Our grandniece, Enid, is older than Lisa, her sister. Indeed, Enid was
twenty-two that Spring, and had been for two years happily married in
spite of the fact that Pelleas and I had had no hand in the wooing. To
see Enid with her baby in her arms was considerably like watching a
wild rose rock a butterfly, and no one can fancy how tenderly we two
observed her. I think that few sweet surprises of experience or even of
wisdom have so confirmed our joy in life as the sight of our grandniece
Enid with her baby.
It chanced that when the baby was but a few weeks old David, Enid’s
young husband, was sent to The Hague upon some government business, a
state of affairs for which it seemed to Pelleas and me that the United
States should be called to account. For experience shows that the
government will go irresistibly forward but I protest that the baby’s
father never can be compensated for that absence; and I would like to
have any one object who can believe differently.
For all his impatience to see whether the little child had grown to
manhood in those six weeks or so, David was obliged to report at
Washington immediately upon his return. When the steamship was almost
due Enid found that she could wait for him to see the baby not one day
longer than that on which the boat was to arrive. So she took train
from somewhere in Connecticut with that very little child and arrived
at our house in a sad state of collapse, a few minutes before her
telegram. Enid has no nurse maid. They are very young married people
indeed.
The night on which Enid and her baby reached us Pelleas and I had been
sitting in the dark of our drawing-room, with the fire almost burned
out. It was one of the nights when all the little shadows that live
near come creeping forth. They came when we were not aware and there
they were in the room, saying nothing. The ghosts that come to the
platforms of Elsinore do not often speak.
“We dreamed it differently, Etarre,” Pelleas had said.
I knew what he meant. Have we not all dreamed it differently? And then
we sat thinking of the Great Dream which we had had and lost. For
there was a time, when Pelleas could model and I could write so that
a few were deceived, that the Great Dream for one radiant year was
in our home and went away when little Cedric died. In all the years
since then we have gone wondering where he may be now, and where now,
without us. For he was so very tiny when he left us; he could hardly
take a step alone even by clinging to my finger, with Pelleas’ hands
outstretched before him. I think it is partly lest he be needing us as
he needed us then that we are never very far from him in thought, and
that night we talked long of him until one by one all the other shadows
went away in the presence of his little figure on our hearth.
So we were sitting with “Do you remember?” and “But do you remember?”
on our lips when the door-bell rang and Nichola came upstairs to
answer it, talking all the way. We wondered somewhat, for we have no
unexpected visitors and no small excitements. We wondered the more when
she appeared on the threshold of the drawing-room, bearing in her arms
a white bundle which wore long and alarmingly fluffy skirts.
“Nichola!” we both cried; for you do not know how pleasant it is when
the days grow colourless to have something happen which you yourself
did not bring about. “Nichola! What is it?”
“It’s a babby,” Nichola informed us grimly, and laid it in Pelleas’
arms--face downward, he afterward told me. Then she beckoned me to the
hall and I went, barely able to stand; for I was certain that it had
been left in a basket on the steps with nothing but a locket.
“Nichola,” I begged, “whose baby?”
Nichola was bending over the bench where sat poor little Enid, crying
helplessly.
“N--nobody told me,” Enid sobbed on my shoulder, “what it would be like
to travel with a ten-weeks-old baby. He cried every m--mile of the way
here--and he is a good baby, too!”
Bless the little mothers. I have never yet known one who would not
assure you, though in the presence of a child exhibiting a most
dreadful temper, that her baby was “usually so good, too.”
Together, though I suppose that I hindered far more than I helped,
Nichola and I got Enid upstairs and put her in bed, dear little thing,
hardly more than a baby herself for all her wise use of the most
advanced baby terms. Nichola hurried downstairs and in a few minutes
bustled back with a steaming bowl of some mysterious compound, hot and
savoury in a bowl. How do some people always know what to bring you,
hot and savoury, in a bowl? If I had gone down to the kitchen I protest
that I could have devised nothing but eggs.
