He knew. He said nothing; but he knew how it is written.
"Peter," I said, "I suppose Miggy will never have been to your house?"
I knew that she could not have been there.
"Some day soon," I said—"before you go away—ask us to come there. I should like her to sit by your table and look from your window."
For how can one be sure that divine non-interference is always divine?
Peter drew his breath long.
"Would you?" he said; "would you? So many times I've thought maybe that would make her think of me as if Iwasme."
Yes, that might help. If only Miggy knew how to shake hands as Elfa shook hands with Nicholas Moor, that might help, too. How did it begin, this pride of individualism in a race which does not know its own destiny save as the great relationships, human and divine, can reveal that destiny? But Peter knows! And the hope of the world is that so many do know.
Since he said his grateful good night and rushed away, I have been trying to readjust my impression of Peter. For I can no longer think of him in connection with Miggy and the cannery and my neighbour's lawn and the village. Now he is a figure ranging the ample intervals of a field fraternal to the night and to the day. Fraternal, too, to any little moon-washed area, won from the void, where it is easy to be in conference with the spirit without and within. Truly, it is as if the meaning of the universe were passioning for the comradeship of hearts that can understand.
The big window of my sitting room is an isle of sirens on whose shore many of my bird neighbours are continually coming to grief. For, from without, the window makes a place of soft skies and seductive leaves where any bird might think to wing a way. And in that mirrored deep there is that curious atmosphere which makes In-a-looking-glass a better thing than the room which it reflects—an elusive sense which Little Child might call Isn't-any-such-placeness. I think that I might call it so too. And so, evidently, the birds would call it, for they are always trying to find there some path of flight.
A morning or two ago, when I heard against the pane the soft thud of an eager little body, I hurried out to see lying under the window an oriole. It was too terrible that it should have been an oriole. For days I had seen him hanging here and there, back downward, on this limb and that, and heard his full-throated note ringing from the innermost air, so that the deeps of air could never again bewholly alien to me. And now he lay, his wings outstretched, his eyes dim, his breast hardly moving. I watched him, hoping for the breath to begin to flutter and labour. But though the great Nature was with him, herself passioning in all the little fibres to keep life pulsing on, yet her passion was not enough; and while I looked the little life went out.
... I held the tiny body in my hand, and it was almost as if the difference between living and not living slipped through my fingers and was gone. If only that one within me, who watches between the seeing and the knowing, had been a little quicker, I might almost have understood....
"Them little things go out like a match," said my neighbour.
She was standing on the other side of the box hedge, and I caught a look on her face that I had seen there once or twice before, so that my heart had warmed to her; and now, because of that look, she fitted within the moment like the right word.
"It don't seem like anybody couldmean'em to die before their time," she said. "Ain't it almost as if it happened when Everything somehow couldn't help it?"
It was this, the tragedy of the Unfulfilled Intention, that was in my mind while I hollowed thelittle grave under the hedge. And when we had finished, my neighbour, who had stepped informally over the box to help me, looked up with a return of that fleeting expression which I had noted.
"I guess we've found one now for sure," she said.
"Found one?" I puzzled.
"I thought you knew," she told me. "I thought everybody knew—we've been looking for one so long. For a baby."
She never had told me and no one had told me, but I loved her for thinking that all the world knew. There are abroad a multitude of these sweet suspicions as well as the sad misgivings of the hunted. She had simply let me know, that early morning in the garden, her sorrow that there was "no little thing runnin' round." And now she told me for how long they had been trying to find one to adopt, consciously serving no social need, but simply hungering for a child whom they could "take to." It was a story of fruitless visits to the homes in the city, the news sent of this little waif or that, all proving too old or of too sad an inheritance. To me it would seem that the more tragic the inheritance the more poignantly sounds the cry for foster-folk. And this may be extreme, I know, but virtue, I find, does not lie exclusively in the mean, either. It lies partly in one's taste in extremes. However,this special extreme I find not generally believed in as I believe in it; and my neighbour, not sharing it, had waited on with empty arms.
