
+special extreme I find not generally believed in as I believe in it; and
+my neighbour, not sharing it, had waited on with empty arms.
+
+And now, after all the long hoping, she had found a baby--a baby who
+filled all the requirements and more. First of all, he was a boy;
+second, he was of healthful Scotch parentage; third, he was six weeks
+old; and, fondest I could see in my neighbour's heart, he was good to
+look at. When she told me this she produced, from beneath her apron, a
+broken picture post-card. The baby was lying on a white blanket spread
+on the grass, and he was looking up with the intentness of some little
+soul not yet embodied; or as if, having been born, some shadow-thing,
+left over from his source of shadows, yet detained his attention.
+"William," it said beneath the picture.
+
+"But I shall call him Kenneth," my neighbour said; "I've always meant
+to. I don't want he should be called after his father, being he isn't
+ours, you might say. But he is ours," she added in a kind of challenge.
+"_He's_ going after him to-morrow to the city"--and now "he" meant her
+husband, in that fine habit of use by these husbands and wives of the
+two third persons singular to mean only each other, in a splendid,
+ultimate, inevitable sense, authentic as the "we" of a sovereign, no
+more to be mistaken. "I'd go too," she added, "but we're adopting the
+baby with the egg money--we've saved it for years for when the time
+come. And one fare to the city and back is a lot of eggs. I thought I'd
+rather wait for him here and have the ticket money to spend on the
+clothes."
+
+She was on her way, I thought I guessed, to carry her good news to our
+friends in the village, for she bore that same air which I have noted,
+of being impermanent and subject to flight. And as she left me she
+turned to give me one of those rare compliments which are priceless.
+
+"You come over this afternoon," she said, "and I'll show you what little
+things I've made."
+
+I remember another compliment. It was when, in town, a charming little
+woman, a woman all of physical curves and mental tangents, had been
+telling a group of us about a gay day in a four-in-hand. She had not
+looked at me because for that sort of woman, as well as for others, I
+lack all that which would make them take account of my presence; but
+when in the four-in-hand she came to some mention of the road where the
+accident had nearly occurred ("Oh, it was a beautiful road," she said,
+"the river on one side, and the highlands, and a whole _mob_ of trees,")
+she turned straight upon me through her description as consistently as
+she had neglected me when she described the elbow-bits of the leaders
+and the boots of the woman on the box-seat. It may have been a chance,
+but I have always hugged it to me.
+
+My neighbour's house is small, and her little upstairs rooms are the
+half-story with sloping ceilings and windows which extend from the floor
+to the top of one's head. It gives me a curious sense of
+over-familiarity with a window to be as tall as it is. I feel that I
+have it at advantage and that I am using it with undue intimacy. When I
+was a little girl I used to creep under the dining-room table and sit
+there, looking up, transfixed at the difference. A new angle of material
+vision, the sight of the other side of the shield, always gives me this
+pause. But whereas this other aspect of things used to be a delight,
+now, in life, I shrink a little from availing myself of certain
+revelations. I have a great wish to know things, but I would know them
+otherwise than by looking at their linings. I think that even a window
+should be sanctioned in its reticences.
+
+Before a black walnut commode my neighbour knelt that afternoon, and I
+found that it was filled with the things which she had made for the
+baby, when they should find him. These she showed to me--they were
+simple and none too fine, and she had made them on her sewing-machine in
+the intervals of her busy life. For three years she had wrought at them,
+buying them from the egg money. I wondered if this secret pastime of
+garment-making might not account for my impression of her that she must
+always be off to engage in something other. Perhaps it was this
+occupation, always calling her, which would not let her appear fixed at
+garden-watering or festival. I think that it may be so of any who are
+"pressed in the spirit" to serve, to witness to any truth: that is their
+vocation and every other is an avocation, a calling away from the real
+business of life. For this reason it is my habit to think of the social
+workers in any division of the service, family or town or state or
+church, as Vocationists. It is they who are following the one great
+occupation. The rest of us are avocationists. In my neighbour I
+perceived one of the great comrade company of the Vocationists,
+unconscious of her banner, but because of some sweet, secret piping,
+following, following....
+
+"I've always thought I'd get to do a little embroidering on a yoke or
+two," she said, "but so far I couldn't. Anyway I thought I could do the
+plain part and running the machine before he came. The other I could sit
+by the crib and do. Embroidery seems sort o' baby-watchin' work, don't
+it?"
+
+When I left her I walked across the lawns to my home in a sense of
+security and peace. With increasing thousands consciously striving and
+passioning to help, and thousands helping because of the unconscious
+spirit within them, are there not many windows in the walls?
+
+"He" was to go by the Accommodation early next morning to bring home the
+baby. Therefore when, just before seven o'clock, I observed my
+neighbour's husband leave his home and join Peter at his gate as usual,
+I went at once to see if something was amiss.
+
+My neighbour was having breakfast as her custom was "after the men-folks
+were out of the way." At all events she was pretending to eat. I saw in
+her eyes that something was troubling her, but she greeted me
+cheerfully. I sat by the sewing-machine while she went on with her
+pretence at breakfast.
+
+"The little thing's sick," she said. "Last night we got the despatch.
+'Baby in hospital for day or two. Will advise often,' it had in it. I'm
+glad they put that in. I'll feel better to know they'll get good
+advice."
+
+I sat with her for a long time, regardless of my work or that Miggy was
+waiting for me. I was struck by the charm of matter-of-fact hopefulness
+in my neighbour, not the deliberate forcing of hope, but the simple
+expectation that nothing tragic would occur. But for all that she ate no
+breakfast, and I knew well the faint, quite physical sickness that she
+must have endured since the message came.
+
+"I'm going to get his basket ready to-day," she said. "I never did that,
+two reasons. One was, it seemed sort of taking too much for granted,
+like heating your spider before the meat wagon drives up. The other
+reason was I needed the basket for the clothes."
+
+I stayed with her while she made ready the clothes-basket, lining it
+with an old muslin curtain, filling it with pillows, covering it with
+the afghan from the parlour couch. Then, in a shoe box edged with the
+curtain's broad ruffle, she put an array of little things: the brush
+from the spare-room bureau, the pincushion from her own work-basket, a
+sachet bag that had come with a last year's Christmas gift, a cake of
+"nice soap" which she had kept for years and never unwrapped because it
+was so expensive. And then she added a little glass-stoppered bottle of
+white pills.
+
+"I don't know what they're for," she said. "I found them when I
+housecleaned, and there was so many of 'em I hated to throw 'em away. Of
+course I'll never use 'em, but they look sort of nice in there--so white
+and a glass cork--don't you think so?"
+
+She walked with me across the lawn and stood brooding, one hand across
+her mouth, looking down at the disturbance--so slight!--in the grass
+where we had laid the bird. And on her face was the look which, each
+time that I saw it there, drew me nearer to her.
+
+"'Seems as if I'd ought to be there to the hospital," she said, "doing
+what I can. Do you s'pose they'll take good care of him? I guess they
+know more about it than I do. But if I could get hold of him in my arms
+it seems as if I could help 'em."
+
+I said what I could, and she went away to her house. And for the first
+time since I had known her she did not seem put upon to be back at some
+employment. These times of unwonted idleness are terrible to witness. I
+remember a farmer whom I once saw in the afternoon, dressed in his best,
+waiting in the kitchen for the hour of his daughter's wedding, and I
+wondered that the great hands did not work of their own will. The lost
+aspect of certain men on holidays, the awful inactivity of the day of a
+funeral, the sad idleness of old age, all these are very near to the
+tragedy of negation. Work, the positive, the normal, the joyous, is like
+an added way of being. I thought that I would never again marvel at my
+neighbour for being always on the edge of flight to some pressing
+occupation. Why should she not be so?--with all that there is to be
+done. Whether we rush about, or conceal the need and rush secretly, is a
+detail of our breeding; the need is to get things done, to become by
+doing. And while for myself I would prefer the accomplishment of not
+seeming to hurry, as another is accomplished at the harp, yet I own that
+I would cheerfully forego the pretty grace rather than find myself
+without some slight degree of the robust proficiency of getting things
+done.
+
+"If you're born a picture in a book," Calliope once said, "it's all very
+well to set still on the page an' hold your hands. But if you're born
+anyways human at all, stick up your head an' start out for somewhere."
+
+My neighbour rarely comes to my house. And therefore, though she is to
+me so familiar a figure in her garden, when next morning I found her
+awaiting me in my sitting room, she seemed strange to me. Perhaps, too,
+she was really strange to me that day.
+
+"My baby died," she said.
+
+She stood there looking at me, and I knew that what she said was true,
+but it seemed to me for a moment that I could not have it so.
+
+"He died yesterday in the evening," she told me. "I just heard this
+morning, when the telegraph office opened. I dressed myself to go after
+him, but _he's_ gone."
+
+"To go after him?" I repeated.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"He was in the charity part. I was afraid they'd bury him in the
+potter's field and they wouldn't mark--it, and that I couldn't never
+tell which one it was. So I want to get him and have him buried here.
+_He_ didn't want I should go--he thought it'd be too much for me. But I
+was bound to, so he says he'd go. They'd ought to get here on the Five
+o'Clock this afternoon. Oh, if I'd went yesterday, do you think it would
+'a' been any different?"
+
+There I could comfort her. I did not think it would have been different.
+But when I tried to tell her how much better it was this way than that
+the baby should first have come to her and then have sickened, she would
+have none of it.
+
+"I've never held him once," she said. "Do you s'pose anything could be
+worse than that? I'd rather have got hold of him once, no matter what."
+
+It touched me unutterably, the grief of this mother who was no mother. I
+had no knowledge what to say to her. But I think that what she wanted
+most was companionship. She went to one and another and another of our
+neighbours to whom she had shown so happily the broken post-card
+picture, and to them in the same way she took the news:--
+
+"My baby died."
+
+And I was amazed to find how in this little time, the tentacles of her
+heart having fastened and clung, she had made for herself, without ever
+having seen the child, little things to tell about him: His eyes were so
+bright; the sun was shining and the picture was made out-of-doors, yet
+the eyes were opened wide. They were blue eyes--had she told us? Had we
+noticed the hands in the picture? And the head was a beautiful shape....
+All this seemed to me marvellous. For I saw that no woman ever mourns
+for any child dumbly, as a bird mourns a fledgling, but even if she
+never sees it, she will yet contrive some little tender ways to give it
+personality and to cherish it.
+
+They did their best to comfort her, the women of the village. But many
+of them had lost little children of their own, and these women could not
+regard her loss as at all akin to theirs. I think that this my neighbour
+felt; and perhaps she dimly felt that to me her grief, hardly less than
+theirs, brimmed with the tragic disaster of the unfulfilled and bore,
+besides, its own peculiar bitterness. In any case I was of those who,
+that afternoon, went out to the cemetery to await the coming of my
+neighbour and "him" and their little burden. Calliope was there, and
+Mis' Amanda Toplady and Miggy; and when it was time to go Little Child
+was with me, so she went too. For I am not of those who keep from
+children familiarity with death. Familiarity with the ways of death I
+would spare them, but not the basic things, primal as day.
+
+"I don't want to give a real funeral," my neighbour had said. "I just
+want the few that I tell to happen out there to the cemetery, along
+about five. And then we'll come with him. It seems as if it'll hurt
+less that way. I couldn't bear to see a whole line driving along, and
+me look back and know who it was for."
+
+The cemetery had the dignity and serenity of a meadow, a meadow still
+somewhat amazed that it had been for a while distracted from its ancient
+uses, but, after all, perceiving no permanent difference in its
+function. I am never weary of walking down these grassy streets and of
+recounting their strangenesses. As that of the headstone of David
+Bibber's wives, one stone extending across the heads of the two graves
+and at either end of the stone two Gothic peaks from whose inner slopes
+reach two marble hands, clasped midway, and,
+
+
+     SACRED TO THE WIVES OF DAVID BIBBER
+
+
+inscribed below, the wifely names not appearing in the epitaph. And that
+of Mark Sturgis who, the village said, had had the good luck to marry
+two women named Dora; so he had erected a low monument to "Dora, Beloved
+Wife of Mark Sturgis, Jr." ("But how mixin' it must be to the ghosts!"
+Calliope said.) And of the young girl of a former Friendship family of
+wealth, a girl who sleeps beneath a monument on which stands a great
+figure of a young woman in a white marble dress made with three
+flounces. ("Honest," Calliope had put it, "you can't hardly tell
+whether it's a tomb or a valentine.")
+
+But these have for me an interest less of the bizarre than of the human,
+and nothing that is human was alien to that hour.
+
+We waited for them by the new little grave, the disturbance--so
+slight!--in the earth where we would lay the stranger baby. Our hands
+were filled with garden flowers--Calliope had drawn a little hand cart
+laden with ferns and sweet-brier, and my dear Mis' Amanda Toplady had
+cut all the half-blown buds from her loved tea rose.
+
+"It seems like a little baby wasn't real dead that I hadn't helped lay
+out," said that great Mis' Amanda, trying to find her handkerchief. "Oh,
+I wish't it was alive. It seems like such a little bit of comin' alive
+to ask the Lord!"
+
+And as the afternoon shadows drew about us with fostering arms,
+
+"Out-Here knows we feel bad more than Down Town, don't it?" said Little
+Child.
+
+I have always thought very beautiful that village custom of which I have
+before spoken, which provides that the father and mother of a little
+baby who dies may take it with them in a closed carriage to the grave.
+It was so that my neighbour and her husband brought their baby to the
+cemetery from the station, with the little coffin on their knees.
+
+On the box beside the driver Peter was riding. We learned afterward
+that he had appeared at the station and had himself taken that little
+coffin from the car. "So then it didn't have to be on the truck at all,"
+my neighbour noted thankfully when she told me. I think that it must be
+this living with only a street or two between folk and the open country
+which gives these unconscious sharpenings of sensibility often,
+otherwhere, bred only by old niceties of habit.
+
+So little Kenneth was buried, who never had the name save in unreality;
+whom my neighbour had never tended; who lived for her only in dream and
+on that broken post-card and here in the hidden dust. It made her grief
+so sad a thing that her arms did not miss him; nor had he slipped from
+any usage of the day; nor was any link broken with the past; only the
+plans that had hung in air had gone out, like flames which had kindled
+nothing. Because of this she sorrowed from within some closed place at
+which her husband could only guess, who stood patiently without in his
+embarrassed concern, his clumsy anxiety to do what there was to be done,
+his wondering distress at his wife's drooping grief. But her sorrow was
+rooted in the love of women for the "little young thing, runnin' round,"
+for which she had long passioned.
+
+"Oh, God, who lived in the spirit of the little Lord Jesus, live Thou
+in this child's spirit, and it in Thee, world without end," Doctor June
+prayed. And Little Child whispered to me and then went to let fall a
+pink in the grave. "So if the flower gets to be an angel flower, then
+they can go round together," she explained.
+
+When I looked up there were in the west the first faint heraldings of
+rose. And against it stood Miggy and Peter, side by side, looking down
+this new way of each other's lives which took account of sorrow. He said
+something to her, and she nodded, and gave him her white hollyhocks to
+lay with the rest. And as they turned away together Little Child
+whispered to me, pulling herself, by my arm, to high tiptoe:--
+
+"That little child we put in the sunset," she said, nodding to the west,
+"it's there now. It's there now!"
+
+Perhaps it was that my heart was filled with the tragedy of the
+unfulfilled intention, perhaps it was that I thought that Little Child's
+whispering was true. In any case I hastened my steps, and as we passed
+out on the road I overtook Miggy and Peter.
+
+"Peter," said I, "may Miggy and I come to pay you that visit now, on the
+way back?"
+
+Miggy looked startled.
+
+"It's supper time," she objected.
+
+Who are we that we should interrupt a sunset, or a situation, or the
+stars in their courses, merely to sup? Neither Miggy nor I belong to
+those who do so. Besides, we had to pass Peter's very door. I said so,
+and all the time Peter's face was glowing.
+
+"Hurry on ahead," I bade him, "and Miggy and Little Child and I will
+come in your house to call."
+
+He looked at me gratefully, and waited for good night to my neighbour,
+and went swiftly away down the road toward the sunset.
+
+"Oh, goody grand, goody grand," Little Child went on softly, in an
+invocation of her own to some secret divinity of her pleasure. "Oh, that
+little child we put there, it's talkin' to the sky, an' I guess that
+makes sunset be!"
+
+My neighbour was looking back across the tranquil meadow which might
+have been deep with summer hay instead of mounded to its sad harvest.
+
+"I wish," she said, "I could have had his little grave in my garden,
+same as you would a bird. Still I s'pose a cemet'ry is a cemet'ry and
+had ought to be buried in. But oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to
+have him here in Friendship Village. It's better to think about, ain't
+it?"
+
+But the thing that gripped my heart was to see her, beside her husband,
+go down the road and not hurry. All that bustling impermanence was
+fallen from her. I think that now I am becoming thankful for every one
+who goes busily quickening the day with a multitude, yes, even with a
+confusion, of homely, cheerful tasks.
+
+Miggy slipped her hand within my arm.
+
+"Did you think of it?" she said. "I've been, all the time. It's most the
+same with her as it would be to me if I'd lost _her_. You know ... that
+little Margaret. I mean, if she should never be."
+
+As when one hears the note of an oriole ringing from the innermost air,
+so now it seems to me that after these things the deeps of air can never
+again be wholly alien to me.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+AT PETER'S HOUSE
+
+
+I wondered somewhat that Peter did not come out of his house to fetch
+us. He was not even about the little yard when we went up the walk,
+though he knew that we must arrive but a few moments after he did.
+Little Child ran away to pick Bouncing Bet and Sweet Clover in the long,
+rank grass of the unkept garden. And Miggy and I went and stood on the
+porch before Peter's door, and I knew what I intended.
+
+"Rap!" I said to Miggy.
+
+She looked at me in surprise--I have not often commanded her like that.
+But I wanted to see her stand at Peter's door asking for admission. And
+I think that Peter had wanted it too and that this was why he had not
+come to the gate to fetch us. I guessed it by the light on his face
+when, in the middle of Miggy's knock, he caught open the door. I like to
+remember his face as it looked at that moment, with the little twist of
+mouth and lifting of brow which gave him a peculiar sweetness and
+naïveté, curiously contradicted by the way his eyes were when they met
+Miggy's.
+
+"How long it took you," he said. "Come in. _Come in._"
+
+We went in, and I looked at Miggy. For I did not want her to step in
+that house as she would have stepped in a house that was just a house.
+Is it not wonderful how some front doors are Front Doors Plus? I do not
+know plus what--that is one of those good little in-between things which
+we know without always naming. But there are some front doors which are
+to me boards and glass and a tinkling cymbal bell; while other doors of
+no better architecture let me within dear depths of homes which are to
+houses what friends are to inhabitants. It was so that I would have had
+Miggy go within Peter's house,--not as within doors, but as within arms.
+
+We entered directly from the porch into the small parlour--the kind of
+man's parlour that makes a woman long to take it on her lap and tend it.
+There were no curtains. Between the windows was a big table filled with
+neat piles of newspapers and weeklies till there should be time to look
+them over. The shelf had a lamp, not filled, a clock, not going, and a
+pile of seed catalogues. On two walls were three calendars with big
+hollyhocks and puppies and ladies in sunbonnets. The entire inner wall
+was occupied by a map of the state--why does a man so cherish a map of
+something, hung up somewhere? On the organ was a row of blue books--what
+is it that men are always looking for in blue books? In a corner, on the
+floor, stood a shotgun. The wood stove had been "left up" all summer to
+save putting it up in the fall--this business of getting a stove on
+rollers and jacking it up and remembering where it stood so that the
+pipe will fit means, in the village, a day of annual masculine sacrifice
+to the feminine foolishness of wanting stoves down in summer. There was
+nothing disorderly about the room; but it was dressed with no sash or
+hair ribbon or coral beads, as a man dresses his little girl.
+
+"We don't use this room much," Peter said. "We sit in here sometimes in
+summer, but I think when a man sits in his parlour he always feels like
+he was being buried from it, same as they're used for."
+
+"Why--" said Miggy, and stopped. What she was going to say it was not
+important to know, but I was glad that she had been going to say it.
+Something, perhaps, about this being a very pretty room if there were
+somebody to give it a touch or two.
+
+Peter was obviously eager to be in the next room, and that, he
+explained, would have been the dining room, only he had taken it for
+his own, and they ate in the kitchen. I think that I had never heard him
+mention his father at all, and this "we" of his now was a lonelier thing
+than any lonely "I."
+
+"This is my room," he said as we entered it. "It's where I live when I'm
+not at the works. Come and let me show you."
+
+So Peter showed Miggy his room, and he showed it to me, too, though I do
+not think that he was conscious of that. It was a big room, bare of
+floor and, save for the inescapable flowery calendar, bare of walls.
+There was a shelf of books--not many, but according to Peter's nature
+sufficiently well-selected to plead for him: "Look at us. Who could love
+us and not be worth while?"--bad enough logic, in all conscience, to
+please any lover. Miggy hardly looked at the books. She so
+exasperatingly took it for granted that a man must be everything in
+general that it left hardly anything for him to be in particular. But
+Peter made her look, and he let me look too, and I supplied the comments
+and Miggy occasionally did her three little nods. The writing table
+Peter had made from a box, and by this Miggy was equally untouched. All
+men, it appeared, should be able to make writing tables from boxes. With
+the linen table cover it was a little different--this Peter's mother had
+once worked in cross-stitch for his room, and Miggy lifted an end and
+looked at it.
+
+"She took all those stitches for you!" she said. "There's one broken,"
+she showed him.
+
+"I can mend that," Peter said proudly, "I'll show you my needle kit."
+
+At this she laughed out suddenly with, "_Needle kit!_ What a real
+regular old bachelor you are, aren't you?"
+
+"I can't help that," said Peter, with "and the same cannot be said for
+you" sticking from the sentence.
+
+On the table lay the cannery account books, and one was open at a full
+page of weary little figures.
+
+"Is this where you sit nights and do your work and read?" Miggy
+demanded.
+
+"Right here," Peter told her, "every night of the year, 'most. Except
+when I come to see you."
+
+Miggy stood looking at the table and the wooden chair.
+
+"That's funny," she remarked finally, with an air of meditative
+surprise; "they know you so much better than I do, don't they?"
+
+"Well," Peter said gravely, "they haven't been thought about as much as
+you have, Miggy--that's one thing."
+
+"Thinking's nothing," said Miggy, merrily; "sometimes you get a tune in
+your head and you can't get it out."
+
+"Sit down at the table," said Peter, abruptly. "Sit down!" he repeated,
+when her look questioned him. "I want to see you there."
+
+She obeyed him, laughing a little, and quite in the woman's way of
+pretending that obedience is a choice. Peter looked at her. It is true
+that he had been doing nothing else all the while, but now that she sat
+at the table--his table--he looked more than before.
+
+"Well," he said, "well, well." As a man says when he has a present and
+has no idea what to say about it.
+
+Peter's photographs were on the wall above the table, and Peter suddenly
+leaned past Miggy and took down the picture of his mother and put it in
+her hand, without saying anything. For the first time Miggy met his
+eyes.
+
+"Your mother," she said, "why, Peter. She looked--oh, Peter, she looked
+like you!"
+
+Peter nodded. "Yes, I do look like she did," he said; "I'm always so
+glad."
+
+"She knew you when you were a little bit of a baby, Peter," Miggy
+advanced suddenly.
+
+Peter admitted it gravely. She had.
+
+"Well," said Miggy, as Peter had said it. "Well."
+
+There was a picture of Peter's father as a young man,--black,
+curly-haired, black-moustached, the cheeks slightly tinted in the
+picture, his hands laid trimly along his knees. The face was weak,
+empty, but it held that mere confidence of youth which always gives a
+special sting to the grief of unfulfilment. Over this they passed,
+saying nothing. It struck me that in the delicacy of that silence it was
+almost as if Miggy shared something with Peter. Also, it struck me
+pleasantly that Miggy's indifference to the personalities of divers
+aunts in straight bangs and long basques was slightly exaggerated,
+especially when, "I never thought about your having any aunts," she
+observed.
+
+And then Peter took down a tiny picture of the sort we call in the
+village "card size," and gave it to her.
+
+"Guess who," he said.
+
+It was a little boy of not more than five, in a straight black coat
+dress, buttoned in the front and trimmed with broad black velvet strips,
+and having a white scalloped collar and white cuffs. One hand was
+resting on the back of a camp-chair and the other held a black helmet
+cap. The shoes had double rows of buttons, and for some secret reason
+the photographer had had the child laboriously cross one foot
+negligently over the other. The fine head, light-curled, was resting in
+the horns of that ex-device that steadied one out of all semblance to
+self. But in spite of the man who had made the picture, the little boy
+was so wholly adorable that you wanted to say so.
+
+"Peter!" Miggy said, "It's _you_."
+
+I do not know how she knew. I think that I would not have known. But
+Miggy knew, and her knowing made me understand something which evidently
+she herself did not understand. For she looked at the picture and looked
+at it, a strange, surprised smile on her face. And,
+
+"Well, well, _well_," she said again. "I never thought about that
+before. I mean about you. _Then._"
+
+"Would--would you want that picture, Miggy?" Peter asked; "you can have
+it if you do."
+
+"Can I really?" said Miggy. "Well, I do want it. Goodness...."
+
+"I always kind of thought," Peter said slowly, "that when I have a son
+he'll look something like that. He might, you know."
+
+Peter was leaning beside her, elbows on the table, and Miggy looked up
+at him over the picture of the child, and made her three little nods.
+
+"Yes," she said, "you would want your little boy to look like you."
+
+"And I'd want him named Peter. It's a homely old name, but I'd want him
+to have it."
+
+"Peter isn't a homely name," said Miggy, in a manner of surprise. "Yes,
+of course you'd want him--"
+
+The sentence fell between them unfinished. And I thought that Miggy's
+face, still somewhat saddened by the little Kenneth and now tender with
+its look for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing of colour.
+But then I saw that this would be the light of the sunset on her cheeks,
+for now the West was become a glory of rose and yellow, so that it held
+captive her eyes. It is too frail a thing for me to have grasped by
+sense, but the Moment seemed to say--and could give no reason--that our
+sunset compact Miggy kept then without remembering the compact.
+
+It almost startled me when out in the unkept garden Little Child began
+to sing. We had nearly forgotten her and we could not see her, so that
+she might have been any other little child wandering in the sweet
+clover, or merely a little voice coming in with the western light:--
+
+
+     "I like to stand in this great air
+     And see the sun go down.
+     It shows me a bright veil to wear
+     And such a pretty gown.
+     Oh, I can see a playmate there
+     Far up in Splendour Town!"
+
+
+"Look here," said Peter to Miggy; and I went over to the sunset window
+and let them go on alone.
+
+He led her about the room, and she still had the little picture in her
+hand. From the bureau, with its small array of cheap brushes and boxes,
+she turned abruptly away. I think that she may have felt as I felt
+about the splash of rose on the rose-breasted grosbeak's throat--that I
+ought not to have been looking. Beyond was a little old dry-goods box
+for odds and ends, a box which must have known, with a kind of feminine
+intelligence, that it ought to be covered with cretonne. On this box
+Miggy knelt to read Peter's high school diploma, and she stopped before
+a picture of the house where he was born. "Was it there?" she asked.
+"Doesn't that seem funny?" Which manifestly it did not seem. "Is _that_
+where your violin lives?" she asked, when they came to its
+corner--surely a way of betrayal that she had thought of it as living
+somewhere else. And all the while she carried the picture in her hand,
+and the sunset glorified the room, and Little Child was singing in the
+garden.
+
+"Peter," said Miggy, "I don't believe a man who can play the violin can
+sew. Give me the needle kit. I'm going to mend the table cover--may I?"
+
+Might she! Peter, his face shining, brought out his red flannel
+needle-book--he kept it on the shelf with his shaving things!--and, his
+face shining more, sat on a creaking camp-chair and watched her.
+
+"Miggy," he said, as she caught the threads skilfully together, "I don't
+believe I've ever seen you sew. I know I never have."
+
+"This isn't sewing," Miggy said.
+
+"It's near enough like it to suit me," said Peter.
+
+He drew a breath long, and looked about him. I knew how he was seeing
+the bare room, lamp-lighted, and himself trying to work in spite of the
+longing that teased and possessed him and bade him give it up and lean
+back and think of her; or of tossing on the hard couch in the tyranny of
+living his last hour with her and of living, too, the hours that might
+never be. And here she was in this room--his room. Peter dropped his
+head on his hand and his eyes did not leave her face save to venture an
+occasional swift, ecstatic excursion to her fingers.
+
+Simply and all quietly, as Nature sends her gifts, miracles moved toward
+completion while Miggy sewed. The impulse to do for him this trifling
+service was like a signal, and when she took up the needle for him I
+think that women whose hands had long lain quiet stirred within her
+blood. As for Peter--but these little housewifely things which enlighten
+a woman merely tease a man, who already knows their import and longs for
+all sweet fragments of time to be merged in the long possession.
+
+Miggy gave the needle back to Peter and he took it--needle, red book,
+and hand.
+
+"Miggy!" he said, and the name on his lips was like another name. And it
+was as if she were in some place remote and he were calling her.
+
+She looked at him as if she knew the call. Since the world began, only
+for one reason does a man call a woman like that.
+
+"What is it you want?" she said--and her voice was very sweet and very
+tired.
+
+"I want more of _you_!" said Peter Cary.
+
+She may have tried to say something, but her voice trembled away.
+
+"I thought it would be everything--your coming here to-day," Peter said.
+"I've wanted it and wanted it. And what does it amount to? Nothing,
+except to make me wild with wanting you never to go away. I dread to
+think of your leaving me here--shutting the door and being gone. If it
+was just plain wanting you I could meet that, and beat it, like I do the
+things down to the works. But it isn't that. It's like it was something
+big--bigger than me, and outside of me, and it gets hold of me, and it's
+like it asked for you without my knowing. I can't do anything that you
+aren't some of it. It isn't fair, Miggy. I want more of you--all of
+you--all the time, Miggy, all the time...."
+
+I should have liked to see Miggy's face when she looked at Peter, whose
+eyes were giving her everything and were asking everything of her; but I
+was studying the sunset, glory upon glory, to match the glory here. And
+the singing of Little Child began again, like that of a little voice
+vagrant in the red west....
+
+
+     "Oh, I can see a playmate there,
+     Far up in Splendour Town!"
+
+
+Miggy heard her, and remembered.
+
+"Peter, Peter!" she cried, "I couldn't--I never could bring us two on
+you to support."
+
+Peter gave her hands a little shake, as if he would have shaken her. I
+think that he would have shaken her if it had been two or three thousand
+years earlier in the world's history.
+
+"You two!" he cried; "why, Miggy, when we marry do I want--or do you
+want--that it should stay just you and me? We want children. I want you
+for their mother as much as I want you for my wife."
+
+It was the voice of the paramount, compelling spirit, the sovereign
+voice of the Family, calling through the wilderness. Peter knew,--this
+fine, vital boy seeking his own happiness; he gropingly understood this
+mighty thing, and he was trying his best to serve it. And, without
+knowing that she knew, Miggy knew too ... and the seal that she knew was
+in what was in the sunset. And as far removed from these things as the
+sunset itself was all Miggy's cheap cynicism about love and all the
+triviality of her criticism of Peter.
+
+Miggy stood motionless, looking at Peter. And then, like an evil spell
+which began to work, another presence was in the room....
+
+Somewhile before I had begun to hear the sound, as a faint undercurrent
+to consciousness; an unimportant, unpleasant, insisting sound that
+somehow interfered. Gradually it had come nearer and had interfered more
+and had mingled harshly with the tender treble of Little Child. Now,
+from Peter's gate the sound besieged my ears and entered the room and
+explained itself to us all--
+
+
+     "My Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I _never_ know,
+     You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh--"
+
+
+the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air....
+
+I knew what it was, and they knew. At the sound of his father's voice,
+drunken, piteous, Peter dropped Miggy's hands and his head went down and
+he stood silent, like a smitten thing. My own heart sank, for I knew
+what Miggy had felt, and I thought I knew what she would feel now. So
+here was another unfulfilled intention, another plan gone astray in an
+unperfected order.
+
+Peter had turned somewhat away before he spoke.
+
+"I'll have to go now," he said quietly, "I guess you'll excuse me."
+
+He went toward the kitchen door ashamed, miserable, all the brightness
+and vitality gone from him. I am sorry that he did not see Miggy's face
+when she lifted it. I saw it, and I could have sung as I looked. Not for
+Peter or for Miggy, but for the sake of something greater than they,
+something that touched her hand, commanded "Look at me," bade her follow
+with us all.
+
+Before Peter reached the door she overtook him, stood before him, put
+her hands together for a moment, and then laid one swiftly on his cheek.
+
+"Peter," she said, "that don't make any difference. That don't make any
+difference."
+
+No doubt he understood her words, but I think what he understood best
+was her hand on his cheek. He caught her shoulders and looked and
+looked....
+
+"Honest--honest, don't it?" he searched her.
+
+You would not have said that her answer to that was wholly direct. She
+only let fall her hand from his cheek to his shoulder, and,
+
+"Peter," she said, "_is it like this_?"
+
+"Yes," he said simply, "it's like this."
+
+And then what she said was ever so slightly muffled, as if at last she
+had dropped her head in that sweet confusion which she had never seemed
+to know; as if at last she was looking at Peter as if he _was_ Peter.
+
+"Then I don't ever want to be any place where you aren't," she told him.
+
+"Miggy!" Peter cried, "take care what you say. Remember--he'd live with
+us."
+
+She made her three little nods.
+
+"So he will," she answered, "so he will. He--and my little sister--and
+all of us."
+
+Peter's answer was a shout.
+
+"Say it out!" he cried, "say you will. Miggy! I've _got_ to hear you say
+it out!"
+
+"Peter, Peter," she said, "I want to marry you."
+
+He took her in his arms and in the room was the glory upon glory of the
+west, a thing of wings and doors ajar. And strong as the light, there
+prevailed about them the soul of the Family, that distributes burdens,
+shares responsibilities, accepts what is and what is to come. Its voice
+was in the voice of Little Child singing in the garden, and of old Cary
+babbling at the gate. Its heart was the need of Peter and Miggy, each
+for the other. I saw in their faces the fine freedoms of the sunset,
+that sunset where Miggy and Little Child and I had agreed that a certain
+spirit lives. And it did but tally with the momentous utterance of these
+things and of the evening when Miggy spoke again.
+
+"Go now--you go to him," she said, "we'll wait. And--Peter--when you
+come back, I want to see everything in the room again."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+THE CUSTODIAN
+
+
+When the river is low, a broad, flat stone lying a little way from shore
+at the foot of our lawn becomes an instrument of music. In the day it
+plays now a rhapsody of sun, now a nocturne of cloud, now the last
+concerto, Opus Eternal. In the night it becomes a little friendly
+murmur, a cradle song, slumber spell, neighbour to the Dark, the alien
+Dark who very likely grows lonely, being the silent sister, whereas the
+Light goes on blithely companioned of us all. But if I were the Dark and
+owned the stars, and the potion which quickens conscience, and the sense
+of the great Spirit brooding, brooding, I do not know that I would
+exchange and be the Light. Still, the Light has rainbows and toil and
+the sun and laughter.... After all, it is best to be a human being and
+to have both Light and Darkness for one's own. And it is concerning this
+conclusion that the river plays on its instrument of music, this shallow
+river
+
+
+              "--to whose falls
+     Melodious birds sing madrigals."
+
+
+I have heard our bank cat-birds in the willows sing madrigals to the
+stone-music until I wanted to be one of them--cat-bird, madrigal,
+shallows, or anything similar. But the human is perhaps what all these
+are striving to express, and so I have been granted wish within wish,
+and life is very good.
+
+Life was very good this summer afternoon when half the village gathered
+on our lawn above the singing stone, at Miggy's and Peter's
+"Announcement Supper." To be sure, all Friendship Village had for
+several days had the news and could even tell you when the betrothal
+took place and where; but the two were not yet engaged, as Miggy would
+have said, "out loud."
+
+"What _is_ engaged?" asked Little Child, who was the first of my guests
+to arrive, and came bringing an offering of infinitesimal flowers which
+she finds in the grass where I think that they bloom for no one else.
+
+"It means that people love each other very much--" I began, and got no
+further.
+
+"Oh, goody grand," cried Little Child. "Then I'm engaged, aren't I? To
+everybody."
+
+Whenever she leads me in deep water, I am accustomed to invite her to a
+dolphin's back by bidding her say over some song or spell which I have
+taught her. This afternoon while we waited on the lawn and her little
+voice went among the charmed words, something happened which surely
+must have been due to a prank of the dolphin. For when she had taken an
+accurate way to the last stanza of "Lucy," Little Child soberly
+concluded:--
+
+
+     "'She lived unknown, and few could know
+       When Lucy ceased to be;
+     But she is in her grave, and what's
+       The difference to me!'"
+
+
+But, even so, it was charming to have had the quiet metre present.
+
+I hope that there is no one who has not sometime been in a company on
+which he has looked and looked with something living in his eyes; on a
+company all of whom he holds in some degree of tenderness. It was so
+that I looked this afternoon on those who came across the lawn in the
+pleasant five o'clock sun, and I looked with a difference from my manner
+of looking on that evening of my visit to the village, when I first saw
+these, my neighbours. Then I saw them with delight; now I see them with
+delight-and-that-difference; and though that difference is, so to say,
+partly in my throat, yet it is chiefly deep in my understanding. There
+came my Mis' Amanda Toplady, with her great green umbrella, which she
+carries summer and winter; Mis' Postmaster Sykes, with the full-blooming
+stalk of her tuberose pinned on her left shoulder; Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss in the pink nun's veiling of the Post-office
+hall supper; and my neighbour, who had consented to come, with: "I
+donno as that little thing would want I should stay home. Oh, but do you
+know, that's the worst--knowin' that the little thing never saw me and
+can't think about me at all!" And there came also those of whom it
+chances that this summer I have seen less than I should have wished: the
+Liberty sisters, in checked print. "It don't seem so much of a jump out
+of mournin' into wash goods as it does into real dress-up cloth," gentle
+Miss Lucy says. And Abigail Arnold, of the Home Bakery, who sent a great
+sugared cake for to-day's occasion. "Birthday cakes is correct," she
+observed, "an' weddin' cake is correct. Why ain't engagement cakes
+correct--especially when folks get along without the ring? I donno. I
+always think doin' for folks is correct, whether it's the style or
+whether it ain't." And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, with a new and
+upbraiding baby; Mis' Fire Chief Merriman in "new black, but not true
+mournin' now, an' anyway lit up by pearl buttons an' a lace handkerchief
+an' plenty o' scent." And Mis' "Mayor" Uppers who, the "mayor" not
+returning to his home and the tickets for the parlour clock having all
+been sold, to-day began offering for sale tickets on the "parlour
+'suit,' brocade' silk, each o' the four pieces a differ'nt colour and
+all as bright as new-in-the-store." And though we all understood what
+she was doing and she knew that we all knew, she yet drew us aside, one
+after another, to offer the tickets for sale privately, and we slipped
+the money to her beneath our handkerchiefs or our fans or our sewing.
+
+We all had our sewing--even I have become pleasantly contaminated and
+have once or twice essayed eyelets. Though there was but an hour to
+elapse before supper-time and the arrival of the "men-folks," we settled
+ourselves about the green, making scallops on towels, or tatting for
+sheet hems, or crocheted strips for the hems of pillow-slips. Mis' Sykes
+had, as she almost always does have, new work which no one had ever seen
+before, and new work is accounted of almost as much interest as a new
+waist and is kept for a surprise, as a new waist should be kept. Little
+Child, too, had her sewing; she was buttonhole-stitching a wash-cloth
+and talking like a little old woman. I think that the little elf
+children like best to pretend in this way, as regular, arrant witches
+feign old womanhood.
+
+"Aunt Effie is sick," Little Child was telling Mis' Toplady; "she is
+sick from her hair to her slippers."
+
+I had a plan for Little Child and for us all; that after supper she
+should have leaves in her hair and on her shoulders and should dance on
+the singing stone in the river. And Miggy, whose shy independence is now
+become all shyness, was in the house, weaving the leaves, and had not
+yet appeared at her party at all.
+
+Then one of those charming things happened which surely have a kind of
+life of their own and wake the hour to singing, as if an event were a
+river stone, and more, round which all manner of faint music may be set
+stirring.
+
+"Havin' a party when I ain't lookin'!" cried somebody. "My, my. I don't
+b'lieve a word of what's name--this evolution business. I bet you
+anything heaven is just _gettin' back_."
+
+And there was Calliope, in her round straw hat and tan ulster, who in
+response to my card had hastened her imminent return.
+
+"Yes," she said, when we had greeted her and put her in a chair under
+the mulberry tree, "my relation got well. At least, she ain't sick
+enough to be cross, so 'most anybody could take care of her now."
+
+Calliope laughed and leaned back and shut her eyes.
+
+"Land, land," she said, "I got so much to tell you about I don't know
+where to begin. It's all about one thing, too--somethin' I've found
+out."
+
+Mis' Amanda Toplady drew a great breath and let fall her work and looked
+round at us all.
+
+"Goodness," she said, "ain't it comfortable--us all settin' here
+together, nobody's leg broke, nobody's house on fire, nor none of us
+dead?"
+
+"'Us all settin' here together,'" Calliope repeated, suddenly grave
+amid our laughter, "that's part of what I'm comin' to. I wonder," she
+said to us, "how you folks have always thought of the City? Up till I
+went there to stay this while I always thought of it as--well, as the
+City an' not so much as folks at all. The City always meant to me big
+crowds on the streets--hurryin', hurryin', eatin', eatin', and not
+payin' much attention to anything. One whole batch of 'em I knew was
+poor an' lookin' in bakery windows. One whole batch of 'em I knew was
+rich an' sayin' there has to be these distinctions. And some more I knew
+was good--I always see 'em, like a pretty lady, stoopin' over, givin'.
+And some more I knew was wicked an' I always thought of them climbin' in
+windows. And then there was the little bit o' batch that knows the
+things I want to know an' talks like I'd like to talk an' that I'd
+wanted an' wanted to go up to the City an' get with.
+
+"Well, then I went. An' the first thing, I see my relative wa'n't rich
+nor poor nor bad nor good nor--the way I mean. Nor her friends that come
+to see her, they wan't either. The ones I took for rich talked economy,
+an' the ones I thought was poor spent money, an' the good ones gossiped,
+an' they all jabbered about music and pictures that I thought you
+couldn't talk about unless you knew the 'way-inside-o'-things, like
+they didn't know. The kinds seemed all mixed up, and all of 'em far away
+an' formal, like--oh, like the books in a library when you can't think
+up one to draw out. I couldn't seem to get near to anything.
+
+"Then one night I done what I'd always wanted to do. I took two dollars
+an' went to the theatre alone an' got me a seat. I put on the best I
+had, an' still I didn't feel like I was one of 'em, nor one of much of
+anybody. The folks on the car wasn't the way I meant, an' I felt mad at
+'em for bein' differ'nt. There was a smilin' young fellow, all dressed
+black an' expensive, an' I thought: 'Put you side of Peter Cary an'
+there wouldn't be anybody there but Peter.' And when I got inside the
+theatre, it was just the same: one awful collection of dressed-up hair
+an' dressed-down backs an' everybody smilin' at somebody that wasn't me
+and all seemin' so sure of themselves. Specially the woman in front of
+me, but I guess it always is specially the woman in front of you. She
+was flammed out abundant. She had trimmin's in unexpected places, an' a
+good many colours took to do it, an' a cute little chatter to match. It
+come to me that she was more than different from me: she was the
+_otherest_ a person can be. An' I felt glad when the curtain went up.
+
+"Well, sir," Calliope said, "it was a silly little play--all about
+nothin' that you could lay much speech to. But oh, they was somethin'
+in it that made you get down on your hands and knees in your own heart
+and look around in it, and _look_. They was an old lady and a young
+mother and a child and a man and a girl--well, that don't sound like
+much special, does it? And that's just it: it wasn't much special, but
+yet it was all of everything. It made 'em laugh, it made 'em cry, it
+made _me_ laugh and cry till I was ashamed and glad and grateful. And
+when the lights come up at the end, I felt like I was kind of the mother
+to everything, an' I wanted to pick it up an' carry it off an' keep care
+of it. And it come over me all of a sudden how the old lady and the
+young mother an' man an' girl, man an' girl, _man an' girl_ was right
+there in the theatre, near me, over an' over again; an' there I'd been
+feelin' mad at 'em for seemin' far off. But they wasn't far off. They'd
+been laughin' and cryin', too, an' they knew, just like I knew, what was
+what in the world. My, my. If it'd been Friendship I'd have gone from
+house to house all the way home, shakin' hands. An' as it was, I just
+_had_ to speak to somebody. An' just then I see the flammed-out woman in
+front of me, that her collar had come open a little wee bit up top--not
+to notice even, but it give me an excuse. And I leaned right over to her
+and I says with all the sympathy in me:--
+
+"'Ma'am, your neck is peepin'."
+
+"She looked around su'prised and then she smiled--smiled 'most into
+laughin'. And she thanked me sweet as a friend an' nodded with it, an' I
+thought: 'Why, my land, you may have a baby home.' I never had thought
+of that. An' then I begun lookin' at folks an' lookin'. An' movin' up
+the aisles, there wasn't just a theatre-lettin'-out. They was _folks_.
+And all over each one was the good little things they'd begun
+rememberin' now that the play was over, or the hurt things that had come
+back onto 'em again.... An' out on the street it was the same. The folks
+had all got alive and was waitin' for me to feel friendly to 'em.
+_Friendly._ The young fellows in the cars was lovers, just like Peter.
+An' everybody was just like me, or anyhow more alike than differ'nt; and
+just like Friendship, only mebbe pronouncin' their words some differ'nt
+an' knowin' more kinds of things to eat. It seems to me now I could go
+anywhere an' find folks to be nice to. I don't love Friendship Village
+any the less, but I love more things the same way. Everything, 'most.
+An' I tell you I'm glad I didn't die before I found it out--that we're
+all one batch. _Do_ you see what I mean--deep down inside what I say?"
+Calliope cried. "Does it sound like anything to you?"
+
+To whom should it sound like "anything" if not to us of Friendship
+Village? We know.
+
+"Honestly," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady, trying to wipe her
+eyes on her crochet work, "Whoever God is, I don't believe He wants to
+keep it a secret. He's always 'most lettin' us know. I 'most knew Who He
+is right then, while Calliope was talkin'."
+
+"I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope was talkin'." ... I
+said the words over while the men crossed the lawn, all arriving
+together in order to lighten the trial of guesthood: Dear Doctor June,
+little Timothy Toplady, Eppleby Holcomb, Postmaster Sykes, Photographer
+Jimmie Sturgis, Peter, and Timothy, Jr., and the others. Liva Vesey was
+already in the kitchen with Miggy and Elfa, and I knew that, somewhere
+invisible, Nicholas Moor was hovering, waiting to help dish the
+ice-cream. When the little tables, each with its bright, strewn
+nasturtiums, were set about the lawn, Miggy reluctantly appeared from
+the kitchen. She was in the white frock which she herself had made, and
+she was, as I have said, a new Miggy, not less merry or less elfin, but
+infinitely more human. It was charming, I thought, to see how she and
+Peter, far from tensely avoiding each other, went straight to each
+other's side. With them at table were Liva and Timothy, Jr., now meeting
+each other's eyes as simply as if eyes were for this purpose.
+
+"I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope was talkin'" ... I
+thought again as we stood in our places and Doctor June lifted his hands
+to the summer sky as if He were there, too.
+
+"Father," he said, "bless these young people who are going to belong to
+each other--Thou knowest their names and so do we. Bless our being
+together now in their honour, and be Thou in our midst. And bless our
+being together always. Amen."
+
+And that was the announcement of Miggy's and Peter's betrothal, at their
+Engagement Party.
+
+Little Child, who was sitting beside Calliope, leaned toward her.
+
+"How long will it take for God to know," she asked, "after Doctor June
+sent it up?"
+
+Calliope put her arm about her and told her.
+
+"Then did He get here since Doctor June invited Him?" Little Child
+asked.
+
+"You think, 'way deep inside your head, an' see if He isn't here," I
+heard Calliope say.
+
+Little Child shut her eyes tightly, and though she did open them briefly
+to see what was on the plate which they set before her, I think that she
+found the truth.
+
+"I 'most know," she said presently. "Pretty near I know He is. I guess
+I'm too little to be sure nor certain. When I'm big will I know sure?"
+
+"Yes," Calliope answered, "then you'll know sure."
+
+"I 'most knew Who He is while Calliope was talkin'" ... I said over once
+more. And suddenly in the words and in the homely talk and in the happy
+comradeship I think that I slipped between the seeing and the knowing,
+and for a moment stood very near to the Custodian--Himself. The
+Custodian Who is in us all, Who speaks, now as you, now as I, most
+clearly in our human fellowship, in our widest kinship, in the universal
+_togetherness_. Truly, it is not as my neighbour once said, for I think
+that God has many and many to "neighbour with," if only we would be
+neighbours.
+
+Presently, as if it knew that it belonged there, the sunset came, a
+thing of wings and doors ajar. Then Miggy fastened the leaves in Little
+Child's hair and led her down to dance on the broad, flat stone which is
+an instrument of music. Above the friendly murmur of the shallows the
+little elf child seemed beckoning to us others of the human voices on
+the shore. And in that fair light it was as if the river were some clear
+highway, leading from Friendship Village to Splendour Town, where
+together we might all find our way.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Friendship Village Love Stories, by Zona Gale
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Friendship Village Love Stories, by Zona Gale
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Friendship Village Love Stories
+
+Author: Zona Gale
+
+Release Date: May 7, 2017 [EBook #54676]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="center"><a name="cover.jpg" id="cover.jpg"></a><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="cover" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE<br />LOVE STORIES</h1>
+
+<p class="bold space-above">BY</p>
+
+<p class="bold2">ZONA GALE</p>
+
+<p class="bold">AUTHOR OF "FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," "THE LOVES<br />OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE," ETC.</p>
+
+<p class="bold space-above">NEW YORK<br />GROSSET &amp; DUNLAP<br />PUBLISHERS</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1909,<br />
+<span class="smcap">By</span> THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.<br />&mdash;&mdash;<br />
+Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909. Reprinted<br />November, 1909; April, 1912.</p>
+
+<p class="center space-above"><i>Norwood Press<br />
+J. S. Cushing Co.&mdash;Berwick &amp; Smith Co.<br />Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center">To<br />MY FRIENDS IN PORTAGE<br />WISCONSIN</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<blockquote><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p><p>Certain of the following chapters have appeared in <i>Everybody's</i>, <i>The
+American Magazine</i>, <i>The Outlook</i>, <i>The Woman's Home Companion</i>, and
+<i>The Delineator</i>. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous
+permission to reprint these chapters, and to Messrs. Harper Brothers for
+permission to reprint the sonnet in Chapter XI.</p></blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table summary="CONTENTS">
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="left"><span class="smaller">CHAPTER</span></td>
+    <td><span class="smaller">PAGE</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>I.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Open Arms</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>II.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Inside June</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_15">15</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>III.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Miggy</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Splendour Town</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_43">43</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>V.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Different</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_62">62</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Fond Forenoon</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Afraid</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_96">96</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Java Entertainment</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_116">116</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IX.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Cold Shoulder</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>X.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Evening Dress</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_148">148</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Undern</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_176">176</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Way the World Is</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Householdry</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XIV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Postmarks</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_223">223</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Peter</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_248">248</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XVI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The New Village</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_258">258</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XVII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Adoption</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_274">274</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XVIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">At Peter's House</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_293">293</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XIX.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Custodian</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_309">309</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="bold2">Friendship Village Love Stories</p>
+
+<h2><span>I</span> <span class="smaller">OPEN ARMS</span></h2>
+
+<p>Although it is June, the Little Child about whom I shall sometimes write
+in these pages this morning brought me a few violets. June violets. They
+sound unconvincing and even sentimental. However, here they are in their
+vase; and they are all white but one.</p>
+
+<p>"Only one blue one," said Little Child, regretfully; "May must be 'most
+dead by mistake."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't the months die as soon as they go away?" I asked her, and a
+little shocked line troubled her forehead.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," she said; "they never die at all. They wait and show the next
+months how."</p>
+
+<p>So this year's May is showing June how. As if one should have a kind of
+pre-self, who kept on, after one's birth, and told one what to live and
+what not to live. I wish that I had had a pre-self and that it had kept
+on with me to show me how. It is what one's mother is, only one is so
+occupied in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> being one's born self that one thinks of her worshipfully
+as one's mother instead. But this young June seems to be chiefly May,
+and I am glad: for of all the months, May is to me most nearly the
+essence of time to be. In May I have always an impulse to date my
+letters "To-morrow," for all the enchantment of the usual future seems
+come upon me. The other months are richly themselves, but May is all the
+great premonitory zest come true; it is expectation come alive; it is
+the Then made Now. Conservatively, however, I date my May letters merely
+"To-morrow," and it is pleasant to find a conservative estimate which no
+one is likely to exceed. For I own that though there is a conservatism
+which is now wholly forbidden to me, yet I continue to take in it a
+sensuous, stolen pleasure, such as I take in certain ceremonies; and I
+know that if I were wholly pagan, extreme conservatism would be my chief
+indulgence.</p>
+
+<p>This yet-May morning, then, I have been down in the village, gardening
+about the streets. My sort of gardening. As in spring another looks
+along the wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the
+upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence I peered round this
+wall and that for faces and things in the renascence of recognition, or
+in the pleasant importance of having just been born. Many a gate and
+fa&ccedil;ade and well-house, of which in my absence I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> have not thought even
+once, has not changed a whit in consequence. And when changes have come,
+they have done so with the prettiest preening air of accomplishment: "We
+too," they say, "have not been idle."</p>
+
+<p>Thus the streets came unrolling to meet me and to show me their
+treasures: my neighbour's new screened-in porch "with a round extension
+so to see folks pass on the cross street"; in the house in which I am to
+live a former blank parlour wall gravely regarding me with a magnificent
+new plate glass eye; Daphne Street, hitherto a way of sand, now become a
+thing of proud macadam; the corner catalpas old enough to bloom; a white
+frame cottage rising like a domestic Venus from a once vacant lot of
+foam-green "Timothy"; a veranda window-box acquired, like a bright
+bow-knot at its house's throat; and, farther on, the Herons' freshly
+laid cement sidewalk, a flying heron stamped on every block. I fancy
+they will have done that with the wooden heron knocker which in the
+kitchen their grandfather Heron himself carved on sleepless nights.