Nichola insisted on feeding Enid--the impertinent old woman had
observed that when I am excited my hands tremble. But whose do not? As
for Nichola I had often told her that she would not show emotion if
an army with banners were to march in the front door. Instead of fear
or sorrow or agitation Nichola’s way of emotion is anger; and I should
have expected her to remind such an army of the purpose of the door mat.
“You’d best,” Nichola said to me over her shoulder, “go downstairs and
see after that--babby.”
Nichola dislikes a great many things, but the greatest of these
dislikes is babies. When she passes one in its perambulator I have seen
her take the extreme edge of the walk.
“They ain’t a bone in ’em,” she once explained; “when you go to pick
’em up, they _slimpse_.”
I deplored this failing of Nichola’s as I hurried downstairs to
Pelleas, but I was chiefly concerned to know how he had got on in my
absence--Pelleas, who will not even hold my Angora.
No sound came from the drawing-room. I entered fearfully, for even a
man of genius is sometimes helpless. I have never known my own alarm
more swiftly rebuked.
He had managed to turn on the lights and furthermore he had contrived
to take off the baby’s cloak and bonnet and veil, though usually he
could as easily embroider a thing as to untie it, save after a very
long time. And there sat Pelleas on the sofa with the baby in one arm,
and he was gravely holding a lighted match a foot from its face.
As I looked he threw the burned match in the grate, soberly lighted
another and repeated the performance. Evidently he construed some
movement of the baby’s face to be an answering smile, for he looked
vastly pleased and encouraged and instantly said clearly:--
“Well, tol, tol, tol, tolly tol! Yes!” And then added in a tone of the
simplest conviction, “Of course.”
I hurried forward, laughing at him in spite of the sudden lump in my
throat. It is sad for Pelleas to be nobody’s grandfather when he looks
so precisely like a grandfather on the stage.
“What are the matches for, Pelleas?” I cried.
He looked up with the adorably abashed expression that I love to bring
to his eyes.
“They keep its attention,” he murmured apologetically, “nothing else
would. I think it’s hungry.”
“‘It’!” I cried scornfully; “why, it’s a boy.”
“Ah, well now,” Pelleas argued placidly, “you said ‘It’s a boy.’ And I
said, ‘It’s hungry.’ What’s the difference?”
And to this there was really no response.
The baby’s disturbed babbling waxed to a steady fretting which
increased in volume and violence. Hungry he undoubtedly was.
I remembered that Enid’s black bag lay on the bench in the hall. I
hurried to it, and there was the baby’s empty bottle. When I came back,
though Pelleas was lighting matches at a furious rate, the baby was
crying at the top of his small strength.
“He’ll disturb Enid,” I said. “Pelleas,” I added, as one proposing
revolutions, “we must take the baby down to the kitchen and feed him.”
You to whom such sweet offices are the joy--or the burden!--of every
day, what can you know of the thrill of that moment to one whose arms
have been empty for so long? I protest that holding the keys to The
Hague and all Europe and the other continents is not to be compared to
the radiant responsibility of that moment.
Pelleas promptly stood up and extended his arms.
“Take it,” he said, with enchanting masculine helplessness. Pelleas
will not even let me carry my primroses up and down stairs, but merely
because this was a baby he resigned his rights. I had almost forgotten
how humble men are in such a presence.
I took the baby in my arms, and he settled down with that contented
little gurgle which always attends a baby’s changing hands, most
subtilely flattering the new nurse until the storm breaks afresh harder
than before. This the storm did next, and I looked at Pelleas a little
wildly. For whatever was to be done I must do.
“Go first,” said I firmly, “and open the kitchen door.”
I followed him down the stairs, one foot at a time, and when he opened
the door the sight warmed my heart. The kitchen was cheery and brightly
lighted, a hot fire was blazing in the range, and the teakettle was
singing away to make the most miserable at peace. Sometime I shall
write a letter to those who are of all men the bluest, and the
substance of it will be: Go and put on the teakettle.