And now, after all the long hoping, she had found a baby—a baby who filled all the requirements and more. First of all, he was a boy; second, he was of healthful Scotch parentage; third, he was six weeks old; and, fondest I could see in my neighbour's heart, he was good to look at. When she told me this she produced, from beneath her apron, a broken picture post-card. The baby was lying on a white blanket spread on the grass, and he was looking up with the intentness of some little soul not yet embodied; or as if, having been born, some shadow-thing, left over from his source of shadows, yet detained his attention. "William," it said beneath the picture.
"But I shall call him Kenneth," my neighbour said; "I've always meant to. I don't want he should be called after his father, being he isn't ours, you might say. But he is ours," she added in a kind of challenge. "He'sgoing after him to-morrow to the city"—and now "he" meant her husband, in that fine habit of use by these husbands and wives of the two third persons singular to mean only each other, in a splendid, ultimate, inevitable sense, authentic as the "we" of a sovereign, no more to be mistaken. "I'd go too," she added, "but we're adopting thebaby with the egg money—we've saved it for years for when the time come. And one fare to the city and back is a lot of eggs. I thought I'd rather wait for him here and have the ticket money to spend on the clothes."
She was on her way, I thought I guessed, to carry her good news to our friends in the village, for she bore that same air which I have noted, of being impermanent and subject to flight. And as she left me she turned to give me one of those rare compliments which are priceless.
"You come over this afternoon," she said, "and I'll show you what little things I've made."
I remember another compliment. It was when, in town, a charming little woman, a woman all of physical curves and mental tangents, had been telling a group of us about a gay day in a four-in-hand. She had not looked at me because for that sort of woman, as well as for others, I lack all that which would make them take account of my presence; but when in the four-in-hand she came to some mention of the road where the accident had nearly occurred ("Oh, it was a beautiful road," she said, "the river on one side, and the highlands, and a wholemobof trees,") she turned straight upon me through her description as consistently as she had neglected me when she described the elbow-bits of the leaders and the boots of the woman on thebox-seat. It may have been a chance, but I have always hugged it to me.
My neighbour's house is small, and her little upstairs rooms are the half-story with sloping ceilings and windows which extend from the floor to the top of one's head. It gives me a curious sense of over-familiarity with a window to be as tall as it is. I feel that I have it at advantage and that I am using it with undue intimacy. When I was a little girl I used to creep under the dining-room table and sit there, looking up, transfixed at the difference. A new angle of material vision, the sight of the other side of the shield, always gives me this pause. But whereas this other aspect of things used to be a delight, now, in life, I shrink a little from availing myself of certain revelations. I have a great wish to know things, but I would know them otherwise than by looking at their linings. I think that even a window should be sanctioned in its reticences.
Before a black walnut commode my neighbour knelt that afternoon, and I found that it was filled with the things which she had made for the baby, when they should find him. These she showed to me—they were simple and none too fine, and she had made them on her sewing-machine in the intervals of her busy life. For three years she had wrought at them, buying them from the egg money.I wondered if this secret pastime of garment-making might not account for my impression of her that she must always be off to engage in something other. Perhaps it was this occupation, always calling her, which would not let her appear fixed at garden-watering or festival. I think that it may be so of any who are "pressed in the spirit" to serve, to witness to any truth: that is their vocation and every other is an avocation, a calling away from the real business of life. For this reason it is my habit to think of the social workers in any division of the service, family or town or state or church, as Vocationists. It is they who are following the one great occupation. The rest of us are avocationists. In my neighbour I perceived one of the great comrade company of the Vocationists, unconscious of her banner, but because of some sweet, secret piping, following, following....
"I've always thought I'd get to do a little embroidering on a yoke or two," she said, "but so far I couldn't. Anyway I thought I could do the plain part and running the machine before he came. The other I could sit by the crib and do. Embroidery seems sort o' baby-watchin' work, don't it?"
When I left her I walked across the lawns to my home in a sense of security and peace. With increasing thousands consciously striving and passioning to help, and thousands helping because ofthe unconscious spirit within them, are there not many windows in the walls?
"He" was to go by the Accommodation early next morning to bring home the baby. Therefore when, just before seven o'clock, I observed my neighbour's husband leave his home and join Peter at his gate as usual, I went at once to see if something was amiss.
My neighbour was having breakfast as her custom was "after the men-folks were out of the way." At all events she was pretending to eat. I saw in her eyes that something was troubling her, but she greeted me cheerfully. I sat by the sewing-machine while she went on with her pretence at breakfast.
