Chapter VI: Part 6

The New Lady was not at home, Elfa told him, in her motherly little heart pitying him. And at the news he sat down, quite simply, in the chair in which he had sat before. He must see her. It was unthinkable that she should be away. To-night he had meant to have the courage to leave with her his verses.

On the willow table lay her needlework. It was soft and white beyond the texture of most clouds, and she had wrought on it a pattern like the lines on a river. As his eyes rested on it, Nicholas could fancy it lying against her white gown and upon it her incomparable hands. Some way, she seemed nearer to him when he was not with her than when, with her incomparable hands and her fluent speech, she was in his presence. When she was not with him, he could think what to say to her. When he stood before her--the thought of his leave-taking on that veranda seized upon him, so that he caught his breath in the sharp thrust of mortified recollection, and looked away and up.

His eyes met those of Elfa, who was quietly sitting opposite.

"How they must all have laughed at me. You too!" he said.

"Why?" she asked.

"That last time I was here. Shaking hands that way," he explained.

"I didn't laugh," she unexpectedly protested; "I cried."

He looked at her. And this was as if he were seeing her for the first time.

"_Cried?_" he repeated.

"Nobody ever shakes hands with me," Elfa told him.

He stared at her as she sat on the edge of her chair, her plump hands idle on her apron.

"No," he admitted, "no, I don't suppose they do. I didn't think--"

But he had not thought of her at all.

"By the door all day I let in hand-shakes," she said, "an' then I let 'em out again. But I don't get any of 'em for me."

That, Nicholas saw, was true enough. Even he had been mortified because he had taken her hand.

"Once," Elfa said, "I fed a woman at the back door. An' when she went she took hold o' my hand, thankful. An' then you done it too--like it was a mistake. That's all, since I worked out. I don't know folks outside much, only some that don't shake hands, 'count of seemin' ashamed to."

"I know," said Nicholas.

"Sometimes," she went on, "folks come here an' walk in to see _her_ an' they don't shake. Ain't it funny--when folks can an' don't? When they come from the city to-morrow, the whole house'll shake hands, but me. Once I went to prayer-meetin' an' I hung around waitin' to see if somebody wouldn't. But they didn't--any of 'em. It was rainin' outside an' I guess they thought I come with somebody's rubbers."

Nicholas looked at her a little fearfully. It had seemed to him that in a great world of light he had always moved in a little hollow of darkness and detachment. Were there, then, other hollows like that? Places to which outstretched hands never penetrate? A great understanding possessed him, and he burst out in an effort to express it.

"You're a funny girl," he said.

She flushed, and suddenly lifted one hand and looked at it. Nicholas watched her now intently. She studied the back of her hand, turned it, and sat absorbedly examining her little thumb. And Nicholas felt a sudden sense of understanding, of gladness that he understood. As he felt when he was afraid and wretched, so Elfa was feeling now.

He leaned toward her.

"Don't feel afraid," he said gently.

She shook her head.

"I don't," she said; "I don't, truly. I guess that's why I stayed here now. She won't be back till ten--I ought to have said so before. You--you won't want to wait so long."

He rose at once. And now, being at his ease, his head was erect, his arms naturally fallen, his face as confident and as occupied by his spirit as when he lay alone in the meadows.

"Well, sir," he said, "let's shake hands again!"

She gave him her hand and, in their peculiarly winning upward look, her eyes--blue, wide, watchful, with that brooding mother watchfulness of some women, even in youth. And her hand met his in the clasp which is born of the simple, human longing of kind for kind.

"Good-by," she answered his good-by, and they both laughed a little in a shyness which was a way of delight.

In the days to follow there flowed in the boy's veins a tide of novel sweetness. And now his thoughts eluded one another and made no chain, so that when he tried to remember what, on that first evening, the New Lady and he had talked about, there came only a kind of pleasure, but it had no name. Everything that he had to do pressed upon him, and when he could get time he was away to the meadow, looking down on the chimneys of that house, and swept by a current that was like a singing. And always, always it was as if some one were with him.

There came a night when he could no longer bear it, when his wish took him to itself and carried him with it. Those summer dusks, warm yellow with their moon and still odorous of spring, were hard to endure alone. Since the evening with her, Nicholas had not seen the New Lady save when, not seeing him, she had driven past in a phaëton. At the sight of her, and once at the sight of Elfa from that house, a faintness had seized him, so that he had wondered at himself for some one else, and then with a poignancy that was new pain, new joy, the new life, had rejoiced that he was himself. So, when he could no longer bear it, he took his evening way toward the row of poplars, regretting the moonlight lest by it they should see him coming. And to-night he had with him no verses, but only his longing heart.

He had no intimation of the guests, for the windows at that house were always brightly lighted, and until he was within the screened veranda the sound of voices did not reach him. Then from the rooms there came a babel of soft speech and laughter, and a touch of chords; and when he would have incontinently retreated, the New Lady crossed the hall and saw him.

She came to the doorway and greeted him, and Nicholas looked up in the choking discomfort of sudden fear. She was in a gown that was like her needlework, mysteriously fashioned and intricate with shining things which made her infinitely remote. The incomparable little hands were quite covered with jewels. It was as if he had come to see a spirit and had met a woman.

