Chapter V: Part 5

“One morning he met a witch. And he said, ‘Witch, I wish you would--would give me something to eat. I’m very hungry.’ So the witch took him to her kitchen and gave him a bowl of porridge, and it was hot and burned his mouth, and he asked for a drink of water, and--and--”

“What was the use of having her a witch if _that_ was all he was going to ask her?” demanded Mary Elizabeth.

“They _always_ have witches in the best stories,” Margaret Amelia contended, “and anyway, that’s all I’m going to tell.”

Delia took up the tale uninvited.

“And he got his drink of water, pumped up polite by the witch herself, and she was going to put a portion in it. But while she was looking in the top drawer for the portion, the sun went away. And--”

This time it was I who intervened.

“‘Portion!’” I said with superiority. “Who ever heard of anybody drinking a _portion_? That word is _potient_.”

Delia was plainly taken aback.

“You’re thinking of long division,” she said feebly.

“I’m thinking of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’” I responded with dignity. “They had one, in the tomb, where Tybalt, all bloody--”

“Don’t say that one--don’t say it!” cried Margaret Amelia. “I can see that one awful after the light is out. Go on, somebody, quick.”

To take up her share of the story, Betty Rodman refused, point-blank. I think that her admission to our group must have been principally on the credentials of sistership to one of us, a basis at once pathetic and lovely.

“I never can think of anything to have happen,” Betty complained, “and if I make something happen, then it ends up the story.”

Calista had a nail in her shoe, and was too much absorbed in pounding it down with a stone to be approached; so, when we had all minutely examined the damage which the nail had wrought, it was my turn to take up the tale. And then the thing happened which was always happening to me: I could think of nothing to have the story do. At night, and when I was alone, I could dream out the most fascinating adventures, but with expectant faces--or a clean pad--before me, I was dumb and powerless.

“I don’t feel like telling one just now,” said I, the proposer of the game, and went on digging leaves out of a crevice in the rotting rail. So Mary Elizabeth serenely took up the tale where she had left it.

“One morning he looked over a high sky mountain--that’s what suns like to do best because it is so becoming--and he shone in a room of the sky where a little black star was sleeping. And he thought he would ask it what to do. So he said to it, ‘Little Black Star, where shall I be, now that I am all done and finished, nice and shiny?’ And the Little Black Star said: ‘You’re not done. What made you think you were done? Hardly anybody is ever done. I’ll tell you what to be. Be like a carriage and take all us little dark stars in, and whirl and whirl for about a million years, and make us all get bright too, and _then_ maybe you’ll be a true sun--but not all done, even then.’ So that’s what he decided to do, and he’s up there now, only you can’t see him, because he’s so far, and our sun is so bright, and he’s whirling and whirling, and lots more like him, getting to be made.”

Delia followed Mary Elizabeth’s look into the blue.

“I don’t believe it,” said she. “The sun is biggest and the moon is next. How could there be any other sun? And it don’t whirl. It don’t even rise and set. It stands still. Miss Messmore said so.”

We looked at Mary Elizabeth, probably I alone having any impulse to defend her. And we became aware that she was quite white and trembling. In the same moment we understood that we were hearing something which we had been hearing without knowing that we heard. It was a thin, wavering strain of singing, in a man’s voice. We scrambled up, and looked over the edge of the band-stand. Coming unevenly down the broken brick walk that cut the schoolhouse grounds was Mary Elizabeth’s father. His hat was gone. It was he who was singing. He looked as he had looked that first day that I had seen him in the wood yard. We knew what was the matter. And all of us unconsciously did the cruel thing of turning and staring at Mary Elizabeth.

In a moment she was over the side of the band-stand and running to him. She took him by the hand, and we saw that she meant to lead him home. Her little figure looked very tiny beside his gaunt frame, in its loosely hanging coat. I remember how the sun was pouring over them, and over the brilliant green beyond where blackbirds were walking. I have no knowledge of what made me do it--perhaps it was merely an attitude, created by the afternoon, of standing up for Mary Elizabeth no matter what befell; or it may have been a child’s crude will to challenge things; at any rate, without myself really deciding it, I suddenly took the way that she had taken, and caught up with the two.

“Mary Elizabeth,” I meant to say, “I’m going.”

But in fact I said nothing, and only kept along beside her. She looked at me mutely, and made a motion to me to turn back. When her father took our hands and stumblingly ran with us, I heartily wished that I had turned back. But nearly all the way he went peaceably enough. Long before we reached their home across the tracks, however, I heard the six o’clock whistles blow, and pictured the wrath of the mistress of the New Family when Mary Elizabeth had not returned in time to “help with the supper.” Very likely now they would not let her stay, and this new companionship of ours would have to end. Mary Elizabeth’s home was on the extreme edge of the town, and ordinarily I was not allowed to cross the tracks. Mary Elizabeth might even move away--that had happened to some of us, and the night had descended upon such as these and we had never heard of them again: Hattie Schenck, whom I had loved with unequalled devotion, where, for example, was she? Was it, then, to be the same with Mary Elizabeth?