+("Six hundred and twenty hours of Grandpa Heron's life hanging on our
+front door," his son's wife said; "I declare I feel like that bird could
+just about lay.") To see all these venturesome innovations, these
+obscure and pleasant substitutions, is to be greeted by the very annuals
+of this little garden as a real <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>gardener in green lore might be
+signalled, here by a trembling of new purple and there by a yellow
+marching line of little volunteers.</p>
+
+<p>I do not miss from their places many friends. In this house and that I
+find a new family domiciled and to be divined by the subtle changes
+which no old tenant would ever have made: the woodpile in an
+unaccustomed place, the side shed door disused and strung for vines, a
+wagon now kept by a north and south space once sacred to the sweet-pea
+trench. Here a building partly ruined by fire shows grim, returned to
+the inarticulate, not evidently to be rebuilt, but to be accepted, like
+any death. But these variations are the exception, and only one
+variation is the rule, and against that one I have in me some special
+heritage of burning. I mean the felling of the village trees. We have
+been used wantonly to sacrifice to the base and the trivial, trees
+already stored with years of symmetry when we of these Midlands were the
+intruders and not they&mdash;and I own that for me the time has never wholly
+passed. They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel our lawns
+with twigs, they rot the shingles on our barns. It has seemed to occur
+to almost nobody to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too, are
+beginning to discern, so that when in the laying of a sidewalk we meet a
+tree who was there before we were anywhere at all, though we may not
+yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our love of a
+straight line, and our votive offering is to give the tree the
+walk&mdash;such a slight swerving is all the deference she asks!&mdash;and in
+return she blesses us with balms and odours.... For me these signs of
+our mellowing are more delightful to experience than might be the
+already-made quietudes of a nation of effected and distinguished
+standards. I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves an
+elemental gesture, though I personally would prefer not to be the one to
+have made the gesture. And this is my solace when with some
+inquisitioner I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine&mdash;an
+isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hemlock: verily, I say,
+it was so that we did here in the old days when there were forests to
+conquer, and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his blood as he
+has his genius for toil. And I try not to remember that if in America we
+had had plane trees, we should almost certainly have cut them into
+cabins.... But this morning even the trees that I missed could not make
+me sad. No, nor even the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers
+hanging on a street door which I passed. All these were as if something
+elementary had happened, needless wounds, it might be, on the plan of
+things, contortions which science has not yet bred away, but, as truly
+as the natural death from age, eloquent of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> the cosmic persuading to
+shape in which the nations of quietude and we of strivings are all in
+fellowship.</p>
+
+<p>In fellowship! I think that in this simple basic emotion lies my joy in
+living in this, my village. Here, this year long, folk have been
+adventuring together, knowing the details of one another's lives,
+striving a little but companioning far more than striving, kindling to
+one another's interests instead of practising the faint morality of mere
+civility; and I love them all&mdash;unless it be only that little Mrs. Oliver
+Wheeler Johnson, newly come to Friendship; and perhaps my faint liking
+for her arises from the fact that she has not yet lived here long enough
+to be understood, as Friendship Village understands. The ways of these
+primal tribal bonds are in my blood, for from my heart I felt what my
+neighbour felt when she told me of the donation party which the whole
+village has just given to Lyddy Ember:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I declare," she said, "it wasn't so much the stuff they brought in,
+though that was all elegant, but it was the <i>Togetherness</i> of it. I
+couldn't get to sleep that night for thinkin' about God not havin'
+anybody to neighbour with."</p>
+
+<p>It was no wonder, therefore, that when in the middle of Daphne Street my
+neighbour met me this morning, for the first time since my return, and
+held out her arms, I walked straight into them. Here is the secret, as
+more of us know than have the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> wisdom to acknowledge: fellowship,
+comradeship, kinship&mdash;call it what you will. My neighbour and I will
+understand.</p>
+
+<p>"I heard you was here," my neighbour said&mdash;bless her, her voice
+trembled. I suppose there never was such a compliment as that tremor of
+her voice.</p>
+
+<p>I am afraid that I am not going to tell what else she said. But it was
+all about our coming to Friendship Village to live; and that is a thing
+which, as I feel about it, should be set to music and sung in the
+wind&mdash;where Thoreau said that some apples are to be eaten. As for me, I
+nodded at my neighbour, and could do no more than that&mdash;as is the custom
+of mortals when they are face to face with these sorceries of Return and
+Meeting and Being Together.</p>
+
+<p>I am not yet wonted to the sweetness of our coming to Friendship Village
+to live, the Stranger and I. Here they still call him the Stranger; and
+this summer, because of the busts and tablets which he must fashion in
+many far places, so do I. Have I said that that Stranger of mine is a
+sculptor? He is. But if anyone expects me to write about him, I tell you
+that it is impossible. Save this: That since he came out of the mist one
+morning on the Plank Road here in Friendship Village, we two have kept
+house in the world, shared in the common welfare,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> toiled as we might
+for the common good, observed the stars, and thanked God. And this: that
+since that morning, it is as if Someone had picked us up and set us to
+music and sung us to the universal piping. And we remember that once we
+were only words, and that sometime we shall be whatever music is when it
+is free of its body of sound, and for that time we strive. But I repeat
+that these vagrant notes are not about this great Stranger, absent on
+his quests of holy soul prisoned in this stone and that marble, nor yet
+about our life together. Rather, I write about our Family, which is this
+loved town of ours. For we have bought Oldmoxon House, and here, save
+for what flights may be about and over-seas, we hope that we may tell
+our days to their end.</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour had both my hands, there in the middle of Daphne Street,
+and the white horse of the post-office store delivery wagon turned out
+for us as if he knew.</p>
+
+<p>"If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd have put on my other
+hat," my neighbour said, "but I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down
+for some rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't what they
+used to be, are they? One season an' they lay down life. I could jounce
+up an' down I'm so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed
+gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> I heard the girl that
+was comin' to help you ain't comin' near."</p>
+
+<p>My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and she has done the
+disappointing by telegraph. I had almost said, publicly by telegraph.
+But I protest that I would rather an entire village should read my
+telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole city should care
+almost nothing for me or my telegrams either. And if you please, I would
+rather not have that telegram-reading criticised.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity, "I've got you one. She'll be
+up to talk to you in a day or two&mdash;I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can
+spell like the minister."</p>
+
+<p>I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her name with something of
+that sense of the inescapable to which the finality of my neighbour
+impressed me. As if I were to have said, "So, then, it is to be Miggy!"
+Or was it something more than that? Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and
+mine had struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have come to
+call the emotion of finality. I suppose that other people have it: that
+occasional prophetic sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses
+this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness of&mdash;shall I
+say?&mdash;brightness; a mental area of clearness; a quite definite physical
+emotion of yes-ness. But if the thing will not happen this says<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> itself
+by a complementary apprehension of dim, down-sloping, vacant negation. I
+have seldom known this divination to fail me&mdash;though I am chary of using
+it lest I use it up! And then I do not always wish to know. But this
+morning my emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware: I <i>knew</i> that
+it would be Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>"What a curious name," I said, in a manner of feebly fending off the
+imminent; "<i>why</i> Miggy?" For it seemed to me one of those names instead
+of which any other name would have done as well and perhaps better.</p>
+
+<p>"Her name is Margaret," my neighbour explained, "and her mother was a
+real lady that come here from Off and that hard work killed her because
+she <i>was</i> a lady. The father was bound there shouldn't be any lady about
+Miggy, but he couldn't seem to help himself. Margaret was her mother's
+name and so he shaved it and shrunk it and strained it down to Miggy.
+'No frills for nobody,' was his motto, up to his death. Miggy and her
+little sister lives with her old Aunt Effie that dress-makes real French
+but not enough to keep 'em alive on. Miggy does odd jobs around. So when
+I heard about your needin' somebody, I says to myself, 'Miggy!'&mdash;just
+like I've said it to you."</p>
+
+<p>It was not the name, as a name, which I would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> have said could be
+uppermost in my mind as I walked on that street of June&mdash;that May was
+helping to make fair. And I was annoyed to have the peace of my return
+so soon invaded. I fell wondering if I could not get on, as I usually
+do, with no one to bother. I have never wanted a helper at all if I
+could avoid it, and I have never, never wanted a helper with a
+personality. A personality among my strewn papers puts me in a fever of
+embarrassment and misery. Once such an one said to me in the midst of a
+chapter: "Madame, I'd like to ask you a question. What do <i>you</i> think of
+your hero?" In an utter rout of confusion I owned that I thought very
+badly of him, indeed; but I did not add the truth, that she had
+effectually drugged him and disabled me for at least that day. My taste
+in helpers is for one colourless, noiseless, above all intonationless,
+usually speechless, and always without curiosity&mdash;some one, save for the
+tips of her trained fingers, negligible. As all this does sad violence
+to my democratic passions, I usually prefer my negligible self. So the
+idea of a Miggy terrified me, and I said to myself that I would not have
+one about. As I knew the village, she was not of it. She was not a part
+of my gardening. She was no proper annual. She was no doubt merely a
+showy little seedling, chance sown in the village.... But all the time,
+moving within me, was that serene area of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> brightness, that clear
+certainty that, do what I could, it would still be Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>... It is through this faint soothsaying, this conception which is
+partly of sight and partly of feeling, that some understanding may be
+won of the orchestration of the senses. I am always telling myself that
+if I could touch at that fluent line where the senses merge, I should
+occasionally find there that silent Custodian who is myself. I think,
+because emotion is so noble, that the Custodian must sometimes visit
+this line where the barrier between her and me is so frail. Her presence
+seems possible to me only for a moment, only, it may be, for the
+fraction of a second in which I catch the romance, the <i>idea</i> of
+something old and long familiar. And when this happens, I say: She has
+just been there, between the seeing and the feeling, or between the
+seeing and the knowing. Often I am sure that I have barely missed her.
+But I am never quick enough to let her know....</p>
+
+<p>When I finished my walk and stepped under the poplars before my gate, I
+caught a faint exclamation. It was that Little Child, who had been
+waiting for me on my doorstep and came running to meet me and bring me
+the violets. When she saw me, she said, "Oh!" quickly and sweetly in her
+throat, and, as I stood still to taste the delight of having her run
+toward me, I felt very sorry for every one who has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> not heard that
+involuntary "Oh!" of a child at one's coming. Little Child and I have
+met only once before, and that early this morning, at large, on the
+village street, as spirits met in air, with no background of names nor
+auxiliary of exchange of names; but we had some talk which for me
+touched on eternal truth and for her savoured of story-telling; and we
+are friends. So now when she gave me the violets and explained to me Who
+was showing June how, I accepted this fair perception of the motherhood
+of May, this childish discernment of the familyhood of things, and,</p>
+
+<p>"Will you come some day soon to have another story?" I asked her.</p>
+
+<p>"Prob'ly I can," said Little Child. "I'll ask Miggy."</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy! But is it your Miggy, too?" I demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"It's my sister," said Little Child, nodding.</p>
+
+<p>I thought that the concreteness of her reply to my ill-defined query was
+almost as if she remembered how to understand without words. You would
+think that children would need to have things said out, but they are
+evidently closer to a more excellent way.</p>
+
+<p>So when I entered the house just now, I brought in with me a kind of
+premonitory Miggy, one of those ghostly, anticipatory births which we
+are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>constantly giving to those whom we have not met. As if every one
+had for us a way of life without the formality of being seen. As if we
+are a big, near family whether we want to be so or not. Verily, it is
+not only May and June, or Little Child and Miggy, who are found
+unexpectedly to be related; it is the whole world, it seems, and he is
+wise who quickens to many kinships. I like to think of the comrade
+company that already I have found here: June and Little Child and
+Miggy-to-be and my neighbour and Daphne Street and the remembered faces
+of the village and the hamadryads. I think that I include the very
+herons in the cement sidewalk. Like a kind of perpetual gift it is, this
+which my neighbour called <i>Togetherness</i>.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>II</span> <span class="smaller">INSIDE JUNE</span></h2>
+
+<p><i>The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough to
+it. This month comes within few houses, and if you want it you must go
+out to it. When you are within doors, knowing that out-of-doors it is
+June, the urge to be out there with it is resistless. But though you
+wade in green, steep in sun, breast wind, and glory in them all, still
+the day itself eludes you. It would seem, in June, that there should be
+a specific for the malady of being oneself, so that one might get to be
+a June day outright. However, if one were oneself more and more, might
+not one finally become a June day?...</i></p>
+
+<p>Or something of this sort. I am quoting, as nearly as may be, from the
+Book of Our Youth, your youth and mine. Always the Book of Youth will
+open at a page like this. And occasionally it is as if we turned back
+and read there and made a path right away through the page.</p>
+
+<p>This morning a rose-breasted grosbeak wakened me, singing on a bough of
+box-elder so close to my window<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> that the splash of rose on his throat
+almost startled me. It was as if I ought not to have been looking. And
+to turn away from out-of-doors was like leaving some one who was saying
+something. But as soon as I stepped into the day I perceived my old
+problem: <i>The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near
+enough</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I stood for a little at the front gate trying soberly to solve the
+matter&mdash;or I stood where the front gate should have been; for in our
+midland American villages we have few fences or hedges, and, alas, no
+stone walls. Though undoubtedly this lack comes from an insufficient
+regard for privacy, yet this negative factor I am inclined to condone
+for the sake of the positive motive. And this I conceive to be that we
+are wistful of more ample occupation than is commonly contrived by our
+fifty-feet village lots, and so we royally add to our "yards" the
+sidewalk and the planting space and the road and as much of our
+neighbour's lawn as our imagination can annex. There seems to me to be
+in this a certain charming pathos; as it were, a survival in us of the
+time when we had only to name broad lands our own and to stay upon them
+in order to make them ours in very fact. And now it is as if this serene
+pushing back of imaginary borders were in reality an appending, a kind
+of spiritual taking up of a claim.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p><p>How to get nearer to June? I admit that it is a question of the veriest
+idler. But what a delightful company of these questions one can
+assemble. As, How to find one's way to a place that <i>is</i> the way it
+seems Away Across a Meadow. How to meet enough people who hear what one
+says in just the way that one means it. How to get back at will those
+fugitive moments when one almost <i>knows</i> ... what it is all about. And
+with this question the field of the idler becomes the field of the wise
+man; and, indeed, if one idles properly&mdash;or rather, if the proper person
+idles&mdash;the two fields are not always on opposite sides of the road. To
+idle is by no means merely to do nothing. It is an avocation, a calling
+away, nay, one should say, a piping away. To idle is to inhibit the body
+and to let the spirit keep on. Not every one can idle. I know estimable
+people who frequently relax, like chickens in the sun; but I know only a
+few who use relaxation as a threshold and not as a goal, and who idle
+until the hour yields its full blessing.</p>
+
+<p>I wondered if to idle at adventure might not be the way to June, so I
+went out on the six o'clock street in somewhat the spirit in which
+another might ride the greenwood. Almost immediately I had an encounter,
+for I came on my neighbour in her garden. Not my neighbour who lives on
+the other side of me, and who is a big and obvious deacon,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> with a
+family of a great many Light Gowns; but My Neighbour. She was watering
+her garden. These water rules and regulations of the village are among
+its spells. To look at the members of the water commission one would
+never suspect them of romance. But if they have it not, why have they
+named from five until nine o'clock the only morning hours when one may
+use the city water for one's lawn and garden? I insist that it cannot be
+a mere regard for the municipal resources, and that the commissioners
+must see something of the romance of getting up before five o'clock to
+drench one's garden, and are providing for the special educational value
+of such a custom. Or, if I do not believe this, I wish very much that I
+did, with the proper grounds.</p>
+
+<p>To tell the truth, however, I do not credit even my neighbour with
+feeling the romance of the hour and of her occupation. She is a still
+woman of more than forty, who does not feel a difference between her
+flower and her vegetable gardens, but regards them both as a part of her
+life in the kind of car-window indifference and complacency of certain
+travellers. She raises foxgloves and parsley, and the sun shines over
+all. I must note a strange impression which my neighbour gives me: she
+has always for me an air of personal impermanence. I have the fancy,
+amounting to a sensation, that she is where she is for just a moment,
+and that she must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> rush back and be at it again. I do not know at what.
+But whether I see her in church or at a festival, I have always all I
+can do to resist saying to her, "How <i>did</i> you get away?" It was so that
+she was watering her flowers; as if she were intending at any moment to
+hurry off to get breakfast or put up the hammock or mend. And yet before
+she did so she told me, who was a willing listener, a motion or two of
+the spirit of the village.</p>
+
+<p>There is, I observe, a nicety of etiquette here, about the
+Not-quite-news, Not-quite-gossip shared with strangers and
+semi-strangers. The rules seem to be:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Strangers shall be told only the pleasant occurrences and conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Half strangers may discuss the unpleasant matters which they themselves
+have somehow heard, but only pleasant matters may be added by accretion.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of society may say whatever it "has a mind." But this mind, as
+I believe, is not harsh, since nobody ever gossips except to people who
+gossip back.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady told me last night that Calliope Marsh is coming home for
+the Java entertainment, next week," my neighbour imparted first. And
+this was the best news that she could have given me.</p>
+
+<p>It has been a great regret to me that this summer Calliope is not in the
+village. She has gone to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> city to nurse some distant kinswoman more
+lonely than she, and until ill-health came, long forgetful of Calliope.
+But she is to come back now and again, to this and to that, for the
+village interests are all her own. I have never known any one in whom
+the tribal sense is so persistently alive as in Calliope.</p>
+
+<p>I asked my neighbour what this Java entertainment would be, which was to
+give back Calliope, and she looked her amazement that I did not know. It
+would be, it appeared, one of those great fairs which the missionary
+society is always projecting and carrying magnificently forward.</p>
+
+<p>"It's awful feet-aching work," said my neighbour, reflectively; "but
+honestly, Calliope seems to like it. I donno but I do, too. The Sodality
+meant to have one when they set out to pave Daphne Street, but it turned
+out it wasn't needed. Well, big affairs like that makes it seem as if
+we'd been born into the whole world and not just into Friendship
+Village."</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour told me that a new public library had been opened in a
+corner of the post-office store, and that "a great crowd" was drawing
+books, though for this she herself cannot vouch, since the library is
+only open Saturday evenings, and "Saturday," she says with decision, "is
+a bad night." It is, in fact, I note, very difficult to find a free
+night in the village, save only Tuesday. Monday, because of its obvious
+duties and incident fatigue, is as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>impossible as Sunday; Wednesday is
+club day; Thursday "is prayer-meeting"; Friday is sacred to church
+suppers and entertainments and the Ladies' Aid Society; and Saturday is
+invariably denominated a bad night and omitted without question. We are
+remote from society, but Tuesday is literally our only free evening.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it won't be the same with you about books," my neighbour
+admits. "You can send your girl down to get a book for you. But I have
+to be home to get out the clean clothes. How's your girl going to like
+the country?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>I am to have here in the village, I find, many a rebuke for habits of
+mine which lag behind my theories. For though I try to solve my share of
+a tragic question by giving to my Swedish maid, Elfa, the self-respect
+and the privilege suited to a human being dependent on me, together with
+ways of comfort and some leisure, yet I find the homely customs of the
+place to have accomplished more than my careful system. And though, when
+I took her from town I scrupulously added to the earnings of my little
+maid, I confess that it had not occurred to me to wonder whether or not
+she would like Friendship Village. We seem so weary-far from the
+conditions which we so facilely conceive. Especially, I seem far. I am
+afraid that I engaged Elfa in the first place with less attention to her
+economic fitness than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> that she is so trim and still and wistful, with
+such a peculiarly winning upward look; and that her name is Elfa. I told
+my neighbour that I did not know yet, whether Elfa would like it here or
+not; and for refuge I found fault with the worms on the rose bushes.
+Also I made a note in my head to ask Elfa how she likes the country. But
+the spirit of a thing is flown when you make a note of it in your head.
+How does Elfa like the town, for that matter? I never have asked her
+this, either.</p>
+
+<p>"She'll be getting married on your hands, anyway," my neighbour
+observed; "the ladies here say that's one trouble with trying to keep a
+hired girl. They <i>will</i> get married. But I say, let 'em."</p>
+
+<p>At least here is a matter in which my theory, like that of my
+neighbour's, outruns those of certain folk of both town and village. For
+I myself have heard women complain of their servants marrying and
+establishing families, and deplore this shortsightedness in not staying
+where there is "a good home, a nice room, plenty to eat, and all the
+flat pieces sent to the laundry."</p>
+
+<p>"Speaking of books," said my neighbour, "have you seen Nicholas Moor?"</p>
+
+<p>"I see almost no new books," I told her guiltily.</p>
+
+<p>"Me either," she said; "I don't mean he's a book. He's a boy. Nicholas
+Moor&mdash;that does a little writin' himself? I guess you will see him.
+He'll<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> be bringin' some of his writing up to show you. He took some to
+the new school principal, I heard, and to the invalid that was here from
+the city. He seems to be sort of lonesome, though he <i>has</i> got a good
+position. He's interested in celluloid and he rings the Catholic bell.
+Nicholas must be near thirty, but he hasn't even showed any signs."</p>
+
+<p>"Signs?" I hazarded.</p>
+
+<p>"Of being in love," she says simply. And I have pondered pleasantly on
+this significant ellipsis of hers which takes serenely for granted the
+basic business of the world. Her elision reminds me of the delicate
+animism of the Japanese which says, "When the rice pot speaks with a
+human voice, then the demon's name is Kanjo." One can appraise a race or
+an individual by the class of things which speech takes for granted,
+love or a demon or whatever it be.</p>
+
+<p>And apropos of "showing signs," do I remember Liva Vesey and Timothy
+Toplady, Jr.? I am forced to confess that I remember neither. I recall,
+to be sure, that the Topladys had a son, but I had thought of him as a
+kind of qualifying clause and it is difficult to conceive of him as the
+subject of a new sentence. When I hear of Liva Vesey I get her confused
+with a pink gingham apron and a pail of buttermilk which used sometimes
+to pass my house with Liva combined. Fancy that pink gingham and that
+pail becoming a person! And my <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>neighbour tells me that the Qualifying
+Clause and the Pink Gingham are "keeping company," and perhaps are to
+determine the cut of indeterminate clauses and aprons, world without
+end.</p>
+
+<p>"The young folks <i>will</i> couple off," says my neighbour; "and," she adds,
+in a manner of spontaneous impression, "<i>I</i> think it's nice. And it's
+nice for the whole family, too. I've seen families that wouldn't ever
+have looked at each other come to be real friends and able to see the
+angels in each other just by the young folks pairing off. This whole
+town's married crisscross and kittering, family into family. I like it.
+It kind o' binds the soil."</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour told me of other matters current in the village, pleasant
+commonplaces having for her the living spirit which the commonplace
+holds in hostage. ("I'm breathing," Little Child soberly announced to me
+that first day of our acquaintance. And I wonder why I smiled?) My
+neighbour slowly crossed her garden and I followed on the walk&mdash;these
+informal colloquies of no mean length are perfectly usual in the village
+and they do not carry the necessity for an invitation within the house
+or the implication of a call. The relations of hostess and guest seem
+simply to be suspended, and we talk with the freedom of spirits met in
+air. Is this not in its way prophetic of the time when we shall meet,
+burdened of no conventions or upholstery or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> perhaps even words, and
+there talk with the very freedom of villagers? Meanwhile I am content
+with conventions, and passive amid upholstery. But I do catch myself
+looking forward.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly my neighbour turned to me with such a startled, inquiring
+manner that I sent my attention out as at an alarm to see what she
+meant. And then I heard what I had not before noted: a thin, wavering
+line of singing, that had begun in the street beyond our houses, and now
+floated inconsequently to us, lifting, dipping, wandering. I could even
+hear the absurd words.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"<i>My</i> Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I <i>never</i> know.</div>
+<div>You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh&mdash;"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air.</p>
+
+<p>To say something was like interrupting my neighbour's expression; so I
+waited, and,</p>
+
+<p>"It's old Cary," she explained briefly. "When he does that it's like
+something hurts you, ain't it?"</p>
+
+<p>I thought that this would be no one of my acquaintance, and I said so,
+but tentatively, lest I should be forgetting some inherent figure of the
+village.</p>
+
+<p>"He's come here in the year," she explained&mdash;and, save about the obvious
+import of old Cary's maudlin song, she maintained that fine, tribal
+reticence of hers. "Except for the drinking," she even said,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> "he seems
+to be a quiet, nice man. But it's a shame&mdash;for Peter's sake. Peter
+Cary," she added, like a challenge, "is the brainiest young man in
+<i>this</i> town, say what you want."</p>
+
+<p>On which she told me something of this young superintendent of the
+canning factory who has "tried it in Nebraska," and could not bear to
+leave his father here, "this way," and has just returned. "He works
+hard, and plays the violin, and is making a man of himself generally,"
+she told me; "Don't miss him." And I have promised that I will try not
+to miss Peter Cary.</p>
+
+<p>"They live out towards the cemetery way," she added, "him and his
+father, all alone. Peter'll be along by here in a minute on his way to
+work&mdash;it's most quarter to. I set my husband down to his breakfast and
+got up his lunch before I come out&mdash;I don't have my breakfast till the
+men folks get out of the way."</p>
+
+<p>I never cease to marvel at these splendid capabilities which prepare
+breakfasts, put up lunches, turn the attention to the garden, and all,
+so to speak, with the left hand; ready at any moment to enter upon the
+real business of life&mdash;to minister to the sick or bury the dead, or
+conduct a town meeting or a church supper or a birth. They have a kind
+of goddess-like competence, these women. At any of these offices they
+arrive, lacking the cloud, it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> true, but magnificently equipped to
+settle the occasion. In crises of, say, deafness, they will clap a hot
+pancake on a friend's ear with an &AElig;sculapian <i>savoir faire</i>, for their
+efficiencies combine those of lost generations with all that they hear
+of in this, in an open-minded eclecticism. With Puritans and foresters
+and courtiers in our blood, who knows but that we have, too, the
+lingering ichor of gods and goddesses? Oh&mdash;"<i>don't you wish you had</i>?"
+What a charming peculiarity it would be to be descended from a state of
+immortality as well as to be preparing for it, nay, even now to be
+entered upon it!</p>
+
+<p>In a few moments after that piteous, fuddled song had died away on the
+other street, Peter Cary came by my neighbour's house. He was a
+splendid, muscular figure in a neutral, belted shirt and a hat battered
+quite to college exactions, though I am sure that Peter did not know
+that. I could well believe that he was making a man of himself. I have
+temerity to say that this boy superintendent of a canning factory looked
+as, in another milieu, Shelley might have looked, but so it was. It was
+not the first time that I have seen in such an one the look, the eyes
+with the vision and the shadow. I have seen it in the face of a man who
+stood on a step-ladder, papering a wall; I have seen it in a mason who
+looked up from the foundation that he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>mortared; I have seen it often
+and often in the faces of men who till the soil. I was not surprised to
+know that Peter Cary "took" on the violin. The violin is a way out (for
+that look in one's eyes), as, for Nicholas Moor, I have no doubt, is the
+ringing of the Catholic bell. And I am not prepared to say that
+celluloid, and wall-paper, and mortar, and meadows, and canneries,&mdash;run
+under good conditions,&mdash;may not be a way out as well. At all events, the
+look was still in Peter's face.</p>
+
+<p>Peter glanced briefly at my neighbour, running the risk of finding us
+both looking at him, realized the worst, blushed a man's brown blush,
+and nodded and smiled after he had looked away from us.</p>
+
+<p>"You see this grass?" said my neighbour. "Peter keeps it cut, my husband
+don't get home till so late. We're awful fond of Peter."</p>
+
+<p>There is no more tender eulogy. And I would rather have that said of me
+in the village than in any place I know. No grace of manner or dress or
+mind can deceive anybody. They are fond of you or they are not, and I
+would trust their reasons for either.</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour's husband came out the front door at that moment, and he
+and Peter, without greeting, went on together. Her husband did not look
+toward us, because, in the village, it seems not to be a husband and
+wife ceremonial to say good-by in the morning. I often fall wondering
+how it is in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> other places. Is it possible that men in general go away
+to work without the consciousness of family, of themselves as going
+forth on the common quest? Is it possible that women see them go and are
+so unaware of the wonder of material life that they do not instance it
+in, at least, good-by? One would think that even the female bear in the
+back of the cave must growl out something simple when her lord leaves
+her in the hope of a good kill.</p>
+
+<p>And when the two men had turned down the brick walk, the maple leaves
+making a come-and-go of shadows and sun-patterns on their backs, my
+neighbour looked at me with a smile&mdash;or, say, with two-thirds of a
+smile&mdash;as if her vote to smile were unanimous, but she were unwilling by
+it to impart too much.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all Miggy with Peter," she said, as if she were mentioning a
+symptom.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy?" I said with interest&mdash;and found myself nodding to this new
+relationship as to a new acquaintance. And I was once more struck with
+the precision with which certain simple people and nearly all great
+people discard the particularities and lay bare their truths. Could any
+amount of elegant phrasing so reach the heart of the thing and show it
+beating as did, "It's all Miggy with Peter"?</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," my neighbour told me, "it's been her with him ever since he come
+here."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p><p>Assuredly I thought the better of Miggy for this; and,</p>
+
+<p>"Is it all Peter with Miggy?" I inquired, with some eagerness.</p>
+
+<p>Land knows, my neighbour thought, and handed me the hose to hold while
+she turned off the water at the hydrant. I remember that a young robin
+tried to alight on the curving spray just as the water failed and
+drooped.</p>
+
+<p>"I like to get a joke on a robin that way," said my neighbour, and
+laughed out, in a kind of pleasant fellowship with jokes in general and
+especially with robins. "It made Miggy's little sister laugh so the
+other day when that happened," she added. Then she glanced over at me
+with a look in her face that I have not seen there before.</p>
+
+<p>"Land," she said, "this is the time of day, after my husband goes off in
+the morning, when I wish I had a little young thing, runnin' round.
+<i>Now</i> almost more than at night. Well&mdash;I don't know; both times."</p>
+
+<p>I nodded, without saying anything, my eyes on a golden robin prospecting
+vainly among the green mulberries. I wish that I were of those who know
+what to say when a door is opened like this to some shut place.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said my neighbour, "now I'll bake up the rest of the batter.
+Want a pink?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p><p>Thus tacitly excused&mdash;how true her instinct was, courteously to put the
+three fringed pinks in my hand to palliate her leaving!&mdash;I have come
+back to my house and my own breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>"Elfa," said I, first thing, "do you think you are going to like the
+country?"</p>
+
+<p>My little maid turned to me with her winning upward look.</p>
+
+<p>"No'm," she shocked me by saying. And there was another door, opened
+into another shut place; and I did not know what to say to that either.</p>
+
+<p>But I am near to my neighbour; and, in a manner to which Elfa's trimness
+and wistfulness never have impressed me, near to Elfa herself, and I am
+near, near to the village. As I left the outdoors just now, all the
+street was alive: with men and girls going to work, women opening
+windows, a wagon or two in from a Caledonia farm, a general, universal,
+not to say cosmic air of activity and coffee. All the little houses, set
+close together up and down the street, were like a friendly porch party,
+on a long, narrow veranda, where folk sit knee to knee with an avenue
+between for the ice-cream to be handed. All the little lawns and gardens
+were disposed like soft green skirts, delicately embroidered, fragrant,
+flowing.... As I looked, it seemed to me that I could hear the faint hum
+of the village talk&mdash;in every house the intimate, revealing confidences
+of the Family, quick<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> with hope or anxiety or humour or passion,
+animated by its common need to live. And along the street flooded the
+sun, akin to the morning quickening in many a heart.</p>
+
+<p>The day has become charged for me with something besides daylight,
+something which no less than daylight pervades, illumines, comes to meet
+me at a thousand points. I wonder if it can be that, unaware, I did get
+near to June?</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>III</span> <span class="smaller">MIGGY</span></h2>
+
+<p>I have never heard the chimes of Westminster cathedral, but when some
+time they do sound for me I shall find in them something all my own. For
+the old rosewood clock which has told time for me these many years is
+possessed of a kind of intelligence because its maker gave to it the
+Westminster chimes. Thus, though the clock must by patient ticking teach
+the rhythm of duration until the secret monotony of rhythm is confessed,
+it has also its high tides of life, rhythmic, too, and at every quarter
+hour fills a kind of general creative office: four notes for the
+quarter, eight for the half, twelve for the three-quarters, sixteen for
+the hour, and then the deep Amen of the strokes. At twelve o'clock it
+swells richly to its zenith of expression and almost says something
+else. Through even the organ fulness of the cathedral bells I shall hear
+the tingling melody of the rosewood clock chimes, for their sweet
+incidence has been to me both matins and lullaby and often trembles
+within my sleep. I have the clock always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> with me. It is a little
+voice-friend, it is one of those half folk, like flowers and the wind
+and an open fireplace and a piano, which are a frail, semi-born race,
+wistful of complete life, but as yet only partly overlapping our own
+sphere. These fascinate me almost as much as the articulate. That was
+why, when my little maid Elfa had brought me the summons to-day, I stood
+on the threshold and in some satisfaction watched Miggy, rapt before my
+clock in its musical maximum of noon.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy is as thin as a bough, and her rather large head is swept by an
+ungovernable lot of fine brown hair. Her face was turned from me, and
+she was wearing a high-necked gingham apron faded to varying values of
+brown and faint purple and violet of a quite surprising beauty. When the
+last stroke ceased, she turned to me as if I had been there all the
+time.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I could hear it do that again," she said, standing where she had
+stood, arms folded.</p>
+
+<p>"You will, perhaps, to-morrow," I answered.</p>
+
+<p>Truly, if it was to be Miggy, then she would hear the chimes to-morrow
+and to-morrow; and as she turned, my emotion of finality increased. I
+have never loved the tribe of the Headlongs, though I am very sorry for
+any one who has not had with them an occasional innocent tribal junket;
+but I hold that through our intuitions, we may become<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> a kind of
+apotheosis of the Headlongs. Who of us has not chosen a vase, a chair, a
+rug, by some motive transcending taste, by the bidding of a
+friendly-faithful monitor who, somewhere inside one, nodded a choice
+which we obeyed? And yet a vase is a dead thing with no little seeking
+tentacles that catch and cling, while in choosing the living it is that
+one's friendly-faithful monitor is simply recognizing the monitor of the
+other person. I, for one, am more and more willing to trust these two to
+avow their own. For I think that this monitor is, perhaps, that silent
+Custodian whom, if ever I can win through her elusiveness, I shall know
+to be myself. As the years pass I trust her more and more. I find that
+we like the same people, she and I! And instantly we both liked Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy stood regarding me intently.</p>
+
+<p>"I saw you go past the Brevy's yesterday, where the crape is on the
+door," she observed; "I thought it was you."</p>
+
+<p>I wonder at the precision with which very little people and very big
+people brush aside the minor conventions and do it in such ways that one
+nature is never mistaken for the other.</p>
+
+<p>"The girl who died there was your friend, then?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No," Miggy said; "I just knew her to speak to. And she didn't always
+bother her head to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> speak to me. I just went in there yesterday morning
+to get the feeling."</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon. To get&mdash;what?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Miggy, "you know when you look at a corpse you can always
+sense your own breath better&mdash;like it was something alive inside you.
+That's why I never miss seeing one if I can help. It's the only time I'm
+real glad I'm living."</p>
+
+<p>As I motioned her to the chair and took my own, I felt a kind of
+weariness. The neurotics, I do believe, are of us all the nearest to the
+truth about things, but as I grow older I find myself getting to take a
+surpassing comfort in the normal. Or rather, I am always willing to have
+the normal thrust upon me, but my neurotics I wish to select for myself.</p>
+
+<p>"My neighbour tells me," I said merely, "that she thinks you should be
+my secretary." (It is a big word for the office, but a little hill is
+still a hill.)</p>
+
+<p>"I think so, too," said Miggy, simply, "I was afraid you wouldn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you ever been anybody's secretary?" I continued.</p>
+
+<p>"Never," said Miggy. "I never saw anybody before that had a secretary."</p>
+
+<p>"But something must have made her think you would do," I suggested. "And
+what made you think so?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Miggy said, "she thinks so because she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> wants me to get ahead.
+And I think so because I generally think I can do anything&mdash;except
+mathematics. Has Secretary got any mathematics about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not my secretary work," I told her, reviewing these extraordinary
+qualifications for duty; "except counting the words on a page. You could
+do that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that!" said Miggy. "But if you told me to multiply two fractions
+you'd never see me again, no matter how much I wanted to come back.
+Calliope Marsh says she's always expecting to find some folks' heads
+caved in on one side&mdash;same as red and blue balloons. If mine caved, it'd
+be on the mathematics corner."</p>
+
+<p>I assured her that I never have a fraction in my house.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I'll come," said Miggy, simply.</p>
+
+<p>But immediately she leaned forward with a look of anxiety, and her face
+was pointed and big-eyed, so that distress became a part of it.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "I <i>forgot</i>. I meant to tell you first."</p>
+
+<p>"What is it? Can you not come, after all?" I inquired gravely.</p>
+
+<p>"I've got a drawback," said Miggy, soberly. "A man's in love with me."</p>
+
+<p>She linked her arms before her, a hand on either<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> shoulder&mdash;arms whose
+slenderness amazes me, though at the wrist they taper and in their
+extreme littleness are yet round. Because of this frailty she has a kind
+of little girl look which at that moment curiously moved me.</p>
+
+<p>"Who told you that?" I asked abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"About it being a drawback? Everybody 'most," said Miggy. "They all
+laugh about us and act like it was a pity."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment I felt a kind of anger as I felt it once when a woman said
+to me of a wife of many years whose first little child was coming, that
+she was "in trouble." I own that,&mdash;save with my neighbour, and Calliope,
+and a few more whom I love&mdash;here in the village I miss the simple good
+breeding of the perception that nothing is nobler than the emotions, and
+the simple good taste of taking seriously love among its young. Taking
+it seriously, I say. Not, heaven forbid, taking it for granted, as do
+the cities.</p>
+
+<p>"Other things being equal, I prefer folk who are in love," I told Miggy.
+Though I observe that I instance a commercialization which I deplore by
+not insisting on this secretarial qualification to anything like the
+extent with which I insist on, say, spelling.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy nodded&mdash;three little nods which seemed to settle everything.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I'll come," she repeated. "Anyhow, it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> isn't me that's in love at
+all. It's Peter. But of course I have to have some of the blame."</p>
+
+<p>So! It was, then, not "all Peter with Miggy." Poor Peter. It must be a
+terrific problem to be a Peter to such a Miggy. I must have looked "Poor
+Peter," because the girl's face took on its first smile. Such a smile as
+it was, brilliant, sparkling, occupying her features instead of
+informing them.</p>
+
+<p>"He won't interfere much," she observed. "He's in the cannery all day
+and then he practises violin and tinkers. I only see him one or two
+evenings a week; and I never think of him at all."</p>
+
+<p>"As my secretary," said I, "you may make a mental note for me: remind me
+that I wish sometime to meet Peter."</p>
+
+<p>"He'll be real pleased," said Miggy, "and real scared. Now about my
+being your secretary: do I have to take down everything you do?"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear child!" I exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't I?" said Miggy. "Why, the Ladies' Aid has a secretary and she
+takes down every single thing the society does. I thought that was being
+one."</p>
+
+<p>I told her, as well as might be, what I should require of her&mdash;not by
+now, I own, with any particularity of idea that I had a secretary, but
+rather that I had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be of use in
+many a little mechanical task. She listened,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> and, when I had made an
+end, gave her three little nods; but her face fell.</p>
+
+<p>"It's just doing as you're told," she summed it up with a sigh.
+"Everything is, ain't it? I thought maybe Secretary was doing your
+best."</p>
+
+<p>"But it is," I told her.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said positively, "you can't do your best when you have to do
+just exactly what you're told. Your <i>best</i> tells you how to do itself."</p>
+
+<p>At this na&iuml;ve putting of the personal equation which should play so
+powerful a part in the economics of toil I was minded to apologize for
+intending to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible duties with
+me. She had the truth, though: that the strong creative instinct is the
+chief endowment, primal as breath; for on it depend both life and the
+expression of life, the life of the race and the ultimate racial
+utterance.</p>
+
+<p>We talked on for a little, Miggy, I observed, having that royal
+indifference to time which, when it does not involve indifference to the
+time of other people, I delightedly commend. For myself, I can never
+understand why I should eat at one or sleep at eleven, if it is, as it
+often is, <i>my</i> one and <i>my</i> eleven and nobody else's. For, as between
+the clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other o'clocks are mine
+and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who
+would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> interrupt a sunset to go to dine, or wave away the stars in their
+courses to go to sleep, merely because the hour had struck. It must be
+in their blood, poor things, as descendants from the cell, to which time
+and space were the only considerations.</p>
+
+<p>When Miggy was leaving, she paused on the threshold with her first hint
+of shyness, a hint which I welcomed. I think that every one to whom I am
+permanently drawn must have in his nature a phase of shyness, even of
+unconquerable timidity.</p>
+
+<p>"If I shouldn't do things," Miggy said, "like you're used to having them
+done&mdash;would you tell me? I know a few nice things to do and I do 'em.
+But I'm always waking up in the night and thinking what a lot there must
+be that I do wrong. So if I do 'em wrong would you mind not just
+squirming and keeping still about 'em&mdash;but tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you, child, if there is need," I promised her. And I caught
+her smile&mdash;that faint, swift, solemn minute which sometimes reveals on a
+face the childlike wistfulness of every one of us, under the mask, to
+come as near as may be to the others.</p>
+
+<p>I own that when, just now, I turned from her leave-taking, I had that
+infrequent sense of emptiness-in-the-room which I have had usually only
+with those I love or with some rare being, all fire and spirit and idea,
+who has flamed in my presence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> and died into departure. I cannot see why
+we do not feel this sense of emptiness whenever we leave one another.
+Would you not think that it would be so with us who live above the abyss
+and below the uttermost spaces? It is not so, and there are those from
+whose presence I long to be gone in a discomfort which is a kind of
+orison of my soul to my body to hurry away. It is so that I long to be
+gone from that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, and of this I am
+sorely ashamed. But I think that all such dissonance is merely a failure
+in method, and that the spirit of this business of being is that we long
+for one another to be near.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, in "this world of visible images" and patterns and schedules and
+o'clocks, it is like stumbling on the true game to come on some one who
+is not on any dial. And I fancy that Miggy is no o'clock. She is not
+Dawn o'clock, because already she has lived so much; nor Noon o'clock,
+because she is far from her high moment; nor is she Dusk o'clock,
+because she is so poignantly alive. Rather, she is like the chimes of a
+clock&mdash;which do not tell the time, but which almost say something else.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>IV</span> <span class="smaller">SPLENDOUR TOWN</span></h2>
+
+<p>Last night I went for a walk across the river, and Little Child went
+with me to the other end of the bridge.</p>
+
+<p>I would have expected it to be impossible to come to the fourth chapter
+and to have said nothing of the river. But the reason is quite clear:
+for the setting of the stories of the village as I know them is
+pre&euml;minently rambling streets and trim dooryards, and neat interiors
+with tidy centre-tables. Nature is merely the necessary opera-house, not
+the intimate setting. Nature's speech through the trees is most
+curiously taken for granted as being trees alone, and she is, as I have
+shown, sometimes cut off quite rudely in the midst of an elm or linden
+sentence and curtly interrupted by a sidewalk. If a grove of trees is
+allowed to remain in a north dooryard it is almost certainly because the
+trees break the wind. Likewise, Nature's unfoldings in our turf and
+clover we incline to regard as merely lawns, the results of seeds and
+autumn fertilizing. Our vines<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> are for purposes of shade, cheaper and
+prettier than awnings or porch rollers. With our gardens, where our
+"table vegetables" are grown, Nature is, I think, considered to have
+little or nothing to do; and we openly pride ourselves on our early this
+and our prodigious that, quite as when we cut a dress or build a
+lean-to. We admit the rain or the sunny slope into partnership, but what
+we recognize is weather rather than the mighty spirit of motherhood in
+Nature. Indeed, our flower gardens, where are wrought such miracles of
+poppies and pinks, are perhaps the only threshold on which we stand
+abashed, as at the sound of a singing voice, a voice that sings
+believing itself to be alone.</p>
+
+<p>These things being so, it is no wonder that the river has been for so
+long no integral part of village life. The river is accounted a place to
+fish, a place to bathe, a thing to cross to get to the other side, an
+objective point&mdash;including the new iron bridge&mdash;to which to take guests.
+But of the everyday life it is no proper part. On the contrary, the
+other little river, which strikes out silverly for itself to eastward,
+is quite a personality in the village, for on it is a fine fleet of
+little launches with which folk take delight. But this river of mine to
+the west is a thing of whims and eddies and shifting sand bars, and here
+not many boats adventure. So the river is accepted as a kind of pleasant
+hermit living on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> edge of the village. It draws few of us as Nature
+can draw to herself. We know the water as a taste only and not yet as an
+emotion. We say that we should enjoy going there if we had the time. I
+know, I know. You see that we do not yet <i>live</i> the river, as an ancient
+people would live their moor. But in our launches, our camping parties,
+our flights to a little near lake for dinner, in a tent here and a swing
+there, set to face riverward, there lies the thrill of process, and by
+these things Nature is wooing us surely to her heart. Already the Pump
+pasture has for us the quality of individuality, and we have picnics
+there and speak of the pasture almost as of a host. Presently we shall
+be companioned by all our calm stretches of meadow, our brown sand bars,
+our Caledonia hills, our quiet lakes, our unnavigable river, as the
+Northmen were fellowed of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Little Child has at once a wilder and a tamer instinct. She has this
+fellowship and the fellowship of more.</p>
+
+<p>"Where shall we go to-day?" I ask her, and she always says, "Far away
+for a party"&mdash;in a combination, it would seem, of the blood of shepherd
+kings with certain corpuscles of modernity. And when we are in the woods
+she instances the same dual quality by, "Now let's sit down in a <i>roll</i>
+and wait for a fairy, and be a society."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p><p>We always go along the levee, Little Child and I, and I watch the hour
+have its way with her, and I do not deny that occasionally I try to
+improve on the hour by a tale of magic or by the pastime of teaching her
+a lyric. I love to hear her pretty treble in "Who is Sylvia? What is
+she?" and "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," and "April, April, laugh
+thy girlish laughter," and in Pippa's song. Last night, to be sure, the
+lyrics rather gave way to some talk about the circus to be to-day, an
+unwonted benison on the village. But even the reality of the circus
+could not long keep Little Child from certain sweet vagaries, and I love
+best to hear her in these fancyings.</p>
+
+<p>"Here," she said to me last night, "is her sponge."</p>
+
+<p>I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are always finding the fairy's
+cast-off ornaments and articles of toilet. On occasion we have found her
+crown, her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her plumed fan,
+her parasol&mdash;a skirtful of fancies which next day Little Child has
+brought to me in a shoe box for safe keeping so that "They" would not
+throw the things away: that threatening "They" which overhangs
+childhood, casting away its treasures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying
+a ladder straight through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the
+back yard. I can visualize that "They" as I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> believe it seems to some
+children, something dark and beetling and menacing and imminent, less
+like the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this precious idea of
+the Family, to conserve which is one of our chief hopes, should so often
+be made to appear to its youngest member in the general semblance of a
+phalanx?</p>
+
+<p>We sat down for a little at the south terminal of the bridge, where a
+steep bank and a few desperately clinging trees have arranged a little
+shrine to the sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across the bridge
+I had been watching against the gold the majestic or apathetic or sodden
+profiles of the farmers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face,
+it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it to forecast the
+weather. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky
+and called "The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the
+village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white
+pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital. And
+there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the butcher's cart halted in
+snow while a tawny-jerseyed boy lifts high his yellow light to find a
+parcel. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising
+values and fresco our village libraries with them&mdash;yes, and our drug
+stores, too.</p>
+
+<p>The story that I told Little Child while we rested<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> had the symbolism
+which I often choose for her: that of a girl keeping a garden for the
+coming of a child. All her life she has been making ready and nothing
+has been badly done. In one green room of the garden she has put fair
+thoughts, in another fair words, and in the innermost fastnesses of the
+garden fair deeds. Here she has laid colour, there sweet sound, there
+something magic which is a special kind of seeing. When the child comes,
+these things will be first toys, then tools, then weapons. Sometimes the
+old witch of the wood tries to blow into the garden a thistle of discord
+or bubbles of delight to be followed, and these must be warded away. All
+day the spirit of the child to come wanders through the garden, telling
+the girl what to do here or here, keeping her from guile or from
+idleness-without-dreams. She knows its presence and I think that she has
+even named it. If it shall be a little girl, then it is to be Dagmar,
+Mother of Day, or Dawn; but if a little boy, then it shall be called for
+one whom she has not yet seen. Meanwhile, outside the door of the garden
+many would speak with the girl. On these she looks, sometimes she even
+leans from her casement, and once, it may be, she reaches out her hand,
+ever so swiftly, and some one without there touches it. But at that she
+snatches back her hand and bars the garden, and for a time the spirit of
+the little child does not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> come very near. So she goes serenely on
+toward the day when a far horn sounds and somebody comes down the air
+from heaven, as it has occurred to nobody else to do. And they hear the
+voice of the little child, singing in the garden.</p>
+
+<p>"The girl is me," says little Little Child, as she always says when I
+have finished this story.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I tell her.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd like to see that garden," she says thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>Then I show her the village in the trees of the other shore, roof upon
+roof pricked by a slim steeple; for that is the garden.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care about just bein' good," she says, "but I'd like to
+housekeep that garden."</p>
+
+<p>"For a sometime-little-child of your own," I tell her.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she assents, "an' make dresses for."</p>
+
+<p>I cannot understand how mothers let them grow up not knowing, these
+little mothers-to-be who so often never guess their vocation. It is a
+reason for everything commonly urged on the ground of conduct, a ground
+so lifeless to youth. But quicken every desert space with "It must be
+done so for the sake of the little child you will have some day," and
+there rises a living spirit. Morals, civics, town and home economics,
+learning&mdash;there is the concrete reason for them all; and the abstract
+understanding<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> of these things for their own sakes will follow,
+flower-wise, fruit-wise, for the healing of the times.</p>
+
+<p>I had told to that old Aunt Effie who keeps house for Miggy and Little
+Child something of what I thought to do&mdash;breaking in upon the old
+woman's talk of linoleum and beans and other things having, so to say,
+one foot in the universe.</p>
+
+<p>"Goodness," that old woman had answered, with her worried turn of head,
+"I'm real glad you're going to be here. <i>I dread saying anything.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Here too we must look to the larger day when the state shall train for
+parenthood and for citizenship, when the schools and the universities
+shall speak for the state the cosmic truths, and when by comparison
+botany and differential calculus shall be regarded as somewhat less
+vital in ushering in the kingdom of God.</p>
+
+<p>The water reservoir rose slim against the woods to the north; to the
+south was a crouching hop house covered with old vines. I said to Little
+Child:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Look everywhere and tell me where you think a princess would live if
+she lived here."</p>
+
+<p>She looked everywhere and answered:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"In the water tower in those woods."</p>
+
+<p>"And where would the old witch live?" I asked her.</p>
+
+<p>"In the Barden's hop house," she answered.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p><p>"And where would the spirit of the little child be?" I tested her.</p>
+
+<p>She looked long out across the water.</p>
+
+<p>"I think in the sunset," she said at last. And then of her own will she
+said over the Sunset Spell I have taught her:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"I love to stand in this great air</div>
+<div>And see the sun go down.</div>
+<div>It shows me a bright veil to wear</div>
+<div>And such a pretty gown.</div>
+<div>Oh, I can see a playmate there</div>
+<div>Far up in Splendour Town."</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>I could hardly bear to let her go home, but eight o'clock is very
+properly Little Child's bedtime, and so I sent her across the bridge
+waving her hand every little way in that fashion of children who, I
+think, are hoping thus to save the moment that has just died. I have
+known times when I, too, have wanted to wave my hand at a moment and
+keep it looking at me as long as possible. But presently the moment
+almost always turned away.</p>
+
+<p>Last night I half thought that the sunset itself would like to have
+stayed. It went so delicately about its departure, taking to itself
+first a shawl of soft dyes, then a painted scarf, then frail iris wings.