I sat by the fire while Pelleas, by devious ways of pantry and
refrigerator, sought out the milk, and we were very merry over warming
it, for it was a wonderful occasion. Pelleas spilled a great deal of
milk on Nichola’s perfectly polished griddles--O, I could not have
loved him if in such a pleasant experience his hands had been perfectly
firm and indifferent. Nichola’s hands would have been quite firm. That
brown old woman has no tremors and no tears. And just as Pelleas had
filled the baby’s bottle, she appeared at the stair door.
“The babby’s mother,” she said, folding her arms, “says you’d know
about mixin’ in the lime water an’ the milk sugar, an’ boilin’ the
bottles up, an’ washin’ out the babby’s mouth with carbolic acid.”
“Nichola!” we gasped.
“That’s what she says,” Nichola maintained firmly, “some kind o’ acid.
I think she says her Aunt Septy told her. She says I’s to tell you or
the babby’d starve. The young leddy acts like a cluck-chicken.”
When she had gone back upstairs Pelleas and I looked in each other’s
faces.
“I had forgotten,” I said weakly, “Pelleas, they boil _everything_ now.”
“They do?” said Pelleas helplessly.
“And they use two _separate_ bottles,” I recalled anxiously. “And
they--”
Pelleas wrinkled his eyes at the corners.
“Fudge!” he said.
O, I loved Pelleas for that “Fudge!” Not that I do not believe in every
improvement in the world. I do. And Pelleas holds the most advanced
doctrines. But now and then I do love a “Fudge!”
“Would you dare give him this warm milk?” I asked him bravely.
“I certainly would dare,” Pelleas answered clearly; “we would take the
baby to ride in an automobile, would we not? and as for danger--”
“But, Pelleas,” I hesitated, “I don’t like to think we’re behind the
times, undermining the progress of Society and Science and--”
By then the displeasure of the baby was like that of a young god,
neglected of Hebe. Pelleas handed me the bottle.
“I am the last not to sympathize with these details,” he said gravely,
“but it’s hungry, Etarre. Feed it. The situation seems to require
something more than a boiled bottle.”
So, being unregenerate, we hesitated no longer. And Pelleas sat beside
me, and the baby drank with little soft, shuddering breaths at the
painful memory of how hungry he really had been. I bent above him and
so did Pelleas, our heads quite close together as we watched him,
and heard the little soft noises and sighs and met the eyes’ grave,
wondering criticism. So long, so long it had been since I had seen that
one serious eye lifted to mine as a little face lay against my breast.
Pelleas put out one finger and the funny little hand caught it and
clung to it. Pelleas wrinkled his eyes at the corners and smiled up at
me--I had almost forgotten how he used to do that and then wait for me
to tell him that at that rate I could never get Cedric to sleep. When
Pelleas did that now we sat silent; for very little babies are never
unlike, and if I had really let myself I might have imagined and so I
think might Pelleas have imagined ... that which for more than forty
years we have only dreamed.
At last the baby moved his head, gurgled a brief grace, stared up
at us unwinkingly, and then wrinkled his face astoundingly. Pelleas
rose and looked wildly about for matches. One would have said that
we were fugitives from justice crouching behind a panel and that our
safety depended upon keeping that baby quiet during the passing of the
men-at-arms. I cannot tell how it is with others, but when one is
seventy a baby affects one like this and to prevent it crying seems all
the law and a fair proportion of the prophets. So that when Pelleas
came with a box of paraffin matches and lighted whole handfuls before
Enid’s baby’s eyes I said very little; for he did stop crying, though
he looked at these humble pyrotechnics somewhat haughtily and as if he
knew more about them than he cared to give out.
The stair door does not creak, and this time Nichola was quite in the
kitchen before we heard her. She looked at us once and then hurried to
the other side of the room and busied herself at the dresser. We have
seldom seen Nichola laugh but, if it were not that we cannot imagine
her laughing, I would have thought and Pelleas would have thought that
her voice sounded ever so slightly muffled.
“Its mother wants it right straight off,” she remarked, with her back
toward us.