"The little thing's sick," she said. "Last night we got the despatch. 'Baby in hospital for day or two. Will advise often,' it had in it. I'm glad they put that in. I'll feel better to know they'll get good advice."
I sat with her for a long time, regardless of my work or that Miggy was waiting for me. I was struck by the charm of matter-of-fact hopefulness in my neighbour, not the deliberate forcing of hope, but the simple expectation that nothing tragic would occur. But for all that she ate no breakfast, and I knew well the faint, quite physical sickness that she must have endured since the message came.
"I'm going to get his basket ready to-day," she said. "I never did that, two reasons. One was, itseemed sort of taking too much for granted, like heating your spider before the meat wagon drives up. The other reason was I needed the basket for the clothes."
I stayed with her while she made ready the clothes-basket, lining it with an old muslin curtain, filling it with pillows, covering it with the afghan from the parlour couch. Then, in a shoe box edged with the curtain's broad ruffle, she put an array of little things: the brush from the spare-room bureau, the pincushion from her own work-basket, a sachet bag that had come with a last year's Christmas gift, a cake of "nice soap" which she had kept for years and never unwrapped because it was so expensive. And then she added a little glass-stoppered bottle of white pills.
"I don't know what they're for," she said. "I found them when I housecleaned, and there was so many of 'em I hated to throw 'em away. Of course I'll never use 'em, but they look sort of nice in there—so white and a glass cork—don't you think so?"
She walked with me across the lawn and stood brooding, one hand across her mouth, looking down at the disturbance—so slight!—in the grass where we had laid the bird. And on her face was the look which, each time that I saw it there, drew me nearer to her.
"'Seems as if I'd ought to be there to the hospital," she said, "doing what I can. Do you s'pose they'll take good care of him? I guess they know more about it than I do. But if I could get hold of him in my arms it seems as if I could help 'em."
I said what I could, and she went away to her house. And for the first time since I had known her she did not seem put upon to be back at some employment. These times of unwonted idleness are terrible to witness. I remember a farmer whom I once saw in the afternoon, dressed in his best, waiting in the kitchen for the hour of his daughter's wedding, and I wondered that the great hands did not work of their own will. The lost aspect of certain men on holidays, the awful inactivity of the day of a funeral, the sad idleness of old age, all these are very near to the tragedy of negation. Work, the positive, the normal, the joyous, is like an added way of being. I thought that I would never again marvel at my neighbour for being always on the edge of flight to some pressing occupation. Why should she not be so?—with all that there is to be done. Whether we rush about, or conceal the need and rush secretly, is a detail of our breeding; the need is to get things done, to become by doing. And while for myself I would prefer the accomplishment of not seeming to hurry, as another is accomplished at the harp, yet I own that I wouldcheerfully forego the pretty grace rather than find myself without some slight degree of the robust proficiency of getting things done.
"If you're born a picture in a book," Calliope once said, "it's all very well to set still on the page an' hold your hands. But if you're born anyways human at all, stick up your head an' start out for somewhere."
My neighbour rarely comes to my house. And therefore, though she is to me so familiar a figure in her garden, when next morning I found her awaiting me in my sitting room, she seemed strange to me. Perhaps, too, she was really strange to me that day.
"My baby died," she said.
She stood there looking at me, and I knew that what she said was true, but it seemed to me for a moment that I could not have it so.
"He died yesterday in the evening," she told me. "I just heard this morning, when the telegraph office opened. I dressed myself to go after him, buthe'sgone."
"To go after him?" I repeated.
She nodded.
"He was in the charity part. I was afraid they'd bury him in the potter's field and they wouldn't mark—it, and that I couldn't never tell which one it was. So I want to get him and have him buried here.Hedidn't want I should go—he thought it'd be too much for me. But I was bound to, so he says he'd go. They'd ought to get here on the Five o'Clock this afternoon. Oh, if I'd went yesterday, do you think it would 'a' been any different?"
There I could comfort her. I did not think it would have been different. But when I tried to tell her how much better it was this way than that the baby should first have come to her and then have sickened, she would have none of it.
"I've never held him once," she said. "Do you s'pose anything could be worse than that? I'd rather have got hold of him once, no matter what."