+It mounted far up the heavens, testing its strength for flight and
+shaking brightness from its garments. And it slipped lingeringly away as
+if the riot of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> colour were after all the casual part, and the real
+business of the moment were to stay on with everybody. In the tenuity of
+the old anthropomorphisms I marvel that they did not find the sunset a
+living thing, tender of mortals, forever loth to step from out one
+moment into the cherishing arms of the next. Think! The sunset that the
+Greeks knew has been flaming round the world, dying from moment to
+moment and from mile to mile, with no more of pause than the human
+heart, since sunset flamed for Hero and Helen and Ariadne.</p>
+
+<p>If the sunset was made for lovers, and in our midland summers lingers on
+their account, then last night it was lingering partly for Miggy and
+Peter. At the end of the bridge I came on them together.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy did not flush when she saw me, and though I would not have
+expected that she would flush I was yet disappointed. I take an
+old-fashioned delight in women whose high spirit is compatible with a
+sensibility which causes them the little agonizings proper to this
+moment, and to that.</p>
+
+<p>But Miggy introduced Peter with all composure.</p>
+
+<p>"This," she said, "is Peter. His last name is Cary."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you do, Peter?" I said very heartily.</p>
+
+<p>I thought that Peter did something the rationale of which might have
+been envied of courts. He turned to Miggy and said "Thank you."
+Secretly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> I congratulated him on his embarrassment. In a certain milieu
+social shyness is as authentic a patent of perception as in another
+milieu is taste.</p>
+
+<p>"Come home with me," I besought them. "We can find cake. We can make
+lemonade. We can do some reading aloud." For I will not ask the mere
+cake and lemonade folk to my house. They must be, in addition, good or
+wise or not averse to becoming either.</p>
+
+<p>I conceived Peter's evident agony to rise from his need to reply.
+Instead, it rose from his need to refuse.</p>
+
+<p>"I take my violin lesson," he explained miserably.</p>
+
+<p>"He takes his violin lesson," Miggy added, with a pretty, somewhat
+maternal manner of translating. I took note of this faint manner of
+proprietorship, for it is my belief that when a woman assumes it she
+means more than she knows that she means.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm awful sorry," said Peter, from his heart; "I was just having to go
+back this minute."</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow's his regular lesson day," Miggy explained, "but to-morrow
+he's going to take me to the circus, so he has his lesson to-night. Go
+on," she added, "you'll be late and you'll have to pay just the same
+anyway." I took note of this frank fashion of protection of interests,
+for it is my belief that matters are advancing when the lady practises
+economics in courtship. But I saw that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> Miggy was manifesting no
+symptoms of accompanying Peter, and I begged them not to let me spoil
+their walk.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right," Miggy said; "he'll have to hurry and I don't want to
+go in yet anyway. I'll walk back with you." And of this I took note with
+less satisfaction. It was as if Miggy had not come alive.</p>
+
+<p>Peter smiled at us, caught off his hat, and went away with it in his
+hand, and the moment that he left my presence he became another being. I
+could see by his back that he was himself, free again, under no bondage
+of manner. It is a terrific problem, this enslavement of speech and
+trivial conduct which to some of us provides a pleasant medium and for
+some of us furnishes fetters. When will they manage a wireless society?
+I am tired waiting. For be it a pleasant medium or be it fetters, the
+present communication keeps us all apart. "I hope," I said once at
+dinner, "that I shall be living when they think they get the first sign
+from Mars." "I hope," said my companion, "that I shall be living when I
+think I get the first sign from you&mdash;and you&mdash;and you, about this
+table." If this young Shelley could really have made some sign, what
+might it not have been?</p>
+
+<p>"Everybody's out walking to-night," Miggy observed. "There's Liva Vesey
+and Timothy Toplady ahead of us."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p><p>"They are going to be married, are they not?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy looked as if I had said something indelicate.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she answered, "not out loud yet."</p>
+
+<p>Then, fearing that she had rebuked me, "He's going to take her to the
+circus to-morrow in their new buckboard," she volunteered. And I find in
+Friendship that the circus is accounted a kind of official
+trysting-place for all sweethearts.</p>
+
+<p>We kept a little way back of the lovers, the sun making Liva Vesey's
+pink frock like a vase-shaped lamp of rose. Timothy was looking down at
+her and straightway looking away again when Liva had summoned her
+courage to look up. They were extremely pleasant to watch, but this
+Miggy did not know and she was intent upon me. She had met Little Child
+running home.</p>
+
+<p>"She's nice to take a walk with," Miggy said; "but I like to walk around
+by myself too. Only to-night Peter came."</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy," said I, "I want to congratulate you that Peter is in love with
+you."</p>
+
+<p>She looked up with puzzled eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, that was nothing," she said; "he seemed to do it real easy."</p>
+
+<p>"But it is <i>not</i> easy," I assured her, "to find many such fine young
+fellows as Peter seems to be. I hope you will be very happy together."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p><p>"I'm not engaged," said Miggy, earnestly; "I'm only invited."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, well," I said, "if I may be allowed&mdash;I hope you are not sending
+regrets."</p>
+
+<p>Miggy laughed out suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Married isn't like a party," she said; "I know that much about society.
+Party you either accept or regret. Married you do both."</p>
+
+<p>I could have been no more amazed if the rosewood clock had said it.</p>
+
+<p>"Who has been talking to you, child?" I asked in distress.</p>
+
+<p>"I got it out of living," said Miggy, solemnly. "You live along and you
+live along and you find out 'most everything."</p>
+
+<p>I looked away across the Pump pasture where the railway tracks cut the
+Plank Road, that comes on and on until it is modified into Daphne
+Street. I remembered a morning of mist and dogwood when I had walked
+that road through the gateway into an earthly paradise. Have I not said
+that since that time we two have been, as it were, set to music and
+sung; so that the silences of separation are difficult to beguile save
+by the companionship of the village&mdash;the village that has somehow taught
+Miggy its bourgeoise lesson of doubt?</p>
+
+<p>My silence laid on her some vague burden of proof.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p><p>"Besides," she said, "I'm not like the women who marry people. Most of
+'em that's married ain't all married, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean, child?" I demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"They're not," protested Miggy. "They marry like they pick out a way to
+have a dress made when they don't admire any of the styles very much,
+and they've wore out everything else. Women like some things about
+somebody, and that much they marry. Then the rest of him never is
+married at all, and by and by that rest starts to get lonesome."</p>
+
+<p>"But Miggy," I said to all this, "I should think you might like Peter
+entirely."</p>
+
+<p>She surprised me by her seriousness.</p>
+
+<p>"Anyhow, I've got my little sister to bring up," she said; "Aunt Effie
+hasn't anything. And I couldn't put two on him to support."</p>
+
+<p>I wondered why not, but I said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"And besides," Miggy said after a pause, "there's Peter's father. You
+know about him?"</p>
+
+<p>I did know&mdash;who in the village did not know? Since my neighbour had told
+me of him I had myself seen him singing through the village streets,
+shouting out and disturbing the serene evenings, drunken, piteous....</p>
+
+<p>"Peter has him all the time," I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>She must have found a hint of resistance in my voice, for her look
+questioned me.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p><p>"I never could stand it to have anybody like that in the house," she
+said defensively. "I've told Peter. I've told him both reasons...."
+Miggy threw out her arms and stood still, facing the sunset. "Anyway, I
+want to keep on feeling all free and liberty-like!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>This intense individualism of youth, passioning only for far spaces,
+taking no account of the common lot nor as yet urgent to share it is,
+like the panther grace in the tread of the cat, a survival of the
+ancient immunity from accountabilities. To note it is to range down the
+evolution of ages. To tame it&mdash;there is a task for all the servants of
+the new order.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy was like some little bright creature caught unaware in the net of
+living and still remembering the colonnades of otherwhere, renowned for
+their shining. She was looking within the sunset, where it was a thing
+of wings and doors ajar and fair corridors. I saw the great freedoms of
+sunset in her face&mdash;the sunset where Little Child and I had agreed that
+a certain spirit lived.... Perhaps it was that that little vagrant
+spirit signalled to me&mdash;and the Custodian understood it. Perhaps it was
+that I saw, beneath the freedoms, the woman-tenderness in the girl's
+face. In any case I spoke abruptly and half without intention.</p>
+
+<p>"But you don't want to be free from Little Child.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> It is almost as if
+she were your little girl, is it not?" I said.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy's eyes did not leave the sunset. It was rather as if she saw some
+answer there.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I like to pretend she is," she said simply.</p>
+
+<p>"That," I said quietly, "is pleasant to pretend."</p>
+
+<p>And now her mood had changed as if some one had come to take her place.</p>
+
+<p>"But if she <i>was</i>&mdash;that," she said, "her name, then, would most likely
+be Margaret, like mine, wouldn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It would be very well to have it Margaret," I agreed.</p>
+
+<p>Her step was quickened as by sudden shyness.</p>
+
+<p>"It's funny to think about," she said. "Sometimes I most think of&mdash;her,
+till she seems in the room. Not quite my sister. I mean <i>Margaret</i>."</p>
+
+<p>It made my heart beat somewhat. I wondered if anything of my story to
+Little Child was left in my mind, and if subconsciously Miggy was
+reading it. This has sometimes happened to me with a definiteness which
+would be surprising if the supernatural were to me less natural. But I
+think that it was merely because Miggy had no idea of the sanctity of
+what she felt that she was speaking of it.</p>
+
+<p>"How does she look?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Like me," said Miggy, readily; "I don't want her to either. I want her
+to be pretty and I'm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> not. But when I think of her running 'round in the
+house or on the street, I always make her look like me. Only little."</p>
+
+<p>"Running 'round in the house." That was the way my neighbour had put it.
+Perhaps it is the way that every woman puts it.</p>
+
+<p>"Does she seem like you, too?" I tempted her on.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, better," Miggy said confidently; "learning to play on the piano and
+not much afraid of folks and real happy."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you ever pretend about a boy?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said; "if I do&mdash;I never can think him out real plain. Margaret
+I can most see."</p>
+
+<p>And this, too, was like the girl in the garden and the spirit of that
+one to be called by a name of one whom she had not seen.</p>
+
+<p>I think that I have never hoped so much that I might know the right
+thing to say. And when most I wish this I do as I did then: I keep my
+impulse silent and I see if that vague Custodian within, somewhere
+between the seeing and the knowing, will not speak for me. I wonder if
+she did? At all events, what either she or I said was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy! Look everywhere and tell me the most beautiful thing you can
+see."</p>
+
+<p>She was not an instant in deciding.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p><p>"Why, sunset," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Promise me," said I&mdash;said we!&mdash;"that you will remember <i>Now</i>. And that
+after to-night, when you see a sunset&mdash;always, always, till she
+comes&mdash;you will think about her. About Margaret."</p>
+
+<p>Because this caught her fancy she promised readily enough. And then we
+lingered a little, while the moment gave up its full argosy. I have a
+fancy for these times when I say "I will remember," and I am always
+selecting them and knowing, as if I had tied a knot in them, that I will
+remember. These times become the moments at which I keep waving my hand
+in the hope that they will never turn away. And it was this significance
+which I wished the hour to have for Miggy, so that for her the sunset
+should forever hold, as Little Child had said that it holds, that tiny,
+wandering spirit....</p>
+
+<p>Liva Vesey and Timothy had lingered, too, and we passed them on the
+bridge, he still trying to win her eyes, and his own eyes fleeing
+precipitantly whenever she looked up. The two seemed leaning upon the
+winged light, the calm stretches of the Pump pasture, the brown sand
+bar, the Caledonia hills. And the lovers and the quiet river and the
+village, roof upon roof, in the trees of the other shore, and most of
+all Miggy and her shadowy Margaret seemed to me like the words of some
+mighty cosmic utterance, with the country evening for its tranquil voice.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>V</span> <span class="smaller">DIFFERENT</span></h2>
+
+<p>Those who had expected the circus procession to arrive from across the
+canal to-day were amazed to observe it filing silently across the tracks
+from the Plank Road. The Eight Big Shows Combined had arrived in the
+gray dawn; and word had not yet gone the rounds that, the Fair Ground
+being too wet, the performance would "show" in the Pump pasture, beyond
+the mill. There was to be no evening amusement. It was a wait between
+trains that conferred the circus on Friendship at all.</p>
+
+<p>Half the country-side, having brought its lunch into town to make a day
+of it, trailed as a matter of course after the clown's cart at the end
+of the parade, and about noon arrived in the pasture with the
+pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to find it transformed
+into unknown ground. Who in the vicinity of the village had not known
+the Pump pasture of old? Haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,
+it had lain expressionless as the hills,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> for as long as memory. When in
+spring, "Where you goin'? Don't you go far in the hot sun!" from
+Friendship mothers was answered by, "We're just goin' up to the Pump
+pasture for vi'lets" from Friendship young, no more was to be said. The
+pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great, faithful Newfoundland
+dog; and about it was something of the safety of silence and warmth and
+night-in-a-trundle-bed.</p>
+
+<p>And lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture were articulate. The great
+elliptical tent, the strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of
+the hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were doing&mdash;these gave
+to the place the aspect of having from the first been secretly familiar
+with more than one had suspected.</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't it the divil?" demanded Timothy Toplady, Jr., ecstatically, as
+the glory of the scene burst upon him.</p>
+
+<p>Liva Vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in the buckboard, looked up
+at his brown Adam's apple&mdash;she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as
+her sweetheart's face&mdash;and rejoined:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Timmie! ain't it just what you might say <i>great</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly, "that it is that."</p>
+
+<p>He looked down in her face with a lifting of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>eyebrows and an honest
+fatuity of mouth. Liva Vesey knew the look&mdash;without ever having met it
+squarely, she could tell when it was there, and she promptly turned her
+head, displaying to Timothy's ardent eyes tight coils of beautiful blond
+crinkly hair, a little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver
+locket chain. At which Timothy now collapsed with the mien of a man who
+is unwillingly having second thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>"My!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>They drove into the meadow, and when the horse had been loosed and cared
+for, they found a great cottonwood tree, its leaves shimmering and
+moving like little banners, and there they spread their lunch. The sunny
+slope was dotted with other lunchers. The look of it all was very gay,
+partly because the trees were in June green, and among them windmills
+were whirling like gaunt and acrobatic witches, and partly because it
+was the season when the women were brave in new hats, very pink and very
+perishable.</p>
+
+<p>The others observed the two good-humouredly from afar, and once or twice
+a tittering group of girls, unescorted, passed the cottonwood tree,
+making elaborate detours to avoid it. At which Liva flushed, pretending
+not to notice; and Timothy looked wistfully in her face to see if she
+wished that she had not come with him. However, Timothy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> never dared
+look at her long enough to find out anything at all; for the moment that
+she seemed about to meet his look he always dropped his eyes
+precipitantly to her little round chin and so to the silver chain and
+locket. And then he was miserable.</p>
+
+<p>It was strange that a plain heart-shaped locket, having no initials,
+could make a man so utterly, extravagantly unhappy. Three months
+earlier, Liva, back from a visit in the city, had appeared with her
+locket. Up to that time the only personality in which Timothy had ever
+indulged was to mention to her that her eyes were the colour of his
+sister's eyes, whose eyes were the colour of their mother's eyes and
+their father's eyes, and of Timothy's own, and "Our eyes match, mine and
+yours," he had blurted out, crimson. And yet, even on these terms, he
+had taken the liberty of being wretched because of her. How much more
+now when he was infinitely nearer to her? For with the long spring
+evenings upon them, when he had sat late at the Vesey farm, matters had
+so far advanced with Timothy that, with his own hand, he had picked a
+green measuring-worm from Liva's throat. Every time he looked at her
+throat he thought of that worm with rapture. But also every time he
+looked at her throat he saw the silver chain and locket. And on circus
+day, if the oracles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> seemed auspicious, he meant to find out whose
+picture was worn in that locket, even though the knowledge made him a
+banished man.</p>
+
+<p>If only she would ever mention the locket! he thought disconsolately
+over lunch. If only she would "bring up the subject," then he could find
+courage. But she never did mention it. And the talk ran now:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Would you ever, ever think this was the Pump pasture?" from Liva.</p>
+
+<p>"No, you wouldn't, would you? It don't look the same, does it? You'd
+think you was in a city or somewheres, wouldn't you now? Ain't it
+differ'nt?"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you count the elephants?"</p>
+
+<p>"I bet I did. Didn't you? Ten, wa'n't it? Did you count the cages?
+Neither did I. And they was too many of 'em shut up. I don't know
+whether it's much of a circus or not&mdash;" with gloomy superiority&mdash;"they
+not bein' any calliope, so."</p>
+
+<p>"A good many cute fellows in the band," observed Liva. For Liva would
+have teased a bit if Timothy would have teased too. But Timothy replied
+in mere misery:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You can't tell much about these circus men, Liva. They're apt to be the
+kind that carouse around. I guess they ain't much to 'em but their swell
+way."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p><p>"Oh, I don't know," said Liva.</p>
+
+<p>Then a silence fell, resembling nothing so much as the breath of
+hesitation following a <i>faux pas</i>, save that this silence was longer,
+and was terminated by Liva humming a little snatch of song to symbolize
+how wholly delightful everything was.</p>
+
+<p>"My!" said Timothy, finally. "You wouldn't think this was the Pump
+pasture at all, it looks so differ'nt."</p>
+
+<p>"That's so," Liva said. "You wouldn't."</p>
+
+<p>It was almost as if the two were inarticulate, as the pasture had been
+until the strange influences of the day had come to quicken it.</p>
+
+<p>While Liva, with housewifely hands, put away the lunch things in their
+basket, Timothy nibbled along lengths of grass and hugged his knees and
+gloomed at the locket. It was then that Miggy and Peter passed them and
+the four greeted one another with the delicate, sheepish enjoyment of
+lovers who look on and understand other lovers. Then Timothy's look went
+back to Liva. Liva's rose-pink dress was cut distractingly without a
+collar, and the chain seemed to caress her little throat. Moreover, the
+locket had a way of hiding beneath a fold of ruffle, as if it were <i>her</i>
+locket and as if Timothy had no share in it.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," cried Liva, "<i>Timmie</i>! That was the lion roared. Did you hear?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p><p>Timothy nodded darkly, as if there were worse than lions.</p>
+
+<p>"Wasn't it the lion?" she insisted.</p>
+
+<p>Timothy nodded again; he thought it might have been the lion.</p>
+
+<p>"What you so glum about, Timmie?" his sweetheart asked, glancing at him
+fleetingly.</p>
+
+<p>Timothy flushed to the line of his hair.</p>
+
+<p>"Gosh," he said, "this here pasture looks so differ'nt I can't get over
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Liva, "it does look differ'nt, don't it?"</p>
+
+<p>Before one o'clock they drifted with the rest toward the animal tent.
+They went incuriously past the snake show, the Eats-'em-alive show, and
+the Eastern vaudeville. But hard by the red wagon where tickets were
+sold Timothy halted spellbound. What he had heard was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Types. Types. Right this way AND in this direction for Types. No,
+Ladies, and no, Gents: Not Tin-types. But Photo-types. Photo<i>graphs</i> put
+up in Tintype style AT Tintype price. Three for a quarter. The fourth of
+a dozen for the fourth of a dollar. Elegant pictures, elegant finish,
+refined, up-to-date. Of yourself, Gents, of yourself. Or of any one you
+see around you. And WHILE you wait."</p>
+
+<p>Timothy said it before he had any idea that he meant to say it:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span></p><p>"Liva," he begged, "come on. You."</p>
+
+<p>When she understood and when Timothy saw the momentary abashment in her
+eyes, it is certain that he had never loved her more. But the very next
+moment she was far more adorable.</p>
+
+<p>"Not unless you will, Timmie," she said, "and trade."</p>
+
+<p>He followed her into the hot little tent as if the waiting chair were a
+throne of empire. And perhaps it was. For presently Timothy had in his
+pocket a tiny blurry bit of paper at which he had hardly dared so much
+as glance, and he had given another blurry bit into her keeping. But
+that was not all. When she thanked him she had met his eyes. And he
+thought&mdash;oh, no matter what he thought. But it was as if there were
+established a throne of empire with Timothy lord of his world.</p>
+
+<p>Then they stepped along the green way of the Pump pasture and they
+entered the animal tent, and Strange Things closed about them. There
+underfoot lay the green of the meadow, verdant grass and not infrequent
+moss, plantain and sorrel and clover, all as yet hardly trampled and
+still sweet with the breath of kine and sheep. And three feet above,
+foregathered from the Antipodes, crouched and snarled the striped and
+spotted things of the wild, with teeth and claws quick to kill, and with
+generations of the jungle in their shifting eyes. The bright<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> wings of
+unknown birds, the scream of some harsh throat of an alien wood, the
+monkeys chattering, the soft stamp and padding of the elephants chained
+in a stately central line along the clover&mdash;it was certain, one would
+have said, that these must change the humour of the pasture as the
+companionship of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the
+mind. That the pasture, indeed, would never be the same, and that its
+influence would be breathed on all who entered there. Already Liva and
+Timothy, each with the other's picture in a pocket, moved down that tent
+of the field in another world. Or had that world begun at the door of
+the stuffy little phototype tent?</p>
+
+<p>It was the cage of bright-winged birds that held the two. Timothy stood
+grasping his elbows and looking at that flitting flame and orange. Dare
+he ask her if she would wear his phototype in her locket&mdash;dare he&mdash;dare
+he&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>He turned to look at her. Oh, and the rose-pink cambric was so near his
+elbow! Her face, upturned to the birds, was flushed, her lips were
+parted, her eyes that matched Timothy's were alight; but there was
+always in Timothy's eyes a look, a softness, a kind of speech that
+Liva's could not match. He longed inexpressibly to say to her what was
+in his heart concerning the locket&mdash;the phototype&mdash;themselves. And Liva
+herself was longing to say<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> something about the sheer glory of the hour.
+So she looked up at his brown Adam's apple, and,</p>
+
+<p>"Think, Timmie," she said, "they're all in the Pump pasture where
+nothin' but cows an' robins an' orioles ever was before!"</p>
+
+<p>"I know it&mdash;I know it!" breathed Timothy fervently. "Don't seem like it
+could be the same place, does it?"</p>
+
+<p>Liva barely lifted her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"It makes us seem differ'nt, too," she said, and flushed a little, and
+turned to hurry on.</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinkin' that too!" he cried ecstatically, overtaking her. But
+all that Timothy could see was tight coils of blond, crinkled hair, and
+a little ear and a curve of white throat, with a silver locket chain.</p>
+
+<p>Down the majestic line of the elephants, towering in the apotheosis of
+mere bulk to preach ineffectually that spirit is apocryphal and mass
+alone is potent; past the panthers that sniffed as if they guessed the
+nearness of the grazing herd in the next pasture; past the cage in which
+the lioness lay snarling and baring her teeth above her cubs, so
+pathetically akin to the meadow in her motherhood; past unknown
+creatures with surprising horns and shaggy necks and lolling tongues&mdash;it
+was a wonderful progress. But it was as if Liva had found something more
+wonderful than these when, before the tigers' cage, she stepped
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>forward, stooped a little beneath the rope, and stood erect with
+shining eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Look!" she said. "Look, Timmie."</p>
+
+<p>She was holding a blue violet.</p>
+
+<p>"In front of the tigers; it was <i>growing</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you give it to me?" was Timothy's only answer.</p>
+
+<p>She laid it in his hand, laughing a little at her daring.</p>
+
+<p>"It won't ever be the same," she said. "Tigers have walked over it. My,
+ain't everything in the pasture differ'nt?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just as differ'nt as differ'nt can be," Timothy admitted.</p>
+
+<p>"Here we are back to the birds again," Liva said, sighing.</p>
+
+<p>Timothy had put the violet in his coat pocket and he stood staring at
+the orange and flame in the cage: Her phototype and a violet&mdash;her
+phototype and a violet.</p>
+
+<p>But all he said, not daring to look at her at all, was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I can't make it seem like the Pump pasture to save me."</p>
+
+<p>There is something, as they have said of a bugle, "winged and warlike"
+about a circus&mdash;the confusions, the tramplings, the shapes, the keen
+flavour of the Impending, and above all the sense of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>Untoward,
+which is eternal and which survives glamour as his grave survives a man.
+Liva and Timothy sat on the top row of seats and felt it all, and
+believed it to be merely honest mirth. Occasionally Liva turned and
+peered out through the crack in the canvas where the side met the roof,
+for the pure joy of feeling herself alien to the long green fields with
+their grazing herds and their orioles, and at one with the colour and
+music and life within. And she was glad of it all, glad to be there with
+Timothy. But all she said was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Timmie, I hope it ain't half over yet. Do you s'pose it is? When I
+look outside it makes me feel as if it was over."</p>
+
+<p>And Timothy, his heart beating, a great hope living in his breast,
+answered only:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"No, I guess it'll be quite some time yet. It's a nice show. Nice
+performance for the money, right through. Ain't it?"</p>
+
+<p>When at length it really was over and they left the tent, the wagons
+from town and country-side and the "depot busses" had made such a place
+of dust and confusion that he took her back to the cottonwood on the
+slope to wait until he brought the buckboard round. He left her leaning
+against the tree, the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly on
+the smooth silver locket. And when he drove back, and reached down a
+hand to draw her up to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment,
+as she mounted, with all the panorama of the field behind her, he
+perceived instantly that the locket was gone. Oh, and at that his heart
+leaped up! What more natural than to dream that she had taken it off to
+slip his phototype inside and that he had come back too soon? What more
+natural than to divine the reality of dreams?</p>
+
+<p>His trembling hope held him silent until they reached the highway. Then
+he looked at the field, elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming
+crowds, and he observed as well as he could for the thumping of his
+heart:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I kind o' hate to go off an' leave it. To-morrow when I go to town with
+the pie-plant, it'll look just like nothin' but a pasture again."</p>
+
+<p>Liva glanced up at him and dropped her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't sure," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" he asked her, wondering.</p>
+
+<p>But Liva shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't sure," she said evasively, "but I don't think somehow the Pump
+pasture'll <i>ever</i> be the same again."</p>
+
+<p>Timothy mulled that for a moment. Oh, could she <i>possibly</i> mean
+because....</p>
+
+<p>Yet what he said was, "Well, the old pasture looks differ'nt enough now,
+all right."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," assented Liva, "don't it?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p><p>Timothy had supper at the Vesey farm. It was eight o'clock and the
+elder Veseys had been gone to prayer-meeting for an hour when Liva
+discovered that she had lost her locket.</p>
+
+<p>"Lost your locket!" Timothy repeated. It was the first time, for all his
+striving, that he had been able to mention the locket in her presence.
+He had tried, all the way home that afternoon, to call her attention
+innocently to its absence, but the thing that he hoped held fast his
+intention. "Why," he cried now, in the crash of that hope, "you had it
+on when I left you under the cottonwood."</p>
+
+<p>"You sure?" Liva demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure," Timothy said earnestly; "didn't&mdash;didn't you have it off while I
+was gone?" he asked wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>"No," Liva replied blankly; she had not taken it off.</p>
+
+<p>When they had looked in the buckboard and had found nothing, Timothy
+spoke tentatively.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell you what," he said. "We'll light a lantern and hitch up and drive
+back to the Pump pasture and look."</p>
+
+<p>"Could we?" Liva hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>It was gloriously starlight when the buckboard rattled out on the Plank
+Road. Timothy, wretched as he was at her concern over the locket, was
+yet recklessly, magnificently happy in being alone by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> her side in the
+warm dusk, and on her ministry. She was silent, and, for almost the
+first time since he had known her, Timothy was silent too&mdash;as if he were
+giving his inarticulateness honest expression instead of forcing it
+continually to antics of speech.</p>
+
+<p>From the top of the hill they looked down on the Pump pasture. It lay
+there, silent and dark, but no longer expressionless; for instantly
+their imagination quickened it with all the music and colour and life of
+the afternoon. Just as Timothy's silence was now of the pattern of
+dreams.</p>
+
+<p>He tied the horse, and together they entered the field by the great open
+place where the fence had not yet been replaced. The turf was still soft
+and yielding, in spite of all the treading feet. The pasture was girdled
+by trees&mdash;locusts and box-alders outlined dimly upon the sky,
+nest-places for orioles; and here and there a great oak or a cottonwood
+made a mysterious figure on the stars. One would have said that
+underfoot would certainly be violets. A far light pricked out an answer
+to their lantern, and a nearer firefly joined the signalling.</p>
+
+<p>"I keep thinkin' the way it looked here this afternoon," said Liva once.</p>
+
+<p>"That's funny, so do I," he cried.</p>
+
+<p>Under the cottonwood on the slope, its leaves stirring like little
+banners, Timothy flashed his light,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> first on tufted grass, then on
+red-tasselled sorrel, then&mdash;lying there as simply as if it belonged
+there&mdash;on Liva's silver locket. She caught it from him with a little
+cry.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "I'm so glad. Oh, thank you ever so much, Timmie."</p>
+
+<p>He faced her for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you so almighty glad?" he burst out.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it's the first locket I ever had!" she said in surprise. "So of
+course I'm glad. Oh, Timmie&mdash;thank you!"</p>
+
+<p>"You're welcome, I'm sure," he returned stiffly.</p>
+
+<p>She gave a little skipping step beside him.</p>
+
+<p>"Timmie," she said, "let's circle round a little ways and come by where
+the big tent was. I want to see how it'll seem."</p>
+
+<p>His ill-humour was gone in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"That's what we <i>will</i> do!" he cried joyously.</p>
+
+<p>He walked beside her, his lantern swinging a little rug of brightness
+about their feet. So they passed the site of the big red ticket wagon,
+of the Eastern vaudeville, of the phototype tent; so they traversed the
+length where had stretched the great elliptical tent that had prisoned
+for them colour and music and life, as in a cup. And so at last they
+stepped along that green way of the pasture where underfoot lay the
+grass and the not infrequent moss and clover, not yet wholly trampled to
+dust; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> this was where there had been assembled bright-winged birds
+of orange and flame and creatures of the wild from the Antipodes, and
+where Strange Things had closed them round.</p>
+
+<p>The influence of what the pasture had seen must have been breathed on
+all who entered there that night: something of the immemorial freedom of
+bright birds in alien woods, of the ancestral kinship of the wild. For
+that tranquil meadow, long haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,
+expressionless as the hills, dependable as a nurse, had that day known
+strange breath, strange tramplings, cries and trumpetings, music and
+colour and life and the beating of wild hearts&mdash;and was it not certain
+that these must change the humour of the place as the coming of the
+grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind? The field bore the
+semblance of a place exquisitely of the country and, here in the dark,
+it was inarticulate once more. But something was stirring there,
+something that swept away what had always been as a wind sweeps,
+something that caught up the heart of the boy as ancient voices stir in
+the blood.</p>
+
+<p>Timothy cast down his lantern and gathered Liva Vesey in his arms. Her
+cheek lay against his shoulder and he lifted her face and kissed her,
+three times or four, with all the love that he bore her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p><p>"Liva," he said, "all the time&mdash;every day&mdash;I've meant this. Did you
+mean it, too?"</p>
+
+<p>She struggled a little from him, but when he would have let her go she
+stood still in his arms. And then he would have her words and "Did you?"
+he begged again. He could not hear what she said without bending close,
+close, and it was the sweeter for that.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Timmie," she answered, "I don't know. I don't know if I <i>did</i>. But
+I do&mdash;now."</p>
+
+<p>Timothy's courage came upon him like a mantle.</p>
+
+<p>"An' be my wife?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"An' be ..." Liva assented, and the words faltered away. But they were
+not greatly missed.</p>
+
+<p>Timothy looked over the pasture, and over the world. And lo, it was
+suddenly as if, with these, he were become articulate, and they were all
+three saying something together.</p>
+
+<p>When they turned, there was the lantern glimmering alight on the trodden
+turf. And in its little circle of brightness they saw something coloured
+and soft. It was a gay feather, and Timothy took it curiously in his
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>"See, it's from one of the circus birds," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"No!" Liva cried. "It's an oriole feather. One of the pasture orioles,
+Timmie!"</p>
+
+<p>"So it is," he assented, and without knowing why, he was glad that it
+was so. He folded it away with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> the violet Liva had gathered that
+afternoon. After all the strangeness, what he treasured most had
+belonged to the pasture all the time.</p>
+
+<p>"Liva!" he begged. "Will you wear the picture&mdash;my picture&mdash;in that
+locket?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "Timmie, I'm so sorry. The locket's one I bought cheap
+in the city, and it don't open."</p>
+
+<p>She wondered why that seemed to make him love her more. She wondered a
+little, too, when on the edge of the pasture Timothy stood still,
+looking back.</p>
+
+<p>"Liva!" he said, "don't the Pump pasture seem differ'nt? Don't it seem
+like another place?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Liva said, "it don't seem the same."</p>
+
+<p>"Liva!" Timothy said again, "it ain't the pasture that's so differ'nt.
+It's <i>us</i>."</p>
+
+<p>She laughed a little&mdash;softly, and very near his coat sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>"I 'most knew that this afternoon," she answered.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>VI</span> <span class="smaller">THE FOND FORENOON</span></h2>
+
+<p>This morning Miggy came by appointment to do a little work for me, and
+she appeared in some "best" frock to honour the occasion. It was a blue
+silk muslin, cut in an antiquated style and trimmed with tarnished
+silver passementerie. In it the child was hardly less distinguished than
+she had been in her faded violet apron. It was impossible for her to
+seem to be unconscious of her dress, and she spoke of it at once with
+her fine directness.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't have anything good enough to wear," she said. "I haven't got
+any good dress this summer till I get it made myself. I got this out of
+the trunk. It was my mother's."</p>
+
+<p>"It suits you very well, Miggy," I told her.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought maybe she'd like my wearing it&mdash;here," said Miggy, shyly.
+"You've got things the way she always wanted 'em."</p>
+
+<p>We went in my workroom and sat among my books and strewn papers. A
+lighted theatre with raised curtain and breathless audience, a room
+which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> one wakens to find flooded by a gibbous moon, these have for me
+no greater sorcery than morning in a little book-filled room, with the
+day before me. Perhaps it is that I ought to be doing so many things
+that I take an idler's delight in merely attending to my own occupation.</p>
+
+<p>While I wondered at what I should set Miggy, I looked for the spirit of
+the minute and tried not to see its skeleton. The skeleton was that I
+had here an inexperienced little girl who was of almost no use to me.
+The spirit was that whatever I chose to do, my work was delightful to
+me, and that to bring Miggy in contact with these things was a kind of
+adventure. It is, I find, seldom sufficient to think even of the body of
+one's work, which to-day proved to be in my case a search in certain old
+books and manuscripts for fond allusions. If one can, so to say, think
+in and out till one comes to the spirit of a task, then there will be
+evident an indeterminate sense of wings. Without these wings there can
+be no expression and no creation. And in the true democracy no work will
+be wingless. It will still be, please God, laborious, arduous, even
+heart-breaking, but never body-fettered, never with its birdlike spirit
+quenched. And in myself I would bring to pass, even now, this fair order
+of sweet and willing toil by taking to my hand no task without looking
+deep within for its essential life.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p><p>So it was with a sense not only of pleasure but of leisure that I
+established Miggy by the window with a manuscript of ancient romances
+and told her what to do: to look through them for a certain story,
+barely more than a reference, to the love of an Indian woman of this
+Middle West for her Indian husband, sold into slavery by the French
+Canadians. It is a simple story&mdash;you will find small mention made of
+it&mdash;but having once heard it the romance had haunted me, and I was fain
+to come on it again: the story of the wife of Kiala, fit to stand niched
+with the great loves of the world.</p>
+
+<p>The morning sun&mdash;it was hardly more than eight o'clock&mdash;slanted across
+the carpet; some roses that Little Child had brought me before her
+breakfast were fresh on my table; and the whole time was like a quiet
+cup. In that still hour experience seemed drained of all but fellowship,
+the fellowship of Miggy and my books and the darling insistence of the
+near outdoors. Do you not think how much of life is so made up, free of
+rapture or anxiety, dedicated, in task or in pastime, to serene
+companionship?</p>
+
+<p>I have said that for me there are few greater sorceries than morning,
+with the day before me, in a small book-filled room. I wonder if this is
+not partly because of my anticipations of the parentheses I shall take?
+Not recesses, but parentheses, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> can flavour a whole day. I
+remember a beloved house in which breakfast and luncheon were daily
+observations looked forward to not so much for themselves, as that they
+were occasions for the most delightful interruptions. Dinner was a
+ceremony which was allowed to proceed; but a breakfast or a luncheon was
+seldom got through without one or two of us leaving the table to look up
+a stanza, or to settle if two words had the same derivation, or to find
+if some obsolete fashion in meanings could not yet be worn with
+impunity. It grieved the dear housewife, I remember, and we tried to
+tell her how much more important these things were than that our new
+potatoes should be buttered while they were hot. But she never could see
+it, and potatoes made us think of Ireland, and in no time we were deep
+in the Celtic revival and racing off to find "The Love Talker." I
+remember but one dinner interruption, and that was when we all left in
+the midst of the fish to go in the study and determine if moonlight
+shining through stained glass does cast a coloured shadow, as it did on
+St. Agnes' eve.... I suppose, in those days, we must have eaten
+something, though, save a certain deep-dish cherry pie I cannot remember
+what we ate; but those interruptions are with me like so many gifts, and
+I maintain that these were the realities. Those days&mdash;and especially the
+morning when we read through the "Ancient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> Mariner" between pasting in
+two book plates!&mdash;taught me the precious lesson that the interruption
+and not the task may hold the angel. It was so that I felt that morning
+with Miggy; and I know that what we did with that forenoon will persist
+somewhere when all my envelopes of clippings are gone to dust.</p>
+
+<p>After a time I became conscious that the faint rustling of the papers
+through which I was looking was absorbed by another sound, rhythmic,
+stedfast. I looked out on my neighbour's lawn, and at that moment,
+crossing my line of vision through the window before which Miggy was
+seated, I saw Peter, cutting my neighbour's grass. I understood at once
+that he had chosen this morning for his service in order to be near
+Miggy. It all made a charming sight,&mdash;Peter, bareheaded, in an
+open-throated, neutral shirt, cutting the grass there beyond Miggy in
+her quaint dress, reading a romance. I forgot my work for a little, and
+watched for those moments of his passing. Miggy read on, absorbed. Then,
+for a little, I watched her, pleased at her absorption.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, from my window, I have looked down on the river and the long
+yellow sand bar and the mystery of the opposite shore where I have never
+been, and I have felt a great pity that these things cannot know that
+they are these things. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>Sometimes, in the middle of a summer night, when
+the moon is so bright that one can see well within one's own soul, I
+have fancied that I have detected an aroma of consciousness, of definite
+self-wonder, in the Out-of-doors. Fleetingly I have divined it in the
+surprise of Dawn, the laughter of a blue Forenoon, the girlish shyness
+of Twilight. And this morning I wanted self-wonder for Miggy and Peter.
+What a pity that they could not see it all as I saw it: the Shelley-like
+boy cutting the grass and loving this girl, in her mother's gown. But
+you must not suppose, either, that I do not know how that vast
+unconsciousness of Nature and Love flows with a sovereign essence almost
+more precious than awareness.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy," I said presently, "Peter is not at work to-day. That is he
+cutting grass."</p>
+
+<p>She looked out briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"He's got two days off coming to him," she answered. "It's for overtime.
+This must be one of 'em. Have <i>you</i> read these stories?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I said, "I have. Miggy, don't you want to go and ask Peter to
+have lunch with us at twelve?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, thank you," she dismissed this. "This isn't the day I see him."</p>
+
+<p>"But wouldn't you like it?" I pressed the matter curiously. "Just we
+three at luncheon alone?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p><p>She was turning the leaves of the manuscript and she looked up to set
+me right.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you know," she said, "I don't know Peter <i>that</i> way at all. I just
+know him to have him walk home with me, or call, or go walking. Peter
+never eats with me."</p>
+
+<p>Poor Peter, indeed, to be denied the simple intimacy of sometimes
+breaking bread with Miggy. I understood that to invite a man to "noon
+lunch" in the village was almost unheard of, but,</p>
+
+<p>"I think he would eat this noon if he never ate before," said I. To
+which Miggy made answer:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"If you have read all these stories will you&mdash;wouldn't you&mdash;tell me
+some, please? I can't bear to think of having to wait to read 'em before
+I know 'em!"</p>
+
+<p>She shut the book and leaned her chin in her hand and looked at me. And
+the idea of having Peter with us for lunch drifted out of the room,
+unattended.</p>
+
+<p>I maintain that one who loves the craft of letters for its own sake, one
+who loves both those who have followed it and the records that they have
+left, and one who is striving to make letters his way of service, must
+all have acted in the same way; and that was the way that I took. In
+these days when Helen and Juliet are read aloud to children while they
+work buttonholes in domestic science class, think of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> pure
+self-indulgence of coming on a living spirit&mdash;I say a <i>living</i>
+spirit&mdash;who had never heard of the beloved women of the world. I wonder
+if we could not find such spirits oftener if we looked with care? When I
+see certain women shopping, marketing, jolting about in busses, I am
+sometimes moved to wonder if they know anything about Nicolete and, if
+they were to be told, whether it would not rest them.</p>
+
+<p>I love it, I love this going back into old time and bringing out its
+sweet elements. I have said that there is a certain conservatism in
+which, if I let my taste have its way with me, I would luxuriate, as I
+might then indulge my love of the semi-precious stones, or of old
+tiling, or of lilies-of-the-valley, all day long. And it is so that my
+self-indulgence would lead me to spend my days idling over these shadowy
+figures in the old romances and the old biographies. The joy of it never
+leaves me. Always from these books drifts out to me the smoke of some
+hidden incense that makes the world other. Not that I want the world to
+be that way, but I like to pretend. I know now that in a world where one
+must give of one's utmost, spend and be spent if one is even to pay for
+one's keep, these incense hours must be occasional, not to say stolen.
+So that to find a Miggy to whom to play preceptor of romance was like
+digging a moonstone out of the river bank.</p>
+
+<p>What did I tell her? Not of Helen or Cleopatra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> or Isolde or Heloise or
+Guinevere, because&mdash;why, I think that you would not have told her of
+these, either. Of Beatrice and Brunhilde and Elaine and Enid I told her,
+for, though these are so sad, there beat the mighty motives, seeds of
+the living heart. Last I told her, of Nicolete and of Griselda and of
+Psyche and of the great sun of these loves that broke from cloud. She
+listened, wrapt as I was wrapt in the telling. Was it strange that the
+room, which had been like a quiet cup for serene companionship, should
+abruptly be throbbing with the potent principles of the human heart? I
+think that it was not strange, for assuredly these are nearer to us than
+breathing, instant to leap from us, the lightning of the soul, electric
+with life or with death. We are never very far from strong emotion. Even
+while I recounted these things to Miggy, there, without my window, was
+Peter, cutting the grass.</p>
+
+<p>When I had done, "Is there more like that in books?" asked Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, yes; thank heaven and the people who wrote them down, there are in
+books many more like these.</p>
+
+<p>"I s'pose lots didn't get into the books at all," said Miggy,
+thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>It is seldom that one finds and mourns a bird that is dead. But think of
+the choir of little bright breasts whose raptures nobody hears, nobody
+misses,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> nobody remembers. How like them we are, we of the loving
+hearts.</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't wonder if there's lots of folks being that way right, right
+now," concluded Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>Who am I that I should doubt this?</p>
+
+<p>"A tournament," said Miggy, dreamily; "I s'pose that was something like
+the Java entertainment is going to be."</p>
+
+<p>She slipped to one side of the big chair and laid both hands on its arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen," she said. "Would this be one? You know Delly Watson that's
+crazy? She was in love with Jem Pitlaw, a school teacher that used to be
+here, an' that died, an' that wasn't in love with her even if he had
+stayed living, and it did that to her. You know ... she talks about
+things that nobody ever heard of, and listens, and laughs at what she
+thinks she hears. Ain't that like Elaine?"</p>
+
+<p>Yes, if poor Delly Watson of the village had had a barge and a dwarf and
+a river winding from towered city to towered city, she would not have
+been unlike Elaine.</p>
+
+<p>"And Jerry, that sets up folks's stoves and is so in love with the music
+teacher that he joined the chorus and paid his dues and set in the bass
+corner all winter to watch her and he can't sing a note. And she don't
+even see him when she passes him. Ain't that like Beatrice and the Pale
+Man?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p><p>Jerry is so true and patient, and our young music teacher is so fair,
+that no one could find it sacrilege to note this sad likeness.</p>
+
+<p>"And Mis' Uppers that her husband went out West and she didn't get any
+word, and he don't come, and he don't come, and she's selling tickets on
+the parlour clock, and she cries when anybody even whistles his
+tunes&mdash;isn't that some like Brunhilde, that you said about, waiting all
+alone on top of the mountain? I guess Brunhilde had money, but I don't
+think Mis' Uppers' principal trouble is that she ain't. With both of 'em
+the worst of it must 'a' been the waiting."</p>
+
+<p>And I am in no wise sure that that slow-walking woman in the pointed
+gray shawl may not have a heart which aches and burns and passions like
+a valkyr's.</p>
+
+<p>"And Mame Wallace, that her beau died and all she's got is to keep house
+for the family, and keep house, and <i>keep</i> house. It seems as if she's
+sort of like Psyche, that had such an awful lot of things to do&mdash;and her
+life all mussed up."</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it is so that in that gaunt Mame Wallace, whose homing passion
+has turned into the colourless, tidy keeping of her house, there is
+something shining, like the spirit of Psyche, that would win back her
+own by the tasks of her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"And then there's Threat Hubbelthwait," said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> Miggy, "that gets drunk
+and sets in his hotel bar fiddling, and Mis' Hubbelthwait shoves him his
+meals in on to the cigar show-case and runs before he throws his bow at
+her&mdash;she's just exactly like those two&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Enid or Griselda?" I recognized them, and Miggy nodded. Poor Mis'
+Hubbelthwait! Was she not indeed an Enid, lacking her beauty, and a
+Griselda, with no hope of a sweet surprise of a love that but tested
+her? Truly, it was as Miggy said: in some form they were all there in
+the village, minus the bower and the silken kirtle, but with the same
+living hearts.</p>
+
+<p>And these were not all.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy," I said, "what about Liva Vesey and Timothy? Did you count
+them?" For Aucassin and Nicolete were happy and so are Liva and Timothy,
+and I think that they have all understood meadows.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy looked startled. One's own generation never seems so typical of
+anything as did a generation or two past.</p>
+
+<p>"Could they be?" she asked. "They got engaged the night of the circus
+Liva told me&mdash;everybody knows. Could they be counted in?"</p>
+
+<p>Oh, yes, I assured her. They might be counted. So, I fancy, might all
+love-in-the-village, if we knew its authentic essence.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p><p>"Goodness," said Miggy, meditatively, "then there's Christopha and
+Allen last winter, that I was their bridesmaid, and that rode off in the
+hills that way on their wedding night. I s'pose that was like something,
+if we only knew?"</p>
+
+<p>I could well believe that that first adventure of the young husband and
+wife, of whom I shall tell you, was like something sweet and bright and
+long ago.</p>
+
+<p>"And what," I said to Miggy abruptly, "about Peter?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Peter?</i>" repeated Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>Why not Peter?</p>
+
+<p>She looked out the window at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," she said, "but he's <i>now</i>. Peter's now. And he wears black
+clothes. And he's cutting grass...."</p>
+
+<p>True for Peter, to all these impeachments. I told her that, in his day,
+Aucassin was <i>now</i>, too; and that he wore the clothes of his times, and
+that if he did not do the tasks nearest his hand, then Nicolete should
+not have loved him.</p>
+
+<p>"And," said I, "unless I'm very much mistaken, in the same way that all
+the ancient lovers loved their ladies, Peter loves you."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>That</i> way?" said Miggy, laying her hand on the manuscript.</p>
+
+<p>"That way," said I. And a very good way it was, too.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p><p>Miggy put up both hands with a manner of pointing at herself.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," she said, "not me." Then her little shoulders went up and she
+caught her breath like a child. "<i>Honest?</i>" she said.</p>
+
+<p>I said no more, but sat silent for a little, watching her across the
+fallen manuscript of ancient romances. Presently I picked up the sheets,
+and by chance my look fell on the very thing for which we had been
+searching: the story of the wife of Kiala, a Wisconsin Indian chief who
+was sold into slavery and carried to Martinique. And alone, across those
+hundreds of miles of pathless snow and sea, the wife of Kiala somehow
+followed him to the door of his West Indian owner. And to him she gave
+herself into slavery so that she might be with her husband.</p>
+
+<p>I read the story to Miggy. And because the story is true, and because it
+happened so near and because of this universe in general, I was not able
+to read it quite so tranquilly as I should have wished.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," Miggy said, "is it like <i>that</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>Yes, please God; if the heart is big enough to hold it, it is like that.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy put her hand down quickly on the blue muslin dress she wore.</p>
+
+<p>"My mother knew!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>And that is the most wonderful thing of all: one's mother knew.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p><p>Miggy turned once more and looked out the window at Peter. Bless Peter!
+I think that he must have been over that grass with the mower quite
+twice&mdash;perhaps twice and a half. Almost immediately Miggy looked away
+from Peter, and I thought&mdash;though perhaps after all it was merely the
+faint colour that often hovers in her cheek. I felt, however, that if I
+had again suggested to Miggy that we ask Peter to lunch, Peter might
+possibly have lunched with us. But now I did not suggest it. No, if ever
+it gets to be "all Peter with Miggy," it must be so by divine
+non-interference.</p>
+
+<p>My little voice-friend up there on the shelf, the Westminster chimes,
+struck twelve, in its manner of sweet apology for being to blame for
+things ending. In the village we lunch at twelve, and so my forenoon was
+done and even the simple tasks I had set were not all finished. I
+wonder, though, if deep within this fond forenoon we have not found
+something&mdash;wings, or a light, or a singing&mdash;that was of the spirit of
+the tasks? I wish that I thought so with reasons which I could give to a
+scientist.</p>
+
+<p>At all events I am richly content. And over our luncheon Miggy has just
+flattered me unconscionably.</p>
+
+<p>"My!" she said, "I should think everybody would want to be Secretary."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>VII</span> <span class="smaller">AFRAID</span></h2>
+
+<p>I must turn aside to tell of Allen and Christopha, that young husband
+and wife whose first adventure, Miggy thought, was like something sweet
+and bright and long ago. It happened this last winter, but I cannot
+perceive any grave difference between that winter night and this June.
+Believe me, the seasons and the silences and we ourselves are not so
+different as we are alike.</p>
+
+<p>On the night of her wedding, Christopha threw her bouquet from the
+dining-room doorway, because there were no front stairs from which to
+throw it, but instead only a stairway between walls and to be reached
+from the dining room: a mere clerk of a stair instead of a
+proprietor-like hall staircase. In the confusion which followed&mdash;the
+carnations had narrowly missed the blazing white gas burner high in the
+room&mdash;the bride ran away above stairs, her two bridesmaids following.
+Her mother was already there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As Miggy
+had told me, she herself was one of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>Christopha's bridesmaids, and it is
+from Miggy that I have heard something of the outcome of the story.</p>
+
+<p>Almost as soon as the door was closed there was a rap at it, a rap
+peremptory, confident.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me in," said Allen; "I'm the groom!" Chris herself opened the door.