Her mother saw us coming. She hurried down to the gateway--the gate was detached and lying in the weeds within--and even then I was struck by the way of maternity with which she led her husband to the house. I remember her as large-featured, with the two bones of her arms sharply defined by a hollow running from wrist to elbow, and she constantly held her face as if the sun were shining in her eyes, but there was no sun shining there. And somehow, at the gate she had a way of receiving him, and of taking him with her. Hardly anything was said. The worst of it was that no one had to explain anything. Two of the little children ran away and hid. Someone dodged behind an open door. The man’s wife led him to the broken couch, and he lay down there like a little child. Standing in the doorway of that forlorn, disordered, ill-smelling room, I first dimly understood what I never have forgotten: That the man was not poor because he drank, as the village thought, but that he drank because he was poor. Instead of the horror at a drunken man which the village had laid it upon me to feel, I suddenly saw Mary Elizabeth’s father as her mother saw him when she folded her gingham apron and spread it across his shoulders and said:

“Poor lad.”

And when, in a few minutes, Mary Elizabeth and I were out on the street again, running silently, I remember feeling a great blind rage against the whole village and against the whole world that couldn’t seem to think what to do any more than Mary Elizabeth and I could think.

The man of the New Family was watering the lawn, which meant that supper was done. We slipped in our back gate,--the New Family had none,--climbed the fence by my play-house, dropped down into the New Family’s garden, and entered their woodshed. In my own mind I had settled that I was of small account if I could not give the New Lady such a picture of what had happened that Mary Elizabeth should not lose her place, and I should not lose her.

The kitchen door was ajar. The dish-pan was in the sink, the kettle was steaming on the stove. And from out the dining-room abruptly appeared Calista and _Delia_, bearing plates.

“Girls!” I cried, but Mary Elizabeth was dumb.

Delia carefully set down her plate in the dish-pan and addressed me:

“Well, you needn’t think you’re the only one that knows what’s proper, miss,” she said.

Calista was more simple.

“We wanted to get ’em all done before you got back,” she owned. “We would, if Margaret Amelia and Betty had of come. They wanted to, but they wouldn’t let ’em.”

Back of Delia and Calista appeared the mistress of the house. She had on her afternoon dress, and her curl papers were out, and she actually smiled at Mary Elizabeth and me.

“_Now_ then!” she said to us.

* * * * *

If I could have made a dream for that night, I think it would have been that ever and ever so many of us were sitting in rows, waiting to be counted. And a big sun came by, whirling and growing, to take us, and we thought we couldn’t all get in. But there was room, whether we had been counted or not.

XI

DOLLS

The advent of the New Boy changed the face of the neighbourhood. Formerly I had been accustomed to peep through cracks in the fence only to look into a field of corn that grew at the side; or, on the other side, into raspberry bushes, where at any moment raspberries might be gathered and dropped over the fence to me. Also, there was one place in the deep green before those bushes where blue-eyed grass grew, and I had to watch for that. Then there was a great spotted dog that sometimes came, and when he had passed, I used to wait long by the high boards lest he should return and leap at me to whom, so far, he had never paid the slightest attention. As a child, my mother had once jumped down into a manger where a great spotted dog was inadvertently lying and, though from all accounts he was far more frightened than she, yet I feared his kind more than any other.... The only real excitement that we had been wont to know in the neighbourhood occurred whenever there was a Loose Horse. Somebody would give the alarm, and then we would all make sure that the gates were latched and we would retire to watch him fearfully, where he was quietly cropping the roadside grass. But sometimes, too, a Loose Horse would run--and then I was terrified by the sound of his hoofs galloping on the sidewalk and striking on the bricks and boards. I was always afraid that a Loose Horse would see me, and nights, after one had disturbed our peace, I would dream that he was trying to find me, and that he had come peering between the dining-room blinds; and though I hid under the red cotton spread that was used “between-meals,” it never came down far enough, and he always stood there interminably waiting, and found me, through the fringe.

But all these excitements were become as nothing. A new occupation presented itself. A dozen times a day now I had to watch through the fence-cracks, or through the knot-hole, or boldly between the pickets of the front fence, at the fascinating performances of the New Boy and his troops of friends. At any moment both Mary Elizabeth and I would abandon what we were doing to go to stare at the unaccountable activities which were forever agitating them. They were always producing something from their pockets and examining it, with their heads together, or manufacturing something or burying something, or disputing about something unguessed and alluring. Their whole world was filled with doing, doing, doing, whereas ours was made wholly of watching things get done.

On an afternoon Mary Elizabeth and I were playing together in our side yard. It was the day for Delia’s music lesson, and as she usually did her whole week’s practising in the time immediately preceding that event, the entire half day was virtually wasted. We could hear her going drearily over and over the first and last movements of “At Home,” which she had memorized and could play like lightning, while the entire middle of the piece went with infinite deliberation. Calista was, we understood (because of some matter pertaining to having filled the bath-tub and waded in it and ruined the dining-room ceiling), spending the day in her bed. And Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman were being kept at home because the family had company; and such was the prestige of the Rodmans that the two contrived to make this circumstance seem enviable, and the day before had pictured to us their embroidered white dresses and blue ribbons, and blue stockings, and the Charlotte Russe for supper, until we felt left out, and not in the least as if their company were of a kind with events of the sort familiar to us. Since I have grown up, I have observed this variety of genius in others. There is one family which, when it appears in afternoon gowns on occasions when I have worn a street dress, has power to make me wonder how I can have failed to do honour to the day; but who, when they wear street gowns and I am dressed for afternoon, invariably cause me to feel inexcusably overdressed. It is a kind of genius for the fit, and we must believe that it actually designates the atmosphere which an occasion shall breathe.