It touched me unutterably, the grief of this mother who was no mother. I had no knowledge what to say to her. But I think that what she wanted most was companionship. She went to one and another and another of our neighbours to whom she had shown so happily the broken post-card picture, and to them in the same way she took the news:—
"My baby died."
And I was amazed to find how in this little time, the tentacles of her heart having fastened and clung, she had made for herself, without ever having seen the child, little things to tell about him: His eyes were so bright; the sun was shining and the picture was made out-of-doors, yet the eyes were opened wide. They were blue eyes—had she told us?Had we noticed the hands in the picture? And the head was a beautiful shape.... All this seemed to me marvellous. For I saw that no woman ever mourns for any child dumbly, as a bird mourns a fledgling, but even if she never sees it, she will yet contrive some little tender ways to give it personality and to cherish it.
They did their best to comfort her, the women of the village. But many of them had lost little children of their own, and these women could not regard her loss as at all akin to theirs. I think that this my neighbour felt; and perhaps she dimly felt that to me her grief, hardly less than theirs, brimmed with the tragic disaster of the unfulfilled and bore, besides, its own peculiar bitterness. In any case I was of those who, that afternoon, went out to the cemetery to await the coming of my neighbour and "him" and their little burden. Calliope was there, and Mis' Amanda Toplady and Miggy; and when it was time to go Little Child was with me, so she went too. For I am not of those who keep from children familiarity with death. Familiarity with the ways of death I would spare them, but not the basic things, primal as day.
"I don't want to give a real funeral," my neighbour had said. "I just want the few that I tell to happen out there to the cemetery, along about five. And then we'll come with him. It seems as if it'll hurt lessthat way. I couldn't bear to see a whole line driving along, and me look back and know who it was for."
The cemetery had the dignity and serenity of a meadow, a meadow still somewhat amazed that it had been for a while distracted from its ancient uses, but, after all, perceiving no permanent difference in its function. I am never weary of walking down these grassy streets and of recounting their strangenesses. As that of the headstone of David Bibber's wives, one stone extending across the heads of the two graves and at either end of the stone two Gothic peaks from whose inner slopes reach two marble hands, clasped midway, and,
SACRED TO THE WIVES OF DAVID BIBBER
inscribed below, the wifely names not appearing in the epitaph. And that of Mark Sturgis who, the village said, had had the good luck to marry two women named Dora; so he had erected a low monument to "Dora, Beloved Wife of Mark Sturgis, Jr." ("But how mixin' it must be to the ghosts!" Calliope said.) And of the young girl of a former Friendship family of wealth, a girl who sleeps beneath a monument on which stands a great figure of a young woman in a white marble dress made with three flounces. ("Honest," Calliope had put it,"you can't hardly tell whether it's a tomb or a valentine.")
But these have for me an interest less of the bizarre than of the human, and nothing that is human was alien to that hour.
We waited for them by the new little grave, the disturbance—so slight!—in the earth where we would lay the stranger baby. Our hands were filled with garden flowers—Calliope had drawn a little hand cart laden with ferns and sweet-brier, and my dear Mis' Amanda Toplady had cut all the half-blown buds from her loved tea rose.
"It seems like a little baby wasn't real dead that I hadn't helped lay out," said that great Mis' Amanda, trying to find her handkerchief. "Oh, I wish't it was alive. It seems like such a little bit of comin' alive to ask the Lord!"
And as the afternoon shadows drew about us with fostering arms,
"Out-Here knows we feel bad more than Down Town, don't it?" said Little Child.
I have always thought very beautiful that village custom of which I have before spoken, which provides that the father and mother of a little baby who dies may take it with them in a closed carriage to the grave. It was so that my neighbour and her husband brought their baby to the cemetery from the station, with the little coffin on their knees.
On the box beside the driver Peter was riding. We learned afterward that he had appeared at the station and had himself taken that little coffin from the car. "So then it didn't have to be on the truck at all," my neighbour noted thankfully when she told me. I think that it must be this living with only a street or two between folk and the open country which gives these unconscious sharpenings of sensibility often, otherwhere, bred only by old niceties of habit.