"How good of you to come again," she said. "Come, I want my friends to meet you."

Her friends! That quick crossing of words within there, then, meant the presence of her friends from the city.

"I couldn't! I came for a book--I'll get it some other time. I've got to go now!" Nicholas said.

Then, "Bettina--Bettina!" some one called from within, and a man appeared in the hallway, smiled at sight of the New Lady, dropped his glass at sight of Nicholas, bowed, turned away--oh, how should he know that her name was Bettina when Nicholas had not known!

This time he did not say good night at all. This time he did not look at his great hand, which was trembling, but he got away, mumbling something, his retreat graciously covered by the New Lady's light words. And, the sooner to be gone and out of the moonlight that would let them see him go, he struck blindly into the path that led to the side gate of the garden. The mortification that chains spirit to flesh and tortures both held him and tortured him. For a breath he imagined himself up there among them all, his hands holding his hat, imagined having to shake hands with them: and somehow this way of fellowship, this meeting of hands outstretched for hands, seemed, with them, the supreme ordeal, the true symbol of his alien state from them and from the New Lady. No doubt she understood him, but for the first time Nicholas saw that this is not enough. For the first time he saw that she was as far away from him as were the others. How easy, Nicholas thought piteously, those people in her house all found it to act the way they wanted to! Their hands must be like her hands....

He got through the garden and to the side gate. And now the old loneliness was twofold upon him because he had known what it is to reach from the dark toward the light; yet when he saw that at the gate some one was standing, he halted in his old impulse to be on guard, hunted by the fear that this would be somebody alien to him. Then he saw that it was no one from another star, but Elfa.

"Oh...." he said, and that, too, was what she said, but he did not hear. Not from another star she came, but from the deep of the world where Nicholas felt himself alone.

"I--was just going away," he explained.

For assent she stepped a little back, saying nothing. But when Nicholas would have passed her it was as if the immemorial loneliness and the seeking of forgotten men innumerable stirred within him in the ache of his heart, in the mere desperate wish to go to somebody, to be with somebody, to have somebody by the hand.

He turned upon Elfa almost savagely.

"Shake hands!" he said.

Obediently she put out her hand, which of itself stayed ever so briefly, within his. He held it, feeling himself crushing it, clinging to it, being possessed by it. Her hand was, like his, rough from its work, and it was something alive, something human, something that answered. And instantly it was not Elfa alone who was there companioning him, but the dark was quick with presences, besieging him, letting him know that no one alive is alone, that he was somehow one of a comrade company, within, without, encompassing. And the boy was caught up by the sweet will outside his own will and he never knew how it was that he had Elfa in his arms.

"Come here. Come here...." he said.

To Elfa, in her loneliness threaded by its own dream, the moment, exquisite and welcome as it was, was yet as natural as her own single being. But to the boy it was not yet the old miracle of one world built from another. It was only the answer to the groping of hands for hands, the mere human call to be companioned. And the need to reassure her came upon him like the mantle of an elder time.

"Don't feel afraid," he said.

Her eyes gave him their winning upward look, and it was as if their mother watchfulness answered him gravely:--

"I don't. I don't, truly."

And at this she laughed a little, so that he joined her; and their laughter together was a new delight.

Across the adjoining lawn Nicholas could see in the moonlight the moving figure of the big deacon, a Light Gown or two attending. A sudden surprising sense of safety from them overswept the boy. What if they did come that way! What, he even thought, if those people in the house were to come by? Somehow, the little hollow of dark in which he had always walked in the midst of light was as light as the rest of the world, and he was not afraid. And all this because Elfa did not stir in his arms, but was still, as if they were her harbour. And then Nicholas knew what they both meant.

"Elfa!" he cried, "do you...?"

"I guess I must...." she said, and knew no way to finish that.

"Love me?" said Nicholas, bold as a lion.

"I meant that too," Elfa said.

Between the New Lady's house and the big, obvious deacon's lawn the boy stood, silent, his arms about the girl. So this was the way the world is, people bound together, needing one another, wanting one another, stretching out their hands....

"Why, it was _you_ I wanted!" Nicholas said wonderingly.

XIII

HOUSEHOLDRY

"After supper" in the village is like another room of the day. On these summer nights we all come out to our porches to read the daily paper, or we go to sit on the porch of a neighbour, or we walk about our lawns in excesses of leisure, giving little twitches to this green and to that. "In our yards" we usually say. Of these some are so tiny that the hammocks or the red swinging-chairs find room on the planting spaces outside the walks, and there men smoke and children frolic and call across the street to one another. And this evening, as I went down Daphne Street to post my letters, I saw in process the occasional evening tasks which I have noted, performed out-of-doors: at the Sykeses' cucumbers in preparation for to-morrow's pickles; a bushel of over-ripe cherries arrived unexpectedly at the Herons' and being pitted by hand; a belated needle-task of Mis' Holcomb's finishing itself in the tenuous after-light. This fashion of taking various employments into the open delights me. If we have peas to shell or beans to string or corn to husk, straightway we take them to the porch or into the yard. This seems to me to hold something of the grace of the days in the Joyous Garde, or on the grounds of old châteaux where they embroidered or wound worsted in woodland glades, or of colonial America, where we had out our spinning wheels under the oaks. When I see a great shining boiler of gasoline carried to the side yard for the washing of delicate fabrics, I like to think of it as done out-of-doors for the charm of it as much as for the safety. So Nausicaa would have cleansed with gasoline!