+Her muslin-wedding gown and the little bells of lilies unfaded in her
+blond hair became her wholly, and all her simple prettiness still wore
+the mystery and authority of the hour.</p>
+
+<p>"Allen," she said, "you oughtn't to of."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir, I ought!" he protested gayly, his voice pleasant with mirth
+and with its new, deep note. "I'll never see you a bride again&mdash;a real,
+weddin'-dress bride. I had to come."</p>
+
+<p>Christopha's mother looked up from her vague, bright fabrics.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you started to take the minister the kodak album," she said
+to Allen plaintively. "Has he got anybody to show him any attention? I
+should think you might&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But the two bridesmaids edged their way into the next room, and on some
+pretext of fabrics, took Christopha's mother with them,&mdash;as if there
+were abroad some secret Word of which they knew the meaning. For Miggy
+is sufficiently dramatic to know the Word for another, though she is not
+sufficiently simple to know it for herself.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p><p>Allen sat beside his bride on the cretonne-covered skirt box. And after
+all, he did not look at her, but only at her warm left hand in his.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the funniest thing," he said, "when I see you comin' in the
+parlour lookin' so differ'nt, I'm blessed if I wasn't afraid of you.
+What do you think of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"You's afraid of my dress," Chris told him, laughing, "not me. You use'
+to be afraid of me when we's first engaged, but you ain't now. It's
+<i>me</i>. I feel afraid of you&mdash;Allen. You're&mdash;differ'nt."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed tenderly, confidently.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Boo!</i>" he said. "Now are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she answered seriously; "now."</p>
+
+<p>"Chris!" he cried boyishly, "we're married! We're goin' to keep house."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "Allen! Think of the fun of puttin' the presents in the
+house&mdash;the dishes, and the glass, and the ornaments. There won't be
+another dinin' room in town like ours. Sideboard an' plate rail, an' the
+rug not tacked down."</p>
+
+<p>Their thoughts flew to the little house, furnished and waiting, down the
+snowy street by the Triangle park: their house.</p>
+
+<p>"Dinners, and suppers, and breakfas's&mdash;just us two by ourselves," Allen
+said. "<i>And</i> the presents. My!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, and company," she reminded him,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> "that's what I want. The girls
+in to tea in our own house."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he assented. "Right away?" he wanted to know.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said, "not right away, Silly! We've got to buy curtains and
+things. I never thought I'd have so many presents," she went on happily.
+"They's two water pitchers alike. Bess says I can change hers. We'll
+take it to the City"&mdash;she gave a little bounce on the skirt box&mdash;"and
+see a show, a really, truly show."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure we will," said he, magnificently. "And I'll take you to the place
+I told you about&mdash;where I got picked up."</p>
+
+<p>The little bride nodded, her eyes softening almost maternally. It was as
+if that story were her own, the story of Allen, the little stray child
+picked up on the streets of the City by that good woman whom Chris had
+never seen. But the name of Sarah Ernestine was like a charm to Chris,
+for the woman had been to Allen father and mother both.</p>
+
+<p>Chris bent down swiftly to his hands, closed over her own, and kissed
+them.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Allen," she said, with a curious wistfulness, "will you <i>always</i>,
+always be just like you are now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I should say I would," he answered gently. "They's nobody like
+you anywheres, Chris. Mis' Chris, Mis' Allen Martin."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p><p>"Don't it scare you to say it?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir, it does," he confessed. "It's like sayin' your own name over
+the telephone. What about you? Will <i>you</i> always, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, "always. Only&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Only what?" he repeated anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "don't let's let any outside things come between us,
+Allen&mdash;like they do, like with Bess and Opie,&mdash;business and
+sewin',&mdash;that's what I'm afraid of," she ended vaguely.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, "I guess we ain't much afraid of each other, honey. I
+guess we're just afraid of what could come between us."</p>
+
+<p>A voice, unconvincing, unimportant, a part of the inessential aspect of
+alien things, detached itself from the accompaniment in the next room,
+saying something responsible and plaintive about only an hour till train
+time.</p>
+
+<p>"An hour," Allen said over, and put his arms about her, with boyish
+awkwardness for the sake of the crisp muslin gown that had so terrified
+him. She rose and stood beside him, and he waited for a moment looking
+up in her face. "Chris," he said, "I'm scared of this one hour even.
+Till train time."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll hurry up and get the hour done as quick as I can," she promised
+him gayly.</p>
+
+<p>"Honestly, now&mdash;" said Chris's mother from the vague and indeterminate
+region where she moved.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span></p><p>"Right off, Mis' Mother!" Allen said, and knew that she was in the
+doorway, with the bridesmaids laughing beside her. And then he went down
+the stairway, his first radiant moment gone by.</p>
+
+<p>In the dining room the messenger was waiting. The messenger had arrived,
+in the clear cold of the night, from a drive across the Caledonia hills,
+and some one had sent him to that deserted room to warm himself. But
+Allen found him breathing on his fingers and staring out the frosty
+window into the dark. It was Jacob Ernestine, brother to the woman who
+had brought up Allen and had been kind to him when nobody else in the
+world was kind. For years Sarah Ernestine had been "West"&mdash;and with that
+awful inarticulacy of her class, mere distance had become an impassable
+gulf and the Silence had taken her. Allen had not even known that she
+meant to return. And now, Jacob told him, she was here, at his own home
+back in the hills&mdash;Sarah and a child, a little stray boy, whom she had
+found and befriended as she had once befriended Allen. And she was
+dying.</p>
+
+<p>"She didn't get your letter, I guess," the old man said, "'bout gettin'
+married. She come to-day, so sick she couldn't hold her head up. I see
+she didn't know nothin' 'bout your doin's. I didn't let her know. I jus'
+drove in, like split, to tell you, when the doctor went. He says she
+can't&mdash;she won't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> ... till mornin'. I thought," he apologized wistfully,
+"ye'd want to know, anyways, so I jus' drove in."</p>
+
+<p>"That was all right," Allen said. "You done right, Jacob."</p>
+
+<p>Then he stood still for a moment, looking down at the bright figures of
+the carpet. Jacob lived twelve miles back in the hills.</p>
+
+<p>"How'd you come?" Allen asked him briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"I've got the new cutter," the old man answered, with a touch of eager
+pride. "I'll drive ye."</p>
+
+<p>Then some one in the parlour caught sight of the bridegroom, and they
+all called to him and came where he was, besieging him with
+good-natured, trivial talk. The old man waited, looking out the window
+into the dark. He had known them all since they were children, and their
+merrymaking did not impress him as wholly real. Neither, for that
+matter, did Allen's wedding. Besides, his own sister was dying&mdash;somehow
+putting an end to the time when he and she had been at home together.
+That was all he had thought of during his drive to town, and hardly at
+all of Allen and his wedding. He waited patiently now while Allen got
+the wedding guests back to the parlour, and then slipped away from them,
+and came through the dining room to the stair door.</p>
+
+<p>"Stay there a minute," Allen bade him shortly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> and went back to the
+upper floor and to Chris's door again.</p>
+
+<p>It was her mother who answered his summons this time, and Allen's manner
+and face checked her words. Before he had done telling her what had
+happened, Chris herself was on the threshold, already in sober brown, as
+one who has put aside rainbows and entered on life. She had a little
+brown hat in one hand, and for the other hand he groped out and held it
+while he told her, as well as he could.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I've got to go, Chrissie," he ended miserably.</p>
+
+<p>She met his eyes, her own soft with sympathy for the plight of the other
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes," she said quietly, "of course we've got to go."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her breathlessly. That possibility had not crossed his
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>"You!" he cried. "You couldn't go, dear. Twelve miles out in Caledonia,
+cold as it is to-night. You&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>In spite of her sympathy, she laughed at him then.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you honestly think I wouldn't?" she asked, in a kind of wonder.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm sure&mdash;" began her mother. But the two bridesmaids manifestly
+heard the Word again, for they talked with her both at once.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p><p>"Not with Jacob, though," Chris was saying decisively. "You help father
+and the boys get out our cutter, Allen."</p>
+
+<p>Allen strode past the mother and lifted his wife's face in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean it?" he demanded. "Will you go&mdash;in the cold&mdash;all that long
+way&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You Silly!" she answered, and drew away from him and set the little
+brown hat on her head.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above">The road lay white before them, twelve miles of snow and stars to
+Jacob's cottage among the Caledonia hills. Jacob had gone on&mdash;from the
+crest of the rise by the Corner church they saw him and heard the faint
+signalling of his bells. It was a place, that rise by the Corner church
+on the edge of the village, where two others in such case might have
+drawn rein to look at Everything, stretching before, rhythmic crest and
+shallow, and all silent and waiting. But not these two, incurious as the
+gods, na&iuml;ve as the first lovers. Only, though of this they were
+unconscious, they saw things a little differently that night.</p>
+
+<p>"Look!" said the girl, with a sign to the lowlands, expressive with
+lights. "So many folks's houses&mdash;homes, all started. I s'pose it was
+just as big a thing for them. But <i>theirs</i> don't seem like anything,
+side of ours!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p><p>"That's so, too," assented Allen. "And theirs <i>ain't</i> anything side of
+ours!" he maintained stoutly.</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir," she agreed, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>Then she grew suddenly grave, and fell silent for a little, her eyes
+here and there on the valley lights, while Allen calculated aloud the
+time of the arrival at Jacob's house.</p>
+
+<p>"Allen!" she said at last.</p>
+
+<p>"Here!" he answered. "I'm here, you bet."</p>
+
+<p>"Just look at the lights," she said seriously, "and then <i>think</i>.
+There's Bess and Opie&mdash;not speakin' to each other. Over there's the
+Hubbelthwait farm that they've left for the hotel&mdash;an' Threat
+Hubbelthwait drunk all the time. An' Howells's, poor and can't pay, and
+don't care if they can't, and quarrels so folks can hear 'em from the
+road. And the Moneys', that's so ugly to the children, and her findin'
+fault, and him can't speak without an oath. That only leaves the
+Topladys' over there that's real, regular people. And she kind o' bosses
+him."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, looking at the lights with
+a difference.</p>
+
+<p>Chris's right hand was warm in his great-coat pocket, and she suddenly
+snuggled close to him, her chin on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Allen," she said, "I'm <i>afraid</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"What? On the Plank Road?" he wanted to know, missing her meaning.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p><p>"All them folks started out with presents, and a house, like us," she
+said, "and with their minds all made up to bein' happy. But just look at
+'em."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Allen, reasonably, "we <i>ain't</i> them."</p>
+
+<p>"We might get like 'em," she insisted. "How can you tell? Folks just do
+get that way or they just don't. How can you <i>tell</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"I s'pose that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother's got a picture of the Hubbelthwaits when they was married,"
+Chris pursued. "Her in white an' slippers and bracelets, and him slick
+as a kitten's foot. Think of her now, Allen, with <i>bracelets</i>. And him
+drunk all the time, 'most. How can you tell how things'll turn out? Oh,
+Allen, I <i>am</i>! I'm afraid."</p>
+
+<p>He bent to her face and laid his own against hers, glowing and cold and
+with fresh, warm lips.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's just try to be happy and keep ourselves happy," he said.</p>
+
+<p>The troubled woman was still in her face, but at his touch the fears
+went a little away, and the valley lights being already left behind
+among the echoes of the bells, they forgot both the lights and their
+shadows and drifted back to talk about the new house and the presents,
+and the dinners and suppers and breakfasts together. For these were the
+stuff of which the time was made. As it was made, too,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> of that shadowy,
+hovering fear for the future, and the tragic pity of their errand, and
+of sad conjecture about the little stray child whom Sarah Ernestine had
+brought.</p>
+
+<p>"That ain't it a'ready, is it?" Christopha exclaimed when they saw
+Jacob's cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"It just is&mdash;it's 'leven o'clock now," Allen answered, and gave the
+horse to the old man; and they two went within.</p>
+
+<p>The light in the room, like the lights back in the valley, was as if
+some great outside influence here and there should part the darkness to
+win a little stage for a scene of the tragedy: in the valley, for the
+drunkenness at the Hubbelthwaits', the poverty at the Howells', the ill
+nature at the Moneys'; and here, in Jacob's cottage, for death. There
+was no doubt of the quality of the hour in the cottage. The room was
+instinct with the outside touch. Already it was laid upon the woman in
+the bed, and with a mystery and authority not unlike that which had come
+upon Christopha in her marriage hour and was upon her still.</p>
+
+<p>The woman knew Allen, smiled at him, made him understand her
+thankfulness that he had come. At Christopha she looked kindly and quite
+without curiosity. Some way, that absence of curiosity at what was so
+vital to him gripped Allen's heart, and without his knowing the process,
+showed him the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> nature of death. The neighbour who had been with the
+sick woman slipped outside, and as she went she patted Chris's shoulder;
+and Allen felt that she understood, and he was dumbly grateful to her.</p>
+
+<p>Allen sat by the bed and held the hand of his foster-mother; and Chris
+moved about the room, heating water for a little pot of tea. And so it
+was Chris who first saw the child. He was sitting at the end of the wood
+box, on the floor before the oven&mdash;that little stray boy whom Sarah
+Ernestine had picked up as she had once picked up Allen. He looked up at
+Christopha with big, soft eyes, na&iuml;ve as the first bird. Almost before
+she knew that she meant to do so, Chris stooped, with a wondering word,
+and took him in her arms. He clung to her and she sat in the rocking
+chair near the window where stood Jacob's carnation plant. And she tried
+both to look at the child and to love him, at the same time.</p>
+
+<p>"See, Allen," she said, "this little boy!"</p>
+
+<p>The child looked over his shoulder at Allen, his little arms leaning on
+Christopha's breast. And very likely because he had felt strange and
+lonely and now was taken some account of, he suddenly and beautifully
+smiled, and you would have loved him the more for the way he did that.</p>
+
+<p>The woman, lying with closed eyes, understood and remembered.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p><p>"Allen," she said, "that's little John. You find him&mdash;a home
+somewheres. If you can...."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes, mother, we'll do that. We can do that, I guess. Don't you
+worry any about <i>him</i>," said Allen.</p>
+
+<p>"He's all alone. I donno his name, even.... But you be good to him,
+Allen, will you?" she said restlessly. "I found him somewheres."</p>
+
+<p>"Like me," Allen said.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head feebly.</p>
+
+<p>"Worse," she said, "worse. I knew I couldn't&mdash;do much. I just&mdash;thought I
+could keep him from bein' wicked&mdash;mebbe."</p>
+
+<p>"Like you did me, mother, I guess," the boy said.</p>
+
+<p>Then she opened her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Allen!" she said clearly. "Oh, if I did! When I think how mebbe I done
+that&mdash;<i>I ain't afraid to die</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Jacob Ernestine came in the room and stood rubbing one hand on the back
+of the other. He saw the kettle's high column of steam and looked
+inquiringly at Chris. But she sat mothering the little silent boy, who
+looked at her gravely, or smiled, or pulled at her collar, responsive to
+her touch as she was thrillingly responsive to his nearness. So Jacob
+lifted the kettle to the back of the stove, moved his carnation plant a
+little away from the frost of the pane, and settled himself at the
+bed's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> foot to watch. And when, after a long time, the child fell
+asleep, Chris would not lay him down. Allen would have taken him, and
+Jacob came and tried to do so, but she shook her head and they let her
+be. She sat so still, hour after hour, that at last she herself dozed;
+and it seemed to her, in a manner of dreaming, that the carnation plant
+on the window-sill had lifted and multiplied until something white and
+like fragrance filled the room; and this, then, she dreamed, was what
+death is, death in the room for the woman. Or might it not be the
+perfume of her own bridal bouquet, the carnations which she had carried
+that night? But then the child stirred, and Christopha roused a little,
+and after all, the sense of flowers in the room was the sense of the
+little one in her arms. As if many things mean one thing.</p>
+
+<p>It was toward dawn that the end came, quite simply and with no manner of
+finality, as if one were to pass into another chamber. And after that,
+as quickly as might be, Christopha and Allen made ready to drive back to
+the village for the last bitter business of all.</p>
+
+<p>Allen, in the barn with Jacob, wondered what he must do. Allen was
+sore-hearted at his loss, grateful for the charge that he had been
+given; but what was he to do? The child ought not to stay in Jacob's
+cottage. If Chris's mother would take him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> for a little,&mdash;but Allen
+knew, without at all being able to define it, her plaintive, burdened
+manner, the burdened manner of the irresponsible. Still puzzling over
+this, he brought the cutter to the side door; and the side door opened,
+and Chris came out in the pale light, leading the little boy&mdash;awake,
+warmly wrapped, ready for the ride.</p>
+
+<p>"Where you goin' to take him to, Chrissie?" Allen asked breathlessly.</p>
+
+<p>"Some of the neighbours, I guess, ain't we?" she answered. "I donno. I
+thought we could see. He mustn't be left here&mdash;now."</p>
+
+<p>"No, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen only. "He mustn't."</p>
+
+<p>The three drove out together into the land lying about the gate of dawn.
+A fragment of moon was in the east. There was about the hour something
+primitive, as if, in this loneliest of all the hours, the world reverted
+to type, remembered ancient savage differences, and fell in the primal
+lines.</p>
+
+<p>"Allen," Chris said, "you'll miss her. I mean miss knowin' she's alive."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," the boy said, "I'll miss knowin' she's alive."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we must try to settle what to do with the little boy," she
+suggested hastily.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he assented, "that's right. We've got to settle that," and at
+this they fell silent.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p><p>"There's Hopkins's," Chris said presently, nodding toward the home of
+the neighbour who had waited their coming to Jacob's cottage. "But
+she'll hev to be over there lots to-day and to-morrow. And she was kep'
+up so late it don't hardly seem as if we'd ought to stop and ask her."</p>
+
+<p>"No," Allen said, "I donno as it does, really."</p>
+
+<p>"There's Cripps's," she suggested a little farther on, "but they ain't
+up yet. I donno's 'twould do to roust 'em up."</p>
+
+<p>"No," Allen agreed, "best not do that, I guess." Christopha looked over
+the great fields.</p>
+
+<p>"My!" she said, "you'll miss her&mdash;miss thinkin' of her bein' somewheres.
+Allen! Where do you s'pose she is?"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought o' that," said Allen, soberly.</p>
+
+<p>"Goodness!" said Christopha, and shivered, and suddenly drew the child
+close to her. He was sleeping again. And it was so, with his little body
+between them, that she could no longer keep her hand warm in Allen's
+greatcoat pocket. But above the child's head her eyes and Allen's would
+meet, and in that hour the two had never been so near. Nearer they were
+than in the talk about the new house, and the presents, and the dinners
+and suppers and breakfasts together.</p>
+
+<p>They passed the farmhouses that looked asleep, and the farmhouses that
+looked watchfully awake<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> while their owners slept. It would not be well
+to knock at these, still and sombre-windowed. And though there were
+lights at the Moneys' and at the Howells' and at the Hubbelthwait farm,
+and even at Bess and Opie's, their gates, by common consent, were also
+passed. Nor did they stop at the Topladys'.</p>
+
+<p>"They're real, regular people with a grown son," Chris said of them
+vaguely, "and it don't seem hardly fair to give 'em little John, too!"</p>
+
+<p>"Little John," Allen said over wonderingly. When they called him that
+the child seemed suddenly a person, like themselves. Their eyes met
+above his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Allen!" Chris said.</p>
+
+<p>"What? What is it?" he asked eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>"Could&mdash;do you think&mdash;could <i>we</i>?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"My!" he answered, "I been a-wishin'&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Involuntarily he drew rein. They were on the rise by the Corner church
+at the edge of the village. The village, rhythmic crest of wall and
+shallow of lawn, lay below them, and near the little Triangle park would
+be their waiting house.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you mean have him live with us?" Allen made sure.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I did," Chris said, "if we had the money."</p>
+
+<p>"Well!" said the boy, "well, I guess <i>that'll</i> be all right!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p><p>"How much <i>she'd</i> of liked it," said Chris.</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't she, though," Allen assented; "wouldn't she? And you heard
+what she said&mdash;that about keepin' him from bein'&mdash;wicked?
+Chrissie&mdash;<i>could</i> we, you and me? This little fellow?"</p>
+
+<p>Chris lifted her face and nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't afraid," she said simply.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't either," her husband said.</p>
+
+<p>As if, in this new future, there were less need of fear than in the
+future which had sought to "try to be happy and keep ourselves happy."</p>
+
+<p>They looked down where their house would be, near the gate of the coming
+dawn. And&mdash;as two others in such case might have seen&mdash;it was as if they
+were the genii of their own mysterious future, a future whose solution
+trembled very near. For with the charge of the child had come a courage,
+even as the dead woman had known, when she thought of her charge of
+Allen, that she was not afraid to die.</p>
+
+<p>"Allen," said Chris, stumblingly, "it don't seem as if we could get like
+the Howells' an' the Hubbelthwaits and them. Somehow it don't seem as if
+we <i>could</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Allen, "we couldn't. That's so, ain't it?"</p>
+
+<p>Above little John's head their eyes met in a kind of new betrothal, new
+marriage, new birth. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> when he would have driven on, Allen pulled at
+the reins again, and,</p>
+
+<p>"Chrissie," he said suddenly, "if afterwards&mdash;there should be
+anybody&mdash;else. I mean for us. Would&mdash;would you keep on lovin' this
+little kiddie, too?"</p>
+
+<p>She met his eyes bravely, sweetly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you Silly," she said, "of course I would!"</p>
+
+<p>At which Allen laughed joyously, confidently.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Chris," he cried, "we're married! For always an' always. An'
+here's this little old man to see to. Who's afraid?"</p>
+
+<p>Then they kissed each other above the head of the sleeping child, and
+drove on toward the village, and toward their waiting house.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>VIII</span> <span class="smaller">THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT</span></h2>
+
+<p>When I opened my door this morning, the Outdoors was like a thing coming
+to meet me. I mean that it was like a person coming to meet me&mdash;no, it
+was like many persons, hand in hand and, so to speak, mind in mind; a
+great company of whom straightway I became one. I felt that swift, good
+gladness that <i>now</i> was <i>now</i>,&mdash;that delicate, fleeting Now, that very
+coquette of time, given and withdrawn. I remember that I could not soon
+go to sleep on the night of the day on which I learned that the Hebrew
+tongue has no present tense. They could not catch at that needle-point
+of experience, and we can do so. I like to glory in it by myself when no
+one else is thinking of it; to think aside, as if <i>to</i> Something, that
+now is being now.... And I long for the time when we shall all know it
+together, all the time, and understand its potentialities and let it be
+breath and pulse to keep the Spirit Future alive and pure.</p>
+
+<p>It would have been no great wonder if I had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> rejoicing past all
+reason in the moment. For at that very instant came Calliope Marsh, home
+for the Java entertainment which was set for to-night, and driving to my
+gate the Sykes's white horse in the post-office store delivery wagon.
+And as I saw her, so precisely did she look like herself, that I could
+have believed that Now was not Now, but Then, when first I knew her.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope brought the buckled lines informally over the horse's head and
+let them fall about the tie post, and ran to me. I am afraid that I am
+not going to tell what we said. But it was full of being once more in
+the presence of those whom you love. Do you not think that such being
+together is a means of actual life transcending both breath and
+perception?</p>
+
+<p>When our greeting was done, Calliope sat down on the stair in my hall,
+and,</p>
+
+<p>"Hev you got any spare candle-shades an' sherbet glasses, an' pretty
+doilies an' lunch cloths an' rugs an' willow chairs an' a statue of
+almost anybody an' a meat-chopper with a peanut-butter attachment an' a
+cap an' gown like colleges?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>And when I told her that I thought I might have some of these things,</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Calliope said, "she wants 'em all. Who do I mean by She? Mis'
+Oliver Wheeler Johnson, the personal queen of things."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p><p>She leaned forward, hugging her thin little arms, and she looked up at
+me from under the brim of her round straw hat.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm in need of grace," she said shortly. "I never felt like this toward
+any human being. But I tell you, when that little Mis' Johnson comes
+dilly-nippin' around where I am, noddin' her blue ostrich tip, seems my
+spine just stiffens out in me like it was going to strike at her, same
+as a stick. Do you know the feelin'?"</p>
+
+<p>I answered reluctantly, and not as I should wish to answer; for it is
+certain that I, too, have seldom seen Mrs. Johnson without an urgency to
+be gone from her little fluttering presence. But Calliope! I could not
+imagine Calliope shrinking from any one, or knowing herself alien to
+another.</p>
+
+<p>"For sixty years," she answered my thought of her, "I've never known
+what it was to couldn't bear anybody, not without I had a reason. They
+ain't much of anybody I what you might say don't like, without they're
+malicious or ugly a-purpose. Ugly by nature, ugly an' can't help it,
+ugly an' don't know it&mdash;I can forgive all them. An' Mis' Johnson ain't
+ugly at all&mdash;she's just a real sweet little slip of a thing, doin' her
+hard-workin' best. But when I first see her in church that day, I says
+to myself: 'I'll give that little piece two months to carry the sail
+she's carryin' here to-day; four months<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> to hev folks tired of her, an'
+six months to get herself the cold shoulder all 'round.' An' I hold to
+what I said. An' when her baby-blue nineteen-inch feather swings in an'
+'round, an' when she tells how things ought to be, I kind o' bristle all
+over me. I'm ashamed of it&mdash;an' yet, do you know, I like to give in to
+it?" Calliope said solemnly. "I donno what's come over me. Hev you heard
+where the Java entertainment's put to be?"</p>
+
+<p>I had not heard, nor was I sure just why it was of Java, save that
+Friendship is continually giving entertainments with foreign names and
+practising a wild imperialism to carry out an effect of foreign parts.
+And since, at the missionary meeting which had projected the affair,
+Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had told about <i>their</i> Java entertainment in
+<i>their</i> church at home, that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady, who
+was president of the society, had appointed her chairman of the Java
+entertainment committee.</p>
+
+<p>"And," Calliope informed me, "she's picked out the engine-house for it.
+Yes, sir,&mdash;the fire-engine house. No other place was <i>quaint</i> enough. No
+other place lent itself to decoration probabilities&mdash;or somethin' like
+that. She turned her back flat on the church an' went round to empty
+stores, lookin' for <i>quaint-ity</i>. One while I thought she'd hev us in
+the Chinese laundry, she seemed that took with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> the tomato-coloured
+signs on the walls. But, finally, she lit on the engine-house; an' when
+she see the big, bare engine-room, with the big, shinin' engine in it,
+an' harnesses hangin' from them rough board beams in a kind of avenoo,
+an' the board walls all streaked down, she spatted her hands an' 'lowed
+we'd hev our Java there. 'What a dear, quaint place,' s's she,&mdash;'so
+<i>flexible</i>!' She held out about the harnesses bein' so quaintly
+picturesque an' the fire-engine a piece o' resistance&mdash;or somethin' like
+that. An' she rents the room, without ay, yes, no, nor boo. My way of
+thinkin', a chairman ought to hev boo for a background, even if she <i>is</i>
+chairman. That's where she wants the statue an' the nut butter an' the
+cap an' gown. Can we borrow 'em of you?"</p>
+
+<p>"The engine-house!" I repeated incredulously. "You cannot mean the
+fire-engine house, Calliope?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do," Calliope said firmly, "the quaint, flexible fire-engine house.
+They ain't been a fire in Friendship in over two years, so Mis' Johnson
+says we ain't got that to think of&mdash;an' I donno as we hev. An' they
+never use the engine any more, now they've got city water, excep' for
+fires in the country, and then nobody ever gets in to give the alarm
+till the house is burned down an' no need to bother goin'. Even if they
+do get in in some sort of season, the department has to go to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> mayor
+to get a permit to go outside the city limits. It was so when the
+Topladys' barn burned. Timothy told 'em, when they come gallopin' up
+after it was most done smokin', that if they had held off a little
+longer they could have been a sight of help to him in shinglin' the new
+one. Oh, no, they ain't much of any danger of our being disturbed by a
+fire in them two hours to-night. Anyhow, they can't be a fire. Mis'
+Oliver Wheeler Johnson said so."</p>
+
+<p>We laughed like children as we loaded my "Java" stuffs on the wagon.
+Calliope was a valiant helper to Mrs. Johnson, and so I told her. She
+was standing in the wagon box, one arm about my palm, the other free for
+driving.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm the chairman o' the refreshments, too," she confessed. "Oh, well.
+Yourself you can boss round, you know," she threw back, smiling;
+"anybody can do that. But your feelin's you're some cramped about
+runnin'."</p>
+
+<p>It is certain that Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson was signally unfitted for
+a future in Friendship Village. She was a woman of some little world in
+which she had moved before she came to us, and in the two worlds she
+perceived no difference. Or, where she saw a difference, she sought to
+modify it by a touch when a breath would have been too much, and the
+only factor of potency would have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> been a kind of potency of spirit,
+which she did not possess.</p>
+
+<p>The Oliver Wheeler Johnsons had moved to Friendship only three months
+before, and nobody had looked for them at church on their first Sunday.
+"Movin' so, you want your Sabbath to take some rest in, an' you ain't
+expected to dress yourself up an' get out to Sunday service an' face
+strangers," the village said&mdash;and when the two walked into church while
+the responses were being made nearly everybody lost the place.</p>
+
+<p>They were very young, and they were extremely well dressed.</p>
+
+<p>"He's got on one o' the long coats," comment ran after church, "an' he's
+got a real soft-speakin' voice. But he seems to know how to act."</p>
+
+<p>And, "I declare, nice white gloves an' a nineteen-inch baby-blue ostrich
+feather durin' movin' seems some like puttin' on."</p>
+
+<p>And, "The back of her dress fits her just like the front, an' I must say
+she knows it. No pullin' down the jacket or hitchin' the strings forward
+for <i>her</i>, when she stands up!"</p>
+
+<p>As Miggy, who first told me about that day, had said, "That Sunday
+morning, Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson was the belle of the congregation."</p>
+
+<p>After service that day, instead of going directly home or waiting to be
+addressed, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> Johnson had spoken to the woman with
+whom she had been seated. It was Mis' Postmaster Sykes.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you so much," Mrs. Johnson said, "for letting us share your pew.
+May I present my husband? We have come to Friendship to live, and we
+shall be coming here to church. And I shall want to join your Ladies'
+Aid Society and your Missionary Circle and, perhaps, be in the
+Sunday-school right away. I&mdash;I think I'll be less homesick&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Actually," Mis' Sykes said afterward, "she took my breath clear away
+from me. I never heard of such a thing. Of course, we're real glad to
+hev our newcomers Christian people, but we want quiet Christians. An'
+did you notice how she was when I give her an introduction around? Why,
+she up an' out with somethin' to say to everybody. Just a neat little
+'How d' do' wouldn't do for her to remark. I always suspicion them
+talkative-at-first kind. It's like they'd been on the stage or brought
+up in a hotel."</p>
+
+<p>When she first came to the Ladies' Aid and the missionary meetings, Mrs.
+Johnson "said something." She was "up to her feet" three or four times
+at each session with suggestion, information, or description of how they
+did in her home church. And some way I think that what chiefly separated
+her from the village was the way that inevitable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> nineteen-inch blue
+ostrich plume on the little woman's hat bobbed and won attention and was
+everywhere at once. Or, perhaps&mdash;such creatures of wax we are to our
+impressions&mdash;it may have been little Mrs. Johnson's mere way of lifting
+her small, pointed chin when she talked, and of frowning and
+over-emphasizing. Or it may have been that she stood with her hands
+clasped behind her in what seemed to Friendship exaggerated ease, or
+that she smiled arbitrarily and ingratiatingly as she talked when there
+was absolutely nothing at which to smile. I think that these made her
+seem as alien to us as, in varied measure, certain moral defects might
+have done.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, she mentioned with familiarity objects and usages of which
+Friendship Village knew nothing: Carriage shoes, a new cake of soap for
+each guest, some kind of ice served, it was incredulously repeated, "in
+the middle o' the meal!" She innocently let fall that she sent to the
+city for her letter-paper. She had travelled in a state-room on a train,
+and she said so. She knew a noted woman. She used, we saw from the
+street, shaded candles on the table when she and her husband were at
+supper alone. She thought nothing of ordering Jimmy Sturgis and the bus
+to take her down town to her marketing on a rainy day. She had inclined
+to blame the village that Daphne Street was not paved, instead of
+joining<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> with the village to blame somebody else. Above all, she tried
+to buy our old furniture. I do not know that another might not have done
+all these quite without giving offence, and, indeed, rather have left us
+impressed with her superior familiarity with an envied world. But by the
+time of the Java entertainment Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had
+innocently alienated half Friendship Village. And this morning Calliope
+merely voiced what I knew to be the sentiment of most of Mrs. Johnson's
+neighbours and acquaintances. For these people are the kindly of earth;
+but they are of earth, where reign both the centrifugal and centripetal
+forces,&mdash;and the control is not always so swift as science and the human
+heart could wish.</p>
+
+<p>At five o'clock to-day&mdash;the day set for the Java evening
+entertainment&mdash;I made my way to the engine-house. This was partly
+because I wished to be as much as possible with Calliope during her few
+days in the village, and partly it was because the affair would belong
+to the class of festivity which I am loath to miss, and I think that,
+for Friendship's sake, I will never willingly pass by a "hall" in which
+is to be found a like diversion. Already on the great room, receiving
+its final preparation, had descended something of the excited spirit of
+the evening: the heat, the insufficient light, the committee members'
+shrill, rollicking children sliding on the floor, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> booths which in
+all bazaars contain with a precision fairly bewildering the same class
+of objects; and the inevitable sense of hurry and silk waists and aching
+feet and mustn't-take-your-change-back. But to all these things the Java
+engine-house affair would add an element of novelty, almost a flavour of
+romance. Certainly the room lent itself to "decoration probabilities,"
+as Calliope had vaguely quoted; it had been a roller-skating rink,
+utilized by the fire-department on the decline of the pastime, and there
+was, as Mrs. Johnson's <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i>, the fire-engine.</p>
+
+<p>I had never before been in the engine-house&mdash;you know how there will be
+commonplace enough spots in your own town to which you never go: the
+engine-house, the church belfry, the wood yard, upstairs over this store
+and that, and grocery cellars whose sloping trap-doors, open now and
+then to the walk, are as alien as the inside of the trunks of your
+trees. When I stepped in the engine-house, it seemed insistently a place
+in which I had never been before. And this may have been partly because
+the whole idea of a village fire-department is to me singular: the
+waiting horses and ladders and hose, whose sole reason for being is
+merely ameliorative, and never human and preventive; that pealing of the
+sharp, peculiar, terrifying alarm and summons first imprinting something
+on the very air, stabbing us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> with <i>Halt</i> while we count the bell
+strokes for the ward, and then clanging the wild fury of the
+quick-stroke command to help.</p>
+
+<p>To-day the great glittering fire-engine, flanked by hose-cart and
+hook-and-ladder wagon, occupied almost wonderingly the head of the room
+which had been invaded, and an inspired committee had garlanded the
+engine with paper roses and American flags. The flag of the Netherlands,
+copied from a dictionary and wrought in red-white-and-blue cambric with
+a silver crown, drooped meditatively from the smoke-stack; a scarlet fez
+and a peacock-feather fan hung on the supply hose; and on the
+tongue-bracer was fixed a pink sofa cushion from Mis' Amanda Toplady's
+parlour, with an olive Indian gentleman in a tinsel zouave jacket
+stamped on the cover. On the two big sliding doors, back of which stood
+the fire company's horses, were tacked innumerable Javanese trifles more
+picturesque than authentic; and on outlying booths and tables there were
+others. Directly before the engine was to be the tea-table, where Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes was to serve Java tea from a Java canister, loaned by
+the Post-office store.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as I entered I sought out Calliope's booth, a huge affair
+constructed of rugs whose red-tongued, couchant dogs and bounding fawns
+somewhat marred the Eastern effect. And within, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> found myself in a
+circle of the Friendship women whom I know best&mdash;all of them tired with
+that deadly tiredness born of a day's work at a church fair of any
+nation. But at once I saw that it was not merely fatigue which was
+disquieting them.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope was leaning against a bit of Bagelen blue, loaned by the new
+minister's wife. And she said to me as if, I thought, in explanation of
+what I was to hear,&mdash;"I guess we're all pretty tired. Most of us look
+like we wanted to pant. I'm all of a shake, myself."</p>
+
+<p>When Mis' Postmaster Sykes spoke unsmilingly, I understood:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It ain't the bein' tired," she disclaimed; "tired I can stand an' hev
+stood since my own birth. But it's the bein' commanded 'round&mdash;me,
+<i>commanded</i>&mdash;by that little I'm-the-one-an'-you-do-as-I-say out there!"</p>
+
+<p>"Land-a-livin' an' a-dyin'!" said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "I
+declare if I know whether I'm on foot or on horseback. It's bad enough
+to hev to run a fair, without you've got to be run yourself, too. Ain't
+it enough for Mis' Johnson to be made chairman without her wantin' to
+boss besides? She might as well say to me, 'Mis' Holcomb, you do
+everything the opposite way from the way you've just done it,' an' hev
+it over with."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p><p>Mis' Amanda Toplady&mdash;even that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda&mdash;shook her
+head.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Johnson surely acts used to bein' bowed down to," she admitted;
+"she seems fair bent on lordin' it. My land, if she wasn't bound to
+borrow my Tea rose plant that's just nearin' ready to bud."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope laughed, a little ruefully, and wholly in sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>"Honest," she said, "I guess what's the matter with all of us ain't so
+much what she does as the particular way she does it. It's so with some
+folks. They just seem to sort of <i>set</i> you all over, when you come near
+'em&mdash;same as the cold does to gravy. We'd all ought to wrostle with the
+feelin', I expect."</p>
+
+<p>"I expect we had," said Mis' Holcomb, "but you could wrostle all your
+days with vinegar an' it'd pucker your mouth same way."</p>
+
+<p>"Funny part," Calliope observed, "everybody feels just alike about her.
+When she skips around so sort o' momentous, we all want to dodge. I felt
+sorry for her, first, because I thought she was in for nervous
+prostration. But after a while I see it wasn't disease&mdash;it was just her
+feelin' so up an' down significant, you might say."</p>
+
+<p>"I donno," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "but it's part the way
+she says her <i>a</i>'s. That real <i>a</i>-soundin' <i>a</i> kind," she explained
+vaguely.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p><p>"She's so right an' left cuffy&mdash;I guess that's the whole thing,"
+Calliope put it in her rich idiom.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Mis' Amanda, sadly, "there must be somethin' we could like
+her for, even if it was only her husband."</p>
+
+<p>"He ain't what I'd call much, either," Calliope dismissed Mr. Oliver
+Wheeler Johnson positively; "he's got too soft-speakin' a voice. I like
+a man's voice to rumble up soft from his chest an' not slip down thin
+from his brain."</p>
+
+<p>I remember that I listened in a great wonder to these women whom I had
+seen at many an office of friendliness to strangers and aliens. Yet as I
+looked across the floor at that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson&mdash;who,
+in the hat with the blue plume, was everywhere, directing, altering,
+objecting, arranging, commanding and, especially, doing over&mdash;I most
+unwillingly felt much as they felt. If only Mrs. Johnson had not
+continually lifted her little pointed chin. If only she had not
+perpetually and ingratiatingly smiled when there was nothing at which to
+smile at all.</p>
+
+<p>Then Abigail Arnold hurried up to us with a tray of cups for the Java
+tea.</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope," she said to the chairman of the refreshments, "Mis' Johnson
+jus' put up her little chin an' says, 'What! ain't we no lemons for the
+tea?'"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p><p>Calliope compressed her lips and lifted their thin line tight and high.</p>
+
+<p>"Lemins," she replied, "ain't necessarily found in Java. I've a good big
+mind to go home to bed."</p>
+
+<p>Then we saw little Mrs. Johnson's blue linen dress hurrying toward us
+with the waving line of the blue feather above her, like a last little
+daring flourish by the artist of her. She was really very pretty and
+childish, with a manner of moving in wreaths and lines and never in
+solids. Her little feet twinkled along like the signature to the pretty
+picture of her. But yet she was not appealing. She was like an
+overconfident child whom you long to shut in a closet. Yes, I understand
+that I sound like a barbarian in these days of splendid corrective
+treatment of children who are studied and not stormed at. And in this
+treatment I believe to the uttermost. And yet, overconfidence in a child
+is of all things the most&mdash;I will amend what I said: Mrs. Oliver Wheeler
+Johnson was like an overconfident child whom you long to shut in a
+closet because of your ignorance of what else on earth to do. No doubt
+there is a better way, but none of us knew it. And she came toward us
+intent, every one felt, on some radical change in arrangements, though
+the big room was now in the pink of appointment and ready to be left
+while the committee went home to sup on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> "just sauce and
+bread-and-butter," and to don silk waists.</p>
+
+<p>We saw little Mrs. Johnson hurrying toward us, upon a background of the
+great, patient room, all-tolerant of its petty bedizening. And then Mrs.
+Johnson, we in Calliope's booth, the sliding, rollicking children, and
+all the others about stood still, at the sharp, peculiar terrifying
+alarm and summons which seemed to imprint something on the very air,
+stabbing us with <i>Halt</i> that we might count the bell strokes for the
+ward, and clanging a wild fury of the quick-stroke command to help. For
+the first time in two years the Friendship fire alarm was sounding from
+the tower above our heads.</p>
+
+<p>There was a panting sweep and scurry for the edges of the room, as
+instantly a gong on the wall sounded with the alarm, and the two big
+sliding doors went back, scattering like feathers the innumerable
+Javanese trifles that had been tacked there. Forward, down the rug-hung
+vista, plunged the two big horses of the department. We saw the Java
+tea-table borne to earth, the Javanese exhibits adorning outlying
+counters swept away, and all the "decoration probabilities" vanish in
+savage wreck. Then the quaintly picturesque harnesses fell to the
+horses' necks, their hoofs trampled terrifyingly on the loose boards of
+the floor, and forth from the yawning doors the horses pounded, dragging
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i>, with garlands on its sides, the pink zouave
+cushion crushed beneath it, and the flag of the Netherlands streaming
+from the stack. Horses rushed thither in competition, came thundering at
+the doors, and galloped to place before the two carts. I think not a
+full minute can have been consumed. But the ruin of the Java
+entertainment committee's work was unbelievably complete. Though there
+had been not a fire in Friendship Village in two years, that night, of
+all nights, Jimmy Sturgis's "hay-barn," for the omnibus horses, "took it
+on itself," it was said, "to go to work an' burn up." And Jimmy's barn
+is outside the city limits, so that the <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i> had to be
+used. And Jimmy is in the fire-department, so that the company galloped
+informally to the rescue without the benefit of the mayor's authority.</p>
+
+<p>As the last of the department disappeared, and the women of the
+committee stood looking at one another&mdash;tired with the deadly tiredness
+of a day such as theirs&mdash;a little blue linen figure sprang upon a chair
+and clasped her hands behind her, and a blue ostrich feather lifted and
+dipped as she spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"Quickly!" Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson cried. "All hands at work now!
+Mrs. Sykes, will you set up the tea-table? You can get more dishes from
+my house. Mrs. Toplady, this booth, please. You can make it right in no
+time. Mrs. Holcomb, you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> will have to do your booth entirely over&mdash;you
+can get some things from my house. Miss Marsh&mdash;ah, Calliope Marsh, you
+must go to my house for my lace curtains&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled ingratiatingly and surely arbitrarily, for we all knew full
+well that there was absolutely nothing to smile at. And with that
+Calliope's indignation, as she afterward said, "kind of crystallized and
+boiled over." I remember how she stood, hugging her thin little arms and
+speaking her defiance.</p>
+
+<p>"I donno how you feel, Mis' Johnson," she said dryly, "but, <i>my</i> idea,
+Bedlam let loose ain't near quaint enough for a Java entertainment. Nor
+I don't think it's what you might say real Java, either. Things here
+looks to me too flexible. I'm goin' home an' go to bed."</p>
+
+<p>There was no doubt what the rest meant to do. With one impulse they
+turned toward the door as Calliope turned, and silently they took the
+way that the <i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i> had taken before them. Little Mrs.
+Johnson stood on her chair making many gestures; but no one went back.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope looked straight before her.</p>
+
+<p>"My feet ache like I done my thinkin' with 'em," she said, "an' my head
+feels like I'd stood on it. An' what's it all for?"</p>
+
+<p>"Regular clock performance," Mis' Postmaster<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> Sykes assented. "We've
+ticked hard all day long an' ain't got a thing out of it. I often think
+it's that way with my housework, but I did think the Ladies' Missionary
+could tick, when it <i>did</i> tick, for eternity. I'm tuckered to the bone."</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody knows," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was Mame-Bliss, "how my poor neck
+aches. It's there I suffer first an' most."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was walking behind the rest, took three great
+steps and caught us up and spoke, a little breathlessly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Land, land," she said, "I guess I'll go home an' pop some corn. Seems
+to me it'd smell sort of cosy an' homelike an' soothin' down. It's a
+grand thing to smell when you're feelin' far off from yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope laughed a little then.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she said, "anyhow I ain't got my silk waist to get into&mdash;and I
+didn't hev a nice one to put on anyway. I was wishin' I had, and now my
+wish has come true by bein' took away from me, bodily&mdash;like they will.
+But just the same&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She turned on the walk and faced us, and hugged her thin little arms.</p>
+
+<p>"A while ago," she said, "I give that little woman there six months to
+get herself the cold shoulder all around. Well, the time ain't up
+yet&mdash;but both my shoulders feels stone cold!"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>IX</span> <span class="smaller">THE COLD SHOULDER</span></h2>
+
+<p>There is something more about Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson.</p>
+
+<p>Did you ever look through an old school-book of your own and, say, on
+the history picture of Vesuvius in eruption impose your own memory of
+Pompeii, visited in these twenty years since you studied about it; and
+have you not stared hard at the time between and felt yourself some one
+other than that one who once dreamed over the Vesuvius picture? Or,
+years after you read the Letters, you have made a little mark below
+Cicero's cry from exile, "Oh, that I had been less eager for life!" and
+you look at the cry and at the mark, and you and one of these become an
+anachronism&mdash;but you are not sure which it is that so becomes. So now,
+in reading over these notes some while after I have set them down, I am
+minded here to give you my look ahead to the end of the summer and to
+slip in some account of what happened as a closing of the tale. And I
+confess that something about me&mdash;perhaps it is the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>Custodian
+herself&mdash;likes this way of pretending a freedom from time and of looking
+upon its fruit to say which seeds have grown and which have not.</p>
+
+<p>Friendship Village is not superstitious, but when curious coincidences
+occur we do, as we say, "take down note." And it did seem like a
+judgment upon us that, a little time after the Java fiasco, and while
+indignation was yet at high noon, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson fell ill.</p>
+
+<p>At first I think we affected not to know it. When she did not appear at
+church, none of us mentioned it for a Sunday or two. Then when some one
+casually noted her absence we said, "Oh, wasn't she? Got little cold,
+likely." That we saw her no more down town or "brushing up" about her
+door we facilely laid to chance. When the village heard that her
+maid&mdash;who always offended by talking almost in a whisper&mdash;had once or
+twice excused her mistress to callers, every one shut lips and hardened
+hearts and said some folk acted <i>very</i> funny about their calling duties.
+But when, at the twelve o'clock breakfast of the new minister's
+wife&mdash;("Like enough breakfast at noon was a real Bible custom," the
+puzzled devotees solved that amazing hour), Mrs. Johnson did not appear,
+the village was forced to admit that something must be wrong.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, against its will the behaviour of young Mr. Johnson was
+gravely alarming Friendship.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> Mr. Johnson was in real estate and
+insurance in the city, and this did not impress the village as a serious
+business. "Because, what does he <i>sell</i>!" as Abigail Arnold said. "We
+know he don't own property. He rents the very house they live in. A
+doctor's a doctor an' he gives pills, an' a store's a store with the
+kind o' thing you need. But it don't seem like that man could make a
+real good livin' for her, dealin' vague in nothin' that way." His
+income, it was felt, was problematical, and the village had settled it
+that what the Oliver Wheeler Johnsons' had was chiefly wedding presents
+"an' high-falutin' tastes." But, in the face of the evidence, every
+afternoon at three o'clock the young husband ordered a pha&euml;ton from
+Jimmy Sturgis and came home from the city to take his wife to drive.
+Between shutters the village saw that little Mrs. Johnson's face did
+look betrayingly pale, and the blue ostrich plume lay motionless on her
+bright hair.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess Mis' Johnson's real run down," her acquaintances said to one
+another uneasily. Still we did not go to see her. The weeks went by
+until, one morning, Calliope met the little new Friendship doctor on the
+street and asked him about his patient.</p>
+
+<p>"I up an' ask' him flat out," Calliope confessed afterward; "not that I
+really cared to be told, but I hated to know I was heathenish. You don't
+like the feelin'. To know they ain't heathens is all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> that keeps some
+folks from <i>bein</i>' 'em. Well, so I ask' him. 'Doctor Heron,' s'I, 'is
+that Mis' Johnson real sick, or is she just sickish?' He looks at me
+an'&mdash;'Looks pretty sick, don't she?' s'e. 'Well,' s'I, 'I've seen folks
+look real rich that wa'n't it by right-down pocketbook evidence.' 'Been
+to see her?' s'e. 'No,' s'I, short. 'Might drop in,' s'e, an' walks off,
+lookin' cordial. That little Doctor Heron is that close-mouthed I
+declare if I don't respect him same as the minister an' the pipe-organ
+an' the skippin' hills."</p>
+
+<p>So, as midsummer passed and found the little woman still ailing, I
+obeyed an idle impulse and went one evening to see her. I recall that as
+soon as I had crossed her threshold the old influence came upon me, and
+I was minded to run from the place in sheer distaste of the overemphasis
+and the lifted, pointed chin and the fluttering importances of her
+presence. I was ashamed enough that this should be so, but so it was;
+and I held my ground to await her coming to the room only by a measure
+of will.</p>
+
+<p>I sat with Mrs. Johnson for an hour that evening. And it would seem
+that, as is the habit of many, having taken my own way I was straightway
+possessed to draw others after me. There are those who behave similarly
+and who set cunningly to work to gain their own ends, as, for example, I
+did.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> For one night soon I devised a little feast, which I have always
+held to be a good doorway to any enterprise, and, at the
+Friendship-appointed supper hour of six, I made my table as fair as
+possible, as has been done in like case ever since butter was first
+served "in a lordly dish." And my guests were Calliope, without whom no
+festival is wholly in keeping, and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and
+Mis' Postmaster Sykes, and that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady.</p>
+
+<p>Because they had arrived so unsuspectingly I own myself to have felt
+guilty enough when, in that comfortable half-hour after a new and
+delectable dessert had been pronounced upon, I suggested with what
+casualness I might summon that we five pay a visit that night to Mrs.
+Oliver Wheeler Johnson.</p>
+
+<p>"Land!" said Mis' Holcomb, "I've thought I would an' then I've thought I
+wouldn't till I feel all two-faced about myself. I donno. Sometimes I
+think one way an' sometimes I think the other. Are you ever like that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I s'pose," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, majestically, "that them in our
+position ought to overlook. I donno's 'twould hurt us any to go," she
+added graciously.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope's eyes twinkled.</p>
+
+<p>"That's it," she said; "let them that's got the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> social position to
+overlook things be Christian an' overlook 'em."</p>
+
+<p>That great Mis' Amanda Toplady folded her hands, dimpled like a baby
+giant's.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd be glad to go," she said simply; "I've got some grape jell that
+looks to me like it wasn't goin' to keep long, an' I'd be thankful to be
+on terms with her so's I could carry it in to her. They ain't a single
+other invalid in Friendship."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope sprang to her feet and crossed her little arms, a hand hugging
+either shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Well said!" she cried; "do let's go! I'm sick to death of slidin' off
+the subject whenever it comes up in my mind."</p>
+
+<p>So, in the fair October dusk, we five went down the Plank Road&mdash;where
+Summer lingers late. The air was gentle with the soft, impending dark. I
+wonder why the colonnade of sweet influences, down which we stepped, did
+not win us to themselves. But I remember how, instead, our imminent
+visit drew us back to the days of Mrs. Johnson's coming, so that
+presently we were going over the incident of the Java entertainment,
+and, as Calliope would have put it, "crystallizing and boiling over"
+again in the old distaste.</p>
+
+<p>But when we reached the little cottage of the Johnsons, our varied
+motives for the visit were abruptly merged in a common anxiety. For
+Doctor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> Heron's buggy stood at the gate and the little one-story cottage
+was dark save for a light in what we knew to be a corner bedroom. The
+hallway was open to the night, but though we could distinctly hear the
+bell jingle in the kitchen no one answered the summons. Then, there
+being somewhere about a murmur of voices, Calliope stepped within and
+called softly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor, Doctor Heron&mdash;you there? Is they anything we can do?"</p>
+
+<p>The doctor came momentarily to the lighted doorway down the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"That you, Calliope?" he said. "You might come here, will you? Tell the
+rest to sit down somewheres. And you tell Mr. Johnson he can come."</p>
+
+<p>On which, from out the dark living room, some one emerged very swiftly
+and without a word pushed by us all where we were crowded in the passage
+and strode down to the little lighted chamber. Calliope hurried after
+him, and we four shrank back in sudden dread and slipped silently into
+the room which the young husband had left, and stood together in the
+dimness. Was she so sick? In that room he must have heard the door-bell
+as we had heard it, and yet he had not answered. Was it possible that we
+had come too late?</p>
+
+<p>While we waited we said nothing at all, save that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> great Mis' Amanda
+Toplady, who said three times or four, "Oh, dear, oh, dear, I'm always
+waitin' till somethin's too late&mdash;either me or the other thing." It
+seemed very long before we heard some stir, but it can have been only a
+few minutes until the doctor came down the little hall and groped into
+the room. In answer to all that we asked he merely occupied himself in
+lighting a match and setting it deliberately to the candles on the table
+and adjusting their shades. They were, we noted afterward, the same
+candles whose presence we had detected and derided at those long ago
+t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te suppers in that house. The light glowed on the young
+doctor's pale face as he looked at us, each in turn, before he spoke.