So little Kenneth was buried, who never had the name save in unreality; whom my neighbour had never tended; who lived for her only in dream and on that broken post-card and here in the hidden dust. It made her grief so sad a thing that her arms did not miss him; nor had he slipped from any usage of the day; nor was any link broken with the past; only the plans that had hung in air had gone out, like flames which had kindled nothing. Because of this she sorrowed from within some closed place at which her husband could only guess, who stood patiently without in his embarrassed concern, his clumsy anxiety to do what there was to be done, his wondering distress at his wife's drooping grief. But her sorrow was rooted in the love of women for the "little young thing, runnin' round," for which she had long passioned.
"Oh, God, who lived in the spirit of the littleLord Jesus, live Thou in this child's spirit, and it in Thee, world without end," Doctor June prayed. And Little Child whispered to me and then went to let fall a pink in the grave. "So if the flower gets to be an angel flower, then they can go round together," she explained.
When I looked up there were in the west the first faint heraldings of rose. And against it stood Miggy and Peter, side by side, looking down this new way of each other's lives which took account of sorrow. He said something to her, and she nodded, and gave him her white hollyhocks to lay with the rest. And as they turned away together Little Child whispered to me, pulling herself, by my arm, to high tiptoe:—
"That little child we put in the sunset," she said, nodding to the west, "it's there now. It's there now!"
Perhaps it was that my heart was filled with the tragedy of the unfulfilled intention, perhaps it was that I thought that Little Child's whispering was true. In any case I hastened my steps, and as we passed out on the road I overtook Miggy and Peter.
"Peter," said I, "may Miggy and I come to pay you that visit now, on the way back?"
Miggy looked startled.
"It's supper time," she objected.
Who are we that we should interrupt a sunset, ora situation, or the stars in their courses, merely to sup? Neither Miggy nor I belong to those who do so. Besides, we had to pass Peter's very door. I said so, and all the time Peter's face was glowing.
"Hurry on ahead," I bade him, "and Miggy and Little Child and I will come in your house to call."
He looked at me gratefully, and waited for good night to my neighbour, and went swiftly away down the road toward the sunset.
"Oh, goody grand, goody grand," Little Child went on softly, in an invocation of her own to some secret divinity of her pleasure. "Oh, that little child we put there, it's talkin' to the sky, an' I guess that makes sunset be!"
My neighbour was looking back across the tranquil meadow which might have been deep with summer hay instead of mounded to its sad harvest.
"I wish," she said, "I could have had his little grave in my garden, same as you would a bird. Still I s'pose a cemet'ry is a cemet'ry and had ought to be buried in. But oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to have him here in Friendship Village. It's better to think about, ain't it?"
But the thing that gripped my heart was to see her, beside her husband, go down the road and not hurry. All that bustling impermanence was fallen from her. I think that now I am becoming thankful for every one who goes busily quickening the daywith a multitude, yes, even with a confusion, of homely, cheerful tasks.
Miggy slipped her hand within my arm.
"Did you think of it?" she said. "I've been, all the time. It's most the same with her as it would be to me if I'd losther. You know ... that little Margaret. I mean, if she should never be."
As when one hears the note of an oriole ringing from the innermost air, so now it seems to me that after these things the deeps of air can never again be wholly alien to me.
I wondered somewhat that Peter did not come out of his house to fetch us. He was not even about the little yard when we went up the walk, though he knew that we must arrive but a few moments after he did. Little Child ran away to pick Bouncing Bet and Sweet Clover in the long, rank grass of the unkept garden. And Miggy and I went and stood on the porch before Peter's door, and I knew what I intended.
"Rap!" I said to Miggy.
She looked at me in surprise—I have not often commanded her like that. But I wanted to see her stand at Peter's door asking for admission. And I think that Peter had wanted it too and that this was why he had not come to the gate to fetch us. I guessed it by the light on his face when, in the middle of Miggy's knock, he caught open the door. I like to remember his face as it looked at that moment, with the little twist of mouth and lifting of brow which gave him a peculiar sweetness andnaïveté, curiously contradicted by the way his eyes were when they met Miggy's.
"How long it took you," he said. "Come in.Come in."