It was sight of the old Aunt Effie sewing a seam in Mis' Holcomb's dooryard which decided me to go to see Miggy. For I would not willingly be where Aunt Effie is, who has always some tragedy of gravy-scorching or dish-breaking to tell me. I have been for some time promising to go to see Miggy in her home, and this was the night to do so, for the New Lady went home to-day and I have been missing her sorely. There is a kind of minus-New Lady feeling about the universe.

At the same moment that I decided for Miggy, Peter rose out of the ground. I wonder if he can have risen a very little first? But that is one of those puzzles much dwelt upon by the theologians, and I will not decide. Perhaps the thought of Miggy is a mighty motive on which Peter's very being is conditioned. Anyway, there he was, suddenly beside me, and telling me some everyday affair of how little use in the cannery were Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade, whose houses we were passing. And to his talk of shop I responded by inviting him to go with me to see Miggy. Would he go? He smiled his slow smile, with that little twist of mouth and lifting of brow.

"This is like finding an evening where there wasn't one before," he said.

The little house where Miggy lives has a copper beech in the dooryard--these red-leaved trees seem to be always in a kind of hush at their own difference. The house is no-colour, with trimmings of another no-colour for contrast, and the little front porch looks like something that has started to run out the front door and is being sternly snatched backward. The door stood ajar--no doubt for the completion of this transaction--and no one was about. We rapped, for above the bell push was a legend of Aunt Effie's inscribing, saying: "Bell don't ring." For a moment our summons was unanswered. Then Miggy called from upstairs.

"I'll be down in a minute," she said. "Go right in, both of you, and wait for me--will you?"

To take the cards of one's visitors from a butler of detached expression or from a maid with inquisitive eyelashes is to know nothing of the charm of this custom of ours of peeping from behind an upper curtain where we happen to be dressing, and alone in the house, at the ringing of the doorbell, and of calling down to a back which we recognize an informal "Oh, go right in and wait for me a minute, will you?" In this habit there is survival of old tribal loyalties and hospitalities; for let the back divined below be the back of a stranger, that is to say, of a barbarian, and we stay behind our curtains, silent, till it goes away.

In the sitting room at Miggy's house a little hand lamp was burning, the fine yellow light making near disclosures of colour and form, and farther away formulating presences of shadow. Aunt Effie had been at her sewing, and there were yards of blue muslin billowing over a sunken arm-chair and a foam of white lining on the Brussels-covered couch. The long blue cotton spread made the big table look like a fat Delft sugar bowl, and the red curtains were robbed of crude colour and given an obscure rosy glow. A partly finished waist disguised the gingerbread of the what-not, one forgot the carpet, the pictures became to the neutral wall what words which nobody understands are to ministering music. And on the floor before the lounge lay Little Child and Bless-your-Heart, asleep.

At first I did not see the child. It was Peter who saw her. He stooped and lifted her, the kitten still in her arms, and instead of saying any of the things a woman might have said, Peter said _"Well...._" with a tenderness in his voice such as women can give and more. For a man's voice-to-a-child gets down deeper than happiness. I suppose it is that the woman has always stayed with the child in the cave or the tent or the house, while the man has gone out to kill or to conquer or to trade; and the ancient crooning safety is still in the woman's voice, and the ancient fear that he may not come back to them both is in the voice of the man. When Peter lifted Little Child in his arms, I wished that Miggy had been there to hear.

"What's it dreaming about?" Peter said.

"'Bout Miggy," said Little Child sleepily, and she snuggled in Peter's coat collar.

"Dream about Peter too!" Peter commanded.

"Well, _I_ will," promised Little Child o' Dreams, and drifted off.

Peter sank awkwardly down to the floor and held her so, and he sat there stroking Bless-your-Heart and looking as if he had forgotten me, save that, "Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade that I was telling you about," he remarked once irrelevantly, "_they've_ each got a kiddie or so."

Miggy came downstairs and, "I'm a surprise," she said in the doorway, and stood there in a sheer white frock--a frock which said nothing to make you look, but would not let you look away; and it had a little rhyme of lace on this end and on that. It was the frock that she had made herself--she told me so afterward, but she did not mention it before Peter, and I liked her the better for that. When I hear women boast of these things I always wonder why, then and there, I should not begin to recite a sonnet I have turned, so as to have a hand in things. To write an indifferent sonnet is much less than to make a frock which can be worn, but yet I should dislike infinitely to volunteer even so little as a sonnet or a quatrain. In any case, it would be amazing taste for me to do so; while "I made it myself" I hear everywhere in the village, especially in the presence of the Eligible. But I dare say that this criticism of mine is conditioned by the fact that my needle-craft cell got caught in the primal protozoan ooze and did not follow me.

"Miggy! Oh, Miggery!" said Peter, softly. He had made this name for a sort of superlative of her.

"Like me?" inquired Miggy. I wonder if even the female atom does not coquette when the sun strikes her to shining in the presence of her atom lord?