+And when he had done with his slow scrutiny&mdash;I think that we cannot
+wholly have fancied its accusation&mdash;he said only:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, she's pretty sick. I can't tell yet."</p>
+
+<p>Then he turned and closed the outer door and stood leaning against it,
+looking up the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Marsh!" he called.</p>
+
+<p>But why did the man not tell us something, we wondered; and there
+flashed in my mind Calliope's reference to the pipe-organ and the
+skipping hills. At all events, Calliope would tell us.</p>
+
+<p>And so she did. We heard her step in the hall, coming quickly and yet
+with a manner of exceeding care. I think that with the swift sense which
+wings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> before intelligence, the others understood before they saw her,
+even as I understood. Calliope stopped in the doorway as if she could
+trust herself to go no farther. And she was holding something in her
+arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope," we said; "Calliope...."</p>
+
+<p>She looked down at that which she held, and then she looked at us. And
+the tears were in her eyes, but her face was brighter than I have ever
+known it.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a baby," she said, "a little bit of a baby. <i>Her</i> baby. An' it
+makes me feel&mdash;it makes me feel&mdash;oh," she broke off, "don't it make you
+feel that way, too?"</p>
+
+<p>We looked at one another, and avoided one another's look, and then
+looked long at the baby. I do not remember that we said anything at all,
+or if we did so, that it bore a meaning. But an instant after Calliope
+gave the baby to the nurse who appeared in the doorway, we all tiptoed
+down to the kitchen by common consent. And it was plain that Mrs.
+Johnson's baby made us feel that way, too.</p>
+
+<p>In our desire to be of tardy service we did the most absurd things. We
+took possession of the kitchen, rejoicing that we found the supper
+dishes uncared for, and we heated a great kettle of water, and washed
+and wiped and put away, as softly as we could; and then we "brushed up
+around." I think that only the need of silence kept us from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> cleaning
+windows. When the nurse appeared&mdash;who had arrived that day unknown of
+Friendship&mdash;we sprang as one to do her bidding. We sent the little maid
+to bed, we tidied the living room, walking tiptoe, and then we went back
+through the kitchen and sat down on the little side "stoop." And all
+this time we had addressed one another only about the tasks which we had
+in hand.</p>
+
+<p>After a little silence,</p>
+
+<p>"The milkman was quite late this morning," observed Mis' Holcomb.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he's begun to deliver in cans instead o' bottles," Mis' Sykes
+explained; "it takes him some longer to get around. He says bottles
+makes his wife just that much more to do."</p>
+
+<p>Then we fell silent again.</p>
+
+<p>It was Calliope, sitting on the porch step outside, where it was dark,
+who at last had the courage to be articulate.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope&mdash;I <i>hope</i>," she said, "she's goin' to be all right."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Sykes shaded her eyes from the bracket lamp within.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go bail," she said, "that little you-do-as-I-say chin'll carry her
+through. I'm glad she's got it."</p>
+
+<p>Just then we heard the thin crying of the child and we could divine
+Calliope, that on the step where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> she sat she was hugging her arms and
+rocking somewhat, to and fro.</p>
+
+<p>"Like enough," she said, "oh, like enough&mdash;folks ain't so cramped about
+runnin' their own feelin's as they think they are!"</p>
+
+<p>To this we murmured something indefinite in sound but positive enough in
+sense. And we all knew what we all knew.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's go out around the house to the front gate," said that great Mis'
+Amanda Toplady, abruptly. "Have any of you ladies got two
+handkerchiefs?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've got two," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, "an' I ain't used either
+one. Do you want the one with essence or the one without?"</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't partial," said Mis' Amanda.</p>
+
+<p>We rose and stumbled along the grassy path that led round the house. At
+the gate we met Doctor Heron.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said slowly, "well." And after a moment, "Will&mdash;will any of
+you be here in the morning?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," we all said simply.</p>
+
+<p>"That's good," he commented shortly, "I didn't know."</p>
+
+<p>We five had to separate at the first corner to go our home ways, and we
+stood for a moment under the gas-light. I remember how, just then,
+Peter's father came singing past us, like one of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>Friendship family
+who did not understand his kinship. Even as we five had not understood
+ours.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't got a shawl, hev you?" Mis' Sykes said to me solicitously.</p>
+
+<p>"The nights have been some chilly on a person's shoulders for a day or
+two now," said Mis' Holcomb.</p>
+
+<p>Calliope put her hand up quickly to her throat.</p>
+
+<p>"Quit," she said. "All of you. Thank God. An' shake hands. I tell you,
+after this I bet I'll run my own feelin's about folks or I'll bring down
+the sky an' make new feelin's! Oh," said Calliope, "don't her&mdash;an'
+<i>now</i>&mdash;an' the baby&mdash;an'&mdash;oh, an' that bright star winkin' over that
+hitchin' post, make things seem&mdash;easy? Good night. I can't stand out
+here any longer."</p>
+
+<p>But when we had gone away a few steps, Calliope called us back. And as
+we turned again,</p>
+
+<p>"To bring down the sky," she repeated, "I bet that's the way God meant
+us to do. They ain't any of us got enough <i>to</i> us to piece out without it!"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>X</span> <span class="smaller">EVENING DRESS</span></h2>
+
+<p>I have said that Daphne Street has been paved within the past year, but
+I had not heard of the manner in which the miracle had been wrought
+until the day when Calliope's brief stay in the village ended and she
+came to tell me good-by&mdash;and, more than incidentally, to show me some
+samples of a dress which she might have, and a dress which she wouldn't
+have, and a dress which she had made up her mind to have.</p>
+
+<p>"We don't dress much here in Friendship Village," she observed. "Not but
+what we'd like to, but we ain't the time nor the means nor the places to
+wear to. But they was one night&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at me, as always when she means to tell a story, somewhat
+with the manner of asking a permission.</p>
+
+<p>"None of the low-neck' fashion-plates used to seem real to us," she
+said. "We used to look at 'em pinned up in Lyddy Ember's dressmakin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+windows, ah-ahing in their low pink an' long blue, an' we'd look 'em
+over an' think tolerant enough, like about sea-serpents. But neither the
+one nor the other bit hold rill vital, because the plates was so young
+an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an' we was old an' busy, like you get,
+an' considered past the dressin' age. Still, it made kind of a nice
+thing to do on the way home from the grocery hot forenoons&mdash;draw up
+there on the shady side, where the street kitters some into a curve, an'
+look at Lyddy's plates, an' choose, like you was goin' to get one.</p>
+
+<p>"Land knows we needed some oasises on that street from the grocery up
+home. Daphne Street, our main street, didn't always use' to be what it
+is now&mdash;neat little wooden blocks an' a stone curb. You know how it use'
+to be&mdash;no curb an' the road a sight, over your shoe-tops with mud in the
+wet, an' over your shoe-tops with sand when it come dry. We ladies used
+to talk a good deal about it, but the men knew it meant money to hev it
+fixed, an' so they told us hevin' it fixed meant cuttin' the trees down,
+an' that kept us quiet&mdash;all but the Friendship Married Ladies Cemetery
+Improvement Sodality.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Postmaster Sykes was president o' the Sodality last year, you
+know,&mdash;she's most always president of everything,&mdash;an' we'd been
+workin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> quite hard all that winter, an' had got things in the cemetery
+rill ship-shape&mdash;at least I mean things <i>on</i> the cemetery was. An' at
+one o' the July meetin's last summer Mis' Sykes up an' proposed that we
+give over workin' for the dead an' turn to the livin', an' pave the main
+street of Friendship Village.</p>
+
+<p>"'True,' she says, 'our constitution states that the purpose of our
+Sodality shall be to keep up the graves of our townspeople an' make 'em
+attractive to others. But,' says she, 'when they ain't enough of us dead
+to occupy all the time, the only Christian way to remedy that is to work
+for folks before they die, while we're waitin' for their graves.'</p>
+
+<p>"This seemed reasonable, an' we voted unanimous to pave Daphne Street.
+An' on the way home Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Timothy Toplady an' I see
+Timothy Toplady settin' in the post-office store, an' we went in to tell
+him an' Silas Sykes about it. But before we could start in, Silas says,
+eyebrows all eager, 'Ain't you heard?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Heard what?' says his wife, kind o' cross, bein' he was her wedded
+husband an' she <i>hadn't</i> heard.</p>
+
+<p>"''Bout Threat Hubbelthwait,' says Silas, lookin' at Mis' Toplady an'
+me, bein's Mis' Sykes was his wife. 'Drunk again,' says Silas, 'an'
+fiddlin' for dear life, an' won't let anybody into the hotel. Mis'
+Hubbelthwait has gone over to her mother's,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> an' the hired girl with
+her; an' Threat's settin' in the bar an' playin' all the hymn tunes he
+knows.'</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't the first time it had happened, you know. Threat an' his wife
+an' the hired girl keep the only hotel in Friendship Village&mdash;when
+Threat is sober. When he isn't, he sometimes closes up the house an'
+turns out whoever happens to be there, an' won't let a soul in&mdash;though,
+of course, not much of anybody ever comes to Friendship anyway, excep'
+now an' then an automobile on its way somewheres. An' there Threat will
+set in the bar, sometimes most of one week, sometimes most of two, an'
+scrape away on the only tunes he knows&mdash;all hymns, 'Just As I Am,' an'
+'Can A Little Child Like Me?' Threat don't mean to be sacrilegious; he
+shows that by never singin' them two hymns in church, when they're give
+out.</p>
+
+<p>"'Land!' says Mis' Sykes, when Silas got through, 'what men are!'</p>
+
+<p>"'We ain't so much as woman, lemme tell you,' says Silas, right crisp.
+Which wasn't what he meant, an' we all laughed at him, so he was a
+little mad to start with.</p>
+
+<p>"'The Sodality's decided to pave Daphne Street,' Mis' Sykes mentions
+then, simple.</p>
+
+<p>"'Pave <i>what</i>?' shouts Silas&mdash;Silas always seems to think the more you
+do in sound the more you'll do in sense.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p><p>"'Do <i>what</i> to Daphne Street?' says Timothy, whirlin' from the peanut
+roaster.</p>
+
+<p>"'Pave Daphne Street,' says Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' me,
+wonderin'.</p>
+
+<p>"Silas wrapped his arms around his own shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"'When,' says he, lettin' his head lurch with his own emphasizin', 'did
+the Common Council hear about this?'</p>
+
+<p>"'They ain't heard, about it,' says Mis' Sykes, 'no more'n we ever hear
+anything about them.'</p>
+
+<p>"Silas an' Timothy is both aldermen, an' rill sensitive over it. I guess
+the Common Council always <i>is</i> a delicate subject, ain't it?</p>
+
+<p>"Mebbe it wasn't a rill diplomatic way to begin, but it hadn't entered
+the Sodality's head that the town wouldn't be glad to hev the pavin'
+done if the Sodality was willin' to do it. Ain't it a hard thing to
+learn that it ain't all willingness, nor yet all bein' capable, that
+gets things done in the world? It's part just edgin' round an' edgin'
+round.</p>
+
+<p>"What did the Common Council do that night but call a special meetin'
+an' vote not to order any city pavin' done that present year. Every
+member was there but Threat Hubbelthwait, who was fiddlin', an' every
+vote was switched by Silas an' Timothy to be unanimous, excep' Eppleby
+Holcomb's vote. Eppleby, we heard afterwards, said that when a pack o'
+women made up their minds to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> pave, they'd pave if it was to pave&mdash;some
+place that Eppleby hadn't ought to 'a' mentioned; an' he was goin' to be
+on the pavin' side. But then, Eppleby is the gentlest husband in
+Friendship Village, an' known to be.</p>
+
+<p>"Sodality met special next day, not so much to do anything as to let it
+be known that we'd took action. This we done by votin' to lay low till
+such time as we could order the wooden blocks. We preferred to pave
+peaceable, it bein' hot weather.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss an'
+Mis' Mayor Uppers an' I walked home together from that meetin'. It was a
+blisterin' July afternoon&mdash;one of them afternoons that melts itself out
+flat, same as a dropped pepp'mint on a brick walk, an' you're left
+stickin' in it helpless as a fly, an' generally buzzin'. I rec'lect we
+was buzzin'&mdash;comin' down Daphne Street in that chokin' dust an' no
+pavement.</p>
+
+<p>"'It's a dog's life, livin' in a little town&mdash;in some respects,' I
+remember Mis' Sykes says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, tolerant, 'I know. I know it is. But I'd
+rather live in a little town an' dog it out than go up to the city an'
+turn wolf, same as some.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' yet we all felt the same, every one of us. They ain't a woman
+livin' in a little place that don't feel the same, now and again. It's
+quiet an' it's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> easy housework, an' you get to know folks well. But oh,
+none of it what you might say <i>glitters</i>. An' they ain't no woman
+whatever&mdash;no matter how good a wife an' mother an' Christian an' even
+housekeeper she is&mdash;that don't, 'way down deep in her heart, feel that
+hankerin' after some sort o' <i>glitter</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"So it was natural enough that we should draw up at Lyddy's dressmakin'
+window an' rest ourself. An' that afternoon we'd have done so, anyway,
+for she hed been pinnin' up her new summer plates&mdash;Lyddy don't believe
+in rushin' the season. An' no sooner had we got a good look at 'em&mdash;big
+coloured sheets they was, with full-length pictures&mdash;than Mis' Toplady
+leaned 'way forward, her hands on her knees, an' stood lookin' at 'em
+the way you look at the parade.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, look-a-there,' she says. 'Look at that one.'</p>
+
+<p>"The one she meant was a woman with her hair all plaited an' fringed an'
+cut bias, an' with a little white hat o' lilacs 'bout as big as a cork;
+an' her dress&mdash;my land! Her dress was long an' rill light blue, an'
+seemed like it must have been paper, it was so fancy. It didn't seem
+like cloth goods at all, same as we hed on. It was more like we was
+wearin' meat an' vegetable dresses, an' this dress was dessert&mdash;all
+whipped cream an' pink sugar an' a flower on the plate.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p><p>"'Dear land!' says Mis' Toplady, lookin' 'round at us strange, 'do they
+do it when they get gray hair? I didn't know they done it when their
+hair was gray.'</p>
+
+<p>"We all looked, an' sure enough, the woman's hair was white. 'Afternoon
+Toilette for Elderly Woman,' it said underneath, plain as plain. Always
+before the plates hed all been young an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an'
+we'd thought of all that as past an' done for, with us, along with all
+the other things that didn't come true. But here was a woman grayer than
+any of us, an' yet lookin' as live as if she'd been wearin' a housework
+dress.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why,' says Mis' Sykes, starin', 'that must be a new thing this season.
+I never heard of a woman well along in years wearin' anything but brown
+or navy blue or gray,&mdash;besides black.' Mis' Sykes is terribly dressy,
+but even she never yet got anywheres inside the rainbow, except in a bow
+at the chin.</p>
+
+<p>"'My,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, wistful, 'wouldn't it seem
+like heaven to be able to wear colours without bein' talked about?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' Mis' Mayor Uppers&mdash;her that her husband grew well off bein' mayor,
+an' never'd been back to Friendship Village since he was put out of
+office, she says low:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'You ladies that has husbands to keep thinkin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> well of you, I should
+think you'd think about this thing. Men,' she says, 'loves the light
+shades.'</p>
+
+<p>"At that Mis' Toplady turned around on us, an' we see her eyes
+expressin' i-dees.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ladies,' says she, impressive, 'Mis' Uppers is right. We hadn't ought
+to talk back or show mad. We ladies of the Sodality had ought to be able
+to get our own way peaceable, just by takin' it, the way the Lord give
+women the weapons to do.'</p>
+
+<p>"We see that somethin' was seethin' in her mind, but we couldn't work
+our way to what it was.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ladies,' says she, an' stepped up on the wooden step to Lyddy's
+dressmakin' shop, 'has the husbands of any one of us seen us, for twenty
+years, dressed in the light shades?'</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't hev any husband to answer for, but I could truthfully say of
+the rest that you'd think black an' brown an' gray an' navy had
+exhausted the Lord's ingenuity, for all the attention they'd paid to any
+other colour He'd wove with.</p>
+
+<p>"'Let's the Sodality get up an evenin' party, an' hev it in post-office
+hall, an' invite our husbands an' buy new dresses&mdash;light shades an' some
+lace,' says Mis' Toplady, lettin' the i-dee drag her along, main
+strength.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes was studyin' the fashion-plate hungry, but she stopped an'
+stepped up side o' Mis' Toplady.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p><p>"'Well, sir,' she said, 'I donno but 'twould help us to work the pavin'
+of Daphne Street. Why, Silas Sykes, for one, is right down soft-hearted
+about clothes. He always notices which one of their waists the choir's
+got on. I heard him say once he wasn't goin' to church again till they
+bought somethin' new.'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Holcomb nodded. 'Five years ago,' she said, 'I went up to the city
+with Eppleby. An' I saw him <i>turn around</i> to look after a woman. I'll
+never forget the sensation it give me&mdash;like I was married to a man that
+wasn't my husband. The woman had on a light pink dress. I know I come
+home an' bought a pink collar; I didn't think I could go any farther,
+because she was quite young. Do you s'pose....'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady pointed at Lyddy's fashion-plate. 'I should go,' she says,
+'just as far as my money would let me go.'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Uppers stood lookin' down to the walk. 'The mayor,' she says&mdash;she
+calls him 'the mayor' yet&mdash;'was terrible fond o' coloured neckties. He
+was rill partial to green ones. Mebbe I didn't think enough about what
+that meant....'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady came down off the step. 'Every man is alike,' says she,
+decided. 'Most of us Friendship ladies thinks if we give 'em a clean
+roller towel we've done enough towards makin' things pretty;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> an' I
+think it's time, as wives, we took advantage of the styles.'</p>
+
+<p>"'An',' says Mis' Sykes, the president, rill dreamy for her, but firm,
+'I think so, too.'</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you, we all walked home feelin' like we'd hed a present&mdash;me too,
+though I knew very well I couldn't hev a light dress, an' I didn't hev
+any husband. You start out thinkin' them are the two principal things,
+but you get a-hold o' some others, if you pay attention. Still, I judged
+the ladies was on the right track, for men is men, say what who will.
+All but Threat Hubbelthwait. We passed the hotel an' heard him settin'
+in there by the bar scrapin' away on 'Can A Little Child Like Me?' We
+took shame to him, an' yet I know we all looked at each other sort of
+motherly, like he <i>was</i> some little shaver, same as he sung, an'
+performin' most fool.</p>
+
+<p>"It don't take us ladies long to do things, when our minds is made.
+Especially it don't when Mis' Timothy Toplady is chairman of the
+Entertainment Committee, or the Doin' Committee of whatever happens,
+like she was that time. First, we found out they was plenty enough nun's
+veilin' in the post-office store, cheap an' wide an' in stock an' all
+the light shades; an' I bought all the dresses, noons, of the clerk, so
+Silas wouldn't suspect&mdash;me not hevin' any husband to inquire around,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+like they do. Then we hired the post-office hall, vague, without sayin'
+for what&mdash;an' that pleased Silas that gets the rent. An' then we give
+the invitations, spectacular, through the <i>Friendship Daily</i> to the
+Sodality's husbands, for the next Tuesday night. We could do it that
+quick, not bein' dependent on dressmakers same as some. The ladies was
+all goin' to make their dresses themselves, an' the dresses wa'n't much
+to do to make. Nobody bothered a very great deal about how we should
+make 'em, the principal thing bein' the colour; Mis' Toplady's was blue,
+like the fashion-plate; Mis' Holcomb's pink, like the woman in the city;
+Mis' Uppers' green, like the mayor's necktie, an' so on. I made me up a
+dress out o' the spare-room curtains&mdash;white, with a little blue flower
+in it, an' a new blue ribbon belt. But Mis' Sykes, she went to work an'
+<i>rented</i> a dress from the city, for that one night. That much she give
+out about it, an' would give out no more. That woman loves a surprise.
+She's got a rill pleasant mind, Mis' Sykes has, but one that does enjoy
+jerkin' other people's minds up, an most anything'll do for the string.</p>
+
+<p>"For all we thought we hed so much time, an' it was so easy to do, the
+afternoon o' the party we went 'most crazy. We'd got up quite a nice
+little cold supper&mdash;Mis' Hubbelthwait had helped us, she bein' still at
+large, an' Threat fiddlin'. We planned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> meat loaf an' salad an' pickles
+an' jelly, an' scalloped potatoes for the hot dish, an' ice cream an'
+cake, enough in all for thirty folks: fifteen husbands an' fifteen
+Sodality, or approximatish. An' we planned to go to the hall in the
+afternoon an' take our dresses there, an' sly em' up and leave 'em, an'
+put 'em on after we'd got there that night, so's nobody's husbands
+should suspect. But when we all came in the afternoon, an' the
+decoratin' with greens an' festoons of cut paper an' all was to do,
+there Mis' Toplady, that was to make scalloped potatoes, hadn't got her
+sleeves in yet, an' she was down to the hall tryin' to do both; an' Mis'
+Holcomb, that was to make the salad dressing, had got so nervous over
+her collar that she couldn't tell which edge she'd cut for the top. But
+the rest of us was ready, an' Mis' Sykes's dress had come from the city,
+an' we all, Mis' Toplady an' Mame too, hed our dresses in boxes in the
+post-office hall kitchen cupboards. An' we done the decoratin', an' it
+looked rill lovely, with the long tables laid ready at each side, an'
+room for bein' a party left in between 'em.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb left the hall about five
+o'clock to go home an' lay out Silas's an' Timothy's an' Eppleby's best
+clothes for 'em&mdash;the rest hed done it at noon. Mis' Hubbelthwait was
+goin' over to the hotel to get some dishes out, an' I went with her to
+help. The bar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> was to the back, where Threat set an' slep' an' fiddled,
+an' Mis' Hubbelthwait was goin' to slip in still an' sly the dishes out
+to me. A good many of the hotel dishes was her individual weddin'
+presents, so she didn't think wrong of her conscience.</p>
+
+<p>"We was all five hurryin' along together, rehearsin' all we'd got to do
+before six-thirty, when we heard a funny sound. We listened, an' we
+thought they must be testin' the hose. But when we got to Lyddy's shop,
+where the street kitters off some in a curve, we looked ahead an' we see
+it wasn't that.</p>
+
+<p>"It's an automobile," says Mis' Toplady. 'My land,' she says, 'it ain't
+only one. It's two.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' we see it was. There come the two of 'em, ploughin' along through
+the awful sand of Daphne Street, that was fit for no human locomotive,
+unless ostriches. When the Proudfits are here, that's the only one in
+the village with an automobile, they understand the sand, and they'd put
+on the whole steam and tear right along through it. But strangers would
+go careful, for fear they'd get stuck, an' so they got it, like you do.
+An' them two big red cars was comin' slow, the dust like cloaks an'
+curtains billowin' up behind. They looked quite wild, includin' the
+seven folks in each one that was laughin' an' callin' out. An' by the
+time they'd come up to us, us four ladies of the Sodality an' Mis'
+Hubbelthwait was lined up on the walk watchin' 'em. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> stopped an'
+one of 'em hailed us, leanin' past his driver.</p>
+
+<p>"'I beg your pardon,' he says, 'is this the street to the best hotel?'</p>
+
+<p>"It was Mis' Toplady that answered him, rill collected. 'They's only one
+street in town,' says she, 'an' they's only one hotel, an' that they
+ain't now.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Can you tell me how soon there will be one?' says the man. 'By
+dinner-time, I hope.'</p>
+
+<p>"We all felt kind of delicate about answerin' this, an' so Mis'
+Hubbelthwait herself spoke up. 'Threat's drunk an' fiddlin', she says.
+'They's no tellin' when Friendship Village will ever hev a hotel again.'</p>
+
+<p>"Both automobiles was listenin' by then, an' though some of 'em laughed
+out sort o' rueful, not many of 'em see the funny.</p>
+
+<p>"'Gad,' one of the men says, 'how about the bird an' the bottle we were
+to send back to Bonner, sittin' by his tire in the desert, a ways back?
+Don't tell us there's no place,' he says, 'where we can find dinner,
+twenty-one of us and the three chauf&mdash;' that word.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady shook her head. 'They ain't a place big enough to seat
+twenty-one, even if they was the food to feed 'em&mdash;' she begun, an' then
+she stopped an' looked 'round at us, as though she was thinkin'
+somethin'.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p><p>"'Oh, come now,' says the man,&mdash;he was good-lookin' an' young, an'
+merry-seemin',&mdash;'Oh, come now,' he said, 'I am sure that the ladies of
+Friendship could cook things such as never man yet ate. We are
+sta-arving,' he says, humorous. 'Can't you do something for us? We'll
+give you,' he winds up, genial, 'two dollars a plate for a good,
+home-cooking dinner for the twenty-four of us. What do you say?'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady whirled toward us sort o' wild. 'Is two dollars times
+twenty-four, forty-eight dollars?' says she, low.</p>
+
+<p>"An' we see it was, though Mis' Holcomb was still figurin' it out in the
+palm of her other hand, while we stood gettin' glances out of each
+other's eyes, an' sendin' 'em, give for take. We see, quick as a flash,
+what Mis' Toplady was thinkin' about. An' it was about that hall, all
+festooned with greens an' cut paper, an' the two long tables laid ready,
+an' the veal loaf an' scalloped potatoes an' ice-cream for thirty. An'
+when Mis' Sykes, that usually speaks, stood still, an' didn't say one
+word, but just nodded a little bit, sort o' sad, Mis' Toplady, that was
+chairman o' the Entertainment Committee, done like she does
+sometimes&mdash;she took the whole thing into her own hands an' just settled
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, yes,' she says to 'em, rill pleasant, 'if you want to come up to
+post-office hall at half-past<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> six,' she says, 'the Friendship Married
+Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality will serve you your supper, nice
+as the nicest, for two dollars a head.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Good!' the men all sings out, an' the women spats their hands soft,
+an' one of 'em says somethin' to the merry-seemin' man.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, yes,' he says then, 'couldn't we all break into this hotel an'
+floss up a bit before dinner?'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Hubbelthwait stepped out towards 'em.</p>
+
+<p>"'I was thinkin' of that,' says she. 'My husband,' she says, dignified,
+'is settin' in the bar&mdash;practisin' his violin. He&mdash;he does that
+sometimes, an' we&mdash;don't bother him. But the bar is at the back. I can
+let you in, still, the front way to the rooms, if you want. An' I'll be
+there myself to wait on you.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' that was what they done, somebody takin' one o' the cars back for
+the other car, an' the rest of us fair breakin' into a run toward
+post-office hall.</p>
+
+<p>"'My land,' says Mis' Toplady, almost like a groan, 'what <i>hev</i> we
+done?'</p>
+
+<p>"It <i>was</i> a funny thing to do, we see it afterward. But I tell you, you
+can't appreciate the influence o' that forty-eight dollars unless you've
+tried to earn money in a town the size o' Friendship Village. Sodality
+hardly ever made more than five dollars to its ten-cent
+entertainments&mdash;an' that for a big turn-out on a dry night. An' here was
+the price<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> of about nine such entertainments give us outright, an' no
+extra work, an' rill feet-achin' weather. I say it was more than flesh
+an' blood <i>or</i> wives could stand. We done it automatic, like you
+contradict when it's necessary.</p>
+
+<p>"But there <i>was</i> the men to reckon with.</p>
+
+<p>"'What'll Timothy&mdash;an' Silas&mdash;an' Eppleby....' Mis' Toplady says, an'
+stops, some bothered an' some rill pained.</p>
+
+<p>"I judged, not havin' any husband to be doin' the inquirin', it wasn't
+polite for me to laugh. But I couldn't hardly help it, thinkin' o' them
+fifteen hungry men an' the supper et away from 'em, just William Nilly.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes, we remembered afterwards, never said a word, but only kep'
+up with us back to the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"Back to the hall, where the rest o' the Sodality was, we told 'em what
+we'd done&mdash;beginnin' with the forty-eight dollars, like some kind o'
+weapon. But I tell you, we hadn't reckoned without knowin' our
+hostesses, head an' heart. An' they went in pell mell, pleased an' glad
+as we was, an' plannin' like mad.</p>
+
+<p>"The first need was more food to make up that supper to somewheres near
+two dollars' worth&mdash;feedin' your husband is one thing an' gettin' up a
+two-dollar meal is another. But we collected that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> all in pretty sudden:
+leg o' lamb, left from the Holcombs' dinner an' only cut off of one
+side; the Sykes's roast o' veal, the same; three chickens for soup the
+Libertys hed just dressed for next day company dinner; big platter of
+devilled eggs chipped in from Mis' Toplady; a jar o' doughnuts, a
+steamer o' cookies, a fruit-cake a year old&mdash;we just made out our list
+an' scattered to empty out all our pantries.</p>
+
+<p>"By six o'clock we was back in the hall, an' all the food with us. But
+nobody hed met nobody's husband yet, an' nobody wanted to. We didn't
+quite know how we was goin' to do, I guess&mdash;but done is done, an' to do
+takes care of itself.</p>
+
+<p>"'Hadn't we ought to 'a' sent word to the men?' says Mis' Holcomb, for
+the third or fourth time. 'I sneaked around so's not to pass Eppleby's
+office, but I declare I feel mean. He'll hev to eat sauce an' plain
+bread-an'-butter for his supper. An' most o' the men-folks the same.
+'Seems though somebody'd ought to send 'em word an' not let 'em come up
+here, all washed an' dressed.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, cuttin' cake with her lips shut tight an'
+talkin' anyway, 'I kind o' thought&mdash;leave 'em come up. I bet they'd
+rather be in it than out of it, every one of 'em, an' who knows they
+might be some supper left? An' we can all&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p><p>"An' at that Mis' Toplady faces round from cuttin' the cake: 'My land,
+my land,' she says, sort o' hushed, 'why, doin' this, we can't none of
+us wear our new dresses!'</p>
+
+<p>"An' at that we looked at each other, each one sort of accusin', an' I
+guess all our hearts givin' one o' them sickish thumps. An' Mis' Sykes,
+her that hed been so still, snaps back:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'I wondered what you thought I'd rented my dress from the city for at
+<i>Three Dollars a night</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you, that made a hush in the middle of the plannin'. We'd forgot
+all about our own dresses, an' that was bad enough, with the hall all
+hired an' everything all ready, an' every chance in the world of
+everybody's husband's findin' out about the dresses before we could get
+up another Sodality party, same way. But here was Mis' Sykes, three
+dollars out, an mebbe wouldn't be able to rent her dress again at all.</p>
+
+<p>"'I did want Silas,' Mis' Sykes says then, wistful, 'to see me in that
+dress. Silas an' I have been married so long,' she says, 'that I often
+wonder if I seem like a person to him at all. But in that dress from the
+city, I think I would.'</p>
+
+<p>"We was each an' all ready to cry, an' I dunno but we would hev done
+it&mdash;though we was all ready to serve, too: coffee made, potatoes pipin'
+hot, veal an' lamb het up an' smellin' rich, chicken<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> soup steamin', an'
+all. But just that very minute we heard some of 'em comin' in the
+hall&mdash;an' the one 'ready' conquered the other 'ready,' like it will, an'
+we all made a rush, part curious an' part nerves, to peek through the
+little servin' window from the kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>What</i> do you think we saw? It was the automobile folks, hungry an' got
+there first. In they'd come, women laughin', men jokin', all makin' a
+lark out o' the whole thing. An' if the women wasn't, every last one of
+'em, wearin'&mdash;not the clothes they hed come in, but light pink an' light
+blue an' white an' flowered things, an' all like that.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Hubbelthwait burst in on us while we was lookin'. 'They hed things
+in their trunk at the back o' the automobile,' says she. 'They says they
+wanted to floss up for dinner, an' floss up they hev. They look like
+Lyddy's fashion sheets, one an' all.'</p>
+
+<p>"At that Mis' Sykes, a-ceasin' to peek, she drops her tray on the bare
+floor an' begun untyin' her apron. 'Quick!' she raps out, 'Mis'
+Hubbelthwait, you go an' set 'em down. An' every one o' you&mdash;into them
+togs of ours! Here's the chance to wear 'em&mdash;here an' <i>now</i>,' she says,
+'an' leave them folks see we know how to do things here in Friendship
+Village as good as the best.'</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p><p>"Well, bein' as she had rented the dress, an' three dollars hed to be
+paid out anyhow, an' bein' as she was president, an' bein' as we was all
+hankerin' in our hearts, we didn't need much urgin'. We slammed the
+servin' window shut an' set chairs against both doors, an' we whisked
+out of our regular dresses like wild.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, land&mdash;my land, the sleeves&mdash;the sleeves ain't in mine!' says Mis'
+Toplady, sort o' glazed, an' speakin' in a wail. But we encouraged her
+up to pin 'em in, which she done, an' it couldn't be told from stitches.
+Poor Mame Holcomb's collar that wasn't on yet we turned in for her
+V-shape, so's her dress was low, like the best. An' Mis' Uppers, that
+was seasonin' the chicken soup like none of us could, her we took turns
+in dressin' in her green. An' I'd got into my spare-room curtains,
+somehow, just as Mis' Hubbelthwait come shoving at that door.</p>
+
+<p>"'The men&mdash;the men!' says she, painful. 'They're all out here&mdash;Silas an'
+Timothy an' Eppleby an' all. They've all heard about it&mdash;the automobiles
+went to the post-office for their mail, an' Silas told 'em enjoyable
+about Threat, an' the automobiles told him where they was goin' to eat.
+An' they've come, thinkin' they's enough for all, an' they're out here
+now.'</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Toplady groaned a little, agonized an'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> stifled, but rill firm.
+'Tell 'em, then,' says she, 'to come back up here, like men, an'
+<i>help</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>"Then we heard a little rustle, soft an' silky an' kind o'
+pink-soundin', an' we looked around, an' there, from where she had been
+dressin' herself over behind the kitchen boiler all alone, Mis'
+Postmaster Sykes stepped out. My land, if she wasn't in a white dress, a
+little low in the neck, an' elbow sleeves, an' all covered solid as
+crust with glitterin' silver spangles.</p>
+
+<p>"'Let's tell 'em ourselves,' she says, 'come on&mdash;all of you. Let's take
+out the first course, an' tell the men what we want 'em to do.'</p>
+
+<p>"We made Mis' Sykes go first, carryin' high the tureen of chicken soup.
+An' on one side of her walked Mis' Timothy Toplady, in blue, with the
+wafers, an' on the other Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, in pink, with
+the radishes. An' neither one of 'em could hardly help lookin' at Mis'
+Sykes's dress all the way out. An' back of 'em went the rest o' the
+ladies, all in pink an' blue an' white an' pale green nun's veilin' that
+they'd made, an' carryin' the water-pitchers an' ice an' celery an' like
+that. An' me, I hung back in the kitchen watchin' an' lovin' 'em every
+one&mdash;an' almost lovin' Timothy Toplady an' Silas Sykes an' Eppleby when
+they looked on an' saw.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes set the soup down in front o' the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> merry-seemin' man for him
+to serve it. An' then she crossed over an' spoke to Silas, an' swep' up
+ahead of him in that spangly dress, the other ladies followin' an'
+noddin' bright when they passed the men, an' motionin' 'em toward the
+back o' the hall. An' back the men all come into the kitchen, followin'
+as they was asked to do, an' orderly through bein' dazed. Silas an'
+Timothy an' Eppleby was first, an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' Mame
+went up to 'em together.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll never forget that minute. I thought the men was goin' to burst out
+characteristic an' the whole time be tart, an' I shut both doors an' the
+servin' window careful. An' instead o' that, them three men stood there
+just smilin' a little an lookin' surprised an' agreeable; an' the other
+husbands, either takin' the cue or feelin' the same, done likewise, too.
+An' when Mame Bliss says, sort o' tremblin'&mdash;Eppleby bein' the gentlest
+husband in Friendship Village, an' known to be: 'How do you like us,
+Eppleby?' Eppleby just nods an' wrinkles up his eyes an' smiles at her,
+like he meant lots more. An' he says, 'Why didn't you never wear that
+dress before, Mame?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' 'Well, Timothy?' says Mis' Toplady, sort o' masterful, an' fully
+expectin' to hev to master. But Timothy Toplady, he just rubs his hands
+an' looks at her sort o' wonderin', an' he says, 'Blisterin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> Benson,
+you look as good as the city folks, Amandy&mdash;all light, an' loose made,
+an' stylish&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"But Silas Sykes, he just stood lookin' at his wife an' lookin'. Of
+course she <i>did</i> hev the advantage, bein' her spangles shone so. An'
+Silas looked at her an' looked, just as if her bein' his wife didn't
+make him admire her any the less. An' Mis' Sykes, she was rill pink an'
+pleased an' breathless, an' I guess she could see she seemed like a
+person to Silas, the way she'd wanted to.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above">"It all went off splendid. The men stayed an' dished in the kitchen an'
+helped carry away from the tables&mdash;the forty-eight dollars completin'
+their respect&mdash;an' we ladies done the servin'. An' I tell you, we served
+'em with an air, 'count o' bein' well dressed, like they was, an'
+knowin' it. An' we knew the automobile folks appreciated it&mdash;we could
+tell by the way they kep' lookin' at us. But of course we all understood
+Mis' Sykes looked the best, an' we let her do all the most prominent
+things&mdash;bringin' in the first dish of everything an' like that, so's
+they could hev a good look.</p>
+
+<p>"When it was over, the merry-seemin' man stood up an' made a little
+speech o' thanks, rill courteous an' sweet, an' like he knew how to act.
+An' when he was through we, one an' all, nudged Mis' Sykes to reply, an'
+she done so, the two tables<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> listenin', an' the Sodality standin' in
+between, an' the Sodality's husbands crowdin' in both kitchen doors to
+listen.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes says, rill dignified, an' the light catchin' in her
+spangles: 'We're all very much obliged, I'm sure, for our forty-eight
+dollars clear. An' we think perhaps you'd like to know what the money is
+goin' toward. It's goin',' she says, 'towards the pavin' of the main
+street of our little city.'</p>
+
+<p>"Silas Sykes was lookin' out the servin' window like it was a box.
+'What's that?' says he, more of him comin' out of the window, 'what's
+<i>that</i> you say?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' they was a little wave o' moves an' murmurs all around him like
+when somethin' is goin' to happen an' nobody knows what; an' I know the
+Sodality caught its breath, for, as Mis' Toplady always says, the dear
+land knows what men <i>will</i> do.</p>
+
+<p>"With that up springs the merry-seemin' man, his face all beamin', an'
+he says loud an' clear an' drowndin' out everything else: 'Hear, hear!
+Likewise, here an' now. I move that we as one man, an' that man's
+automobile having lately come up the main street of Friendship
+Village&mdash;do ourself contribute to this most worthy end. Get to work,'
+says he. 'Think civic thoughts!'</p>
+
+<p>"He slid the last roll off its plate, an' he laid somethin' in paper
+money on it, an' he started it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> down the table. An' every man of 'em
+done as he done. An' I tell you, when we see Mis' Hubbelthwait's bread
+plate pilin' with bills, an' knew what it was for, we couldn't help&mdash;the
+whole Sodality couldn't help&mdash;steppin' forwards, close to the table, an'
+standin' there an' holdin' our breaths. An' the men, back there in the
+kitchen, they hushed up when they see the money, an' they kep' hushed.
+Land, land, it was a great minute! I like to think about it.</p>
+
+<p>"An' when the plate come back to the merry-seemin' man, he took it an'
+he come over towards us with it in his hand, an' we nudged Mis' Sykes to
+take the money. An' she just lifted up the glitter part of her skirt an'
+spread it out an' he dropped the whole rustlin' heap on to the spangles.
+An' the rest of us all clapped our hands, hard as we could, an' right
+while we was doin' it we heard somethin' else&mdash;deeper an' more manly
+than us. An' there was the men streamin' out o' the kitchen doors, an'
+Silas Sykes high in the servin' window&mdash;an' every one of 'em was
+clappin', too.</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you, we was glad an' grateful. An' we was grateful, too, when
+afterwards they was plenty enough supper left for the men-folks. An'
+when we all set down together around that table, Mis' Sykes at the head
+an' the plate o' bills for a centrepiece, Mis' Toplady leaned back, hot
+an' tired, an' seein'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> if both her sleeves was still pinned in place,
+an' she says what we was all thinkin':&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, ladies,' she says, 'we can pave streets an' dress in the light
+shades even if we ain't young, like the run o' the fashion-plates. Ain't
+it like comin' to life again?' she says."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XI</span> <span class="smaller">UNDERN</span></h2>
+
+<p>I have a guest who is the best of the three kinds of welcome guests. Of
+these some are like a new rug which, however fine and unobtrusive it be,
+at first changes the character of your room so that when you enter you
+are less conscious of the room than of the rug. Some guests are like
+flowers on the table, leaving the room as it was save for their sweet,
+novel presence. And some guests are like a prized new book, unread, from
+which you simply cannot keep away. Of these last is my guest whom my
+neighbour calls the New Lady.</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour and Elfa and Miggy and Little Child and I have all been
+busy preparing for her. Elfa has an almost pathetic fondness for
+"company,"&mdash;I think it is that she leads such a lonely life in the
+little kitchen-prison that she welcomes even the companionship of
+more-voices-in-the-next-room. I have tried to do what I can for Elfa,
+but you never help people very much when you only try to do what you
+can. It must lie nearer the heart than that. And I perfectly understand
+that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> magazines and trifles of finery which I give to her, and the
+flowers I set on the kitchen clock shelf, and the talks which, since my
+neighbour's unconscious rebuke, I have contrived with her, are about as
+effectual as any merely ameliorative means of dealing with a social
+malady. For Elfa is suffering from a distinct form of the social malady,
+and not being able to fathom it, she knows merely that she is lonely. So
+she has borrowed fellowship from her anticipation of my guest and of
+those who next week will come down from the town; and I know, though she
+does not know, that her jars of fresh-fried cakes and cookies, her fine
+brown bread and her bowl of salad-dressing, are her utmost expression of
+longing to adjust the social balance and give to herself companionship,
+even a kind of household.</p>
+
+<p>Little Child to-day came, bringing me a few first sweet peas and
+Bless-your-Heart, Bless-your-Heart being her kitten, and as nearly pink
+as a cat can be and be still a cat.</p>
+
+<p>"To lay in the New Lady's room," she remarked, bestowing these things
+impartially upon me.</p>
+
+<p>Later, my neighbour came across the lawns with a plate of currant tarts
+and a quarter of a jelly cake.</p>
+
+<p>"Here," she said, "I don't know whether you like tarts or not. They're
+more for children, I always think. I always bake 'em, and the little
+round child fried cakes, too, and I put frosting faces<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> on the cookies,
+and such things. It makes my husband and I seem more like a family," she
+explained, "and that's why I always set the dining-room table. As long
+as we ain't any little folks running around, I always tell him that him
+and I would be eating meat and potatoes on the kitchen drop-leaf like
+savages if I didn't pretend there was more of us, and bake up for 'em."</p>
+
+<p>Miggy alone does not take wholly kindly to the New Lady idea, though I
+assure her that our mornings are to remain undisturbed.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," she observed, while in the New Lady's honour she gathered
+up strewn papers, "I know I'll like her because she's your friend. But I
+don't know what folks want to visit for. Don't you s'pose that's why the
+angels don't come back&mdash;because they know everything, and they know what
+a lot of extra work they'd make us?"</p>
+
+<p>In Miggy the tribal sense seems to have run itself out. Of the sanctity
+of the individual she discerns much; but of the wider sanctities she has
+no clear knowledge. Most relationships she seems to regard, like the
+love of Peter, as "drawbacks," save only her indefinite consciousness of
+that one who is "not quite her sister"&mdash;the little vague Margaret. And
+this, I think, will be the leaven. Perhaps it is the universal leaven,
+this consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>I was glad that the New Lady was to arrive in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> the afternoon. Sometimes
+I think that the village afternoon is the best time of all. It is no
+wonder that they used to call that time "undern." If they had not done
+so, the word must have grown of its own will&mdash;perhaps it did come to
+life with no past, an immaculate thing, so like its meaning that it
+could not help being here among us. I know very well that Sir John
+Mandeville and others used "undern" to mean the third hour, or about
+nine in the morning, but that may have been because at first not every
+one recognized the word. Many a fairy thing wanders for a long time on
+earth, patiently putting up with other connotations than its own.
+Opportunism, the subconscious mind, personality, evolution itself,&mdash;all
+these are still seeking their full incarnations in idea. No wonder
+"undern" was forced for a long while to mean morning. But nine o'clock
+in the morning! How, after all, was that possible? You have only to say
+it over&mdash;undern, undern, undern,&mdash;to be heavenly drowsy with summer
+afternoon. The north of England recognized this at last and put the word
+where it belongs; and I have, too, the authority of the lady of Golden
+Wing:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Undern cometh after noon,</div>
+<div>Golden Wings will be here soon...."</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>One can hardly stop saying that, once one is started. I should like to
+go on with it all down the page.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p><p>I was thinking of these things as I drove to the station alone to meet
+the New Lady. The time had taken on for me that pleasant, unlike-itself
+aspect which time bears in any mild excitement, so that if in the moment
+of reading a particularly charming letter one can remember to glance up
+and look the room in the face, one may catch its <i>other</i> expression, the
+expression which it has when one is not looking. So now I caught this
+look in the village and an air of
+Something-different-is-going-to-happen, such as we experience on
+holidays. Next week, when the New Lady's friends come down to us for two
+days, I dare say, if I can remember to look for it, that the village
+will have another expression still. Yet there will be the same quiet
+undern&mdash;though for me it is never a commonplace time. Indeed, usually I
+am in the most delighted embarrassment how to spend it. In the mornings
+now&mdash;Miggy being willing&mdash;I work, morning in the true democracy being
+the work time; afternoon the time for recreation and the more
+specialized forms of service <i>and</i> a little rest; the evening for
+delight, including the delight of others. Not every one in the village
+accepts my afternoon and evening classifications. I am constantly coming
+on people making preserves after mid-day, and if I see a light in a
+kitchen window after nine at night I know that somebody is ironing in
+the cool of the day. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> usually my division of time is the general
+division, save that&mdash;as in the true democracy&mdash;service is not always
+recognized as service. Our afternoons may be spent in cutting carpet
+rags, or in hemming linen, or sewing articles for an imminent bazaar,
+and this is likely to be denominated "gettin' through little odd jobs,"
+and accounted in a measure a self-indulgence. And if evening delight
+takes the form of gardening and later a flame of nasturtiums or dahlias
+is carried to a friend, nobody dreams that this is not a pleasant
+self-indulgence too, and it is so regarded. With these things true is it
+not as if a certain hope abroad in the world gave news of itself?</p>
+
+<p>Near the Pump pasture I came on Nicholas Moor&mdash;who rings the Catholic
+bell and is interested in celluloid&mdash;and who my neighbour had told me
+would doubtless come to me, bringing his little sheaf of "writin's." I
+had not yet met him, though I had seen in the daily paper a vagrant poem
+or two over his name&mdash;I remember a helpless lyric which made me think of
+a gorgeous green and gold beetle lying on its back, unable to recover
+its legs, but for all that flashing certain isolated iridescent colours.
+My heart ached for Nicholas, and when I saw him now going across the
+pasture his loneliness was like a gap in things, one of the places where
+two world-edges do not quite meet. There are so many pleasant ways to do
+and the boy seemed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> to know how to do none of them. How can he be lonely
+in the village? For myself, if I decide of an afternoon to take my work
+and pay a visit, I am in a pleasant quandary as to which way to turn. If
+I go to the west end of Daphne Street, there are at least five families
+among whom to choose, the other four of whom will wonder why I did not
+come to them. Think of knowing five families in two blocks who would
+welcome one's coming and even feel a little flattering bitterness if one
+chose the other four! If I take a cross street, I am in the same
+difficulty. And if I wish to go to the house of one of my neighbours, my
+motives clash so seriously that I often sit on my porch and call to
+whoever chances to be in sight to come to me. Do you wonder that, in
+town, the moment I open my address book I feel smothered? I recover and
+enjoy town as much as anybody, but sometimes in a stuffy coup&eacute;, hurrying
+to get a half-dozen of the pleasantest calls "done," I surprise a
+companion by saying: would now that it were undern on Daphne Street!</p>
+
+<p>I told this to the New Lady as we drove from the station. The New Lady
+is an exquisite little Someone, so little that it is as if she had been
+drawn quickly, in a single delicate curving line, and then left, lest
+another stroke should change her. She understands the things that I say
+in the way that I mean them; she is the way that you always think<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> the
+people whom you meet are going to be, though they so seldom are; like
+May, she is expectation come alive. What she says fits in all the
+crannies of what you did not say and have always known, or else have
+never thought of before and now never can forget. She laughs when she
+should laugh, and never, never when somebody else should laugh alone.
+When you tell her that you have walked eight miles and back, she says
+"<i>And back!</i>" with just the proper intonation of homage. She never tells
+a story upon the heels of your own little jest so swiftly that it cannot
+triumphantly escape. When you try to tell her something that you have
+not quite worked out, she nods a little and you see that she meant it
+before you did. She enters every moment by its gate and not over its
+wall, though she frequently wings her way in instead of walking. Also,
+she is good to look at and her gowns are as meet as the clouds to the
+sky&mdash;and no less distracting than the clouds are at their very best.
+There is no possible excuse for my saying so much about her, but I like
+to talk of her. And I like to talk to her as I did when we left the
+station and I was rambling on about undern.</p>
+
+<p>The New Lady looked about with a breath of content.</p>
+
+<p>"No wonder," she said, "you like to pretend Birthday, in New York."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span></p><p>It is true that when I am there where, next to the village, I like best
+to live, I am fond of this pretence. It is like the children's game of
+"Choosing" before shop windows, only it is extensive and not, as cream
+puffs and dolls and crumpets in the windows dictate to the children,
+purely intensive. Seeing this man and that woman in the subway or the
+tea-room or the caf&eacute; or the car, I find myself wondering if it is by any
+chance their birthdays; and if it is, I am always wishing to deal out
+poor little gifts at which I fancy they would hardly look. To the lithe
+idle blond woman, elbows on table; to the heavy-lidded,
+engagement-burdened gentlewoman; to the busy, high-eyebrowed man in a
+cab; to the tired, slow-winking gentleman in his motor; to the
+thick-handed labourer hanging to his strap, I find myself longing to
+distribute these gifts: a breakfast on our screened-in porch in the
+village, with morning-glories on the table; a full-throated call of my
+oriole&mdash;a June call, not the isolated reminiscent call of August; an
+hour of watering the lawn while robins try to bathe in the spray; a
+morning of pouring melted paraffin on the crimson tops of moulds of
+currant jelly; a yellow afternoon of going with me to "take my work and
+stay for supper." I dare say that none of my chosen beneficiaries would
+accept; but if I could pop from a magic purse a crop of caps and fit
+folk, willy nilly, I wonder if afterward, even if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> they remembered
+nothing of what had occurred, they might not find life a little
+different.</p>
+
+<p>"If it was my birthday," said the New Lady, "I would choose to be driven
+straight away through that meadow, as if I had on wings."</p>
+
+<p>That is the way she is, the New Lady. Lacking wings of her own she gives
+them to many a situation. Straightway I drove down into the Pump pasture
+and across it, springy soil and circus-trodden turf and mullein stalks
+and ten-inch high oak trees.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's let down the bars," said the New Lady, "and drive into that next
+meadow. If it <i>is</i> a sea, as it looks, it will be glad of your company."</p>
+
+<p>It was not a sea, for as we drove through the lush grass the yellow and
+purple people of the meadow came marching to meet us, as dignified as
+garden flowers, save that you knew, all the time, that wild hearts were
+beating beneath the rainbow tassels. It was a meadow with things to say,
+but with finger on lip&mdash;as a meadow should be and as a spirit must be.