We rose promptly, and meekly made our way upstairs. Old Nichola
dictates to us all day long in matters in which, as I think, we are
really far wiser than she; how then should we not yield in crises of
which we may be supposed to know nothing? Though I am bound to confess
that save in matters of boiling I felt myself as wise as little Enid
who, as I have said, is a baby herself. And this suggests something
about which I have often wondered, namely, when the actual noon of
motherhood may be? For I protest it seems to me that all the mothers of
my acquaintance are either themselves babies, or else I catch myself
thinking that they are too old and even spinsterish in their notions
to be able perfectly to bring up a child. Yet it cannot very well be
that I was the only mother neither too young nor too old to train youth
properly.
I laid the little thing in Enid’s bed, and Enid smiled--that tender,
pitiful, young-mother smile which somehow breaks one’s heart no matter
how happy the young mother may be. But I was certain that the baby
would disturb her. And an hour later while the doctor was with her an
idea came to me that set me in a delicious flutter. I had forgotten
that there are such sweet excitements in the world. I hugged the hope in
silence for a moment and then shared it with Pelleas.
“Suppose,” I said, “that Enid should need her rest to-night?”
I looked at him tentatively, expecting him to understand at once
as he almost never fails to do. I did not remember that it is far
easier to understand in matters of design, rhythm and the like, which
had occupied us these many years, than to adjust one’s self without
preparation to the luminous suggestion which I was harbouring.
“I hope that she _will_ have a good night,” Pelleas advanced, with
appalling density.
“But suppose,” I persisted, “that she should need her rest and that the
doctor thought the baby would be certain to disturb her?”
“If it cries,” Pelleas suggested then with magnificent generosity, “you
might get it and rock it awhile.”
“Pelleas!” I cried, “don’t you see? Maybe we can have the baby with us
all night.”
Pelleas looked up in surprise; then his dear face shone.
“Could we, do you think?” he said, as we say when we want a thing very
much.
“We will,” I promised.
Therefore when we heard the doctor coming downstairs we hurried to the
hall and waited for him at the foot of the stairs. Between us we must
have laid the matter before him, though I do not in the least remember
what we may have said; but some way we made him know for he nodded and
smiled in a surprising fashion.
“Yes,” said he, “yes--by all means! I really am persuaded that it would
be an act of charity for you to keep that baby with you to-night.”
“On our niece’s account, you know,” said I with dignity.
“Certainly,” said he gravely, and caught up his hat and rushed away. At
the time it seemed to me that he was curiously moved about something
and I feared that Enid might be very ill.
As for Pelleas and me we could hardly wait to go upstairs. Of course
Nichola had to know; she brought up the milk and the alcohol lamp
and we were obliged to tell her. To tell Nichola that you mean to do
anything which she considers foolish is very like a confession that
your whole point of view is ignorant and diseased. Still, in some
fashion, Pelleas and I together told her. Our old servant regarded us
with the disapprobation which it is her delight not to disguise. Then
on her brown fingers she checked matters off.
“No sleep for neither one of you,” she cast up the account. “Headaches
to-morrow all day. Death o’ cold dancin’ in an’ out o’ bed. An’ a
smothered babby by mornin’.”
“O, no, no, Nichola,” said we, gently but sweepingly.
I brought the baby in our room to undress him. Our room was cheerful
and warm. An open fire was burning; and Pelleas had lighted all the
candles as we will do on the rare occasions when we are dressing for
some great event. On a table beside the bed stood the alcohol lamp and
the glasses and the baby’s bottle--I had not even mentioned lime water
and boiled bottles to Enid--and strange enough they looked where only
my Bible and my medicine have lived for so long. The baby was asleep
when we took him from Enid, but he waked and smiled impartially and
caught at the air in perfect peace. I took off the little garments,
feeling all the old skill come back to my hands idle to all such sweet
business for more than forty years. Pelleas insisted on drawing off the
tiny socks and stockings and when I saw the little feet in his palm
I could almost have believed, for one swift moment, that the years
had indeed rolled back. Then we wrapped him warmly and laid him in
the great bed. And Pelleas spent a long while happily tucking in and
tucking down and pretending to be very useful.
We had thought to read for a little while as is our wont and we did
try to do so; but neither of us could keep our eyes anywhere near the
book or could listen to the other read aloud. For the unwonted sound
of that soft breathing was wholly distracting. And once a little hand
was thrown up over the edge of the covers. What did we care about the
sculptures at Ægina then?