You know that low, emphatic, unspellable thing which may be said by the throat when a thing is liked very much? When one makes it, it feels like a vocal dash in vocal italics. Peter did that, very softly.

"Well," said Miggy, "I feel that dressed-up that I might be cut out of paper. What _are_ you doing down there, Peter?"

He glanced down mutely, and Miggy went round the table and saw what he held.

"Why," she said, "that great heavy girl, Peter. Give her to me."

Miggy bent over Peter, with her arms outstretched for the child. And Peter looked up at her and enjoyed the moment.

"She's too heavy for you to lift," he said, with his occasional quiet authority. "I'll put her where you want her."

"Well, it's so hot upstairs," Miggy hesitated. "It's past her bedtime, but I hate to take her up there."

"Undress her down here," said I. "The Delft sugar bowl shuts you off a fine dressing-room. And let her sleep for a while on the couch."

So Miggy went for the little nightgown, and Peter, with infinite pains, got to his feet, and detached Bless-your-Heart and deposited her on the table, where she yawned and humped her back and lay down on an unfinished sleeve and went to sleep again. And when Miggy came down, she threw a light quilt and a pillow near the couch and sat behind the table and held out her arms.

"Now!" she said to Peter, and to me she said, "I thought maybe you'd spread her up a bed there on the couch."

"Let Peter," said I. "I've another letter I ought to have written. If I may, I'll write that here while you undress her."

"Well," said Miggy, "there's some sheets of letter-paper under the cover of the big Bible. And the ink--I guess there's some in the bottle--is on top of the organ. And the pen is there behind the clock. And you'd ought to find a clean envelope in that pile of newspapers. I think I saw one there the other day. You spread up her bed then, Peter."

I wrote my letter, and Peter went at the making up of the lounge, and Miggy sat behind the table to undress Little Child. And Little Child began waking up. It touched me infinitely that she who in matters of fairies and visionings is so wise and old should now, in her sleepyhood, be just a baby again.

"I--_won't_--go--bed," she said.

"Oh," said Miggy, "yes. Don't you feel all the little wingies on your face? They're little dream wings, and the dreams are getting in a hurry to be dreamed."

"I do' know those dreams," said Little Child, "I do' _want_ those dreams. Where's Bless-your-Heart?"

"Dreaming," said Miggy, "all alone. Goodness, I believe you've got a little fever."

Peter stopped flopping the quilt aimlessly over the lounge and turned, and Miggy laid the back of her hand on Little Child's cheek and beneath her chin. The man watched her anxiously as, since the world began, millions of men have looked down at this mysterious pronouncement of the woman.

"She has?" he said. "She'd ought not to have any milk, then, had she?" he added vaguely. It seemed to me that Miggy must have paused for a moment to like Peter for this wholly youthful, masculine eagerness to show that he knew about such things.

"I'll fix her something to take," said Miggy, capably. "No, dear. The other arm. Straighten elbow."

"I want my shoes an' stockin's on in bed," Little Child observed. She was sitting up, her head drooping, her curls fastened high with a hairpin of Miggy's. "An' I want my shirtie on. An' _all_ my clothes. I won't go bed if you don't."

Miggy laughed. "Bless-your-Heart hasn't got her clothes on," she parried.

"Ain't she got her furs on any more?" demanded Little Child, opening her eyes. "She has, too. She has not, too, took a bath. An' I won't have no bath," she went on. "I'm too old for 'em."

At that she would have Bless-your-Heart in her arms, and there was some argument arising from her intention to take the kitten in one hand all the way through her nightgown sleeve. And by this time sleepyhood tears were near.

"_Don't_ curl your toes under so," said Miggy, struggling with a shoe. "Peter, do go on. You'll never have it done."

Whereat Peter flapped the quilt again; and--

"I will curl my toes up. That's what I want to do. I _want_ to curl 'em up!" said Little Child. And now the sleepyhood tears were very near.

"Goodness," said Miggy, suddenly, "to-morrow is Sunday. I'll have to do her hair up for curls. Peter!" she cried, "stop waving that quilt, and tear me off a strip of that white lining there."

"Yes, _I'll_ have curls," said Little Child, unexpectedly, "because that is so becunning to me."

But she was very sleepy, and when Peter had been sent for the brush from the kitchen shelf, her head was on Miggy's shoulder, and Miggy looked at Peter helplessly.

"Give her to me," said Peter, and took the child and laid the kitten at large upon the floor; and then, holding Little Child's head in the hollow of his arm, he sat down before Miggy, leaning toward her, and all the child's soft brown hair lay on his sleeve.

I should have liked to watch them then. And I should have liked Calliope and Mis' Toplady and my neighbour to see them--those three who of all the village best understood mystery. I know that Peter did not take his eyes from Miggy's face as she brushed and wound the curls. How could he?--and Miggy, "sweet as boughs of May" in that white frock, her look all motherly intent upon her task. She was very deft, and she had that fine mother-manner of caring for the child with her whole hand instead of tipsifingers. I would see a woman infinitely delicate in the touching of flowers or tea-cups or needlework, but when she is near a child, I want her to have more than delicacy. I was amazed at Miggy's gentleness and her pretty air of accustomedness. And when Little Child stirred, Miggy went off into some improvised song about a little black dog that got struck with a wagon and went Ki--yi--ki--yi--_ad infinitum_, and Miggy seemed to me to have quite the technical mother-air of tender abstraction.