We went in, and I looked at Miggy. For I did not want her to step in that house as she would have stepped in a house that was just a house. Is it not wonderful how some front doors are Front Doors Plus? I do not know plus what—that is one of those good little in-between things which we know without always naming. But there are some front doors which are to me boards and glass and a tinkling cymbal bell; while other doors of no better architecture let me within dear depths of homes which are to houses what friends are to inhabitants. It was so that I would have had Miggy go within Peter's house,—not as within doors, but as within arms.
We entered directly from the porch into the small parlour—the kind of man's parlour that makes a woman long to take it on her lap and tend it. There were no curtains. Between the windows was a big table filled with neat piles of newspapers and weeklies till there should be time to look them over. The shelf had a lamp, not filled, a clock, not going, and a pile of seed catalogues. On two walls were three calendars with big hollyhocks and puppies and ladies in sunbonnets. The entire innerwall was occupied by a map of the state—why does a man so cherish a map of something, hung up somewhere? On the organ was a row of blue books—what is it that men are always looking for in blue books? In a corner, on the floor, stood a shotgun. The wood stove had been "left up" all summer to save putting it up in the fall—this business of getting a stove on rollers and jacking it up and remembering where it stood so that the pipe will fit means, in the village, a day of annual masculine sacrifice to the feminine foolishness of wanting stoves down in summer. There was nothing disorderly about the room; but it was dressed with no sash or hair ribbon or coral beads, as a man dresses his little girl.
"We don't use this room much," Peter said. "We sit in here sometimes in summer, but I think when a man sits in his parlour he always feels like he was being buried from it, same as they're used for."
"Why—" said Miggy, and stopped. What she was going to say it was not important to know, but I was glad that she had been going to say it. Something, perhaps, about this being a very pretty room if there were somebody to give it a touch or two.
Peter was obviously eager to be in the next room, and that, he explained, would have been the diningroom, only he had taken it for his own, and they ate in the kitchen. I think that I had never heard him mention his father at all, and this "we" of his now was a lonelier thing than any lonely "I."
"This is my room," he said as we entered it. "It's where I live when I'm not at the works. Come and let me show you."
So Peter showed Miggy his room, and he showed it to me, too, though I do not think that he was conscious of that. It was a big room, bare of floor and, save for the inescapable flowery calendar, bare of walls. There was a shelf of books—not many, but according to Peter's nature sufficiently well-selected to plead for him: "Look at us. Who could love us and not be worth while?"—bad enough logic, in all conscience, to please any lover. Miggy hardly looked at the books. She so exasperatingly took it for granted that a man must be everything in general that it left hardly anything for him to be in particular. But Peter made her look, and he let me look too, and I supplied the comments and Miggy occasionally did her three little nods. The writing table Peter had made from a box, and by this Miggy was equally untouched. All men, it appeared, should be able to make writing tables from boxes. With the linen table cover it was a little different—this Peter's mother had once worked in cross-stitch for his room, and Miggy lifted an end and looked at it.
"She took all those stitches for you!" she said. "There's one broken," she showed him.
"I can mend that," Peter said proudly, "I'll show you my needle kit."
At this she laughed out suddenly with, "Needle kit!What a real regular old bachelor you are, aren't you?"
"I can't help that," said Peter, with "and the same cannot be said for you" sticking from the sentence.
On the table lay the cannery account books, and one was open at a full page of weary little figures.
"Is this where you sit nights and do your work and read?" Miggy demanded.
"Right here," Peter told her, "every night of the year, 'most. Except when I come to see you."
Miggy stood looking at the table and the wooden chair.
"That's funny," she remarked finally, with an air of meditative surprise; "they know you so much better than I do, don't they?"
"Well," Peter said gravely, "they haven't been thought about as much as you have, Miggy—that's one thing."
"Thinking's nothing," said Miggy, merrily; "sometimes you get a tune in your head and you can't get it out."
"Sit down at the table," said Peter, abruptly."Sit down!" he repeated, when her look questioned him. "I want to see you there."
She obeyed him, laughing a little, and quite in the woman's way of pretending that obedience is a choice. Peter looked at her. It is true that he had been doing nothing else all the while, but now that she sat at the table—his table—he looked more than before.
"Well," he said, "well, well." As a man says when he has a present and has no idea what to say about it.