Nichola looked in.
“Best leave a lamp burnin’,” she said crossly. “An’ if it should cry,
you call me.”
By which, as Pelleas said afterward, she by no means intended to
provide for the possible emotion of the lamp.
I was longing to feel that little head in the hollow of my arm. I
laid it there presently and tucked my hand between the two pillows as
I had been wont and held away the covering from the baby’s face. There
was the fine dark hair, and there was the tiny hand uplifted and--as I
live!--there was the identical ruffle of lace which had always used to
bother about the little chin. In that first ecstatic moment I looked up
at Pelleas almost frightened, half-expecting the buoyant, youthful face
and the dear eyes that were wont to look down upon Cedric and me. And
the dear eyes smiled, for they have never changed.
I lay very still listening to that quiet breathing, to the rustle and
turning which is a tender language of its own. When one is seventy and
closes one’s eyes it is wonderful how the whole world grows youthful.
And when I had almost dozed that tender rustling brought me back so
happily that I could hardly tell which was memory of that other little
head upon my arm and which was now. At midnight and twice later when
the baby’s food had to be warmed it was I who did this, and the old
familiar helplessness of Pelleas in this little presence delighted me
beyond measure. Though when the baby grew impatient and cried, Pelleas
valiantly lighted matches before him, and he fell silent and even
smiled, and slept again. I record it as a mere matter of history that
in the intervals of these ceremonies I had not slept for a moment. For
there had come thronging back such a company of memories, such a very
flight of spirits of the old delight of our wonderful year when there
was Cedric, that the world had no room for sleep at all. Sleep! I do
not suppose that any one would chide me for being wakeful at a ball?
And nothing in the world could have been so delightful to me as were
those hours when that little head lay on my arm.
Sometime after daylight he awoke. Cedric had been wont to lie quietly
as long as ever I would do so, but Enid’s baby--for it was Enid’s baby
for all our pretending--awoke and played with his fists. Then a fancy
that had hovered over me all the night took shape, and I told it to
Pelleas.
“Dear,” I said, “you know the things in the bottom drawer in the
closet?”
“Yes,” he answered at once, “I have been thinking about them.”
“Suppose,” I suggested, “that we were to--to try some of them on the
baby.”
“I have been thinking the same thing,” Pelleas said.
It was not cold in the room, for we had kept the hearth alive all the
night. When we were warmly wrapped and had drawn chairs before the
fire, Pelleas brought from the closet that box filled with the tender
yellow muslins that Cedric had worn such a little time. I chose the
white batiste gown that I had made myself, every stitch; and over
his little nightgown we put it on Enid’s baby. He was very good, and
crowed and nestled; and so we found the long white cloak that I had
embroidered and a bonnet that Pelleas had once selected himself, all
alone, at a shop. And Enid’s baby’s arm doubled up in a ball when I
tried to put it in a sleeve--I suppose that there never was a baby’s
arm that did not do this, but I have known only one little arm. And
when the pink hand came creeping through the cuff Pelleas caught it and
kissed it--O, I had not thought for years how he used to do that.
“Now!” I said, “Pelleas--look now.”
Enid’s baby sat on my knee, his back to us both. The little bent back
in that white coat, the soft collar crumpling up about the neck in
spite of me, the same little bonnet with the flower in the back and the
lace all around--
Pelleas and I looked at each other silently. And not so much in grief
as in longing that was like the hope of heaven.
We did not hear Nichola coming with our coffee. So she opened the door
and saw the box on the floor and the things scattered all about. She
knew what they were. She was with us when little Cedric was here, and
she had not forgotten. She stood still, and then set the tray down on
the table.
“Drink your coffee!” she called sharply, and was out of the room before
we could speak.
In a moment, when I could, and because Enid’s baby cried then I laid
him in Pelleas’ arms and went out to tell Nichola to bring more milk.
And leaning against a bureau in the passage Nichola stood crying as if
her heart would break.
“Go on away!” she said, shaking her old gray head. “Go on away!”
X