"How dark her hair is growing," she said.

"It's just the colour of yours," said Peter, "and the little curls on the edges. They're like yours, too."

"My hair!" Miggy said deprecatingly. "You've got rather nice hair, Peter, if _only_ it wouldn't stick up that way at the back."

"I know it sticks up," Peter said contritely. "I do every way to make it stay down. But it won't."

"It makes you look funny," observed Miggy, frankly.

"Well," he told her, "if you wouldn't ever make me go 'way from you, you wouldn't ever need to see the back of my head."

"That would be just what would turn your head," she put it positively. "Peter, doesn't your arm ache, holding her so?"

He looked down at his arm to see, and, "I wouldn't care if it did," he replied, in some surprise. "No. It feels good. Oh, Miggy--do you do this every night?"

"I don't always curl her hair," said Miggy, "but I always put her to bed. If ever Aunt Effie undresses her, she tells her she _may_ die before morning, so she'd better say her prayer, pretty. Goodness, she hasn't said her prayer yet, either."

"Isn't she too sleepy?" asked Peter.

"Yes," Miggy answered; "but she feels bad in the morning if she doesn't say it. You know she thinks she says her prayer to mother, and that mother waits to hear her...."

Miggy looked up fleetingly at her mother's picture on the wall--one of those pale enlargements of a photograph which tell you definitely that the subject is dead.

"I do' want any other curls on me," announced Little Child, suddenly.

"Just one more, dear," Miggy told her, "and then we're through. Turn her head a little, Peter."

"No," said Little Child. "Now I'm all curly."

And, "Yes, Precious. Be still on Peter's arm just a minute more," said Miggy at the same time.

And, "If you say anything more, I'll kiss you," said Peter, to whom it might concern.

"Kiss _me_?" said Little Child. "I won't be."

"Somebody's got to be," said Peter, with decision.

"Now, our prayer," ruled Miggy suddenly, and rose. "Come, dear."

Peter looked up in Miggy's face.

"Let her be here," he said. "Let her be here."

He lifted Little Child so that she knelt, and her head drooped on his shoulder. He had one arm about her and the other hand on the pink, upturned soles of her feet. The child put out one hand blindly for Miggy's hand. So Miggy came and stood beside Peter, and together they waited for the little sleepy voice.

It came with disconcerting promptness.

"Now--I--lay--me--down--to--sleep--for--Jesus'--sake--Amen," prayed Little Child in one breath.

"No, sweetheart," Miggy remonstrated, with her alluring emphasis on "sweet." "Say it right, dear."

"Now I lay me--is Bless-your-Heart sayin' hers?" demanded Little Child.

"Couldn't you get along without her, when you're so sleepy?" Miggy coaxed.

"Mustn't skip nights," Little Child told her. "Bless-your-Heart might die before morning."

So Miggy found Bless-your-Heart under the couch, and haled her forth, and laid her in Little Child's arms. And Peter put his face close, close to Little Child's, and shut his eyes.

"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take who'll I bless to-night?" said Little Child.

"Aunt Effie," Miggy prompted.

"Bless Aunt Effie," said Little Child, "and Miggy and Bless-your-Heart and New Auntie" (she meant me. Think of her meaning me!) "and the man that gave me the peanuts, and bless Stella's party and make 'em have ice-cream, and bless my new shoes and my sore finger. For Jesus' sake, Amen."

Little Child drew a long breath and stirred to get down, but Peter did not move.

"And bless Peter," Miggy said.

"No," said Little Child, "He needn't. Peter's nice 'nuff."

Peter got to his feet with Little Child in his arms, and his face was glowing, and he looked at Miggy as if she were what he meant whenever he said "universe." But Miggy had gone to the couch, and was smoothing the quilt that Peter had wrinkled in all directions, and patting the pillow that Peter had kneaded into a hard ball.

"You lay her down," she said.

Peter did so, setting the kitten on the floor, and then bending low over the couch, looking in the upturned face as the little dark head touched the pillow and sought its ease, and her hand fell from where it had rested on his shoulder. And he stooped and kissed her cheek more gently than he had ever done anything.

"I want my drink o' water," said Little Child, and opened her eyes; and now from the couch she could see me. "Tell me a story," she commanded me, drowsily.

I did not go to her, for who am I that I should have broken that trio? But when Miggy and Peter took the lamp and went away to the kitchen for the drink of water and for some simple remedy for the fever which Miggy had noted or fancied, I sat beside Little Child and said over something that had been persistently in my mind as I had watched Miggy with her:--

"I like to stand in this great air
And see the sun go down;
It shows me a bright veil to wear
And such a pretty gown.
Oh, I can see a playmate there
Far up in Splendour Town!"

Little Child began it with me, but her voice trailed away. I thought that in the darkness were many gentle presences--Little Child's tender breathing, the brushing wings of hurrying dreams, and perhaps that other--"not quite my sister," but a shadowy little Margaret.

Afterward, Miggy and Peter and I sat together for a little while, but Peter had fallen in a silence. And presently Aunt Effie came home, and on the porch--which seemed not yet to have escaped--she told us about having broken her needle and left her shears at her neighbour's. While Peter ran over to Mis' Holcomb's for the shears, I had a word with Miggy.