Peter's photographs were on the wall above the table, and Peter suddenly leaned past Miggy and took down the picture of his mother and put it in her hand, without saying anything. For the first time Miggy met his eyes.
"Your mother," she said, "why, Peter. She looked—oh, Peter, she looked like you!"
Peter nodded. "Yes, I do look like she did," he said; "I'm always so glad."
"She knew you when you were a little bit of a baby, Peter," Miggy advanced suddenly.
Peter admitted it gravely. She had.
"Well," said Miggy, as Peter had said it. "Well."
There was a picture of Peter's father as a young man,—black, curly-haired, black-moustached, the cheeks slightly tinted in the picture, his hands laid trimly along his knees. The face was weak, empty,but it held that mere confidence of youth which always gives a special sting to the grief of unfulfilment. Over this they passed, saying nothing. It struck me that in the delicacy of that silence it was almost as if Miggy shared something with Peter. Also, it struck me pleasantly that Miggy's indifference to the personalities of divers aunts in straight bangs and long basques was slightly exaggerated, especially when, "I never thought about your having any aunts," she observed.
And then Peter took down a tiny picture of the sort we call in the village "card size," and gave it to her.
"Guess who," he said.
It was a little boy of not more than five, in a straight black coat dress, buttoned in the front and trimmed with broad black velvet strips, and having a white scalloped collar and white cuffs. One hand was resting on the back of a camp-chair and the other held a black helmet cap. The shoes had double rows of buttons, and for some secret reason the photographer had had the child laboriously cross one foot negligently over the other. The fine head, light-curled, was resting in the horns of that ex-device that steadied one out of all semblance to self. But in spite of the man who had made the picture, the little boy was so wholly adorable that you wanted to say so.
"Peter!" Miggy said, "It'syou."
I do not know how she knew. I think that I would not have known. But Miggy knew, and her knowing made me understand something which evidently she herself did not understand. For she looked at the picture and looked at it, a strange, surprised smile on her face. And,
"Well, well,well," she said again. "I never thought about that before. I mean about you.Then."
"Would—would you want that picture, Miggy?" Peter asked; "you can have it if you do."
"Can I really?" said Miggy. "Well, I do want it. Goodness...."
"I always kind of thought," Peter said slowly, "that when I have a son he'll look something like that. He might, you know."
Peter was leaning beside her, elbows on the table, and Miggy looked up at him over the picture of the child, and made her three little nods.
"Yes," she said, "you would want your little boy to look like you."
"And I'd want him named Peter. It's a homely old name, but I'd want him to have it."
"Peter isn't a homely name," said Miggy, in a manner of surprise. "Yes, of course you'd want him—"
The sentence fell between them unfinished. AndI thought that Miggy's face, still somewhat saddened by the little Kenneth and now tender with its look for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing of colour. But then I saw that this would be the light of the sunset on her cheeks, for now the West was become a glory of rose and yellow, so that it held captive her eyes. It is too frail a thing for me to have grasped by sense, but the Moment seemed to say—and could give no reason—that our sunset compact Miggy kept then without remembering the compact.
It almost startled me when out in the unkept garden Little Child began to sing. We had nearly forgotten her and we could not see her, so that she might have been any other little child wandering in the sweet clover, or merely a little voice coming in with the western light:—
"I like to stand in this great 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 like 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 like 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 like to stand in this great air
And see the sun go down.
It shows me a bright veil to wear
And such a pretty gown.
Oh, I can see a playmate there
Far up in Splendour Town!"
"Look here," said Peter to Miggy; and I went over to the sunset window and let them go on alone.
He led her about the room, and she still had the little picture in her hand. From the bureau, with its small array of cheap brushes and boxes, sheturned abruptly away. I think that she may have felt as I felt about the splash of rose on the rose-breasted grosbeak's throat—that I ought not to have been looking. Beyond was a little old dry-goods box for odds and ends, a box which must have known, with a kind of feminine intelligence, that it ought to be covered with cretonne. On this box Miggy knelt to read Peter's high school diploma, and she stopped before a picture of the house where he was born. "Was it there?" she asked. "Doesn't that seem funny?" Which manifestly it did not seem. "Isthatwhere your violin lives?" she asked, when they came to its corner—surely a way of betrayal that she had thought of it as living somewhere else. And all the while she carried the picture in her hand, and the sunset glorified the room, and Little Child was singing in the garden.