+The meadow seemed to wish to say: "It is all very pleasant for you there
+in the village to admire one another's wings, but the real romance is in
+the flight." I wondered if it were not so that it had happened&mdash;that one
+day a part of the village had got tired waiting, and had broken off and
+become something free, of which the meadow was the body and its secret
+was the spirit. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> then the presence of the New Lady always sets me
+wondering things like this.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," I said to her suddenly, "spring has gone! I wonder how that
+happened. I have been waiting really to get hold of spring, and here it
+is June."</p>
+
+<p>"June-and-a-half," assented the New Lady, and touched the lines so that
+we came to a standstill in the shade of a cottonwood.</p>
+
+<p>"This way," she said&mdash;and added softly, as one who would not revive a
+sadness, her own idea of the matter.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Where did Spring die? I did not hear her go</div>
+<div>Down the soft lane she painted. All flower still</div>
+<div>She moved among her emblems on the hill</div>
+<div>Touching away their burden of old snow.</div>
+<div>Was it on some great down where long winds flow</div>
+<div>That the wild spirit of Spring went out to fill</div>
+<div>The eyes of Summer? Did a daffodil</div>
+<div>Lift the pale urn remote where she lies low?</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Oh, not as other moments did she die,</div>
+<div>That woman-season, outlined like a rose.</div>
+<div>Before the banner of Autumn's scarlet bough</div>
+<div>The Summer fell; and Winter, with a cry,</div>
+<div>Wed with March wind. Spring did not die like those;</div>
+<div>But vaguely, as if Love had prompted, 'Now.'"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>The New Lady's theory does not agree with that of Little Child. I am in
+doubt which to accept. But I like to think about both.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p><p>And when the New Lady had said the faint requiem, we drove on again and
+the next moment had almost run down Nicholas Moor, lying face downward
+in the lush grass.</p>
+
+<p>I recognized him at once, but of course the New Lady did not do so, and
+she leaned from the cart, thoroughly alarmed at the boy's posture and,
+as he looked up, at his pallor.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, what is the matter?" she cried, and her voice was so heavenly
+pitying that one would have been willing to have most things the matter
+only to hear her.</p>
+
+<p>Nicholas Moor scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and stood abashed,
+looking as strangely detached from the moment as if he had fallen from a
+frame and left the rest of the picture behind.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing. I just like to be here," he was surprised into saying.</p>
+
+<p>The New Lady sat down and smiled. And her smile was even more
+captivating than had been her late alarm.</p>
+
+<p>"So do I," she told him heartily. "So do I. What do you like about it,
+<i>best</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>I do not think that any one had ever before spoken to Nicholas so
+simply, and he answered, chord for chord.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess&mdash;I guess I like it just on account of its being the way it is,"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p><p>"That is a very, very nice reason," the New Lady commented. "Again, so
+do I."</p>
+
+<p>We left him, I remember, looking about as if he were seeing it all for
+the first time.</p>
+
+<p>As we drove away I told my New Lady about Nicholas, and she looked along
+her own thought and shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"There must be hundreds of them," she said, "and some are poets. But
+most of them are only lonesome. I wonder which Nicholas is?"</p>
+
+<p>We lingered out-of-doors as long as we might, because the touch of the
+outdoors was so companioning that to go indoors was a distinct good-by.
+Is it so with you that some Days, be they never so sunny, yet walk with
+you in a definite reserve and seem to be looking somewhere else; while
+other Days come to you like another way of being yourself and will not
+let you go? I know that some will put it down to mood and not to the Day
+at all; but, do what I will, I cannot credit this.</p>
+
+<p>It was after five o'clock when we drove into the village, and all Daphne
+Street was watering its lawns. Of those who were watering some pretended
+not to see us, but I understood that this they accounted the etiquette
+due to a new arrival. Some bowed with an excess of cordiality, and this
+I understood to be the pleasant thought that they would show my guest
+how friendly we all are. And some laid down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> the hose and came to the
+sidewalk's edge to meet the New Lady then and there.</p>
+
+<p>Of these were Mis' Postmaster Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss
+and my neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," Mis' Postmaster Sykes said graciously
+to the New Lady. "I must say it seems good to see a strange face now an'
+then. I s'pose you feel all travel dust an' mussed up?"</p>
+
+<p>And at Mis' Holcomb's hitching post:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Pleased to meet you," said Mis' Holcomb. "I was saying to Eppleby that
+I wondered if you'd come. Eppleby says, 'I donno, but like enough
+they've went for a ride somewheres.' Lovely day, ain't it? Been to the
+cemetery?"</p>
+
+<p>I said that we had not been there yet, and,</p>
+
+<p>"Since it's kept up it makes a real nice thing to show folks," Mis'
+Holcomb said. "I s'pose you wouldn't come inside for a bite of supper,
+would you?"</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour&mdash;bless her!&mdash;had on a black wool dress to do honour to my
+guest.</p>
+
+<p>"It's nice for the neighbours to see company comin' and goin'," she said
+cordially, "though of course we don't have any of the extra work. But I
+guess everybody likes extra work of <i>this</i> kind."</p>
+
+<p>And as we drove away:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span></p><p>"Good-by," she cried, "I hope you'll have a good night's rest and a
+good breakfast."</p>
+
+<p>When I looked at the New Lady I saw her eyes ever so slightly misted.</p>
+
+<p>"Spring didn't die," she said&mdash;as Little Child had said. "Spring knew
+how to keep alive. It got down in these people's hearts."</p>
+
+<p>Yes, the New Lady is a wholly satisfactory guest. She even pretended not
+to notice Peter's father who, as we alighted, came singing by, and bowed
+to us, his barren old face lighted with a smile, as a vacant room is
+lighted, revealing the waste. If I had some one staying with me who had
+smiled at Peter's father or&mdash;at any one, or who did not see the village
+as it is, I think I should be tempted to do as my neighbour did to me
+that morning: pick three carnation pinks for her and watch her go away.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XII</span> <span class="smaller">THE WAY THE WORLD IS</span></h2>
+
+<p>Was it not inevitable that poor, lonely Nicholas Moor should have sought
+out my New Lady? A night or two after her arrival he saw her again, at a
+supper in the church "lecture-room." He was bringing in a great freezer
+of ice-cream and when she greeted him he had all but dropped the
+freezer. Then a certain, big obvious deacon whose garden adjoined my own
+had come importantly and snatched the burden away, and the boy had
+stood, shamefast, trying to say something; but his face was lighted as
+at a summons. So the New Lady had divined his tragedy, the loneliness
+which his shyness masked as some constant plight of confusion.</p>
+
+<p>"Come and see me sometime," she had impulsively bidden him. "Do you know
+where I am staying?"</p>
+
+<p>Did he know that! Since he had seen her in the meadow had he known
+anything else? And after some days of hard trying he came one night,
+arriving within the dusk as behind a wall. Even in the twilight, when he
+was once under the poplars, he did<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> not know what way to look. To seem
+to look straight along the road was unnatural. To seem to look out
+across the opposite fields was hypocrisy. To look at the house which
+held the New Lady was unthinkable. So, as he went in at the gate and up
+the fern-bordered walk, he examined the back of his hand&mdash;near, and then
+a little farther away. As he reached the steps he was absorbedly
+studying his thumb.</p>
+
+<p>From a place of soft light, shed through a pink box shade on the table,
+and of scattered willow chairs and the big leaves of plants, the New
+Lady came toward him.</p>
+
+<p>"You did come!" she said. "I thought you wouldn't, really."</p>
+
+<p>With the utmost effort Nicholas detached one hand from his hat brim and
+gave it her. From head to foot he was conscious, not of the touch of her
+hand, little and soft, but of the bigness and coarseness of his own
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I hated to come like everything," he said.</p>
+
+<p>At this of course she laughed, and she went back to her willow chair and
+motioned him to his. He got upon it, crimson and wretched.</p>
+
+<p>"As much as that!" she observed.</p>
+
+<p>"You know I wanted to come awfully, too," he modified it, "but I dreaded
+it&mdash;like sixty. I&mdash;I can't explain...." he stumbled.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p><p>"Don't," said the New Lady, lightly, and took pity on him and rang a
+little bell.</p>
+
+<p>She thought again how fine and distinguished he was, as he had seemed to
+her on the day when she had first spoken to him. He sat staring at her,
+trying to realize that he was on the veranda with her, hearing the sound
+of the little bell she had rung. He had wanted something like this,
+wistfully, passionately. Miserable as he was, he rested in the moment as
+within arms. And the time seemed distilled in that little silver
+bell-sound and the intimacy of waiting with her for some one to come.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that some one with a light footfall did come to the veranda. He
+heard the New Lady call her Elfa. But he saw only her hands, plump and
+capable and shaped like his own, moving among the glasses. After which
+his whole being became absorbed in creditably receiving the tall, cool
+tumbler on the tray which the capable hands held out to him. A period of
+suspended intelligence ensued, until he set the empty glass on the
+table. Then the little maid had gone, and the New Lady, sipping her own
+glass, was talking to him.</p>
+
+<p>"You were lying on the grass that day," she said, "as if you understood
+grass. Not many do understand about grass, and almost nobody understands
+the country. People say, 'Come, let us go into the country,' and when
+they get there is it the country<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> they want at all? No, it is the
+country sports, the country home,&mdash;everything but the real country. They
+play match games. They make expeditions, climb things in a stated time,
+put in a day at a stated place. I often think that they must go home
+leaving the country aghast that they could have come and gone and paid
+so little heed to it. Presently we are going to have some charming
+people out here who will do the same thing."</p>
+
+<p>So she talked, asking him nothing, even her eyes leaving him free. It
+seemed to him, tense and alert and ill at ease as he listened, that he,
+too, was talking to her. From the pressing practicalities, the
+self-important deacon, the people who did not trouble to talk to him,
+his world abruptly escaped, and in that world he walked, an escaped
+thing too, forgetful even of the little roll of verses which he had
+dared to bring.</p>
+
+<p>Yet when she paused, he looked out at her shrinkingly from under his
+need to reply. He did not look at her face, but he looked at her hands,
+so little that each time he saw them they were a new surprise and alien
+to him. He looked away from them to the friendliness of her smile. And
+when he heard himself saying detached, irrelevant things, he again fell
+to studying one of his own hands, big and coarse and brown. Oh, he
+thought, the difference between her and him was so hopelessly the
+difference in their hands.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span></p><p>In an absurdly short time the need to be gone was upon him; but of this
+he could not speak, and he sat half unconscious of what she was saying,
+because of his groping for the means to get away. Clearly, he must not
+interrupt her to say that he must go. Neither could he reply to what she
+said by announcing his intention. And yet when he answered what she
+said, straightway her exquisite voice went on with its speech to him.
+How, he wondered, does anybody ever get away from anywhere? If only
+something would happen, so that he could slip within it as within doors,
+and take his leave.</p>
+
+<p>Something did happen. By way of the garden, and so to a side door, there
+arrived those whose garden adjoined,&mdash;the big, obvious, self-important
+deacon, and behind him Three Light Gowns. The little maid Elfa came
+showing them through the house, in the pleasant custom of the village.
+And when the New Lady, with pretty, expected murmurings, rose to meet
+them, Nicholas got to his feet confronting the crisis of saying good-by,
+and the moment closed upon him like a vise. He heard his voice falter
+among the other voices, he saw himself under the necessity to take her
+hand and the deacon's hand, and the hands, so to speak, of the Three
+Light Gowns; and this he did as in a kind of unpractised bewildering
+minuet.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p><p>And then he found his eyes on a level with eyes that he had not seen
+before&mdash;blue eyes, gentle, watching, wide&mdash;and a fresh, friendly little
+face under soft hair. It was Elfa, taking away the empty glasses. And
+the boy, in his dire need to ease the instant, abruptly and inexplicably
+held out his hand to her too. She blushed, sent a frightened look to the
+New Lady, and took the hand in hers that was plump and capable, with its
+strong, round wrist. And the little maid, being now in an embarrassment
+like his own, the two hands clung for a moment, as if they had each the
+need.</p>
+
+<p>"Good night," she said, trembling.</p>
+
+<p>"Good night," said the New Lady, very gently.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>good night</i>!" burst from the boy as he fled away.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above">It was Elfa who admitted him at his next coming. The screened porch was
+once more in soft light from the square rose shade, and the place had
+the usual pleasant, haunted air of the settings of potentialities. As if
+potentiality were a gift of enchantment to human folk.</p>
+
+<p>The New Lady was not at home, Elfa told him, in her motherly little
+heart pitying him. And at the news he sat down, quite simply, in the
+chair in which he had sat before. He must see her. It was unthinkable
+that she should be away. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>To-night he had meant to have the courage to
+leave with her his verses.</p>
+
+<p>On the willow table lay her needlework. It was soft and white beyond the
+texture of most clouds, and she had wrought on it a pattern like the
+lines on a river. As his eyes rested on it, Nicholas could fancy it
+lying against her white gown and upon it her incomparable hands. Some
+way, she seemed nearer to him when he was not with her than when, with
+her incomparable hands and her fluent speech, she was in his presence.
+When she was not with him, he could think what to say to her. When he
+stood before her&mdash;the thought of his leave-taking on that veranda seized
+upon him, so that he caught his breath in the sharp thrust of mortified
+recollection, and looked away and up.</p>
+
+<p>His eyes met those of Elfa, who was quietly sitting opposite.</p>
+
+<p>"How they must all have laughed at me. You too!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"That last time I was here. Shaking hands that way," he explained.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't laugh," she unexpectedly protested; "I cried."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her. And this was as if he were seeing her for the first
+time.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Cried?</i>" he repeated.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p><p>"Nobody ever shakes hands with me," Elfa told him.</p>
+
+<p>He stared at her as she sat on the edge of her chair, her plump hands
+idle on her apron.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he admitted, "no, I don't suppose they do. I didn't think&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But he had not thought of her at all.</p>
+
+<p>"By the door all day I let in hand-shakes," she said, "an' then I let
+'em out again. But I don't get any of 'em for me."</p>
+
+<p>That, Nicholas saw, was true enough. Even he had been mortified because
+he had taken her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Once," Elfa said, "I fed a woman at the back door. An' when she went
+she took hold o' my hand, thankful. An' then you done it too&mdash;like it
+was a mistake. That's all, since I worked out. I don't know folks
+outside much, only some that don't shake hands, 'count of seemin'
+ashamed to."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," said Nicholas.</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes," she went on, "folks come here an' walk in to see <i>her</i> an'
+they don't shake. Ain't it funny&mdash;when folks can an' don't? When they
+come from the city to-morrow, the whole house'll shake hands, but me.
+Once I went to prayer-meetin' an' I hung around waitin' to see if
+somebody wouldn't. But they didn't&mdash;any of 'em. It was rainin' outside
+an' I guess they thought I come with somebody's rubbers."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p><p>Nicholas looked at her a little fearfully. It had seemed to him that in
+a great world of light he had always moved in a little hollow of
+darkness and detachment. Were there, then, other hollows like that?
+Places to which outstretched hands never penetrate? A great
+understanding possessed him, and he burst out in an effort to express
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"You're a funny girl," he said.</p>
+
+<p>She flushed, and suddenly lifted one hand and looked at it. Nicholas
+watched her now intently. She studied the back of her hand, turned it,
+and sat absorbedly examining her little thumb. And Nicholas felt a
+sudden sense of understanding, of gladness that he understood. As he
+felt when he was afraid and wretched, so Elfa was feeling now.</p>
+
+<p>He leaned toward her.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't feel afraid," he said gently.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't," she said; "I don't, truly. I guess that's why I stayed here
+now. She won't be back till ten&mdash;I ought to have said so before.
+You&mdash;you won't want to wait so long."</p>
+
+<p>He rose at once. And now, being at his ease, his head was erect, his
+arms naturally fallen, his face as confident and as occupied by his
+spirit as when he lay alone in the meadows.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir," he said, "let's shake hands again!"</p>
+
+<p>She gave him her hand and, in their peculiarly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> winning upward look, her
+eyes&mdash;blue, wide, watchful, with that brooding mother watchfulness of
+some women, even in youth. And her hand met his in the clasp which is
+born of the simple, human longing of kind for kind.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-by," she answered his good-by, and they both laughed a little in a
+shyness which was a way of delight.</p>
+
+<p>In the days to follow there flowed in the boy's veins a tide of novel
+sweetness. And now his thoughts eluded one another and made no chain, so
+that when he tried to remember what, on that first evening, the New Lady
+and he had talked about, there came only a kind of pleasure, but it had
+no name. Everything that he had to do pressed upon him, and when he
+could get time he was away to the meadow, looking down on the chimneys
+of that house, and swept by a current that was like a singing. And
+always, always it was as if some one were with him.</p>
+
+<p>There came a night when he could no longer bear it, when his wish took
+him to itself and carried him with it. Those summer dusks, warm yellow
+with their moon and still odorous of spring, were hard to endure alone.
+Since the evening with her, Nicholas had not seen the New Lady save
+when, not seeing him, she had driven past in a pha&euml;ton. At the sight of
+her, and once at the sight of Elfa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> from that house, a faintness had
+seized him, so that he had wondered at himself for some one else, and
+then with a poignancy that was new pain, new joy, the new life, had
+rejoiced that he was himself. So, when he could no longer bear it, he
+took his evening way toward the row of poplars, regretting the moonlight
+lest by it they should see him coming. And to-night he had with him no
+verses, but only his longing heart.</p>
+
+<p>He had no intimation of the guests, for the windows at that house were
+always brightly lighted, and until he was within the screened veranda
+the sound of voices did not reach him. Then from the rooms there came a
+babel of soft speech and laughter, and a touch of chords; and when he
+would have incontinently retreated, the New Lady crossed the hall and
+saw him.</p>
+
+<p>She came to the doorway and greeted him, and Nicholas looked up in the
+choking discomfort of sudden fear. She was in a gown that was like her
+needlework, mysteriously fashioned and intricate with shining things
+which made her infinitely remote. The incomparable little hands were
+quite covered with jewels. It was as if he had come to see a spirit and
+had met a woman.</p>
+
+<p>"How good of you to come again," she said. "Come, I want my friends to
+meet you."</p>
+
+<p>Her friends! That quick crossing of words within<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> there, then, meant the
+presence of her friends from the city.</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't! I came for a book&mdash;I'll get it some other time. I've got to
+go now!" Nicholas said.</p>
+
+<p>Then, "Bettina&mdash;Bettina!" some one called from within, and a man
+appeared in the hallway, smiled at sight of the New Lady, dropped his
+glass at sight of Nicholas, bowed, turned away&mdash;oh, how should he know
+that her name was Bettina when Nicholas had not known!</p>
+
+<p>This time he did not say good night at all. This time he did not look at
+his great hand, which was trembling, but he got away, mumbling
+something, his retreat graciously covered by the New Lady's light words.
+And, the sooner to be gone and out of the moonlight that would let them
+see him go, he struck blindly into the path that led to the side gate of
+the garden. The mortification that chains spirit to flesh and tortures
+both held him and tortured him. For a breath he imagined himself up
+there among them all, his hands holding his hat, imagined having to
+shake hands with them: and somehow this way of fellowship, this meeting
+of hands outstretched for hands, seemed, with them, the supreme ordeal,
+the true symbol of his alien state from them and from the New Lady. No
+doubt she understood him, but for the first time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> Nicholas saw that this
+is not enough. For the first time he saw that she was as far away from
+him as were the others. How easy, Nicholas thought piteously, those
+people in her house all found it to act the way they wanted to! Their
+hands must be like her hands....</p>
+
+<p>He got through the garden and to the side gate. And now the old
+loneliness was twofold upon him because he had known what it is to reach
+from the dark toward the light; yet when he saw that at the gate some
+one was standing, he halted in his old impulse to be on guard, hunted by
+the fear that this would be somebody alien to him. Then he saw that it
+was no one from another star, but Elfa.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh...." he said, and that, too, was what she said, but he did not hear.
+Not from another star she came, but from the deep of the world where
+Nicholas felt himself alone.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;was just going away," he explained.</p>
+
+<p>For assent she stepped a little back, saying nothing. But when Nicholas
+would have passed her it was as if the immemorial loneliness and the
+seeking of forgotten men innumerable stirred within him in the ache of
+his heart, in the mere desperate wish to go to somebody, to be with
+somebody, to have somebody by the hand.</p>
+
+<p>He turned upon Elfa almost savagely.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span></p><p>"Shake hands!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>Obediently she put out her hand, which of itself stayed ever so briefly,
+within his. He held it, feeling himself crushing it, clinging to it,
+being possessed by it. Her hand was, like his, rough from its work, and
+it was something alive, something human, something that answered. And
+instantly it was not Elfa alone who was there companioning him, but the
+dark was quick with presences, besieging him, letting him know that no
+one alive is alone, that he was somehow one of a comrade company,
+within, without, encompassing. And the boy was caught up by the sweet
+will outside his own will and he never knew how it was that he had Elfa
+in his arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Come here. Come here...." he said.</p>
+
+<p>To Elfa, in her loneliness threaded by its own dream, the moment,
+exquisite and welcome as it was, was yet as natural as her own single
+being. But to the boy it was not yet the old miracle of one world built
+from another. It was only the answer to the groping of hands for hands,
+the mere human call to be companioned. And the need to reassure her came
+upon him like the mantle of an elder time.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't feel afraid," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes gave him their winning upward look, and it was as if their
+mother watchfulness answered him gravely:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I don't. I don't, truly."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p><p>And at this she laughed a little, so that he joined her; and their
+laughter together was a new delight.</p>
+
+<p>Across the adjoining lawn Nicholas could see in the moonlight the moving
+figure of the big deacon, a Light Gown or two attending. A sudden
+surprising sense of safety from them overswept the boy. What if they did
+come that way! What, he even thought, if those people in the house were
+to come by? Somehow, the little hollow of dark in which he had always
+walked in the midst of light was as light as the rest of the world, and
+he was not afraid. And all this because Elfa did not stir in his arms,
+but was still, as if they were her harbour. And then Nicholas knew what
+they both meant.</p>
+
+<p>"Elfa!" he cried, "do you...?"</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I must...." she said, and knew no way to finish that.</p>
+
+<p>"Love me?" said Nicholas, bold as a lion.</p>
+
+<p>"I meant that too," Elfa said.</p>
+
+<p>Between the New Lady's house and the big, obvious deacon's lawn the boy
+stood, silent, his arms about the girl. So this was the way the world
+is, people bound together, needing one another, wanting one another,
+stretching out their hands....</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it was <i>you</i> I wanted!" Nicholas said wonderingly.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XIII</span> <span class="smaller">HOUSEHOLDRY</span></h2>
+
+<p>"After supper" in the village is like another room of the day. On these
+summer nights we all come out to our porches to read the daily paper, or
+we go to sit on the porch of a neighbour, or we walk about our lawns in
+excesses of leisure, giving little twitches to this green and to that.
+"In our yards" we usually say. Of these some are so tiny that the
+hammocks or the red swinging-chairs find room on the planting spaces
+outside the walks, and there men smoke and children frolic and call
+across the street to one another. And this evening, as I went down
+Daphne Street to post my letters, I saw in process the occasional
+evening tasks which I have noted, performed out-of-doors: at the
+Sykeses' cucumbers in preparation for to-morrow's pickles; a bushel of
+over-ripe cherries arrived unexpectedly at the Herons' and being pitted
+by hand; a belated needle-task of Mis' Holcomb's finishing itself in the
+tenuous after-light. This fashion of taking various employments into the
+open delights me. If we have peas to shell or beans to string or corn to
+husk,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> straightway we take them to the porch or into the yard. This
+seems to me to hold something of the grace of the days in the Joyous
+Garde, or on the grounds of old ch&acirc;teaux where they embroidered or wound
+worsted in woodland glades, or of colonial America, where we had out our
+spinning wheels under the oaks. When I see a great shining boiler of
+gasoline carried to the side yard for the washing of delicate fabrics, I
+like to think of it as done out-of-doors for the charm of it as much as
+for the safety. So Nausicaa would have cleansed with gasoline!</p>
+
+<p>It was sight of the old Aunt Effie sewing a seam in Mis' Holcomb's
+dooryard which decided me to go to see Miggy. For I would not willingly
+be where Aunt Effie is, who has always some tragedy of gravy-scorching
+or dish-breaking to tell me. I have been for some time promising to go
+to see Miggy in her home, and this was the night to do so, for the New
+Lady went home to-day and I have been missing her sorely. There is a
+kind of minus-New Lady feeling about the universe.</p>
+
+<p>At the same moment that I decided for Miggy, Peter rose out of the
+ground. I wonder if he can have risen a very little first? But that is
+one of those puzzles much dwelt upon by the theologians, and I will not
+decide. Perhaps the thought of Miggy is a mighty motive on which Peter's
+very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> being is conditioned. Anyway, there he was, suddenly beside me,
+and telling me some everyday affair of how little use in the cannery
+were Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade, whose houses we were
+passing. And to his talk of shop I responded by inviting him to go with
+me to see Miggy. Would he go? He smiled his slow smile, with that little
+twist of mouth and lifting of brow.</p>
+
+<p>"This is like finding an evening where there wasn't one before," he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>The little house where Miggy lives has a copper beech in the
+dooryard&mdash;these red-leaved trees seem to be always in a kind of hush at
+their own difference. The house is no-colour, with trimmings of another
+no-colour for contrast, and the little front porch looks like something
+that has started to run out the front door and is being sternly snatched
+backward. The door stood ajar&mdash;no doubt for the completion of this
+transaction&mdash;and no one was about. We rapped, for above the bell push
+was a legend of Aunt Effie's inscribing, saying: "Bell don't ring." For
+a moment our summons was unanswered. Then Miggy called from upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be down in a minute," she said. "Go right in, both of you, and
+wait for me&mdash;will you?"</p>
+
+<p>To take the cards of one's visitors from a butler<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> of detached
+expression or from a maid with inquisitive eyelashes is to know nothing
+of the charm of this custom of ours of peeping from behind an upper
+curtain where we happen to be dressing, and alone in the house, at the
+ringing of the doorbell, and of calling down to a back which we
+recognize an informal "Oh, go right in and wait for me a minute, will
+you?" In this habit there is survival of old tribal loyalties and
+hospitalities; for let the back divined below be the back of a stranger,
+that is to say, of a barbarian, and we stay behind our curtains, silent,
+till it goes away.</p>
+
+<p>In the sitting room at Miggy's house a little hand lamp was burning, the
+fine yellow light making near disclosures of colour and form, and
+farther away formulating presences of shadow. Aunt Effie had been at her
+sewing, and there were yards of blue muslin billowing over a sunken
+arm-chair and a foam of white lining on the Brussels-covered couch. The
+long blue cotton spread made the big table look like a fat Delft sugar
+bowl, and the red curtains were robbed of crude colour and given an
+obscure rosy glow. A partly finished waist disguised the gingerbread of
+the what-not, one forgot the carpet, the pictures became to the neutral
+wall what words which nobody understands are to ministering music. And
+on the floor before the lounge lay Little Child and Bless-your-Heart,
+asleep.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p><p>At first I did not see the child. It was Peter who saw her. He stooped
+and lifted her, the kitten still in her arms, and instead of saying any
+of the things a woman might have said, Peter said <i>"Well....</i>" with a
+tenderness in his voice such as women can give and more. For a man's
+voice-to-a-child gets down deeper than happiness. I suppose it is that
+the woman has always stayed with the child in the cave or the tent or
+the house, while the man has gone out to kill or to conquer or to trade;
+and the ancient crooning safety is still in the woman's voice, and the
+ancient fear that he may not come back to them both is in the voice of
+the man. When Peter lifted Little Child in his arms, I wished that Miggy
+had been there to hear.</p>
+
+<p>"What's it dreaming about?" Peter said.</p>
+
+<p>"'Bout Miggy," said Little Child sleepily, and she snuggled in Peter's
+coat collar.</p>
+
+<p>"Dream about Peter too!" Peter commanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, <i>I</i> will," promised Little Child o' Dreams, and drifted off.</p>
+
+<p>Peter sank awkwardly down to the floor and held her so, and he sat there
+stroking Bless-your-Heart and looking as if he had forgotten me, save
+that, "Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade that I was telling
+you about," he remarked once irrelevantly, "<i>they've</i> each got a kiddie
+or so."</p>
+
+<p>Miggy came downstairs and, "I'm a surprise,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> she said in the doorway,
+and stood there in a sheer white frock&mdash;a frock which said nothing to
+make you look, but would not let you look away; and it had a little
+rhyme of lace on this end and on that. It was the frock that she had
+made herself&mdash;she told me so afterward, but she did not mention it
+before Peter, and I liked her the better for that. When I hear women
+boast of these things I always wonder why, then and there, I should not
+begin to recite a sonnet I have turned, so as to have a hand in things.
+To write an indifferent sonnet is much less than to make a frock which
+can be worn, but yet I should dislike infinitely to volunteer even so
+little as a sonnet or a quatrain. In any case, it would be amazing taste
+for me to do so; while "I made it myself" I hear everywhere in the
+village, especially in the presence of the Eligible. But I dare say that
+this criticism of mine is conditioned by the fact that my needle-craft
+cell got caught in the primal protozoan ooze and did not follow me.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy! Oh, Miggery!" said Peter, softly. He had made this name for a
+sort of superlative of her.</p>
+
+<p>"Like me?" inquired Miggy. I wonder if even the female atom does not
+coquette when the sun strikes her to shining in the presence of her atom
+lord?</p>
+
+<p>You know that low, emphatic, unspellable thing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> which may be said by the
+throat when a thing is liked very much? When one makes it, it feels like
+a vocal dash in vocal italics. Peter did that, very softly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Miggy, "I feel that dressed-up that I might be cut out of
+paper. What <i>are</i> you doing down there, Peter?"</p>
+
+<p>He glanced down mutely, and Miggy went round the table and saw what he
+held.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," she said, "that great heavy girl, Peter. Give her to me."</p>
+
+<p>Miggy bent over Peter, with her arms outstretched for the child. And
+Peter looked up at her and enjoyed the moment.</p>
+
+<p>"She's too heavy for you to lift," he said, with his occasional quiet
+authority. "I'll put her where you want her."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's so hot upstairs," Miggy hesitated. "It's past her bedtime,
+but I hate to take her up there."</p>
+
+<p>"Undress her down here," said I. "The Delft sugar bowl shuts you off a
+fine dressing-room. And let her sleep for a while on the couch."</p>
+
+<p>So Miggy went for the little nightgown, and Peter, with infinite pains,
+got to his feet, and detached Bless-your-Heart and deposited her on the
+table, where she yawned and humped her back and lay down on an
+unfinished sleeve and went to sleep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> again. And when Miggy came down,
+she threw a light quilt and a pillow near the couch and sat behind the
+table and held out her arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Now!" she said to Peter, and to me she said, "I thought maybe you'd
+spread her up a bed there on the couch."</p>
+
+<p>"Let Peter," said I. "I've another letter I ought to have written. If I
+may, I'll write that here while you undress her."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Miggy, "there's some sheets of letter-paper under the cover
+of the big Bible. And the ink&mdash;I guess there's some in the bottle&mdash;is on
+top of the organ. And the pen is there behind the clock. And you'd ought
+to find a clean envelope in that pile of newspapers. I think I saw one
+there the other day. You spread up her bed then, Peter."</p>
+
+<p>I wrote my letter, and Peter went at the making up of the lounge, and
+Miggy sat behind the table to undress Little Child. And Little Child
+began waking up. It touched me infinitely that she who in matters of
+fairies and visionings is so wise and old should now, in her sleepyhood,
+be just a baby again.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;<i>won't</i>&mdash;go&mdash;bed," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Miggy, "yes. Don't you feel all the little wingies on your
+face? They're little dream wings, and the dreams are getting in a hurry
+to be dreamed."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p><p>"I do' know those dreams," said Little Child, "I do' <i>want</i> those
+dreams. Where's Bless-your-Heart?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dreaming," said Miggy, "all alone. Goodness, I believe you've got a
+little fever."</p>
+
+<p>Peter stopped flopping the quilt aimlessly over the lounge and turned,
+and Miggy laid the back of her hand on Little Child's cheek and beneath
+her chin. The man watched her anxiously as, since the world began,
+millions of men have looked down at this mysterious pronouncement of the
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>"She has?" he said. "She'd ought not to have any milk, then, had she?"
+he added vaguely. It seemed to me that Miggy must have paused for a
+moment to like Peter for this wholly youthful, masculine eagerness to
+show that he knew about such things.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll fix her something to take," said Miggy, capably. "No, dear. The
+other arm. Straighten elbow."</p>
+
+<p>"I want my shoes an' stockin's on in bed," Little Child observed. She
+was sitting up, her head drooping, her curls fastened high with a
+hairpin of Miggy's. "An' I want my shirtie on. An' <i>all</i> my clothes. I
+won't go bed if you don't."</p>
+
+<p>Miggy laughed. "Bless-your-Heart hasn't got her clothes on," she
+parried.</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't she got her furs on any more?" demanded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> Little Child, opening
+her eyes. "She has, too. She has not, too, took a bath. An' I won't have
+no bath," she went on. "I'm too old for 'em."</p>
+
+<p>At that she would have Bless-your-Heart in her arms, and there was some
+argument arising from her intention to take the kitten in one hand all
+the way through her nightgown sleeve. And by this time sleepyhood tears
+were near.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Don't</i> curl your toes under so," said Miggy, struggling with a shoe.
+"Peter, do go on. You'll never have it done."</p>
+
+<p>Whereat Peter flapped the quilt again; and&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I will curl my toes up. That's what I want to do. I <i>want</i> to curl 'em
+up!" said Little Child. And now the sleepyhood tears were very near.</p>
+
+<p>"Goodness," said Miggy, suddenly, "to-morrow is Sunday. I'll have to do
+her hair up for curls. Peter!" she cried, "stop waving that quilt, and
+tear me off a strip of that white lining there."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, <i>I'll</i> have curls," said Little Child, unexpectedly, "because that
+is so becunning to me."</p>
+
+<p>But she was very sleepy, and when Peter had been sent for the brush from
+the kitchen shelf, her head was on Miggy's shoulder, and Miggy looked at
+Peter helplessly.</p>
+
+<p>"Give her to me," said Peter, and took the child and laid the kitten at
+large upon the floor; and then, holding Little Child's head in the
+hollow of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> his arm, he sat down before Miggy, leaning toward her, and
+all the child's soft brown hair lay on his sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>I should have liked to watch them then. And I should have liked Calliope
+and Mis' Toplady and my neighbour to see them&mdash;those three who of all
+the village best understood mystery. I know that Peter did not take his
+eyes from Miggy's face as she brushed and wound the curls. How could
+he?&mdash;and Miggy, "sweet as boughs of May" in that white frock, her look
+all motherly intent upon her task. She was very deft, and she had that
+fine mother-manner of caring for the child with her whole hand instead
+of tipsifingers. I would see a woman infinitely delicate in the touching
+of flowers or tea-cups or needlework, but when she is near a child, I
+want her to have more than delicacy. I was amazed at Miggy's gentleness
+and her pretty air of accustomedness. And when Little Child stirred,
+Miggy went off into some improvised song about a little black dog that
+got struck with a wagon and went Ki&mdash;yi&mdash;ki&mdash;yi&mdash;<i>ad infinitum</i>, and
+Miggy seemed to me to have quite the technical mother-air of tender
+abstraction.</p>
+
+<p>"How dark her hair is growing," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"It's just the colour of yours," said Peter, "and the little curls on
+the edges. They're like yours, too."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p><p>"My hair!" Miggy said deprecatingly. "You've got rather nice hair,
+Peter, if <i>only</i> it wouldn't stick up that way at the back."</p>
+
+<p>"I know it sticks up," Peter said contritely. "I do every way to make it
+stay down. But it won't."</p>
+
+<p>"It makes you look funny," observed Miggy, frankly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he told her, "if you wouldn't ever make me go 'way from you, you
+wouldn't ever need to see the back of my head."</p>
+
+<p>"That would be just what would turn your head," she put it positively.
+"Peter, doesn't your arm ache, holding her so?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked down at his arm to see, and, "I wouldn't care if it did," he
+replied, in some surprise. "No. It feels good. Oh, Miggy&mdash;do you do this
+every night?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't always curl her hair," said Miggy, "but I always put her to
+bed. If ever Aunt Effie undresses her, she tells her she <i>may</i> die
+before morning, so she'd better say her prayer, pretty. Goodness, she
+hasn't said her prayer yet, either."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't she too sleepy?" asked Peter.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Miggy answered; "but she feels bad in the morning if she doesn't
+say it. You know she thinks she says her prayer to mother, and that
+mother waits to hear her...."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p><p>Miggy looked up fleetingly at her mother's picture on the wall&mdash;one of
+those pale enlargements of a photograph which tell you definitely that
+the subject is dead.</p>
+
+<p>"I do' want any other curls on me," announced Little Child, suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Just one more, dear," Miggy told her, "and then we're through. Turn her
+head a little, Peter."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Little Child. "Now I'm all curly."</p>
+
+<p>And, "Yes, Precious. Be still on Peter's arm just a minute more," said
+Miggy at the same time.</p>
+
+<p>And, "If you say anything more, I'll kiss you," said Peter, to whom it
+might concern.</p>
+
+<p>"Kiss <i>me</i>?" said Little Child. "I won't be."</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody's got to be," said Peter, with decision.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, our prayer," ruled Miggy suddenly, and rose. "Come, dear."</p>
+
+<p>Peter looked up in Miggy's face.</p>
+
+<p>"Let her be here," he said. "Let her be here."</p>
+
+<p>He lifted Little Child so that she knelt, and her head drooped on his
+shoulder. He had one arm about her and the other hand on the pink,
+upturned soles of her feet. The child put out one hand blindly for
+Miggy's hand. So Miggy came and stood beside Peter, and together they
+waited for the little sleepy voice.</p>
+
+<p>It came with disconcerting promptness.</p>
+
+<p>"Now&mdash;I&mdash;lay&mdash;me&mdash;down&mdash;to&mdash;sleep&mdash;for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>&mdash;Jesus'&mdash;sake&mdash;Amen," prayed
+Little Child in one breath.</p>
+
+<p>"No, sweetheart," Miggy remonstrated, with her alluring emphasis on
+"sweet." "Say it right, dear."</p>
+
+<p>"Now I lay me&mdash;is Bless-your-Heart sayin' hers?" demanded Little Child.</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't you get along without her, when you're so sleepy?" Miggy
+coaxed.</p>
+
+<p>"Mustn't skip nights," Little Child told her. "Bless-your-Heart might
+die before morning."</p>
+
+<p>So Miggy found Bless-your-Heart under the couch, and haled her forth,
+and laid her in Little Child's arms. And Peter put his face close, close
+to Little Child's, and shut his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I
+should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take who'll I bless
+to-night?" said Little Child.</p>
+
+<p>"Aunt Effie," Miggy prompted.</p>
+
+<p>"Bless Aunt Effie," said Little Child, "and Miggy and Bless-your-Heart
+and New Auntie" (she meant me. Think of her meaning me!) "and the man
+that gave me the peanuts, and bless Stella's party and make 'em have
+ice-cream, and bless my new shoes and my sore finger. For Jesus' sake,
+Amen."</p>
+
+<p>Little Child drew a long breath and stirred to get down, but Peter did
+not move.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p><p>"And bless Peter," Miggy said.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Little Child, "He needn't. Peter's nice 'nuff."</p>
+
+<p>Peter got to his feet with Little Child in his arms, and his face was
+glowing, and he looked at Miggy as if she were what he meant whenever he
+said "universe." But Miggy had gone to the couch, and was smoothing the
+quilt that Peter had wrinkled in all directions, and patting the pillow
+that Peter had kneaded into a hard ball.</p>
+
+<p>"You lay her down," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Peter did so, setting the kitten on the floor, and then bending low over
+the couch, looking in the upturned face as the little dark head touched
+the pillow and sought its ease, and her hand fell from where it had
+rested on his shoulder. And he stooped and kissed her cheek more gently
+than he had ever done anything.</p>
+
+<p>"I want my drink o' water," said Little Child, and opened her eyes; and
+now from the couch she could see me. "Tell me a story," she commanded
+me, drowsily.</p>
+
+<p>I did not go to her, for who am I that I should have broken that trio?
+But when Miggy and Peter took the lamp and went away to the kitchen for
+the drink of water and for some simple remedy for the fever which Miggy
+had noted or fancied, I sat beside Little Child and said over something<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+that had been persistently in my mind as I had watched Miggy with her:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"I like to stand in this great air</div>
+<div>And see the sun go down;</div>
+<div>It shows me a bright veil to wear</div>
+<div>And such a pretty gown.</div>
+<div>Oh, I can see a playmate there</div>
+<div>Far up in Splendour Town!"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>Little Child began it with me, but her voice trailed away. I thought
+that in the darkness were many gentle presences&mdash;Little Child's tender
+breathing, the brushing wings of hurrying dreams, and perhaps that
+other&mdash;"not quite my sister," but a shadowy little Margaret.</p>
+
+<p>Afterward, Miggy and Peter and I sat together for a little while, but
+Peter had fallen in a silence. And presently Aunt Effie came home, and
+on the porch&mdash;which seemed not yet to have escaped&mdash;she told us about
+having broken her needle and left her shears at her neighbour's. While
+Peter ran over to Mis' Holcomb's for the shears, I had a word with
+Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy!" I said, "don't you see?"</p>
+
+<p>"See what?" she wanted to know, perversely.</p>
+
+<p>"How Peter would love to have Little Child, too?" I said.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed a little, and was silent; and laughed again.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span></p><p>"He was funny and nice," she admitted; "and wasn't Little Child funny
+not to bless him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because he is nice enough," I reminded her.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy laughed once more&mdash;I had never seen her in so tender and feminine
+a mood. And this may have been partly due to the new frock, though I
+cannot think that it was entirely this. But abruptly she shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter's father went by just before you came in," she said.
+"He&mdash;couldn't hardly walk. What if I was there to get supper for him
+when he got home? I never could&mdash;I never could...."</p>
+
+<p>By the time Peter and I were out alone on Daphne Street again, the
+sitting rooms in all the houses were dark, with a look of locked front
+doors&mdash;as if each house had set its lips together with, "We are a home
+and you are not."</p>
+
+<p>Peter looked out on all this palpable householdry.</p>
+
+<p>"See the lights upstairs," he said; "everybody's up there, hearing their
+prayers and giving 'em fever medicine. Yes, sir, Great Scott! Shorty
+Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade&mdash;they ain't good for a thing in
+the cannery. And yet they know...."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XIV</span> <span class="smaller">POSTMARKS</span></h2>
+
+<p>Between church service and Sunday School we of the First church have so
+many things to attend to that no one can spare a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Reverent things, not secular," Calliope explains, "plannin' for church
+chicken-pie suppers an' Christmas bazaars and like that; but not a word
+about a picnic, not even if they was to be one o' Monday sunrise."</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, this habit of ours occasionally causes a contretemps. As
+when one morning Mis' Toplady arrived late and, in a flurry, essayed to
+send up to the pulpit by the sexton a Missionary meeting notice to be
+read. Into this notice the minister plunged without the precaution of
+first examining it, and so delivered aloud:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags.</div>
+<div>"See Abigail about enough forks for her table.</div>
+<div>"Look around for my rubbers.</div>
+<div>"Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span></p><p>Not until he reached the fourth item was the minister stopped by the
+agonized rustle in a congregation that had easily recognized Mis'
+Toplady's "between services" list of reminder, the notice of the
+forthcoming meeting being safe in her hymn book.</p>
+
+<p>Still we persist in our Sabbath conferences when "everybody is there
+where you want 'em an' everybody can see everybody an' no time lost an'
+no party line listening"; and it is then that those who have been for
+some time away from the village receive their warmest welcome. I am not
+certain that the "I must get down to church and see everybody" of a
+returned neighbour does not hold in fair measure the principles of
+familyhood and of Christ's persuadings to this deep comradeship.</p>
+
+<p>It was in this time after church that we welcomed Calliope one August
+Sunday when she had unexpectedly come down from town on the Saturday
+night. And later, when the Sunday-school bell had rung, I waited with
+her in the church while she looked up her Bible, left somewhere in the
+pews. When she had found it, she opened it in a manner of eager haste,
+and I inadvertently saw pasted to the inside cover a sealed letter,
+superscription down, for whose safety she had been concerned. I had
+asked her to dine with me, and as we walked home together she told me
+about the letter and what its sealed presence in her Bible meant.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p><p>"I ain't ever read it," Calliope explained to me wistfully. "Every one
+o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle has got one, an' none of us has
+ever read 'em. It ain't my letter, so to say. It's one o' the Jem Pitlaw
+collection. The postmark," she imparted, looking up at me proudly, "is
+Bombay, India."</p>
+
+<p>At my question about the Jem Pitlaw collection she laughed
+deprecatingly, and then she sighed. ("Ain't it nice," she had once said
+to me, "your laughs hev a sigh for a linin', an' sighs can hev laughin'
+for trimmin'. Only trouble is, most folks want to line with trimmin's,
+an' they ain't rill durable, used that way.")</p>
+
+<p>"Jem Pitlaw," Calliope told me now, "used to be schoolmaster here&mdash;the
+kind that comes from Away an' is terrible looked up to on that account,
+but Jem deserved it. He knew all there was <i>to</i> know, an' yet he thought
+we knew some little things, too. We was all rill fond of him, though he
+kept to himself, an' never seemed to want to fall in love, an' not many
+of us knew him well enough to talk to at all familiar. But when he went
+off West on a vacation, an' didn't come back, an' never come back, an'
+then died, Friendship Village mourned for him,&mdash;sincere, though no
+crape,&mdash;an' missed him enormous.</p>
+
+<p>"He'd had a room at Postmaster Sykes's&mdash;that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> was when he was postmaster
+first an' they was still humble an' not above the honest penny. An' Jem
+Pitlaw left two trunks an' a sealed box to their house. An' when he
+didn't come back in two years, Silas Sykes moved the things out of the
+spare room over to the post-office store loft. An' there they set, three
+years on end, till we got word Jem was dead&mdash;the very week o' the
+Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle's Ten Cent Tropical F&ecirc;te. Though,
+rilly, the Tropical F&ecirc;te wasn't what you might say 'tropical.' It was
+held on the seventeenth of January, an' that night the thermometer was
+twenty-four degrees below on the bank corner. Nor it wasn't rilly what
+you might say a F&ecirc;te, either. But none o' the Circle regretted them
+lacks. A lack is as good as a gift, sometimes.</p>
+
+<p>"We'd started the Foreign Missionary Circle through Mis' Postmaster
+Sykes gettin' her palm. I donno what there is about palms, but you know
+the very name makes some folks think thoughts 'way outside their heads,
+an' not just stuffy-up inside their own brains. When I hear 'palm,' I
+sort o' feel like my i-dees got kind o' wordy wings an' just went it
+without me. An' that was the way with more than me, I found out. Nobody
+in Friendship Village hed a palm, but we'd all seen pictures an'
+hankered&mdash;like you do. An' all of a sudden Mis' Sykes got one, like she
+gets her new hat, sometimes,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> without a soul knowin' she's thinkin'
+'hat' till she flams out in it. Givin' surprise is breath an' bread to
+that woman. She unpacked the palm in the kitchen, an' telephoned around,
+an' we all went over just as we was an' set down there an' looked at it
+an' thought 'Palm'! You can't realize how we felt, all of us, if you
+ain't lived all your life with nothin' but begonias an' fuchsias from
+November to April, an' sometimes into May. But we was all mixed up about
+'em, now we see one. Some hed heard dates grew on palms. Others would
+have it it was cocoanuts. Still more said they was natives of the
+equator, an' give nothin' but shade. So it went. But after a while Mis'
+Timothy Toplady spoke up with that way o' comin' downstairs on her words
+an' rilly gettin' to a landin':&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'They's quite a number o' things,' she says, 'that I want to do so much
+it seems like I can't die without doin' 'em. But I guess prob'ly I will
+die without. Folks seems to drop off leavin' lots of doin's undone. An'
+one o' my worst is, I want to see palm trees growin' in hot lands&mdash;big
+spiky leaves pointin' into the blue sky <i>like fury</i>. 'Seems if I could
+do that,' s'she, 'I'd take in one long breath that'd make me all lungs
+an' float me up an' off.'</p>
+
+<p>"We all laughed, but we knew what she meant well enough, because we all
+felt the same way. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> think most North folks do&mdash;like they was cocoanuts
+an' dates in our actions, 'way back. An' so we was all ready for Mis'
+Toplady's idee when it come&mdash;which is the most any idee can expect:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'I tell you what,' s'she, 'le's hev a Ladies' Foreign Missionary
+Circle, an' get read up on them tropical countries. The only thing I
+really know about the tropics is what comes to me unbeknownst when I
+smell my tea rose. I've always been meanin' to take an interest in
+missions,' says she.</p>
+
+<p>"So we started it, then an' there, an' she an' I was the committee to
+draw out a constitution an' decide what officers should be elected an'
+do the general creatin'. We made it up that Mis' Sykes should be the
+president&mdash;that woman is a born leader, and, as a leader, you can depend
+on the very back of her head. An' at last we went off to the minister
+that then was to ask him what to take up.</p>
+
+<p>"'Most laudable,' s'he, when he'd heard. 'Well, now, what country is it
+you're most interested in?' he says. 'Some island of the sea, I s'pose?'
+he asks, bright.</p>
+
+<p>"'We're interested in palms,' Mis' Timothy Toplady explained it to him
+frank, 'an' we want to study about the missionaries in some country
+where they's dates an' cocoanuts an' oaseses.'</p>
+
+<p>"He smiled at that, sweet an' deep&mdash;I know it seemed to me as if he knew
+more about what we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> wanted than we knew ourselves. Because they's some
+ministers that understands that Christianity ain't all in the bottle
+labelled with it. Some of it is labelled 'ointment,' an' some 'perfume,'
+an' some just plain kitchen flavourin'. An' a good deal of it ain't
+labelled at all.</p>
+
+<p>"I forget what country it was we did study. But they was nine to ten of
+us, an' we met every week, an' I tell you the time wa'n't wasted. We
+took things in lavish. I know Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said that
+after belongin' to the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle she could never
+feel the same absent-minded sensation again when she dusted her parlour
+shells. An' Mis' Toplady said when she opened her kitchen cabinet an'
+smelt the cinnamon an' allspice out o' the perforated tops, 'most
+always, no matter how mad she was, she broke out in a hymn, like 'When
+All Thy Mercies,' sheer through knowin' how allspice was born of God an'
+not made of man. An' Mis' Sykes said when she read her Bible, an' it
+talked about India's coral strand, it seemed like, through knowin' what
+a reef was, she was right there on one, with her Lord. I felt the same
+way, too&mdash;though I'd always felt the same way, for that matter&mdash;I always
+did tip vanilla on my handkerchief an' pretend it was flowers an' that
+I'd gone down South for the cold months. An' it got so that when the
+minister give out a text that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> had geography in it, like the Red Sea, or
+Beer-elim, or 'a place called The Fair Haven,' the Ladies Foreign
+Missionary Circle would look round in our seats an' nod to each other,
+without it showin', because we knew that we knew, extra special, just
+what God was talkin' about. I tell you, knowledge makes you alive at
+places where you didn't know there was such a place.</p>
+
+<p>"In five months' time we felt we owed so much to the Ladies' Foreign
+Missionary Circle that it was Mis' Sykes suggested we give the Ten Cent
+Tropical F&ecirc;te, an' earn five dollars or so for missions.</p>
+
+<p>"'We know a great deal about the tropics now,' she says, 'an' I propose
+we earn a missionary thank-offering. Coral an' cocoanuts an' dates an'
+spices isn't all the Lord is interested in, by any means,' s'she. 'An'
+the winter is the time to give a tropic f&ecirc;te, when folks are thinkin'
+about warm things natural.'</p>
+
+<p>"We voted to hev the f&ecirc;te to Mis' Sykes's because it was too cold to
+carry the palm out. We went into it quite extensive&mdash;figs an' dates an'
+bananas an' ginger for refreshments, an' little nigger dolls for
+souvenirs, an' like that. It was quite a novel thing for Friendship, an'
+everybody was takin' an interest an' offerin' to lend Japanese umbrellas
+an' Indian baskets an' books on the South Sea, an' a bamboo chair with
+an elephant crocheted in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> tidy. An' then, bein' as happenin's always
+crowd along in flocks, what come that very week o' the f&ecirc;te but a letter
+from an old aunt of Jem Pitlaw's, out West. An' if Jem hadn't been dead
+almost ever since he left Friendship! an' the aunt wrote that we should
+sell his things to pay for keepin' 'em, as she was too poor to send for
+'em an' hadn't any room if she wasn't.</p>
+
+<p>"I donno whether you know what rill excitement is, but if you don't,
+you'd ought to drop two locked trunks an' a sealed box into a town the
+size o' Friendship Village, an' leave 'em there goin' on five years, an'
+then die an' let 'em be sold. That'll show you what a pitch true
+interest can get het up to. All of a sudden the Tropical F&ecirc;te was no
+more account than the telephone ringin' when a circus procession is
+going by. Some o' the Ladies' Missionary was rill indignant, an' said
+we'd ought to sue for repairin' rights, same as when you're interfered
+with in business. Mis' Sykes, she done her able best, too, but nothin'
+would do Silas but he must offer them things for sale on the instant.