"Miggy!" I said, "don't you see?"

"See what?" she wanted to know, perversely.

"How Peter would love to have Little Child, too?" I said.

She laughed a little, and was silent; and laughed again.

"He was funny and nice," she admitted; "and wasn't Little Child funny not to bless him?"

"Because he is nice enough," I reminded her.

Miggy laughed once more--I had never seen her in so tender and feminine a mood. And this may have been partly due to the new frock, though I cannot think that it was entirely this. But abruptly she shook her head.

"Peter's father went by just before you came in," she said. "He--couldn't hardly walk. What if I was there to get supper for him when he got home? I never could--I never could...."

By the time Peter and I were out alone on Daphne Street again, the sitting rooms in all the houses were dark, with a look of locked front doors--as if each house had set its lips together with, "We are a home and you are not."

Peter looked out on all this palpable householdry.

"See the lights upstairs," he said; "everybody's up there, hearing their prayers and giving 'em fever medicine. Yes, sir, Great Scott! Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade--they ain't good for a thing in the cannery. And yet they know...."

XIV

POSTMARKS

Between church service and Sunday School we of the First church have so many things to attend to that no one can spare a moment.

"Reverent things, not secular," Calliope explains, "plannin' for church chicken-pie suppers an' Christmas bazaars and like that; but not a word about a picnic, not even if they was to be one o' Monday sunrise."

To be sure, this habit of ours occasionally causes a contretemps. As when one morning Mis' Toplady arrived late and, in a flurry, essayed to send up to the pulpit by the sexton a Missionary meeting notice to be read. Into this notice the minister plunged without the precaution of first examining it, and so delivered aloud:--

"See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags.
"See Abigail about enough forks for her table.
"Look around for my rubbers.
"Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."

Not until he reached the fourth item was the minister stopped by the agonized rustle in a congregation that had easily recognized Mis' Toplady's "between services" list of reminder, the notice of the forthcoming meeting being safe in her hymn book.

Still we persist in our Sabbath conferences when "everybody is there where you want 'em an' everybody can see everybody an' no time lost an' no party line listening"; and it is then that those who have been for some time away from the village receive their warmest welcome. I am not certain that the "I must get down to church and see everybody" of a returned neighbour does not hold in fair measure the principles of familyhood and of Christ's persuadings to this deep comradeship.

It was in this time after church that we welcomed Calliope one August Sunday when she had unexpectedly come down from town on the Saturday night. And later, when the Sunday-school bell had rung, I waited with her in the church while she looked up her Bible, left somewhere in the pews. When she had found it, she opened it in a manner of eager haste, and I inadvertently saw pasted to the inside cover a sealed letter, superscription down, for whose safety she had been concerned. I had asked her to dine with me, and as we walked home together she told me about the letter and what its sealed presence in her Bible meant.

"I ain't ever read it," Calliope explained to me wistfully. "Every one o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle has got one, an' none of us has ever read 'em. It ain't my letter, so to say. It's one o' the Jem Pitlaw collection. The postmark," she imparted, looking up at me proudly, "is Bombay, India."

At my question about the Jem Pitlaw collection she laughed deprecatingly, and then she sighed. ("Ain't it nice," she had once said to me, "your laughs hev a sigh for a linin', an' sighs can hev laughin' for trimmin'. Only trouble is, most folks want to line with trimmin's, an' they ain't rill durable, used that way.")

"Jem Pitlaw," Calliope told me now, "used to be schoolmaster here--the kind that comes from Away an' is terrible looked up to on that account, but Jem deserved it. He knew all there was _to_ know, an' yet he thought we knew some little things, too. We was all rill fond of him, though he kept to himself, an' never seemed to want to fall in love, an' not many of us knew him well enough to talk to at all familiar. But when he went off West on a vacation, an' didn't come back, an' never come back, an' then died, Friendship Village mourned for him,--sincere, though no crape,--an' missed him enormous.

"He'd had a room at Postmaster Sykes's--that was when he was postmaster first an' they was still humble an' not above the honest penny. An' Jem Pitlaw left two trunks an' a sealed box to their house. An' when he didn't come back in two years, Silas Sykes moved the things out of the spare room over to the post-office store loft. An' there they set, three years on end, till we got word Jem was dead--the very week o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle's Ten Cent Tropical Fête. Though, rilly, the Tropical Fête wasn't what you might say 'tropical.' It was held on the seventeenth of January, an' that night the thermometer was twenty-four degrees below on the bank corner. Nor it wasn't rilly what you might say a Fête, either. But none o' the Circle regretted them lacks. A lack is as good as a gift, sometimes.