Mary Elizabeth and I were playing Dolls. We rarely did this on a pleasant day in Summer, Dolls being an indoor game, matched with carpets and furniture and sewing baskets rather than with blue sky and with the soft brilliance of the grass. But that day we had brought everything out in the side yard under the little catalpa tree, and my eleven dolls (counting the one without any face, and Irene Helena, the home-made one, and the two penny ones) were in a circle on chairs and boxes and their backs, getting dressed for the tea-party. There was always going to be a tea-party when you played Dolls--you of course had to lead up to something, and what else was there to lead up to save a tea-party? To be sure, there might be an occasional marriage, but boy-dolls were never very practical; they were invariably smaller than the bride-doll, and besides we had no mosquito-netting suitable for a veil. Sometimes we had them go for a walk, and once or twice we had tried playing that they were house-cleaning; but these operations were not desirable, because in neither of them could the dolls dress up, and the desirable part of playing dolls is, as everybody knows, to dress them in their best. That is the game. That, and the tea-party.

“Blue or rose-pink?” Mary Elizabeth inquired, indicating the two best gowns of the doll she was dressing.

It was a difficult question. We had never been able to decide which of these two colours we preferred. There was the sky for precedent of blue, but then rose-pink we loved so to say!

“If they’s one cloud in the sky, we’ll put on the rose-pink one,” said Mary Elizabeth. “And if there isn’t any, that’ll mean blue.”

She settled everything that way--she counted the petals of fennel daisies, blew the thistle from dandelions, did one thing if she could find twelve acorns and another if they were lacking. Even then Mary Elizabeth seemed always to be watching for a guiding hand, to be listening for a voice to tell her what to do, and trying to find these in things of Nature.

We dressed the Eleven in their best frocks, weighing each choice long, and seated them about a table made of a box covered with a towel. We sliced a doughnut and with it filled two small baskets for each end of the table, on which rested my toy castor and such of my dishes as had survived the necessity which I had felt for going to bed with the full set, on the night of the day, some years before, when I had acquired them. We picked all the flowers suitable for doll decorations--clover, sorrel, candytuft, sweet alyssum. We observed the unities by retiring for a time sufficient to occupy the tea-party in disposing of the feast; and then we came back and sat down and stared at them. Irene Helena, I remember, had slipped under the table in a heap, a proceeding which always irritated me, as nakedly uncovering the real depths of our pretence--and I jerked her up and set her down, like some maternal Nemesis.

In that moment a wild, I may almost say _thick_, shriek sounded through our block, and there came that stimulating thud-thud of feet on earth that accompanies all the best diversions, and also there came the cracking of things,--whips, or pistols, or even a punch, which rapidly operated will do almost as well. And down the yards of the block and over the fences and over the roof of my play-house came tumbling and shrieking the New Boy, and in his wake were ten of his kind.

Usually they raced by with a look in their eyes which we knew well, though we never could distinguish whether it meant robbers or pirates or dragons or the enemy. Usually they did not even see us. But that day something in our elaborate preparation to receive somebody or to welcome something, and our eternal moment of suspended animation at which they found us, must have caught the fancy of the New Boy.

“Halt!” he roared with the force and effect of a steam whistle, and in a moment they were all stamping and breathing about Mary Elizabeth and me.

We sprang up in instant alarm and the vague, pathetic, immemorial impulse to defence. We need not have feared. The game was still going forward and we were merely pawns.

“Who is the lord of this castle?” demanded the New Boy.

“Bindyliggs,” replied Mary Elizabeth, without a moment’s hesitation, a name which I believe neither of us to have heard before.

“Where is this Lord of Bindyliggs?” the New Boy pressed it.

Mary Elizabeth indicated the woodshed. “At meat,” she added gravely.

“Forward!” the New Boy instantly commanded, and the whole troop disappeared in our shed. We heard wood fall, and the clash of meeting weapons, and the troop reappeared, two by way of the low window.

“Enough!” cried the New Boy, grandly. “We have spared him, but there is not a moment to lose. You must come with us _immediately_. What you got to eat?”

Raptly, we gave them, from under the wistful noses of Irene Helena and the doll without the face and the rest, the entire sliced doughnut, and two more doughnuts, dipped in sugar, which we had been saving so as to have something to look forward to.

“Come with us,” said the New Boy, graciously. “To horse! We may reach the settlement by nightfall--_if_ we escape the Brigands in the Wood. The Black Wood,” he added.

Even then, I recall, I was smitten with wonder that he who had shown so little imagination in that matter of dirt and apples and potatoes should here be teeming with fancy on his own familiar ground. It was years before I understood that there are almost as many varieties of imaginative as of religious experience.

Fascinated, we dropped everything and followed. The way led, it appeared, to the Wells’s barn, a huge, red barn in the block, with doors always invitingly open and chickens pecking about, and doves on a little platform close to the pointed roof.