"Peter," said Miggy, "I don't believe a man who can play the violin can sew. Give me the needle kit. I'm going to mend the table cover—may I?"
Might she! Peter, his face shining, brought out his red flannel needle-book—he kept it on the shelf with his shaving things!—and, his face shining more, sat on a creaking camp-chair and watched her.
"Miggy," he said, as she caught the threads skilfully together, "I don't believe I've ever seen you sew. I know I never have."
"This isn't sewing," Miggy said.
"It's near enough like it to suit me," said Peter.
He drew a breath long, and looked about him. I knew how he was seeing the bare room, lamp-lighted, and himself trying to work in spite of the longing that teased and possessed him and bade him give it up and lean back and think of her; or of tossing on the hard couch in the tyranny of living his last hour with her and of living, too, the hours that might never be. And here she was in this room—his room. Peter dropped his head on his hand and his eyes did not leave her face save to venture an occasional swift, ecstatic excursion to her fingers.
Simply and all quietly, as Nature sends her gifts, miracles moved toward completion while Miggy sewed. The impulse to do for him this trifling service was like a signal, and when she took up the needle for him I think that women whose hands had long lain quiet stirred within her blood. As for Peter—but these little housewifely things which enlighten a woman merely tease a man, who already knows their import and longs for all sweet fragments of time to be merged in the long possession.
Miggy gave the needle back to Peter and he took it—needle, red book, and hand.
"Miggy!" he said, and the name on his lips was like another name. And it was as if she were in some place remote and he were calling her.
She looked at him as if she knew the call. Since the world began, only for one reason does a man call a woman like that.
"What is it you want?" she said—and her voice was very sweet and very tired.
"I want more ofyou!" said Peter Cary.
She may have tried to say something, but her voice trembled away.
"I thought it would be everything—your coming here to-day," Peter said. "I've wanted it and wanted it. And what does it amount to? Nothing, except to make me wild with wanting you never to go away. I dread to think of your leaving me here—shutting the door and being gone. If it was just plain wanting you I could meet that, and beat it, like I do the things down to the works. But it isn't that. It's like it was something big—bigger than me, and outside of me, and it gets hold of me, and it's like it asked for you without my knowing. I can't do anything that you aren't some of it. It isn't fair, Miggy. I want more of you—all of you—all the time, Miggy, all the time...."
I should have liked to see Miggy's face when she looked at Peter, whose eyes were giving her everything and were asking everything of her; but I was studying the sunset, glory upon glory, to match the glory here. And the singing of Little Child beganagain, like that of a little voice vagrant in the red west....
"Oh, I can see a playmate there,Far up in Splendour Town!"
"Oh, I can see a playmate there,Far up in Splendour Town!"
"Oh, I can see a playmate there,Far up in Splendour Town!"
"Oh, I can see a playmate there,
Far up in Splendour Town!"
Miggy heard her, and remembered.
"Peter, Peter!" she cried, "I couldn't—I never could bring us two on you to support."
Peter gave her hands a little shake, as if he would have shaken her. I think that he would have shaken her if it had been two or three thousand years earlier in the world's history.
"You two!" he cried; "why, Miggy, when we marry do I want—or do you want—that it should stay just you and me? We want children. I want you for their mother as much as I want you for my wife."
It was the voice of the paramount, compelling spirit, the sovereign voice of the Family, calling through the wilderness. Peter knew,—this fine, vital boy seeking his own happiness; he gropingly understood this mighty thing, and he was trying his best to serve it. And, without knowing that she knew, Miggy knew too ... and the seal that she knew was in what was in the sunset. And as far removed from these things as the sunset itself was all Miggy's cheap cynicism about love and all the triviality of her criticism of Peter.
Miggy stood motionless, looking at Peter. Andthen, like an evil spell which began to work, another presence was in the room....
Somewhile before I had begun to hear the sound, as a faint undercurrent to consciousness; an unimportant, unpleasant, insisting sound that somehow interfered. Gradually it had come nearer and had interfered more and had mingled harshly with the tender treble of Little Child. Now, from Peter's gate the sound besieged my ears and entered the room and explained itself to us all—