"We'd started the Foreign Missionary Circle through Mis' Postmaster Sykes gettin' her palm. I donno what there is about palms, but you know the very name makes some folks think thoughts 'way outside their heads, an' not just stuffy-up inside their own brains. When I hear 'palm,' I sort o' feel like my i-dees got kind o' wordy wings an' just went it without me. An' that was the way with more than me, I found out. Nobody in Friendship Village hed a palm, but we'd all seen pictures an' hankered--like you do. An' all of a sudden Mis' Sykes got one, like she gets her new hat, sometimes, without a soul knowin' she's thinkin' 'hat' till she flams out in it. Givin' surprise is breath an' bread to that woman. She unpacked the palm in the kitchen, an' telephoned around, an' we all went over just as we was an' set down there an' looked at it an' thought 'Palm'! You can't realize how we felt, all of us, if you ain't lived all your life with nothin' but begonias an' fuchsias from November to April, an' sometimes into May. But we was all mixed up about 'em, now we see one. Some hed heard dates grew on palms. Others would have it it was cocoanuts. Still more said they was natives of the equator, an' give nothin' but shade. So it went. But after a while Mis' Timothy Toplady spoke up with that way o' comin' downstairs on her words an' rilly gettin' to a landin':--

"'They's quite a number o' things,' she says, 'that I want to do so much it seems like I can't die without doin' 'em. But I guess prob'ly I will die without. Folks seems to drop off leavin' lots of doin's undone. An' one o' my worst is, I want to see palm trees growin' in hot lands--big spiky leaves pointin' into the blue sky _like fury_. 'Seems if I could do that,' s'she, 'I'd take in one long breath that'd make me all lungs an' float me up an' off.'

"We all laughed, but we knew what she meant well enough, because we all felt the same way. I think most North folks do--like they was cocoanuts an' dates in our actions, 'way back. An' so we was all ready for Mis' Toplady's idee when it come--which is the most any idee can expect:--

"'I tell you what,' s'she, 'le's hev a Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle, an' get read up on them tropical countries. The only thing I really know about the tropics is what comes to me unbeknownst when I smell my tea rose. I've always been meanin' to take an interest in missions,' says she.

"So we started it, then an' there, an' she an' I was the committee to draw out a constitution an' decide what officers should be elected an' do the general creatin'. We made it up that Mis' Sykes should be the president--that woman is a born leader, and, as a leader, you can depend on the very back of her head. An' at last we went off to the minister that then was to ask him what to take up.

"'Most laudable,' s'he, when he'd heard. 'Well, now, what country is it you're most interested in?' he says. 'Some island of the sea, I s'pose?' he asks, bright.

"'We're interested in palms,' Mis' Timothy Toplady explained it to him frank, 'an' we want to study about the missionaries in some country where they's dates an' cocoanuts an' oaseses.'

"He smiled at that, sweet an' deep--I know it seemed to me as if he knew more about what we wanted than we knew ourselves. Because they's some ministers that understands that Christianity ain't all in the bottle labelled with it. Some of it is labelled 'ointment,' an' some 'perfume,' an' some just plain kitchen flavourin'. An' a good deal of it ain't labelled at all.

"I forget what country it was we did study. But they was nine to ten of us, an' we met every week, an' I tell you the time wa'n't wasted. We took things in lavish. I know Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said that after belongin' to the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle she could never feel the same absent-minded sensation again when she dusted her parlour shells. An' Mis' Toplady said when she opened her kitchen cabinet an' smelt the cinnamon an' allspice out o' the perforated tops, 'most always, no matter how mad she was, she broke out in a hymn, like 'When All Thy Mercies,' sheer through knowin' how allspice was born of God an' not made of man. An' Mis' Sykes said when she read her Bible, an' it talked about India's coral strand, it seemed like, through knowin' what a reef was, she was right there on one, with her Lord. I felt the same way, too--though I'd always felt the same way, for that matter--I always did tip vanilla on my handkerchief an' pretend it was flowers an' that I'd gone down South for the cold months. An' it got so that when the minister give out a text that had geography in it, like the Red Sea, or Beer-elim, or 'a place called The Fair Haven,' the Ladies Foreign Missionary Circle would look round in our seats an' nod to each other, without it showin', because we knew that we knew, extra special, just what God was talkin' about. I tell you, knowledge makes you alive at places where you didn't know there was such a place.

"In five months' time we felt we owed so much to the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle that it was Mis' Sykes suggested we give the Ten Cent Tropical Fête, an' earn five dollars or so for missions.

"'We know a great deal about the tropics now,' she says, 'an' I propose we earn a missionary thank-offering. Coral an' cocoanuts an' dates an' spices isn't all the Lord is interested in, by any means,' s'she. 'An' the winter is the time to give a tropic fête, when folks are thinkin' about warm things natural.'

"We voted to hev the fête to Mis' Sykes's because it was too cold to carry the palm out. We went into it quite extensive--figs an' dates an' bananas an' ginger for refreshments, an' little nigger dolls for souvenirs, an' like that. It was quite a novel thing for Friendship, an' everybody was takin' an interest an' offerin' to lend Japanese umbrellas an' Indian baskets an' books on the South Sea, an' a bamboo chair with an elephant crocheted in the tidy. An' then, bein' as happenin's always crowd along in flocks, what come that very week o' the fête but a letter from an old aunt of Jem Pitlaw's, out West. An' if Jem hadn't been dead almost ever since he left Friendship! an' the aunt wrote that we should sell his things to pay for keepin' 'em, as she was too poor to send for 'em an' hadn't any room if she wasn't.