“Aw, say, you ain’t goin’ to take ’em along, are you?” demanded one knight, below his voice. “They’ll spoil everythin’.”

“You’re _rescuin’_ ’em, you geezer,” the New Boy explained. “You got to have ’em along till you get ’em rescued, ain’t you? Arrest that man!” he added. “Put him in double irons with chains and balls on. And gag him, to make sure.”

And it was done, with hardly a moment’s loss of time.

We went round by the walk--a course to which the arrested one had time to refer in further support of his claim as to our undesirability. But he was drowned in the important topics that were afoot: the new cave to be explored where the Branchetts were putting a cellar under the dining-room, mysterious boxes suspected to contain dynamite being unloaded into the Wells’s cellar, and the Court of the Seven Kings, to which, it seemed, we were being conveyed in the red barn.

“Shall we give ’em the password?” the New Boy asked, _sotto voce_, as we approached the rendezvous. And Mary Elizabeth and I trembled as we realized that he was thinking of sharing the password with us.

“_Naw!_” cried the Arrested One violently. “It’ll be all over town.”

The New Boy drew himself up--he must have been good to look at, for I recall his compact little figure and his pink cheeks.

“Can’t you tell when you’re gagged?” he inquired with majesty. “You’re playin’ like a girl yourself. I can give the password for ’em, though,” he added reasonably. So we all filed in the red barn, to the Court of the Seven Kings, and each boy whispered the password into the first manger, but Mary Elizabeth and I had it whispered for us.

What the Court of the Seven Kings might have held for us we were never to know. At that instant there appeared lumbering down the alley a load of hay. Seated in the midst was a small figure whom we recognized as Stitchy Branchett; and he rose and uttered a roar.

“Come on, fellows!” he said. “We dast ride over to the Glen. I was lookin’ for you. Father said so.” And Stitchy threw himself on his back, and lifted and waved his heels.

Already our liberators were swarming up the hay-rack, which had halted for them. In a twinkling they were sunk in that fragrance, kicking their heels even as their host. Already they had forgotten Mary Elizabeth and me, nor did they give us good-bye.

We two turned and went through the Wells’s yard, back to the street. Almost at once we were again within range of the sounds of Delia, practising interminably on her “At Home.”

“I never rode on a load of hay,” said Mary Elizabeth at length.

Neither had I, though I almost always walked backward to watch one when it passed me.

“What do you _s’pose_ the password was?” said Mary Elizabeth.

It was days before we gave over wondering. And sometimes in later years I have caught myself speculating on that lost word.

“I wonder what we were rescued from,” said Mary Elizabeth when we passed our woodshed door.

We stopped and peered within. No Lord of Bindyliggs, though we had almost expected to see him stretched there, bound and helpless.

What were we rescued from? _We should never know._

We rounded the corner by the side yard. There sat our staring dolls, drawn up about the tea-table, static all. As I looked at them I was seized and possessed by an unreasoning fury. And I laid hold on Irene Helena, and had her by the heels, and with all my strength I pounded her head against the trunk of the catalpa tree.

Mary Elizabeth understood--when did she not understand?

“Which one can I--which one can I?” she cried excitedly.

“All of ’em!” I shouted, and one after another we picked up the Eleven by their skirts, and we threw them far and wide in the grass, and the penny dolls we hurled into the potato patch.

Then Mary Elizabeth looked at me aghast.

“Your dolls!” she said.

“I don’t care!” I cried savagely. “I’ll never play ’em again. I hate ’em!” And I turned to Mary Elizabeth with new eyes. “Let’s go down town after supper,” I whispered.

“I could,” she said, “but you won’t be let.”

“I won’t ask,” I said. “I’ll go. When you get done, come on over.”

I scorned to gather up the dolls. They were in the angle below the parlour windows, and no one saw them. As soon as supper was finished, I went to my room and put on my best shoes, which I was not allowed to wear for everyday. Then I tipped my birthday silver dollar out of my bank and tied it in the corner of my handkerchief. Down in the garden I waited for Mary Elizabeth.

It was hardly dusk when she came. We had seen nothing of Delia, and we guessed that she was to stay in the house for the rest of the day as penance for having, without doubt, played “At Home” too badly.

“You better not do it,” Mary Elizabeth whispered. “They might....”

“Come on,” I said only.

“Let’s try a June grass,” she begged. “If the seeds all come off in my teeth, we’ll go. But if they don’t--”

“Come on,” said I, “I’m not going to monkey with signs any more.”

We climbed the back fence, partly so that the chain, weighted with a pail of stones, might not creak, and partly because to do so seemed more fitting to the business in hand. We ran crouching, thereby arousing the attention of old Mr. Branchett, who was training a Virginia creeper along his back fence.

“Hello, hello,” said he. “Pretty good runners for girls, seems to me.”

Neither of us replied. Our souls were suddenly sickened at this sort of dealing.

Wisconsin Street was a blaze of light. The ’buses were on their way from the “depots” to the hotels--nobody knew who might be in those ’buses. They were the nexus between us and the unguessed world. Strangers were on the streets. Everything was in motion. Before Morrison’s grocery they were burning rubbish, some boys from the other end of town were running unconcernedly through the flames, and the smell of the smoke set us tingling. At the corner a man was pasting a circus bill--we stopped a moment to look down the throat of the hippopotamus. Away up the street a band struck up, and we took hold of hands again, and ran.