+'The time,' s'he, firm, 'to do a thing is now, while the interest is up.
+An' in this country,' s'he, '"now" don't stay "now" more'n two minutes
+at a time.'</p>
+
+<p>"So he offered for sale the contents of them three things&mdash;the two
+trunks an' the sealed box&mdash;unsight, unseen, on the day before the F&ecirc;te
+was to be. Only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> one thing interfered with the 'unsight, unseen'
+business: the sealed box had got damp an' broke open, an' what was
+inside was all showin'.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes an' I saw it on the day o' the sale. Most o' the Circle was
+to her house finishin' up the decorations for the F&ecirc;te so's to leave the
+last day clear for seein' to the refreshments, an' her an' I run over to
+the post-office store for some odds an' ends. Silas had brought the two
+trunks an' the box down from the loft so to give 'em some advertisin'.
+An' lookin' in the corner o' the broke box we could see, just as plain
+as plain, was <i>letters</i>. Letters in bunches, all tied up, an' letters
+laid in loose&mdash;they must 'a' been full a hundred of 'em, all lookin'
+mysterious an' ready to tell you somethin', like letters will. I know
+the looks o' the letters sort o' went to my head, like the news of Far
+Off. An' I hated seein' Jem's trunks there, with his initials on,
+appearin' all trustin' an' as if they thought he was still alive.</p>
+
+<p>"But that wasn't the worst. They was three strangers there in the
+store&mdash;travellin' men that had just come in on the Through, an' they was
+hangin' round the things lookin' at 'em, as if they had the right to.
+This town ain't very much on the buy, an' we don't hev many strangers
+here, an' we ain't rill used to 'em. An' it did seem too bad, I know we
+thought, that them three should hev happened in on the day of a private
+Friendship Village sale that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> didn't concern nobody else but one, an'
+him dead. An' we felt this special when one o' the men took a-hold of a
+bunch o' the letters, an' we could see the address of the top one, to
+Jem Pitlaw, wrote thin an' tiny-fine, like a woman. An' at that Mis'
+Sykes says sharp to her husband:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Silas Sykes, you ain't goin' to sell them letters?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes, ma'am, I am,' Silas snaps, like he hed a right to all the letters
+on earth, bein' he was postmaster of Friendship Village. 'Letters,'
+Silas give out, 'is just precisely the same as books, only they ain't
+been through the expense of printin'. No differ'nce. No
+differ'nce!'&mdash;Silas always seems to think repeatin' a thing over'll get
+him somewheres, like a clock retickin' itself. 'An',' he says, 'I'm
+goin' to sell 'em for what they'll bring, same as the rest o' the
+things, an' you needn't to say one word.' An' bein' as Silas was
+snappin', not only as a postmaster but as a husband, Mis' Sykes, she
+kep' her silence. Matrimony an' politics both in one man is too much for
+any woman to face.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we two went back to Mis' Sykes's all het up an' sad, an' told the
+Circle about Jem Pitlaw's letters. An' we all stopped decoratin' an' set
+down just where we was an talked about what an awful thing it seemed. I
+donno as you'll sense it as strong as we did. It was more a feelin' than
+a wordin'. <i>Letters</i>&mdash;bein' sold an' read out loud an' gettin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> known
+about. It seemed like lookin' in somebody's purse before they're dead.</p>
+
+<p>"'I should of thought,' Mis' Sykes says, 'that Silas regardin' bein'
+postmaster as a sacred office would have made him do differ'nt. An' I
+know he talked that right along before he got his appointment. "Free
+Private Secretary to the People," an' "Trusted Curator of Public
+Communication," he put it when he was goin' around with his petition,'
+says she, grievin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says Mis' Amanda Toplady&mdash;I rec'lect she hed been puttin' up a
+big Japanese umbrella, an' she looked out from under it sort o' sweet
+an' sincere an' dreamy&mdash;'you've got to be a woman an' you've got to live
+in a little town before you know what a letter really is. I don't think
+these folks that hev lots o' mail left in the front hall in the
+mornin'&mdash;an' sometimes get one that same afternoon&mdash;<i>knows</i> about
+letters at all. An' I don't believe any man ever knows, sole except when
+he's in love. To sense what a letter is you've got to be a woman without
+what-you-may-say much to enjoy; you've got to hear the train whistle
+that might bring you one; you've got to calculate how long it'll take
+'em to distribute the mail, an' mebbe hurry to get your bread mixed, or
+your fried-cakes out o' the lard, or your cannin' where you can leave
+it&mdash;an' then go change your shoes an' slip on another skirt,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> an' poke
+your hair up under your hat so's it won't show, an' go down to the
+post-office in the hot sun, an' see the letter through the glass, there
+in your own box, waitin' for you. That minute, when your heart comes up
+in your throat, I tell you, is gettin' a letter.'</p>
+
+<p>"We all knew this is so&mdash;every one of us.</p>
+
+<p>"'It's just like that when you write 'em, only felt differ'nt,' says
+Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I do mine to my sister a little at a
+time&mdash;I keep it back o' the clock in the kitchen an' hide the pencil
+inside the clock door, so's it won't walk off, the way pencils do at our
+house. An' then, right in the midst of things, be it flour or be it
+suds, I can scratch down what comes in my head, till I declare sometimes
+I can hardly mail it for readin' it over an' thinkin' how she'll like to
+get it.'</p>
+
+<p>"'My, my!' says Mis' Sykes, reminiscent, ''specially since Silas has
+been postmaster an' we've had so much to do with other people's letters,
+I've been so hungry for letters of my own that I've wrote for samples. I
+can do that with a level conscience because, after all, you do get a new
+dress now an' then. But I couldn't answer advertisements, same as some,
+when I didn't mean true&mdash;just to get the letters back. That don't seem
+to me rill honest.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' then I owned up.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p><p>"'Last week, when I paid my taxes,' I says, 'I whipped out o' the
+clerk's office quick, sole so's he'd hev to mail me my tax receipt. But
+he didn't do it. He sent it over by their hired girl that noon. I love
+letters like I do my telephone bell an' my friends,' I know I says.</p>
+
+<p>"An' there was all that hundred letters or so&mdash;letters that somebody had
+put love in for Jem Pitlaw, an' that he'd read love out of an' saved
+'em&mdash;there they was goin' to be sold for all Friendship Village to read,
+includin' some that hadn't even known him, mebbe more than to speak to.</p>
+
+<p>"We wasn't quite through decoratin' when supper time come, so we stayed
+on to Mis' Sykes's for a pick-up lunch, et in the kitchen, an' finished
+up afterwards. Most of 'em could do that better than they could leave
+their work an' come down again next mornin'&mdash;men-folks can always get
+along for supper, bein' it's not a hot meal.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ain't it wonderful,' says Mis' Toplady, thoughtful, 'here we are,
+settin' 'round the kitchen table at Mis' Postmaster Sykes's in
+Friendship Village. An' away off in Arabia or Asia or somewhere that I
+ain't sure they is any such place, is somebody settin' that never heard
+of us nor we of him, an' he's goin' to hev our five dollars from the
+Tropical F&ecirc;te to-morrow night, an' put it to work doin' good.'</p>
+
+<p>"'It makes sort of a connection, don't it?' says<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'There they are an' here we are. Ain't it
+strange? 'Seems like our doin' this makes us feel nearer to them places.
+I donno but that,' says she, noddin', 'is the start of what it means
+about the lion and the lamb layin' down together.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh!'says Mis' Toplady, 'I tell you the Foreign Missionary Circle has
+been next best to <i>goin'</i>. 'Seems sometimes as if I've 'most been
+somewheres an' seen palms a-growin' an' a-wavin' an' a red sky back.
+Don't it to you? I've dreamed o' them places all my life, an' I ain't
+never had anything but Friendship Village, an' I don't know now that
+Arabia an' Asia an' India is rilly fitted in, the way they look on the
+map. An' so with some more. But if so be they are, then,' she says, 'we
+owe it to the Foreign Missionary Circle that we've got that far towards
+seein' 'em.'</p>
+
+<p>"An' we all agreed, warm, excep' Mis' Sykes, who was the hostess an' too
+busy to talk much; but we knew how she felt. An' we said some more about
+how wonderful things are, there in Mis' Sykes's kitchen while we et.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, when we got done decoratin' after supper, we all walked over to
+the post-office store to the sale&mdash;the whole Circle of us. Because, of
+course, if the letters was to be sold there wasn't any harm in seein'
+who got 'em, an' in knowin' just how mean<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> who was. Then, too, we was
+interested in what was in the two trunks. We was quite early&mdash;early
+enough to set along on the front rows of breakfast-food boxes that was
+fixed ready. An' in the very frontmost one was Mis' Sykes an' Mis'
+Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, an' me.</p>
+
+<p>"But we see, first thing when we got into the store, that they was
+strangers present. The three travellin' men that Mis' Sykes an' I had
+noticed that afternoon was still in town, of course, an' there they was
+to the sale, loungin' along on the counter each side o' the cheese. We
+couldn't bear their bein' there. It was our sale, an' they wasn't rill
+sure to understand. To us Mr. Pitlaw hed been Mr. Pitlaw. To them he was
+just somebody that hed been somebody. I didn't like it, nor they didn't
+none o' the Ladies' Missionary like it. We all looked at each other an'
+nodded without it showin', like we do, an' we could see we all felt the
+same.</p>
+
+<p>"Silas was goin' to officiate himself&mdash;that man has got the idee it's
+the whistle that runs the boat. They had persuaded him to open the
+trunks an' sell the things off piecemeal, an' he see that was rilly the
+only way to do it. So when the time come he broke open the two trunks
+an' he wouldn't let anybody touch hasp or strap or hammer but himself.
+It made me sort of sick to see even the trunk things of Mr. Pitlaw's
+come out&mdash;a pepper an' salt suit, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> pair of new suspenders, a collar
+an' cuff case&mdash;the kind that you'd recognize was a Christmas present; a
+nice brush an' comb he'd kept for best an' never used, a cake of
+pretty-paper soap he'd never opened, a bunch o' keys, an' like that. You
+know how it makes you feel to unpack even your own things that have been
+put away a good while; it's like thinkin' over forgot thoughts. Well,
+an' this was worse. Jem Pitlaw, that none of us had known well enough to
+mention familiar things to, was dead&mdash;he was <i>dead</i>; an' here we were,
+lookin' on an' seein' the things that was never out of his room before,
+an' that he'd put in there, neat an' nice, five years back, to be took
+out, he thought, in a few weeks. Quite a lot of us felt delicate, but
+some got behind the delicate idee an' made it an excuse for not buyin'
+much. They's all kinds to a sale&mdash;did you ever notice? Timothy Toplady,
+for instance&mdash;I donno but he's all kinds in his single self. 'Seems he
+couldn't bring himself to bid on a thing but Jem Pitlaw's keys.</p>
+
+<p>"'Of course nobody knows what they'll fit,' says he, disparagin', 'so to
+buy 'em don't seem like bein' too familiar with Mr. Pitlaw,' s'he, rill
+pleased with himself.</p>
+
+<p>"But Mis' Sykes whispers to me:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Them keys'll go dirt cheap, an' Timothy knows it, an' a strange key
+may come in handy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> any minute. Timothy's reasons never whip to a froth,'
+s'she, cold.</p>
+
+<p>"But I guess she was over-critical because of gettin' more fidgety, like
+we all did, the nearer Silas got to the letters. He hed left the letters
+till the last. An' what with folks peekin' in the box since he'd brought
+it down, an' what with handlin' what was ready to spill out, most of 'em
+by then was in plain sight. An' there I see more o' them same
+ones&mdash;little thin writin', like a woman's. We 'most all noticed it. An'
+I couldn't keep my eyes off of 'em. 'Seemed like she might be somebody
+with soft ways that ought to be there, savin' the letters, wardin' off
+the heartache for Mr. Pitlaw an' mebbe one for herself.</p>
+
+<p>"An' right while I was lookin' Silas turned to the box and cleared his
+throat, important as if he was the whistle for New York City, an' he
+lifted up the bunch of the letters that had the little fine writin' on
+top, just the way Mr. Pitlaw had tied 'em up with common string.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh!' says Mis' Toplady and Mis' Sykes, each side of me, the one 'oh!'
+strong an' the other low, but both 'oh's' meanin' the same thing.</p>
+
+<p>"'Now, what,' says Silas, brisk, 'am I bid for this package of nice
+letters here? Good clear writin', all in strong condition, an' no holes
+in, just as firm an' fresh,' s'he, 'as the day they was dropped into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
+the mail. What am I bid for 'em?' he asks, his eyebrows rill expectant.</p>
+
+<p>"Not one of the travellin' men had bid a thing. They had sat still, just
+merely loungin' each side the cheese, laughin' some, like men will,
+among each other, but not carin' to take any part, an' we ladies felt
+rill glad o' that. But all of a sudden, when Silas put up the bunch o'
+letters, them three men woke up, an' we see like lightnin' that this was
+what they hed been waitin' for.</p>
+
+<p>"'Twenty-five cents!' bids one of 'em, decisive.</p>
+
+<p>"There was a movement of horror spread around the Missionary Circle at
+the words. Sometimes it's bad enough to hev one thing happen, but often
+it's worse to hev another occur. Even Silas looked a little doubtful,
+but to Silas the main chance is always the main thing, an' instantly he
+see that these men, if they got in the spirit of it, would run them
+letters up rill high just for the fun of it. An' Silas was like some
+are: he felt that money is money.</p>
+
+<p>"So what did he do but begin cryin' the goods up higher&mdash;holdin' the
+letters in his hands, that little, thin writin' lookin' like it was
+askin' somethin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'Here we hev letters,' says Silas, 'letters from Away. Not just
+business letters, to judge by the envelopes&mdash;an' I allow, gentlemen,'
+says Silas, facetious, 'that, bein' postmaster of Friendship Village,
+I'm as good a judge of letters as there is a-goin'.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> Here we hev some
+intimate personal letters offered for sale legitimate by their heiress.
+What am I bid?' asks he.</p>
+
+<p>"'Thirty-five cents!'</p>
+
+<p>"'Fifty cents!' says the other two travellin' gentlemen, quick an' in
+turn.</p>
+
+<p>"'Seventy-five cents!' cries out the first, gettin' in earnest&mdash;though
+they was all laughin' at hevin' somethin' inspirin' to do.</p>
+
+<p>"But Silas merely caught a-hold of the mood they was in, crafty, as if
+he'd been gettin' the signers to his petition while they was feelin'
+good.</p>
+
+<p>"'One moment, gentlemen!' s'he. 'Do you know what you're biddin' on? I
+ain't told you the half yet,' s'he. 'I ain't told you,' s'he, 'where
+these letters come from.'</p>
+
+<p>"With that he hitches his glasses an' looked at the postmarks. An' he
+read 'em off. Oh, an' what do you guess them postmarks was? I'll never
+forget the feelin' that come over me when I heard what he was sayin',
+turnin' back in under the string to see. For the stamps on the letters
+was foreign stamps. The postmarks was foreign postmarks. An' what Silas
+read off was: Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Singapore&mdash;oh, I can't begin to
+remember all the names nor to pronounce 'em, but I think they was all in
+India, or leastwise in Asia. Think of it! in Asia, that none of the
+Ladies' Foreign<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> Missionary Circle hed been sure there was such a place.</p>
+
+<p>"I know how we all looked around at each other sudden, with the same
+little jump in the chest as when we remember we've got bread in the oven
+past the three-quarters, or when we've left the preserves on the blaze
+while we've done somethin' else an' think it's burnin', or when we've
+cut out both sleeves for one arm an' ain't got any more cloth. I mean it
+was that intimate, personal jump, like when awful, first-person things
+have happened. An' I tell you what, when the Ladies' Missionary feels a
+thing, they feel it strong an' they act it sudden. It's our way, as a
+Circle. An' in that look that went round among us there was hid the nod
+that knows what each other means.</p>
+
+<p>"'One dollar!' shouts one o' the travellin' men.</p>
+
+<p>"An' with that we all turned, like one solid human being, straight
+towards Mis' Postmaster Sykes, that was our president an' a born leader
+besides, an' the way we looked at her resembled a vote.</p>
+
+<p>"Mis' Sykes stood up, grave an' scairt, though not to show. An' we was
+sure she'd do the right thing, though we didn't know what the right
+thing was; but we felt confidence, I know, in the very pattern on the
+back of her shawl. An' she says, clear:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'I'd like to be understood to bid for the whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> box o' Mr. Pitlaw's
+letters, includin' the bunch that's up. An' I bid five dollars.'</p>
+
+<p>"Of course we all knew in a minute what that meant: Mis' Sykes was
+biddin' with the proceeds of the Ten Cent Tropical F&ecirc;te that was to be.
+But we see, too, that this was a missionary cause if there ever was one,
+an' they wa'n't one of us that thought it irregular, or grudged it, or
+looked behind.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know whether you know how much five dollars rilly is&mdash;like you
+sense it when you've spoke it to a sale, or put it on a subscription
+paper in Friendship. There wasn't a sound in that store, everybody was
+so dumfounded. But none was so much as Silas Sykes. Silas was so
+surprised that he forgot that he was in public.</p>
+
+<p>"'My King!' says he, unexpected to himself. 'What you sayin', Huldy? You
+ain't biddin' that out o' your allowance, be you?' says he. Silas likes
+big words in the home.</p>
+
+<p>"'No, sir,' says she, crisp, back, 'I ain't. I can't do miracles out of
+nothin'. But I bid, an' you'll get your money, Silas. An' I may as well
+take the letters now.'</p>
+
+<p>"With that she rose up an' spread out her shawl almost broodin', an'
+gathered that box o' Jem Pitlaw's into her two arms. An' with one motion
+all the rest o' the Ladies' Missionary got up behind her an' stalked out
+of the store, like a big bid is sole all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> there is to an auction. An'
+they let us go. Why, there wasn't another thing for Silas Sykes to do
+but let be as was. Them three men over by the cheese just laughed, an'
+said out somethin' about no gentleman outbiddin' a lady, an' shut up,
+beat, but pretendin' to give in, like some will.</p>
+
+<p>"Just before we all got to the door we heard somebody's feet come down
+off'n a cracker-barrel or somethin', an' Timothy Toplady's voice after
+us, shrill-high an' nervous:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Amanda,' s'he, 'you ain't calculatin' to help back up this
+tomfoolishness, I hope?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' Mis' Amanda says at him, over her shoulder:</p>
+
+<p>"'If I was, that'd be between my hens an' me, Timothy Toplady,' says
+she.</p>
+
+<p>"An' the store door shut behind us&mdash;not mad, I remember, but gentle,
+like 'Amen.'</p>
+
+<p>"We took the letters straight to Mis' Sykes's an' through the house to
+the kitchen, where there was a good hot fire in the range. It was bitter
+cold outdoors, an' we set down around the stove just as we was, with the
+letters on the floor in front o' the hearth. An' when Mis' Sykes hed got
+the bracket lamp lit, she turned round, her bonnet all crooked but her
+face triumphant, an' took off a griddle of the stove an' stirred up the
+coals. An' we see what was in her mind.</p>
+
+<p>"'We can take turns puttin' 'em in,' she says.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p><p>"But I guess it was in all our minds what Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss says, wistful:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Don't you think,' she says, 'or <i>do</i> you think, it'd be wrongin' Mr.
+Pitlaw if we read over the postmarks out loud first?'</p>
+
+<p>"We divided up the bunches an' we set down around an' untied the
+strings, an', turn in an' turn out, we read the postmarks off. 'Most
+every one of 'em was foreign&mdash;oh, I can't begin to tell you where. It
+was all mixed up an' shinin' of names we'd never heard of before, an'
+names we had heard in sermons an' in the Bible&mdash;Egypt an' Greece an'
+Rome an' isles o' the sea. Mis' Toplady stopped right in the middle o'
+hers.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, I can't be sure I'm pronouncin' 'em right,' she says, huntin' for
+her handkerchief, 'but I guess you ladies get the <i>feel</i> o' the places,
+don't you?'</p>
+
+<p>"An' that was just it: we did. We got the feel of them far places that
+night like we never could hev hed it any other way. An' when we got all
+through, Mis' Toplady spoke up again&mdash;but this time it was like she flew
+up a little way an' lit on somethin'.</p>
+
+<p>"'It ain't likely,' she says, 'that we'll ever, any of us, hev a letter
+of our own from places like these. We don't get many letters, an' what
+we do get come from the same old towns, over an' over again, an' quite
+near by. Do you know,' she says, 'I believe this Writin' here'&mdash;she held
+out the tiny fine <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>writing that was like a woman with soft ways&mdash;'would
+understand if we each took one of her letters an' glued it together here
+an' now an' carried it home an' pasted it in our Bibles. <i>She</i> went
+travellin' off to them places, an' she must have wanted to; an' she
+would know what it is to want to go an' yet never get there.'</p>
+
+<p>"I think Mis' Amanda was right&mdash;we all thought so. An' we done what she
+mentioned, an' made our choice o' postmarks. I know Mis' Amanda took
+Cairo.</p>
+
+<p>"''Count of the name sort o' picturin' out a palm tree a-growin' an'
+a-wavin' against a red sky,' she says, when she was pinnin' her shawl
+clear up over her hat to go out in the cold. 'Think of it,' she says;
+'she might 'a' passed a palm the day she wrote it. Ain't it like seein'
+'em grow yourself?'</p>
+
+<p>... "Mebbe it all wasn't quite regular," Calliope added, "though we made
+over five dollars at the Ten Cent F&ecirc;te. But the minister, when we told
+him, he seemed to think it was all right, an' he kep' smilin', sweet an'
+deep, like we'd done more'n we <i>had</i> done. An' I think he knew what we
+meant when we said we was all feelin' nearer, lion an' lamb, to them
+strange missionary countries. Because&mdash;oh, well, sometimes, you know,"
+Calliope said, "they's things that makes you feel nearer to faraway
+places that couldn't hev any postmark at all."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XV</span> <span class="smaller">PETER</span></h2>
+
+<p>Last night in my room there was no sleeping, because the moon was there.
+It is a south room, and when the moon shines on the maple floor with its
+white cotton rugs and is reflected from the smooth white walls, to step
+within is like entering an open flower. Who could sleep in an open
+flower? I might sleep in a vast white petunia, because petunias do not
+have as much to say to me as do some other flowers. But in the bell of a
+lily, as in the bell of the sky or in my moonlit room, I should wish my
+thought to stay awake and be somebody. Be Somebody. On these nights, it
+is as if one had a friend in one's head conferring with one. And I think
+of this comrade as Her, the Custodian of me, who lives deep within and
+nearly comes outside to this white porch of the moon.</p>
+
+<p>I like to light my candle and watch its warm rays mix with the
+blue-white beams from without. There would have been a proper employment
+for a wizard:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> to diffuse varying insubstantialities, such as these, and
+to look within them, as within a pool&mdash;a pool free of its basin and
+enjoying the air. Yes, they were an unimaginative race, wizards. When
+will the era of white art come, with &aelig;sthetic witches and wizards who
+know our modern magics of colour and form and perception as a mere basis
+for their sorceries? Instead of pottering with thick, slab gruel and
+medi&aelig;val newts' eyes, think what witches they will be! Sometimes I think
+that they are already arriving. The New Lady told me the most delightful
+thing about a Thought of hers that she saw ... but it was such an
+elusive thing to tell and so much of it I had to guess, because words
+have not yet caught up with fancies, that it is hard to write down.
+Besides, perhaps you know. And if you did not know, you would skip this
+part anyway. So I merely mention that <i>she</i> mentioned the coming alive
+of a thought of hers which helped her spirit to grow, quite without her
+will. Very likely you understand other wizardries. An excellent place to
+think them out must be the line where candle rays meet moonbeams, but
+there is no such discoverable line, just as there is no discoverable
+line between the seeing and the knowing, where the Custodian dwells....
+By all of which I am merely showing you what the moon can do to one's
+head and that it is no great wonder that one cannot sleep.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span></p><p>"Ain't the moon kind of like a big, shinin' brain," Calliope said once,
+"an' moonlight nights it gets in your head and thinks for you."</p>
+
+<p>So last night when I went in my room I did not try to sleep; nor did I
+even light my candle. I went straight to a window and opened it&mdash;the one
+without a screen. I would not live in a house that did not have certain
+windows which one could open to let in the moon, or the night, or the
+living out-of-doors, with no screens to thwart their impulse. Suppose
+that sometime Diana&mdash;well, suppose what you will that is sensible, no
+moon can shine through a screen. Really, it cannot do its best through
+even an open window. And this was why I gave up trying to make it do so
+and went downstairs again&mdash;which is the earthly and rational of floating
+out into that utter beauty as I wanted to float.</p>
+
+<p>Of going out into such a night I would like to write for a long time, as
+I would like to keep on breathing lilies-of-the-valley and never have
+done. I think, though, that "into" such a night is not the word; to go
+out <i>upon</i> the night is the essential experience. For, like a June day,
+a moonlit night of itself will not let us inside. We must know some
+other way of entrance. And I suspect that some of us never quite find
+the way&mdash;I wonder if we are missed?</p>
+
+<p>I stepped round the house to the open ocean of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> light that broke on soft
+shores of leaf and line, solemnizing, magnifying. It was like a glimpse
+into something which, afterward and afterward, is going to be. The
+definiteness of its premonitory message was startling. As when on seeing
+once that something had happened on my birthday, 1500, I felt as if I
+had heard from a kind of twin-time, so now I understood that this night
+was the birthday of far-off, immortal moments of my own, yet to be lived
+... so friendly near we are to the immeasurable kindred.</p>
+
+<p>And there, from the shadow of the flowering currant bush, which just now
+is out of flower and fallen in meditative quiet&mdash;a man arose. My sharp
+fear, as savage a thing as if the world were ten thousand years younger,
+or as if I were a ptarmigan and he a cougar&mdash;was only momentary. For the
+cougar began to apologize and I recognized him.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," I said, "Peter."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes'm," said he, "I couldn't help being here&mdash;for a little while."</p>
+
+<p>"Neither could I, Peter," I told him.</p>
+
+<p>These were remarkable admissions of ours, for a large part of evening in
+the village is an uninhabitable part of day and, no matter in what
+splendour of sky it comes, is a thing to be shut outside experience. If
+we relate being wakened by something that goes bang, we begin it, "In
+the middle of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> night, about twelve o'clock;" and, "They have a light
+in their house 'most every night till midnight," is a bit of sharp
+criticism not lightly to be lived down. But now it was as if Peter were
+a part of the time itself, and outlaw too, if the evening was outlaw.
+"I'm glad I saw you," Peter said&mdash;as if we were here met by chance in
+the usual manner. "I wanted to see you and tell you: I'm going away&mdash;to
+be gone right along."</p>
+
+<p>"Why," I said again, "Peter!"</p>
+
+<p>"You'd go too," he said simply.</p>
+
+<p>"I should want to go," I told him, "but I doubt if I would go. Where are
+you going?"</p>
+
+<p>"They want to put in a cannery at Marl. It'd be a branch. I'd run it
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>I did not miss the implication of the conditional mood. And <i>Marl</i>. What
+wonderful names they give to some of the towns of this world. That word
+makes a picture all of white cornices and white wings of buildings and
+bright fa&ccedil;ades. I dare say from the railroad track the real town of Marl
+shows an unpainted livery barn and a blue barber shop, but the name
+sounds like the name of a chapter of travel, beginning: To-day we drove
+to Marl to see the queen. Or the cataract. Or the porch of the morning.</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you going, Peter?" I drove in the peg for him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p><p>"I guess you know," he said. "It's all Miggy with me."</p>
+
+<p>I knew that he wanted before all else to tell somebody, to talk to
+somebody, to have somebody know.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me, Peter," I said.</p>
+
+<p>And now Peter told me how things were with him. If I should repeat what
+he said you would be scornful, for it was so little. It was broken and
+commonplace and set with repetition. It was halting and unfinished, like
+the unformed writing of a boy. But in his words I felt the movings of
+life and destiny and death more than I feel them when I think about the
+rushing of the stars. He loved her, and for him the world became a
+transparent plane wherein his soul moved as simply as his body. Here was
+not only a boy longing for a girl. Here was not only a man, instinct
+with the eager hope of establishing a home. Here was something not
+unlike this very moon-washed area won from the illimitable void, this
+area where we stood and spoke together, this little spot which alone was
+to us articulate with form and line and night sounds. So Peter,
+stumbling over his confession of love for Miggy, was like the word
+uttered by destiny to explicate its principle. It mattered not at all
+what the night said or what Peter said. Both were celestial.</p>
+
+<p>These moments when the soul presses close to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> its windows are to be
+understood as many another hint at the cosmic&mdash;Dawn, May, the firmament,
+radio-activity, theistic evolution, a thousand manifestations of the
+supernal. In this cry of enduring spirit it was as if Peter had some
+intimacy with all that has no boundaries. I hardly heard his stumbling
+words. I listened to him down some long avenue of hearths whose
+twinkling lights were like a corridor of stars.</p>
+
+<p>And all this bright business was to be set at naught because Miggy would
+have none of it.</p>
+
+<p>"She seems to like me," Peter said miserably, "but I guess she'd like me
+just as well if I wasn't me. And if I was right down somebody else, I
+guess she'd like me a good deal better. She&mdash;don't like my hands&mdash;nor
+the way my hair sticks up at the back. She thinks of all such things. I
+wouldn't care if she said all her words crooked. I'd know what she
+meant."</p>
+
+<p>I knew the difference. To him she was Miggy. To her he was an
+individual. He had never in her eyes graduated from being a person to
+being himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Calliope says," I told him, "that she likes almond extract better than
+any other kind, but that she hardly ever gets a bottle of almond with
+which she does not find fault. She says it's the same way with people
+one loves."</p>
+
+<p>Peter smiled&mdash;he is devoted to Calliope, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> alone in the village has
+been friendly with his father. <i>Friendly.</i> The rest of the village has
+only been kind.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he tried to put it, "but Miggy never seems to be thinking of me
+as <i>me</i>, only when she's finding fault with me. If she'd only think
+about me, even a little, the way I think about her. If she'd only miss
+me or want me or wonder how the house would seem if we were married. But
+she don't care&mdash;she don't care."</p>
+
+<p>"She says, you know," I ventured, "that she can't ask you to support
+Little Child too."</p>
+
+<p>"Can't she see," he cried, "that the little thing only makes me love her
+more? Don't she know how I felt the other night&mdash;when she let me help
+her that way? She must know. It's just an excuse&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He broke off and his hands dropped.</p>
+
+<p>"Then there's her other reason," he said, "I guess you know that. I
+can't blame her for it. But even with that, it kind of seems as if,&mdash;if
+she loved me&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I said, "Peter, it does seem so."</p>
+
+<p>And yet in my heart I am certain that the reason is not at all that
+Miggy cannot love him&mdash;I remember the woman-softening of her face that
+forenoon when she found the spirit of the old romances in the village. I
+am not even certain that the reason<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> is that she does not love Peter
+now&mdash;I remember how tender and feminine she was the other night with
+Peter and Little Child. I think it is only that the cheap cynicism of
+the village&mdash;which nobody means even when it is said!&mdash;has taught her
+badly; and that Life has not yet touched her hand, has not commanded
+"Look at me," has not bidden her follow with us all.</p>
+
+<p>I looked into the bright bowl of the night which is alternately with one
+and against one in one's mood of emprise; the bright bowl of the night
+inverted as if some mighty genii were shaking the stars about like
+tea-leaves to fortune the future. What a pastime <i>that</i> for a wizard!</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Peter," I said, "<i>if</i> one were a wizard!"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't understand," said Peter.</p>
+
+<p>"How pleasant it would be to make folk love folk," I put it.</p>
+
+<p>He understood that. "Wouldn't it, though?" he assented wistfully. So
+does everybody understand. Wouldn't it, though! Oh, <i>don't you wish you
+could</i>?</p>
+
+<p>In the silence which fell I kept on looking at those starry tea-leaves
+until I protest that a thought awoke in my mind as if it wanted to be
+somebody. Be Somebody. It was as if it came alive, quite without my
+will, so that almost I could see it. It was a friend conferring in my
+head. Perhaps it was the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> Custodian herself, come outside to that white
+porch of the moon.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," I said, "I think I'm going to tell you a story."</p>
+
+<p>For I longed to make him patient with Miggy, as men, who understand
+these things first, are not always patient with women, who often and
+often understand too late.</p>
+
+<p>He listened to the story as I am setting it down here&mdash;the story of the
+New Village. But in it I could say nothing of how, besides by these
+things celestial, cosmic, I was touched by the simple, human entreaty of
+the big, baffled man and that about his hands and the way his hair
+sticks up at the back.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XVI</span> <span class="smaller">THE NEW VILLAGE</span></h2>
+
+<p>Once upon a time there was a village which might have been called
+The-Way-Certain-Folk-Want-It-Now. That, however, was not its name&mdash;it
+had a proper, map-sounding name. And there every one went to and fro
+with a fervour and nimbleness which proved him to be skilfully intent
+upon his own welfare.</p>
+
+<p>The village had simple buildings and white walls, lanes and flowering
+things and the flow of pure air. But the strange thing about the town
+was that there each inhabitant lived alone. Every house had but one
+inmate and he well content. He liked everything that he owned and his
+taste was all-sufficient and he took his pleasure in his own walls and
+loved best his own ways. The day was spent in lonely selling or lonely
+buying, each man pitted against all others, and advantage and
+disadvantage were never equal, but yet the transactions were dreary,
+lacking the picturesqueness of unlicensed spoliation. The only greeting
+which folk exchanged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> in passing was, "Sir, what do you do for
+yourself?" There were no assemblings of the people. The town kept itself
+alive by accretion from without. When one died another appeared and took
+his place gladly, and also others arrived, like precept added to precept
+and not like a true flowering. There were no children. And the village
+common was overgrown and breast-high with weeds. When the day was done
+every one retired to his own garden and saw his flowers blossoming for
+him and answering to the stars which came and stood over his head. There
+was in the town an epidemic of the intensive, only the people thought of
+it as the normal, for frequently epidemics are so regarded.</p>
+
+<p>In one soul the contagion did not prevail. The soul was the lad Matthew,
+whose body lived on the town's only hill. When others sat at night in
+their gardens Matthew was wont to go up an airy path which he had made
+to the upper spaces and there wander conjecturing about being alive. For
+this was a detail which he never could take wholly for granted, in the
+manner in which he had become wonted to door-mats, napkin-rings,
+oatmeal, and mirrors. Therefore he took his thought some way nearer to
+the stars, and there he found so much beauty that he longed to fashion
+it to something, to create of it anew. And as he opened his heart he
+began to understand that there is some one of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> whom he was the
+offspring. As he was companioned by this idea, more and more he longed
+for things to come nearer. Once, in his walking a hurrying bird brushed
+his face, grew confused, fluttered at his breast, and as he would have
+closed it in his hands he found that the bird was gone and his hands
+were empty, but beneath them his own heart fluttered and throbbed like a
+thing apart.</p>
+
+<p>One night, so great was the abstraction of the boy, that instead of
+taking the upper path he fared down into the town. It was a curious way
+to do&mdash;to go walking in the town as if the thing were common property,
+but then the walls were very high and the gates were fast closed and
+bound round with creeping things, which grow very quickly. Matthew
+longed to enter these gardens, and he wondered who lived in the houses
+and what might be in their hearts.</p>
+
+<p>Amazingly, at the turn of a white wall, a gate was opened and she who
+had opened it leaned into the night as if she were looking for
+something. There was a fluttering in the breast of Matthew so that he
+looked down to see if the bird had come back. But no bird was there. And
+it smote him that the lady's beauty, and surely her goodness, were great
+enough so that of them something might be created, as he would fain have
+created marvels from the sky.</p>
+
+<p>"I would like to make your beauty into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>something other," he said to
+her. "I cannot think whether this would be a song or a picture or a
+vision."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with as much pleasure as if he had been an idea of her
+own.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me about my beauty," she bade him. "What thing is that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, that will take some while," Matthew said. "If I do that, I must
+come in your garden."</p>
+
+<p>Now, such a thing had never happened in the town. And as this seemed why
+it never happened, it seemed likely to go on never happening
+indefinitely. But loneliness and the longing to create and the
+conjecture about life have always been as potent as battles; and beauty
+and boredom and curiosity have had something to do with history as well.</p>
+
+<p>"Just this once, then," said the lady, and the gate closed upon the two.</p>
+
+<p>Here was a garden like Matthew's own, but indefinitely atmosphered
+other. It spoke strangely of a wonted presence, other than his own. In
+his own garden he fitted as if the space for him were niched in the air,
+and he went as a man accustomed will go without thinking. But here he
+moved free, making new niches. And whereas on his own walks and plots he
+looked with lack-lustre eye as a man looks on his own gas-jet or rain
+pipe, now Matthew looked on all that he saw as on strange flame and
+sweet waters. And it was not the shrubs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> and flowers which most
+delighted him, but it was rather on a garden bench the lady's hat and
+gloves and scissors.</p>
+
+<p>"How pleasing!" said he, and stopped before them.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you find them so?" asked the lady.</p>
+
+<p>And when he told her about her beauty, which was more difficult to do
+than he had imagined and took a longer time, she said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"There can be no other man in the world who would speak as you speak."</p>
+
+<p>On which he swore that there was no man who would not speak so, and
+likewise that no man could mean one-half what he himself meant. And he
+looked long at her house.</p>
+
+<p>"In those rooms," he said, "you go about. I wish that I could go about
+there."</p>
+
+<p>But that frightened her a little.</p>
+
+<p>"In there," he said, "are the lamps you light, the plates you use, the
+brush that smooths your hair. How strange that is."</p>
+
+<p>"Does it seem strange?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Sometime I will go there," said he, and with that he thought that the
+bird once more was fluttering at his breast. And again there was no
+bird.</p>
+
+<p>When the time was come that he must leave her, this seemed the most
+valiant thing to do that ever he had done. It was inconceivable to
+accept that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> though now she was with him, breathing, sentient, yet in
+another moment he would be out alone in the empty night. Alone. For the
+first time the word became a sinister thing. It meant to be where she
+was not.</p>
+
+<p>"How is this to go on," he said, "I living where you do not live?"</p>
+
+<p>But she said, "Such things have never been any other way," and closed
+the gate upon him.</p>
+
+<p>It is a mighty thing when one who has always lived alone abruptly finds
+himself to have a double sense. Here is his little box of ideas, neatly
+classified, ready for reference, which have always methodically bobbed
+out of their own will the moment they were mentioned. Here are his own
+varieties of impression ready to be laid like a pattern upon whatever
+presents itself to be cut out. Here are his tastes, his sentiments, his
+beliefs, his longings, all selected and labelled and established. And
+abruptly ideas and impressions and tastes are thrown into rapt disorder
+while he wonders what this other being would think, and his sentiment
+glows like a lamp, his belief embraces the world, his longing becomes
+only that the other being's longing be cast in counterpart. When he
+walks abroad, the other's step accompanies him, a little back, and
+invisible, but as authentic as his own. When he thinks, his thought,
+without his will, would share itself. All this is a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> new way of
+consciousness. All this makes two universes where one universe had
+previously been competent to support life.</p>
+
+<p>Back on his hill Matthew went through his house as if he were seeing it
+for the first time. There was the garden that he had planted, and she
+was not walking there. There was his window, and she was not looking
+from it; his table, and she was not sitting beside it; his book which he
+could not read for wondering if she had read. All the tools of his home,
+what could they not become if she touched them? The homely tasks of the
+cupboard, what joy if she shared them? But what to do? He thought that
+it might be something if they exchanged houses, so that he could be
+where she had been, could use what she had used, could think of her in
+her setting. But yet this did not wholly delight him, either.</p>
+
+<p>And now his house stifled him, so that he rushed out upon that airy path
+of his that he had made to reach the upper spaces, and he fled along,
+learning about being alive. Into the night he went, farther than ever he
+had gone before, till the stars looked nearer to him than houses
+commonly look, and things to think about seemed there waiting for him.</p>
+
+<p>So it adventured that he came abruptly upon the New Village. It lay upon
+the air as lightly as if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> strong, fair hands were uniting to bear it up,
+and it was not far from the stars and the clear places. Before he
+understood its nearness, the night was, so to say, endued with this
+village, and he entered upon its lanes as upon light.</p>
+
+<p>This was a town no larger than his own and no more fortuned of Nature.
+Here were buildings not too unlike, and white walls and flowering things
+and the flow of pure air. But here was also the touch of bells. And he
+saw that every one went to and fro in a manner of quiet purpose that was
+like a garment.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir, what do you do for yourself?" he asked courteously of one who was
+passing.</p>
+
+<p>The citizen gave him greeting.</p>
+
+<p>"I make bread for my family," said he, "and, it may be, a dream or two."</p>
+
+<p>Matthew tried hard to perceive, and could make nothing of this.</p>
+
+<p>"Your family," he said, "what thing is that?"</p>
+
+<p>The citizen looked at him narrowly.</p>
+
+<p>"I see that you rebuke me," said he, gently; "but I, too, labor for the
+community, so that the day shall become a better day."</p>
+
+<p>"Community," said Matthew. "Now I know not at all what that may be,
+either."</p>
+
+<p>Then the man understood that here was one who would learn about these
+things, and in the New<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> Village such a task is sacred and to be assumed
+on the moment by any to whom the opportunity presents. So the man took
+Matthew with him.</p>
+
+<p>"Come," he said, "this is the day when we meet together."</p>
+
+<p>"Together," said Matthew, and without knowing why he liked what he felt
+when he said that.</p>
+
+<p>They went first to the market-place, trodden of many feet, and about it
+a fair green common planted in gracious lines. Here Matthew found men in
+shops that were built simply and like one another in fashion, but with
+pleasant devices of difference, and he found many selling together and
+many buying, and no one was being robbed.</p>
+
+<p>"How can these things be?" he asked. "Here every man stands with the
+others."</p>
+
+<p>"Inside of all things," the citizen answered, "you will find that it is
+so written."</p>
+
+<p>On the common many were assembled to name certain projects and purposes:
+the following of paths to still clearer spaces, the nurturing of certain
+people, ways of cleanliness, purity of water, of milk, wide places for
+play, the fashioning of labour so that the shrines within be not
+foregone, the freeing of fountains, the planting of green things.</p>
+
+<p>"Why will all this be?" asked Matthew. "For these things a man does in
+his own garden or for his own house, and no other interferes."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p><p>"Nay, but look deep within all things, Friend," the citizen said, "and
+you will never find it written so."</p>
+
+<p>"Friend," repeated Matthew, "<i>friend</i>...."</p>
+
+<p>Then the citizen went to his own house, and Matthew with him. The wall
+was no wall, but a hedge, and the garden was very beautiful. And lo,
+when they went in, there came tumbling along the path little beings made
+in the image of the citizen himself. And with them a woman of exceeding
+beauty and power, which the little ones also bore. As if the citizen had
+chosen her beauty and power to make them into something other.</p>
+
+<p>It was as it had been when the bird was fluttering and beating at the
+boy's breast, but he did not even heed.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me!" he cried. "These&mdash;do they live here with you? Are they
+yours?"</p>
+
+<p>"We are one another's," said the citizen.</p>
+
+<p>Matthew sat among them, and to pleasure him they did many sweet tasks.
+They brought him to eat and drink in the garden. The woman gave quiet
+answers that had in them something living, and alive, too, some while
+after she had spoken. ("So <i>she</i> could answer," Matthew thought, "and
+better, too, than that.") And the children brought him a shell, a pretty
+stone, a broken watch, and a little woolly lamb on three wheels, and the
+fourth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> wheel missing. The lamb had a sound to make by squeezing, and
+this sound Matthew made a great many times, and every time the children
+laughed. And when they did that Matthew could think of nothing to say
+that seemed a thing to be said, but he was inscrutably elated, and did
+the trick again.</p>
+
+<p>And when he rose to take his leave:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Is it for them that you make bread and a dream or two?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that he should always like to remember the citizen's smile as he
+answered.</p>
+
+<p>They stood at the opening of the hedge and folk were going by.</p>
+
+<p>"Are they not jealous of you?" Matthew asked.</p>
+
+<p>"They have families and bread and dreams of their own," said the
+citizen. "Every house is filled with them."</p>
+
+<p>Matthew looked breathlessly along the street of the New Village, and he
+saw men, as they went, giving one another greeting: "Friend, is much
+accomplished?" or, "Peace to you, Friend." And they talked together, and
+entered gardens where were those who came to meet them or who waited
+within. They were a fine company, moving as to some secret way of being,
+and as if they had all looked deep within to see how it is written. And
+as he watched, something in Matthew would have cried out that he, too,
+was offspring of their Father, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> for all this had he too been
+created, and that for this would he live, joying and passioning and
+toiling in the common destiny. But when he spoke, all that he could say
+was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Every man, then, may sit down now with a lamb with three wheels and the
+fourth wheel missing...."</p>
+
+<p>On which he ceased for very shame. But the citizen understood and smiled
+once more, and said to him: "Come you here again, Brother."</p>
+
+<p>With that word Matthew was off, down from the clear upper spaces, to
+where, lonely on its hill, his own house stood among its lonely
+neighbours. And Matthew strode shouting down the deserted streets and
+calling at every gate; and, it being now day, every one came forth to
+his lonely toil.</p>
+
+<p>Matthew went and stood on the common where the weeds were high, and so
+amazed were the folk that they came about him, each suspecting the other
+of secret connivance in this strange business. For nothing had ever been
+done so.</p>
+
+<p>"Men and brothers," cried Matthew, "it is not so that it was meant. I
+pray you look deep within, and see how the meaning was written. Is it
+that you should live, each pitted against another, wounding the other,
+advantaging himself? Join now each his hand with that of a neighbour.
+<i>His neighbour.</i> Make the thing of which, it seems, the world is made;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>
+a family. Let the thing come alive which is greater than the family: the
+community. Oh, my comrades, let us work together for the coming of the
+kingdom of God."</p>
+
+<p>In the murmur that rose were the words which have been spoken since time
+began:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It is not so that it was done in the old time...."</p>
+
+<p>"It is not seemly that we change...."</p>
+
+<p>"If every one did this ... but we cannot do it alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you thought what will become of our business?"</p>
+
+<p>And again and yet again: "It is not so that it was done in the old
+time."</p>
+
+<p>And when the most would have none of it, Matthew made his way sadly
+through the throng&mdash;of whom were many who smiled (kindly!)&mdash;to the edge
+of the common, where stood a woman, trembling.</p>
+
+<p>"Come," he said.</p>
+
+<p>She went with him, and she with many little frightened breaths, but he
+had no pity, for he read deep within and saw that it was written that
+she wanted none. When they reached her own house, she would have
+entered.</p>
+
+<p>"Go we in here," she besought him, "I will show you the rooms where I go
+about and the lamps that I light."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p><p>"We are past all that now," said Matthew, gently, "I will not go on
+living where you do not live."</p>
+
+<p>He took her to his own house, through the garden that he had planted. He
+made her look from his window, sit by his table, open his books; and he
+bade her to a little task at the cupboard and laughed for joy that she
+performed it.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come away," he cried. "And now we will go quickly to the New
+Village, that one which I have found or another, where men know all this
+happiness and more."</p>
+
+<p>But she stood there by Matthew's cupboard and shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said gravely, "here we will stay, you and I, in your house.
+Here we will live&mdash;and it may be there is a handful of others who
+understand. And here we will do what we can."</p>
+
+<p>"But I must show you," Matthew cried, "the way the others live&mdash;the
+things they strive for: the following of paths to clearer spaces, the
+freeing of shrines."</p>
+
+<p>"All that," she said, "we will do here."</p>
+
+<p>"But," he urged, "you must see how else they do&mdash;the shell, the pretty
+stone, the watch, the woolly lamb on three wheels and one wheel
+missing...."</p>
+
+<p>"All that," she said, "is in my heart."</p>
+
+<p>Matthew looked in her face and marvelled, for he saw that beside her
+beauty there was her power, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> to that he bowed himself as to a far
+voice. And again it was as when the bird was at his breast, but now he
+knew what this would be.</p>
+
+<p>So they live there in Matthew's house. And a handful besides understand
+and toil for the fairer order. And this will come; and then that New
+Village, in the clear upper spaces, will hang just above every
+village&mdash;nay, will come down to clothe it like a garment.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above">When I had done,</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," I said&mdash;I nearly called him Matthew!&mdash;"these are the things
+that Miggy does not understand. And that she will understand."</p>
+
+<p>He knew. He said nothing; but he knew how it is written.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," I said, "I suppose Miggy will never have been to your house?"</p>
+
+<p>I knew that she could not have been there.</p>
+
+<p>"Some day soon," I said&mdash;"before you go away&mdash;ask us to come there. I
+should like her to sit by your table and look from your window."</p>
+
+<p>For how can one be sure that divine non-interference is always divine?</p>
+
+<p>Peter drew his breath long.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you?" he said; "would you? So many times I've thought maybe that
+would make her think of me as if I <i>was</i> me."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p><p>Yes, that might help. If only Miggy knew how to shake hands as Elfa
+shook hands with Nicholas Moor, that might help, too. How did it begin,
+this pride of individualism in a race which does not know its own
+destiny save as the great relationships, human and divine, can reveal
+that destiny? But Peter knows! And the hope of the world is that so many
+do know.</p>
+
+<p>Since he said his grateful good night and rushed away, I have been
+trying to readjust my impression of Peter. For I can no longer think of
+him in connection with Miggy and the cannery and my neighbour's lawn and
+the village. Now he is a figure ranging the ample intervals of a field
+fraternal to the night and to the day. Fraternal, too, to any little
+moon-washed area, won from the void, where it is easy to be in
+conference with the spirit without and within. Truly, it is as if the
+meaning of the universe were passioning for the comradeship of hearts
+that can understand.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XVII</span> <span class="smaller">ADOPTION</span></h2>
+
+<p>The big window of my sitting room is an isle of sirens on whose shore
+many of my bird neighbours are continually coming to grief. For, from
+without, the window makes a place of soft skies and seductive leaves
+where any bird might think to wing a way. And in that mirrored deep
+there is that curious atmosphere which makes In-a-looking-glass a better
+thing than the room which it reflects&mdash;an elusive sense which Little
+Child might call Isn't-any-such-placeness. I think that I might call it
+so too. And so, evidently, the birds would call it, for they are always
+trying to find there some path of flight.</p>
+
+<p>A morning or two ago, when I heard against the pane the soft thud of an
+eager little body, I hurried out to see lying under the window an
+oriole. It was too terrible that it should have been an oriole. For days
+I had seen him hanging here and there, back downward, on this limb and
+that, and heard his full-throated note ringing from the innermost air,
+so that the deeps of air could never again be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> wholly alien to me. And
+now he lay, his wings outstretched, his eyes dim, his breast hardly
+moving. I watched him, hoping for the breath to begin to flutter and
+labour. But though the great Nature was with him, herself passioning in
+all the little fibres to keep life pulsing on, yet her passion was not
+enough; and while I looked the little life went out.</p>
+
+<p>... I held the tiny body in my hand, and it was almost as if the
+difference between living and not living slipped through my fingers and
+was gone. If only that one within me, who watches between the seeing and
+the knowing, had been a little quicker, I might almost have
+understood....</p>
+
+<p>"Them little things go out like a match," said my neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>She was standing on the other side of the box hedge, and I caught a look
+on her face that I had seen there once or twice before, so that my heart
+had warmed to her; and now, because of that look, she fitted within the
+moment like the right word.</p>
+
+<p>"It don't seem like anybody could <i>mean</i> 'em to die before their time,"
+she said. "Ain't it almost as if it happened when Everything somehow
+couldn't help it?"</p>
+
+<p>It was this, the tragedy of the Unfulfilled Intention, that was in my
+mind while I hollowed the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> little grave under the hedge. And when we had
+finished, my neighbour, who had stepped informally over the box to help
+me, looked up with a return of that fleeting expression which I had
+noted.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess we've found one now for sure," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Found one?" I puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you knew," she told me. "I thought everybody knew&mdash;we've been
+looking for one so long. For a baby."</p>
+
+<p>She never had told me and no one had told me, but I loved her for
+thinking that all the world knew. There are abroad a multitude of these
+sweet suspicions as well as the sad misgivings of the hunted. She had
+simply let me know, that early morning in the garden, her sorrow that
+there was "no little thing runnin' round." And now she told me for how
+long they had been trying to find one to adopt, consciously serving no
+social need, but simply hungering for a child whom they could "take to."