"I donno whether you know what rill excitement is, but if you don't, you'd ought to drop two locked trunks an' a sealed box into a town the size o' Friendship Village, an' leave 'em there goin' on five years, an' then die an' let 'em be sold. That'll show you what a pitch true interest can get het up to. All of a sudden the Tropical Fête was no more account than the telephone ringin' when a circus procession is going by. Some o' the Ladies' Missionary was rill indignant, an' said we'd ought to sue for repairin' rights, same as when you're interfered with in business. Mis' Sykes, she done her able best, too, but nothin' would do Silas but he must offer them things for sale on the instant. 'The time,' s'he, firm, 'to do a thing is now, while the interest is up. An' in this country,' s'he, '"now" don't stay "now" more'n two minutes at a time.'

"So he offered for sale the contents of them three things--the two trunks an' the sealed box--unsight, unseen, on the day before the Fête was to be. Only one thing interfered with the 'unsight, unseen' business: the sealed box had got damp an' broke open, an' what was inside was all showin'.

"Mis' Sykes an' I saw it on the day o' the sale. Most o' the Circle was to her house finishin' up the decorations for the Fête so's to leave the last day clear for seein' to the refreshments, an' her an' I run over to the post-office store for some odds an' ends. Silas had brought the two trunks an' the box down from the loft so to give 'em some advertisin'. An' lookin' in the corner o' the broke box we could see, just as plain as plain, was _letters_. Letters in bunches, all tied up, an' letters laid in loose--they must 'a' been full a hundred of 'em, all lookin' mysterious an' ready to tell you somethin', like letters will. I know the looks o' the letters sort o' went to my head, like the news of Far Off. An' I hated seein' Jem's trunks there, with his initials on, appearin' all trustin' an' as if they thought he was still alive.

"But that wasn't the worst. They was three strangers there in the store--travellin' men that had just come in on the Through, an' they was hangin' round the things lookin' at 'em, as if they had the right to. This town ain't very much on the buy, an' we don't hev many strangers here, an' we ain't rill used to 'em. An' it did seem too bad, I know we thought, that them three should hev happened in on the day of a private Friendship Village sale that didn't concern nobody else but one, an' him dead. An' we felt this special when one o' the men took a-hold of a bunch o' the letters, an' we could see the address of the top one, to Jem Pitlaw, wrote thin an' tiny-fine, like a woman. An' at that Mis' Sykes says sharp to her husband:--

"'Silas Sykes, you ain't goin' to sell them letters?'

"'Yes, ma'am, I am,' Silas snaps, like he hed a right to all the letters on earth, bein' he was postmaster of Friendship Village. 'Letters,' Silas give out, 'is just precisely the same as books, only they ain't been through the expense of printin'. No differ'nce. No differ'nce!'--Silas always seems to think repeatin' a thing over'll get him somewheres, like a clock retickin' itself. 'An',' he says, 'I'm goin' to sell 'em for what they'll bring, same as the rest o' the things, an' you needn't to say one word.' An' bein' as Silas was snappin', not only as a postmaster but as a husband, Mis' Sykes, she kep' her silence. Matrimony an' politics both in one man is too much for any woman to face.

"Well, we two went back to Mis' Sykes's all het up an' sad, an' told the Circle about Jem Pitlaw's letters. An' we all stopped decoratin' an' set down just where we was an talked about what an awful thing it seemed. I donno as you'll sense it as strong as we did. It was more a feelin' than a wordin'. _Letters_--bein' sold an' read out loud an' gettin' known about. It seemed like lookin' in somebody's purse before they're dead.

"'I should of thought,' Mis' Sykes says, 'that Silas regardin' bein' postmaster as a sacred office would have made him do differ'nt. An' I know he talked that right along before he got his appointment. "Free Private Secretary to the People," an' "Trusted Curator of Public Communication," he put it when he was goin' around with his petition,' says she, grievin'.

"'Well,' says Mis' Amanda Toplady--I rec'lect she hed been puttin' up a big Japanese umbrella, an' she looked out from under it sort o' sweet an' sincere an' dreamy--'you've got to be a woman an' you've got to live in a little town before you know what a letter really is. I don't think these folks that hev lots o' mail left in the front hall in the mornin'--an' sometimes get one that same afternoon--_knows_ about letters at all. An' I don't believe any man ever knows, sole except when he's in love. To sense what a letter is you've got to be a woman without what-you-may-say much to enjoy; you've got to hear the train whistle that might bring you one; you've got to calculate how long it'll take 'em to distribute the mail, an' mebbe hurry to get your bread mixed, or your fried-cakes out o' the lard, or your cannin' where you can leave it--an' then go change your shoes an' slip on another skirt, an' poke your hair up under your hat so's it won't show, an' go down to the post-office in the hot sun, an' see the letter through the glass, there in your own box, waitin' for you. That minute, when your heart comes up in your throat, I tell you, is gettin' a letter.'

"We all knew this is so--every one of us.

"'It's just like that when you write 'em, only felt differ'nt,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I do mine to my sister a little at a time--I keep it back o' the clock in the kitchen an' hide the pencil inside the clock door, so's it won't walk off, the way pencils do at our house. An' then, right in the midst of things, be it flour or be it suds, I can scratch down what comes in my head, till I declare sometimes I can hardly mail it for readin' it over an' thinkin' how she'll like to get it.'