We crossed the big square by the City Bank, under the hissing arc lamp. By the post-office a crowd of men and boys was standing, and between the files young women whom we knew, wearing ribbons and feathers, were passing in and out of the office and laughing. Bard’s jewellery store was brilliant--it looked lighter than any other store with its window of dazzling cut glass and its wonderful wall of clocks whose pendulums never kept pace. In a saloon a piano was playing--we glanced in with a kind of joyous fear at the green screen beyond the door. We saw Alma Fremont, whose father kept a grocery store, standing in the store door with a stick of pink candy thrust in a lemon, and we thought on the joy of having a father who was a grocer. We longed to stare in the barber-shop window, and looked away. But our instinctive destination was the place before the Opera House, where the band was playing. We reached it, and stood packed in the crowd, close to the blare of the music, and shivered with delight.

“If only the fire-engine would come,” Mary Elizabeth breathed in my ear.

But in a little while the guffaws, the jostling, the proximity of dirty coats, the odour of stale tobacco must have disturbed us, because gradually we edged a little away, and stood on the edge of the crowd, against an iron rail outside a billiard room. The band ceased, and went up into the hall. We had a distinct impulse to do the next thing. What was there to do next? What was it that the boys did when they went down town evenings? What else did they do while we were tidying our play-houses for the night? For here we were, longing for play, if only we could think what to do.

I felt a hand beneath my chin, lifting my face. There, in the press, stood my Father. Over his arm he carried my black jacket with the Bedford cord.

“Mother thought you might be cold,” he said.

I put on the jacket, and he took Mary Elizabeth and me by the hand, and we walked slowly back down Wisconsin Street.

“We will see Mary Elizabeth safely home first,” my Father said, and we accompanied her to the New Family’s door.

Once in our house, it was I who proposed going to bed, and the suggestion met with no opposition. Upstairs, I slipped the screen from my window and leaned out in the dusk. The night, warm, fragrant, significant, was inviting me to belong to it, was asking me, even as bright day had asked me, what it had in common with the stuffiness and dulness of forever watching others do things. Something hard touched my hand. It was my birthday dollar. It had not occurred to me to spend it.

I saw my Father stroll back down the street, lighting a cigar. Below stairs I could hear my Mother helping to put away the supper dishes. A dozen boys raced through the alley, just on their way down town. So long as they came home at a stated hour at night, and turned up at table with their hands clean, who asked them where they had been? “Where have you been?” they said to me, the moment I entered the house--and to Delia and Calista and Margaret Amelia and Betty. We had often talked about it. And none of us had even ridden on a load of hay. We had a vague expectation that it would be different when we grew up. A sickening thought came to me: _Would it be different, or was this to be forever?_

I ran blindly down the stairs where my Mother was helping to put away the supper dishes--in the magic of the night, helping to put away the supper dishes.

“Mother!” I cried, “Mother! Who made it so much harder to be a girl?”

She turned and looked at me, her face startled, and touched me--I remember how gently she touched me.

“Before you die,” she said, “it will be easier.”

I thought then that she meant that I would grow used to it. Now I know that she meant what I meant when I woke that night, and remembered my dolls lying out in the grass and the dew, and was not sorry, but glad: Glad that the time was almost come--for real playthings.

XII

BIT-BIT

At the Rodmans’, who lived in a huge house on a hill, some of the rooms had inscriptions in them--or what I should have called mottoes--cunningly lettered and set about. Some of these were in Margaret Amelia’s and Betty’s room, above the mirror, the bed, the window; and there was one downstairs on a panel above the telephone. The girls said that they had an aunt who had written them “on purpose,” an aunt who had had stories in print. In my heart I doubted the part about the printed stories, and so did Mary Elizabeth, but we loved Margaret Amelia and Betty too well to let this stand between us. Also, we were caught by the inscriptions. They were these:

FOR A CRADLE[A]

I cannot tell you who I am
Nor what I’m going to be.
You who are wise and know your ways
Tell me.

[A] Copyright, 1908, by Harper & Brothers.

FOR THE MIRROR

Look in the deep of me. What are we going to do?
If I am I, as I am, who in the world are you?

FOR AN IVORY COMB

Use me and think of spirit, and spirit yet to be.
This is the jest: Could soul touch soul if it were not for me?

FOR THE DOLL’S HOUSE

Girl-doll would be a little lamp
And shine like something new.
Boy-doll would be a telephone
And have the world speak through.
The Poet-doll would like to be
A tocsin with a tongue
To other little dolls like bells
Most sensitively rung.
The Baby-doll would be a flower,
The Dinah-doll a star,
And all--how ignominious!
Are only what they are.

WHERE THE BOUGHS TOUCH THE WINDOW

We lap on the indoor shore--the waves of the leaf mere,
We try to tell you as well as we can: We wonder what you hear?

FOR ANOTHER WINDOW

I see the stones, I see the stars,
I know not what they be.
They always say things to themselves
And now and then to me.
But when I try to look between
Big stones and little stars,
I almost know ... but what I know
Flies through the window-bars.

