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 vinesare 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 theedge 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 yetlivethe 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 arolland 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 Ibelieve 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 restedhad 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 notcome 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 understandingof 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 airAnd see the sun go down.It shows me a bright veil to wearAnd such a pretty gown.Oh, I can see a playmate thereFar up in Splendour Town."
"I love to stand in this great airAnd see the sun go down.It shows me a bright veil to wearAnd such a pretty gown.Oh, I can see a playmate thereFar up in Splendour Town."
"I love to stand in this great airAnd see the sun go down.It shows me a bright veil to wearAnd such a pretty gown.Oh, I can see a playmate thereFar up in Splendour Town."
"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 ofcolour 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." SecretlyI 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 thatMiggy 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 isnoteasy," 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 shewas—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 meanMargaret."
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'mnot. 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 rememberNow. 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.
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 saygreat?"
"You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly, "that it is that."
He looked down in her face with a lifting ofeyebrows 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, Timothynever 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 oraclesseemed 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 afaux 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 wereherlocket 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. Photographsput 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 brightwings 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 saysomething 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 steppedforward, 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 wasgrowing!"
"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 theUntoward, 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 tothe 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'lleverbe the same again."
Timothy mulled that for a moment. Oh, could shepossiblymean 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 byher 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 wewilldo!" 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; andthis 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 Idid. 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 withthe 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'sus."
She laughed a little—softly, and very near his coat sleeve.
"I 'most knew that this afternoon," she answered.
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 whichone 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, whichcan 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 "AncientMariner" 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. Haveyouread 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 Peterthatway 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 thepure self-indulgence of coming on a living spirit—I say alivingspirit—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 Cleopatraor 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, andkeephouse. 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," saidMiggy, "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'snow. 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 wasnow, 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.