+It was a story of fruitless visits to the homes in the city, the news
+sent of this little waif or that, all proving too old or of too sad an
+inheritance. To me it would seem that the more tragic the inheritance
+the more poignantly sounds the cry for foster-folk. And this may be
+extreme, I know, but virtue, I find, does not lie exclusively in the
+mean, either. It lies partly in one's taste in extremes. However,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> this
+special extreme I find not generally believed in as I believe in it; and
+my neighbour, not sharing it, had waited on with empty arms.</p>
+
+<p>And now, after all the long hoping, she had found a baby&mdash;a baby who
+filled all the requirements and more. First of all, he was a boy;
+second, he was of healthful Scotch parentage; third, he was six weeks
+old; and, fondest I could see in my neighbour's heart, he was good to
+look at. When she told me this she produced, from beneath her apron, a
+broken picture post-card. The baby was lying on a white blanket spread
+on the grass, and he was looking up with the intentness of some little
+soul not yet embodied; or as if, having been born, some shadow-thing,
+left over from his source of shadows, yet detained his attention.
+"William," it said beneath the picture.</p>
+
+<p>"But I shall call him Kenneth," my neighbour said; "I've always meant
+to. I don't want he should be called after his father, being he isn't
+ours, you might say. But he is ours," she added in a kind of challenge.
+"<i>He's</i> going after him to-morrow to the city"&mdash;and now "he" meant her
+husband, in that fine habit of use by these husbands and wives of the
+two third persons singular to mean only each other, in a splendid,
+ultimate, inevitable sense, authentic as the "we" of a sovereign, no
+more to be mistaken. "I'd go too," she added, "but we're adopting the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+baby with the egg money&mdash;we've saved it for years for when the time
+come. And one fare to the city and back is a lot of eggs. I thought I'd
+rather wait for him here and have the ticket money to spend on the
+clothes."</p>
+
+<p>She was on her way, I thought I guessed, to carry her good news to our
+friends in the village, for she bore that same air which I have noted,
+of being impermanent and subject to flight. And as she left me she
+turned to give me one of those rare compliments which are priceless.</p>
+
+<p>"You come over this afternoon," she said, "and I'll show you what little
+things I've made."</p>
+
+<p>I remember another compliment. It was when, in town, a charming little
+woman, a woman all of physical curves and mental tangents, had been
+telling a group of us about a gay day in a four-in-hand. She had not
+looked at me because for that sort of woman, as well as for others, I
+lack all that which would make them take account of my presence; but
+when in the four-in-hand she came to some mention of the road where the
+accident had nearly occurred ("Oh, it was a beautiful road," she said,
+"the river on one side, and the highlands, and a whole <i>mob</i> of trees,")
+she turned straight upon me through her description as consistently as
+she had neglected me when she described the elbow-bits of the leaders
+and the boots of the woman on the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>box-seat. It may have been a chance,
+but I have always hugged it to me.</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour's house is small, and her little upstairs rooms are the
+half-story with sloping ceilings and windows which extend from the floor
+to the top of one's head. It gives me a curious sense of
+over-familiarity with a window to be as tall as it is. I feel that I
+have it at advantage and that I am using it with undue intimacy. When I
+was a little girl I used to creep under the dining-room table and sit
+there, looking up, transfixed at the difference. A new angle of material
+vision, the sight of the other side of the shield, always gives me this
+pause. But whereas this other aspect of things used to be a delight,
+now, in life, I shrink a little from availing myself of certain
+revelations. I have a great wish to know things, but I would know them
+otherwise than by looking at their linings. I think that even a window
+should be sanctioned in its reticences.</p>
+
+<p>Before a black walnut commode my neighbour knelt that afternoon, and I
+found that it was filled with the things which she had made for the
+baby, when they should find him. These she showed to me&mdash;they were
+simple and none too fine, and she had made them on her sewing-machine in
+the intervals of her busy life. For three years she had wrought at them,
+buying them from the egg money.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> I wondered if this secret pastime of
+garment-making might not account for my impression of her that she must
+always be off to engage in something other. Perhaps it was this
+occupation, always calling her, which would not let her appear fixed at
+garden-watering or festival. I think that it may be so of any who are
+"pressed in the spirit" to serve, to witness to any truth: that is their
+vocation and every other is an avocation, a calling away from the real
+business of life. For this reason it is my habit to think of the social
+workers in any division of the service, family or town or state or
+church, as Vocationists. It is they who are following the one great
+occupation. The rest of us are avocationists. In my neighbour I
+perceived one of the great comrade company of the Vocationists,
+unconscious of her banner, but because of some sweet, secret piping,
+following, following....</p>
+
+<p>"I've always thought I'd get to do a little embroidering on a yoke or
+two," she said, "but so far I couldn't. Anyway I thought I could do the
+plain part and running the machine before he came. The other I could sit
+by the crib and do. Embroidery seems sort o' baby-watchin' work, don't
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>When I left her I walked across the lawns to my home in a sense of
+security and peace. With increasing thousands consciously striving and
+passioning to help, and thousands helping because of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> the unconscious
+spirit within them, are there not many windows in the walls?</p>
+
+<p>"He" was to go by the Accommodation early next morning to bring home the
+baby. Therefore when, just before seven o'clock, I observed my
+neighbour's husband leave his home and join Peter at his gate as usual,
+I went at once to see if something was amiss.</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour was having breakfast as her custom was "after the men-folks
+were out of the way." At all events she was pretending to eat. I saw in
+her eyes that something was troubling her, but she greeted me
+cheerfully. I sat by the sewing-machine while she went on with her
+pretence at breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>"The little thing's sick," she said. "Last night we got the despatch.
+'Baby in hospital for day or two. Will advise often,' it had in it. I'm
+glad they put that in. I'll feel better to know they'll get good
+advice."</p>
+
+<p>I sat with her for a long time, regardless of my work or that Miggy was
+waiting for me. I was struck by the charm of matter-of-fact hopefulness
+in my neighbour, not the deliberate forcing of hope, but the simple
+expectation that nothing tragic would occur. But for all that she ate no
+breakfast, and I knew well the faint, quite physical sickness that she
+must have endured since the message came.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to get his basket ready to-day," she said. "I never did that,
+two reasons. One was, it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> seemed sort of taking too much for granted,
+like heating your spider before the meat wagon drives up. The other
+reason was I needed the basket for the clothes."</p>
+
+<p>I stayed with her while she made ready the clothes-basket, lining it
+with an old muslin curtain, filling it with pillows, covering it with
+the afghan from the parlour couch. Then, in a shoe box edged with the
+curtain's broad ruffle, she put an array of little things: the brush
+from the spare-room bureau, the pincushion from her own work-basket, a
+sachet bag that had come with a last year's Christmas gift, a cake of
+"nice soap" which she had kept for years and never unwrapped because it
+was so expensive. And then she added a little glass-stoppered bottle of
+white pills.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what they're for," she said. "I found them when I
+housecleaned, and there was so many of 'em I hated to throw 'em away. Of
+course I'll never use 'em, but they look sort of nice in there&mdash;so white
+and a glass cork&mdash;don't you think so?"</p>
+
+<p>She walked with me across the lawn and stood brooding, one hand across
+her mouth, looking down at the disturbance&mdash;so slight!&mdash;in the grass
+where we had laid the bird. And on her face was the look which, each
+time that I saw it there, drew me nearer to her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p><p>"'Seems as if I'd ought to be there to the hospital," she said, "doing
+what I can. Do you s'pose they'll take good care of him? I guess they
+know more about it than I do. But if I could get hold of him in my arms
+it seems as if I could help 'em."</p>
+
+<p>I said what I could, and she went away to her house. And for the first
+time since I had known her she did not seem put upon to be back at some
+employment. These times of unwonted idleness are terrible to witness. I
+remember a farmer whom I once saw in the afternoon, dressed in his best,
+waiting in the kitchen for the hour of his daughter's wedding, and I
+wondered that the great hands did not work of their own will. The lost
+aspect of certain men on holidays, the awful inactivity of the day of a
+funeral, the sad idleness of old age, all these are very near to the
+tragedy of negation. Work, the positive, the normal, the joyous, is like
+an added way of being. I thought that I would never again marvel at my
+neighbour for being always on the edge of flight to some pressing
+occupation. Why should she not be so?&mdash;with all that there is to be
+done. Whether we rush about, or conceal the need and rush secretly, is a
+detail of our breeding; the need is to get things done, to become by
+doing. And while for myself I would prefer the accomplishment of not
+seeming to hurry, as another is accomplished at the harp, yet I own that
+I would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> cheerfully forego the pretty grace rather than find myself
+without some slight degree of the robust proficiency of getting things
+done.</p>
+
+<p>"If you're born a picture in a book," Calliope once said, "it's all very
+well to set still on the page an' hold your hands. But if you're born
+anyways human at all, stick up your head an' start out for somewhere."</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour rarely comes to my house. And therefore, though she is to
+me so familiar a figure in her garden, when next morning I found her
+awaiting me in my sitting room, she seemed strange to me. Perhaps, too,
+she was really strange to me that day.</p>
+
+<p>"My baby died," she said.</p>
+
+<p>She stood there looking at me, and I knew that what she said was true,
+but it seemed to me for a moment that I could not have it so.</p>
+
+<p>"He died yesterday in the evening," she told me. "I just heard this
+morning, when the telegraph office opened. I dressed myself to go after
+him, but <i>he's</i> gone."</p>
+
+<p>"To go after him?" I repeated.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"He was in the charity part. I was afraid they'd bury him in the
+potter's field and they wouldn't mark&mdash;it, and that I couldn't never
+tell which one it was. So I want to get him and have him buried here.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>
+<i>He</i> didn't want I should go&mdash;he thought it'd be too much for me. But I
+was bound to, so he says he'd go. They'd ought to get here on the Five
+o'Clock this afternoon. Oh, if I'd went yesterday, do you think it would
+'a' been any different?"</p>
+
+<p>There I could comfort her. I did not think it would have been different.
+But when I tried to tell her how much better it was this way than that
+the baby should first have come to her and then have sickened, she would
+have none of it.</p>
+
+<p>"I've never held him once," she said. "Do you s'pose anything could be
+worse than that? I'd rather have got hold of him once, no matter what."</p>
+
+<p>It touched me unutterably, the grief of this mother who was no mother. I
+had no knowledge what to say to her. But I think that what she wanted
+most was companionship. She went to one and another and another of our
+neighbours to whom she had shown so happily the broken post-card
+picture, and to them in the same way she took the news:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"My baby died."</p>
+
+<p>And I was amazed to find how in this little time, the tentacles of her
+heart having fastened and clung, she had made for herself, without ever
+having seen the child, little things to tell about him: His eyes were so
+bright; the sun was shining and the picture was made out-of-doors, yet
+the eyes were opened wide. They were blue eyes&mdash;had she told us?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> Had we
+noticed the hands in the picture? And the head was a beautiful shape....
+All this seemed to me marvellous. For I saw that no woman ever mourns
+for any child dumbly, as a bird mourns a fledgling, but even if she
+never sees it, she will yet contrive some little tender ways to give it
+personality and to cherish it.</p>
+
+<p>They did their best to comfort her, the women of the village. But many
+of them had lost little children of their own, and these women could not
+regard her loss as at all akin to theirs. I think that this my neighbour
+felt; and perhaps she dimly felt that to me her grief, hardly less than
+theirs, brimmed with the tragic disaster of the unfulfilled and bore,
+besides, its own peculiar bitterness. In any case I was of those who,
+that afternoon, went out to the cemetery to await the coming of my
+neighbour and "him" and their little burden. Calliope was there, and
+Mis' Amanda Toplady and Miggy; and when it was time to go Little Child
+was with me, so she went too. For I am not of those who keep from
+children familiarity with death. Familiarity with the ways of death I
+would spare them, but not the basic things, primal as day.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to give a real funeral," my neighbour had said. "I just
+want the few that I tell to happen out there to the cemetery, along
+about five. And then we'll come with him. It seems as if it'll hurt
+less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> that way. I couldn't bear to see a whole line driving along, and
+me look back and know who it was for."</p>
+
+<p>The cemetery had the dignity and serenity of a meadow, a meadow still
+somewhat amazed that it had been for a while distracted from its ancient
+uses, but, after all, perceiving no permanent difference in its
+function. I am never weary of walking down these grassy streets and of
+recounting their strangenesses. As that of the headstone of David
+Bibber's wives, one stone extending across the heads of the two graves
+and at either end of the stone two Gothic peaks from whose inner slopes
+reach two marble hands, clasped midway, and,</p>
+
+<p class="center">SACRED TO THE WIVES OF DAVID BIBBER</p>
+
+<p>inscribed below, the wifely names not appearing in the epitaph. And that
+of Mark Sturgis who, the village said, had had the good luck to marry
+two women named Dora; so he had erected a low monument to "Dora, Beloved
+Wife of Mark Sturgis, Jr." ("But how mixin' it must be to the ghosts!"
+Calliope said.) And of the young girl of a former Friendship family of
+wealth, a girl who sleeps beneath a monument on which stands a great
+figure of a young woman in a white marble dress made with three
+flounces. ("Honest," Calliope had put it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> "you can't hardly tell
+whether it's a tomb or a valentine.")</p>
+
+<p>But these have for me an interest less of the bizarre than of the human,
+and nothing that is human was alien to that hour.</p>
+
+<p>We waited for them by the new little grave, the disturbance&mdash;so
+slight!&mdash;in the earth where we would lay the stranger baby. Our hands
+were filled with garden flowers&mdash;Calliope had drawn a little hand cart
+laden with ferns and sweet-brier, and my dear Mis' Amanda Toplady had
+cut all the half-blown buds from her loved tea rose.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems like a little baby wasn't real dead that I hadn't helped lay
+out," said that great Mis' Amanda, trying to find her handkerchief. "Oh,
+I wish't it was alive. It seems like such a little bit of comin' alive
+to ask the Lord!"</p>
+
+<p>And as the afternoon shadows drew about us with fostering arms,</p>
+
+<p>"Out-Here knows we feel bad more than Down Town, don't it?" said Little
+Child.</p>
+
+<p>I have always thought very beautiful that village custom of which I have
+before spoken, which provides that the father and mother of a little
+baby who dies may take it with them in a closed carriage to the grave.
+It was so that my neighbour and her husband brought their baby to the
+cemetery from the station, with the little coffin on their knees.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span></p><p>On the box beside the driver Peter was riding. We learned afterward
+that he had appeared at the station and had himself taken that little
+coffin from the car. "So then it didn't have to be on the truck at all,"
+my neighbour noted thankfully when she told me. I think that it must be
+this living with only a street or two between folk and the open country
+which gives these unconscious sharpenings of sensibility often,
+otherwhere, bred only by old niceties of habit.</p>
+
+<p>So little Kenneth was buried, who never had the name save in unreality;
+whom my neighbour had never tended; who lived for her only in dream and
+on that broken post-card and here in the hidden dust. It made her grief
+so sad a thing that her arms did not miss him; nor had he slipped from
+any usage of the day; nor was any link broken with the past; only the
+plans that had hung in air had gone out, like flames which had kindled
+nothing. Because of this she sorrowed from within some closed place at
+which her husband could only guess, who stood patiently without in his
+embarrassed concern, his clumsy anxiety to do what there was to be done,
+his wondering distress at his wife's drooping grief. But her sorrow was
+rooted in the love of women for the "little young thing, runnin' round,"
+for which she had long passioned.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, God, who lived in the spirit of the little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> Lord Jesus, live Thou
+in this child's spirit, and it in Thee, world without end," Doctor June
+prayed. And Little Child whispered to me and then went to let fall a
+pink in the grave. "So if the flower gets to be an angel flower, then
+they can go round together," she explained.</p>
+
+<p>When I looked up there were in the west the first faint heraldings of
+rose. And against it stood Miggy and Peter, side by side, looking down
+this new way of each other's lives which took account of sorrow. He said
+something to her, and she nodded, and gave him her white hollyhocks to
+lay with the rest. And as they turned away together Little Child
+whispered to me, pulling herself, by my arm, to high tiptoe:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"That little child we put in the sunset," she said, nodding to the west,
+"it's there now. It's there now!"</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was that my heart was filled with the tragedy of the
+unfulfilled intention, perhaps it was that I thought that Little Child's
+whispering was true. In any case I hastened my steps, and as we passed
+out on the road I overtook Miggy and Peter.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," said I, "may Miggy and I come to pay you that visit now, on the
+way back?"</p>
+
+<p>Miggy looked startled.</p>
+
+<p>"It's supper time," she objected.</p>
+
+<p>Who are we that we should interrupt a sunset, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> a situation, or the
+stars in their courses, merely to sup? Neither Miggy nor I belong to
+those who do so. Besides, we had to pass Peter's very door. I said so,
+and all the time Peter's face was glowing.</p>
+
+<p>"Hurry on ahead," I bade him, "and Miggy and Little Child and I will
+come in your house to call."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at me gratefully, and waited for good night to my neighbour,
+and went swiftly away down the road toward the sunset.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, goody grand, goody grand," Little Child went on softly, in an
+invocation of her own to some secret divinity of her pleasure. "Oh, that
+little child we put there, it's talkin' to the sky, an' I guess that
+makes sunset be!"</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour was looking back across the tranquil meadow which might
+have been deep with summer hay instead of mounded to its sad harvest.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish," she said, "I could have had his little grave in my garden,
+same as you would a bird. Still I s'pose a cemet'ry is a cemet'ry and
+had ought to be buried in. But oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to
+have him here in Friendship Village. It's better to think about, ain't
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>But the thing that gripped my heart was to see her, beside her husband,
+go down the road and not hurry. All that bustling impermanence was
+fallen from her. I think that now I am becoming thankful for every one
+who goes busily quickening the day<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> with a multitude, yes, even with a
+confusion, of homely, cheerful tasks.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy slipped her hand within my arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you think of it?" she said. "I've been, all the time. It's most the
+same with her as it would be to me if I'd lost <i>her</i>. You know ... that
+little Margaret. I mean, if she should never be."</p>
+
+<p>As when one hears the note of an oriole ringing from the innermost air,
+so now it seems to me that after these things the deeps of air can never
+again be wholly alien to me.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XVIII</span> <span class="smaller">AT PETER'S HOUSE</span></h2>
+
+<p>I wondered somewhat that Peter did not come out of his house to fetch
+us. He was not even about the little yard when we went up the walk,
+though he knew that we must arrive but a few moments after he did.
+Little Child ran away to pick Bouncing Bet and Sweet Clover in the long,
+rank grass of the unkept garden. And Miggy and I went and stood on the
+porch before Peter's door, and I knew what I intended.</p>
+
+<p>"Rap!" I said to Miggy.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at me in surprise&mdash;I have not often commanded her like that.
+But I wanted to see her stand at Peter's door asking for admission. And
+I think that Peter had wanted it too and that this was why he had not
+come to the gate to fetch us. I guessed it by the light on his face
+when, in the middle of Miggy's knock, he caught open the door. I like to
+remember his face as it looked at that moment, with the little twist of
+mouth and lifting of brow which gave him a peculiar sweetness and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>
+na&iuml;vet&eacute;, curiously contradicted by the way his eyes were when they met
+Miggy's.</p>
+
+<p>"How long it took you," he said. "Come in. <i>Come in.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>We went in, and I looked at Miggy. For I did not want her to step in
+that house as she would have stepped in a house that was just a house.
+Is it not wonderful how some front doors are Front Doors Plus? I do not
+know plus what&mdash;that is one of those good little in-between things which
+we know without always naming. But there are some front doors which are
+to me boards and glass and a tinkling cymbal bell; while other doors of
+no better architecture let me within dear depths of homes which are to
+houses what friends are to inhabitants. It was so that I would have had
+Miggy go within Peter's house,&mdash;not as within doors, but as within arms.</p>
+
+<p>We entered directly from the porch into the small parlour&mdash;the kind of
+man's parlour that makes a woman long to take it on her lap and tend it.
+There were no curtains. Between the windows was a big table filled with
+neat piles of newspapers and weeklies till there should be time to look
+them over. The shelf had a lamp, not filled, a clock, not going, and a
+pile of seed catalogues. On two walls were three calendars with big
+hollyhocks and puppies and ladies in sunbonnets. The entire inner<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> wall
+was occupied by a map of the state&mdash;why does a man so cherish a map of
+something, hung up somewhere? On the organ was a row of blue books&mdash;what
+is it that men are always looking for in blue books? In a corner, on the
+floor, stood a shotgun. The wood stove had been "left up" all summer to
+save putting it up in the fall&mdash;this business of getting a stove on
+rollers and jacking it up and remembering where it stood so that the
+pipe will fit means, in the village, a day of annual masculine sacrifice
+to the feminine foolishness of wanting stoves down in summer. There was
+nothing disorderly about the room; but it was dressed with no sash or
+hair ribbon or coral beads, as a man dresses his little girl.</p>
+
+<p>"We don't use this room much," Peter said. "We sit in here sometimes in
+summer, but I think when a man sits in his parlour he always feels like
+he was being buried from it, same as they're used for."</p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;" said Miggy, and stopped. What she was going to say it was not
+important to know, but I was glad that she had been going to say it.
+Something, perhaps, about this being a very pretty room if there were
+somebody to give it a touch or two.</p>
+
+<p>Peter was obviously eager to be in the next room, and that, he
+explained, would have been the dining<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> room, only he had taken it for
+his own, and they ate in the kitchen. I think that I had never heard him
+mention his father at all, and this "we" of his now was a lonelier thing
+than any lonely "I."</p>
+
+<p>"This is my room," he said as we entered it. "It's where I live when I'm
+not at the works. Come and let me show you."</p>
+
+<p>So Peter showed Miggy his room, and he showed it to me, too, though I do
+not think that he was conscious of that. It was a big room, bare of
+floor and, save for the inescapable flowery calendar, bare of walls.
+There was a shelf of books&mdash;not many, but according to Peter's nature
+sufficiently well-selected to plead for him: "Look at us. Who could love
+us and not be worth while?"&mdash;bad enough logic, in all conscience, to
+please any lover. Miggy hardly looked at the books. She so
+exasperatingly took it for granted that a man must be everything in
+general that it left hardly anything for him to be in particular. But
+Peter made her look, and he let me look too, and I supplied the comments
+and Miggy occasionally did her three little nods. The writing table
+Peter had made from a box, and by this Miggy was equally untouched. All
+men, it appeared, should be able to make writing tables from boxes. With
+the linen table cover it was a little different&mdash;this Peter's mother had
+once worked in cross-stitch for his room, and Miggy lifted an end and
+looked at it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span></p><p>"She took all those stitches for you!" she said. "There's one broken,"
+she showed him.</p>
+
+<p>"I can mend that," Peter said proudly, "I'll show you my needle kit."</p>
+
+<p>At this she laughed out suddenly with, "<i>Needle kit!</i> What a real
+regular old bachelor you are, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't help that," said Peter, with "and the same cannot be said for
+you" sticking from the sentence.</p>
+
+<p>On the table lay the cannery account books, and one was open at a full
+page of weary little figures.</p>
+
+<p>"Is this where you sit nights and do your work and read?" Miggy
+demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Right here," Peter told her, "every night of the year, 'most. Except
+when I come to see you."</p>
+
+<p>Miggy stood looking at the table and the wooden chair.</p>
+
+<p>"That's funny," she remarked finally, with an air of meditative
+surprise; "they know you so much better than I do, don't they?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Peter said gravely, "they haven't been thought about as much as
+you have, Miggy&mdash;that's one thing."</p>
+
+<p>"Thinking's nothing," said Miggy, merrily; "sometimes you get a tune in
+your head and you can't get it out."</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down at the table," said Peter, abruptly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> "Sit down!" he repeated,
+when her look questioned him. "I want to see you there."</p>
+
+<p>She obeyed him, laughing a little, and quite in the woman's way of
+pretending that obedience is a choice. Peter looked at her. It is true
+that he had been doing nothing else all the while, but now that she sat
+at the table&mdash;his table&mdash;he looked more than before.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, "well, well." As a man says when he has a present and
+has no idea what to say about it.</p>
+
+<p>Peter's photographs were on the wall above the table, and Peter suddenly
+leaned past Miggy and took down the picture of his mother and put it in
+her hand, without saying anything. For the first time Miggy met his
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Your mother," she said, "why, Peter. She looked&mdash;oh, Peter, she looked
+like you!"</p>
+
+<p>Peter nodded. "Yes, I do look like she did," he said; "I'm always so
+glad."</p>
+
+<p>"She knew you when you were a little bit of a baby, Peter," Miggy
+advanced suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>Peter admitted it gravely. She had.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Miggy, as Peter had said it. "Well."</p>
+
+<p>There was a picture of Peter's father as a young man,&mdash;black,
+curly-haired, black-moustached, the cheeks slightly tinted in the
+picture, his hands laid trimly along his knees. The face was weak,
+empty,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> but it held that mere confidence of youth which always gives a
+special sting to the grief of unfulfilment. Over this they passed,
+saying nothing. It struck me that in the delicacy of that silence it was
+almost as if Miggy shared something with Peter. Also, it struck me
+pleasantly that Miggy's indifference to the personalities of divers
+aunts in straight bangs and long basques was slightly exaggerated,
+especially when, "I never thought about your having any aunts," she
+observed.</p>
+
+<p>And then Peter took down a tiny picture of the sort we call in the
+village "card size," and gave it to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Guess who," he said.</p>
+
+<p>It was a little boy of not more than five, in a straight black coat
+dress, buttoned in the front and trimmed with broad black velvet strips,
+and having a white scalloped collar and white cuffs. One hand was
+resting on the back of a camp-chair and the other held a black helmet
+cap. The shoes had double rows of buttons, and for some secret reason
+the photographer had had the child laboriously cross one foot
+negligently over the other. The fine head, light-curled, was resting in
+the horns of that ex-device that steadied one out of all semblance to
+self. But in spite of the man who had made the picture, the little boy
+was so wholly adorable that you wanted to say so.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span></p><p>"Peter!" Miggy said, "It's <i>you</i>."</p>
+
+<p>I do not know how she knew. I think that I would not have known. But
+Miggy knew, and her knowing made me understand something which evidently
+she herself did not understand. For she looked at the picture and looked
+at it, a strange, surprised smile on her face. And,</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well, <i>well</i>," she said again. "I never thought about that
+before. I mean about you. <i>Then.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Would&mdash;would you want that picture, Miggy?" Peter asked; "you can have
+it if you do."</p>
+
+<p>"Can I really?" said Miggy. "Well, I do want it. Goodness...."</p>
+
+<p>"I always kind of thought," Peter said slowly, "that when I have a son
+he'll look something like that. He might, you know."</p>
+
+<p>Peter was leaning beside her, elbows on the table, and Miggy looked up
+at him over the picture of the child, and made her three little nods.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, "you would want your little boy to look like you."</p>
+
+<p>"And I'd want him named Peter. It's a homely old name, but I'd want him
+to have it."</p>
+
+<p>"Peter isn't a homely name," said Miggy, in a manner of surprise. "Yes,
+of course you'd want him&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The sentence fell between them unfinished. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> I thought that Miggy's
+face, still somewhat saddened by the little Kenneth and now tender with
+its look for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing of colour.
+But then I saw that this would be the light of the sunset on her cheeks,
+for now the West was become a glory of rose and yellow, so that it held
+captive her eyes. It is too frail a thing for me to have grasped by
+sense, but the Moment seemed to say&mdash;and could give no reason&mdash;that our
+sunset compact Miggy kept then without remembering the compact.</p>
+
+<p>It almost startled me when out in the unkept garden Little Child began
+to sing. We had nearly forgotten her and we could not see her, so that
+she might have been any other little child wandering in the sweet
+clover, or merely a little voice coming in with the western light:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"I like to stand in this great air</div>
+<div>And see the sun go down.</div>
+<div>It shows me a bright veil to wear</div>
+<div>And such a pretty gown.</div>
+<div>Oh, I can see a playmate there</div>
+<div>Far up in Splendour Town!"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>"Look here," said Peter to Miggy; and I went over to the sunset window
+and let them go on alone.</p>
+
+<p>He led her about the room, and she still had the little picture in her
+hand. From the bureau, with its small array of cheap brushes and boxes,
+she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> turned abruptly away. I think that she may have felt as I felt
+about the splash of rose on the rose-breasted grosbeak's throat&mdash;that I
+ought not to have been looking. Beyond was a little old dry-goods box
+for odds and ends, a box which must have known, with a kind of feminine
+intelligence, that it ought to be covered with cretonne. On this box
+Miggy knelt to read Peter's high school diploma, and she stopped before
+a picture of the house where he was born. "Was it there?" she asked.
+"Doesn't that seem funny?" Which manifestly it did not seem. "Is <i>that</i>
+where your violin lives?" she asked, when they came to its
+corner&mdash;surely a way of betrayal that she had thought of it as living
+somewhere else. And all the while she carried the picture in her hand,
+and the sunset glorified the room, and Little Child was singing in the
+garden.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," said Miggy, "I don't believe a man who can play the violin can
+sew. Give me the needle kit. I'm going to mend the table cover&mdash;may I?"</p>
+
+<p>Might she! Peter, his face shining, brought out his red flannel
+needle-book&mdash;he kept it on the shelf with his shaving things!&mdash;and, his
+face shining more, sat on a creaking camp-chair and watched her.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy," he said, as she caught the threads skilfully together, "I don't
+believe I've ever seen you sew. I know I never have."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p><p>"This isn't sewing," Miggy said.</p>
+
+<p>"It's near enough like it to suit me," said Peter.</p>
+
+<p>He drew a breath long, and looked about him. I knew how he was seeing
+the bare room, lamp-lighted, and himself trying to work in spite of the
+longing that teased and possessed him and bade him give it up and lean
+back and think of her; or of tossing on the hard couch in the tyranny of
+living his last hour with her and of living, too, the hours that might
+never be. And here she was in this room&mdash;his room. Peter dropped his
+head on his hand and his eyes did not leave her face save to venture an
+occasional swift, ecstatic excursion to her fingers.</p>
+
+<p>Simply and all quietly, as Nature sends her gifts, miracles moved toward
+completion while Miggy sewed. The impulse to do for him this trifling
+service was like a signal, and when she took up the needle for him I
+think that women whose hands had long lain quiet stirred within her
+blood. As for Peter&mdash;but these little housewifely things which enlighten
+a woman merely tease a man, who already knows their import and longs for
+all sweet fragments of time to be merged in the long possession.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy gave the needle back to Peter and he took it&mdash;needle, red book,
+and hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Miggy!" he said, and the name on his lips was like another name. And it
+was as if she were in some place remote and he were calling her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p><p>She looked at him as if she knew the call. Since the world began, only
+for one reason does a man call a woman like that.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it you want?" she said&mdash;and her voice was very sweet and very
+tired.</p>
+
+<p>"I want more of <i>you</i>!" said Peter Cary.</p>
+
+<p>She may have tried to say something, but her voice trembled away.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought it would be everything&mdash;your coming here to-day," Peter said.
+"I've wanted it and wanted it. And what does it amount to? Nothing,
+except to make me wild with wanting you never to go away. I dread to
+think of your leaving me here&mdash;shutting the door and being gone. If it
+was just plain wanting you I could meet that, and beat it, like I do the
+things down to the works. But it isn't that. It's like it was something
+big&mdash;bigger than me, and outside of me, and it gets hold of me, and it's
+like it asked for you without my knowing. I can't do anything that you
+aren't some of it. It isn't fair, Miggy. I want more of you&mdash;all of
+you&mdash;all the time, Miggy, all the time...."</p>
+
+<p>I should have liked to see Miggy's face when she looked at Peter, whose
+eyes were giving her everything and were asking everything of her; but I
+was studying the sunset, glory upon glory, to match the glory here. And
+the singing of Little Child began<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> again, like that of a little voice
+vagrant in the red west....</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Oh, I can see a playmate there,</div>
+<div>Far up in Splendour Town!"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>Miggy heard her, and remembered.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter, Peter!" she cried, "I couldn't&mdash;I never could bring us two on
+you to support."</p>
+
+<p>Peter gave her hands a little shake, as if he would have shaken her. I
+think that he would have shaken her if it had been two or three thousand
+years earlier in the world's history.</p>
+
+<p>"You two!" he cried; "why, Miggy, when we marry do I want&mdash;or do you
+want&mdash;that it should stay just you and me? We want children. I want you
+for their mother as much as I want you for my wife."</p>
+
+<p>It was the voice of the paramount, compelling spirit, the sovereign
+voice of the Family, calling through the wilderness. Peter knew,&mdash;this
+fine, vital boy seeking his own happiness; he gropingly understood this
+mighty thing, and he was trying his best to serve it. And, without
+knowing that she knew, Miggy knew too ... and the seal that she knew was
+in what was in the sunset. And as far removed from these things as the
+sunset itself was all Miggy's cheap cynicism about love and all the
+triviality of her criticism of Peter.</p>
+
+<p>Miggy stood motionless, looking at Peter. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> then, like an evil spell
+which began to work, another presence was in the room....</p>
+
+<p>Somewhile before I had begun to hear the sound, as a faint undercurrent
+to consciousness; an unimportant, unpleasant, insisting sound that
+somehow interfered. Gradually it had come nearer and had interfered more
+and had mingled harshly with the tender treble of Little Child. Now,
+from Peter's gate the sound besieged my ears and entered the room and
+explained itself to us all&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"My Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I <i>never</i> know,</div>
+<div>You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh&mdash;"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air....</p>
+
+<p>I knew what it was, and they knew. At the sound of his father's voice,
+drunken, piteous, Peter dropped Miggy's hands and his head went down and
+he stood silent, like a smitten thing. My own heart sank, for I knew
+what Miggy had felt, and I thought I knew what she would feel now. So
+here was another unfulfilled intention, another plan gone astray in an
+unperfected order.</p>
+
+<p>Peter had turned somewhat away before he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll have to go now," he said quietly, "I guess you'll excuse me."</p>
+
+<p>He went toward the kitchen door ashamed, miserable, all the brightness
+and vitality gone from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> him. I am sorry that he did not see Miggy's face
+when she lifted it. I saw it, and I could have sung as I looked. Not for
+Peter or for Miggy, but for the sake of something greater than they,
+something that touched her hand, commanded "Look at me," bade her follow
+with us all.</p>
+
+<p>Before Peter reached the door she overtook him, stood before him, put
+her hands together for a moment, and then laid one swiftly on his cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," she said, "that don't make any difference. That don't make any
+difference."</p>
+
+<p>No doubt he understood her words, but I think what he understood best
+was her hand on his cheek. He caught her shoulders and looked and
+looked....</p>
+
+<p>"Honest&mdash;honest, don't it?" he searched her.</p>
+
+<p>You would not have said that her answer to that was wholly direct. She
+only let fall her hand from his cheek to his shoulder, and,</p>
+
+<p>"Peter," she said, "<i>is it like this</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said simply, "it's like this."</p>
+
+<p>And then what she said was ever so slightly muffled, as if at last she
+had dropped her head in that sweet confusion which she had never seemed
+to know; as if at last she was looking at Peter as if he <i>was</i> Peter.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I don't ever want to be any place where you aren't," she told him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span></p><p>"Miggy!" Peter cried, "take care what you say. Remember&mdash;he'd live with
+us."</p>
+
+<p>She made her three little nods.</p>
+
+<p>"So he will," she answered, "so he will. He&mdash;and my little sister&mdash;and
+all of us."</p>
+
+<p>Peter's answer was a shout.</p>
+
+<p>"Say it out!" he cried, "say you will. Miggy! I've <i>got</i> to hear you say
+it out!"</p>
+
+<p>"Peter, Peter," she said, "I want to marry you."</p>
+
+<p>He took her in his arms and in the room was the glory upon glory of the
+west, a thing of wings and doors ajar. And strong as the light, there
+prevailed about them the soul of the Family, that distributes burdens,
+shares responsibilities, accepts what is and what is to come. Its voice
+was in the voice of Little Child singing in the garden, and of old Cary
+babbling at the gate. Its heart was the need of Peter and Miggy, each
+for the other. I saw in their faces the fine freedoms of the sunset,
+that sunset where Miggy and Little Child and I had agreed that a certain
+spirit lives. And it did but tally with the momentous utterance of these
+things and of the evening when Miggy spoke again.</p>
+
+<p>"Go now&mdash;you go to him," she said, "we'll wait. And&mdash;Peter&mdash;when you
+come back, I want to see everything in the room again."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XIX</span> <span class="smaller">THE CUSTODIAN</span></h2>
+
+<p>When the river is low, a broad, flat stone lying a little way from shore
+at the foot of our lawn becomes an instrument of music. In the day it
+plays now a rhapsody of sun, now a nocturne of cloud, now the last
+concerto, Opus Eternal. In the night it becomes a little friendly
+murmur, a cradle song, slumber spell, neighbour to the Dark, the alien
+Dark who very likely grows lonely, being the silent sister, whereas the
+Light goes on blithely companioned of us all. But if I were the Dark and
+owned the stars, and the potion which quickens conscience, and the sense
+of the great Spirit brooding, brooding, I do not know that I would
+exchange and be the Light. Still, the Light has rainbows and toil and
+the sun and laughter.... After all, it is best to be a human being and
+to have both Light and Darkness for one's own. And it is concerning this
+conclusion that the river plays on its instrument of music, this shallow river</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i3">"&mdash;to whose falls</div>
+<div>Melodious birds sing madrigals."</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span></p><p>I have heard our bank cat-birds in the willows sing madrigals to the
+stone-music until I wanted to be one of them&mdash;cat-bird, madrigal,
+shallows, or anything similar. But the human is perhaps what all these
+are striving to express, and so I have been granted wish within wish,
+and life is very good.</p>
+
+<p>Life was very good this summer afternoon when half the village gathered
+on our lawn above the singing stone, at Miggy's and Peter's
+"Announcement Supper." To be sure, all Friendship Village had for
+several days had the news and could even tell you when the betrothal
+took place and where; but the two were not yet engaged, as Miggy would
+have said, "out loud."</p>
+
+<p>"What <i>is</i> engaged?" asked Little Child, who was the first of my guests
+to arrive, and came bringing an offering of infinitesimal flowers which
+she finds in the grass where I think that they bloom for no one else.</p>
+
+<p>"It means that people love each other very much&mdash;" I began, and got no
+further.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, goody grand," cried Little Child. "Then I'm engaged, aren't I? To
+everybody."</p>
+
+<p>Whenever she leads me in deep water, I am accustomed to invite her to a
+dolphin's back by bidding her say over some song or spell which I have
+taught her. This afternoon while we waited on the lawn and her little
+voice went among the charmed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> words, something happened which surely
+must have been due to a prank of the dolphin. For when she had taken an
+accurate way to the last stanza of "Lucy," Little Child soberly
+concluded:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"'She lived unknown, and few could know</div>
+<div class="i1">When Lucy ceased to be;</div>
+<div>But she is in her grave, and what's</div>
+<div class="i1">The difference to me!'"</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>But, even so, it was charming to have had the quiet metre present.</p>
+
+<p>I hope that there is no one who has not sometime been in a company on
+which he has looked and looked with something living in his eyes; on a
+company all of whom he holds in some degree of tenderness. It was so
+that I looked this afternoon on those who came across the lawn in the
+pleasant five o'clock sun, and I looked with a difference from my manner
+of looking on that evening of my visit to the village, when I first saw
+these, my neighbours. Then I saw them with delight; now I see them with
+delight-and-that-difference; and though that difference is, so to say,
+partly in my throat, yet it is chiefly deep in my understanding. There
+came my Mis' Amanda Toplady, with her great green umbrella, which she
+carries summer and winter; Mis' Postmaster Sykes, with the full-blooming
+stalk of her tuberose pinned on her left shoulder; Mis'
+Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss in the pink nun's veiling of the Post-office
+hall<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> supper; and my neighbour, who had consented to come, with: "I
+donno as that little thing would want I should stay home. Oh, but do you
+know, that's the worst&mdash;knowin' that the little thing never saw me and
+can't think about me at all!" And there came also those of whom it
+chances that this summer I have seen less than I should have wished: the
+Liberty sisters, in checked print. "It don't seem so much of a jump out
+of mournin' into wash goods as it does into real dress-up cloth," gentle
+Miss Lucy says. And Abigail Arnold, of the Home Bakery, who sent a great
+sugared cake for to-day's occasion. "Birthday cakes is correct," she
+observed, "an' weddin' cake is correct. Why ain't engagement cakes
+correct&mdash;especially when folks get along without the ring? I donno. I
+always think doin' for folks is correct, whether it's the style or
+whether it ain't." And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, with a new and
+upbraiding baby; Mis' Fire Chief Merriman in "new black, but not true
+mournin' now, an' anyway lit up by pearl buttons an' a lace handkerchief
+an' plenty o' scent." And Mis' "Mayor" Uppers who, the "mayor" not
+returning to his home and the tickets for the parlour clock having all
+been sold, to-day began offering for sale tickets on the "parlour
+'suit,' brocade' silk, each o' the four pieces a differ'nt colour and
+all as bright as new-in-the-store." And though we all understood what
+she was doing and she knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> that we all knew, she yet drew us aside, one
+after another, to offer the tickets for sale privately, and we slipped
+the money to her beneath our handkerchiefs or our fans or our sewing.</p>
+
+<p>We all had our sewing&mdash;even I have become pleasantly contaminated and
+have once or twice essayed eyelets. Though there was but an hour to
+elapse before supper-time and the arrival of the "men-folks," we settled
+ourselves about the green, making scallops on towels, or tatting for
+sheet hems, or crocheted strips for the hems of pillow-slips. Mis' Sykes
+had, as she almost always does have, new work which no one had ever seen
+before, and new work is accounted of almost as much interest as a new
+waist and is kept for a surprise, as a new waist should be kept. Little
+Child, too, had her sewing; she was buttonhole-stitching a wash-cloth
+and talking like a little old woman. I think that the little elf
+children like best to pretend in this way, as regular, arrant witches
+feign old womanhood.</p>
+
+<p>"Aunt Effie is sick," Little Child was telling Mis' Toplady; "she is
+sick from her hair to her slippers."</p>
+
+<p>I had a plan for Little Child and for us all; that after supper she
+should have leaves in her hair and on her shoulders and should dance on
+the singing stone in the river. And Miggy, whose shy independence is now
+become all shyness, was in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> house, weaving the leaves, and had not
+yet appeared at her party at all.</p>
+
+<p>Then one of those charming things happened which surely have a kind of
+life of their own and wake the hour to singing, as if an event were a
+river stone, and more, round which all manner of faint music may be set
+stirring.</p>
+
+<p>"Havin' a party when I ain't lookin'!" cried somebody. "My, my. I don't
+b'lieve a word of what's name&mdash;this evolution business. I bet you
+anything heaven is just <i>gettin' back</i>."</p>
+
+<p>And there was Calliope, in her round straw hat and tan ulster, who in
+response to my card had hastened her imminent return.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, when we had greeted her and put her in a chair under
+the mulberry tree, "my relation got well. At least, she ain't sick
+enough to be cross, so 'most anybody could take care of her now."</p>
+
+<p>Calliope laughed and leaned back and shut her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Land, land," she said, "I got so much to tell you about I don't know
+where to begin. It's all about one thing, too&mdash;somethin' I've found
+out."</p>
+
+<p>Mis' Amanda Toplady drew a great breath and let fall her work and looked
+round at us all.</p>
+
+<p>"Goodness," she said, "ain't it comfortable&mdash;us all settin' here
+together, nobody's leg broke, nobody's house on fire, nor none of us
+dead?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span></p><p>"'Us all settin' here together,'" Calliope repeated, suddenly grave
+amid our laughter, "that's part of what I'm comin' to. I wonder," she
+said to us, "how you folks have always thought of the City? Up till I
+went there to stay this while I always thought of it as&mdash;well, as the
+City an' not so much as folks at all. The City always meant to me big
+crowds on the streets&mdash;hurryin', hurryin', eatin', eatin', and not
+payin' much attention to anything. One whole batch of 'em I knew was
+poor an' lookin' in bakery windows. One whole batch of 'em I knew was
+rich an' sayin' there has to be these distinctions. And some more I knew
+was good&mdash;I always see 'em, like a pretty lady, stoopin' over, givin'.
+And some more I knew was wicked an' I always thought of them climbin' in
+windows. And then there was the little bit o' batch that knows the
+things I want to know an' talks like I'd like to talk an' that I'd
+wanted an' wanted to go up to the City an' get with.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then I went. An' the first thing, I see my relative wa'n't rich
+nor poor nor bad nor good nor&mdash;the way I mean. Nor her friends that come
+to see her, they wan't either. The ones I took for rich talked economy,
+an' the ones I thought was poor spent money, an' the good ones gossiped,
+an' they all jabbered about music and pictures that I thought you
+couldn't talk about unless you knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> the 'way-inside-o'-things, like
+they didn't know. The kinds seemed all mixed up, and all of 'em far away
+an' formal, like&mdash;oh, like the books in a library when you can't think
+up one to draw out. I couldn't seem to get near to anything.</p>
+
+<p>"Then one night I done what I'd always wanted to do. I took two dollars
+an' went to the theatre alone an' got me a seat. I put on the best I
+had, an' still I didn't feel like I was one of 'em, nor one of much of
+anybody. The folks on the car wasn't the way I meant, an' I felt mad at
+'em for bein' differ'nt. There was a smilin' young fellow, all dressed
+black an' expensive, an' I thought: 'Put you side of Peter Cary an'
+there wouldn't be anybody there but Peter.' And when I got inside the
+theatre, it was just the same: one awful collection of dressed-up hair
+an' dressed-down backs an' everybody smilin' at somebody that wasn't me
+and all seemin' so sure of themselves. Specially the woman in front of
+me, but I guess it always is specially the woman in front of you. She
+was flammed out abundant. She had trimmin's in unexpected places, an' a
+good many colours took to do it, an' a cute little chatter to match. It
+come to me that she was more than different from me: she was the
+<i>otherest</i> a person can be. An' I felt glad when the curtain went up.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir," Calliope said, "it was a silly little play&mdash;all about
+nothin' that you could lay much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> speech to. But oh, they was somethin'
+in it that made you get down on your hands and knees in your own heart
+and look around in it, and <i>look</i>. They was an old lady and a young
+mother and a child and a man and a girl&mdash;well, that don't sound like
+much special, does it? And that's just it: it wasn't much special, but
+yet it was all of everything. It made 'em laugh, it made 'em cry, it
+made <i>me</i> laugh and cry till I was ashamed and glad and grateful. And
+when the lights come up at the end, I felt like I was kind of the mother
+to everything, an' I wanted to pick it up an' carry it off an' keep care
+of it. And it come over me all of a sudden how the old lady and the
+young mother an' man an' girl, man an' girl, <i>man an' girl</i> was right
+there in the theatre, near me, over an' over again; an' there I'd been
+feelin' mad at 'em for seemin' far off. But they wasn't far off. They'd
+been laughin' and cryin', too, an' they knew, just like I knew, what was
+what in the world. My, my. If it'd been Friendship I'd have gone from
+house to house all the way home, shakin' hands. An' as it was, I just
+<i>had</i> to speak to somebody. An' just then I see the flammed-out woman in
+front of me, that her collar had come open a little wee bit up top&mdash;not
+to notice even, but it give me an excuse. And I leaned right over to her
+and I says with all the sympathy in me:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span></p><p>"'Ma'am, your neck is peepin'."</p>
+
+<p>"She looked around su'prised and then she smiled&mdash;smiled 'most into
+laughin'. And she thanked me sweet as a friend an' nodded with it, an' I
+thought: 'Why, my land, you may have a baby home.' I never had thought
+of that. An' then I begun lookin' at folks an' lookin'. An' movin' up
+the aisles, there wasn't just a theatre-lettin'-out. They was <i>folks</i>.
+And all over each one was the good little things they'd begun
+rememberin' now that the play was over, or the hurt things that had come
+back onto 'em again.... An' out on the street it was the same. The folks
+had all got alive and was waitin' for me to feel friendly to 'em.
+<i>Friendly.</i> The young fellows in the cars was lovers, just like Peter.
+An' everybody was just like me, or anyhow more alike than differ'nt; and
+just like Friendship, only mebbe pronouncin' their words some differ'nt
+an' knowin' more kinds of things to eat. It seems to me now I could go
+anywhere an' find folks to be nice to. I don't love Friendship Village
+any the less, but I love more things the same way. Everything, 'most.
+An' I tell you I'm glad I didn't die before I found it out&mdash;that we're
+all one batch. <i>Do</i> you see what I mean&mdash;deep down inside what I say?"
+Calliope cried. "Does it sound like anything to you?"</p>
+
+<p>To whom should it sound like "anything" if not to us of Friendship
+Village? We know.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p><p>"Honestly," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady, trying to wipe her
+eyes on her crochet work, "Whoever God is, I don't believe He wants to
+keep it a secret. He's always 'most lettin' us know. I 'most knew Who He
+is right then, while Calliope was talkin'."</p>
+
+<p>"I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope was talkin'." ... I
+said the words over while the men crossed the lawn, all arriving
+together in order to lighten the trial of guesthood: Dear Doctor June,
+little Timothy Toplady, Eppleby Holcomb, Postmaster Sykes, Photographer
+Jimmie Sturgis, Peter, and Timothy, Jr., and the others. Liva Vesey was
+already in the kitchen with Miggy and Elfa, and I knew that, somewhere
+invisible, Nicholas Moor was hovering, waiting to help dish the
+ice-cream. When the little tables, each with its bright, strewn
+nasturtiums, were set about the lawn, Miggy reluctantly appeared from
+the kitchen. She was in the white frock which she herself had made, and
+she was, as I have said, a new Miggy, not less merry or less elfin, but
+infinitely more human. It was charming, I thought, to see how she and
+Peter, far from tensely avoiding each other, went straight to each
+other's side. With them at table were Liva and Timothy, Jr., now meeting
+each other's eyes as simply as if eyes were for this purpose.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p><p>"I 'most knew Who He is right then, while Calliope was talkin'" ... I
+thought again as we stood in our places and Doctor June lifted his hands
+to the summer sky as if He were there, too.</p>
+
+<p>"Father," he said, "bless these young people who are going to belong to
+each other&mdash;Thou knowest their names and so do we. Bless our being
+together now in their honour, and be Thou in our midst. And bless our
+being together always. Amen."</p>
+
+<p>And that was the announcement of Miggy's and Peter's betrothal, at their
+Engagement Party.</p>
+
+<p>Little Child, who was sitting beside Calliope, leaned toward her.</p>
+
+<p>"How long will it take for God to know," she asked, "after Doctor June
+sent it up?"</p>
+
+<p>Calliope put her arm about her and told her.</p>
+
+<p>"Then did He get here since Doctor June invited Him?" Little Child
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"You think, 'way deep inside your head, an' see if He isn't here," I
+heard Calliope say.</p>
+
+<p>Little Child shut her eyes tightly, and though she did open them briefly
+to see what was on the plate which they set before her, I think that she
+found the truth.</p>
+
+<p>"I 'most know," she said presently. "Pretty near I know He is. I guess
+I'm too little to be sure nor certain. When I'm big will I know sure?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Calliope answered, "then you'll know sure."</p>
+
+<p>"I 'most knew Who He is while Calliope was talkin'" ... I said over once
+more. And suddenly in the words and in the homely talk and in the happy
+comradeship I think that I slipped between the seeing and the knowing,
+and for a moment stood very near to the Custodian&mdash;Himself. The
+Custodian Who is in us all, Who speaks, now as you, now as I, most
+clearly in our human fellowship, in our widest kinship, in the universal
+<i>togetherness</i>. Truly, it is not as my neighbour once said, for I think
+that God has many and many to "neighbour with," if only we would be
+neighbours.</p>
+
+<p>Presently, as if it knew that it belonged there, the sunset came, a
+thing of wings and doors ajar. Then Miggy fastened the leaves in Little
+Child's hair and led her down to dance on the broad, flat stone which is
+an instrument of music. Above the friendly murmur of the shallows the
+little elf child seemed beckoning to us others of the human voices on
+the shore. And in that fair light it was as if the river were some clear
+highway, leading from Friendship Village to Splendour Town, where
+together we might all find our way.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Friendship Village Love Stories, by Zona Gale
+
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+</body>
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