"Undern cometh after noon,Golden Wings will be here soon...."
"Undern cometh after noon,Golden Wings will be here soon...."
"Undern cometh after noon,Golden Wings will be here soon...."
"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 itsotherexpression, 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 serviceanda 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. Butusually 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 seemedto 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 thinkthe 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 ifthey 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 itisa 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. Butthen 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 goDown the soft lane she painted. All flower stillShe moved among her emblems on the hillTouching away their burden of old snow.Was it on some great down where long winds flowThat the wild spirit of Spring went out to fillThe eyes of Summer? Did a daffodilLift 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 boughThe 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.'"
"Where did Spring die? I did not hear her goDown the soft lane she painted. All flower stillShe moved among her emblems on the hillTouching away their burden of old snow.Was it on some great down where long winds flowThat the wild spirit of Spring went out to fillThe eyes of Summer? Did a daffodilLift 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 boughThe 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.'"
"Where did Spring die? I did not hear her goDown the soft lane she painted. All flower stillShe moved among her emblems on the hillTouching away their burden of old snow.Was it on some great down where long winds flowThat the wild spirit of Spring went out to fillThe eyes of Summer? Did a daffodilLift the pale urn remote where she lies low?
"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 boughThe 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.'"
"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 downthe 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 ofthiskind."
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.
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 didnot 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 countrythey 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 seeheran' 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 peculiarlywinning 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 Elfafrom 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 withinthere, 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 timeNicholas 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 wasyouI wanted!" Nicholas said wonderingly.
"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 verybeing 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 butlerof 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,Iwill," 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'veeach 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 thingwhich 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. Whatareyou 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 sleepagain. 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'wantthose 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'allmy 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?" demandedLittle 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'tcurl 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. Iwantto 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'llhave 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 ofhis 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, ifonlyit 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 shemaydie 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.
"Kissme?" 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 somethingthat had been persistently in my mind as I had watched Miggy with her:—