And downstairs, on the Telephone:

I, the absurdity,
Proving what cannot be.
Come, when you talk with me
Does it become you well
To doubt a miracle?

We did not understand all of them, but we liked them. And I am sure now that the inscriptions were partly responsible for the fact that in a little time, with Mary Elizabeth and me to give them encouragement, everything, indoors and out, had something to say to us. These things we did not confide to the others, not even to Margaret Amelia and Betty who, when we stood still to spell out the inscriptions, waited a respectful length of time and then plucked at our aprons and said: “Come on till we show you something,” which was usually merely a crass excuse to get us away.

So Mary Elizabeth and I discovered, by comparing notes, that at night our Clothes on the chair by the bed would say: “We are so tired. Don’t look at us--we feel so limp.”

And the Night would say: “What a long time the Day had you, and how he made you work. Now rest and forget and stop being you, till morning.”

Sleep would say: “Here I come. Let me in your brain and I will pull your eyes shut, like little blinds.”

And in the morning the Stairs would say: “Come! We are all here, stooping, ready for you to step down on our shoulders.”

Breakfast would say: “Now I’m going to be you--now I’m going to be you! And I have to be cross or nice, just as you are.”

Every fire that warmed us, every tree that shaded us, every path that we took, all these “answered back” and were familiars. Everything spoke to us, save only one. And this one thing was Work. Our playthings in the cupboard would talk to us all day long _until_ the moment that we were told to put them in order, and then instantly they all fell into silence. Pulling weeds in the four o’clock bed, straightening books, tidying the outdoor play-house--it was always the same. Whatever we worked at kept silent.

It was on a June morning, when the outdoors was so busy and beautiful that it was like a golden bee buried in a golden rose, that I finally refused outright to pick up a brown sunhat and some other things in the middle of the floor. Everything outdoors and in was smiling and calling, and to do a task was like going to bed, so far as the joy of the day was concerned. This I could not explain, but I said that I would not do the task, and this was high treason.

Sitting in a straight-backed chair all alone for half an hour thereafter--the usual capital punishment--was like cutting off the head of the beautiful Hour that I had meant to have. And I tried to think it out. Why, in an otherwise wonderful world, did Work have to come and spoil everything?

I do not recall that I came to any conclusion. How could I, at a time that was still teaching the Hebraic doctrine that work is a curse, instead of the new gospel--always dimly divined by children before our teaching has corrupted them,--that being busy is being alive, and that all work may be play if only we are shown how to pick out the kind that is play to us, and that doing nothing is a kind of death.

And while I sat there alone on that straight-backed chair, I wish that I, as I am now, might have called in Mary Elizabeth, whom I could see drearily polishing the New Family’s lamp-chimneys, and that I might have told the story of Bit-bit.

* * * * *

Bit-bit, the smallest thing in the world, sat on the slipperiest edge of the highest mountain in the farthest land, weaving a little garment of sweet-grass. Then out of the valley a great Deev arose and leaned his elbows on the highest mountain and said what he thought--which is always a dangerous business.

“Bit-bit,” said the Deev, “how dare you make up my sweet-grass so disgustin’ extravagant?”

(It is almost impossible for a Deev to say his _ing’s_.)

“Deevy dear,” said Bit-bit, without looking up from his work, “I have to make a garment to help clothe the world. Don’t wrinkle up my plan. And _don’t_ put your elbows on the table.”

“About my elbows,” said the Deev, “you are perfectly right, though Deevs always do that with their elbows. But as to that garment,” he added, “I’d like to know why you have to help clothe the world?”

“Deevy dear,” said Bit-bit, still not looking up from his work, “I have to do so, because it’s this kind of a world. _Please_ don’t wrinkle up things.”

“I,” said the Deev, plainly, “will now show you what kind of a world this really is. And I rather think I’ll destroy you with a great destruction.”

Then the Deev took the highest mountain and he tied its streams and cataracts together to make a harness, and he named the mountain new, and he drove it all up and down the earth. And he cried behind it:

“Ho, Rhumbthumberland, steed of the clouds, trample the world into trifles and plough it up for play. Bit-bit is being taught his lesson.”

From dawn he did this until the sky forgot pink and remembered only blue and until the sun grew so hot that it took even the sky’s attention, and the Deev himself was ready to drop. And then he pulled on the reins and Rhumbthumberland, steed of the clouds, stopped trampling and let the Deev lean his elbows on his back. And there, right between the Deev’s elbows, sat Bit-bit, weaving his garment of sweet-grass.

“Thunders of spring,” cried the Deev, “aren’t you destroyed with a great destruction?”

But Bit-bit never looked up, he was so busy.

“Has anything happened?” he asked politely, however, not wishing to seem indifferent to the Deev’s agitation--though secretly, in his little head, he hated having people plunge at him with their eyebrows up and expect him to act surprised too. When they did that, it always made him savage-calm.

“The world is trampled into trifles and ploughed up for play,” said the exasperated Deev, “_that’s_ what’s happened. How dare you pay no attention?”

“Deevy dear,” said Bit-bit, still not looking up from his task, “I have to work, whether it’s this kind of a world or not. I _wish_ you wouldn’t wrinkle up things.”

Then the Deev’s will ran round and round in his own head like a fly trying to escape from a dark hole--that is the way of the will of all Deevs--and pretty soon his will got out and went buzzle-buzzle-buzzle, which is no proper sound for anybody’s will to make. And when it did that, the Deev went off and got a river, and he climbed up on top of Rhumbthumberland and he swung the river about his head like a ribbon and then let it fall from the heights like a lady’s scarf, and then he held down one end with his great boot and the other end he emptied into the horizon. From the time of the heat of the sun he did this until the shadows were set free from the west and lengthened over the land, shaking their long hair, and then he lifted his foot and let the river slip and it trailed off into the horizon and flowed each way.

“_Now_ then!” said the Deev, disgustingly pompous.

But when he looked down, there, sitting on his own great foot, high and dry and pleasant, was Bit-bit, weaving his garment of sweet-grass and saying:

“Deevy dear, a river washed me up here and I was so busy I didn’t have time to get down.”

The Deev stood still, thinking, and his thoughts flew in and out like birds, but always they seemed to fly against window-panes in the air, through which there was no passing. And the Deev said, in his head:

“Is there nothing in this created cosmos that will stop this little scrap from working to clothe the world? Or must I play Deev in earnest?”

And that was what he finally decided to do. So he said things to his arms, and his arms hardened into stuff like steel, and spread out like mighty wings. And with these the Deev began to beat the air. And he beat it and beat it until it frothed. It frothed like white-of-egg and like cream and like the mid-waters of torrents, frothed a mighty froth, such as I supposed could never be. And when the froth was stiff enough to stand alone, the Deev took his steel-wing arm for a ladle, and he began to spread the froth upon the earth. And he spread and spread until the whole earth was like an enormous chocolate cake, thick with white frosting--one layer, two layers, three layers, disgustingly extravagant, so that the little Deevs, if there had been any, would never have got the dish scraped. Only there wasn’t any dish, so they needn’t have minded.

And when he had it all spread on, the Deev stood up and dropped his steel arms down--and even they were tired at the elbow, like any true, egg-beating arm--and he looked down at the great cake he had made. And there, on the top of the frosting, which was already beginning to harden, was sitting Bit-bit, weaving his garment of sweet-grass and talking about the weather:

“I think there is going to be a storm,” said Bit-bit, “the air around here has been so disgustingly hard to breathe.”

Then, very absently, the Deev let the steel out of his arms and made them get over being wings, and, in a place so deep in his own head that nothing had ever been thought there before, he _thought_:

“There is more to this than I ever knew there is to anything.”

So he leaned over, all knee-deep in the frosting as he was, and he said:

“Bit-bit, say a great truth and a real answer: What is the reason that my little ways don’t bother you? Or kill you? Or keep you from making your garment of sweet-grass?”

“Why,” said Bit-bit, in surprise, but never looking up from his work, “Deevy dear, that’s easy. I’m much, much, _much_ too busy.”

“Scrap of a thing,” said the Deev, “too busy to mind cataracts and an earth trampled to trifles and then frosted with all the air there is?”

“Too busy,” assented Bit-bit, snapping off his thread. “And now I _do_ hope you are not going to wrinkle up things any more.”

“No,” said the Deev, with decision, “I ain’t.” (Deevs are always ungrammatical when you take them by surprise.) And he added very shrewdly, for he was a keen Deev and if he saw that he could learn, he was willing to learn, which is three parts of all wisdom: “Little scrap, teach me to do a witchcraft. Teach me to work.”

At that Bit-bit laid down his task in a minute.

“What do you want to make?” he asked.

The Deev thought for a moment.

“I want to make a palace and a garden and a moat for _me_,” said he. “I’m tired campin’ around in the air.”

“If that’s all,” said Bit-bit, “I’m afraid I can’t help you. I thought you wanted to work. Out of all the work there is in the world I should think of another one if I were you, Deevy.”

“Well, then, I want to make a golden court dress for _me_, all embroidered and flowered and buttoned and gored and spliced,” said the Deev, or whatever these things are called in the clothing of Deevs; “I want to make one. I’m tired goin’ around in rompers.” (It wasn’t rompers, really, but it was what Deevs wear instead, and you wouldn’t know the name, even if I told you.)

“Excuse me,” said Bit-bit, frankly, “I won’t waste time like that. Don’t you want to _work_?”

“Yes,” said the Deev, “I do. Maybe I don’t know what work is.”

“Maybe you don’t,” agreed Bit-bit. “But I can fix that. I’m going for a walk now, and there’s just room for you. Come along.”

So they started off, and it was good walking, for by now the sun had dried up all the frosting; and the Deev trotted at Bit-bit’s heels, and they made a very funny pair. So funny that Almost Everything watched them go by, and couldn’t leave off watching them go by, and so followed them all the way. Which was what Bit-bit had _thought_ would happen. And when he got to a good place, Bit-bit stood still and told the Deev to turn round. And there they were, staring face to face with Almost Everything: Deserts and towns and men and women and children and laws and governments and railroads and factories and forests and food and drink.

“There’s your work,” said Bit-bit, carelessly.

“Where?” asked the Deev, just like other folks.

“_Where?_” repeated Bit-bit, nearly peevish. “Look at this desert that’s come along behind us. Why don’t you swing a river over your head--you _could_ do that, couldn’t you, Deevy?--and make things grow on that desert, and let people live on it, and turn ’em into folks? Why don’t you?”

“It ain’t amusin’ enough,” said the Deev.

(Deevs are often ungrammatical when they don’t take pains; and this Deev wasn’t taking _any_ pains.)

“Well,” said Bit-bit, “then look at this town that has come along behind us, full of dirt and disease and laziness and worse. Why don’t you harness up a mountain--you _could_ do that, couldn’t you, Deevy?--and plough up the earth and trample it down and let people live as they were meant to live, and turn them into folks? Why don’t you?”

“It couldn’t be done that way,” said the Deev, very much excited and disgustingly certain.

“Well,” said Bit-bit, “then look at the men and women and children that have come along behind us. What about them--what about _them_? Why don’t you make your arms steel and act as if you had wings, and beat the world into a better place for them to live, instead of making a cake of it. You could do it, Deevy--_anybody_ could do that.”

“Yes,” said the Deev, “I could do that. But it don’t appeal to me.”

(Deevs are always ungrammatical when they are being emphatic, and now the Deev was being very emphatic. He was a keen Deev, but he would only learn what he wanted to learn.)

“Deevy _dear_,” cried Bit-bit, in distress because the Deev was such a disgusting creature, “then at least do get some sweet-grass and make a little garment to help clothe the world?”

“What’s the use?” said the Deev. “Let it go naked. It’s always been that way.”

So, since the Deev would not learn the work witchcraft, Bit-bit, very sorrowful, stood up and said a great truth and made a real answer--which is always a dangerous business.

“You will, you will, you will do these things,” he cried, “because it’s that kind of a world.”

And then the Deev, who had all along been getting more and more annoyed, pieced together his will and his ideas and his annoyance, and they all went buzzle-buzzle-buzzle together till they made an act. And the act was that he stepped sidewise into space, and he picked up the earth and put it between his knees, and he cracked it hard enough so that it should have fallen into uncountable bits.

“It’s my nut,” said the Deev, “and now I’m going to eat it up.”

But lo, from the old shell there came out a fair new kernel of a world, so lustrous and lovely that the Deev was blinded and hid his eyes. Only first he had seen how the deserts were flowing with rivers and the towns were grown fair under willing hands for men and women and children to live there. And there, with Almost Everything, sat Bit-bit in his place, weaving a little garment of sweet-grass to clothe some mite of the world.

“Now this time try not to wrinkle things all up, Deev,” said Bit-bit. “I must say, you’ve been doing things disgustingly inhuman.”

So after that the Deev was left camping about in the air, trying to make for himself new witchcrafts. And there he is to this day, being a disgusting creature generally, and _only_ those who are as busy as Bit-bit are safe from him.

XIII

WHY

There was a day when Mary Elizabeth and Delia and Calista and Betty and I sat under the Eating Apple tree and had no spirit to enter upon anything. Margaret Amelia was not with us, and her absence left us relaxed and without initiative; for it was not as if she had gone to the City, or to have her dress tried on, or her hair washed, or as if she were absorbed in any real occupation. Her absence was due to none of these things. Margaret Amelia was in disgrace. She was, in fact, confined in her room with every expectation of remaining there until supper time.

“What’d she do?” we had breathlessly inquired of Betty when she had appeared alone with her tidings.

“Well,” replied Betty, “it’s her paper dolls and her button-house. She always leaves ’em around. She set up her button-house all over the rug in the parlour--you know, the rug that its patterns make rooms? An’ she had her paper dolls living in it. That was this morning--and we forgot ’em. And after dinner, while we’re outdoors, the minister came. And he walked into the buttons and onto the glass dangler off the lamp that we used for a folding-doors. And he slid a long ways on it. And he scrushed it,” Betty concluded resentfully. “And now she’s in her room.”

We pondered it. There was justice there, we saw that. But shut Margaret Amelia in a room! It was as ignominious as caging a captain.

“Did she cry?” we indelicately demanded.

“Awful,” said Betty. “She wouldn’t of cared if it had only been raining,” she added.

We looked hard at the sky. We should have been willing to have it rain to make lighter Margaret Amelia’s durance, and sympathy could go no further. But there was not a cloud.

It was Mary Elizabeth who questioned the whole matter.

“How,” said she, “does it do any good to shut her up in her room?”

We had never thought of this. We stared wonderingly at Mary Elizabeth. Being shut in your room was a part of the state of not being grown up. When you grew up, you shut others in their rooms or let them out, as you ruled the occasion to require. There was Grandmother Beers, for instance, coming out the door with scissors in her hands and going toward her sweet-pea bed. Once she must have shut Mother in her room. Mother!

Delia was incurably a defender of things as they are. Whenever I am tempted to feel that guardians of an out-worn order must know better than they seem to know, I remember Delia. Delia was born reactionary, even as she was born brunette.

“Why,” said she with finality, “that’s the way they punish you.”

Taken as a fact and not as a philosophy, there was no question about this.

“I was shut in one for pinching Frankie Ames,” I acknowledged.

“I was in one for getting iron-rust on my skirt,” said Calista, “and for being awful cross when my bath was, and for putting sugar on the stove to get the nice smell.”